(Photo: Dulac / flickr)
And what if the mother of political communication were the Princess Scheherazade, who understood that telling make-believe stories and making people dream allows one to influence them profoundly?
Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s spin doctor, once defined a great principle of political communication, one of its key tenets – even its very basis – as storytelling, which he himself called Scheherazade’s strategy: “When policy dooms you, start telling stories – stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or, in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy.”
Also See: Responding to the Crisis With Communication
This Scheherazade strategy contains all the art of telling the stories people will want to hear, when they want to hear them, and which they want to believe.
Why Scheherazade? One finds the explanation on the “Culture de l’image” blog: “one must transpose oneself to the Eighth Century, to the kingdom of Persian Sultan Shâriar, who, to take revenge for the wife who left him, adopted the bad habit of killing each morning the virgin he had married the previous evening. To bring this massacre to an end, Scheherazade, the Vizier’s daughter, married the sultan and, when evening came, told him a story without completing it. Her husband, who wanted to know what happened next, kept her alive another day. The stratagem lasted a thousand and one nights, at the end of which, an appeased Shâriar definitively renounced killing his wife.”
From Shâriar to George Bush, in the end, the world has changed but little and princes follow one another, whether the stories are told by a Scheherazade or a Karl Rove.
To read or reread: the [French] interview of Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell: part one and part two.
Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher
Mohammed Abbasi 