Randal Marlin (22 January 1938 – 15 May 2026) was a Canadian philosophy professor at Carleton University in Ottawa who specialized in the study of propaganda. He was educated at Princeton University, McGill University, the University of Oxford, Aix-Marseille University, and the University of Toronto. After receiving a Department of National Defence fellowship to study under propaganda scholar Jacques Ellul at Bordeaux in 1979–1980, he started a philosophy and mass communications class at Carleton called Truth and Propaganda, which has run annually ever since.Marlin, Randal. (2002) Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion. Toronto: Broadview Press, p. 10.
One of the texts for this class is his 2002 book Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, which examines historical, ethical, and legal issues relating to propaganda. The revised second edition, released in 2013, examines the Bush administration's use of propaganda based on fear to persuade Americans to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Marlin acknowledges that there are many definitions of propaganda, including favourable ones.Marlin, pp. 15–21. However, his book reflects Ellul's view that propaganda suppresses individual freedom and autonomy.Ellul, Jacques. (1973) Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. New York: Vintage Books Edition, p. 256; Marlin, pp. 170–171.
In 1998, Marlin published a book examining the public uproar following the appointment of a former separatist Quebec political candidate to the top administrator's post at the new Ottawa Hospital. The David Levine Affair: Separatist Betrayal or McCarthyism North? criticizes the Ottawa news media for fanning the flames of intolerance in their quest for higher circulations and audience ratings.Marlin, Randal. (1998) The David Levine Affair: Separatist Betrayal or McCarthyism North?. Winnipeg, Manitoba: Fernwood Publishing, pp. 8–10 and 156. The book also documents how the media kept the controversy going with a barrage of stories, columns, letters, editorials and radio phone-in shows.Marlin, (Levine Affair), pp. 10–11. The David Levine Affair draws on Marlin's knowledge of propaganda techniques that play on stereotypes as well as pre-existing fears, suspicions and resentments to incite intense emotional reactions.Marlin, (Levine Affair), pp. 9 and 15–16.
Marlin died on 15 May 2026, at the age of 88.
Early life and education Randal Marlin spent his early childhood in Washington D.C. where he was born in 1938. His father worked for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. The family moved to Montreal in 1946 after his father started working for the United Nations. Marlin moved again to Ampleforth, a Benedictine college and boarding school, in England. "The school ran largely through the authority of the older boys over the younger boys," Marlin recalled during an interview in 2008. "You can see how people abuse power, and I got very interested in things about law."Bennett (Grub Street) interview.
In 1955, Marlin began four years of university studies at Princeton.COVE. He intended to pursue a career in physics, but discovered that he "couldn't really handle the math of nuclear physics in the second year."Bennett interview. Fortunately, the university encouraged students to enroll in subjects outside their main fields and Marlin studied Greek philosophy. He also worked as a journalist at the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian where he enjoyed stirring up controversy.
Marlin's interest in both philosophy and journalism led him to study the philosophy of language at McGill University. He wrote his thesis on Ernst Cassirer and the phenomenology of language earning an MA degree in philosophy in 1961.Bennett interview; COVE. At Trinity College, Oxford he spent two years studying Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and the philosophy of existentialism. In 1963-64, Marlin taught and studied existentialism at the Institute for American Universities at Aix-en-Provence, France. Then in 1964, he began two years of teaching and PhD studies at the University of Toronto. His PhD thesis, completed in 1973, examined problems concerning morality and criminal law.
Early professional career In 1966, Randal Marlin accepted a teaching post at Carleton in Ottawa, partly because the university had a journalism school. By then, he had worked for two summers at the Montreal Star. He decided to institute a course called Society, Values and Technology to explore several interrelated themes. One reflected his growing involvement in preserving the older neighbourhood where he lived from being overwhelmed by heavy traffic. Marlin said that in the midst of that campaign, he realized from reading Aristotle's Rhetoric that a vivid example can be much more persuasive than logical arguments, an insight reinforced by a fellow community activist. "One thing I recall him saying," Marlin told an interviewer years later, "'If there's an accident in the area, exploit it. That's the time people will act to make changes in the traffic patterns. So don't miss the opportunity when something like that comes up.'"
Marlin's growing interest in persuasion took on added dimensions as he began reading The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul. The book argues that every field of human activity is now dominated by efficient technical methods or, what Ellul calls, technique.Ellul, Jacques. (1964) The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books, p.xxv. Marlin said Ellul's work showed him how the techniques of creating and managing public opinion feed off of or augment each other. Ellul had also published a landmark study of propaganda which explains how information can be used in the exercise of power.Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda, p.112, "[I]nformation is an essential element of propaganda..." and p. 121, "Propaganda is needed in the exercise of power..." "That's the central idea of propaganda," Marlin says, "the maintaining or gaining of power over others."
Truth and propaganda Marlin's fascination with Ellul's writings gave him an idea. "During a crazy moment," he recalled, "I saw one of those advertisements for a Department of National Defence (DND) fellowship, offered for study abroad. It was $12,000, which, in those days -- 1979-1980, was a lot of money." Marlin told DND that Canadians needed to know more about the dangers of subversive propaganda and that if he were given a chance to study with Jacques Ellul at the University of Bordeaux in France, he would establish a university course on propaganda. To his surprise, he won the fellowship. "I had this great delight of studying for a year with Jacques Ellul. I found him as fascinating in person as he was in his writings." After his year abroad, Marlin returned to Carleton and created the course Truth and Propaganda.
Propaganda and ethics In 2002, Marlin published Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, the book that now serves as one of the texts for his university course on propaganda. It contains extensive information about propaganda including various definitions, a brief history from ancient times to the 20th century and a discussion of propaganda techniques.Marlin, (Ethics), pp. 13-135. Marlin bases his own definition of propaganda on what he sees as three of its main features. First, propaganda aims to influence many people in organized and deliberate ways. Second, it is likely to deceive its target audience and third, it uses psychological influences to suppress or bypass rational thought.Marlin, (Ethics), p. 22. Therefore, Marlin defines propaganda as:
The organized attempt through communication to affect belief or action or inculcate attitudes in a large audience in ways that circumvent or suppress an individual's adequately informed, rational, reflective judgment.
In his chapters on ethics, Marlin suggests that propaganda is always ethically questionable because it tries to manipulate using misleading information, emotional appeals and psychological pressure.Marlin, (Ethics), p. 170. He notes that although we tend to associate propaganda with political power or ideology, it also includes other forms of persuasion such as advertising and public relations.Marlin, (Ethics), p. 175.
Atrocity propaganda In Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, Marlin notes that atrocity propaganda is used to demonize wartime enemies.Marlin, (Ethics, pp. 70-71. He writes, for example, that during World War I, British propaganda accused German soldiers of publicly raping women in the town square, decapitating babies and forcing parents to watch as their children's hands and ears were cut off.Marlin, (Ethics), p. 71. The American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton resorted to atrocity propaganda during the 1990/91 Gulf War when it spread the story that the Iraqi soldiers who had invaded Kuwait were ripping helpless Kuwaiti babies from hospital incubators.Marlin, (Ethics), pp. 194-199.
Corpse Factory story In his textbook and in other writings, Marlin examines a specific example of World War I atrocity propaganda to illustrate propaganda techniques.Marlin, (Ethics), pp. 71-76. The Corpse Factory story incited hatred and loathing of Germans who were supposedly "boiling their own dead soldiers to extract from their bodies lubricating oil, fats, soap, glue, glycerine for explosives, bonemeal for animal feed, and fertilizer." According to Marlin's research, the story was likely concocted by British and Belgian propagandists in London and then spread far and wide beginning on 17 April 1917 by the Times and the Daily Mail, newspapers owned by Lord Northcliffe, a man with close connections to British propaganda.
The Northcliffe papers gave the story credibility by combining a mistranslated report from a German newspaper about dead horses being boiled down for glue, with an invented story, ostensibly from Belgian newspapers, quoting a detailed, eyewitness description of dead German soldiers being dumped into a huge cauldron at a "Corpse Exploitation Establishment."Neander and Marlin, pp. 73-74. Other news media spread the gruesome story worldwide.Neander and Marlin, p. 75.
Propaganda techniques Marlin writes that the Corpse Factory story illustrates the seven requirements for effective propaganda outlined in the 1938 book Propaganda Boom by A. J. Mackenzie.Mackenzie, A. J., (1938). London: John Gifford, pp. 50-71, cited in Marlin, (Ethics), pp. 75&92. Those requirements are:
Repetition: The Northcliffe papers kept the story going day after day by publishing readers' letters. Colour: The eyewitness description of the corpse factory appealed to readers' imaginations. Kernel of truth: The Germans did have plants to boil down animal carcasses. Slogans: The story gave support to such propaganda slogans as "The Germans are ghouls." Specific objective: The story incited hatred of the Germans and encouraged people to join in the fight against them. Concealed motive: Publishing reports from "foreign" papers obscured the source of the propaganda. Timing: The mistranslated German report on the animal rendering plant coincided with the concocted Belgian corpse factory report.Marlin, (Ethics), p. 75.
According to Marlin and Joachim Neander, the Corpse Factory story also illustrates other propaganda techniques including the use of deceptive language, appeal to emotion and the Big Lie.Neander and Marlin, p. 77. They write that after the story was exposed as false in 1925, people were determined not to be fooled again. Thus, many doubted reports about the Holocaust early in World War II—testimony to the long-lasting and harmful effects of atrocity propaganda.Neander and Marlin, p. 79.
Two propaganda theorists