Sell the sizzle, not the steak. That was the mantra coined by the American master salesman Elmer Wheeler in the 1930s. What he meant was this — you don’t sell by reasoning. You get people to buy by evoking the great feelings and experiences you can bring them to associate with what you sell. Sell the sizzle, Wheeler taught, and the sizzle will sell the steak.

Successful political propagandists employ that principle. Leni Riefenstahl directed an extraordinarily powerful propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, that sold Hitler as a messianic savior who was restoring power and pride to a nation humiliated by a lost war.
That alone is enough for me to give him the benefit of the doubt in his dealings today with Qatar and Iran.
When I taught a unit on the Holocaust to my high schoolers back in the Nineties, I spent a significant chunk of time on her film. I would stop the film at a significant shot —  for instance, one showing a group of young German soldiers enjoying camaraderie at chow time, as the food was served up in steaming ladles-full by a fat and grinning army cook. I hold the image of the cook still on the screen and ask: What feeling is this image aiming to evoke in the person watching it?
The kids got it. The feelings were — the fun of friendship, the pleasure of the pride of serving along with everyone else, of being powerful, since the projection of power is what an army is all about.
I would ask: did the director mean to discuss the issues of war and peace, of the pros and cons of breaking the treaty that held the peace after a ghastly war? Did it mean for its watchers to ask themselves: are we arming ourselves to use power for a worthy end? Was she seeking that precious necessity for those who would govern their own lives — discernment?
The kids got it. The film was not made to provoke discernment, but to bypass it and promote passionate, uncritical support for Hitler’s program of rearmament and conquest.
Cutting out the mind to get to the emotions is the m...