1. Randal Marlin was educated at Princeton University, McGill University, the University of Oxford, Aix-Marseille University, and the University of Toronto.
24 Facts About Randal Marlin
1. 2.
In 1998, Randal 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.
3.
Randal Marlin spent his early childhood in Washington DC where he was born in 1938.
4.
Randal Marlin's father worked for the US Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency.
5.
Randal Marlin moved again to Ampleforth, a Benedictine college and boarding school, in England.
6.
In 1955, Randal Marlin began four years of university studies at Princeton.
7.
Randal Marlin worked as a journalist at the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian where he enjoyed stirring up controversy.
8.
Randal Marlin wrote his thesis on Ernst Cassirer and the phenomenology of language earning an MA degree in philosophy in 1961.
9.
In 1966, Randal Marlin accepted a teaching post at Carleton in Ottawa, partly because the university had a journalism school.
10.
Randal Marlin decided to institute a course called Society, Values and Technology to explore several interrelated themes.
11.
Randal Marlin says 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.
12.
Randal Marlin's growing interest in persuasion took on added dimensions as he began reading The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul.
13.
Randal Marlin says Ellul's work showed him how the techniques of creating and managing public opinion feed off of or augment each other.
14.
In 2002, Randal Marlin published Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, the book that now serves as one of the texts for his university course on propaganda.
15.
Randal Marlin 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.
16.
Randal Marlin makes it clear in Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, that George Orwell and Jacques Ellul strongly influenced his own writing.
17.
Randal Marlin refers to Orwell's famous 1946 essay Politics and the English Language which describes, for example, how a euphemism such as pacification served to cover up state violence and murder.
18.
Randal Marlin writes that Orwell showed how the owners of weekly magazines used adventure stories and comics to transmit capitalist and imperialist values partly through the repeated use of class and national stereotypes.
19.
Elsewhere, Randal Marlin has argued that the large and powerful vested interests that benefit from what he calls "the technological system" generate systematic propaganda glorifying technology.
20.
Randal Marlin explains that for Ellul, propaganda is founded on the governing myths of a society.
21.
Randal Marlin writes that the notion of an "American way of life", for example, provides a sociological backdrop for active propaganda.
22.
In 1998, Randal Marlin published a book analyzing the uproar over the appointment of David Levine as administrator of The Ottawa Hospital, an amalgamation of the Ottawa General, founded by French-speaking Roman Catholic nuns, and the Ottawa Civic which, although officially non-denominational, was regarded as a Protestant, predominantly English-speaking institution.
23.
Randal Marlin had served as president of the Canadian Association of Teaching Hospitals.
24.
About 200 people turned out in November, 1998 when Randal Marlin launched his book on the Levine affair at an Ottawa Chapters store.