Second World War propaganda Flashcards
Neutral propaganda
Propaganda thus becomes a process for the sowing, germination and cultivation of ideas and, as such, is - or at least should be - neutral, as a concept. The problem is that human beings frequently inject morality into processes.
The first use of propaganda
When the Vatican gave us the word ‘propaganda’ in the seventeenth century to describe its organization to defend ‘the true faith’ against the challenge of the Protestant Reformation, the heretics shouted foul at such outside interference in the development of their ‘natural’ religious thought processes.
The scientific concept of propaganda used the first time
its recent pejorative connotations date mainly from the excesses of atrocity propaganda during the Great War of 1914-18 when the modern ‘scientific’ use of propaganda came of age. It was that development - and particularly its association with falsehood.
The odour got worse when it was employed by the Nazis, the Soviets and other thoroughly nasty regimes ever since. However, it is all too easily forgotten that it was the British who, during the First World War, set the standard in modern propaganda for others to follow.
A country which showed how to create a propaganda
t was no more the policy of the official British wartime propaganda machinery to lie deliberately than it was to tell the whole truth. Facts were deployed selectively yet rationally, while falsehoods were eschewed in the belief that they would ultimately be exposed and thereby jeopardize the credibility of those facts that had been released. The government preferred to lie by omission, not by commission.
Propaganda and war
It is frequently charged with guilt by association with two time-honoured human activities: power and war. With the former, propaganda has always been an additional instrument in the arsenal of power, a psycho- logical instrument, and it is its relationship to power which has attracted suspicion - mainly from the powerless or those resentful of power. Much propaganda in fact emanates from power rather like spontaneous combustion, as the British who started the century as the world’s greatest power and the Americans who ended it having inherited that mantle know only too well. ‘Power speaks for itself.’
Components of propaganda to succeed
hadow does require some substance and myth needs to be rooted in some reality if propaganda is to succeed. Those realities can, of course, change and propaganda needs to adapt accordingly. In pluralistic democracies which purport to exist on the basis of consensus rather than coercion, persuasion thus becomes an integral part of the political process. And once we start talking about persuasion, we enter the psychological dimension of interpersonal, not to mention national or international, relations which has always been a significant element in the political, military, social or economic instruments of power. In the struggle of power propaganda is an instrument to be used by those who want to secure or retain power just as much as it is by those wanting to displace them.
Propaganda power
t can be an alternative to killing, the triumph of communication over violence. It can, however, create myths - not just about why wars begin, are won or are lost, but even on rare occasions transform defeats into victories.
Propaganda objectivty
We must thus beware the dangers of extrapolating twentieth-century perceptions on to our understanding of earlier periods. The same might equally be said for the notion of propaganda as we currently (mis)understand it - but only if we fail to regard it as a neutral process of persuasion. If we do this, we fall into the trap of labelling something ‘good propaganda’ or ‘bad propaganda’, as a persuasive process which we judge from the standpoint of our own core values. Thus the process earns approval because we agree with it, and disapproval because we disagree with it. Propaganda becomes something which is done by others we differ from who are selling a cause which we repudiate; hence they are telling lies or, at best, not telling us ‘the truth’ - and we are back to where we started from. When one person’s beliefs become another’s propaganda, we have already begun to take sides in a subjective manner. Propaganda analysis demands objectivity if it is to be undertaken effectively
What is propaganda and its main goal?
Essentially, propaganda is really no more than the communication of ideas designed to persuade people to think and behave in a desired way. It differs - or should do - from education in that imparting of information and ideas for educational purposes is to enable the recipient to make up his or her own mind on any given issue. Propaganda is about persuading people to do things which benefit those doing the persuading, either directly or indirectly. In wartime that usually means getting them to fight or to support the fight.
As such, propaganda can be used for ‘good purposes’, just as it can be abused. If the history of propaganda in the twentieth century appears to be largely a history of abuse.
Much of propaganda is accidental or unconscious.
The methods employed vary according to the communications media available.
Propaganda vs. other types of persuasion
What distinguishes propaganda from all other processes of persuasion is the question of intent. Propaganda uses communication to convey a message, an idea, or an ideology that is designed primarily to serve the self-interests of the person or people doing the communicating. It may well be that the audience does not want to hear the message; but equally it may well be that it does. Unwanted propaganda, however, does need to be detected in the first place before it can be evaluated.
Sides and propaganda
The problem, when all else is said and done about any issue which arouses human judgements - whether they be historical, economic or moral - is that people seize upon answers that really depend on which side they were on in the first place. Hence propaganda appears most effective when it preaches to the already converted.
Information is power
A great deal of theory works on the assumption that information is power, and whoever controls the flow of information therefore wields power over.the recipient. Propaganda is thus powerful tool for perpetuating power relationships. The problem in much propaganda theory is that the recipient is also felt to be empowered as well, in other words, he or she can reject the messages - provided they can be detected.
An essential characteristic of propaganda
An essential characteristic of propaganda is that it rarely tells the whole truth.
Censorship
Censorship is the essential counterpart to propaganda. They are different sides of the same coin: the manipulation of opinion. The selective processes by which some information is disseminated and some held back is a problem facing all communicators, but where censorship operates - whether it be institutionalized or self-censor- ship - one needs to recognize how close one is sailing into the wind of propaganda.
This is particularly true if the deliberate withhold- ing of certain information is designed to benefit those who control the flow of information in the first place. However, censors of all persuasions take refuge in the notion that they are somehow protecting someone else from something that may do them damage. But invariably they are protecting their own interests for fear that information may indeed empower people to think and do things that might not serve or benefit those interests.
This was why Hitler felt that it was pointless to attempt propaganda against intellectuals; they would always be able to identify propaganda when confronted with it.
Propaganda and operational security
In wartime, censorship is today imposed with the justification that certain information which might serve the interests of the enemy, and thus ieopardize the lives of those doing the.fighting on ‘our’ behalf, must be withheld on the grounds of ‘operational security’. But it is no coincidence that modern military censorship coincides with the arrival of the profession of the war correspondent.
