Military History Companion: propaganda
Propaganda is a word derived from the Vatican's establishment of the Sacre Congregatio de Propaganda Fide in 1622. It is a process of persuasion designed to induce ideas, opinions, or actions beneficial to the source. As a process, it is value-neutral although the word has acquired pejorative meaning. Analysis of propaganda would more profitably benefit by examination of intentions. In, for example, the case of combat propaganda, more usually termed psychological warfare, the intention is to persuade enemy soldiers to defect, desert, surrender, or otherwise influence their behaviour on the battlefield with a view to defeating them. As such, these ‘munitions of the mind’ have become increasingly more sophisticated with advances in psychology and communications, especially during the course of the 20th century.
Before 1914, propaganda was usually associated with religion and the implanting of ideas to be cultivated in support of existing beliefs and ‘faith’. Its wartime applications, in the Napoleonic or the American independence wars, were confined largely to calls to arms, lampooning the enemy, glorifying victory, and sustaining morale. The intention by the few to impress the many can be traced back to the ancient world in art, architecture, and symbolism. The advent of printing in the 14th century shifted the emphasis from script to print. In wars of religion, propaganda from the pulpit remained a potent method of swaying emotions, hence the Vatican's Sacre Congregatio. Massive advances in communications technologies in the 19th century, the development of a global cable network, and the arrival of the mass media by the end of the century extended propaganda to a global audience.
The Great War of 1914-18, a total war which industrialized warfare and made the home front as important as the fighting front, altered the nature of popular involvement and introduced domestic morale as a military asset. It also discredited the word ‘propaganda’ which henceforth came to be associated with the manipulation of opinion, by foul means rather than fair, with lies or half-truths, and with deceit. In particular, the popularization of atrocity propaganda through the relatively new mass-circulation press and the increasingly popular silent cinema discredited the relationship between propaganda and ‘truth’. It was this manipulative power over human emotions which Hitler identified as being a weapon that could be of enormous value for his purposes.
In the new USSR also, propaganda was seized upon as a device that could serve the state, by extending revolutionary ideas to the illiterate masses and, more innovatively, into the international class struggle. With the advent of radio broadcasting in the 1920s, the ability to transmit propaganda across frontiers and appeal directly to foreign audiences undermined traditional notions about non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. A series of radio ‘wars’ prompted the League of Nations in 1936 to pass a convention attempting to outlaw the use of broadcasting for these purposes. More honoured in the breach as the Nazi and Fascist regimes positioned propaganda as a central feature of their domestic and foreign policies, the BBC ideal that ‘Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation’ fell victim to the ideological conflict that was to produce both WW II and the subsequent Cold War.
By the outbreak of WW II, the sound cinema had also become an important medium for disseminating propaganda. The British Ministry of Information (the choice of words reflecting the nervousness of democratic countries in eschewing propaganda) recognized that ‘for the film to be good propaganda it must also be good entertainment’. Once the USA entered the war, the formidable American motion-picture industry (‘Hollywood’) was mobilized in support of wartime propaganda themes: ‘why we fight’, ‘know your enemy’, ‘unity is strength’, and so on. The wartime democratic alliance evolved a ‘Strategy of Truth’ towards their propaganda, which did not mean that the whole truth was told. But the reputation for credibility which organizations like the BBC were able to develop in their broadcasts to Nazi-occupied Europe was a serious corrective to the propaganda output of Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment encapsulated by the phrase the ‘Big Lie’.
While propaganda by press, poster, radio, and film was used extensively on the domestic fronts to sustain popular morale through the harsh realities of war, bombing, rationing, victories, and defeats, on the fighting fronts it was used as an adjunct to military tactics. Millions of leaflets were dropped over enemy lines, mobile loudspeaker teams shouted out messages, and radio transmissions attempted to sow seeds of confusion, doubt, and defeatism. It is axiomatic that successful propaganda must go hand in hand with policy. The Allies in this respect shot themselves in the foot with the insistence on unconditional surrender following the Casablanca Conference of 1942. By announcing that all Germans in defeat would be treated in exactly the same way, this policy fused the fate of the German people with that of the Nazi Party in a way undreamed of by a grateful Goebbels. It enabled him to launch his own drive for total war, it pre-empted the Allied use of such inducements as ‘surrender or die’ since any German soldier would be treated as a war criminal, and it partly helps to explain why the German people kept fighting to the bitter end.
Words by themselves did not win the war. But in the ideological confrontation between the USSR and the USA in the years that followed, they were to become significant weapons in the Cold War. Overt propaganda by the US Information Agency or by Radio Moscow was supplemented by covert activity and disinformation by the CIA and KGB. Propaganda continued to be employed in the low-intensity conflicts of Korea or in the ‘hearts and minds’ campaign in the Malayan emergency, but it was its escalation into a strategic weapon in the global battle for allegiances in disputes over nuclear weapons, the space race, even medical advances or the Olympic Games, which made it an all-pervasive feature of the Cold War.
With the advent of television in the 1950s and 1960s, a new medium of enormous propaganda potential was quickly recognized. The Vietnam war was fought out nightly in the living rooms of middle America and, as the ‘first television war’, raised the spectre of whether democracies would be able to sustain popular support in wartime under its prying lens. A myth emerged that the US military lost the Vietnam war not due to military incompetence but because it had been stabbed in the back by a hostile media on the home front. It is important to remember that Vietnam was the most uncensored war of recent military history and, in light of the lack of restrictions imposed on journalists, the tendency was to shoot the messenger for the bad news it carried.
Nonetheless, the belief that the media could become (to use Churchill's phrase about the BBC) an ‘enemy within the gates’ for democracies, which would always therefore be at a disadvantage in conflicts against authoritarian regimes, gave rise to the belief that restrictions on reporting were essential in wartime. In the 1980s, as the system of media ‘pools’ was being developed, the British showed the way during the Falklands war. Only 30 journalists (all British) were allowed to accompany the Task Force and they were dependent on the military not only for transportation to the combat theatre but also for communications from it. Indeed, it took longer for one Independent Television News despatch to reach London than it had taken one of William Howard Russell's despatches for The Times 150 years earlier during the Crimean war.
Developments in new communications technologies during the 1980s, such as the portable satellite phone, the laptop computer, and digital data transmission meant that such military control of the information environment would never be possible again. However, as the Gulf war of 1991 indicated, propaganda had not been confined to the dustbin of history. An increasingly sophisticated US military information policy was able to secure a desired view of warfare through the release of videotapes showing missiles hitting (not missing) their targets with unprecedented accuracy, and through live television press conferences which bypassed the traditional role of the media as mediator. Despite the unprecedented effort by the Iraqis to counter this propaganda of a ‘clean’ and ‘smart’ high-tech war by permitting correspondents from Coalition countries to stay behind in the enemy capital under fire, the military information agenda succeeded in dominating the media coverage. Democracies had indeed demonstrated that they could wage war in the presence of more than 1, 500 journalists, and thereby sustain public support in the process.
The Gulf war has been described as the first ‘information war’. Indeed, the emphasis in contemporary military thinking on ‘Command and Control Warfare’ places great emphasis on information warfare or ‘information operations’. As such, propaganda is redefined as a non-lethal weapon, a combat force multiplier which saves lives and empowers the individual to make decisions he/she might not otherwise have done—all to the benefit of the source.
