Propaganda, Persuasion and the Great War

Heredity in the modern sale of products and political ideas

Pier Paolo Pedrini

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367594794
• eBook ISBN: 9781351866187
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

How to persuade citizens to enlist? How to convince them to fight in a war which was, for many, distant in terms of kilometres as well as interest? Modern persuasion techniques, both political and commercial, were used to motivate enlistment and financial support to build a "factory of consensus". The propagandists manipulated the public, guiding their thoughts and actions according to the wishes of those in power and were therefore the forerunners of spin doctors and marketing and advertising professionals. Their posters caught the attention of members of the public with images of children and beautiful women, involving them, nourishing their inner needs for well-being and social prestige, motivating them by showing them testimonials in amusing and adventurous situations, and inspiring their way of perceiving the enemy and the war itself, whose objective was to "make the world safe for democracy".

In the discourse of this strategy we find storytelling, humour, satire and fear, but also the language of gestures, recognized as important for the completeness of messages. Were the propagandists "hidden persuaders" who knew the characteristics of the human mind? We do not know for certain. However, their posters have a personal and consistent motivation which this book intends to demonstrate.

1
Propaganda and persuasion

Doubting everything and believing everything are two solutions, equally agreeable, which exempt us, one and the other, from reflecting.

Jules-Henri Poincaré

The ancient Greeks saw the art of persuasion as a form of rhetoric and recognized that logic and reasoning were indispensable components for communicating one’s ideas successfully. About 323 b.c., Aristotle wrote Rhetoric, the first general theory of persuasion in which guidelines were set down for how orators were to formulate their discourse to facilitate the audience’s search for truth.

For the philosopher of Stagira, the objective of persuasion was to communicate a point of view or position which would help people understand the truth regarding facts. This knowledge could be gained only by means of reason. However, he admitted that not everyone was capable of doing this for every subject. Certain people needed persuasion to guide them towards the conclusion that the orator thought would be best for them.

His theory distinguished between three aspects of persuasion, which gave a solid basis for the development of the theory of modern communication: the source (ethos), the message (logos) and the emotions of the public (pathos).

The communicator had to know how to take these into account without undervaluing any one of them: it was important to present oneself as an authority worthy of trust; in formulating messages, it was necessary to know how to use reasoning which followed the rules of logic and which made use of vivid historical or imaginary examples to illustrate the most difficult passages; in order that the oration should be effective, it was essential to know and understand the sentiments of the audience, to direct its emotions in a useful manner and to adapt the message to its previous beliefs.

We shall find all of these fundamental considerations in the theory of modern persuasion, as its beginnings coincide through a long tradition with classical rhetoric. Knowing the point of view of one’s audience, showing oneself to be authoritative, presenting ideas in a rational way and at the same time knowing how to involve the audience emotionally are aspects which are duly considered in any modern treatise upon the subject. Like persuasion, propaganda has in primis the aim of changing people’s perceptions, beliefs and attitudes in order to stimulate certain behaviours rather than others and/or change their opinions. This involves developing a methodic and well-planned repertory of persuasive and manipulative techniques which act primarily on the emotions, for the most part unconsciously.¹

A rather exhaustive definition of propaganda has been suggested by the Professor of Philosophy of Canadian origin, Randal Marlin (1938) who sees it (2002, p. 22) 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 judgement.

In this way, propaganda exercises a kind of social control, implementing the extremely ancient strategy of distraction by diverting the attention of the public from important problems through the use of meaningless information and thus taking its mind off the essential while giving it the illusion of being informed.

A strategy also to be found in advertising discourse is to say nothing about or even hide the limits and defects of a service or product, while emphasizing certain insignificant details which have a high emotional charge. Not by chance it has been found that what the public remembers most about an advertisement is its jingle. Nothing is more emotional than that.

Advertising and the propaganda used in the Great War, also defined as “the world’s greatest adventure in advertising” and “a vast enterprise in salesmanship” (Creel, 2012, p. 4), have other things in common such as the basic need to obtain public approval and to create such potent and absorbing expectations as to succeed in guiding attitudes and behaviour. The strategy which they have most in common and which we will often encounter in the course of our examination, is that which first of all reveals a problem in order to arouse an emotional reaction in the public and then offers a solution, or rather instructions as to how to solve it. Often the latter is persuasive because it is presented by a person of authority (using the principle of authority) and is thus even further enhanced.

It is clear that government decisions appear in a better light if they are presented after describing a situation of disadvantage or danger. Disasters caused by the enemy, or even threatened, precede arms races and consequential limitations of public freedom. Similarly, the advertising of a product which comes to rescue is more appealing after being shown stains which are difficult to remove from clothing, for example.

However, it is important to be clear: not every persuasive act is propaganda. We need to see them rather as two systems that intersect and whose subtle boundaries are not easily drawn. While many advertisers would distance themselves from this, it is certainly arduous to insist with absolute conviction that modern publicity is diametrically opposed to propaganda or even to the psychological techniques used during World War I.

On the contrary, advertising is a kind of propaganda when it exploits an aesthetic ideal or when it uses the ideal of good health in the service of selling a product that is, in reality, a threat to health. To corroborate this comparison between advertising and propaganda, let us quote a convincing statement by the Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, Jason Stanley (2015, p. 56):

Commercial advertising is an attempt to attach possession of the product advertised to an attractive ideal, when possessing that product is in the normal case irrelevant to achieving that ideal.

Posters at that time were most of all political in nature but undeniably invented using typical advertising methods, which were being experimented with in an effort to fascinate, seduce, flatter and, finally, persuade consumers to buy a product. In his publication The Care and Feeding of Ideas (1993), the famous advertising agent Bill Backer suggests regarding the two as sisters; something in an advertising text is connected with human desires, while propaganda shapes the infinite into concrete images.

After dedicating ourselves to the study of propaganda in the World War I, we became convinced of being able to demonstrate that the advertising tactics mentioned above were also present in the propagandist discourse of the time. Distance between them is to be found rather in the complicated question of ethics, in the definition of what is morally admissible or inadmissible, in drawing the line between good and bad, between manipulation and argumentation. It is a problem without a universal solution that everyone agrees with, as it has its origin in the human brain. This was already observed with incredible clarity by Hypocrates (460–377 b.c.) many centuries ago:

It is necessary to know that pleasure, joy, laughter and entertainment, like suffering, pain, fear and weeping have no other source than the brain. It is especially this organ which enables us to think, see and feel and to distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly, good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant.

(see Swaab, 2011, p. 17)

The morality of a persuasive technique is often based upon its success in relation to its objective, the possible consequences of resulting actions as well as their content and the path taken to reach the desired result. The ethical perspective judges actions according to the methods used and condemns the conscious spreading of misinformation, silence in the face of obvious facts, the manipulation of others, the use of false premises and the ambiguous and instrumental appeal to the emotions in order to suppress the critical sense of the individual. In this case, the answer regarding the question of divergence between propaganda and persuasion emerges spontaneously.

But are we certain that it is always so?

The derivation of the term propaganda is propagare in Latin, which signifies spread. It is a term which originated in a religious context when in the 16th century Pope Gregorio XV organized a special commission in charge of propagating the Catholic faith, including its beliefs, mysteries, legends, stories and parables. After the French Revolution the word entered the political context but maintained its neutral meaning of diffusion of opinions and doctrine.

Originally then, propaganda did not refer to misleading information or half-truths. The modern meaning actually came into being at the time of the Great War, during which the initiatives and the size of the persuasive apparatus, first of all to enrol military personnel and to convince people to support the necessity of entering the war, and then to encourage it to remain in the conflict even though the slaughter continued month after month, were exceptional.

Especially in the U.S., propaganda obtained remarkable results in motivating the public and mobilizing it without the slightest constraint. It was from that moment that the word took on a sinister and negative connotation, becoming spontaneously synonymous with falsehood and prejudice which power groups and organizations used to pursue their hidden agendas.

The historian Alex Carey (1922–1988) commented (1997) that propaganda was one of the three most relevant phenomena that distinguished the last century, and which were closely linked to each other: the development of democracy, the growth of economic power and the expansion of propaganda to protect economic power from democracy.

It is precisely in this direction, therefore, that the function of propagandists is to be interpreted. Their wish is to change the way people see a question with the aim of guiding their attitudes, their opinions and, finally, their actions, in order that these should conform to the desires of a political and/or economic group. Implementing the strategy of distraction, facts are presented selectively, information is omitted and details are emphasized, provoking an emotional response. In this way, the public is directed towards the conclusion envisaged by the power group.

This brings us once again close to the thinking of Aristotle.

When the term propaganda is used, it naturally refers to the mass persuasion that characterizes post-industrial society, with techniques whose objective is increasingly less to inform and more to draw public opinion towards a desired position or point of view. This parallel between advertising and propaganda was also established by the English philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). At the end of World War I he wrote (1941, p. 76) that

propaganda, conducted by the means which advertisers have found successful, is now one of the recognized methods of government in all advanced countries and is especially the method by which democratic opinion is created.

This new type of control, which served to change people’s stance through deception or a form of negative persuasion, was meant to form “democratic opinion” and to avert the knowledge of true, serious information, or that which was less interesting for the ruling class. From that point on, the latter could no longer avoid knowing the rules as to how it functioned because, as the prolific scholar on the subject, Terence H. Qualter (1925) pointed out, “if at one time votes could be bought, now they ought to be obtained by persuasion. Politicians should learn about propaganda” (Qualter, 1985; see Welch, 2013, p. 204) in order to construct information to communicate.

Thus, the message must always be studied and directed towards people’s expectations in order to gain approval and win the majority vote. To do this, the needs of the public must be precisely known. For an author, the innermost objective of propaganda is therefore “to control actions by influencing attitudes” (Qualter, 1962, p. 15). This is another concept closely related to Aristotle, but which is above all related to today’s spin doctors.

These interpret communication as a collection of manipulative techniques for indoctrinating the public without the slightest concern of an ethical nature, nor any regard for the general interest. Any means are justified in order to reach the objective.

There are no qualms regarding untrue statements as the executive is thought to have no duty of responsibility towards the public. Nor are the interests of the country defended, only those of its leader.

(Foa, 2006, pp. 37–8)

The theme of propaganda was also a subject of reflection for the great dictators of the last century such as Adolf Hitler whom we have already mentioned. According to him (2000, pp. 171–2), it was “the basis of everything” because “its task is to convince (the public) of the goodness of an ideal”. More specifically, he soon realized its proper use “is a real art.… But not until the war was there a chance to see the enormous results which properly directed propaganda can produce”; it could even succeed in assuring a successful end. It was an art which, in contrast with what had taken place previously, was used at that time on a global scale because it was the first war that could be d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Propaganda and persuasion
• 2 Persuading for the Great War
• 3 The organization of the persuasive apparatus
• 4 Attracting attention
• 5 Repeating the message
• 6 The power of questions
• 7 The persuasion of the source
• 8 Unity is strength
• 9 Target 1: the home front
• 10 Target 2: men to enlist
• Conclusion
• List of images
• Subject and author index