Propaganda, Power and Persuasion

From World War I to Wikileaks

David Welch, David Welch

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857737373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Propaganda
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As Philip Taylor has written, 'The challenge (of the modern information age) is to ensure that no single propaganda source gains monopoly over the information and images that shape our thoughts. If this happens, the war propagandists will be back in business again.' Propaganda came of age in the Twentieth Century. The development of mass- and multi-media offered a fertile ground for propaganda while global conflict provided the impetus needed for its growth. Propaganda has however become a portmanteau word, which can be interpreted in a number of different ways. What are the characteristic features of propaganda, and how can it be defined? The distinguished contributors to this book trace the development of techniques of 'opinion management' from the First World War to the current conflict in Afghanistan. They reveal how state leaders and spin-doctors operating at the behest of the state, sought to shape popular attitudes - at home and overseas - endeavouring to harness new media with the objective of winning hearts and minds. The book provides compelling evidence of how the study and practice of propaganda today is shaped by its history.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

‘OPENING PANDORA’S BOX’: PROPAGANDA, POWER AND PERSUASION

David Welch

Propaganda came of age in the twentieth century. The development of mass and multi-media offered a fertile ground for propaganda, and global conflict provided the impetus needed for its growth. As electorates and audiences have become more sophisticated, they have begun to question the use of propaganda in history and its role in contemporary society. However, propaganda has become a portmanteau word, which can be interpreted in a number of different ways.

With rapidly changing technology, definitions of propaganda have also undergone changes. Propaganda has meant different things at different times, although clearly the scale on which it has been practised has increased in the twentieth century. What are the characteristic features of propaganda, and how can it be defined?¹

Despite the controversy over definition, the subject continues to grow and attract widespread interest. The importance of propaganda in the politics of this century should not be underestimated. The most obvious reason for the increasing prominence given to propaganda and its assumed power over opinion is the broadening base of politics which dramatically transformed the nature of political participation. Of course the means of communication have correspondingly increased, and the growth of education and technological advances in mass communications have all proved contributory factors. We are now witnessing the explosion of ‘information superhighways’ and digital data networks, and legitimate concerns have been expressed about the nature of media proprietorship and access and the extent to which information flows freely (what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have referred to as the ‘manufacture of consent’).² Propagandists have been forced to respond to these changes; they must assess their audience and use whatever methods they consider to be most effective.

Over the past 100 years, ‘opinion management’ has become a central preoccupation of states at war and in peace. The series of essays in this volume trace the development of techniques of ‘opinion management’ from World War I to the current conflict in Afghanistan and the establishment of WikiLeaks. They reveal how state leaders and spin-doctors operating at the behest of the state sought to shape popular attitudes – at home and overseas – seeking to harness new media with the objective of winning hearts and minds. The volume provides compelling evidence of how the study and practice of propaganda today is shaped by its history. It will offer, therefore, a special resonance for contemporary audiences. As Philip Taylor wrote in the preface to his Munitions of the Mind: ‘The challenge [of the modern information age] is to ensure that no single propaganda source gains monopoly over the information and images that shape our thoughts. If this happens, the war propagandists will be back in business again.’³

It is fitting that Taylor’s work is cited, for the essays included in this volume are intended to be a tribute to Taylor’s pioneering legacy in the field of propaganda studies. Philip Taylor, who was the first Professor of International Communications in the UK, died in 2010 at the age of 56.⁴ He leaves behind a towering body of scholarship that has set the benchmark for research combining history with communications.

Although the scale on which propaganda is practised has increased dramatically in the twentieth century, the origin of the word can be traced back to the Reformation, when the spiritual and ecclesiastical unity of Europe was shattered and the medieval Roman Catholic Church lost its hold on the northern countries. During the ensuing struggle between the forces of Protestantism and those of the Counter-Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church found itself faced with the problem of maintaining and strengthening its hold in the non-Catholic countries. Pope Gregory XIII established a commission of cardinals charged with spreading Catholicism and regulating ecclesiastical affairs in heathen lands. A generation later, in 1622, when the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) had broken out, Pope Gregory XV made this commission permanent as the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Holy Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith) charged with the management of foreign missions and financed by a ‘ring tax’ assessed upon each newly appointed cardinal. Within a few years, in 1627, this charge took the form of the College of Propaganda (Collegium Urbanum), which was established to educate young priests who were to undertake such missions. The first propaganda institute was therefore simply a body charged with improving the dissemination of a group of religious dogmas. The word ‘propaganda’ soon came to be applied to any organisation set up for the purpose of spreading a doctrine; then it was applied to the doctrine itself; and lastly to the methods employed in effectuating the dissemination.

From the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries we hear comparatively little about propaganda. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Western Europe remained largely at peace and there were few occasions where propaganda on a national scale was called for. Historically propaganda was associated with periods of stress and turmoil during which violent controversy over doctrine accompanied the use of force. In the struggle for power, propaganda is an instrument to be used by those who want to secure or retain power just as much as by those wanting to displace them. In Philip Taylor’s phrase, ‘for the smoke to rise, there must first be a spark which lights the flame’. Propaganda is that spark.

The link between propaganda and war is the theme that binds the following chapters together. Since the late nineteenth century war, propaganda and the mass media have undergone a long, intricate relationship. Indeed, the history of changing communication technology is often pegged to certain conflicts. This volume begins with World War I. There is a very good reason for that.

Whilst the use of war propaganda dates back 2,400 years to Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War, World War I witnessed its first use by governments in an organised, quasi-scientific manner. Between 1914 and 1918 the wholesale use of propaganda as an organised weapon of modern warfare transformed it into something more sinister. One of the most significant lessons to be learned from the experience of World War I was that public opinion could no longer be ignored as a determining factor in the formulation of government policies. Unlike previous wars, this was the first ‘total war’ in which entire nations rather than just professional armies were locked in mortal combat. The war served to increase the level of popular interest and participation in the affairs of the state. The gap between the soldier at the front and the civilian at home was narrowed substantially in that the full resources of the state – military, economic and psychological – had to be mobilised. In a state of total war, which required civilians to participate in the war effort, morale came to be recognised as a significant military factor, and propaganda slowly emerged as the principal instrument of control over public opinion and an essential weapon in the national arsenal, culminating in the establishment in Britain of the Ministry of Information in 1918 under Lord Beaverbrook and a separate Enemy Propaganda Department at Crewe House under Lord Northcliffe. By means of strict censorship and tightly controlled propaganda campaigns, the press, films, leaflets and posters were all utilised in a coordinated fashion (arguably for the first time) in order to disseminate officially approved themes.

The volume begins with Mark Connelly’s account of the Battle of the Falkland Islands in 1914. Connelly points to the contemporary significance of the Falkland Islands and how, in 1914, it was used to promote the idea that every part of the British Empire was actually engaged in protecting values of civilisation (as defined by the British); this time against German aggression.⁵ The Battle of the Falklands Island in 1914 was used for propaganda purposes to serve a number of agendas and carry a range of messages and equally importantly it was played out on the new medium of film newsreels. Connelly shows how, decades later in the 1980s, the battle could be reshaped to fit an entirely different set of circumstances. During the Great War, however, the battle and the manner in which it was reported helped emphasise the supremacy of the Royal Navy and provide reassurance to the Empire. In the immediate post-war years it was celebrated as one of the last set-piece naval clashes untroubled by new methods of modern warfare. The Battle of the Falkland Islands portrayed combat as glorious, exhilarating and honourable.

David Welch’s chapter takes up the theme of an honourable, ‘Just War’ and shows the importance of the ‘stereotype’ in asserting the righteousness of one’s own cause. The identification of the enemy is of great importance in wartime propaganda in that it offers the target audience a ready-made scapegoat. Welch shows how the stereotype of the German ‘Hun’ came about and how it was used to reinforce British values and contrast such values favourably against German aggression and barbarism. The image of the enemy was a crucial aspect of wartime propaganda and served to justify British war aims, encourage enlistment, help raise war loans, strengthen the fighting spirit of the armed forces and bolster civilian morale.

Despite major tensions, Britain’s wartime consensus generally held up under the exigencies of war. One explanation for this was the skilful use by the government of propaganda and censorship. After the War, however, a deep mistrust developed on the part of ordinary citizens, who realised that conditions at the front had been deliberately obscured by patriotic slogans and ‘atrocity propaganda’ consisting of obscene stereotypes of the enemy and their dastardly deeds. The populace also felt cheated that its sacrifices had not resulted in the promised homes and a land ‘fit for heroes’. Propaganda was associated with lies and falsehood. Even politicians were sensitive to these criticisms; as a result, the Ministry of Information was immediately disbanded. The British government regarded propaganda as politically dangerous and even morally unacceptable in peacetime. It was, as one official wrote in the 1920s, ‘a good word gone wrong – debauched by the late Lord Northcliffe’. The impact of propaganda on political behaviour was so profound that during World War II, when the government attempted to ‘educate’ the populace regarding the existence of Nazi extermination camps, it was not immediately believed since the information was suspected of being more ‘propaganda’.

In spite of the British government’s reluctance to become too closely associated with official propaganda, Jeffrey Richards shows how the commercial cinema was used to disseminate British propaganda overseas in the interwar period. The cinema was now the most potent form for the dissemination of propaganda and was the mass medium of the first half of the twentieth century. Richards traces the career of the largely forgotten British actor George Arliss and shows how he cornered the American market in biopics.

Arliss was not only an actor but what the French call the auteur of his films – and he liked his films to have a propaganda message. At the height of the Great Depression he made a series of films celebrating the romance of capitalism and in his two greatest successes, Disraeli (1929) and The House of Rothschilds (1934), he linked his affirmations of capitalism (in the face of international challenges from both communism and fascism) to a celebration of the achievements of the Jews. This, at a time when Hollywood moguls feared that to highlight Jewish themes might provoke an anti-Semitic backlash. Famously the 1937 Warner Brothers film The Life of Emile Zola, which dealt with the Dreyfus affair, made no mention of Jews or the anti-Semitism that underpinned the scandal. For three of his British films made in the 1930s, the plus value was their consistent support for the policy of peace and appeasement which was the approach of the interwar British governments to foreign policy, a policy that Richards claims was widely supported by the people, desperate to avoid a return to world war.

According to Philip Taylor, World War II ‘witnessed the greatest battle in the history of warfare.’⁶ All the belligerents employed propaganda on a scale that dwarfed that of other conflicts, including World War I. Britain’s principal propaganda structures were the Ministry of Information (MOI) for home, allied and neutral territory and the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) for enemy territory. James Chapman’s chapter explores the little known institutional and ideological rivalry that emerged in Britain between the MOI and the British Council. Founded in 1934, the British Council arose in the Foreign Office and was inspired by the recognition of the importance of ‘cultural propaganda’ in promoting British interests, following the success of similar official cultural organisations established by the French, Germans and Italians in the late 1920s. The council worked out of the various British consulates, but then began opening its own offices in various countries, starting with Egypt in 1938. The overseas associates of the British Council collected information about local conditions, opportunities and openness to British initiates, which information was compiled in London. These ‘information’ functions were transferred to the MOI at the start of World War II.⁷ Chapman shows how competition between institutions with different ideological agendas led to a contested struggle over how British propaganda should be projected overseas. Chapman’s analysis provides a rare insight into how differences over the nature and function of propaganda can become entangled within institutional politics and petty jealousies – with important consequences for the British propaganda effort during the war.

When the MOI information was set up at the outbreak of war, it was, to some extent, making up for lost ground. Morale would obviously be a crucial factor in enduring civilian bombing or a war of attrition and the MOI would have to compete with a German propaganda machine under Joseph Goebbels that had been the first ministry to be established when the Nazis had come to power some six years previously in 1933.

Ironically, the experience of Britain’s propaganda effort during World War I provided the defeated Germans with a fertile source of counter-propaganda directed at the postwar peace treaties and the ignominy of the Weimar Republic. Writing in Mein Kampf, Hitler noted: ‘In the year 1915, the enemy started his propaganda among our soldiers. From 1916 it steadily became more intensive, and at the beginning of 1918, it had swollen into a storm cloud. One could now see the effects of this gradual seduction. Our soldiers learned to think the way the enemy wanted them to think.’ By maintaining that the German army had not been defeated in the field of battle but rather had been forced to submit due to the disintegration of morale from within, which had been accelerated by skilful British propaganda, Hitler (like other right-wing politicians and military groups) was providing historical legitimacy for the ‘stab-in-the-back’ theory. Regardless of the actual role played by British (or Soviet) propaganda in helping to bring Germany to its knees, it was generally accepted that Britain’s wartime experiment was the ideal blueprint according to which other governments would subsequently model their own propaganda apparatus. According to Hitler (again writing in Mein Kampf), ‘Germany had failed to recognise propaganda as a weapon of the first order, whereas the British has [sic] employed it with great skill and ingenious deliberation.’⁸ Convinced of the essential role of propaganda for any movement determined to assume power, Hitler saw propaganda as a vehicle of political salesmanship in a mass market; it was no surprise that the Ministry of Propaganda was the first to be established when the Nazis assumed power in 1933.

The function of propaganda, Hitler argued, was to focus the attention of the masses on certain facts, processes and necessities ‘whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision’. Accordingly, propaganda for the masses had to be simple and concentrate on as few points as possible, which had to be repeated many times, with an emphasis on such emotional elements as love and hatred. Through the continuity and sustained uniformity of its application, Hitler concluded that propaganda would lead to results ‘almost beyond our understanding’.⁹ Unlike the Bolsheviks, however, the Nazis did not distinguish between agitation and propaganda. In Soviet Russia agitation was concerned with influencing the masses through ideas and slogans, while propaganda served to spread the communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism. The distinction dates back to Georgi Plekhanov’s celebrated 1892 definition: ‘A propagandist presents many ideas to one or a few persons; an agitator presents only one or a few ideas, but presents them to a whole mass of people’ (emphasis added). The Nazis, on the other hand, regarded propaganda not merely as an instrument for reaching the party elite but as a means of persuading and indoctrinating all Germans.

Welch’s chapter on Nazi propaganda juxtaposes the heightened political and military ambitions of the regime at the outbreak of the war with the declining effectiveness of Nazi propaganda in the final two years of the conflict. When the war started to turn against Hitler in the winter of 1941–2, it would take some time before military reverses had any noticeable effect on his popularity. However, following the catastrophe of Stalingrad, a defeat for which Hitler was held responsible, his popularity began to decline. Stalingrad marked a turning point in Nazi war propaganda as it allowed Joseph Goebbels finally to implement his drive for the total mobilisation of all Germany’s human resources for the war effort. Welch argues that ...