by Propaganda
49 Ephraim Douglass Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, Vol. II (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1957) 154. See also Knightley 34.
50 Burton J. Hendrick, “Propaganda of the Confederacy,” in A Psychological Warfare Casebook, ed. William E.
Daugherty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1958) 83.
51 E.B. White took issue with Esquire’s publication of a 23-page article by Harrison Salisbury in February 1976.
Xerox sponsored the article but gave the magazine and author “full editorial control.” Salisbury was paid $40,000, plus $15,000 in expenses, and Esquire received $115,000 in advertising. White wrote a letter to the Ellsworth (Maine) American and subsequently directly to Xerox, complaining that “Buying and selling space in news columns could become a serious disease of the press. If it reached epidemic proportions, it could destroy the press ... I want to read what the editor and publisher have managed to dig up on their own—and paid for out of the til .” Xerox agreed with his arguments and aborted two other projects along the same lines. See
“Xerox, please copy!” The Boston Globe, July 5, 1976: 33.
52 Knightley 55–56. As Upton Sinclair tells the story, Hearst admitted and was proud of his role in causing the war. Sinclair, The Brass Check.
53 Knightley 75.
54 Knightley 72.
55 “British Propaganda During the War 1914–1918” (n.d.), 11. This 60-page document has no named publisher and is marked “secret,” though I have seen it openly displayed in the Reading Room of the Imperial War Museum, where I first came across it in the papers of Sir Campbell Stuart. It was written by Ministry of Information insiders at the war’s end as a record of their and their predecessors’ activities. Further quotations from this work come from this source and will be indicated by bracketed reference (BP and page number) in the text. The BP Report has since been moved to the rare books section of the Imperial War Museum Library. It is not a single document but is a compilation of different documents covering different time periods. Masterman’s own reports were titled “Work Conducted for the Government at Wellington House.” The Third Report, the most interesting, has been assigned the reference number 49/3 (41) 01 [Foreign Office News Department]. In comparing divergent spellings between the reports, reference will be to pages in this document.
56 This quotation appears as the eleventh page in the BP Report, but because the Report is a compilation, it appears as page three of the third section, titled “The Department of Information.”
57 See M.L. Sanders and Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda During the First World War, 1914– 18 (London and Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1982) 39; and Gary S. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992) 28.
58 The writers Masterman gathered together at Wellington House included William Archer, Sir J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Mgr. R.H. Benson, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Hope Hawkins, Maurice Hewlett, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Professor Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Sir Gilbert Parker MP, Sir Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells, and Israel Zangwill. Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Quiller Couch were unable to attend the first meeting of September 2, 1914, but expressed willingness to help. In addition to these names, Masterman credits the following, in his Third Report of September 1916, as assisting in Wellington House work: Lord Bryce, Lord Cromer, Lord Revelstoke, Hume Williams, Professor J.H. Morgan, Archibald Hurd, J.M. Robertson, Alfred Noyes, H.W. Massingham, G.W.
Prothero, and the Dutch cartoonist Raemaekers. See Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987) 15–16.
59 At least as regards the Japanese, there appears to be no foundation for this assumption. Non-photographic depictions were widely used in propaganda by the Japanese to their home audiences. I owe this point to Jacob Kovalio, Department of History, Carleton University.
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60 Knightley 106–07. Captain F.W. Wilson’s invention of the baby of Courbeck Loo is a prize example. Wilson, a reporter for the Daily Mail on assignment in Brussels, was unable to find evidence of German atrocities, so he invented the pathetic story of a baby rescued from the Hun amid burning buildings. The story caught the public imagination, with people donating clothing for the baby. To avoid embarrassment he reported the baby died of a contagious disease, thereby explaining the absence of a public burial.
61 Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages, as Presided over by The Right Hon. Viscount Bryce, O.M.
(London: HMSO, 1915) 5. Hereafter cited as Bryce Report. Further quotations from this work come from this source and will be indicated by bracketed reference (BR and page number) in the text.
62 Knightley 105.
63 Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928) 113.
64 In December, 1990, in what turned out to be a prelude to the US involvement in the Gulf War, Amnesty International was widely reported as confirming that Iraqi soldiers had entered hospitals following the invasion of Kuwait City and had removed incubators for shipment to Iraq, leaving 320 babies to die. This horror story was later discredited, with Amnesty International itself issuing a retraction. See Chapter 5, pp. 207ff.
65 Joachim Neander and Randal Marlin, “Media and Propaganda: The Northcliffe Press and the Corpse Factory Story of World War I,” Global Media Journal, Canadian Edition 3. no. 2 (2010): 67–82;
www.gmj.uottawa.ca/1002/v3i2_neander%20and%20marlin.pdf>.
66 Austen Chamberlain, House of Commons Debates, December 2, 1925: 2233.
67 C.F.G., Masterman, Third Report on the Work Conducted for the Government at Wellington House (September, 1916) 88.
68 Frederic William Wile, “Why I Believe the Germans are Ghouls,” The War Illustrated, May 19, 1917: 308.
69 James Morgan Read, Atrocity Propaganda (New York: Arno Press, 1972) 38.
70 Ingrid Pot-Noordman, Regionaal Archief Leiden, in an e-mail to the author on September 23, 2010.
71 Bertrand Russell, “Government by Propaganda.” These Eventful Years (London: The Encyclopedia Britannica Company, 1924) 381.
72 Times (London), April 17, 1917: 5.
73 New York Times, April 20, 1917.
74 A.J. Mackenzie, Propaganda Boom (London: John Gifford, 1938) 50–71.
75 The War Illustrated, May 19, 1917.
76 “The Chemicalising of Corpses,” The Lancet, April 21, 1917: 635.28; New York Times, November 22, 1925: VIII, 14.
77 Thanks to Rebecca Kukla for alerting me to this issue in her Marston LaFrance lecture at Carleton University.
78 Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s “Final Solution” (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1982).
79 There is much more that can be discussed. See Shimon Rubinstein, German Atrocity or British Propaganda, The Seventieth Anniversary of a Scandal: German Corpse Utilization Establishments in the First World War (Jerusalem: Academon, 1987). I came across this interesting work in the Imperial War Museum after I had already covered much of the same ground. In addition to close textual analysis, Rubinstein provides a useful study of the political forces surrounding both the 1917 and 1925 parliamentary questions and answers.
80 See Albert L. Weeks, The First Bolshevik (New York: New York University Press, 1968) 88–89; Georgi Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. I (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974) 339–49; Samuel Baron, Plekhanov (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963), 148f.
81 Plekhanov 344, 345.
82 Baron 149.
83 For this and other passages, I am translating from the French version of the text, Que faire? (Pékin: Éditions du Peuple, 1972) 82–83, 85, 88.
84 See on this Carter
Elwood, “Lenin and Pravda, 1912–1914,” Slavic Review 31 (June 1972); History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( Bolsheviks) (Moscow: International Publishers, Inc., 1939) 145ff.
85 Richard Taylor gives his reference as G. Boltyanskii, Lenin i kino (Moscow, 1925) 16–17 in Film Propaganda 44; also Taylor, Film Propaganda 29, 51.
86 See Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization 1917– 1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 60, 113.
87 Kenez 72.
88 El ul,
Propaganda 110.
89 Kenez 85, 4.
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90 I am indebted for this material to Lloyd Strickland and to an unpublished paper which he co-authored with Tzvetanka Dobreva-Marinova, titled “Bekhterev’s Conception of Mental Phenomena, Activity, and Persuasibility,” presented to the International Society of Political Psychology, Annual Scientific Meeting, 1995. The direct quotations in the context of Strickland’s reporting are taken from Bekhterev’s Kollektivnaia reflexologia (St. Petersburg: Kolos, 1921); in the context of his interpretation, they refer to the text of the unpublished paper itself (11–12).
91 See Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1943, 1971). Page references will be to this text, but some of the wording not in direct quotes is from the Alvin Johnson and John Chamberlain edition (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939). Further quotations from this work come from this source and will be indicated by bracketed reference (MK and page number) in the text.
92 See Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1960) 21, 88–93, 100–01, and passim. I am indebted to Professor Jutta Goheen of the Department of German at Carleton University for drawing my attention to Hitler’s speech and the relevant powerful metaphors.
93 These and other details in this section are taken mostly from Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960).
94 The New York Times, April 16, 1932. The technique can be hilarious. In the early 1980s, Don Harron sometimes asked questions of Prime Minister Trudeau on air for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; he then played some recorded excerpt, which, out of context, made an incongruous impression. Harron meant only to amuse, but Goebbels wanted to score political points; at any rate, it gave Goebbels and his party a higher profile with the international press coverage it attracted.
95 Contrast the account by Helmut Heiber, Goebbels (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1972) 217–18, with that of Manvell and Fraenkel, who have no doubt it was a plot hatched by Goebbels; see Roger Manvell & Heinrich Fraenkel, Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. 120–21. Viktor Reimann, Goebbels (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976) 162, has doubts about the postwar Nuremberg trial testimony of Hans Gisevius, which fingered Goebbels as the mastermind behind the fire. Reimann says, “There was a general tendency during the Nuremberg trial to unload as much as possible on the dead Goebbels.”
96 Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 1933– 1941 (New York: Modern Library, 1999) 5.
97 New York Times, January 31, 1933: 1.
98 New York Times, February 7, 1933.
99 The following account is taken largely from Derrick Sington and Arthur Weidenfeld, The Goebbels Experiment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1943).
100 Sington and Weidenfeld 141.
101 The translation given is by Sington and Weidenfeld 230. Hanns Johst (1890–1978) has a character say this in his play “Schlageter,” first performed in 1933. The actual words are “Wenn ich Kultur höre, entsichere ich meinen Browning.”
102 Sington and Weidenfeld 231.
103 Sington and Weidenfeld 211.
104 See
105 See John Harris, Dunkirk: The Storms of War (Newton Abbot, UK: David, 1980) 13.
106 Edmond Taylor, The Strategy of Terror, rev. ed. (1940; Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1942) 63, 64.
107 J.A. Cole, Lord Haw-Haw (London: Faber and Faber, 1964) 155. Biographical information has also been derived from this book.
108 Sidney Freifeld, “The War of Nerves in the News,” Contemporary Jewish Record (February 1942): 2–31. See 24–25 for the Lochner reference. A shorter version appeared in Public Opinion Quarterly (Summer 1942), under the title “Nazi Press Agentry and the American Press,” 221–35. Quotations below are taken from this source.
109 Freifeld, “Nazi Press Agentry.”
110 Department of Publicity in Enemy Countries, “Analysis of German Propaganda, May 1–16, 1940” (May 27, 1940) (C 6592/18/18), I. The document is included in the Sir Campbell Stuart papers, Imperial War Museum, London.
111 R.G. Nobécourt, Les secrets de la propagande en France occupée (Paris: Fayard, 1962).
112 Nobécourt 39.
113 A poignant account of the treatment of artists in countries under Soviet domination can be found in Punaste Lippude All (Under the Red Banners) (Turku, Finland: Turku Art Museum, 2008). Artists were expected to depict favourable scenes, such as happy family life, vibrant industry, women employed as scientific and CHAPTER 2: HISToRy oF PRoPAgAnDA
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technological experts, etc., under Soviet rule. To produce works that might be seen as challenging that rule risked deportation, imprisonment, or forced labour.
114 See on this Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999).
115 Dwight D. Eisenhower, farewell speech, January 17, 1961; see
php?doc=90&page=transcript>. Quotes from this speech below are taken from this source.
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CHAPTER 3
Propaganda Technique
CHAPTER 3:
An Analysis
PROPAGANDA
TECHNIQUE: AN
ANALYSIS
InTRoDUCTIon
If we keep in mind the notion of propaganda as an organized attempt to affect a given
audience’s beliefs and actions through communications that circumvent or suppress an
individual’s ability to judge adequately the truth of what is conveyed, then we have a
basis for analyzing different techniques of propaganda. These can be separated in vari-
ous categories. We can distinguish verbal from non-verbal forms of propaganda. We
can focus on those techniques that appeal in some way to ethos, roughly translatable
as good character and credibility; others that are designed to affect pathos, or feeling; and still others devoted to persuasion by logos, or argument. We can also take note of large-scale strategies, which combine a whole range of techniques. Or we can choose
to look at individual devices or facilitators, not enough by themselves to produce suc-
cessful propaganda but contributing to the larger end. Logic books often contain a
selection of “informal fal acies.” These deal with illogicalities in reasoning, logical traps into which even well-intentioned people sometimes fal . At least some of these errors
can be exploited for propaganda purposes, and it is useful therefore to be aware of
them. It should be borne in mind, though, that those who use such techniques run the
risk of exposure, resulting in a boomerang effect. Exposure as a propagandist is fatal
to the would-be persuader. As Richard Crossman noted, “The art of the propagandist
is never to be thought a propagandist, but to seem to be a bluff, simple, honorable
enemy who would never think of descending to the level of propaganda.”1One com-
mon way of avoiding such exposure is to
operate on the level of ambiguity, to suggest
and encourage desired beliefs and behaviour, perhaps with mood-affecting music or
pictures, while all the time making no demonstrably false assertions.
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From the AoL Canada website, november 2, 2008. An ashamed-looking
Barack obama, with a police car as background. The story, which had no named
source, was that obama’s aunt was an illegal immigrant. The AP story said at
the end that it was not a criminal matter, but the police car in the image sug-
gested otherwise.
Propaganda analysis that exposes types of ambiguity and the ways in which atten-
tion is captured and directed by the propagandist performs a useful service by alerting
us to possible manipulation by others. But the same knowledge can assist those who
wish to engage in propaganda or persuasion more generally; hence, the need for an
ethical assessment of the activity (we will deal with this issue in Chapter 4). Morally
speaking, one expects that persuasion should in general be free from deliberate decep-
tion, though exceptions exist. But in the world we inhabit, message recipients oft en
come with prejudices and attitudes that may preclude successful communication if
it is in the form of artless transparency. Between outright mendacious manipulation
and artless transparency there is a wide range of communicative behaviour awaiting
examination.
oVERVIEW
We begin by looking at propaganda from a broad perspective. Th ere are certain
things people want. Propaganda, when it is not simply appealing to reflex or herd
instinct, presents its goals in a form or guise that appears to satisfy one or more of
those pre-existing wants. At the most abstract level, people want happiness, so the art
of persuasion will show them, sometimes only implicitly, that a proposed program,
ideology, way of life, commercial object, or whatever will contribute to their happi-
