Propaganda - Oxford Reference butpz/orww.oxfordreterence.com.erproxy lib.monash edu. au...
Oxford Reference
The Oxford Companion to Military History
Richard Holmes, Charies Singleton, and Dr Spencer Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press. Print Pubtication Date: 2001
Pint ISBN-13: 9780198608963, Published onfine: 2004
(Current Ontine Version: 2004 eISBN: 9780191727467
propaganda
Propaganda is a word derived from the Vatican's establishment of the Sacre Congregatio de Propaganda Fide in
1622. itis a process of persuasion designed to induce ideas, opinions, or actions beneficial to the source, AS @
process, itis value-neutral although the word has acquired pejorative meaning, Analysis of propaganda would
imore 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
ctherwise 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 ‘ath’. its wartime applications, in the Napoleonic or the American independence
wars, were confined largely to calls to arms, lempooning 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 “4th century shifted the emphasis fom script to print. In ware 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 @
global audience.
The Great War of 1914-18, a total wer 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,
bby foul means rather than fair, with lies or half-truths, and with deceit. n particular, the popularization of atrocity
propaganda through the relatively new mass-circulation press and the increasingly popular silent cinema
igeredited the relationship between propaganda and ‘ruth’. It was this manipulative power over human
emotions which Hitler identified as being a weapon thet could be of enormous value for his purposes.
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In the new USSR also, propaganda was seized upon as a device that could serve the state, by extending
revolutionary ideas to the ilterate masses and, more innovatively, nto the international class struggle. With the
advent of radio broadcasting in the 1920s, the ability to transmit propaganda across frontiers and appeal directly
tp 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 fo
‘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 confict that was to produce both WWI} and
the subsequent Cold War.
By the outbreak of WII, 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 fonts to sustain
popular morale through the harsh realities of wer, bombing, rationing, victories, and defeats, on the fighting fronte
it was used as an adjunct to miltary 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. iis 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 @ grateful
‘Goebbels. It enabled him to launch his own drive for total war, it pre-empted the Allied use of such inducements
28 ‘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 Wer. 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 Korpa 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
‘frst television war’ raised the spectre of whether democracies would be able to sustain popular support in
wartime under its prying lens. A myth emerged thet 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. Itis 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 Churchills phrase about the BBC) an ‘enemy within
the ates’ for democracies, which would always therefore be at a disadvantage in conflicts against authoritarian
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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 miltary 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 Wiliam Howard Russell's
despatches for The Times 150 years eetlier during the Crimean war.
Developments in new communications technologies during the 1980s, such as the portable satelite 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 fre, the miltary 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 onl ‘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.
‘The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan saw the extensive use of psychological operations tactics to undermine and
demoralize the Taliban forces. This included the jamming of radio transmissions and the dropping af ieatiets
‘offering safe conduct to those Taliban who surrendered and rewards for the capture of Osama bin Laden. During
the 2003 invasion of Iraq, individuat members ofthe Iraqi government and armed forces were targeted with
‘emails and text messages, attempting to persuade them to defect or not show resistance to the Coalition forces.
PHILIP M. TAYLOR
Bibliography
Ellul, J, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (New York, 1965).
Find this resource:
Pratkanis, A.. and Aronson, E., Age of Propaganda (New York, 1991).
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Taylor, Philip M., Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era
(Manchester, 1995)
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