131
How do you know what's right and wrong? Where did you get the idea?
At mother's knee? In school? Have your ideas been changed more
recently? Why should any organization or group or nation be
interested in modifying the opinion of another group or nation? Why
should they go to the trouble of building opinions or attitudes that
are false? And is it possible, if they had the incentive, to do so?
Not many of us see things for ourselves. We are blind and come to see
things that others have seen first and have pointed out to us. The
world is full of the undiscovered, and him who makes new meanings,
interpretations, feeling, known to us, we call genius -- artist.
What is an idea? Most of our ideas come from someone else. They are
passed on to us fragmentarily -- half ideas at best. Most of them come
from the past. An idea is some synthesis of impressions received
through the senses. Ideas string along into lines of thought. Possibly
we have a little less respect for what we call thought since William
James conceived the "stream of consciousness" and James Joyce so fully
illustrated how it runs, and Henshaw Ward in "Thobbing" made fun of
it. Most of us know but will not confess that our stream of
consciousness runs over ribald shallows into turbid depths, that what
we term thinking is mostly mulling or thobbing. Freud has dealt with
the deeper pools, which seem to many like cesspools. Curious pools of
thought are revealed by Havelock Ellis in his autobiography. Fortunate
for most of us that no phonograph record can play back to us what has
run through our consciousness.
The open mind through which the gusty winds of controversy blow is a
source of much fun to those who keep their minds in mothballs. Even
with eyes and ears and sensation gone, the mind doesn't necessarily
close. Even in the basket case described by Dalton Trumbo in Johnny
Got His Gun (Lippincott, 1939), the stream of consciousness went
on, the stimulus generated from within, building on memories.
Portions of our stream of consciousness we are willing boastfully to
bring to the surface. Usually when we speak of our ideas, they are
those we have selected for exhibition purposes.
When we have combined some ideas with some cherished prejudices in an
attitude which we have admired in someone else and the whole has been given a slant by some unconscious atavistic
tendency, we proudly parade this as an opinion. An opinion is
cherished and carefully preserved. Alcohol sometimes helps. I recall a
jar in which were preserved in alcohol the foetus of a monkey, an
embryonic lizard, and a never hatched turkey buzzard. It was an
incongruous assemblage of examples of organic activity stopped. It
reminded me of my fellow club members' opinions, abortive thoughts
preserved in alcohol.
When we have nothing else to boast about, we pride ourselves on our
opinions -- and the more prejudice, the greater pride. There is even
such a thing published as a "Journal of Opinion." The time may come
when we will be ashamed to hold an opinion. For an opinion is a
generalization that has been arrived at from an incomplete
investigation prematurely stopped.
Something of the methods of modern science have permeated to all the
subjects of our university curriculum. Something of the comparative
method and the evolutionary process enters into the treatment of most
of our humanities. In the prep school, the high school, the grammar
school, there is little enough of this outside of the few laboratory
courses.
The modern scientist has shown us a better way to use our senses and
our brains. He observes as accurately as possible, measuring as soon
as he has learned how, so as to make his description quantitative. As
be accumulates data he criticizes it, the method by which it was
arrived at, and estimates the percentage error. Such tested data are
arranged to facilitate comparison, to make possible safe deductions,
generalizations. He tries to detect some trend and on this to build
some theory as to "how come" -- not "why," but what were the
preliminary and intermediate steps and what were the factors that
brought about the variation, the difference, the change. For the
scientist quickly becomes convinced from his observations that
everything is change, there is no other constant. As soon as he has
built an hypothesis, which he regards as a scaffolding on which to
climb higher -- and he doesn't risk his neck by climbing very far when
he knows the scaffolding is shaky -- he invites criticism of it.
Someone demolishes it, he thanks him and builds again.
There are not many of us who have adopted the scientific attitude
toward our opinions. We don't like them treated as the scientist
treats his. We aren't scientific. We are behind the times. We will
seem just as foolish to our grandchildren as our grandfathers'
opinions seem to us. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" was one
of the firmest convictions not only of Martin Luther but of our
English and New English ancestors.
133
"Residues," Pareto calls these irrational attitudes of the past which
we hold sacred. They remain after deducting "derivations," the
rationalizations, sentiments derived from instincts and emotions,
which take the form of beliefs, explanations, dogmas. Our minds are
occupied with old gewgaws, beliefs, and conceptions put over on our
ancestors by the witch doctors, shamans, priests, and propagandists of
their day.
"It is one of the queer common weaknesses of the human mind to be
uncritical of primary assumptions and to smother up any enquiry into
their soundness in secondary elaboration, in technicalities and
conventional formulae," H. G. Wells reminds us in The New World
Order (Knopf, 1940). "Most of our systems of belief rest upon
rotten foundations, and generally these foundations are made sacred to
preserve them from attack. They become dogmas in a sort of holy of
holies."
This sacred body of tradition holds us in the power of the dead hand.
This dead propaganda enters into the words we use -- "imposter-terms"
Jeremy Bentham called them a century ago, showing that "honor,"
"glory," "dignity" are used "to extenuate flagitious political
projects." "Liberty" was a red word that called out the King's troops
to shoot them down in the eighteenth century. "Democracy" was a
bolshevik term to the framers of our Constitution. And though these
words have new connotations today, our language is made of words and
phrases in which are crystallized and preserved the prejudices of
those who died and rotted long ago -- words that are today powerful
symbols, which Pareto devoted his life to classifying.
Then deeper down in our consciousness, in the subcellar, reside those
fossil propaganda, the tabus of the past -- you must not eat pig in
Palestine, but if you are a chief in the South Seas you must eat
"long pig."
With all this burden of dead and fossil propaganda, with the mental
habit of accepting without questioning, our minds are prepared for the
new crop of follies the modern propagandist is preparing for us. And
with the rapidity and pervasiveness of modern methods of propagation
of the faith, we have before us examples of planned propaganda
changing the attitudes, the ideologies, and beliefs of people by
acting on their emotions, by creating hates to order.
The old view that beliefs and opinions are sacred begins to fade. The
blackness of wrong, whiteness of right, become gray. Of course we
must stand for the right, die if necessary. But we are beginning to
appreciate that is the way our opponents feel. How
did you learn what is right? With your great grandfather there was no
question. That branding iron that he used to impress on his slaves the
divine right of property is concrete evidence. But perhaps you have
not so direct a line to the ultimate source of all truth. He had
direct inspiration from God through His ministers. You may not.
"When foreign affairs are ruled by democracies the danger of war will
be in mistaken beliefs," declared Elihu Root as early as 1922. He
understood that an autocrat could go to war for a sinister purpose,
but not a people unless they were fooled. "While there is no human way
to prevent a king from having a bad heart, there is a human way to
prevent a king from having an erroneous opinion. That way is to
furnish the whole people, as part of their ordinary education, with
correct information about their relations to other peoples ... about
what has happened and is happening in international affairs ... so
that the people themselves will have the means to test misinformation
and appeals to prejudice and passion based upon error."
"Never again" was the slogan only two or three years ago. But today
we are told "It's inevitable" -- a rapid change of opinion, planned
and put across unknown, unseen.
Speaking of Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt, H. G. Wells in his The Fate of
Homo Sapiens (Secker and Warburg, London, 1939) doubts "if these
two fine, active minds have ever enquired how it is they know what
they know and think as they do. ... They have the disposition of all
politicians the world over to deal only with made opinion.
They have never enquired how it is that opinion is made. ...
"A mere fraction of our knowledge is self-taught. What we know is
nine-tenths hearsay. We have heard, we have read. The stuff in our
heads was mainly put there by society."
In his more recent New World Order Wells expresses his disgust
with readymade opinions foisted upon us by propaganda, secret or
overt. "There are a few people here and there reading and thinking in
disconnected fragments. This is all the thinking our world is doing
in the face of planetary disaster.
"The universities, bless them! are in uniform or silent. ... The air
is full of the panaceas of halfwits, none listening to the others and
most of them trying to silence the others in their impatience.
Thousands of fools are ready to write us a complete prescription for
our world troubles."
Wells declares that one "should accustom himself to challenge
nonsense politely but firmly and say fearlessly and as clearly as
possible what is in his mind. ... Only the free, clear, open mind can save us, and these difficulties and obstructions on
our line of thought are as evil as children putting obstacles on a
railway line or scattering nails on an automobile speed track."
Opinion as made comes to us in waves, or like an infection. If we go
into the war, "it will be because we have caught the war fever," John
Foster Dulles declared in an address before the New York meeting of
the National Economic Club this spring, published in their
Consensus, May, 1939. Dulles, senior member of America's
largest law firm, was counsel to the American Peace Commission at
Versailles, member of the Reparations Commission, and is author of
War, Peace, and Change, the best antidote to our present
poisoning.
If our policy were based upon a genuine understanding of the causes
of the present crisis and was intelligently designed to achieve a
world order whereby recurrent crises might hereafter be avoided,"
demand for action might be justified.
"Unfortunately, this prerequisite to affirmative action seems... to
be nonexistent. ... I do not find in our public opinion, official or
private, any comprehension of the true nature of the problem. Our
reactions seem to me to be impulsive and emotional, wholly lacking
either that intellectual content or that idealism which alone would
justify the risks which would be involved. The goal of our policy
seems to be regain the power to make over again the same mistakes."
The War Fever Has already crossed the Appalachians and has begun to
spread like a prairie fire. With pressure groups endeavoring to
relieve the bankruptcy of their cotton, tobacco, and packing
constituents, the walls of the Johnson Act will go down under the
blasts of American Congressional trumpets as did the walls of Jericho.
We should not go into war to "repress a revolt which the policies of
the democratic powers have made inevitable, and which a continuance of
those policies will make recurrent." Dulles reminds us, "The end of
the World War initiated a revival of democratic and liberal
institutions throughout the world. In particular Germany, Italy, and
Japan operated on democratic principles under leadership. But ...
economic pressures closed down from without. ... The dynamic peoples
of the world were given to understand that they could expect no
peaceful change ... international morality would be equated with
perpetual acceptance of the status quo."
That "marked the death knell of 'democracy'" with them. "Their
political and social aspirations no longer permitted them the luxury." For democracy is a luxury, of a well fed,
wasteful people. Our own disappeared during the World War, and was
"seriously curtailed" in 1933, when we "went far in adopting the
'leader' principle of government."
Dulles continues, "Our own ideas appear to have reverted to those of
postwar France and England. ... We talk only in terms of 'sanctity of
treaties,' 'law and order,' and 'resisting aggression'." We have
become "the principal exponent of the status quo philosophy. ... The
emotions of our people are deliberately stimulated so they may blindly
follow in this way."
On the same occasion Senator Burton K. Wheeler declared, "If the U.
S. gets into another world war, we will come out ... with an absolute
loss of democracy. ... There will be terrific propaganda in the United
States of America to get us into that war. ... It isn't a fight
between dictators and democracies over there at all. It is an economic
fight, a fight over trade opportunities. It isn't our fight. I am not
so worried about the loss of our exports as I am about the loss of our
sanity."
Fool's gold, the President in 1936 called the profits that might come
from supplying a belligerent. We have gone in for fool's gold, and the
gold we have taken in payment will probably prove to be fool's gold.
But there is still another type of fool's gold. Those who hold to the
old eternal truth may find that it, too, has turned to fool's gold.
"The old despotic Truth that claimed a celestial descent" cannot be
that of which Christ said "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall
make you free," for that he evidently believed was ahead. Those who
would with James Russell Lowell "keep abreast of truth" must keep
their eyes ahead and divest themselves of untruths which they have
cherished.
In this day of partisans preaching their own self interest in the
name of truth and morality, it behooves us to question, challenge, and
pragmatically test what is offered us as truth. We will be likely to
conclude as did Lincoln Steffens after his Life of Unlearning,
"The Truth from now on is always dated; never absolute, never eternal.
You can learn that. Almost all my liberal friends can't. The right is
right, isn't it? they say. My answer is, When?"
137
The most natural thing about the nature of the human is his desire to
impart to his fellows his discoveries, his conception or his idea.
Once he sees his progeny before him, he must propagate in them the
ideas, the beliefs, the faith he holds. And few of us stop with the
family. We desire to spread the good news as far as possible.
To those who are sterile of direct progeny, sublimation brings an
even more intense desire to propagate ideas -- witness Peter the
Hermit, the Jesuit missionaries to the ends of the earth, the
Buddhist missionaries to Ceylon and the Far East two thousand years
earlier, and the great mass of our teachers who have established such
a popular pattern of the schoolmarm that it is difficult for a married
woman to hold her job.
Is the teaching of Mohammedanism education or propaganda? From the
Christian standpoint teaching Paynims the doctrine of Mahoun was of
the devil. That attitude belonged to a period when we knew nothing of
Buddha and Buddhism. Mohammedanism was the only heterodoxy with which
the Western Christian had come in contact.
If a Catholic attempts to instruct a Lutheran or a Buddhist in the
tenets of his belief, is it education or propaganda? That ancient
building in Rome near the Piazza di Spagna from which such activities
have long been directed has cut in its lintel "Propaganda dei Fide."
The thing is relative. What we oppose as sinister propaganda is that
untruthful or partially truthful communication which is promoted to
produce a result predetermined by those who control and conducive to
their own ends. When a Mohammedan teaches the Koran to a child he
does it with a clear conscience that it is for the benefit of the
child. But when Vansittart or the British propaganda Ministry of
Information doctor the cables, it is to "save civilization, morality,
and religion."
There is a lot of propaganda in our schools, not recognized. If we
knew it as propaganda, it would have no value for those who promote
it. For propaganda is a failure unless it changes the emotional slant,
and that has to be done surreptitiously. In propaganda the
information is carefully selected, predigested, and served up to
accomplish its purpose, which is to lead to some action, going to war
or having a new cereal for breakfast.
Education is supposed to supply information, not
lead to any action. The educational processes consist largely in
transmitting our culture, myths, traditions that are native to the
race, the time, and the place. These fundamentals, principles, and
sacred beliefs are untruths to another race, time, and place. But the
teachers are without sinister purpose and innocently believe they are
transmitting the unadulterated truth.
Of course, the real function of education is to produce in America
good citizens (in England, loyal subjects of the King, in Germany
enthusiastic Hitlerites, in Russia, Stalinites -- all others are
persecuted), to Americanize foreigners, to make them docile wage
earners, salary takers, corporation employees, tenant farmers who will
not raise a ruckus, who will docilely remain ignorant of the actual
forces at work behind the scenes.
For if the anthropologist's point of view toward the government,
which we have cited, is true, and if as John Chamberlain maintains
all government is a racket, and in a democracy those in office act as
brokers between the defrauding and the defrauded, then it is essential
to stability, to the maintenance of law and order, to keeping the same
gang in control -- that education produce "good citizens." Education
plays the most important part in maintaining things as they are. There
are all sorts of ways of effecting this, and it was the semantic ways
in particular that Reiser had in mind, as previously referred to, in
denominating education "a racket." For when the people become restive,
dissatisfied, and aware, there is revolution -- and a new group of
rulers and foolers come in.
The teaching of national socialism in Germany we recognize as
propaganda. The teaching of democracy in this country we don't
recognize as propaganda -- it is a live and living thing here.
Democracy, dead in Europe, is still alive in America. We try to pump
new life into it by much preaching and teaching and propagandising of
"education and democracy," "education for democracy," "democratic
integration," etc., instead of practicing it, instead of endeavoring
to introduce the democratic principles into our communities, our state
and national "politics." Coyle in Roads to a New America says
if somebody else, some other country, inculcates, it's propaganda --
if we do it's education -- no matter who "we" is.
The effect is not entirely that of sincerity, as seen from other
countries. It is hard to recognize that other people see something
hypocritical and foolish in the titles of recent articles, speeches,
and addresses put forth by educators during the past year. How many
times have you seen these titles duplicated -- "Education and
Democracy," "Education for Democracy," "The Challenge
of Democracy to Education," "Propaganda and Education," "Education and
Propaganda," etc., etc.? Some of them are the crudest, most blatant
type of propaganda, lacking in sincerity. Others are idealistic,
pollyanna tripe. There is very little recognition of what the
democratic process entails or investigation of how it works in
America.
"Education has been and is only partially democratic in its
organization. From kindergarten to university the spirit of democracy
is violated at every step. The board of control is almost invariably a
group of well-meaning citizens sincerely interested in the school but
quite confused as to the real implications of democracy." ("Are Our
Schools Really Democratic?" by Charles F. Sawhill Virtue, associate
professor of philosophy, University of Louisville, School and
Society, April 6, 1940.)
Converting other people to your point of view to save their souls has
for centuries been a characteristic of most religions. Propagating the
faith, propagating the gospel, spreading the good news -- propagation
of ideas -- has been a normal activity of man since he had ideas,
faiths, beliefs.
"A propagandist must always be alert to capture the holy phrase which
crystallizes public aspiration about it, and under no circumstances
permit the enemy to enjoy its exclusive use and wont," writes
Lasswell.
Propaganda eschews physical force, uses moral suasion, to change
opinion and belief through the supplying of suitable, selected
information and through emotional appeals. All propaganda has a moral
connotation fundamentally, and it is intended to exert moral force,
appealing to the feelings of right and wrong. Propaganda may influence
one's attitude toward a toothpaste. One is "better" than another. This
attitude verges on the moral ideal of right and wrong.
The effort at present of British propagandists is to make Americans
believe that we have a "moral stake" in the war. We are to fight for
the British Raj -- that is the "religion" of Lionel Curtis, the
"morality" of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the "civilization" of
Chamberlain. In the last war, Britain made an emotional appeal to us
to support "democracy" and defeat "militarism." If she were making an
appeal today, if there were British propaganda instead of mere
explanation, which is, of course, denied, the aim would be to
stimulate our feeling of "moral responsibility" to "put down evil" --
that is, to help Britain lick Germany.
Moral ideas have always been the means of controlling the great mass of the people. As loyalty to the King
passed, loyalty to the nation succeeded. Nationalism has arisen within
200 years. We Americans during the early nineteenth century were
filled with enthusiasm for freedom. "When Freedom from her mountain
height unfurled her standard to the air"--then the world began. We had
contempt for the effete peoples of Europe, in whom loyalty to the
sovereign and to the religion of nationalism persisted under fierce
competition up to the last war.
As we had our poets, so the British Empire had theirs. Kipling
made Empire a religion, pouring contempt on those who opposed
imperialistic methods--"What do they know of England who only England
know?" He gave the cockney, the millhand of Lancashire, pride in the
Empire, moral responsibility to carry the "white man's burden," and
fear and hatred of the "bear that walked like a man."
The habit of mind which, satisfied with verbalizations, responds
emotionally to words that have been surcharged with prejudice, is the
result of a "complete conditioning." Words bring a definite reaction.
"Hun" arouses hate. "Jew" stirs prejudice. "Flag" brings cheers. "And
others, when the bagpipe sings i' the nose, cannot contain their
urine: for affection, mistress of passion, sways it to the mood of
what it likes, or loathes." ("General Semantics and Propaganda,"
Public Opinion Quarterly, April, 1939, by Dr. S. I. Hayakawa of
the University of Wisconsin.)
"Such 'unconditional responses' are not sane," says Dr. Hayakawa. It
is the purpose of the propagandist to produce this
type of insanity--to condition us to step on the gas whenever the
green light shows, even if another car is in the path.
"A government influences its own people by legislation,
adjudication, policing, propaganda, and ceremonialism," Harold D.
Lasswell tells us in the latest edition of his Propaganda
Technique in the World War. And Rogerson in Propaganda in the
Next War tells us it is "a natural corollary to the business of
government in times of peace" but "a first consideration" in war.
"Propaganda is one of the most powerful instrumentalities in the
modern world. It has arisen to its present eminence in response to a
complex of changed circumstances which have altered the nature of
society. ... To illuminate the mechanisms of propaganda is to reveal
the secret springs of social action, and to expose to the most
searching criticism our prevailing dogmas of sovereignty, of
democracy, of honesty, and of the sanctity of individual opinion."
(Lasswell).
141
Out of the exigencies of empire came new methods of influencing human
behavior, new technique for moving masses of men through
their emotions, as notable as Mohammed's which in a hundred years
sent men forth ten thousand miles east and west, to life or death.
The British Empire, conceived by Disraeli to flatter Victoria as
Empress of India, was mere bombast to his political opponents. It
wasn't till the '80s that Cecil Rhodes in South Africa developed
great plans for "the furtherance of the Empire," and sold the idea to
the English. W. T. Stead, his friend and biographer, tells us that
"Rhodes planned a secret society, patterned after the Jesuit Society
(he had always admired Ignatius Loyola) which should have its members
in every part of Empire working with one object and one idea. They
should work to advocate the closer union of England and her colonies
to crush all disloyalty and every movement for the severance of the
Empire."
In his first will Rhodes dedicated his yet unmade fortune to "The
extension of British rule throughout the world ... the ultimate
recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the
British Empire ... and finally, the foundation of so great a power as
to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the best interests of
humanity." (Cecil Rhodes, Basil Williams, Holt, 1921.)
After the Boer War (the first threat to British Empire security),
Lord Milner, government representative in South Africa and later
executor of Rhodes's will, gathered about him a group of brilliant
young Oxford men, later known as "Milner's Kindergarten," whom he
inspired and trained in Rhodes's new imperialism.
Milner's young men, most of them Oxonians, became builders of
empire. In Kings, Lords, and Gentlemen (Heinemann, 1939), Karl
H. Abshagen tells their story as it has never before been told. Lord
Lloyd saved India and Egypt to the Empire. Lord Lothian founded the
Round Table, the scholarly propaganda quarterly of the British
Empire. Geoffrey Dawson became editor of the London
Times. Tweedsmuir, late Governor General of Canada, was head of
the Ministry of Information for a time during the last war.
The religio-intellectual dreamer of the group was Lionel Curtis. The
idea of the British Commonwealths, developed in imperial
Conferences after the war, owed much to his two books on the
subject published in 1916--The Problem of the Commonwealth,
The Commonwealth of Nations. He
suggests starting with England and Australia, adding Canada and the
United States.
Curtis's Civitas Dei, republished as World Order (Oxford
University Press, 1939) is the basis of Streit's "Union Now." In
nearly a thousand pages Curtis sets forth the attitudes and
philosophies that are the result of his Public School, Oxford, and
imperialistic training in the "Kindergarten," and which have borne
fruit in his recent efforts to preserve the British Empire.
Lowell of Harvard in his introduction praises Curtis as seeing
the need for increased "intensity of the conviction that right is
right and wrong is wrong, and that it is the duty of men to place
service to mankind above all selfish considerations." Such feelings
and attitudes actuated the men of the Spanish Inquisition and Puritan
New England and persist in those who have had the ecclesiastical
imperialistic training of the British. There never can be doubt in
their minds as to who is "right" and what their "duty" may be. Fears
for the safety of the Empire turn them to religion. There is much
about "the infinite duty of men to God," which is interminably
entwined in his mind with what Kipling called "the white man's
burden."
A high point in this British imperialism was reached at Amritsar in
1919 when under Governor O'Dwyer, General Dyer fired upon a
gathering of unarmed Indians killing 379 and wounding 1200. This lead
to Gandhi's Civil Disobedience inspired by Thoreau's essay of which he
learned through Tolstoy.
"What angered the Nationalists almost as much as shooting of their
countrymen was an order issued by Dyer compelling all natives to crawl
past a spot where a particularly brutal attack had been made by some
roughs on a British missionary." (John Mackintosh, The Paths That
Led To War, Blackie & Son Ltd., 1940.)
For a century since the time of Canning the Foreign Office,
permanently staffed with trained experts, has worked out the plans
that give continuity to England's foreign policy. Here behind the
scenes originate the measures presented by the Prime Minister to his
inner cabinet, diplomatic staff, propaganda organizations, and
finally to the House of Commons.
The permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office is the most
important man in the Government, the late Eugene J. Young, long cable
editor of the New York Times, tells us in his Looking
Behind the Censorship (Lippincott, 1938). "No important speech would be made unless his supervision had been invoked.
... No party government could remove him if he personally behaved
himself and then it could only act with the consent of the King. He
was above party, the acknowledged guardian of the policy and security
of Britain and the British Empire. It is the tradition of the office
that the Permanent Under-Secretary shall remain out of the limelight.
By this means he keeps his freedom of maneuvering in negotiations
because he is never committed to any government program.
"The puissant Permanent Under-Secretary works in secrecy. ... The
head of the permanent organization ... is no idealist and no
internationalist. ... When some important international issue arises
the Prime Minister or Foreign Minister can tap a wealth of
information and counsel. The problem is put before the Permanent
Under-Secretary....
"If the issue should concern America there is a bureau devoted
to this country, with plenty of carefully gathered facts on our
policies, our ways of thought, the qualities of our statesmen, how
they might be swayed, or persuaded -- or outwitted -- and anything
else that is useful."
The British Intelligence Service, which ramifies from the Foreign
Office, perhaps the most marvelous human institution of recent time,
vies with the Vatican in complexity. Its tentacles spread out to every
country in the world.
Diplomatic observers, consular representatives, with staff of
experts, report inside information, though their official positions
limit them. Their reports are supplemented by other
services, many of them secret.
"The British Intelligence Service, that extraordinary elusive
and genuinely melodramatic organization which covers the world in the
service of the City and British interests," has two important
functions, "to disseminate information, meaning propaganda and
occasionally lies; to collect intelligence, i.e., to spy."
This is quoted from the biography, by his former secretary, Glyn
Roberts, of Deterding, the Shell Oil king, The Most Powerful Man
in the World, who though he remained a citizen of Holland was
knighted by the British and was the man most influential with the
British Foreign Office during the last war.
While the Military Intelligence is under the War Office, and the
Naval Intelligence under the Admiralty, the Secret Service proper is
directly under the Foreign Office, through which all other
complex services are coordinated, for it is the function of the
Foreign Office not only to know what is being done in other
countries but to plan Britain's policies as announced by the Prime Minister, to determine when the Army and Navy are to be
called into action. The Foreign Office and the Secret Service, then,
in time of need call upon the best brains, the greatest writers, to
serve them.
Deterding's interest in Russian oil resulted, Roberts tells us, in
the Foreign Office sending to Russia, "to prevent the Bolsheviks
taking power ... Sir Samuel -- 'Minor Hoare' as against his cousin
Major Hoare, director of British capitalism's own domestic espionage
service against Labor, the Economic League." Sir Samuel's "little-read
account of his year in Russia, 'The Fourth Seal'... tells us just how
he was enlisted and gives us a good deal more information about how
the British Intelligence Service works than one is accustomed to
expect from so formidably discreet a diehard as himself." (Roberts.)
Burton Rascoe pungently writes, "That organization can change its
tune and switch its policy in service of whatever is
momentarily deemed expedient in the promotion of Britain's
interest, and its methods are grounded on a perfect psychological
understanding of the means of manipulating individual and mass
emotions. The B.I.S. always works behind the scenes, giving people
deep convictions on subjects favorable to British interests for the
moment without the people's knowing just how they arrived at those
convictions -- but they are always convictions involving the highest
'moralistic' and 'enlightened' palaver. It is a system that has
usually worked in the past." (Newsweek, August 22, 1938.)
The imperialistic propaganda of Disraeli, Rhodes, Kipling, was
cheerful and triumphant, aboveboard and honest. Deceit was
unnecessary, there was no fear. The Boer War brought the first doubt
and fear, and with it vilification of the "uncouth, dirty Boers."
Imperial propaganda to educate the colonials and foreign neutrals
still remained essentially truthful.
"Until the war of 1914-18 came to degrade all international
standards, it was still considered unfitting and unwise for a
statesman to make public pronouncements to his own people which
public opinion in other countries would know to be totally
untrue," writes Harold Nicolson in his Diplomacy (Thornton
Butterworth, 1939). "The war abolished all such delicacies of
conscience. Even the British (who are a truthful race) gradually
acquired a taste for propaganda, and proved that they also could tell
deliberate lies. ... By the last years of the war it had become a
highly organized system and certainly provided a formidable weapon of
popular excitation."
Today the one lie most successfully put forth by the British
propagandists has been that there is no British propaganda in America, that there is no need of it, and that it would
be useless because the Americans have learned their lesson and are
propaganda proof.
How great a task was accomplished in 1914 was explained by the French
historian Gabriel Hanotaux in the words he quotes of Robert Bacon,
then ambassador to France and formerly a partner in the House of
Morgan, who said, "In the United States there are at present perhaps
50,000 persons who feel that the nation should immediately intervene
in the war on your side. But there are over 100,000,000 Americans who
do not so think. Our duty is to reverse these figures so that the
50,000 may become 100,000,000."
We went into the war on a wave of idealism, filled with ever
increasing hatred against the barbarian Hun who had committed such
frightful atrocities. We espoused the cause of France and England who
were so intent on putting down militarism, and we believed with Wilson
that we were to make the world a better, more democratic place to live
in.
Of the difficulties of Pershing with the Allied command we knew
nothing till long after. Of the fraternizing of our troops with the
'Heinies' we learned little till later. Gradually it leaked that at
Versailles all was not idyllic. Later after the importunities of the
Allies, their refusal to recognize their indebtedness, contempt for
the Uncle Shylock, and insistence that they had saved us rather than
we had saved them, made us want to forget the mess. It wasn't till
years after, though, that we learned how and why we went into the
war.
The British, skilled in handling other peoples, with experience in
ruling, and with political sense developed, modified, produced a
propaganda technique all unbeknownst to us Americans that greatly
excited our moral natures. British propaganda during the last war was
the result of dire straits, great stakes, making feasible great
expense and organization.
At first there was ready communication with Germany and reports came
through from unprejudiced correspondents and American officials, but
"the State Department severely snubbed American consuls who, hearing
the rumors of German atrocities, sought to investigate them and to
establish the truth; such was not the duty of the officers of a
neutral country. A group of dependable journalists, caught in Germany
by the war, Roger Lewis, Irvin S. Cobb, Harry Hansen, James O'Donnell
Bennett, and John T. McCutcheon, united September 3 'in declaring
German atrocities groundless as far as we were able
to observe'," Frederic L. Paxson tells us in his Pre-War Years
(Houghton, Mifflin, 1936).
Our university professors, historians, and public men accepted
without question the crudest stories of atrocities attributed to the
enemy, and waxed indignant. When we were shown photographs of the
Germans collecting corpses on the battlefield and pictures of
factories in which they were converted into soap and fats, there were
few Americans who doubted. We Americans knew that we were shrewd and
that nothing could be put over on us.
And even the doubters like myself were convinced when Lord Bryce lent
his endorsement to the publication of hundreds of affidavits of
Belgian refugees telling of children's hands and women's breasts cut
off. Hundreds of thousands of copies of this pamphlet were circulated
in our schools and colleges and created the "idealism" that sent out
our boys into the war, convinced that the Kaiser was a mad dog to be
hunted down and hanged.
Propaganda is not recognized as such till dead. If it is, it's not
good propaganda. While propaganda is playing upon us, it's
information, news. It causes indignation, horror, feelings of "moral
responsibility," or whatever may be desired. It isn't till after the
effect has been produced, until after the event for which it was
planned is over, that we usually come to recognize what has caused us
to act as we did.
There was German propaganda. We were aware of that. Blatant, noisy,
conspiratorial, it was ineffective. The Germans, an immature people, a
bit crude, have a more direct scientific habit of mind, of
investigating and ascertaining the truth. Then, as they are a
self-centered people with little political experience, they cannot see
why the truth as they have demonstrated it will not be accepted. They
made the outrageous error during the last war of telling the truth at
times when their enemy was not at all ready to admit it. We became
indignant, outraged at their clumsy conspiracies and even more at
their insistence on things that we later learned were true.
German propaganda, recognized as such, was worse than useless. But
British propaganda, secretly maintained and conducted, remained
unsuspected until the participants began to confess long after the
war.
German scholars after the war began to investigate propaganda in an
endeavor to understand what had undermined morale and led to collapse.
It was they who first made the elaborate studies of propaganda, as
Lasswell explains. It was not until 1927 that Lasswell published in
his Propaganda Technique in the World War, the earliest and perhaps the best analysis in English.
This was followed by O. W. Reigel's Mobilizing for Chaos -- The
Story of the New Propaganda (Yale, 1934), J. Duane Squires's
British Propaganda (Harvard, 1935), Leonard W. Doob's
Propaganda, Its Psychology and Technique (Holt, 1935) -- the
classics on the subject. In 1935 Lasswell published an annotated
bibliography of Propaganda and Promotional Activities (U. of
Minn. Press) listing 4500 titles showing the rapidly increasing
awareness of the importance of this subject. These books and many
others were reviewed in the twentieth edition of this Handbook,
1935.
The biographies, memoirs, published papers, and letters of Page,
House, Wilson, Lansing in America, and the memoirs and confessions of
the British propagandists Earl Grey, Masterman, Parker, Wells, and
others, have revealed the deceitful and dishonest practices,
manufactured atrocities, calumnious stories, by which we gullible
Americans were emotionally stirred to
surrender our wealth and manhood for the preservation of the European
status quo.
The rising tide of popular indignation led to Congressional
investigation and much newspaper publicity which made the Americans
for the first time propaganda conscious.
To coordinate the various complex agencies for propaganda in the last
war, Lasswell tells us, "the British were finally constrained to get
up a committee of executives of approximately ministerial importance,
each of whom was charged with some such important branch of propaganda
as enemy, home, allied, or neutral ... securing a man of prestige to
head each important service."
"The War Propaganda Bureau was created by the Foreign Office in 1914.
Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, put Masterman of the
Daily News at its head and gave him offices at Wellington
House. Its existence was kept secret for a long time, and many of its
publications were anonymously written and issued by private firms,"
Frank P. Chambers writes in The War Behind the War, 1914-1918:
A History of the Political and Civilian Fronts (Harcourt, Brace, 1939;
Faber and Faber, London).
"By January 1917 Wellington House had become too small for its work,
and Lloyd George, then newly Premier, appointed John Buchan [later
Lord Tweedsmuir] to a special Department of Information at the
Foreign Office, of which Wellington House became thenceforth a part.
An Advisory Committee under Lord Northcliffe was set up to help him
... By the end of 1917 'the Ministry of Moral Munitions' was a very considerable organization."
J. Duane Squires in British Propaganda, Harvard University
Press, quotes from an address on the floor of the House of Commons,
August 5, 1918, after we had come in, in explaining the news
department, one of the four divisions of the Department of
Information, then under Col. Buchan, later Lord Tweedsmuir of Canada.
The news department was "the imaginative department, the fiction
department, the body which dresses up the facts for presentment to the
public, a most important function, and one leaving scope for
individual imagination ..." (Hansard, the British equivalent of
our Congressional Record, 5th series, vol. 109, H.C., col.
951.)
Wellington House, starting with nine men, in 1917 had 54, and an
American mailing list of 260,000 names. Sir Gilbert Parker was in
charge for the United States, William Archer for Scandinavia, H. G.
Wells later for Germany. The best minds and the greatest writers wrote
secretly -- Conrad, Kipling, Chesterton, Alfred Noyes, Hilaire Belloc,
Hugh Walpole, Compton Mackenzie, Somerset Maugham, A. E. W. Mason,
Wickham Steed; historians like Seton-Watson, A. J. Toynbee. The
"superlative qualifications of newspapermen for propaganda work" were
recognized because they were "not hampered by what Dr. Johnson has
termed 'needless scrupulosity'... and know the public is not convinced
by logic." (Lasswell.)
It was Wellington House that brought out the famous Bryce Report on
German atrocities which Peterson calls "in itself one of the worst
atrocities of the war."
In 1918, when Lord Beaverbook became Minister of Information,
Northcliffe started his career at Crewe House as Director of
Propaganda in Enemy Countries.
Sir Stuart Campbell in The Secrets of Crewe House (London,
1921) wrote "What is propaganda? It is the statement of a case in such
a way that others may be influenced. Insofar as its use against any
enemy is concerned, the subject matter employed must not be self-
evidently propagandist. Except in special circumstances its origin
should be completely concealed."
When the United States got into the war, we set up our own propaganda
machine known as the Creel Bureau. How completely this deceived and
fooled our own people during the war is brought out in Words That
Won The War (Princeton University Press, 1939). The authors,
Cedric Larson and James R. Mock, dug into the dusty archives of the
Bureau to disclose the inner workings and underhand methods that were
secretly used.
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Dale Wharton.