Psychological Warfare in World War I
World War I saw psychological warfare transformed from an incidental to
a major military instrument, and later it was even called the weapon
which won the war. The story spread, since the Germans liked to imagine
that they had been talked out of winning, and since ex-propagandists
among the Allies enjoyed thinking that their own cleverness had been
decisive when even the tremendous violence of trench warfare had
produced nothing more than a stalemate. If psychological warfare is
considered in the broad sense, it seems plain that it was among the
decisive weapons of 1914-1918. The political decency of the Allies, the
appeal of President Wilson's Fourteen Points, the patent obsolescence of
the Kaiser and what he stood for, the resurgence of Polish, Baltic,
Finnish, Czechoslovak and South Slav nationalisms--all these played a
real part in making Germany surrender in 1918. More real than the role
of guns, men, ships, planes, tanks? This cannot be answered: it is like
asking of a long-distance runner whether his heart, lungs, legs, or head
contributed most to his success. Since war is waged by and against all
parts of the human personality--physical condition, skills,
intelligence, emotions, and so on--it is impossible to distinguish
between the performance of one kind of weapon and the other in the
attainment of a goal itself complex--governmental surrender. Only a
weapon which left no enemy survivors could claim for itself undisputed
primacy in victory.
Propaganda came to prominence in war because the nations involved had
made mass-communications part of their civilian lives. The appearance of
huge newspapers, systematic advertising, calculated political publicity,
and opinion manipulation in other forms made it inevitable that skills
which developed in civilian life should be transferred to the military.
In general, _the psychological warfare efforts of each belligerent were
the direct equivalent of his peacetime nonpolitical propaganda
facilities_. (By way of exception, the peculiar genius of the Bolshevik
leaders stimulated a propaganda effort disproportionate to the
facilities, either of personnel or matériel, to be found in pre-1914
Russia.)
Nations rarely change their basic character in time of war. When war
starts it is usually too late to re-educate generations already grown
up, teach them wholly new skills, or develop administrative or
operational procedures unknown in peacetime life. Sometimes, by great
effort, a nation can transform a small available cadre into large, new
and effective units on the political, military, economic or social
fronts. Even then, the character of the war effort will be colored and
influenced by the experience of the men undertaking it. The British had,
in 1914, one of the world's finest news systems, a highly sophisticated
press, and extensive experience in international communication for
technical and commercial purposes, notably the undersea cable system,
and they turned these to war use with considerable smoothness. The
Germans had a far more regimented press and a more limited network of
commercial and technical connections. The British, furthermore, had a
diplomatic and consular service of superb quality; comparable German
services included a much higher proportion of bunglers and enthusiasts.
From the very beginning the British had the lead. They nailed German
propaganda as propaganda, while circulating their own as news, cultural
relations, or literature. The Germans who boasted that they were a
"cultured" people had their naïveté rewarded when the British let the
German word _Kultur_ become a synonym for boorish pedantic arrogance.
The Germans had the awful habit of putting many of their own
unattractive emotions into words, and the even more ruinous habit of
then printing the words. In many instances, the British simply let the
Germans think up braggadocio or vengeful phrases, then circulated the
German phrases to the world. The English language was permanently
enriched by some of these: _strafe_ comes from the German plea that God
"strafe" (punish) England. The actual "Hymn of Hate" was originally a
song made up by Germans for Germans. The word "Hun" was applied to the
German Army by Kaiser Wilhelm himself, and so on. Furthermore, the
Germans created in their press and information services a condition of
bureaucratic snafu which has rarely been excelled in any war. National
character certainly worked out its automatic vengeances in World War I.
The American psychological warfare effort of 1917-1919 also drew heavily
on familiar skills: the American press, second only to that of the
British at the time; the church, Y.M.C.A., and Chautauqua groups; and
the wealth of private clubs which flourish under our liberal system of
laws and usages. Other nationalities made efforts similarly in keeping
with their peacetime facilities. The Japanese were adroit, but even at
that time confused by the mix-up of trying to be a "civilized" power but
simultaneously expansionist. The French showed high professional skill
in adapting their military and diplomatic personnel to propaganda tasks.
France's position as battleground ensured her of the rage of her own
people and the sympathy of neutrals, giving propaganda from Paris a
hearing. The Chinese, though undergoing the downfall of the Yüan
Shih-k'ai dictatorship and lapsing into chaos, maintained an impeccable
diplomatic front and played a weak hand for everything it was worth;
they had their private quasi-war with the Japanese in 1915. That they
did so while putting the blame for Allied disunity squarely on the
Japanese where it belonged is to their credit.
The weight of the propaganda war, as of the material war, fell on its
prime contestants, Britain, Germany, and the United States. The private
and revolutionary groups which emerged as the revolutionary governments
played a vigorous part because they had few other functions to distract
their attention. The Republic of Czechoslovakia got its start in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1918, and fought psychological warfare from
the instant it took form; not till later did it assume the weightier and
more expensive responsibilities of ruling and warring.
=The British Effort.= In World War I, the British made most of the
mistakes and learned most of the lessons which the Americans were to
make and to learn in World War II. The British Foreign Office formed a
War Propaganda Bureau in 1914, but a great deal of the effort was done
by private facilities (patriotic associations) or by lower political and
military echelons of the government and armed forces--and without
coordination. Things became so confused that at the mid-point of the
war, the British organized a Department of Information with Colonel John
Buchan at its head. (Buchan will be remembered by all adventure-lovers
as author of _The Thirty-nine Steps_, _The Courts of the Morning_, and
other first-class thrillers; he was also made a peer under the style,
Lord Tweedsmuir, and became a popular Governor-General of Canada.)
Buchan did not always get along with the committee which floated above
him, telling him how to run his business.
The British, like the Germans, had immense organizational difficulties.
The British ended up by inventing a distinction of roles. Thus they
finished World War I with two separate propaganda agencies. The Ministry
of Information, under Lord Beaverbrook, with Colonel Buchan as Director
of Intelligence, carried on civilian psychological warfare outside
Britain; the National War Aims Committee carried on civilian
psychological warfare within Britain. Military psychological warfare was
carried on by military and civilian agencies, both. The British required
five years of honest effort, bitter wrangling, and positive political
invention in order to devise a psychological warfare system sufficient
to meet the needs of a great power at war. They did not let their
administrative difficulties prevent their conduct of correct, poised and
highly moral propaganda, nor impede their use of plentiful funds and
high ingenuity in getting their propaganda across.[22]
The British set the pace in coordinating political warfare with
news-propaganda, and in effecting workable liaison between national
policy-makers and operational and public-relations chiefs of the armed
services. It is not likely that, even in World War II, the
Americans--within the looser, younger, bigger framework of our more
compendious government--achieved as good results in terms of timing.
State-War-Navy-OWI-OSS-Treasury timing of related events or news items
was obtained through most of World War II in the following manner: the
federal agency affected did whatever it was going to do anyhow, and
other federal agencies took notice after the event, initiating their
related actions, if any were feasible, then and only then. The British
sought to get around this in World War I by correlating their policy
toward various countries with their policy involving different
departments. They were not totally successful but they learned a lot;
the net product of their propaganda was, for most of its purposes,
superb.
=The German Failure In Propaganda.= German writers, after World War I,
sometimes attributed the superiority of the British in propaganda to the
innate fiendishness of Britishers as contrasted with the gullible purity
of Germans. The psychoneurotic non-com who made himself famous to the
world's cost did not make this mistake. In _Mein Kampf_ Hitler stated
categorically that the British had understood the professional touch in
propaganda while the Germans had not. Hitler's contempt for the masses
was shown in his explicit statement of their inattentiveness, their poor
response to formal logic, their affirmative reaction to simple one-sided
reiteration. He said: "[In England] ... propaganda was a weapon of the
first class, while with us it was a sop to unemployed politicians...."
German nationalists of whatever stripe found themselves in accord when
they blamed their military defeat on the enemy's use of propaganda. They
thus succeeded in maintaining the myth, already sedulously inculcated
for two centuries, that the German army could not be beaten in the
field. The extremists and crackpots among them went on to develop the
"stab-in-the-back" theory that an unbeaten Germany was betrayed from
within by Jews, socialists, and democratic people. (The mutually
exclusive alternatives--namely that either Allied propaganda was
fiendishly good, and the Germans merely innocent victims, or else that
Allied propaganda was ineffectual and the anti-war sentiment a purely
German development--did not keep the Hitlerites from exploiting both
alibis simultaneously.)
The postwar period of the 1920's saw, therefore, the curious spectacle
of the Germans lauding American psychological warfare, and counting it
as a major factor of defeat, while the Americans naturally emphasized
the fighting record of American troops.
As for Kaiserist propaganda, it started out with the twin curses of
amateurishness and bureaucracy, each of them crippling but deadly when
paired. German writers and scholars ran wild in 1914 and 1915 in trying
to put the blame on the Allies; amateurish in public relations, they
succeeded in arousing a tremendous amount of antagonism. They were
handicapped by the ponderosity of the German Imperial Government, by the
intervention of persons unfamiliar with news or advertising (at that
time the most obvious sources of civilian propaganda personnel), and by
a military stodginess which made German press communiqués infuriating
even to anti-British readers. Overseas propaganda developed through
poorly secured clandestine channels, and was mixed up with espionage and
sabotage personnel. Inescapable "breaks" gave all German agents a bad
name. George Sylvester Viereck, who has enjoyed the odd distinction of
being our most vocal pro-German sympathizer in both wars with Germany,
later wrote a naïve but revealing account of his operations under the
title _Spreading Germs of Hate_ (Boston, 1930). (No British information
officer was guilty, even after the war, of a comparable breach of
taste.) Viereck praises the British for their sang-froid and skill;
coming from him, the praise is more than deserved.
More seriously, German propaganda lacked both organization and moral
drive. Lieutenant Colonel Nicolai, the Imperial German General Staff
officer responsible, puts part of the blame on the German press and on
the press officers of the Army and the Reich: "In fact, the enemy
remained virtually untouched by any kind of German propaganda. This
reproach falls against the press, it would seem, as well as on the
responsible officials.... Internationally minded papers themselves
failed to cooperate. Yet it was precisely these which were circulated
and esteemed abroad. Newspapers with other (pro-militarist) editorial
policies, failing to get leadership from the Government, could not aim
at any unified effect.... Instead, the goal of the governmental press
leadership remained a thoroughly negative one: to prevent the press from
doing harm to national policy."[23]
Without developing his theme into systematic doctrine for psychological
warfare, the German colonel stated the basic defect of World War I from
the German point of view. Writing in 1920, he went on to say: "The enemy
alleges simply to have copied our front-line propaganda when he
initiated his. In so doing, he is guilty of a deliberate untruth, made
for the sake of removing the moral blot which is attached to his
victory...." Nicolai could not overcome the supposition that propaganda
was a dirty and unsoldierly device and that it was much more honorable
for armies to exchange loss of life than to save men on both sides by
talking the enemy into surrendering, but he went on to the real point at
issue. "Furthermore, it was not moralistic misgivings which kept us from
applying to the enemy front lines a propaganda campaign as successful as
theirs, but very sober practical obstacles. There were available to us
none of the (psychological) points of attack at which propaganda would
have been effective against the enemy forces, points such as the enemy
found in our own domestic conditions. What was lacking was political
propaganda as precursor of military."
What the Germans failed to learn in World War I, they later learned and
applied in World War II. The German Imperial Government started in 1914
with a defiant assurance of its own power. Power was not sought among
the masses so far as Kaiser Wilhelm was concerned; one inherited it from
one's ancestors, along with an army, and the masses had better keep
their noses out of it. The Hitlerite German government of 1939 began its
world war only after two decades of shrewd, conscienceless, bitter
domestic propaganda. Hitlerism had come to power by first wooing and
then bullying the common man, and the Nazi chiefs, in their strategy of
terror or "warfare psychologically waged," subsequently applied the same
tactics to the international community. Hitler conquered Europe with
these tactics; he started with flattery, made scenes, and ended with
cold brutality. These were the skills of the urban slum.
=The Creel Committee.= The fabulous American propaganda, of which the
Germans expressed such dread, was the work of two agencies. The civilian
agency was the Committee on Public Information, universally known as the
"Creel Committee" after its chairman, Mr. George Creel. The military
agency was the Propaganda Section (or Psychologic Section), G-2D,
General Headquarters, American Expeditionary Forces, under Captain Heber
Blankenhorn.
The Creel Committee had the superlative advantage of possessing a chief
who enjoyed the confidence of the President and whose participation in
national policy was on a high enough level to give propaganda
coordination to other governmental policies on a basis of equality.
Creel himself considered the task to be one of advertising, and he
organized his Committee with extreme looseness, expanding it rapidly.
Although his total gross budget for the war was only a fraction of OWI's
budgets in World War II, he systematized most of the publicity
activities then available.
News services were maintained by means of a news bureau in Washington
that fed material to the commercial press and processed other material
to publicity missions abroad. Heavy emphasis was placed on the home
audience for Creel's mission covered all phases of propaganda work.
Sections were set up for posters, advertising, "Four Minute Men"
(volunteer local speakers in all American communities), films, American
minority groups and the foreign-language press, women's organizations,
information bureaus, syndicated features, and cartoons. The young but
already large American motion picture industry was made a channel
whereby American propaganda movies went to both the United States and
overseas audiences. In one instance Creel got the American producers to
threaten Swiss exhibitors with a boycott unless they showed American
propaganda film along with the features.
Missions were sent to France, England, Italy, Switzerland, Holland,
Spain, Scandinavia, Mexico and other Latin American countries, China,
and Russia. It was not considered necessary to send American
propagandists to Japan in World War I. The Japanese were given the
American propaganda file and were asked to use it; they said they would.
The Creel Committee was run in simple, almost chaotic fashion. Agencies
proliferated whenever a new idea turned up. The basic concept was that
of domestic American agitation, as practiced commercially through
advertising and socially through the civic clubs. The war propaganda
left a rather bad taste in the mouth of many Americans, and the
boisterous joviality of the arousers probably produced negative
attitudes which encouraged pacifism and isolationism in the postwar
years. The purely technical side of the work was done well, but at the
terrible cost of overshooting national commitments.
America emerged from the war disappointed at home and discredited
abroad--so far as the heated propaganda of "making the world safe for
democracy" was concerned. A more modest more calculated national
propaganda effort would have helped forestall those attitudes which, in
turn, made World War II possible. Creel and his fellow-workers did not
remember that beyond every war there lies a peace, in its own way as
grim and difficult as war. They did not understand that no war is the
last war, that leeway must be left for propaganda to be effective
_again_. They said that World War I would be the last of all wars;
perhaps they believed it themselves.
=General Pershing's Headquarters.= The civilians of the Creel committee
patronizingly claimed to have helped the G-2 men at A.E.F. Headquarters
run psychological warfare. In the official history of Captain
Blankenhorn's group, which centered from the very beginning on leaflet
production, there is little reference to outside aid. Radio did not
exist as a means of mass communication, and loudspeakers then surpassed
an ordinary megaphone very little, if at all; hence communication with
the enemy had to be through print. Leaflets were basic.
The Americans at A.E.F. concentrated on morale and surrender leaflets.
They did work that was superb from the point of view of common-sense
psychology. They used British and French experience in applying
techniques of leaflet distribution, making inventions and improvements
of their own. Balloons and airplanes were the chief methods for air
distribution; the plane-borne leaflet bomb was a development of World
War II. Extensive improvements were made in the procedures of leaflet
distribution by means of mortars.
The morale leaflets used the anti-militarist, pro-democratic sentiments
of the world at that time. The autocracy and inefficiency of the German
government provided an excellent target. Since propaganda against the
upper classes was not yet regarded as a Communist monopoly, considerable
appeal was introduced for the common German soldier against his
generals, nobles, officials, and capitalists. German nationalism was
attacked by means of sectional appeals to Lorrainers and Bavarians. The
news that America was in fact producing vast weapons, that the American
army was truly in Europe, that the German retreats were really
serious--these were used in morale form (see below, page 212) rather
than as spot-news leaflets.
It was in the primary mission of combat propaganda--the inducement to
surrender--that the Americans excelled themselves. They produced
limitless appeals (see Figure 13) promising the Germans first-class
American food when they surrendered. Emphasis was indeed on all
surrender themes--good food, human care, privileges under international
law, patriotic value of remaining alive, opportunity to return to loved
ones, and so forth. But the Americans went over these variously, and
came back to the topic of food. For an army of hungry men who knew that
their homeland starved behind them, the enumeration of things to eat had
obsessive value.
Haughty and incompetent, the German high command tried to counteract
Allied leaflets--particularly the American leaflets--by the use of
appeals to "disregard propaganda." While the German armies plainly
backed down toward defeat, such German statements preached about the
situation. They did not put the common soldier's plight in concrete
terms. They did not say, "You will be unemployed, poor, sick,
dishonored, lonely, if you surrender. Your wife will be beaten by
Frenchmen, your daughters raped by savages, your father and mother
starved to death by the food prices." Such tactics had to wait for a
later war. In 1918, the German command, senile and fussy, pointed out
that enemy leaflets were propaganda (nasty! nasty!) and that good German
soldiers would remember their duty. For men who probably imagined they
could smell white bread baking, bacon frying, and coffee cooking across
the lines, such wordage was nonsense. The Germans came on over to
surrender.
[Illustration: _Figure 13: Surrender Leaflet from the AEF._ Though this
American combat leaflet from World War I copies the original form of the
German _Feldpostkarte_ (field postcard, an early precursor of the V-mail
form), it is not black propaganda since neither source nor intent is
concealed. "When you are taken prisoner, by the Americans, give this to
the first officer who checks your identities." The prisoner is commanded
to fill in his own battle-order history. By marking out appropriate
items, he indicates whether he is hurt or not and can explain that he is
well cared for and fed "beef, white bread, potatoes, beans, plums,
genuine bean coffee, milk, butter, tobacco, etc."]
Captain Blankenhorn's unit, without benefit of psychologists, developed
a German morale analysis chart. This was made up before scientific
polling had become a common technique, and was consequently based on a
group of selected known factors given arbitrary weight and then averaged
into a total. It was not, "number of German prisoners per hundred who
express attitudes characterized by doubt" but "the U-boat situation,"
"unity in Germany," and other abstracted generalities which were used as
controls. The chart was carefully kept, and sought to follow morale from
its causative factors rather than by a percentage count of attitudes
discovered in the newspapers or among prisoners.
=The Bolshevik and Chinese Revolutions.= The dynamic propaganda
development of this period came about in Russia. The Russian revolution
began as reaction to an adverse military situation, disesteemed
leadership, economic hardship, and long overdue reforms. In its first,
or constitutional phase, it had an inevitableness about it; there was
little resistance to the revolution, and the popular mood was one of
relief, joy, easement. However, the majority group of the Russian
Socialists interpreted the Marxist philosophy to mean (putting it
bluntly) that the end is justified by the means. They believed that they
had developed a system of politico-economic forecasting which, while not
always certain, was close to certain. And they further believed that no
one else, lacking this system of forecasting, could lead the workers and
peasants to their historically inevitable freedom. This philosophy may
sound beside the point, but it is not. Such abstruse doctrines of
Hegelianism and Marxism were used by the majority-Socialists (known by
their Russian name, _Bolshevik_) to give themselves a sense of
unconditional rightness. From the first phase of the revolution on, the
Bolsheviks pitilessly sabotaged all other democratic groups. There was
no point in helping other groups, when Bolsheviks alone had the inner
secrets of history at their command.
In the geniuses Lenin and Trotzky, the Bolshevik movement found its
leadership. Lenin had no use for democracy as it was known in America.
To him it was a sham, a front for the great capitalist trusts,
which--even though the capitalists themselves might not know it--were
doomed to get bigger on a shrinking market, until international
capitalist war, bankruptcy, and working-class revolution was the result.
Lenin was as sure that this would happen as he was that the sun would
rise the next morning. The only dispute was the matter of timing; a few
Bolshevik pessimists thought that the capitalist world might last into
the 1920's.
Such a frame of mind led to a very deadly kind of psychological warfare.
The Bolsheviks despised their opponents, desiring to "liquidate" them
(this meant breaking down a group and preventing its reforming as a
group, but came above all to mean mass murder). They were so
antagonistic to the "capitalist" world that they hated God, patriotism,
national history, churches, money, private property, chastity, marriage,
and verse that rhymed, all with equal intensity. Moscow became the Mecca
for the eccentrics and malcontents of the world and for some years
Russia was in fact looser in morals than any other civilized country.
Hatred for the capitalist world enabled the Bolsheviks to throw Russian
Czarist patriotism into the discard. They delighted in getting Russian
troops to desert at the front; the Germans delighted in this, too. But
the Bolsheviks were certain they would have the last laugh because they
knew it was only a matter of weeks or months before the revolution--the
_inevitable_ revolution, forecast by Karl Marx's peculiar
economics--broke out in Germany as well. The Russian devil-may-care
attitude toward all established forms of society was perfectly
characterized by Trotzky's flip but deadly answer to the German military
negotiators at the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. When the Germans balked
at some point, "All right," said Trotzky, "no war and--no peace."
The Germans insisted that if the Bolsheviks did not sign the dictated
peace terms the German army would make more war.
Fine, said Trotzky in effect, he didn't mind. Go ahead and make war. It
wouldn't worry him or his army. They would go somewhere else and would
refuse to play games with capitalists.
This stopped the Germans in their tracks. They did not want to send
their troops into a starving country that roared with subversive
doctrines. They knew that while Trotzky wasted their time quibbling over
negotiations, his printing presses worked night and day telling the
German troops that the war was over, that capitalism was on its way out,
that the workers' revolution was coming, everywhere, for everybody, with
food, peace, plenty, atheism and all the other delights of the good
Bolshevik life. The Russians finally signed the surrender treaty but in
point of fact, the German divisions on the Eastern front were
contaminated by Bolshevism, and when they came back across Germany they
brought the message of freedom and peace with them. Germany did have an
abortive Communist revolution--partly because of Russian
operations--though it was stopped by an alliance of the moderate
Socialists and the dependable remnants of the army.
The Russians went on merrily through a living hell. For five more years
the Bolshevik leaders held their country together with wretched
industrial production, poor food, bad weapons. They had amazingly high
morale among their own select Bolshevik group, and against the common
people they had two weapons, propaganda and terror. (The terror was
symptomatic of the first of the modern totalitarian dictatorships; its
domestic police role is not a part of psychological warfare.)
The Bolshevik propaganda was probably the finest propaganda effort ever
known in history down to that time--down, perhaps, all the way to our
own time. The political limit was beyond reach; anything in the old
world was fair game. Things the sober Soviet citizen of 1946 would
regard with veneration were open to ridicule in 1919-1922: patriotism,
religion, national sovereignty, international law, treaties with or
between capitalist states. There flowed from Russia a world-wide stream
of propaganda, mostly clandestine, some of it overt. In every nation of
the world there was, to a greater or less degree, a "Red scare"; the
propaganda of the Bolsheviks was regarded as having mystical subversive
powers which no other operation could match. In retrospect it seems
absurd that anyone could have worried about the Americans of the 1920's
revolting against their own Constitution; but a lot of people, including
the Attorney General of the United States, did indeed worry.
They had cause for alarm though not for the reasons they supposed. Much
of the magic of Bolshevik propaganda arose from its taking up where
British, French and American propaganda left off. The psychological
warfare of the Allies had made the sad mistake of promising a new, a
better world to everyone on earth. When the war ended, and conditions
went back to normal, many people in the world did not consider
"normalcy" the fulfillment of that better world. The Bolshevik
propaganda reaped the harvest which the Allied propagandist had sown and
then left untended. Expectations, whipped up beyond normal, turned to
Bolshevism when the Western democracies abandoned both domestic and
foreign propaganda operations. The strategic advantage of Bolshevik
propaganda was overwhelming. The Allies had gotten the world ready for
it, so that the wild Utopia of the Leninists temporarily made sense to
millions.
This does not mean that the Bolshevik propaganda of the 1920s was not
good. It was good, technically, psychologically, politically--but good
in terms of achieving an immediate scare at the cost of long-range
confidence. The eventual cost to the Soviet Union was terrible. The
Soviet government isolated itself and declared a condition of open
psychological warfare against every other government on earth, including
the United States. (This so exasperated Presidents Wilson, Harding,
Coolidge, and Hoover that they refused to recognize the Soviet Union.)
The Bolshevik propaganda was carried by:
Russian government channels;
Communist "party" channels (the Communists not really being a
political party, anywhere, but using the name "party" to designate the
hierarchy of a dogmatic, ruthless and fanatical political religion);
trade unions;
individual subversive operators;
"cover organizations";
trade, consular and other official missions;
leaflets in the mails;
posters, books and other literature;
films;
radio.
The theme throughout was plain: the world revolution is coming, by
inescapable economic laws discovered by our theory. The world
revolution, which _will_ come, will remove the _owning_ classes from
control of the productive capital, and will put all capital in the hands
of the workers. "The expropriators will be expropriated." Thereupon the
economic laws we have found in Marx's books will cease their bad
influence and will guarantee world peace, world prosperity, happiness,
human freedom. This is not an appeal (they said); this is _science_.
This is _objective_. We _know_. Listen!
The Communists harped on these basic themes. They waged political
warfare along with the psychological. Every attempt of the non-Communist
countries to discuss the situation was termed "conspiracies of the
warmongers." The word "democratic" was reserved to the Communists or to
non-Communists who were certain to cause Communism no trouble. The
Communists invented an entirely new vocabulary, which the Soviet and
other Communist papers still use, with meanings that have the same
emotional value (plus-value, or, "that's _good_!") as in America or
Britain, but which have entirely different meanings in concrete
practice. "Democracy" means "free elections"; "free elections" mean that
the people elect "democratic leaders"; but "democratic leaders" are not
the people who are elected in non-Communist countries. Non-Communist
leaders are usually dubbed "tools" or "stooges" of something; they are
"servile" or "reactionary." Real "democratic leaders" are only those
people approved by the international Communist movement. It _knows_. By
_science_.
What was the net effect of such psychological warfare? In the first
place, much use of common terms without regard to ultimate fulfillment
means that Communist propaganda is self-defeating. It can succeed only
in situations of desperation, anarchy, or terror. That is satisfactory
to the Communist leaders, because they think their _science_ tells them
that the capitalist states will lead to desperation, anarchy and terror
anyhow. Secondly, Communist propaganda sacrifices all other values to
the propaganda. One has to be a religious fanatic (of the Marxist sort)
to turn it out; one has to be ready for a totally new creed in order to
keep on accepting it. International understanding, patriotism,
truthfulness, freedom of action, artistic conscience--all these are
sacrificed to propaganda. In the end, _everything is propaganda_ to the
Communist. Nothing which hurts Communism can be true. They have their
_science_. (If you would like to look at this fabulous _science_, read
_The Communist Manifesto_, V. I. Lenin's _The Teachings of Karl Marx_,
and Stalin's latest current compilation of speeches. You will be
impressed by the crazy logic, the genuine but ill-informed zeal.) Third
and most important, Communist psychological warfare is continuous. The
themes may change--sometimes provocative, sometimes almost
conciliatory--but the machinery, the operation, does not. Communist
propaganda is therefore seasoned and professional, dependent on a
powerful police-state at home and on uneducated or emotionally ill
fanatics abroad, except for those few countries where Communism is so
stable as to attract hard-headed or practical idealistic men.
This Bolshevik success, rather than the splendid but short-lasting
accomplishments of the Allies in World War I, kept psychological warfare
on the map. Modern Communism is permanent psychological warfare in
action.
The Communist leaders unwittingly made a tremendous mistake between 1922
and 1927. They invited the military and political staff of the Chinese
Nationalists (Kuomintang) to cooperate with them. Filled with their own
Communist sense of certainty, it never occurred to them that anyone else
could outsmart them. The Chinese did. Their military chief of mission in
Moscow learned everything that the Communists had to teach about
irregular fighting, subversive propaganda, revolutionary situations,
mass agitation. He then went home and got more Communist aid to carry
out the military phase of the Nationalist revolution, which started
under way in the summer of 1922. The old war-lord armies were helpless
in the face of agents, agitators, poster crews, student strikes, press
propaganda and indoctrinated troops. The most sensational war in modern
Asia involved relatively little combat. The Nationalist leader used all
the Communist psychological warfare techniques, and added a few more of
his own. His name was Chiang Kai-shek.
In 1927 the Communists began a debate in Moscow as to whether they had
used the Nationalists enough or not. One group said they might as well
liquidate the Nationalists, Sunyatsenism, Chiang Kai-shek and all; the
other said they should use the Nationalists a little longer, to carry on
the struggle against American, Japanese, and British "imperialism."
Chiang Kai-shek displayed a keen interest in these formal theoretical
discussions which, thanks to his Moscow training, he understood
perfectly. While the Communists were still debating when and how to
hijack him, he hijacked them. In the fall of 1927, he turned against
them, using the weapons of terror and propaganda, and then shifting to
the more solid ground of economic development. They have not forgiven
him. Nationalist China to this day possesses a working duplicate of the
Moscow propaganda facilities which the Communists, unconscious of the
humor of it, call "fascist." (What is anti-Communist for whatever cause
_is_ Fascist, they say.)
The Russian revolution of 1917-1922 and the Chinese revolution of
1922-1927 represent the situations created by Communist psychological
warfare. Since that time, except for Spain, Communist psychological
warfare has failed in every single attempt to come to power outside
Russia. Following World War II, Communist psychological warfare proved
itself capable of holding countries only _after_ the military force had
occupied or won them. The magic has gone out of Communist propaganda; it
can keep control only with heavy military pressure behind it. But in the
far past, it has been capable of winning--as in Russia and
China--without outside military aid. With a renovation of techniques,
doctrines, and personnel, it may do so again.