Communist Developments.
If the U.S. Government agencies know about the scientific development of Soviet propaganda techniques in the last few years, they have certainly not told this author. What is here presented is therefore derived from first-hand interrogation of Communists, from escapers in both Europe and Asia, and unclassified materials.Sociologically it would seem that the Russian Communists attempted definite improvements of the techniques of Communist revolution and that these improvements have in large part failed in the European satellites. The governments of Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany have turned out to be poor governments—despite the fact that from the Soviet point of view it was a sharp innovation to leave them in pseudo-parliamentary form instead of creating outright Soviet facsimilies.
At the Chinese end of the Moscow-Peking axis the sociology of revolutionary propaganda and organization appears to have worked out much more successfully than at the Russian end. The Chinese Communists, perhaps because they were Chinese, perhaps because they were tougher and more experienced Communists than the Russians, got their country under rigid control and then undertook social and political experiments on a very audacious scale. They have managed not to be un-Chinese while creating in China the kind of pervasive dictatorship which Communist control appears to require.
In the manipulation of satellites and in particularization of propaganda, the North Korean Communist army, the Viet Minh army in Indochina, and the Malayan Races Liberation Army on the Malay peninsula, appear to have near-optimum localism and particularism without suffering serious deviation from the main Communist world-wide pattern. In North Korea, of course, Chinese intervention and Soviet support have sharply modified the position of the North Korean People's Army, but the Annamite and Malay Communist forces appear to be fighting with high morale and considerable success, despite the duality of control from Peking and Moscow, and despite the difficulties of reconciling Asian nationalism with Marxian-world doctrine.
Another Communist technique is now known through Edward Hunter's provocative pioneer book62 by its correct name of "brain-washing." This involves the transformation of a human personality. The author has himself interrogated victims of brain-washing and can attest to the terrifying depth to which this process is carried. The victim of brain-washing is subject to very slight persuasion at the rational level. He is not even given much propaganda as U.S. propagandists of recent years might recognize the product. Instead, the process of brain-washing consists of a frontal attack on all levels of the personality, from the most conscious to the most hidden. The Communists seek through fatigue and sustained interrogation to create a condition similar to what is called "nervous breakdown" in popular parlance. Then they rebuild the personality, healing their victim into Communist normality.
One victim to whom the author talked had been so subject to Communist brain-changing that he thought himself a real Communist even though he had been reared a Catholic. He was completely convinced of the Communist cause and of his own life and place in that cause after the brain-washing had been completed. Unfortunately for Communism, the man got into serious sexual difficulties, difficulties of a kind which any American psychiatrist would recognize as potentially devastating.
As a result of his sexual frustrations he suffered a mild equivalent of the medically recognized phenomenon of the schizophrenic break—that terrible moment of false enlightenment in which the psychotic personality cuts loose with a truth of his own and shuts off most or all communication with normal people—with the consequence that he was walking along Nanking Road in Shanghai, a normal Communist in one instant of time and (as he put it to the author) in a millionth of a second he suddenly realized he was a Catholic, an anti-Communist, the enemy of every man, woman and child in sight—and at war with his entire environment. As this writer understood it, the poor man, though adjusted to the Communist environment after brain-washing, happened to go crazy—crazy enough to come back to our side.
Who can say which is sane, which insane? When two social and cultural systems are completely at odds with one another it may be impossible to be "normal" in both of them.
Scientifically the Chinese process of personality transformation lacked some of the pharmaceutical features apparent in the Western Communist conversions for purposes of confession. It appears to be a combination of audacious practical experimentation with well-known procedures from textbooks of Pavlovian psychology. It is, of course, an interesting scientific question to ask one's self: could Communist psychological researchers do enough psychological research to understand their own difficulties and to de-Communize themselves in the very act of seeking better psychological weapons for Communism? If the people in charge of Communist psychological techniques were scientists, as American psychologists generally are, there might be a real point of discussion. Unfortunately, most of them appear to be artists, believers, and fanatics. The history of the fanatical religions which have inflamed and ripped so much of mankind across the centuries is not such as to suggest that Communism will de-Communize itself by becoming more Communistic or more scientific.
Logically considered, the United States remains the largest extant revolutionary experiment in the world—the first immense human community which survives without profound dogma or profound hatred and which attempts to make short-range, practical, and warm-hearted (though ideologically superficial) concurrence the foundation for a political and industrial civilization. If the United States wins a few more wars it may be that the rest of mankind will be persuaded that our kind of practicality is not only humanly preferable, but scientifically more defensible than the philosophies of competing civilizations. It seems unlikely that Communist research can outstrip us in the propaganda field so far as the race is run in purely scientific terms; artistically and gadget-wise the Communists are just as inventive as we are and often more enthusiastic.
Private PsyWar and Covert Techniques.
Another aspect in the development of PsyWar was the inevitable possibility that skills learned in wartime would not be forgotten in time of peace. Many of the background studies made for OWI during World War II have been developed, on the constructive side, into serious scientific contributions to ethnology, anthropology, or psychology. The postwar studies of RAND Corporation have in part been released in unclassified form and add to our knowledge not only of propaganda but of mankind. The RADIR project at Stanford University, the Russian research program at MIT and Harvard, and other governmentally inspired or encouraged undertakings have borne similar fruit for private scholarship and discussion.On the other side of the coin, it is very hopeful to note that the many and dangerous techniques developed by OSS for covert propaganda, some of which were applied with considerable success in Europe, have not been introduced into domestic U.S. politics, commercial competition, or other forms of private life. After each war there is often a danger that the coarsening of a culture by the war will lead to the application of wartime skills to peacetime situations. This was emphatically not the case in the Presidential campaigns of 1948 and 1952, even though persons of rich PsyWar experience in World War II were on the staffs of both Stevenson and Eisenhower.
It is often forgotten that some of the deadliest and most effective revolutionary enterprises in the nineteenth century were undertaken without the consent or assistance of the existing governments. Karl Marx was certainly not an invention of Lord Palmerston. Bakunin did not operate out of the French Foreign Office.
In the postwar discussion of USA-Communist rivalry, recommendations were often made on the U.S. side that we should counter Soviet covert operations with our own covert operations against the USSR. What has been forgotten in this context is the fact that such operations have been made illegal and dangerous under United States law. Under Federal law as it exists today no Underground Railway could be developed to assist Soviet escapers in the way that Negro slaves were relayed across the Free States to Canada in the years before Emancipation. One of the chief blocks to U.S. covert operations is the immense growth in all directions of the power, authority, and responsibility of the Federal Government; this growth makes it almost impossible to wage revolutionary or conspiratorial operations from U.S. territory without the prior approval of U.S. authorities—which the authorities, under traditional international law, cannot give and cannot afford to give.
It would seem desirable, if the Cold War situation persists over a long period of time, for Americans to reexamine the restraints which they have placed upon their own citizens and to attempt a revision of the laws which would permit pro-American secret activities to be launched without permitting anti-American activities of the same kind to be carried on. One immediately comes to the conundrum:63
How can the Government say yes to the one and no to the other without being cognizant of what happens?
The answer would appear to lie in the older body of our law in that a withdrawal of governmental authority from some fields would leave the individual responsible and subject to indictment and trial if his enterprises should prove deleterious to the United States Government, but not subject to punishment if his enterprises hurt the known antagonists of the USA.
Phrased in another way, this means that the USA might, in a long-range Cold War situation, be required to make some domestic recognition of the fact that the Communist states are the antagonists but not the military enemies of the U.S. system of government and that as antagonists of this system of government such states, their representatives, their property, and their organizations, should not be afforded any more protection under our laws than is given to the National City Bank of New York in the laws applicable to the city of Moscow, or the American Telephone & Telegraph Company in the laws which apply in Budapest. For a long time the Communist states have treated even the most innocent business enterprise and social club on our side as though they were attainted with an inherent factor of criminal and subversive intent. The withdrawal of U.S. legal protection from all things Communist might allow the American people—or those among them who so chose—to develop proclivities for adventure and trouble-making against the Communists. These proclivities are now sternly repressed by Federal statute.
The Future of Psychological Warfare.
PsyWar has become an existing art. Where it had no practitioners at all in the United States between 1919 and 1940, it has had a long and distinguished roster of active and reserve officers, civilian consultants, and demobilized veterans interested in the field ever since 1945. A wide variety of military establishments have had PsyWar responsibilities assigned them. Substantial cadres of officers and skilled enlisted personnel have been recruited and trained. Radio and leaflet facilities are ready to accompany our land, sea, and air forces wherever they may have to go. A U.S. strategic center for global propaganda, instantly convertible to wartime use, exists in the Operations Coordinating Board under the National Security Council.This is not the end of the story.
One of the paradoxical but deeply true factors in the study and conduct of propaganda is this: the more people know about propaganda, the better they can resist it.
Propaganda was a tremendous bogey in the 1920s. It probably seems very ugly and frightening to most people born before 1920. It does not seem too frightening, so far as the author can judge, to Americans born after 1930. Those born in the period 1920-30 appear to be divided in their emotional reactions to mass persuasion situations.
PsyWar is not magic. It is a valuable auxiliary to modern warfare and a useful concomitant to modern strategy. If a particular strategic policy is sanely and effectively devised as a feasible deterrent to war, the PsyWar procedures supporting that strategy will contribute to the prevention of war. Psychological warfare represents a recognition and acceptance in the military and strategic field of skills which grow about us every day.
In so far as ultra-destructive weapons may have increased the tenseness and bad temper of people who must live under the perpetual but remote threat of atomic bombing, one can say that physicists have upset the nerves of mankind and that it is now up to the propagandists to reassure and to reconcile the peoples.
Whatever PsyWar does, it certainly does not and should not increase the bitterness of war. Fighting itself is the supreme bitterness. Radio broadcasts and leaflets even in wartime only rarely should promote hatred. The situation which the world faces is dangerous because of technological development, not because of psychological knowledge. PsyWar ranks as a weapon, but it is almost certainly the most humane of all weapons.
Apart from PsyWar, what military weapon destroys the enemy soldier's capacity to fight by saving his life? PsyWar tries to bring him over alive and tries to send him home as our friend. No rival weapon can do this.
PsyWar, no matter what it may be called in the future, cannot be omitted from the arsenal of modern war. Neither can it outlast war. Its improvement is a cheap, valuable, and humane way of increasing the military potential of any country whether we think that country to be politically right or politically wrong.
Since 1945 we Americans have written more, studied more, and talked more about PsyWar than have any of the other free peoples. This is a hopeful sign. It can be read as an indication that the American love of the gadget, the American quest for a novelty, can be turned to the arena of the soul. The Communists are better liars, better schemers, better murderers than we shall ever be; they start off by being better fanatics. Is it not in the American spirit that we should out-trick them, out-talk them, and out-maneuver them? We have a very creative and resourceful civilization at our backs. We have no Führer to guide us and no party line to comfort us; we don't even want such things. Hard though it may be, we can live with our own consciences and not seek for keepers.
The Communists have started a fight with us. That fight may go on a long time. If they want to stop fighting we shall certainly try to find peace with them. But if they push the fight to its bitter end—
We shall not fail.
APPENDIX
Military PsyWar Operations, 1950-53
On 25 June 1950, when the invasion of the Republic of Korea began, no real military PsyWar organization was tangibly evident. A planning staff headed by Colonel J. Woodall Greene had been re-created in the Far East Command's GHQ in 1947, but it was hardly prepared to direct full-scale propaganda operations on such short notice, especially with a total lack of field operating units. Yet the staff with hasty augmentation did go into action—in effect, became its own operating unit—two days following the invasion, using both leaflets and radio in a strategic campaign that was continued without interruption for over three years.
At the same time that General MacArthur made provision for the PsyWar planning staff in the Far East Command, the Department of the Army's G2 in 1947 directed the inauguration of a long-range program of extension courses to be administered primarily to the specialists of the Military Intelligence Reserve. One such specialty in the military intelligence career program was psychological warfare.64
Parallel with the development of training literature based on World War II experience, the Army experimented with the use of PsyWar in field maneuvers. A special unit, called the Tactical Information Detachment,65 was formed at Fort Riley, Kansas.
Organization of Field Operational Units.
Less than a month after the 1950 invasion, the Department of the Army announced the approval of a new organizational concept for PsyWar field operational units. The new concept, profiting by the organizational happenchance in all theaters of operations during World War II, established two functional units: one for strategic propaganda support, the other for tactical propaganda support.Radio Broadcasting and Leaflet Group.
Although the concept for new unit organization and function was not conceived overnight, FEC's Psychological Warfare Section (PWS) with its dual planning and operating responsibilities pointed up the urgent need for a unit properly manned and equipped to support full-scale strategic operations in any area. So the Radio Broadcasting and Leaflet (RB&L) Group was born. Not only was it designed to conduct strategic propaganda in direct support of military operations, but it likewise was created to support the national world-wide propaganda effort when so directed. It was built on a basic framework of three companies:Headquarters and Headquarters Company, containing the command, administrative, supervisory and creative personnel necessary for propaganda operations.
Reproduction Company, containing intricate equipment and skilled personnel capable of producing leaflets and newspapers of varying sizes and multiple color.
Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company, designed to replace or augment other means of broadcasting radio propaganda.
In 1953 a fourth type company was activated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina—the Consolidation Company. This unit was very flexible and had the job of creating and conducting PsyWar in support of consolidation operations in areas under Military Government control.
Loudspeaker and Leaflet Company.
The Group's junior partner in the conduct of PsyWar support operations was the Loudspeaker and Leaflet (L&L) Company. This unit specifically supported an army in the field with adequate tactical propaganda support. Like the Group, it supported the national propaganda objectives, but it interpreted the directives that came from the theater commander in terms of more immediate objectives. Its targets were smaller, lived under unusual circumstances, and presented highly vulnerable, rapidly changing propaganda opportunities—a real challenge for the L&L Company. Organizationally it was a trimmed-down version of the Group. Its company headquarters and propaganda platoon were the offspring of Headquarters and Headquarters Company. The publications platoon was a smaller, more adaptable version of Reproduction Company. And the loudspeaker platoon was the tactical counterpart of the strategic Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company.The Tactical Information Detachment, moving from Fort Riley to Korea in the fall of 1950, was reorganized as the 1st Loudspeaker and Leaflet Company and, attached to EUSAK, served as Eighth Army's tactical propaganda unit throughout the campaign. It adjusted its location, equipment and propaganda tone to keep pace with the ups and downs of the Korean war.
Psychological Warfare Center.
Paralleling the creation of the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare in the Department of the Army PsyWar training was started in the spring of 1951. A faculty was collected at the Army General School to start the world's first formal school of military propaganda.At the same time, reserve officers whose civilian specialties were in or related to mass communications were recalled to PsyWar assignments. Several RB&L groups and L&L companies were activated and trained at Fort Riley. One of these, the 1st Radio Broadcasting and Leaflet Group, was deployed to Japan to become the strategic propaganda support unit in FEC, thereby relieving the hard-pressed Psychological Warfare Section of its operational functions. The Group left Fort Riley in July 1951 at the height of the Missouri Valley floods, forcing the unit to take emergency detours by bus and train in order to meet its scheduled port of embarkation call. The 1st was the only group to have been used in active operations. Other groups were employed in training missions. In addition, Reserve groups and companies trained periodically at key locations where sufficient specialized personnel were available to keep the units on a ready, stand-by basis.
In April 1952, the PsyWar training activities at Fort Riley were moved to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where the new Psychological Warfare Center was located. This Center not only provided unit training supervision and facilities, but it fathered a new activity, the Psychological Warfare Board, designed to evaluate and test new PsyWar equipment and techniques. And the Psychological Warfare School, an outgrowth of the classes conducted by the Army General School, was formally recognized and established as one of the Army's specialist schools. More than four hundred officers have received diplomas as PsyWar officers at the time of this writing (1953). Most of the graduates have been Army officers, although successfully completing the course have been students from the Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, U.S. Information Agency, and from nine Allied nations.
Psychological Warfare Staff, FEC.
For nearly two years, the Psychological Warfare Section operated under the general staff supervision of Intelligence (G2). Since World War I days G2 had been given the responsibility for monitoring PsyWar activity, a practice that was evident throughout World War II. In 1947 the Department of the Army transferred the monitorship and supervision of PsyWar to Plans and Operations (G3). The shift was effected in FEC in 1952.Early in 1953 PWS was transferred to the staff of the commander, Army Forces Far East (AFFE), a paper transaction to put the staff in a closer position to coordinate the plans and operations of the supporting army PsyWar units.
Throughout the Korean conflict, PWS, like its area commander, wore two hats: PWS was also the PsyWar operations coordinating agency for the United Nations Command.
Broad objectives made possible throughout the war years the development of literally thousands of appropriate themes. One theme so prominent in World War II propaganda, that of unconditional surrender, was never used. UN policy denied its use, and PWS enforced the prohibition.
Psychological Warfare Staff, EUSAK.
Recognizing the need for PsyWar officers on army and corps staffs, the Department of the Army hastened to make an allocation for these officers to be integrated into headquarters structures. The PsyWar officers finally came to rest in the G3 staff section.Eighth Army's PsyWar division of G3 had the 1st Loudspeaker and Leaflet Company under its operational control. EUSAK's PsyWar officer kept a tight control over the propaganda output of the L&L Company by physically moving the propaganda platoon into his EUSAK staff office.
Each of the corps PsyWar officers had under his operational control one loudspeaker section (with a varying number of teams) from the L&L Company.
Radio Operations.
Radio in the Korean conflict was used jointly as a strategic and a consolidation medium. From the beginning of the war, radio was the voice of our military policy. An ambitious network, supervised in 1950-51 directly by PWS and thereafter by the 1st RB&L Group, became known and recognized as the Voice of the United Nations Command. The Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) and the Japan Broadcasting System (JBS) transmitted on a cooperative basis, with the U.S. Government buying air time. The 1st RB&L Group's radio unit furnished programming assistance through key stations in Seoul (KBS), Taegu (KBS), Pusan (KBS) and Tokyo (JBS). In addition, the Group furnished technical assistance to KBS in order to keep as many as twelve network stations on the air.Leaflet Operations.
As in World War II, leaflets were delivered primarily by two means: aircraft and artillery. B-29s of the Far East Air Force ferried leaflet bombs on night missions deep into strategic areas. Light bombers and liaison craft in support of EUSAK dropped both leaflet bombs and bundles on tactical targets. The leaflet bundle was a Korean war development. It was wrapped, tied, and fuzed in such a manner that it would open and release its leaflets in mid-air. The 105mm. howitzer remained the principal artillery piece for placing propaganda-loaded shells on pinpoint targets.Tremendous quantities of leaflets were printed. The 1st RB&L Group on many occasions averaged better than twenty million pieces of printed propaganda every week. To this, the 1st L&L Company in Korea added an average of three and a half million leaflets per week.
Loudspeaker Operations.
The airborne loudspeaker was the object of experimentation, but the bulk of loudspeaker broadcasts were made from vehicle mounts, such as tanks, and from emplacements. During the static battle situation of 1951-53, most of the broadcasts were of the latter kind. Range of the voice casts was short, something like two thousand yards under ideal conditions. Personnel and equipment were supplied by the 1st L&L Company, and scripts were prepared by PsyWar Division, G3, EUSAK.Results of Military PsyWar Operations.
When the question was asked, "Just how effective was PsyWar?" the answer was vague. Clear-cut immediate evaluation of the effects of each propaganda campaign was often impossible to ascertain because of the many intangible conditions that were prevalent in the target area—conditions that were constantly changing.Some critics of the PsyWar operations in the Far East Command charged that there were exaggerated claims of prisoners of war who surrendered as a result of propaganda. They pointed out that a head count of prisoners is an inaccurate measure of direct effects of PsyWar used in support of military operations, because rarely is the taking of prisoners the sole goal of any major PsyWar campaign.
Other critics expressed the belief that emphasis had been placed on quantity rather than quality of propaganda. By quantity they meant propaganda measured by bookkeeping statistics. By quality they meant propaganda that, planned with potent intelligence, was capable of exploiting propaganda opportunities with maximum psychological impact.
Did PsyWar achieve its goal?
The effects of planned persuasion in a thousand days of radio broadcasts, in tens of thousands of loudspeaker appeals, in billions of leaflets, may be measured only in retrospect . The question may be answered when reaction in the target area has reached (or fails to reach) favorable proportion, provided that the tangible results of the military operations can be clearly separated from those of concurrent and subsequent strategic international information operations.
FOOTNOTES:
1 Histories of warfare, of politics (though there are no good recent ones, Edward Jenks' little book being half a century out of date), of political theory (especially the excellent though dissimilar volumes by G. H. Sabine and by G. E. C. Catlin), of particular countries, of diplomacy, of religion, and even of literature all cast a certain amount of light on the subject. No writer known to the author specializes in the topic of historical propaganda; none takes up the long-established historical role of non-violent persuasion in warfare. Some of the sociologists and anthropologists, such as Karl Mannheim, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, Geoffrey Gorer, Ruth Benedict (to mention a few at random) have presented approaches which would justify re-evaluations of history in a way useful to propaganda students; but they have not yet persuaded the historians to do the work.
2 7 Judges 22-23.
3 Leon Wieger, S. J., Textes Historiques, Hsien-hsien, 1929, vol. 1, pp. 628-633.
4 The author's attention to this reference was drawn by an unpublished undated typescript article in the War Department files by Lt. Col. Samuel T. Mackall, Inf.
5 Lo Kuan-chung, San Kuo chih Yen-i, translated by C. H. Brewitt-Taylor as San Kuo or Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Shanghai, 1929, vol. 1, p. 46.
6 Recent writers on Genghis, such as Lamb, Vladimirtsov, Fox and Lattimore all credit the Mongols with a higher technological level of warfare than has been the custom among most Western historians. H. G. Wells' simple but compelling description of the Mongols in his Outline of History is worth re-reading in this connection.
7 Petis de la Croix, The History of Genghizcan the Great, First Emperor of the Antient Moguls and Tartars ..., London, 1722, p. 154.
8 Benedict Figken, Historia Fanaticorum, Danzig, 1664.
9 Philip Davidson's Propaganda and the American Revolution, Chapel Hill, 1941, is a careful scholarly study of this period. Comparable studies have not yet been written concerning other American wars. Military and civilian historians have a fascinating piece of research awaiting them in the material concerning Confederate and Federal psychological warfare. Each participant in the Civil War was vulnerable to the propaganda of the other. Subversive and clandestine pro-Confederate propaganda in the North is outlined in George Fort Milton's engrossing Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column, New York and Washington, D. C., 1942, but no comparable study covering all forms of propaganda on either side is yet available.
10 Various new editions of Paine's chief works are available in popular and inexpensive form. They are worth study as good propaganda.
11 In his The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen, Baltimore, 1937, page 17 and following, this author attempted to present some of the relationships of ideology to other methods of social control and, in connection with that enterprise, was furnished by the philosopher, A.O. Lovejoy, with a definition of "ideology" more systematic and more elaborate than the one used here.
12 For example, in the 1920's the Soviet press expressed resentment and amusement over a ruse adopted by the British during the course of operations along the Northwest Frontier. Plane-mounted loudspeakers had told the tribesmen, in Pushtu, that God was mad at them for having broken the pledged peace, with the result that they scattered and gave up. This maneuver exasperated the Russians, who themselves were making equally sweeping propaganda inroads on the other side of the Pamirs. The Russians were attacking religion, and having heavy going; it struck them as improper warfare to make use of local superstition.
13 Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, Springfield, 1944.
14 The late Huey Long is reported to have created a new word in the language of rustic Louisiana, the word "damlyingnewspapers." By instilling in his followers contempt for the "capitalist" press, he got them to the point where they disbelieved anything which they saw in print, and believed everything which "Ol' Huey, the Kingfish" himself told them. This operation was technically competent, since one of the most effective means of putting propaganda across is to draw alarmed attention to unfriendly propaganda and then just "happening to mention" the "truth" (that is, the promoted side). Long attributed to the newspapers a large number of lies which they did not print, along with the "lies" (which were in historical fact true) that they did actually print. Since most of his followers either boycotted the press or read it in a hostile frame of mind, they never found out whether the newspapers said what Huey said they said, or not. You can try this out on your neighbors or friends by making up some idiotic "quotation" (such as, "The Jewish Vorwaerts says that pickled onions are a cause of immorality" or "Le Temps of Paris says that Alaska is preparing to secede") and the listener will be so busy scoffing at what the paper allegedly said that he will take no time to find out whether the paper did say it or not. Such attributions occur in everyday life; the smart propagandist attributes plenty of rich, ripe, silly quotations to his opponent. How many people actually know what the Communists have said on any given topic? Or bother to check on the actual claims of the Zionist organization? Or the statements of the Arabs in Palestine?
15 The literature in this field is carefully described in two volumes by a three-man team consisting of Harold D. Lasswell, Ralph D. Casey and Bruce Lannes Smith, the first being Propaganda and Promotional Activities, An Annotated Bibliography, Minneapolis, 1935, and the sequel being Propaganda, Communication and Public Opinion, A Comprehensive Reference Guide, Princeton, 1946. The booklists provide material in plenty for any academic-minded inquirer. The essays in the two volumes are well worth reading, although the authors have undergone the professorial delight of inventing a private language of their own. Parts of the latter book, especially, read like proceedings out of an unfamiliar lodge meeting; but there is sound sense and acute observation behind the vocabulary. It must, however, be parenthetically noted that during World War II the key propaganda jobs were held by a radio commentator, a dramatist, a newspaperman, a New York banker, and an absolutely astonishing number of men from commercial radio—along, of course, with a sprinkling of Army and Navy officers in Washington, and a heavy majority of non-specialist officers in the field. The propaganda experts were not, in most instances, called in to do the actual chore of propaganda. Among the exceptions were Leonard W. Doob, author of Propaganda, Its Psychology and Technique, New York, 1935, who served in the War Department's Psychological Warfare Branch and in the Washington propaganda center at OWI; C. A. H. Thomson, who served as a propaganda staff officer both in Washington and overseas after being a collaborator with the Lasswell group; and Drs. Edwin Guthrie and A. L. Edwards, whose chapter "Psychological Warfare" in [E. G. Boring, editor] Psychology for the Fighting Man, Washington, 1943, pp. 430-447, is a lucid epitome of the topic.
16 This means that if you want to get baptised, you've got to get all the way under the water or it doesn't count.
17 See Doob's book, mentioned above, especially pages 71 through 89 and 413 through 417.
18 See the bibliographies by Harold Lasswell and others, mentioned above, for a wealth of literature giving more technical and scientific breakdowns than this. The formula STASM represents what was actually used in preparation of up-to-the-minute propaganda spot analysis for the War Department General Staff by Propaganda Branch during World War II. Some further aspects of this formula are presented in my article, "Stasm: Psychological Warfare and Literary Criticism" in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3, July 1947, pp. 344-348.
19 See Harold Lasswell's Propaganda Technique in the World War, New York, reissue 1938, Chapter II, "Propaganda Organization," for a description of the attempts to coordinate policy and propaganda in World War I.
20 Chicago, 1946. The discussion of what censorship authorities regarded as propaganda material possessing value for the enemy, of the wartime OC-OWI relationship, and of censorship of short-wave broadcasts are of particular interest to the student of psychological warfare.
21 In a somewhat different context, it is interesting to note that Chinese Protestant churches, made up of Chinese church members, like to hire ministers who mouth their Chinese with a strong American accent. The American missionaries established the American accent as part of the liturgical paraphernalia of Protestantism, and the Chinese preachers trained under them accepted the American mispronouncing of Chinese as a part of the religion. It is odd to see a church full of Chinese using absolutely unbelievable tones while singing hymns or making appropriate individual responses. At that, they are no funnier than the Chinese Buddhists, who memorize long Indian sutras without understanding a single syllable.
22 On World War I, see Harold Lasswell's Propaganda Technique in the World War, previously cited; George Creel's How We Advertised America, New York and London, 1920, the very title of which is an indication of its chief shortcoming; Lt. Col. W. Nicolai, Nachrichtendienst, Presse und Volksstimmung im Weltkrieg, Berlin, 1920, by the German general staff officer chiefly responsible for staff work on propaganda and public opinion, a very thoughtful though prejudiced book; Heber Blankenhorn's enjoyable little classic, Adventures in Propaganda, Boston, 1919 (Blankenhorn was the only American officer to see field service in propaganda in both wars, as a Captain in I and a Lieutenant Colonel in II); and George G. Bruntz' scholarly monograph Allied Propaganda and the Collapse of the German Empire in 1918, Stanford, 1938. Readers desiring further references should consult the bibliographies by Lasswell, Casey and Smith, cited above.