The expansion of the Islamic Faith-and-Empire provides a great deal of procedural information which cannot be neglected in our time. It has been said that men's faith should not be destroyed by violence, and that force alone is insufficient to change the minds of men. If this were true, it would mean that Germany can never be de-Nazified, and that there is no hope that the democratic peoples captured by totalitarian powers can adjust themselves to their new overlords or, if adjusted, can be converted back to free principles. In reality warfare by Mohammed's captains and successors demonstrated two principles of long-range psychological warfare which are still valid today:

A people can be converted from one faith to the other if given the choice between conversion and extermination, stubborn individuals being rooted out. To effect the initial conversion, participation in the public ceremonies and formal language of the new faith must be required. Sustained counterintelligence must remain on the alert against backsliders, but formal acceptance will become genuine acceptance if all public media of expression are denied the vanquished faith.

If immediate wholesale conversion would require military operations that were too extensive or severe, the same result can be effected by toleration of the objectionable faith, combined with the issuance of genuine privileges to the new, preferred faith. The conquered people are left in the private, humble enjoyment of their old beliefs and folkways; but all participation in public life, whether political, cultural or economic, is conditioned on acceptance of the new faith. In this manner, all up-rising members of the society will move in a few generations over to the new faith in the process of becoming rich, powerful, or learned; what is left of the old faith will be a gutter superstition, possessing neither power nor majesty.

These two rules worked once in the rise of Islam. They were applied again by Nazi overlords during World War II, the former in Poland, the Ukraine and Byelorussia, the latter in Holland, Belgium, Norway and other Western countries. The rules will probably be seen in action again. The former process is difficult and bloody, but quick; the latter is as sure as a steam-roller. If Christians, or democrats, or progressives—whatever free men may be called—are put in a position of underprivilege and shame for their beliefs, and if the door is left open to voluntary conversion, so that anyone who wants to can come over to the winning side, the winning side will sooner or later convert almost everyone who is capable of making trouble. (In the language of Vilfredo Pareto, this would probably be termed "capture of the rising elite"; in the language of present-day Marxists, this would be described as "utilization of potential leadership cadres from historically superseded classes"; in the language of practical politics, it means "cut in the smart boys from the opposition, so that they can't set up a racket of their own.")

Genghis even used the spies of the enemy as a means of frightening the enemy. When spies were at hand he indoctrinated them with rumors concerning his own forces. Let the first European biographer of Genghis tell, in his own now-quaint words, how Genghis put the bee on Khorezm (Carizme):

Enemy espionage can now—as formerly—prove useful if the net effect of it is to lower enemy morale. The ruler and people of Khorezm put up a terrific fight, nevertheless, despite their expectation of being attacked by wolf-eating wrestlers without number; but they left the initiative in Genghis' hands and were doomed.

However good the Mongols were in strategic and tactical propaganda, they never solved the problem of consolidation propaganda (see page 46, below). They did not win the real loyalty of the peoples whom they conquered; unlike the Chinese, who replaced conquered populations with their own people, or the Mohammedans, who converted conquered peoples, the Mongols simply maintained law and order, collected taxes, and sat on top of the world for a few generations. Then their world stirred beneath them, and they were gone.

Milton fell into the common booby-trap of refuting his opponents item by item, thus leaving them the strong affirmative position, instead of providing a positive and teachable statement of his own faith. He was Latin Secretary to the Council, in that Commonwealth of England which was—to its contemporaries in Europe—such a novel, dreadful, and seditious form of government. The English had killed their king, by somewhat offhanded legal procedures, and had gone under the Cromwellian dictatorship. It was possible for their opponents to attack them from two sides at once. Believers in monarchy could call the English murderous king-killers (a charge as serious in those times as the charge of anarchism or free love in this); believers in order and liberty could call the British slaves of a tyrant. A Frenchman called Claude de Saumaise (in Latin form, Salmasius) wrote a highly critical book about the English, and Milton seems to have lost his temper and his judgment.

In his two books against Salmasius, Milton then committed almost every mistake in the whole schedule of psychological warfare. He moved from his own ground of argument over to the enemy's. He wrote at excessive length. He indulged in some of the nastiest name-calling to be found in literature, and went into considerable detail to describe Salmasius in unattractive terms. He slung mud whenever he could. The books are read today, under compulsion, by Ph.D. candidates, but no one else is known to find them attractive. It is not possible to find that these books had any lasting influence in their own time. (In these texts written by Milton in Latin but now available in English, Army men wearying of the monotonous phraseology of basic military invective can find extensive additions to their vocabulary.) Milton turned to disappointment and poetry; the world is the gainer.

The vocabulary of seventeenth-century propaganda had a strident tone which is, perhaps unfortunately, getting to be characteristic of the twentieth century. The following epithets sound like an American Legion description of Communists, or a Communist description of the Polish democrats, yet they were applied in a book by a Lutheran to Quakers. The title of the tirade reads, in part:

In its first few pages, the book accuses the Quakers of obscenity, adultery, civil commotion, conspiracy, blasphemy, subversion and lunacy.8 Milton was not out of fashion in applying bad manners to propaganda. It is merely regrettable that he did not transcend the frailties of his time.

• Naval psychological warfare techniques used by the Caribbean pirates to unnerve prospective victims.
• Cortez's use of horses as psychological disseminators of terror among the Aztecs, along with his exploitation of Mexican legends concerning the Fair God.
• The failure of Turkish psychological warfare in the great campaigns of 1683 which left the issue one of purely physical means and cost Turkey the possible hegemony of central Europe.
• The propaganda methods of the British East India Company in the conquest of India against overwhelming Indian numerical superiority. (Edmond Taylor mentions these in his Richer by Asia.)
• The preventive psychological warfare system set up by the Tokugawa shoguns after 1636, which bottled up the brains of the Japanese through more rigorous control than has ever been established elsewhere over civilized people.
• The field psychological warfare of the Manchus, who conquered China against odds running as much as 400 to one against them, and who used terror as a means of nullifying Chinese superiority.
• The propaganda of the European feudal classes against the peasant revolts, which identified the peasants with filth, anarchy, murder, and cruelty.
• The Inquisition considered as a psychological warfare facility of the Spanish Empire.
• The agitational practices of the French Revolutionaries.
• Early uses of rockets and balloons for psychological effect.
• The beginnings of leaflet-printing as an adjunct to field operations.

Such a list just begins to touch on subjects which can and should be investigated, either as staff studies or by civilian historians. Collection of the materials and framing of sound doctrines for psychological warfare are no minor task.

The Americans made extensive use of the press.9 When the newspaper proprietors veered too far to the Loyalist side, they were warned to keep to a more Patriotic line. If, in the face of counter-threats from the Loyalists, the newspaper threatened going out of business altogether, it was warned that suspension of publication would be taken as treason to America. The Whigs, before hostilities, and their successors, the Patriots of the war period, showed a keen interest in keeping the press going and in making sure that their side of the story got out and got circulated rapidly. In intimidation and control of the press, they far outdistanced the British, whose papers circulated chiefly within the big cities held as British citadels throughout the war. Political reasoning, economic arguments, allegations concerning the course of the war, and atrocity stories all played a role.

George Washington himself, as commander of the Continental forces, showed a keen interest in war propaganda and in his just, moderate political and military measures provided a policy base from which Patriot propagandists could operate.

Some wars are profoundly affected by a book written on one side or the other; the American revolutionary war was one of these. Thomas Paine's Common Sense (issued as a widely sold series of pamphlets) swept American opinion like wildfire; it stated some of the fundamentals of American thinking, and put its bold but reasonable revolutionary case in such simple terms that even conservatives in the Patriot group could not resist using it for propaganda purposes.10 Common Sense has become a classic of American literature, but it has its place in history too, as "the book that won the war." Other pamphleteers, with the redoubtable Sam Adams in the lead, also did well.

American experience in the Mexican war was less glorious. The Mexicans waged psychological warfare against us with considerable effect, ending up with traitor American artillerymen dealing out heavy murder to the American troops outside Mexico city. Historians in both countries gloss over the treason and subversion which occurred on each side.

In the Civil War, psychological warfare was practised by both Lincoln and the Confederacy in establishing propaganda instrumentalities in England and on the continent of Europe. The Northern use of Negro troops, which was followed, at the end of the war by the Confederate plans for raising Negro troops, did not become the major propaganda issue it might have because of the community of feeling on the two sides, indecision on each side as to the purpose of the war (apart from the basic issue of union or disunion), and the persistence of politics-as-usual both North and South of the battle line.

The Boers, on the other hand, made a stir throughout the world. They got in touch with the Germans, Irish, Americans, French, Dutch, and everybody else who might criticize Britain. They stated their case loudly and often. They waged commando warfare, adding the word commando to international military parlance, and sent small units deep into the British rear, setting off a mad uproar and making the world press go crazy with excitement. When they finally gave in, it was on reasonable terms for themselves; they left the British with an internationally blacked eye.

Nobody remembered the Burmese; everybody remembered the Boers. The Boers used every means they could think of; they did everything they could. They even captured Winston Churchill.

These examples may show that the military role of propaganda and related operations is not as obscure or intangible as it may have seemed. They cannot be considered history but must be regarded as a plea for the writing of history. More recent experience is another question, and involves tracing the doctrines pertaining to psychological warfare which have now become established military procedure in the modern armies.

CHAPTER 2
The Function of Psychological Warfare

Psychological warfare in the broad sense, consists of the application of parts of the science called psychology to the conduct of war; in the narrow sense, psychological warfare comprises the use of propaganda against an enemy, together with such military operational measures as may supplement the propaganda. Propaganda may be described, in turn, as organized persuasion by non-violent means. War itself may be considered to be, among other things, a violent form of persuasion. Thus if an American fire-raid burns up a Japanese city, the burning is calculated to dissuade the Japanese from further warfare by denying the Japanese further physical means of war and by simultaneously hurting them enough to cause surrender. If, after the fire-raid, we drop leaflets telling them to surrender, the propaganda can be considered an extension of persuasion—less violent this time, and usually less effective, but nevertheless an integral part of the single process of making the enemy stop fighting.

Neither warfare nor psychology is a new subject. Each is as old as man. Warfare, being the more practical and plain subject, has a far older written history. This is especially the case since much of what is now called psychology was formerly studied under the heading of religion, ethics, literature, politics, or medicine. Modern psychological warfare has become self-conscious in using modern scientific psychology as a tool.

In World War II the enemies of the United States were more fanatical than the people and leaders of the United States. The consequence was that the Americans could use and apply any expedient psychological weapon which either science or our version of common sense provided. We did not have to square it with Emperor myths, the Führer principle or some other rigid, fanatical philosophy. The enemy enjoyed the positive advantage of having an indoctrinated army and people; we enjoyed the countervailing advantage of having skeptical people, with no inward theology that hampered our propaganda operations. It is no negligible matter to be able to use the latest findings of psychological science in a swift, bold manner. The scientific character of our psychology puts us ahead of opponents wrapped up in dogmatism who must check their propaganda against such articles of faith as Aryan racialism or the Hegelian philosophy of history.

What can psychology do for warfare?

In the first place, the psychologist can bring to the attention of the soldier those elements of the human mind which are usually kept out of sight. He can show how to convert lust into resentment, individual resourcefulness into mass cowardice, friction into distrust, prejudice into fury. He does so by going down to the unconscious mind for his source materials. (During world War II, the fact that Chinese babies remain unimpeded while they commit a nuisance, while Japanese babies are either intercepted or punished if they make a mess in the wrong place, was found to be of significant importance in planning psychological warfare. See below, page 154.)

In the second place the psychologist can set up techniques for finding out how the enemy really does feel. Some of the worst blunders of history have arisen from miscalculation of the enemy state of mind. By using the familiar statistical and questionnaire procedures, the psychologist can quiz a small cross section of enemy prisoners and from the results estimate the mentality of an entire enemy theater of war at a given period. If he does not have the prisoners handy, he can accomplish much the same end by an analysis of the news and propaganda which the enemy authorities transmit to their own troops and people. By establishing enemy opinion and morale factors he can hazard a reasoned forecast as to how the enemy troops will behave under specific conditions.

In the third place, the psychologist can help the military psychological warfare operator by helping him maintain his sense of mission and of proportion. The deadliest danger of propaganda consists of its being issued by the propagandist for his own edification. This sterile and ineffectual amusement can disguise the complete failure of the propaganda as propaganda. There is a genuine pleasure in talking back, particularly to an enemy. The propagandist, especially in wartime, is apt to tell the enemy what he thinks of him, or to deride enemy weaknesses. But to have told the Nazis, for example, "You Germans are a pack of murderous baboons and your Hitler is a demented oaf. Your women are slobs, your children are halfwits, your literature is gibberish and your cooking is garbage," and so on, would have stiffened the German will to fight. The propagandist must tell the enemy those things which the enemy will heed; he must keep his private emotionalism out of the operation. The psychologist can teach the propaganda operator how to be objective, systematic, cold. For combat operations, it does not matter how much a division commander may dislike the enemy; for psychological warfare purposes, he must consider how to persuade them, even though he may privately thirst for their destruction. The indulgence of hatred is not a working part of the soldier's mission; to some it may be helpful; to others, not. The useful mission consists solely of making the enemy stop fighting, by combat or other means. But when the soldier turns to propaganda, he may need the advice of a psychologist in keeping his own feelings out of it.

Finally, the psychologist can prescribe media—radio, leaflets, loudspeakers, whispering agents, returned enemy soldiers, and so forth. He can indicate when and when not to use any given medium. He can, in conjunction with operations and intelligence officers, plan the full use of all available psychological resources. He can coordinate the timing of propaganda with military, economic or political situations.

The psychologist does not have to be present in person to give this advice. He does not have to be a man with an M.D. or Ph. D. and years of postgraduate training. He can be present in the manuals he writes, in the indoctrination courses for psychological warfare officers he sets up, in the current propaganda line he dictates by radio. It is useful to have him in the field, particularly at the higher command headquarters, but he is not indispensable. The psychologist in person can be dispensed with; the methods of scientific psychology cannot. (Further on, throughout this book, reference will be made to current psychological literature. The general history of psychology is described in readable terms in Gregory Zilboorg and George W. Henry, A History of Medical Psychology, New York, 1941, and in Lowell S. Selling, Men Against Madness, New York, 1940, cheap edition, 1942.)

Propaganda can be conducted by rule of thumb. But only a genius can make it work well by playing his hunches. It can become true psychological warfare, scientific in spirit and developed as a teachable skill, only by having its premises clearly stated, its mission defined, its instruments put in systematic readiness, and its operations subject to at least partial check, only by the use of techniques borrowed from science. Of all the sciences, psychology is the nearest, though anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, area studies and other specialties all have something to contribute; but it is psychology which indicates the need of the others.

How much the traditional doctrines may be altered in the terrible light of atomic explosion, no one knows; but though the weapons are novel, the wielders of the weapons will still be men. The motives and weaknesses within war remain ancient and human, however novel and dreadful the mechanical expedients adopted to express them.

Warfare as a whole is traditionally well defined, and psychological warfare can be understood only in relation to the whole process. It is no mere tool, to be used on special occasion. It has become a pervasive element in the military and security situation of every power on earth.

Psychological warfare is a part of war. The simplest, plainest thing which can be said of war—any sort of war, anywhere, anytime—is that it is an official fight between men. Combat, killing, and even large-scale group struggle are known elsewhere in the animal kingdom, but war is not. All sorts of creatures fight; but only men declare, wage, and terminate war; and they do so only against other men.

Formally, war may be defined as the "reciprocal application of violence by public, armed bodies."

If it is not reciprocal, it is not war, the killing of persons who do not defend themselves is not war, but slaughter, massacre, or punishment.

If the bodies involved are not public, their violence is not war. Even our enemies in World War II were relatively careful about this distinction, because they did not know how soon or easily a violation of the rules might be scored against them. To be public, the combatants need not be legal—that is, constitutionally set up; it suffices, according to international usage, for the fighters to have a reasonable minimum of numbers, some kind of identification, and a purpose which is political. If you shoot your neighbor, you will be committing mere murder; but if you gather twenty or thirty friends, together, tie a red handkerchief around the left arm of each man, announce that you are out to overthrow the government of the United States, and then shoot your neighbor as a counterrevolutionary impediment to the new order of things, you can have the satisfaction of having waged war. (In practical terms, this means that you will be put to death for treason and rebellion, not merely for murder.)

Finally, war must be violent. According to the law of modern states, all the way from Iceland to the Yemen, economic, political, or moral pressure is not war; war is the legalization, in behalf of the state, of things which no individual may lawfully do in time of peace. As a matter of fact, even in time of war you cannot kill the enemy unless you do so on behalf of the state; if you had shot a Japanese creditor of yours privately, or even shot a Japanese soldier when you yourself were out of uniform, you might properly and lawfully have been put to death for murder—either by our courts or by the enemies'. (This is among the charges which recur in the war trials. The Germans and Japanese killed persons whom even war did not entitle them to kill.)

The governments of the modern world are jealous of their own monopoly of violence. War is the highest exercise of that violence, and modern war is no simple reversion to savagery. The General Staffs would not be needed if war were only an uncomplicated orgy of homicide—a mere getting-mad and throat-cutting season in the life of man. Quite to the contrary, modern war—as a function of modern society—reflects the institutional, political complexity from which it comes. A modern battle is a formal, ceremonialized and technically intricate operation. You must kill just the right people, in just the right way, with the right timing, in the proper place, for avowed purposes. Otherwise you make a mess of the whole show, and—what is worse—you lose.

Why must you fight just so and so, there and not here, now and not then? The answer is simple: you are fighting against men. Your purpose in fighting is to make them change their minds. It is figuratively true to say that the war we have just won was a peculiar kind of advertising campaign, designed to make the Germans and Japanese like us and our way of doing things. They did not like us much, but we gave them alternatives far worse than liking us, so that they became peaceful.

Sometimes individuals will be unpersuadable. Then they must be killed or neutralized by other purely physical means—such as isolation or imprisonment. (Some Nazis, perhaps including the Führer himself, found our world repellent or incomprehensible and died because they could not make themselves surrender. In the Pacific many Japanese had to be killed before they became acceptable to us.) But such is man, that most individuals will stop fighting at some point short of extinction; that point is reached when one of two things happens:

• Either, the defeated people may lose their sense of organization, fail to decide on leaders and methods, and give up because they can no longer fight as a group. This happened to the American Southerners in April, 1865. The President and Cabinet of the Confederate States of America got on the train at Richmond; the men who got off farther down the line were "refugees." Something happened to them and to the people about them, so that Mr. Davis no longer thought of himself as President Davis, and other people no longer accepted his commands. This almost happened in Germany in 1945 except for Admiral Doenitz.
• Or, the defeated people can retain their sense of organization, and can use their political organization for the purpose of getting in touch with the enemy, arranging the end of the war, and preparing, through organized means, to comply with the wishes of the conquerors. That happened when Britain acknowledged American independence; when the Boers recognized British sovereignty; when Finland signed what Russia had dictated; and when Japan gave up.

Sometimes these things are mixed. The people might wish to make peace, but may find that their government is not recognized by the enemy. Or the victors may think that they have smashed the enemy government, when the new organization is simply the old one under a slightly different name, but with the old leaders and the old ideas still prevailing.

It is plain that whatever happens wars are fought to effect a psychological change in the antagonist. They are then fought for a psychological end unless they are wars of extermination. These are rare. The United States could not find a people on the face of the earth whose ideas and language were unknown to all Americans. Where there is a chance of communication, there is always the probability that one of the antagonistic organizations (governments)—which have already cooperated to the extent of meeting one another's wishes to fight—will subsequently cooperate on terms of primary advantage to the victors. Since the organizations comprise human beings with human ways of doing things, the change must take place in the minds of those specific individuals who operate the existing government, or in the minds of enough other people for that government to be overthrown.

The fact that war is waged against the minds, not the bodies, of the enemy is attested by the comments of military writers of all periods. The dictum of Carl von Clausewitz that "war is politics continued by other means" is simply the modern expression of a truth recognized since antiquity. War is a kind of persuasion—uneconomical, dangerous, and unpleasant, but effective when all else fails.

If our difference of opinion is so inclusive that we can agree on nothing political, our differences have gone from mere opinion into the depths of ideology. Here the institutional framework is affected. You and I would not want to live in the same city; we could not feel safe in one another's presence; each would be afraid of the effect which the other might have on the morals of the community. If I were a Nazi, and you a democrat, you would not like the idea of my children living next door to yours. If I believed that you were a good enough creature—poor deluded devil—but that you were not fit to vote, scarcely to be trusted with property, not to be trusted as an army officer, and generally subversive and dangerous, you would find it hard to get along with me.

It was not metaphysical theories that made Protestants and Catholics burn one another's adherents as heretics in early wars. In the seventeenth century, the Protestants knew perfectly well what would happen if the Catholics got the upper hand, and the Catholics knew what would happen if the Protestants came to power. In each case the new rulers, fearful that they might be overthrown, would have suppressed the former rulers, and would have used the rack, the stake, and the dungeon as preventives of counterrevolution. Freedom cannot be accorded to persons outside the ideological pale. If an antagonist is not going to respect your freedom of speech, your property, and your personal safety, then you are not obliged to respect his. The absolute minimum of any ideology is the assumption that each person living in an ideologically uniform area (what the Nazi General Haushofer, following Rudolf Kjellen, would call a geo-psychic zone) will respect the personal safety, etc., of other individuals in the same area.

In our own time, we have seen Spaniards get more and more mistrustful of one another, until years of ferocious civil war were necessary before one of the two factions could feel safe. Spain went from republican unity to dictatorial unity in four years; in neither case was the unity perfect, but it was enough to give one government and one educational system control of most of the country. The other countries of the world vary in the degree of their ideological cohesion. Scandinavia seemed serene until the German invasion brought to the surface cleavages, latent and unseen, which made Quisling a quisling. Russia, Italy, Germany and various other states have made a fetish of their ideologies and have tried to define orthodoxy and heresy in such a way as to be sure of the mentality of all their people. But most of the countries of the world suffer from a considerable degree of ideological confusion—of instability of basic beliefs—without having any immediate remedy at hand, or even seeking one.