The History of Propaganda


November 24, 2001



BROOKE GLADSTONE: Hubert Humphrey said in 1965: propaganda, to be effective, must be believed. To be believed, it must be credible. To be credible, it must be true. That could explain the ultimate ineffectiveness at the very time the vice president was intoning those words of the Pentagon's propaganda war over Vietnam. The military tried to sustain public support on a raft of lies. But it sank under the weight of the images. Alan Winkler [sp?] is the author of The Politics of Propaganda.

ALLAN WINKLER: As we saw the body bags coming back, as we saw the piled up corpses, people turned against the war, and I think in its effort to avoid that kind of thing, administrations since that time have vowed it will never happen again. [COUNTRY JOE & THE FISH ANTI-VIETNAM WAR SONG] AND IT'S 1, 2, 3 WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR DON'T ASK ME, I DON'T GIVE A DAMN NEXT STOP IS VIETNAM

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Winkler says the government's handling of Vietnam was a far cry from its letter-perfect treatment of the war against Hitler. [SONG MY COUNTRY TIS OF THEE PLAYS] That war engaged all of America, which along with the ultimate sacrifice of its sons, tended its victory gardens, sold war bonds, saved rubber and cut down on little pleasures to advance the nation's cause.

ANNOUNCER:But because of the huge quantities of candy required by our war fighters and war workers, your civilian candy counters may not always be able to fill your needs completely. You can help through your understanding and cooperation.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:President Bush is trying to enlist the nation's support in much the same way by emphasizing the war at home, promoting volunteerism and symbolic gestures like American children sending dollars to their Afghan counterparts without actually calling for sacrifice such as cutting oil consumption. Alan Winkler.

ALLAN WINKLER: He's trying to get people engaged in activities like those of the Office of Civilian Defense during World War II where volunteers were looking for airplanes and felt that they had a vested interest in the war effort. He's trying to get people to do the kinds of things they did during World War II all of which created a sense of a participation and involvement.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Another effective World War II strategy, less employed in the current campaign, involves the relatively free flow of information.

ALLAN WINKLER: They subscribed to what they called a strategy of truth -- they didn't want to use information that was not true. Yes, there was military censorship; yes there were things that were not reported in explicit terms --but people fundamentally felt that they were getting a straight story.

ANNOUNCER:This is a program of cruel hard truth, not for the squeamish or the timid. This truth is ugly and at times horrible. This is the truth about our enemy! [MUSIC]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think that the Bush administration is employing a strategy of truth?

ALLAN WINKLER:I don't. I think that we don't really have a complete picture of what's going on in Afghanistan. I think the government would be serving its own interests by providing greater access to information, by trying to give a sense of what is happening, what may happen next, what the implications of that will be.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Winkler concedes the strategy of truth doesn't always work. Different eras, different conflicts call for different propaganda techniques. But some tactics endure from war to war, and according to journalist and historian Philip Knightly [sp?], the first is the crisis.

PHILIP KNIGHTLY: They say we've exhausted every possible diplomatic and other means of preventing the war but everything has failed, and now we have to go ahead. Stage one.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Sometimes the crisis is palpable; undeniable, as we experienced on September 11th. Sometimes it needs a little, shall we say, punching up. Take the crisis that spurred America's entry into the Gulf War 10 years ago. Iraq's otherwise unstoppable invasion of Saudi Arabia from Kuwait. But there were pictures courtesy of a Russian satellite that showed there were no Iraqi troops gathering along the border.

RICK MacARTHUR: Of course the pretext for sending American troops to Saudi Arabia in the first place without congressional authorization was to defend against an invasion - an imminent invasion of Saudi Arabia from Kuwait by the Iraqi Army.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Rick MacArthur is author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War.

RICK MacARTHUR:These satellite pictures contradicted that premise, but nobody published them, nobody used them until the St. Petersburg Times finally published them, but too late to have any impact.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Once urgency is established, says Philip Knightly, the propaganda war shifts into second gear.

PHILIP KNIGHTLY: Stage two is you have to demonize the enemy leader.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so it has been with Osama bin Laden.

PHILIP KNIGHTLY: British press actually ran a whole article headed Inside the Crazy Maniacal Mind of Osama bin Laden.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:As florid as that rhetoric may be, few would quarrel with it. Sometimes the enemy is every bit as crazy as he is depicted, and so may be his followers and supporters, the third item on Knightly's propaganda check list, and they too must be demonized.

WORLD WAR II PERIOD BRITISH FILM ACTOR: Why has the Nazi Mad Dog won so many successes? Why did he sweep through the terrible years from triumph to triumph? Because never until now have good men everywhere taken united action against evil.

GEORGE W. BUSH: The new war is not only against the evildoers themselves. The new war is against those who harbor them and finance them [AUDIENCE CHEERS] and feed them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: According to Philip Knightly, the next state is the atrocity story -- difficult to check being that both victim and victimizer generally are unavailable for comment. One of the more notorious recent examples of a counterfeit atrocity hales from the Gulf War. Rick MacArthur.

RICK MacARTHUR: It never happened! They just made it up, along with the Kuwaitis and the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In October of 1990 a Kuwaiti teenager, later found to be the daughter of the ambassador, testified before the congressional human rights caucus that Iraqi troops were killing babies by dumping them out of incubators. Three hundred babies by final count. It was the centerpiece of a massive public relations campaign financed almost entirely by the Kuwaiti government.

RICK MacARTHUR: The White House and the American government are capable of lying every bit as vigorously as the Taliban, yes. That doesn't make the causes morally equivalent! It just means that governments use propaganda during wartime and make wildly exaggerated claims!

BROOKE GLADSTONE:The conduct of the Afghan campaign suggests that the current Bush administration is more likely to withhold stories than to plant them in the media. The government doesn't have to, according to Michael Biel, professor of electronic media at Morehead [sp?] State University.

MICHAEL BIEL: They don't have to do it directly; they're doing it indirectly. They're telling the reporters and the editors as to what the message of the day is. They don't have to go out and actually produce a TV program or a newscast to, to do it because-- that would be labeled as propaganda. But if we now see this message being given to us by the newsmen that we trust, then that information gets across to us.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Today there is no Committee on Public Information to lie about the battles as in World War I or Office of War Information to oversee the media messages as in World War II. What we hear now is a cacophony of cryptic briefings from the podium, round the clock rat-a-tat from the talk shows and serious reporting that ranges from the complacent to the cynical. By the time Hubert Humphrey delivered that quote I cited earlier -- that propaganda must be true to be credible -- history had already proved him wrong. Nazi lies were devastatingly effective. But Goebbels had a stranglehold on information, and that is not possible here, today. Perhaps more appropriate is a line from the French playwright Jean Anouilh that goes: propaganda is a soft weapon. Hold it in your hands too long, and it will move around like a snake and strike the other way. [THEME MUSIC]