CHAPTER 7
Propaganda Analysis

Opinion analysis pertains to what people think; propaganda analysis deals with what somebody is trying to make them think. Each form of analysis is a new and flourishing field in civilian social research; the bibliographies of Smith, Lasswell and Casey, and the current reviews in the Public Opinion Quarterly29 demonstrate the existence of a large and growing literature on the subject. Each year, new textbooks in the field or current revisions of old ones can be counted on to bring scholastic and scientific findings up to date.

Technical writings on visual education, religious conversion, labor organization, practical politics, revolutionary agitation, and on commercial advertising have frequent bearing on propaganda analysis.

Propaganda cannot be analyzed in a logical vacuum. Every step in the operation is intensely practical. There is nothing timeless about it, other than that common sense which is based on the nature of man. The ancient Chinese three-character classic, from which several billion Chinese have tried to learn to read, says:

Freely translated, this means, "When people are born, they all start good, but even though they all start out about the same, you ought to see them after they have had time to become different from one another by picking up habits here and there!"30 The common nature of man may be at the basis of all propaganda and politics, but incentives to action are found in the stimuli of varied everyday environments. Certain very elementary appeals can be made almost without reference to the personal everyday background ("cultural-historical milieu") of the person addressed. Yet in a matter as simple as staying alive or not staying alive—in which it might be supposed that all human beings would have the same basic response—the difference between Japanese and Americans was found to be basic when it came to surrender. To Japanese soldiers, the verbal distinction between surrender and cease honorable resistance was as important as the difference between life and death. The Japanese would not survive at the cost of their honor, but if their honor were satisfied, they willingly gave up.

Propaganda is directed to the subtle niceties of thought by which people maintain their personal orientation in an unstable interpersonal world. Propaganda must use the language of the mother, the schoolteacher, the lover, the bully, the policeman, the actor, the ecclesiastic, the buddy, the newspaperman, all of them in turn. And propaganda analysis, in weighing and evaluating propaganda, must be even more discriminating in determining whether the propaganda is apt to hit its mark or not.

In obtaining printed propaganda, better results will be achieved if the same sources are followed consistently over a period of time than if one triumphant raid is carried through. The choice may look like this (see Chart III). If, in this instance the propaganda analysis is to be a one-man enterprise in a small country or area in time of peace, the one man can collect all the different kinds of samples in March and can then spend several months trying to see how they add up. By the time his analysis is ready, it will be badly dated and will necessarily be less interesting to the recipients than would a report which was up-to-the-week. Furthermore, unless the analyst knows the area very well indeed, he will risk mistaking transient issues for basic ones. If the Old Agrarians happen to be accused of Right Wing Deviationism during the week of 3-10 March, the analyst may falsely conclude that the Old Agrarian issue is tempestuous or profound.

Unless he has a large staff, faces a special crisis or pursues a scholarly purpose, the analyst does well to pick the alternative illustrated in the vertical column. He should pick his media carefully, accepting the advice of people who know the area intimately. In an opinion-controlled area, it is wise to take both a direct government propaganda paper and an opposition of semi-independent paper, if such exist. Local papers are often better guides to domestic propaganda than are big metropolitan papers. The propagandists of the country know that foreigners may watch the big papers, and they will reserve their most vicious, naÏve, or bigoted appeals for the local press.

Along with the local press of one or two selected localities, the analyst should select several government personages and should follow every word of theirs he can find. The basic principle is for the analyst himself to determine the range of materials to be covered by deciding his own work-load in advance. This in turn depends on the time he has available for the task, his mastery of the language, his interest in the projects, probable interruptions due to semiofficial elbow-bending, and other personal factors.

The rule remains: Consistent analysis of the same output with reference to basic topics over a sustained period will inevitably reveal the propaganda intention of the source. (It must be pointed out that the expert analyst still is needed to select topics and to confirm interpretations.) To make a first guess as to whether the intended effect is being achieved or not, the analyst uses himself as a propaganda guinea pig. What does he think of the issues? What might he have thought otherwise? What would he think if he were a little less intelligent, a little more uncritical, than he is? And to complete the analysis, the analyst must go out to the audience that receives the materials and find out what effect the propaganda has had by asking them about it (see interrogation, page 145).

Printed matter goes on the air in any major news operation. It is only a matter of time before telephoto facilities develop in line with the experimental New York Times edition printed in San Francisco during the United Nations organizational conference. This was sent, all in one piece, by wirephoto to Frisco and reprinted. The delay between the two editions was merely a matter of minutes. In the future, wireless telephoto may reduce this to seconds, so that all belligerents can simply tune in on each other's major newspapers.

The only defense against enemy use of radio monitoring or broadcasting consists of the application of wired radio—which means plugging all the radio sets in on the telephone circuit, putting nothing on the air, and defying the enemy to eavesdrop. If the radio sets are then policed, and are made incapable of receiving wireless material, that particular audience is effectively cut off from the enemy. (When the Red Army, with its acute propaganda-conscious security, moved into many Eastern European cities, the first thing it did was to round up all the radios which the Nazis had overlooked. This prevented the liberated peoples from being enslaved by the "filthy reactionary lies" of the American and British governments, and made sure that the peoples would stay liberated under influence of their local Soviet-controlled newspapers.)

Wired radio is expensive. Radio suppression is difficult; the successful concealers of radio receivers become two-legged newspapers and go around town spreading all the hot dope which the authorities are trying to suppress. Scarcity puts a premium on such news; rumor then becomes unmanageable. Except for strangely drastic situations, it is probable that the great powers will continue to tolerate radio reception even though it may mean letting foreign subversive propaganda slip in now and then.

It is therefore likely that radio broadcasts will be available for monitoring for the pre-belligerent stages of the next war, should war come again in our time, and that radio may last through a great part or all of the duration of the war. Factors which cannot now be foreseen, such as radio control of weapons, will affect this.

Radio propaganda analysis follows the same considerations as those which govern choice of materials for analyzing printed matter. It is a surer method to follow one or two programs on a station than to make wide random selections. A standard-wave transmitter to the home audience comes closer to revealing the domestic scene than would a global rebroadcast of ostensibly identical material. Radio has a further advantage over print. Few nations print out separate propaganda for each foreign-language area, while almost every large and medium-sized country has international facilities for broadcast. Since the programs are beamed to different language groups, the senders automatically make up propaganda lines for each audience.31

Attentive monitoring can provide material for distinguishing the various lines which any given nation is sending out to its friends, neighbors, or rivals. Frequently the differences between these lines make good counterpropaganda. If you hear the Germans telling the Danes that all Nordics are supermen and all non-Nordics scum, while telling the Japanese that the National Socialist idea of the world transcends pluto-democratic race prejudice, put the two quotations together and send them back to the Danes and the Japanese both.

Radio, unlike print, cannot be held for the analyst's convenience. It is physically unhandy to try to file actual recordings of enemy broadcasts for preservation and reference. When the analysis center is large, as it would be if near the headquarters of a government or a theater of war, the difficulties of monitoring involve problems of stenographic and language help. The monitors themselves can then be stenographers, taking verbatim dictation. They write down the enemy broadcast word-for-word, either right off the air or from records. The editor then selects the most important parts of the day's intake for mimeographic or other circulation. Important material can be put in a daily radio summary of enemy propaganda for the area monitored. The rest of it can be sent along by mail, put in files and classified (lest the enemy government find out what its own propagandists really were saying), preserved on the recording, or destroyed.

During World War II these basic verbatim reports played a very important part. The Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service did the job for the United States, operating through the war years under the Federal Communications Commission. It has since been shifted from FCC to the War Department, and from the War Department to the Central Intelligence Group. Its materials sometimes are unclassified, although during most of the war they were marked restricted, and they are not available to the public except through microfilm copies of the Library of Congress file. These FBIS daily reports skimmed the cream off the enemy news broadcasts, and included editorial or feature material which might have intelligence or policy interest.

The most likely situation for the isolated consul, businessman, officer, missionary, or amateur is one in which he can get a certain amount of stenographic help in taking down the broadcast material. The radio for monitoring varies in accordance with general reception conditions. Practically all the U.S. Army Signal Corps receivers will perform satisfactorily for local monitoring; so too will ordinary private sets, including the larger portables. An automobile radio can often be driven away from interference and from a hilltop or the edge of a lake can pick up a standard-wave station that cannot be distinguished on a much larger house set in the city. For transoceanic or world-wide reception, a short-wave receiver is of course necessary.

It is unwise to pick a sample that involves too much rapid speech, such as a foreign soap opera. The best reception is almost always the Morse code transmission of news or the slow dictation-speed reading of news from one central station to outlying news offices or substations. Selection of a program which usually comes in, arrangement for a verbatim copy of the program, daily checking of the news under standard analysis procedures—this gives a very fair cross-section.

One man sitting at Hankow could find out just what both the Generalissimo and the Chinese Communists were trying to tell the French-understanding and the Dutch-understanding listeners in the Far East. Another with pipe and slippers in Brussels could keep tab on the basic Russian lines to the Spanish-speaking world. Such monitoring obviously comes in handy for newspapers, commercial firms, governments, military establishments, speculators, and research institutions.

The answer is simple: "If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."

Propaganda was defined (at the beginning of this book) as follows: Propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of communication designed to affect the minds and emotions of a given group for a specific purpose. Taking a lesson from Communist theory, we can say that any form of mass-communication is operated for propaganda purposes if no other motive for running it is evident. Human beings talk; they like to talk. Much private talk is idle—but only an imbecile would talk over a radio network just for the pleasure of hearing himself talking. Propaganda is presentation for a purpose; it is the purpose that makes it propaganda, and not the truthfulness or untruthfulness of it.

The collected news of any modern country contains more truth each day than any one man can could read in a lifetime. The reporters, editors, writers, announcers who collect truth not only collect it; they select it. They have to. Why do they select it? That is the propaganda question. If they select it to "affect the minds and emotions of a given group for a specific purpose," it is propaganda. If they report that a little girl fell out of bed and broke her neck—with the intent of frightening parents among their listeners into following the Safe Homes Week Campaign—that is propaganda. But if they report it because it is the only death in the community, and because they might as well fill up the program, it is not propaganda. If you put the statement on the air, "An American negro workman in Greensboro, N. C., got eighty cents for a hard day's work last week," that can be presented and interpreted as:

• (a.) simple news, if there is something more to the story, about what the man said, or how he spent the eighty cents on corn meal to feed his pet tarantula;
• (b.) anti-capitalist propaganda, if you show that eighty cents is mighty little money for American business to pay its workers;
• (c.) pro-capitalist propaganda, if you show that the eighty cents will buy more than two weeks' wages of a worker in the city of Riga, when it comes to consumer goods;
• (d.) anti-White propaganda, if you show the man got only eighty cents because he was a Negro.

And so on, through a further variety of interpretations. The facts—man, happening, amount, place, time—are true in each case. They could be sworn to by the whole membership of an interfaith conference. But the interpretation placed on them—who communicates these facts to whom? why? when?—makes them into propaganda.

And interpretation can no more be true or untrue than a Ford car can be vanilla or strawberry in flavor. The questions of truth and of interpretation are unrelated categories. The essence of motive is that it is ultimately private and impenetrable, and interpretation commonly involves imputation of motive. You can dislike an interpretation; you can kill a man for believing it; you can propagandize him out of believing it; but you cannot sit down and prove that it is untrue. Facts and logic are useful in propaganda, but they cannot be elevated to the point where you can say, "Is it propaganda or is it true?" Almost all good propaganda—no matter what kind—is true. It uses truth selectively.

There is no secret formula which, once applied, provides an unfailing test for propaganda. It is not possible for a person unfamiliar with the part of the world affected, with the topic discussed, with the interested parties, and with the immediate politics involved to put his finger on an item and say, "This Rightist charge is propaganda," and then to turn and say, "But that Rightist statement is not propaganda. It is fact." Untruthful statements are made at times for other than propaganda purposes; truthful statements may be propaganda or not. The analyst must himself be an interested party. He must determine ahead of time what he will regard as propaganda, and what not. And he must do so by delimiting the field of his analysis before he starts. No one person or staff of people could ever trace all the motives behind a single statement; even to attempt that, he would have to be a novelist of the school of Marcel Proust. (And he would end up feeling like James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, or Franz Kafka.)

The analyst looks in the direction in which the message is going. He defines the propaganda presentation of the people who get the message in terms of all the public information to which the persons addressed have access. If he does not know the purpose of the message, he may divine it from the character of the audience and from the effect he presumes the message may reasonably be expected to have upon the audience. If he does not know the audience, he can at least follow the physical transit of the message. In what language does it move? Whence? Whither? When?

• Source (including Media)
• Time
• Audience
• Subject
• Mission

The neologism, Stasm, may serve a mnemonic purpose.

The formula works best in the treatment of monitored materials of which the source is known. First point to note is the character of the source. There are several choices on this: the true source (who really got it out?) and the ostensible source (whose name is signed to it?); also, the first-use source (who used it the first time?) and the second-use source (who claims merely to be using it as a quotation?). Take the statement: "Harry said to me, he said, 'I never told anybody that Al's wife was a retired strip-teaser.' Mind you, I don't pretend to believe Harry, but that's what he said, all right." What are the possible true sources for the statement of fact or libel concerning Al's unnamed wife? What are the alternatives on ostensible sources? First use? Second use? The common sense needed to analyze this statement is of the same order as the process involved in analyzing the statement: "Reliable sources in Paris state that the visit of the American labor delegation has produced sensational repercussions in Moscow, and that Moscow, upon the basis of the American attitude, is determined to press for unification of the entire German labor movement."

It is soon evident that the mere attribution of source is a job of high magnitude. A systematic breakdown of the STASM formula produces the following analysis outline, applicable to any single propaganda item, civil or military, in war or peace, spoken, visual, or printed. There are many other possible arrangements; the one given below is not represented as having official sanction or mysterious powers of its own. It has simply worked well for the author.

• a. Source
  • (1) True source ("Where does it really come from?")
    • (a) Release channel ("How did it come out?") if different from true source without concealing true source
    • (b) Person or institution in whose name material originates
    • (c) Transmitting channel ("Who got it to us?"), person or institution effecting known transmission—omitting, of course, analyst's own procurement facilities
  • (2) Ostensible source ("Where does it pretend to come from?")
    • (a) Release channel ("Who is supposed to be passing it along?")
  • (3) First-use and second-use source (first use, "Who is said to have used this first?"; second use, "Who pretends to be quoting someone else?")
    • (a) Connection between second-use source and first-use source, usually in the form of attributed or unacknowledged quotation; more rarely, plagiarism
    • (b) Modification between use by first-use and second-use sources, when both are known
      • (i) Deletions
      • (ii) Changes in text
      • (iii) Enclosure within editorial matter of transmitter
      • (iv) Falsification which appears deliberate
      • (v) Effects of translation from one language to another
• b. Time
  • (1) Time of events or utterance to which subject-matter refers
  • (2) Time of transmission (publishing, broadcasting, etc.)
  • (3) Timing of repetitions
  • (4) Reasons, if any are evident, for peculiarities of timing
• c. Audience
  • (1) Intended direct audience ("in English to North America"; "a paper for New York restaurant operators")
  • (2) Intended indirect audience (program beamed "in English to North America" but actually reaching Hong Kong and Singapore by deliberate plan of the sender; "a paper for New York restaurant operators" being faked and sent to Southeast Europe in fact)
  • (3) Unintended audience (a Guadalcanal native studying Esquire; your aunt reading the Infantry Journal; a Chinese reading American wartime speeches against the "yellow devils" of Japan)
  • (4) Ostensibly unintended direct audience (such as an appeal to strikers in very abusive-sounding language, sent to businessmen to build up opinion against the strikers, or Hitler's black use of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion)
• d. Subject ("What does it say?")
  • (1) Content listed under any convenient heading as though it were straight news or intelligence
  • (2) Content epitomized as demonstrating new propaganda technique (such as, "Now they're trying to get us out of Tientsin by appeals to our isolationists!")
  • (3) Content which may be useful in counterpropaganda (such as, "They said that the Greeks are our witless puppets, so let's pass that along to the Greeks")
  • (4) Significance of content for intelligence analysis (examples: When the Japanese boasted about their large fish catch, it was an indication their fishing fleet was short of gasoline again, and that the fish catch was actually small; when the Nazis accused the Jews of sedition, it meant that rations were short and that the Nazi government was going to appease the populace by denying the Jews their scanty rations by way of contrast)
• e. Mission
  • (1) Nation, group, or person attacked
  • (2) Relation to previous items with the same or related missions
  • (3) Particular psychological approach used in this instance (such as wedge-driving between groups, or between people and leaders, or between armed services; or demoralization of audience in general; or decrease of listeners' faith in the news)
  • (4) Known or probable connection with originator's propaganda plan or strategy

Such an outline would be useful only if it were applied in common-sense terms, without turning each item into an elaborate project and thus losing the woods in the trees. In most cases, it would suffice to state the item briefly for reference and study in the order of the entries. When poorly trained help is available, it is of course necessary to print or mimeograph a form to be used.

It is as vain to prescribe a propaganda analysis procedure without knowing the user as to prescribe an office filing system while knowing neither the nature of the office nor the kind of files kept. In time of war, subordinate commanders in operational areas will need to keep files at a minimum, while rear echelon or national facilities may be able to keep files of enormous range and thoroughness. In the recording of a large number of propaganda items, however, the material becomes hopelessly unmanageable unless there is some standardized system for organizing it. Mere alphabetization leads inevitably to the question, alphabetization of what?, and the analysis function can be exercised more readily in terms of the sources of propaganda than in terms of its incidental topics.

In war, the action sought is something militarily harmful to the enemy—strikes against his production, panic in his population, complaint from his consumers, mistrust from his newspaper readers and radio listeners (resulting in eventual subversive or negative action on their part), surrender of his troops, disunity of his political leadership to be expressed in deadlocks, and so on. In pre-belligerent or peacetime propaganda, the action sought is against the war-making capacity of the audience—against war itself, if the propagandist feels that his own population is in no immediate danger of being infected by defeatism.

For example, if the Germans stop talking about rations for Jews (in the World War II situation), it may be that their own people, filled with anti-Semitic poison, have been protesting the issuance of rations. Alternatively, it may mean that the Nazi authorities have just cancelled Jewish rations and are letting the Jews starve or are murdering them overtly. If the Germans follow this up with an item on the poor barley crop, it may be that they are preparing the sentimental and humane listeners in their own audience for the announcement of Jewish starvation. If they run Paris-quisling accounts of Jewish hoarding, and of Jews concealing large quantities of food, it means that they are almost certain to be under pressure to explain their Jewish policies and that, therefore, two factors face the German propagandist: first, he must get ready to announce the attack on the Jews; second, he thinks that the Jewish situation is going to arouse anti-Nazi sentiment even in Germany (if these are German-language programs) and he is therefore compelled to defend something because public opinion is believed by him to be against it. Out of a silence (no further news on rations), a domestic item (poor barley crop), and a foreign item (Paris Jews allegedly hoarding), it is possible to reconstruct a whole situation. The reconstruction may fall, if other interpretations arise, but it provides a starting guess.

The situation of enemy morale is often reportable through propaganda analysis long before it can be described by eyewitnesses. Omissions of attacks on the Church may indicate that the religious problem has become touchy. Failure to attack Communism may mean that the government is seeking a diplomatic deal with a Communist state. Mention of children may refer to the fact that parents complain of cold schools, bad food, absent doctors. Good morale is shown by a quiet tone in propaganda; bad morale is shown by extremes, whether of silence or of great vehemence. It is useful to know what the enemy propagandist thinks he is doing, what he considers the obstacles to his propaganda. Such considerations inevitably get to be embodied in the propaganda itself. A tone of extreme defiance, poor international cooperation, war bluster and so on may often spring from the desire to divert a hungry or discontented home public from its real worries at home to imaginary worries abroad.

Nothing is as smart as a human being except another human being. What any one man can try to achieve in the way of deceit, another man can try to figure out. The bulk of propaganda, short of peremptory tactical leaflets, is filled with information about the enemy's personnel, his opinion of himself, his opinion of you, his state of mind, his order of battle, his economic system, and all the rest. The Japanese government, throughout the war, kept the United States informed in English of the changes of ministers and other high officials in the Japanese government. This gave us good political background. There was no use their trying to hide it over a long period of time, and presumably Joho Kyoku (the Imperial Japanese Board of Information) figured that the help it gave the Americans, in filling out their political intelligence files for them, would be more than counterbalanced by the fact that such news would make American newspapermen, officials, officers and others read the propaganda in order to get the facts.

Over and above the direct contribution to straight news or intelligence, enemy propaganda in times of war or crisis affords a clue to enemy strategy. If the coordination is not present the propaganda may do the enemy himself harm. But the moment coordination is present, and one end of the coordinate is handed over to us, we can start figuring what the coordination is for. Sometimes propaganda is sacrificed for weightier considerations of security; German propaganda gave little advance warning of a war with the U.S.S.R., and Soviet propaganda gave none. In other instances, the coordination does give the show away.

In 1941-1942, the Japanese radio began to show an unwholesome interest in Christmas Island in its broadcasts to Japanese at home and abroad. Christmas Island, below Sumatra, was pointed out as a really important place, and tremendously significant in naval strategy. Subsequently the Japanese armed forces went to and took Christmas Island. The home public was delighted that this vital spot had been secured. Of course, Christmas Island was not as important as the Japanese radio said it was, but the significant thing was that the radio talked about it ahead of time. For what little it was worth the Japanese had given us warning.

Enemy realization of an impending defeat may be preceded by disparagement of the importance of the area in which the defeat is to take place, or by description to the home audience of the enormous strength which enemy forces face at that particular place. Enemy action—when the enemy is security-minded—may be anticipated from his complete silence on something which he would normally talk about. It must have seemed odd that the Americans stopped talking about nuclear fission altogether, when prewar years had seen a certain number of news items on the subject in the New York press each month.

A nation getting ready to strike À la Pearl Harbor may prepare by alleging American aggression. A nation preparing to break the peace frequently gets out peace propaganda of the most blatant sort, trying to make sure that its own audience (as well as the world) will believe the real responsibility to lie in the victim whom he attacks. Hitler protested his love of Norwegian neutrality; then he hit, claiming that he was protecting it from the British. No hard-and-fast rules can be made up for all wars or all belligerents. The Germans behaved according to one pattern; the Japanese, another.

For example, the German High Command sought to avoid bragging about anything they could not actually accomplish. They often struck blows without warning but they never said they would strike a blow when they knew or believed that they could not do it. The British and Americans made up a timetable of this, and were able to guess how fast the Germans thought they were going to advance in Russia. Knowing this, the British and Americans planned their propaganda to counter the German boasts; they tried to pin the Germans down to objectives they knew the Germans would not take, in order to demonstrate to the peoples of Europe that Nazi Germany had finally bitten off more than it could chew.

Later, the Allies remembered this German habit when the Nazis on the radio began talking about their own secret weapons. When the British bombed the V-1 ramps on the French coast, the German radio stopped that talk. The British therefore had additional grounds for supposing that the ramps they had bombed were a part of the secret weapon the Germans bragged about. The British further knew that the Germans would try to counter the psychological effect of the announcement of Allied D-Day with some pretty vivid news of their own. When the German radio began mentioning secret weapons again, the British suspected that the Germans had gotten around the damage done to the ramps. D-Day came; the Germans, in one single broadcast designed to impress the Japanese and Chinese, announced that the secret German weapon was about to be turned loose, and that more such weapons would follow. One day later the first V-1 hit London.

In order to follow this type of propaganda, a quantitative chart is needed. A sample imaginary chart for a three-month period is given in chart IV. This chart reveals at a glance the fact that the enemy kept mentioning food supply and naval warfare until the middle of March, because he presumably thought his blockade runners would bring in more food. After March, food drops in emphasis but naval warfare continues to be stressed. In May, following enemy admission to himself of the hopeless naval situation, naval warfare drops almost altogether out of sight. Foodstuffs continue to be modestly mentioned as the enemy explained away minor difficulties, but the use of secret weapons propaganda shows that the enemy propagandists had to have something sensational to keep up the courage of the home audience. Whether the enemy really had a secret weapon or not, depends on the national character, past records, and so forth. The Germans and Japanese both said they had world-shaking secret weapons. The Germans delivered; the Japanese did not.

Such quantity records will also be useful in showing the enemy's propaganda statistically with reference to number of words uttered on each of his major subjects, number of inches of newspaper columns for specified kinds of news, and so on. Percentage charts show which major shifts his propaganda performs. Audience charts (that is, how much time he spends addressing workers, pacifists, mothers, minorities, etc.) show which groups he is really trying to reach. Emphasis charts for selected topics on which your own propaganda has been active show how much you force him to talk about something which he may not wish to discuss.

Such statistical use is possible only if usable records are maintained. A basic item-by-item file of all important or new items, combined with a worksheet of the amount of radio time or printed space the enemy put into use for a stated period, will provide the materials needed for propanal. Propanal is indispensable to psychological warfare. It sifts ordinary intelligence out from propaganda in one process, processing straight intelligence ready for the intelligence people to use, yet providing analysis for psychological warfare purposes.

For peacetime purposes, it is to be remembered that though enemies may hide their scientists, their launching ramps, or their rockets, they cannot hide the occasion for war, nor their own readiness measures. No government can afford to seem the plain unqualified aggressor. Propanal may prove to be one of the soundest war-forecasting systems available to us in a period of ultra-destructive weapons. Psychological mobilization may be disguised: it cannot be concealed.

CHAPTER 8
Propaganda Intelligence

The psychological warfare operator can usually count on two basic interests of his listener. In the field he can be sure that the enemy troops are interested in themselves. In the enemy homeland he can be sure that the civilians are interested in their enemy—himself. He has therefore a certain leeway in which he can be sure of doing no harm, and may accomplish good, if he confines his propaganda to simple, factual and plainly honest statements on these subjects. Pompousness, intricacy and bad taste will recoil against him; it is unwise to employ these even when the situation is well under control. In a developing situation the propagandist can remain safe by confining himself to simple statements as to how strong his country's armed forces are, how realistic and effective their leadership. Elementary information giving the favorable aspects of his economic, strategic and diplomatic situation may also prove valuable initial propaganda.

This interest can be counted on throughout the war. The enemy is always news. The wise enemy realizes this and keeps himself in the news, trusting that in the wider understanding of himself, his politics and culture there is the opening for a more favorable peace in the event of defeat, or for a more docile submission in the event of his own victory. Only unimportant enemies fail to become news. (Few Americans, for example, realize that we were at war with Bulgaria in World War II. Had the Bulgars developed sensational weapons, there would have been a sudden upswing of interest in them. People would have realized that Bulgaria, like Hungary and long-lost Avaria, was once a fierce Asiatic state grafted onto the European system; the fabulous power of the Old Bulgarian Empire would have become known, and the names of Krum, Symeon and the Czar Samuel added to our calendar of hate. But Bulgaria never did enough against the United States to count as an enemy, and even succeeded, by diplomatic ineptitude, in getting into a state of war with all the Axis Powers and all the United Nations simultaneously; Bulgaria escaped the fame which goes with hostility. Contrast this with Japan: thousands of Americans have learned Japanese; Japanese national character is known to us; war has done in a five-year span what education could not have accomplished in a generation.) The wise propagandist can, when in doubt, play good music on the air, or he can—with equal prudence—give the enemy his own elementary-school history and language texts. These do no harm, and may achieve something.

The official propagandist is not a newspaperman. Since he speaks for an army or a government, his utterance is officially responsible. He must be as timely as the peacetime press, but must at the same time be as cautious as a government press agent. He is torn between two responsibilities: his responsibility to the job of propaganda, which requires him to get interesting information and get it out to the enemy quickly; and his responsibility to the official policies of his own government, which requires him to release nothing unconfirmed, nothing that could do harm, or that might embarrass or hurt the government. (A sort of institutional schizophrenia is common to all propaganda offices.)

The sources of news are various. Classified incoming operational reports of the Army and Navy contain material of high interest to the enemy. There are obvious reasons for denying access to such information to the propaganda people. Propaganda men might think of their audience first and security second. If they do not know the secret information, but are advised by military consultants who do, security will be better maintained and the propagandist will not labor under the handicap of a double standard of information—what they know, and what they dare to tell.

In technically advanced countries, the regular commercial facilities of press and radio continue to do a normal news job, and usually do better work than the drafted amateurs in the government. (What intelligence agency in Washington could compile a weekly report as comprehensive, well edited and coldly planned as Time magazine?32 The author often yearned to paraphrase Time, rearranging it and classifying it TOP SECRET, in order to astound his associates with the inside dope to which he had access.) The nature of news is not affected by its classification, and the distinction between news produced on the Federal payroll and news produced off it often consists of the superior professionalism of the latter.

The intelligence that goes into the making of propaganda must compete for attention with the home newspaper of the enemy. It must therefore be up-to-date, well put, authentic. There is no more space in propaganda for the lie, farce, hoax, or joke than there is room for it in a first-class newspaper. Even if exaggerations or nonsense appear in the commercial press of his own country, the propagandist must realize that he is Honorary G-2 to the enemy—a G-2 whose function consists of transmitting news the ultimate effect of which should be bad but which should go forth with each separate item newsworthy and palatable. (A little trick of the human mind helps all propagandists in this regard. Most people have a streak of irresponsibility in them, which makes bad news much more interesting than good. There is a yearning for bad news and a genuine willingness to pass it along. Bad news increases the tension upon the individual and tickles his sense of the importance of things; good news relieves the tension, and to that extent has the effect of a let-down.)

The palatability of news is not concerned so much with its content as with its trustworthiness to the enemy, its seeming to deal with straight fact, its non-editorialized presentation. (One of the reasons why Soviet Communist propaganda, after all these years, is still relatively unsuccessful , lies in the incapacity of the Communists to get out a newspaper with news in it. They put their editorial slant in all their news articles. "Man bites dog" would not make the front page in Russia unless the dog were Stalinist and the man reactionary.)

The Japanese who obediently hated the Americans when it was their duty to do so nevertheless could not help looking at maps that showed where the Americans actually were. Nazis who despised us and everything we stood for nevertheless studied the photographs of our new light bombers. The appeal of credible fact is universal; propaganda does not consist of doctoring the fact with moralistic blather, but of selecting that fact which is correct, interesting, and bad for the enemy to know.33

On the friendly side of the battle lines, the procurement of our own news is a budgetary matter. The propaganda office can subscribe to the news tickers, newspapers, telegraph services, and so on. How much is a matter of administrative housekeeping. In the field, the communications officer can frequently steal news from the news agencies of his own country or allied countries by the process of picking it out of the air. It would be highly unpatriotic of the news agency to send him a bill in the zone of operations, and he can classify his record copies of his material RESTRICTED so that the owners of the material would have no legitimate business acquiring copies that could later be taken into court to support a claim. (Americans would not do this, of course; the reference is to Byzantines.)

This need may be called timeliness.

It can be served by obtaining all the most recent enemy publications that may be available, by listening attentively to enemy prisoners and captured civilians, and by carefully analyzing the enemy's current broadcasts to his own people. The Nazis made the unnecessary mistake of assuming that isolationism used the same old language after Pearl Harbor. They were right in assuming that there was considerable anti-internationalist and anti-Roosevelt sentiment left in the United States, but they were hopelessly wrong in using the isolationist language of mid-1941 as late as mid-1942. Pearl Harbor had dated all that and the isolationist-interventionist argument had shifted to other ground. When the Nazis went on using the old language, they were as conspicuous as last year's hat at a women's club. Instead of making friends and influencing people, they made themselves sound ignorant and look silly. They lacked the element of timeliness. They could have gotten it by procuring representative American publications in Lisbon and studying them.

Propaganda is like a newspaper; it has to be timeless or brand-new. In between, it has no value.

To be useful, opinion analysis must be systematic. For a while the author had the interesting job of interviewing all the latest arrivals from Tokyo at a certain headquarters. The travelers would usually be pumped up with a sense of their own smartness in having evaded the Japanese and arrived at Allied territory. You could almost hear them thinking, "Oh, boy, if Gendarmerie Chief Bakayama could only see me now!" They were ready, in Army parlance, to spill their guts. The only item on which most of them maintained one-man security was the question, "Why, chum, did you yourself go to Tokyo in the first place?" Outside of that, they were eager to talk. (Some of them had frightfully good reasons to be eager; the adverb is literal.) With such sources of information, the author thought that he could find out in short order what the Japanese were thinking.

He found out, all right. He found out every single time. The refugee engineer said the Japanese were so depressed that there was a bull market in butcher knives. The absconding dairyman said the Japanese were ready to die with gloom. The eloping wife said she never saw happy Japanese any more. The military school deserter said the Japanese lay awake all night every night listening for American air raids. The reformed puppet said the Japanese had just gone to pieces. Then each of them grinned (the interviews were individual, of course), and expected to be patted on the head for bringing such good news.

Their comments were worthless. What the enemy thinks in general is worth nothing unless your troops are already in his suburbs. What an informant thinks the enemy thinks is worth even less. What do you, reader, think right now? What do you think you think? See? the question is nonsensical. To work, it has to be specific: What do you think about the price of new suits? What do you think about Senator O'May and Congressman MacNaples? Do you think that we will ever have to fight Laputa? Are you satisfied with your present rate of pay? Why?

What a person thinks—his opinion—is workable in relation to what he does. In practical life his opinion takes effect only when it is part of the opinion of a group. Some groups are formed by the common opinion and have nothing else in common: at a spiritualist meeting you may see the banker sitting next to his own charwoman. Most groups are groups because of things which the people are (Negroes, descendants of Francis Bacon, the hard-of-hearing); or things they do (electrical workers, lawyers, farmer, stamp collectors), or things they have (factory owners, nothing but wages, apartment houses) in common. The community of something practical makes the group have a community of opinion which arises from the problems they think they face with respect to their common interests. Such groups are not only opinion groups, they are interest groups. It is these groups that do things as groups. It is these groups that propaganda tries to stir up, move, set against each other, and use in any handy way. (Few individuals belong to just one group at a time; the groups are almost illimitable in number.)

The propagandist should not get the idea that just because a group exists it is a potential source of weakness or cleavage. Workers are not always against employers, nor the aged against the young, nor women against men, nor shippers against railwaymen. In a well run society, groups have interest only for limited purposes. Railwaymen are not permanently hostile to truckers, shippers, fliers, canal operators. At the moment they may be maddest of all at the insurance companies because of some quarrel about insurance premiums and risks.

The poor propagandist tries to butt in on every fight, even when there is none. Often his propaganda is received the way an intervenor is received in most family quarrels, with the bland question, "What fight? We ain't mad." Sound propaganda picks only those group issues which are acute enough to stand a little help from outside. If outside help would be a kiss-of-death to the group that is helped, then black propaganda instead of white is indicated. In any case, sound operating intelligence is the first precondition to the attempted psychological manipulation of enemy groups.

The profile obtained from civilian polls or from propanal can then be paralleled in the field. Set up a graph showing the entire enemy army. Use several graphs if the army splits along racial, national or plainly sectional lines. On each graph, enter the component groups. From the poll or from the interrogations, list the dissatisfaction in terms of seriousness with which the dissatisfyee attributes to it; it is not what you think he should worry about that is important. It's what actually he does worry about. His weighting counts. Make up a scale, quantitative on the actual count of mentions of particular gripes. (For example, out of 699 prisoners, of whom 167 were union members in civil life, there were 234 separate voluntary mentions of dissatisfaction with the enemy government's labor union policy). When that quantitative count changes up or down, you have a definite guide with which to control your own propaganda policy.

Or you can proceed qualitatively. List enemy dissatisfaction under terms such as these for any one issue (shoe rationing, health facilities, minority rights, esteem for government leaders, etc.): Prisoner—

• (1) is completely satisfied and has no complaints.
• (2) has a few complaints but is generally satisfied.
• (3) has many complaints and does not expect improvement.
• (4) is despondent about the whole situation.
• (5) is definitely antagonistic to home authorities in this matter.

Rate each prisoner or captured civilian according to your best judgment. Then make up percentage lists of the grounds for dissatisfaction of each component group in the enemy society. (This latter figure will be impressive in documents but will not mean as much for practical purposes as will the more specific percentages under each separate head.)

If you feel like showing off, average everything into everything else and call it the Gross Index of Total Enemy Morale. This won't fool anyone who knows the propaganda business, and you won't be able to do anything with or about it, but you can hang it on a month-by-month chart in the front office, where visitors can be impressed at getting in on a military secret. (Incidentally, if some smart enemy agent sees it and reports it back, enemy intelligence experts will go mad trying to figure out just how you got that figure. It's like the old joke that the average American is ten-elevenths White, 52% female, and always slightly pregnant.)

• (a) news;
• (b) military intelligence which can be released as news;
• (c) military intelligence which cannot be released as news, but knowledge of which will prevent the propaganda operator from making mistakes or miscalculations in reporting the news;
• (d) enemy news;
• (e) up-to-the-minute enemy slang, hobbies, fads, grievances, and other matters of current public attention;
• (f) specific grievances of specific groups and of the nation as a whole, should these arise;
• (g) information about probable inter-group conflicts;
• (h) types and forms of discontent with enemy authority;
• (i) identification of unpopular or popular enemy personalities;
• (j) all other information that will enable the psychological warfare operator to act promptly and sympathetically in taking the side of specific enemy individuals against their authorities or other enemy groups.

Enemy opinion cannot be manipulated in general. It must be met on its own ground—the current everyday thoughts of enemy citizens and soldiers. These thoughts do not usually concern grandiose problems of political ethics. They are practical like your own.34 They must be appealed to in a way which makes the listener really listen, makes the reader stop and reread, makes them both think it over later. Getting the attention of the enemy is not enough. Most enemies will pay plenty of attention to you—too much, at times. Getting sympathetic attention is what counts.

This can be done only with specific grounds. With the news, you and he have a genuine common interest. Using his real troubles as a link, you must create that common interest. The force, the effectiveness of your argument may make him forget that it is the enemy who has brought his attention to this issue. You must leave him with the feeling, "By golly, that fellow is right!"

But to talk about his troubles, effectively, you must know what they really are. You must see it his way before you start showing him that his way is your way, that you think that he is really on your side, and that his bosses' side is wrong, incorrect and doomed to get whipped, anyhow. Propaganda can operate only on the basis of specificity. Real persuasion can be sought only on the basis of real sympathy with real troubles. Old, incorrectly guessed, or poorly described issues are worse than none at all.

CHAPTER 9
Estimate of the Situation

In physical warfare, the inherent instability of every situation is concealed by the apparent definiteness of the operation. Panic, revolt or dissolution of regiments is not normally figured into the situation. The assumption is made—and for professional military purposes must be made—that all identical units are of equal quality unless proved otherwise, that all men in a unit will respond with psychological uniformity unless they are reported out physically by medical reports, that the unit will be capable of doing tomorrow what it did yesterday. The terrain comes in as a constant factor and even such variables as weather can be calculated in terms of a predictable risk. Nevertheless, every experienced soldier knows that things do not always work out the way they should, that unexplained or unforeseen factors sooner or later complicate or frustrate the best plans, and that warfare is a huge gamble with a superficial but very necessary coating of exactitude.

In psychological warfare, these considerations apply even more sharply. Combat at least has terrain, order of battle, logistics, estimated capabilities and other concrete factors with which to figure. There is a known degree of difference between one enemy division and five enemy divisions. There is the possibility of computing the time which the enemy will need to fulfill this capability or that, and the equally good possibility of computing time on our side for countermeasures. Even in such very long-range operations as strategic bombing, economic factors can be figured out to give the operation at least the coloration of precision. With propaganda, none of this is possible.

The propagandist never knows the terrain, because his terrain is the enemy mind in its entirety—a factor beyond the understanding of any man. The enemy can have strongholds of faith to be shaken but the propagandist can never say, "This factor is finished. Therefore we proceed to the next." There is neither victory nor defeat, only the endless seesaw of probable accomplishments or probable blunders. The honest psychological warfare operative will admit that he does not know where he is at any given moment, how far from his start, how near to his goal. Even with surrender of the enemy, propaganda cannot be judged to have met with complete failure or complete success, because propaganda is an interminable stream going on into international affairs and carrying over to the next war. Psychological warfare can be given apparent certainty only by the creation of assumptions on the part of the planner. The assumptions will not stand up if questioned by a clever philosopher, any more than did the basic assumptions of the German General Staff when questioned by the sardonic Trotzky at Brest-Litovsk. Nevertheless, the assumptions can work for planning purposes.

For field operations, the goal of the propagandist is to sap the resistance of enemy troops. If the troops are moving forward and are not likely to be in a mood to surrender, then other goals, such as conflict between officers and men, encouraging desertion, informing enemy troops of bad news elsewhere in the war, or morale-depression may be sought. In each case, the propaganda must be aimed at a goal, and a goal is as essential to the operation of psychological warfare as is definition of a target for artillery or bombing. No one ever accomplishes anything shooting "somewhere or other"; no one propagandizes successfully unless he seeks the attainment of a state of mind or series of actions which may actually happen. Most times, it is thus impossible to aim at the total surrender of the enemy armies or state. One can aim for concrete operational purposes only at specific enemy troubles or effects. For the field, troop surrenders; for the home front, interference with the enemy war effort—these are about as general as goals can be made.

They can be made very specific indeed. A situation reported by intelligence may provide an almost perfect opening for psychological warfare. If the enemy press reports that twenty-three embezzlers have been detected in food supply and have been shot, it is a perfect opening for the black propaganda goal, "to conduce to enemy mistrust of food control, to increase food spoilage, to lower efficiency of enemy food consumption through enhancing misuse of food supply." Some of the means might be these. An alleged enemy leaflet could be prepared warning quartermasters to destroy canned foods that have lost labels; another leaflet describing diseases that come from partly spoiled food; an "enemy" allegation (from your side or, better, from neutral territory) that the political chiefs of the enemy country are the biggest food embezzlers of all; getting a black-radio and rumor campaign under way describing the seven hundred and eighty-three people who died last month as a result of eating musty food (even though your own doctors say the mustiness may not interfere with the wholesomeness of that particular food); describing common diseases that actually occur in the enemy country, such as arthritis, stomach ulcers, sinus headaches or infectious jaundice, and blaming them all on the foods the enemy government distributes to the enemy people. On white radio, features could be put on describing the unhappy plight of your own side, where people may get their rashers of bacon for breakfast only every other day, and where nobody can have more than three eggs at a time; point out that the government is worried that food prices have risen 5.3%, without mentioning at that time the fact that enemy prices have gone up 45% or more. The definite goal gives the propaganda boys something to work on. Propaganda to the allies or satellites of the enemy can point out that the enemy government is apt to dump the spoiled food onto the foreign market, that food spoiling in territory of the big enemy will make him requisition more food from his little allies, et cetera.

When the topic has been worked for a while, stop; keep it up only if actual news from the enemy country shows that they are having enough real trouble with food to make your improvements on the fact thoroughly credible.

Propaganda cannot function in a vacuum framed by moral generalities. The goal must be defined in the light of authentic news or intelligence. The operation can be sustained only if there is enough factual reality behind it to make the propaganda fit the case known or credited by the majority of the listeners, counted one by one.

Since no trouble-free, wartime country has been known to exist, the goals should be tailored to the troubles of the particular enemy, and should aim at increasing real difficulties, building up pre-existing doubts, stimulating genuine internal hostilities. Propaganda which invents pure novelty gets nowhere. The Russians did not hesitate to appeal to Bismarck in order to show the professional German soldiers what a rotter Hitler was, and how stupid the Nazi strategy. But if Bismarck had actually said nothing on the subject of the army in general or an Eastern war in particular, they would have been wise to leave him alone. If the Japanese had tried to make the ex-Confederate States secede all over again, they would not have gotten anywhere because they would not have started with a real grievance. But if they had alleged that the Negro units were used for stevedoring because Whites regarded Negroes as unworthy of carrying weapons, they might have hit on a real grievance. The goal must be deeply bedded in reality.

The first thing to do with the hypothetical man is to make him fit the kind of person who does get propaganda. In dealing with China, for example, it would be no use to take a statistically true Chinese, who lived on a farm 1.3 acres in size, went to town 5.8 times a year, had 3.6 children, and never read newspapers. The man to be set up would be the reachable man, the city, town or village dweller who had an income 2.1 times greater than that of the average in his county, who owned 1.7 long coats, and who shared one newspaper with 6.8 neighbors. Take this lowest-common-denominator of a man who can be reached by enemy propaganda and by yours. Name him the Propaganda Man. (Realistically speaking, modal and not arithmetical classes should be set up.)

Make up the prewar life of the Propaganda Man. Use your regional experts as informants. What kinds of things did he like? What prejudices was he apt to have? What kind of gossip did he receive and pass along? What kind of words disgusted him? What kind of patriotic appeal made him do things? What did he think of your country before the war? What things did he dislike you and your people for? What myths did he believe about America—that all Americans drove sports convertibles while drinking liquor? that all had blonde sweethearts? that all exchanged gunfire periodically? Of what American things did he think well—food, shoes, autos, personal freedom, others? What is he apt to be thinking now?

To this add what the enemy propaganda is trying to do to its Propaganda Man. That is, size up the domestic propaganda of the enemy in terms of the concrete individuals at whom it is aimed. This may reveal the enemy's vital necessities and his concealed weaknesses. What are the leaders trying to do? Are they trying to make the Propaganda Man get to work on time? Are they trying to make him give up holidays willingly? Are they trying to make him think that your side will kill him if you win? Are they trying to keep him from being worried about his city going up in an incandescent haze? Are they trying to make him believe that the concrete shelters are good? Why are they harping so on the safety of the shelters? Has the Propaganda Man been muttering back about the flimsiness of the shelters? Does he want to be evacuated from target cities? Are the police being praised for their fairness and speed in issuing leave-the-city permits? Are illegal ÉvacuÉs being treated as scum and traitors and cowards?

Then go after the Propaganda Man yourself. He is your friend. You are his friend. The only enemy is the enemy Leader (or generals, or emperor, or capitalists, or "They"). How is the Propaganda Man going to hear from you? Leaflets? Short-wave—and if so, why is he listening to the enemy in the first place? Standard-wave? Speaker planes? Rumors? Get things to him that you know he will repeat, things which will interest him. Make up a list of the things he worries about each month, a list of the things which the enemy propaganda is trying to do to him currently, a list of the things your propaganda is trying to do. Do the three lists fit? Would they work on an actual living breathing thinking human being, with the prejudices, frailty, nobility, greed, lubricity, and other motives of the ordinary human being? If your list fits his real life, if your list spoils the enemy propaganda list, if your list builds up a psychological effect of confusion, gloom, willingness-to-surrender which accumulates month after month, the terrain is favorable. It is in your Propaganda Man's head.

There are no maps of the human mind, but in certain special cases sociology and psychology can provide leads which even the most acute untrained observation would otherwise overlook. During World War II, for example, Mr. Geoffrey Gorer, a British anthropologist, was able to provide character analyses of the Japanese that stood up under the rigorous analysis of experts long resident in Japan. Gorer took as base data the experience of the Japanese infant in the first forty-odd months of life. How was the baby given toilet training? how was it weaned? how was it disciplined into the family life? how did the small child learn what it was? Gorer found that Japanese domestic life started the child out with a mixture of uncertainty and defiance—that the infant soon learned he was in a definite position in the human queue, where all above him had to be respected on the threat of immediate and condign reprisal, while all below him could be mistreated almost with impunity—that the Japanese had sad dirty little private thoughts about himself to a degree unknown to ourselves or the Chinese—that the Japanese was in adult life the inevitable fulfillment of what he had been made in infancy: arrogant, timid, insanely brave, deferential, fearful of foreigners and overtly cruel to them.

Furthermore, the Japanese identified persons, nations, or institutions as Female (peaceful, possessing enjoyments, subject to bullying) or as Male (fierce, counteraggressive, superordinate). The U.S.A. of Admiral Perry seemed Male; that of Cordell Hull, Female. These findings, applied to propaganda, gave British-American operations an audience unlike the Japanese whom missionaries, soldiers, diplomats, businessmen, and journalists had portrayed in such varied and inconsistent terms. This Japanese Propaganda Man (analyzed at a distance, since Gorer had never been nearer Japan than Indo-China) became a believable person. It was uncanny to see Japanese propaganda movies after reading the Gorer analyses, and to find the Japanese government propagandists, by hunch and instinct, appealing to the same Propaganda Man whom Gorer, by bold but permissible extrapolations, had revealed to Allied propaganda planners.

War eases the motive-switching operation because the leaders and people on each side derive moral exhilaration from the common effort. Ostensibly, politicians become statesmen; all higher-ranking officers become strategists; ordinary men become heroes, martyrs, adventurers. The lofty process of war is one which psychologists will not explain in our time; it transposes ordinary persons and events to a frame of reference in which individuals are less self-conscious and also less critical. Among European and American peoples, particularly, there arises the assumption that because of war men should be brave and unselfish, women kind and chaste, yet alluring, officials self-sacrificing, and so on, even though the facts of the case in the particular country involved may be very much to the contrary. The cruel futility inherent in war is so plain to all civilized men that when war does come men overcompensate for it. They set up illusions.

This need not be taken as a criticism of war or of mankind. The world would be a more inspiring place in which to dwell if people generally lived up to the wartime standards they impose on themselves. That these standards are felt to be real is attested by the distinct drop of the suicide rate in wartime, and the increase in suicide, murder, and crimes of delinquency after every war; that the change of role is largely illusory is attested by the fact that no nation appears to have undergone permanent sociological change as a result of improvement during war. Many wartime changes carry on, of course; but they rarely comprise, by the standards of the people concerned, improvements. The upswing is genuine, when it occurs, but it is rarely permanent, and it seldom affects all levels of the entire population with the same degree of exhilaration.

The propagandist thus has an ideal situation. In the enemy country everyone is trying to be more noble, more unselfish, more hard-working. Everyone applies a higher standard of ethics and performance than in peacetime. Businessmen are not supposed to make too much money, politicians are supposed to work around the clock, officials are supposed to cooperate, housewives to save, children to scavenge, and so on. Yet a certain percentage of the enemy population is not taken into this. Sometimes minorities feel themselves emotionally excluded; at other times private temperamental differences make some persons skeptic while others remain believers. The ground is ready for rumor, for tearing down inflated personages, for breaking the illusion by the simple process of attributing normally selfish motives in wartime.

It is easier to attribute bad motives to civilian leaders than to military. The ceremonialized discipline of modern warfare makes the military figure a little mysterious; his normal peacetime obscurity shielded him and his family from exposure, cheap publicity, gossip. The civilian leader does not have this protection. The very process of becoming prominent has involved his seeking publicity, for the one part, and his pretense of avoiding it, for the other. Furthermore, the man who serves his nation serves himself. It is not possible for a man to lead a large country without benefiting himself, since the act of leadership is itself intensely pleasurable. Also, prominence possesses a characteristic of vice; even when it loses its value for positive enjoyment it retains withdrawal pains. The once-prominent individual hates to leave prominence though he may be genuinely weary of it. He is willing to be tired of the country, but not willing for the country to be tired of him. In wartime old leaders remain and new ones come in. Fame and obscurity shift with even greater rapidity than before. The personality-politics condition of the country is highly mobile. Personalities are tense with interpersonal conflict.

Then comes the propagandist.

First, he attributes normal human motives to the leaders who so obviously possess them. In this job, he is doing what the famous little boy in the Hans Christian Andersen story did when he said of the Emperor, "Mamma, he hasn't any clothes on!" The propagandist need only say what everyone knows: that this man is notoriously fond of money; that another one has been a poor sportsman; that a third has betrayed some old friends; that a fourth has sought power in a selfish, vindictive way. The response which the propagandist seeks is a simple "That's so."

The next step in propaganda is to show that these persons do not measure up to the tragic, heroic, historic roles war has imposed on them. That too is not difficult, especially if the war is not going decisively one way or the other. Defeat or victory serves equally well to make leaders into heroes; Churchill and MacArthur were never more splendid than when they were whipped, the one after Dunkirk, the other after Bataan.

The final approach is the total discrediting of leaders. If the internal politics of the country have been bitter enough, some of the leaders may even come over voluntarily to the enemy. Quisling in Norway; Wang in China; Doriot and Laval in France; Vlassov in the U.S.S.R.; Laurel from the Philippines—such men all possessed a certain amount of standing in their own countries but through capture, impatience, or seduction decided to continue their careers with enemy backing. The propagandist can now pretend to be tolerant. It is he who believes in peace, in reconciliation, in easygoing live-and-let-live attitudes. He describes his protegÉs, the quislings, in warm complimentary terms; he lightens the tenor of his attack on the non-quisling enemy leaders. He takes the attitude that war continues because of private stupidity, vengefulness, greed, unreasonableness on the other. For his part, he is willing to let the politicians, both quisling and patriot, "settle it between themselves." Let them form a coalition government.

Personal smearing is effective. If the war situation runs in the enemy's favor, the easing of the enemy position permits the population the privilege of backbiting, and even within the leader-group some leaders may feel more free to destroy the positions or reputations of the others. The impossible and foolishly heroic stances which the leaders have taken in time of strain now make most of them look a little silly. Conversely, in a downgrade situation, the leaders may gain stature in the first tragic weeks of defeat, but soon the ignobility of defeat sweeps over them all. The propagandist need only be a good reporter, and the leaders of the defeated country will provide him with good propaganda material.

In estimating the propaganda situation, the vulnerability of the leaders to personal attack is one of the major elements. Properly handled, it can be of real value. In the American Revolution, the personal character of George Washington was a very substantial asset. A. very rich man, he could scarcely be accused of a gutter revolution. A slave owner, he could not be accused of wanting the overthrow of the social order. An experienced soldier, he could not be attacked as a military amateur. A man of patience, correct manners, and genuine modesty, he was not easily described as a bloody empire-builder, an immoral sycophant, or a power-drunk madman. British propaganda accordingly went after the Continental Congress, of which there was a great deal to be said. On the other side, the Americans had duck soup when it came to George III and most of his Cabinet—personalities which included boors, fuddy-duddies, too-little-and-too-laters, and conspicuous nincompoops.

Roughly speaking, this is the case. An attempt to apply the outline given in FM 101-5, Appendix I, would produce only a lamentable parody of a military document.

The situation of the military unit possessing Psychological Warfare facilities has relatively little to do with the capabilities of the Psychological Warfare unit. The morale of one's own men should have no effect whatever on the output of the radio script writers and the leaflet writers.

In combat operations, military forces meet. In Psychological Warfare, they do not. In combat operations, it is impossible for two hostile units to occupy the same territory for any length of time without both of them degenerating into a chaos of armed mobs. In Psychological Warfare operations, both sets of operations can be conducted in the same media, can address themselves to the same basic human appeals, can use the same music, the same general kind of news account, and so on.

Furthermore, no modern army ever went into operation with certain units designated as wholly and exclusively defensive, and certain others as wholly and exclusively offensive. (The Great Wall of China is the world's most celebrated example of purely defensive planning, yet it protected Chinese offensive bases for twenty-one hundred years.) But in Psychological Warfare, the Japanese-language short-wave broadcasts from San Francisco had no imaginable effect on the American forces in the Pacific. The only people who could understand them were the Japanese-language officers in G-2 and ONI offices; their personal vexation did not matter.

The offensive operations of combat troops are predicated upon finding the enemy, effecting contact, and either destroying the enemy or making him yield terrain. The defensive operations of combat troops, contrariwise, are planned with a view to resisting an enemy who has been met.

In Psychological Warfare, operators and enemy do not effect contact. The audience cannot strike back through a radio set; the enemy reader cannot throw a leaflet back at the bomber which has dropped it on him. When American planes bombed German radio stations, they did not do so because the flight commander was trying to get German propaganda off the air; they did so because the Americans were trying to break up the entire German communications network. It is almost impossible to pinpoint radio transmitters and printing presses with such accuracy as to deny the enemy all chance of talking back. In a purely physical sense, there are only two sets of measures whereby an actual defense can be set up against Psychological Warfare. Each is a measure of desperation; neither is considered effective; the Americans did not bother with either in World War II.

The first physical defense consists of radio jamming and of the planned interception of enemy leaflet raids. Radio jamming is ineffectual except in the case of an enemy possessing hopelessly inferior signal equipment. (The Japanese tried to jam our radio at Saipan, just as the Germans tried to jam BBC. They impeded reception, but they never succeeded in blocking it out altogether.)

The second physical defense consists of destroying reception facilities. It is possible to sweep an occupied territory and to sequester almost all the radio sets in use. It is possible to issue a military order that any soldier or civilian found in possession of enemy printed matter will be court-martialed and punished. These measures are useful to dictators having secret police, and among armies having the Prussian level of discipline, with the enlisted men regarded as robots. It is not to be expected that they would work against Americans.

Therefore, propaganda does not meet propaganda. Combat forces meet; Psychological Warfare forces pass one another in opposite directions.

In American practice, the forces which countered enemy propaganda were those pertaining to troop information and education—morale or special services. These did not concern themselves with propaganda to the Germans and Japanese. In the German and Russian armies of World War II, but not in the American, British, French or Japanese, there were political officers attached to the units under a variety of titles; these often took charge of propaganda to the enemy (offensive) as well as indoctrination of their own troops (defensive), but the unrelatedness of these two functions let them split apart.

Even here, the parallel between combat operations and propaganda operations breaks down. Rarely does it occur that there is a simple juxtaposition of forces, thus:

The issue is more commonly one in which the propagandist on each side attacks those troops which are retreating, cut off, suffering heavy losses, politically disaffected, or otherwise psychologically promising material for him. Of the factors which can affect troop or enemy morale, the presence of friendly propaganda is a minor one. The result then becomes complicated:

Troops who are starving or are subjected to inordinate losses will not have their propaganda-resistance heightened by pep talks. A chopped-up unit has no means of enjoying USO facilities.

Propaganda vulnerability depends most commonly on the objective situation of the audience. If the objective situation is good or neutral, one's own propaganda can supplement the good morale conditions, but even here, it does not and should not meet enemy propaganda frontally.

In so far as it can be tabulated, the visualizable propaganda situation at any given time would be something like this.

In each of these instances, the propaganda operators are themselves members of an audience. Furthermore, propaganda leaks, as it were, out of the channels into which it is directed. Additionally, propaganda in all countries has to compete with the normal day-to-day preoccupations of the listener—his food, his health, his hour-by-hour activities, his tangible interpersonal relationships. Save for rare moments of intense crisis, propaganda can expect to occupy only a small fraction of the audience's attention. In dictatorships, the range of propaganda can be widened by polluting all news, all theater presentations, all churches, etc., with the "Party line," but visitors to totalitarian capitals—of both the Fascist and Communist varieties—report that most of the common people have become calloused with apathy, over-all disbelief, or skepticism as a result of overexposure to official indoctrination.

Hence a written estimate of the situation follows not from some special Psychological Warfare situation, but from the practical measures available. If desired, it can summarize the following points:

• 1. DEFINITION OF THE AUDIENCE
  • a. Medium through which reached
  • b. Anticipated attention (including means of getting attention)
  • c. Pertinent characteristics (from propaganda intelligence report)
• 2. PSYCHOLOGICAL GOALS TO BE SOUGHT
  • a. Attention of the enemy
  • b. Present-goal (if strategic, opinion or sentiment; if tactical, action)
  • c. Ultimate goal (applicable to strategic only)
• 3. LIMITATIONS OF POLICY
  • a. National political limitations
  • b. Limitation by adverse factual situation
  • c. Limitations arising from one's own security
• 4. MEDIA AVAILABLE
  • a. Kind and quality of media to be used
• 5. THE PROPAGANDA MAN
  • a. Descriptive appreciation of a typical audience member
• 6. COMPETITIVE FACTORS
  • a. Listener's non-propaganda preoccupations
  • b. Continuation of adverse indoctrination
  • c. Effect of news available both to one's self and to listener
  • d. Competitive effect of hostile propaganda
• 7. RELATION TO GENERAL (MILITARY) ESTIMATE OF THE SITUATION
  • a. Timing relationships
    • 1. Contingency plans
    • 2. Contingency prohibitions
  • b. Contribution of Psychological Warfare to operations planning
    • 1. Combat operations psychologically advisable
    • 2. Combat operations subject to propaganda exploitation
    • 3. Operations providing adverse propaganda with opportunity
  • c. Correlation of Psychological Warfare with
    • 1. Public relations programming
    • 2. Information and education plans
    • 3. Medical plans and reporting
    • 4. Countersubversive functions

Such papers might be of use, gathering together in a single document all pertinent facts. In most tactical situations, the situation would have obsolesced before the author of the estimate had finished his document. In strategic situations, it could not normally be made specific enough to be practical—at the operational level—without becoming hopelessly unwieldy. Each skill represented in the estimate does prepare other reports, and the practice of most modern armies indicates that it is better to conduct routine propaganda planning, supervision, and appreciation through liaison than to prepare elaborate documents gathering together the multifarious factors which actually affect Psychological Warfare.

In most American Psychological Warfare facilities—especially in the theaters—the estimate of the situation consisted of a brief rÉsumÉ of home propaganda by the enemy (taken directly from propaganda analysis), comment on the audience by appropriate representatives from the State Department or other Federal agencies, and discussion of the audience by some kind of Psychological Warfare operations-planning and intelligence board. Some of the most valuable suggestions came from persons not concerned with propaganda—such as target-intelligence people who could anticipate enemy civilian or military shortages, or economic-warfare people who suggested vexations which the enemy listener was probably experiencing.

Therefore the psychological estimate should not be presented as a propaganda-versus-propaganda analysis; if it does, it will end as an unproductive and meaningless duel between the propagandists on the two sides. Nor should the estimate pretend to present choices with the pretense that these choices are definitely prescribed by the situation itself. In any field, an expert can hoax or befuddle a layman. A Psychological Warfare officer should present choices for what they really are—options open to him and his staff as creative writers. Policy issues, in specific cases, can be answered yes or no. This is not true of propaganda as a whole. The task of the propagandist is to create something which will arouse attention, will induce attitudes, and will eventually lead to action. It is a task of permanent offense. Its variations are as infinitely diverse as the imaginations of mankind can make them.

Choice is perpetually before the Psychological Warfare propagandist. But it is the wide choice of what he can think up, not the narrow choice dictated by fixed terrain, by specific enemy capabilities, by concrete physical necessities. Adolf Hitler himself, in the near-delirium of his last days of life, recognized this. He told his followers to hold out; German propaganda might still provoke the "inevitable" American-Soviet clash which would save Germany. He said he would choose one side or the other—he didn't much care which. Thus, at the end, the range of propaganda possibilities deceived even the arch propagandist, despite the bold shrewdness he had shown in the past. He knew, as his generals did not, that in the realm of the psychological, the "factor of the unexpected" is always a large one, and hoped to the last to turn it to his ends. His premises were right, even though his conclusion was fatal for him.

In a particular type of instance, estimates of the antagonist's propaganda capacity form a part of normal military operations. This occurs in the instance of allied operation: when the outside ally fears that the local ally may be subverted. Such was the state of France in relation to Britain in 1940, of Central China in relation to the Americans in 1944, of the Balkan states in relation to the Third Reich in 1945. In such instances, estimate of the enemy propaganda becomes a vital part of the total military estimate. The principles stated below can be applied by changing the direction of their application. Propaganda analysis can, in situations like this, provide cues for effective action and correct timing. In this type of situation, the outside ally cannot afford to sit by and hope for the best. By black operations he too must prepare to re-subvert the local ally if the local ally goes over to the enemy. In Rumania, Bulgaria and puppet Serbia the Germans were not successful; in Italy they created the Fascist Italian Social Republic and brought a large part of Northern Italy back into the war. In China, Allied pro-Communist sympathizers hoped that the Japanese would subvert the Generalissimo so badly that America would build up Yenan as a precautionary measure; but the Generalissimo stood firm, and the Yenan maneuver lingered on as an unpleasant memory between certain Americans and certain Nationalist Chinese. This type of situation mixes politics, economics, propaganda and warfare to such a degree that no sound estimate can appraise one factor without including the others.

Naturally, no sane Theater commander would rely on psychological warfare alone for the accomplishment of a military result. It is possible, nevertheless, to allow for planned good luck—good luck which one has created with many months of hard work. When psychological warfare is used in conjunction with invasion, its planned use (to judge by the results found in World War II) might often justify commanders in using minimum rather than maximum allocations of troops for the protection of lines of communications against guerrilla or civilian attack. If the Nazis had chased the Soviet peasants through the woods with soup kitchens, free movies, and mittens for the babies, they would not have had so many furious partisans sniping at them.

Psychological warfare can be relied upon to a considerable degree to step up enemy panic in the application of a rapid forward movement. The Japanese in China panicked whole regiments of local volunteers plumb out of existence by the use of fast-marching Chinese-speaking plainclothes troops, some of whom may have been air-dropped. In the Nazi establishment of the first salient through to Abbeville, the psychological aspects of the blitzkrieg helped prevent the British and French from re-forming a continuous line and led eventually to the pocketing of the British at Dunkirk.

Psychological warfare can also be counted on, tactically, to speed up the reduction of isolated enemy positions when these positions are clearly beyond hope of rescue. All the psychological warfare people need to do is to go in with map leaflets, surrender leaflets, loudspeakers and a near-by radio. The unit may not give in instantly, but the unit would be superhuman if it fought as well in the face of persuasion as it would have fought without psychological attack. In the mopping-up of Japanese in the Pacific island fighting, psychological warfare teams and techniques undoubtedly eased and speeded the process.

These references are to tactical estimates. Strategic propaganda is beyond estimate. All it can do is to weight the probabilities a little more favorably than would be the case without it. If the United States had not dropped the Japanese surrender proposal in Japanese all over Japan, the Japanese government leaders might have been more inclined to resist surrendering. If the Germans had not softened up the French before the Great Western Blitz of 1940, they might have needed more time, days or weeks more to reduce France, and thus might have faced a united French overseas Empire even after France-in-Europe fell. The success of a strategic propaganda operation cannot be guaranteed in any plan. It would be foolhardy optimism to think that psychology can assume a major portion of responsibility for direct military results. It would appear that the Soviet Red Army, despite its propaganda-conscious Communist background, never passed the whole buck to psychological warfare. The Russians never appeared to leave the artillery at home in order to take the loudspeakers or leaflet mortars along. They made brilliant, almost terrifying use of pre-belligerent propaganda; they used propaganda tactically with immense success in the taking of prisoners; they used psychological warfare, with a heavy infusion of political warfare, more drastically for consolidation and occupation purposes than did any of the other United Nations. But like everyone else, they seem to have used strategic propaganda for whatever it might bring in—immediate generalized effect, and the ultimate production of windfalls.

Tactical psychological warfare can be estimated, though to a limited extent, as part of a tactical potential of either the enemy or one's own side. Strategic propaganda can be planned and evaluated only in terms of the diffuse general situation, with the reasonable and fair expectation that if properly employed it will better the position of the user. It sometimes achieves results which astound even the originators, but these results cannot be calculated (except by hunch) in advance. Nevertheless, the operation is well worth trying since it has incalculable possibilities and is quite inexpensive in relation to the gross cost of war.

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