6. War Propaganda
Pursuing all political events with interest as I did, I had always been much interested in propaganda activity. In it I saw an instrument which the Socialist-Marxist organization especially understood and used with masterly skill. I came early to realize that the proper employment of propaganda is a real art, one that had always remained almost unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian Socialist movement, particularly in Lueger’s day, achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which indeed it owed much of its success.
But not until the war was there a chance to see the enormous results which properly directed propaganda can produce. Here again, unfortunately, the other side was the sole subject of study, for on our side the activity in this direction was more than modest. But it was the absolute failure of the whole enlightening activity on the German side, glaringly conspicuous to every soldier, which now led me to investigate more thoroughly the propaganda question.
Often there was more than enough time for reflection, but it was the enemy who gave us practical instruction, unfortunately all too well.
That which we omitted to do, our adversaries made good with extraordinary skill and a calculation amounting to genius. Even I learned an infinite amount from the enemy war propaganda. But of course time passed without a trace over those heads to which it should have been a most salutary lesson; some of them thought themselves too clever to take lessons from the enemy, and the rest had not even an honest will to learn.
Did we really have any propaganda at all?
Unfortunately I can only answer, no. Everything that was really undertaken in this direction was so inadequate and wrong from the start that at best it did no good, and often it was actually harmful.
Inadequate in form, psychologically wrong in essence—such must be our judgment after a careful scrutiny of German war propaganda.
People do not seem to have been quite clear in their minds even on the first question, namely, Is propaganda a means or an end?
It is a means, and must accordingly be judged from the standpoint of purpose; its form must be adapted to attain the end it serves. It is also obvious that the importance of the end may vary from the standpoint of general necessity, and that the intrinsic value of propaganda varies accordingly. But the end for which we were struggling during the war was the most exalted and tremendous that is thinkable for man: the freedom and independence of our people, security of livelihood for the future—and the nation’s honor: something which still exists or rather should exist despite all the contrary opinions of today. Peoples without honor usually lose their freedom and independence sooner or later, which in turn accords with a higher justice, since generations of rascals without honor deserve no freedom. No one who is willing to be a craven slave can or should possess any honor, for it would swiftly become an object of universal contempt in any case.
The German people were fighting for a human existence, and the purpose of propaganda in the war should have been to back up the fight; to help win the victory should have been its goal.
When peoples are fighting for their existence on this planet, and are faced with the fatal question, to be or not to be, all considerations of humaneness or aesthetics crumble into nothing; for these conceptions are not floating in the ether of the world, but are born of Man’s imagination, and are bound to it. His departure from this world dissolves those concepts into nothing again, for Nature knows them not. Even so, they are peculiar to the men of but a few peoples, or rather races, and this to whatever degree they spring of themselves from these men’s feelings. In fact humaneness and aesthetic feeling would disappear from the inhabited world if the races which have created and upheld these concepts were to be lost.
In a people’s struggle for its existence in the world, therefore, these concepts are of but minor importance; they have no part in determining the form of the struggle if the moment comes when they might cripple the force of self-preservation in a struggling people. Always that is the only visible result.
So far as the question of humaneness is concerned, even Moltke pointed out that in war this always consists in the shortness of the process, which is to say that the most drastic style of fighting best achieves it.
If anyone should try to advance upon us in such matters with drivel about aesthetic feelings, etc., there can be but one answer: Questions of destiny so important as a people’s struggle for existence do away with any duty to be beautiful. The least beautiful thing that can exist in human life is and must be the yoke of slavery. Or do these artists’s-quarter decadents find the present lot of the German nation “aesthetic”? We have truly no need to discuss the matter with the Jews, the modern inventors of this perfume of civilization. Their whole existence is protest incarnate against the aesthetics of the Lord’s image.
If considerations of humaneness and beauty do not count in the battle, neither can they be used as standards to judge propaganda.
Propaganda in the war was a means to an end: the German people’s struggle for existence; and hence the propaganda could be considered only in the light of the principles which there applied. The crudest weapons were humane if they brought quicker victory, and only those methods were beautiful which helped assure the dignity of freedom for the nation. This was the only possible attitude toward the question of war propaganda in such a life-and-death struggle.
If this had been realized in so-called competent quarters, the existing uncertainty about form and use of that weapon would never have arisen; for propaganda is only another weapon, if a truly fearful one in the hands of an expert.
The second question, of absolutely central importance, was this:
At whom should propaganda be directed? At the scientific intelligentsia, or at the less-educated masses?
It must be aimed perpetually at the masses alone!
For the intelligentsia, or what today unfortunately often calls itself so, we have not propaganda but scientific instruction. But judged by its substance propaganda is no more science than the technique of a poster in itself is art. The art of the poster is in the designer’s ability to attract the attention of the crowd with form and color. A poster for an art exhibition has only to draw attention to the art in the exhibition; the better it succeeds, the greater is the art of the poster itself. The poster ought further to give the masses some notion of the importance of the exhibition, but it should by no means be a substitute for the art there on display. Anyone who wishes to concern himself with art itself, therefore, must study more than just the poster; in fact for him a mere stroll through the exhibition will not suffice. He may properly be expected to give a profound scrutiny to the individual works, and then slowly to form a sound opinion.
The situation is the same with what we today call propaganda.
Propaganda’s task is not scientific training of the individual, but directing the masses’ attention to particular facts, occurrences, necessities, etc., whose importance is thus brought within their view.
The whole art consists in seizing this so adroitly that a universal conviction of the reality of a fact, the necessity of an occurrence, the rightness of something necessary, etc., is produced. But as it is not and cannot be a knowledge in itself, (since its job, like that of the poster, is to draw the crowd’s attention, and not to instruct a person with scientific training or a thirst for education and knowledge), it must always attempt to work chiefly on the feelings, and only to a very limited extent on the so-called intelligence.
All propaganda must be popular in tone, and must keep its intellectual level to the capacity of the least intelligent among those at whom it is directed. In other words its purely intellectual standard must be set the lower, the larger the mass of people to be laid hold of. And if it is necessary, as in the case of propaganda for the sustaining of a war, to affect a whole people, there can never be enough caution about avoiding excessive intellectual demands.
The slighter its scientific ballast, and the more exclusively it considers the emotions of the masses, the more complete the success. Success after all is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness of propaganda, and not the fact that it satisfies a few scholars or “aesthetic, sickly apes.”
To understand the emotional patterns of the great masses, by proper psychology to find the road to their attention and on into their hearts—this is the whole art of propaganda. The fact that our wiseacres do not understand this proves only their mental laziness or their conceit.
Once we understand the necessity of adjusting the advertising art of propaganda to the broad masses, we have the following corollary:
It is a mistake to try to vary propaganda in the same way as (for instance) scientific education.
The great masses’ capacity to absorb is very limited, their understanding small, and their forgetfulness is great. For these reasons any effective propaganda must be confined to a very few points, and must use these as slogans until the very last man cannot help knowing what is meant. The moment we give up this principle, and try to vary things, we dissipate our effect, since the crowd can neither digest nor retain what we offer it. This again weakens and finally destroys the results.
The larger the line of its delineation has to be, the more acute is the psychology required in determining its tactics.
For instance, it was a fundamental error to make one’s adversary ridiculous, as was done particularly in Austrian and German comic-magazine propaganda. It was a fundamental error because a man’s actual encounter with the enemy at once taught him a new opinion. The result was terrible, because now under the direct pressure of his adversary’s resistance the German soldier felt himself deceived by the makers of his previous enlightenment; and instead of his war spirit or even his steadfastness being strengthened, the opposite occurred. The man became despondent.
The war propaganda of the Englishmen and Americans, on the other hand, was psychologically right. By exhibiting the Germans to their people as barbarians and Huns they prepared the individual soldier for the horrors of war, and thus helped to preserve him from disappointments. Even the most terrible weapons employed against him seemed only to confirm the enlightenment already bestowed on him, and strengthened his belief in the truthfulness of his own government as much as it stirred his rage and hatred against the nefarious enemy. The effect of the weapons which naturally he was discovering by experience at the hands of the enemy gradually came to seem a proof of the barbarian foe’s already familiar “Hunnish” brutality; and he was never led for a moment to reflect that his own weapons might perhaps—in fact probably—be even more fearful.
Consequently the English soldier could never feel he was being untruthfully informed from home, which was unfortunately so much the case with the German soldier that finally he refused anything from that quarter as “a swindle” and “hysterics.” This was all simply because people thought they could detail any convenient donkey (or even “otherwise” intelligent person) to propaganda duty, instead of realizing that for this purpose the greatest geniuses at judging human nature are barely good enough.
German war propaganda was an incomparable laboratory demonstration of an enlightenment whose effects were absolutely reversed through complete lack of any proper consideration of psychology.
The enemy, however, had a tremendous lesson to teach anyone who was open-eyed and flexible-spirited in profiting by the four and a half years’ tidal wave of enemy propaganda.
What was least understood was the first prerequisite of any propaganda activity whatever: a deliberately subjective, one-sided attitude toward every question discussed. The sins in this direction, at the very beginning of the war, and from the top down, were such that one was really justified in doubting whether such madness could really all be ascribed to pure stupidity.
What, for instance, would people say to a poster which was meant to advertise a new soap, but which also described other soaps as “good”? They would simply shake their heads.
But the same thing is true of political advertising. It is the task of propaganda not, for instance, to assay the various causes, but to emphasize exclusively the one cause it represents. It must not objectively explore any truth that favors the other side, and then present it to the masses with doctrinaire honesty, but must perpetually labor for its own truths.
It was a fundamental error to discuss guilt from the standpoint that Germany could not be made solely responsible for the outbreak of the catastrophe; the right way was to load the guilt solely upon the enemy, even if this had not corresponded to the actual situation, which in this case it really did.
What was the result of this half-measure?
The great masses of a people do not consist of diplomats or even of teachers of international law, in fact not even of people capable of a reasoned judgment; they are human beings, wavering, inclined to doubt and uncertainty. The moment their own propaganda concedes so much as the faintest glimmer of justice to the other side, the seeds for doubt of their own cause have been sown. The masses are in no position to tell where the enemy’s misdeeds end and their own begin. In such cases they become uncertain and suspicious, particularly if the enemy is not guilty of the same foolishness, but puts the guilt lock, stock and barrel upon his adversary. What more natural than for one’s own people at last to believe the hostile propaganda, more concerted and single-minded as it is, rather than one’s own? This is most easily proved to be true with a people who suffers from the objectivity craze as severely as the Germans do! For here everyone will strive to do no injustice to the enemy, even at the risk of accusing, nay destroying, his own people and State. The masses never become conscious that it is not thus intended in high quarters. The overwhelming majority of the people is so feminine in tendency and attitude that emotion and feelings rather than sober consideration determine its thought and action.
But this feeling is not complicated; it is simple and firm. There are not many shadings, but a positive or a negative, love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, but never half this and half that, or partly, etc.
All these things English propaganda in particular realized—and took account of—with positive genius. Here were no half-measures which might have raised doubts.
They realized admirably the primitiveness of the broad masses’ emotional state; they proved this with the atrocity propaganda adapted to that level, by which they ruthlessly and brilliantly assured the condition essential for moral endurance at the front despite even the greatest actual defeats, as well as by their equally vivid pillorying of the German foe as the solely guilty party for the outbreak of the war—a lie which by the absolute, one-sided, colossal impudence of its presentation made allowance for the emotional and always extreme attitude of the common people, and therefore was believed.
How effective this sort of propaganda was is shown most strikingly by the fact that after four years it was still holding the enemy to his guns, and had even begun to eat away at our own people.
That our propaganda was not fated to have the same success could really be no surprise. It carried the germ of ineffectiveness in its very inner ambiguity. And its substance alone made it highly improbable that it would create the necessary impression on the masses. Only our free-spirited “statesmen” could have hoped with this stale pacificist dishwater to intoxicate men to the point of dying.
This sorry product was thus useless, nay harmful.
But all the brilliance of presentation in the world will not lead to the success of propaganda unless one fundamental principle is always kept clearly in view. Propaganda must limit itself to saying a very little, and this little it must keep forever repeating. Perseverance, here as so often in this world, is the first and most important prerequisite for success.
In the field of propaganda we must never be guided by aesthetes or the blasé—not by the former because the expression and form of what was said would soon have drawing-power only for literary tea-parties, instead of being suited to the masses; the latter we must anxiously shun because their own lack of emotional freshness is constantly seeking new stimulants. These people are soon fed up with anything; they want variety, and they cannot put themselves in the place of their less surfeited fellow-men, or even understand their needs. They are always the first to criticize propaganda, or rather its substance, which seems to them too old-fashioned, too stale, and then again too outworn. They are always looking for something new, seeking variety, and thus are the death of any effective political mass recruiting. For as soon as organization and substance of any propaganda begin to be made for these people’s needs, they lose any sort of unity, and instead are altogether dissipated.
The purpose of propaganda is not to be a constant source of interesting diversion for blasé little gentlemen, but to convince, and to convince the masses. But they are so slow-moving that it is always some time before they are ready even to take notice of a thing, and only thousandfold repetition of the simplest ideas will finally stick in their minds.
Any variations employed must never change the substance of the propaganda, but must always say the same thing in conclusion. The slogan, that is, must be illuminated from various angles, but every discussion must end again with the slogan itself. Only thus can and will propaganda produce a unified and concentrated effect.
Only this sweeping line, which must never he abandoned, will (with steady and consistent emphasis) pave the way to final success. It is astonishing then to discover the enormous, scarcely comprehensible results which such perserverance leads to.
All advertising, whether in business or politics, succeeds by the steady and long-continued consistency with which it is employed.
Here too the enemy war propaganda was a model of its kind: it was restricted to a few points, calculated exclusively for the masses, continued with tireless perseverance. Those basic ideas and forms of presentation which were seen to be sound found employment throughout the war, without even the slightest change. At first the propaganda seemed crazy in the impudence of its statements; later it became unpleasant, and finally was believed. After four and a half years a revolution whose slogan originated in enemy war propaganda broke out in Germany.
The English understood another thing: that the possible success of this intellectual weapon lies in wholesale use, but that success more than pays the cost.
Propaganda with them was a weapon of the first order, while with us it was the last living for jobless politicians and the sheltered post of second-rate heroes.
And taken all in all its success was nil.