War Propaganda
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
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