Mein Kampf
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
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