1950's Propaganda, Today

One nice thing about all the traveling I'm doing right now (other than making me appreciate TG and home all the more) is that there is a bitchen used-book store right in Milwaukee airport, Renaissance Books.

I manage to stop by there pretty much every trip, and find all kinds of interesting stuff.

This trip, I wandered back to the math area because Middle Guy and I are trying to teach each other more about fractals. No Mandelbrot, sadly, but next to it was the military area, so I scanned quickly and almost bought a really nice copy of Clausewitz for Biggest Guy but it was huge to carry. I did trip over an interesting book that I bought, though - 'Premises for Propaganda' by Leo Bogart (autographed by him, BTW, with an inscription to one Dick Leonard). Subtitled 'The United States Information Agency's Operating Assumptions in the Cold War', it's a 1976 summary of a study done on the USIA in 1953-4.

And it's a fascinating look at the nuts and bolts of an active 'information war'.

Here is an excerpt from the preface (written in 1976):

Twenty years ago, when this study was made, memories of World War II and of its horrors were still vivid, and the political emotions of Europe were direct continuations of those that prevailed in wartime. These bitter feelings have faded in intensity. A generation of Eastern Europeans, reared under Socialism, has come to accept many of its institutions as permanent and desirable. In the Soviet Union, the opposition, restrained rather than crushed, has found new voices, and foreign broadcasts are no longer obliterated by jamming.

The development of the great schism in the Communist camp has been followed by an unprecedented Soviet tolerance of minor deviationism in the policies of individual national parties. The economic recovery of Western Europe and Japan has created strong independent forces within the American system of alliances. A capacity for autonomous political action has been manifested in the succession of wars in the Middle East, the display of economic power by the oil-producing nations, the emergence of independent African states, the growth of guerilla movements in Southeast Asia, and the long agony of Indochina. All these familiar strands of recent history have made the tasks of propaganda, like those of diplomacy, incredibly more complex than they were at the height of the Cold War, when the world was politically polarized.

The political rhetoric of that period was still, at least to a substantial degree, an outgrowth of the ideological self-righteousness of World War II, when terms like "freedom," "democracy," and "the Free World" could be used without a trace of cynicism or self-consciousness and with the expectation that they would strike a responsive chord. Sophisticated political observers could speak unblushingly of the war to win men's minds and souls. There was strong belief in the power of words and ideas to influence events.

As President Eisenhower said in an address to the staff of the Agency in November, 1953, "We are now conducting a cold war. That cold war must have some objective, otherwise it would be senseless. It is conducted in the belief that if there is no war, if two systems of government are allowed to live side by side, that ours, because of its greater appeal to men everywhere, to mankind, in the long run will win out. That it will defeat all forms of dictatorial government because of its greater appeal to the human soul, the human heart, the human mind."

"In the contest for men's minds," wrote former Assistant Secretary of State Edward W. Barrett, "truth can be peculiarly the American weapon." Senator Homer Capehart put it more bluntly a few years later when he said the job of the Agency "is to sell the United States to the world, just as a sales manager's job is to sell a Buick or a Cadillac or a radio or television set."

It was generally assumed that throughout the world, public opinion could be influenced, could be shaped, and that ultimately it would have to be heeded by those who ruled, no matter how evil and ruthless they might be. Who today still maintains this faith? Instead, there has come about, on the part of America's government, its intellectuals, and its general public, a reawakened appreciation of the uses and importance of power, divorced from ideals or ideology. In part, this change in outlook reflects the realities of the nuclear standoff and uneasy awareness of the possibilities of disaster. In part, it reflects the processes of fractionation in international politics to which I have just referred. This very fractionation has reduced the level of dependable and unquestioning support enjoyed by the United States among a variety of former client countries around the world. The illusion of being on the side of the angels becomes more difficult to sustain when few others share it. A succession of regional wars and civil wars in Asia and Africa has further weakened the proposition that international conflicts are essentially expressions of the great division of the world into its Communist and "anti-Communist" components. The "Good Guys" often have turned out to be suspicious or hostile toward the United States, and, in any case, the "Good Guys" don't always win.

In a world in which the triumph of justice and truth is as often as not impeded by naked force, the power of public opinion fades, and the very concept of public opinion may be disregarded as a force in international politics.

Not so much any more.

The book directly addresses many of the challenges that are being discussed today as we discuss our ideological conflict with the Islamist movement. How can a democratcy - founded in the open flow of discussion and information, deliberately shape information so as to combat an opponent who is not so restrained? How do we have political accountability without political meddling (McCarthy was tearing apart the USIA as the study was being written)? How do we balance the desire to simply show the reality of who we are with the desire to sell our beliefs?

What do we do about promoting freedom as our core value to the peoples of unfree allies?

It's a truly interesting book, and a reminder that there is litte that we have to deal with that we can't learn something about from the past.

A definite find.