Americans cannot pride themselves on their immunity or invincibility in the war
of propaganda. Americans bit deeply into the enemy bait. For a time we swallowed
the hook and were making substantial progress on the
line toward the sinker.
Mentally we have always been receptive to propaganda because a large part of our
diet has consisted of newspaper, magazine, billboard and radio advertising. The
mere fact that the shooting war is now over does not mean that we are not
swallowing enemy-manufactured propaganda. Although the enemy is defeated
militarily, he is playing doggo with his propaganda.
As a defense of what is to come during
“peace,”
it would be a good idea to paste
into our hats for future reference this bit of
intelligence distributed by the U.S.
Office of War Information:
“Our enemies have an idea of war very different from ours.
“To them peace is not a normal state of affairs of a nation; war is not a painful and
undesirable interruption of peace. To them,
‘shooting war’
is the continuation of
permanent aggression in another form; to them, war and peace differ only in
calling for use of somewhat different weapons in a permanent war to advance
aggressively their ideas of national interest.
“During a war, they add military aggression to the weapons they already have been
using in time of
‘peace’—informational and propaganda aggression, economic
aggression and political aggression.
“The idea of total war is a part of the larger idea of permanent war. Since Nazi
Germany and militarist Japan are always at war, the only difference between so-called peace and so-called war is the addition of real bullets to the bullets of
propaganda, political and economic combinations.
“In time of peace, a very large number of Germans
and Japanese work indirectly
for victory; in time of war, everybody and everything work directly for victory.”
All psychological warfare, whether carried on in
“peace”
or in war, has general
objectives which can be classified as follows:
1. To weaken and
gradually destroy the morale of the enemy and his will to resist.
2. To encourage and strengthen the spirit of resistance of friendly elements in
territories overrun by the enemy.
3. To promote distrust of the enemy government and army on his home front an
d
among neutrals.
4. To keep neutrals neutral, promote their friendship and sympathy and, if
possible, procure their active co-operation.
