Читать книгу Psychological Warfare - Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger - Страница 40

German writers, after World War I, sometimes attributed the superiority of the British in propaganda to the innate fiendishness of Britishers as contrasted with the gullible purity of Germans. The psychoneurotic non-com who made himself famous to the world's cost did not make this mistake. In Mein Kampf Hitler stated categorically that the British had understood the professional touch in propaganda while the Germans had not. Hitler's contempt for the masses was shown in his explicit statement of their inattentiveness, their poor response to formal logic, their affirmative reaction to simple one-sided reiteration. He said: "[In England] … propaganda was a weapon of the first class, while with us it was a sop to unemployed politicians. … " German nationalists of whatever stripe found themselves in accord when they blamed their military defeat on the enemy's use of propaganda. They thus succeeded in maintaining the myth, already sedulously inculcated for two centuries, that the German army could not be beaten in the field. The extremists and crackpots among them went on to develop the "stab-in-the-back" theory that an unbeaten Germany was betrayed from within by Jews, socialists, and democratic people. (The mutually exclusive alternatives—namely that either Allied propaganda was fiendishly good, and the Germans merely innocent victims, or else that Allied propaganda was ineffectual and the anti-war sentiment a purely German development—did not keep the Hitlerites from exploiting both alibis simultaneously.)

The postwar period of the 1920's saw, therefore, the curious spectacle of the Germans lauding American psychological warfare, and counting it as a major factor of defeat, while the Americans naturally emphasized the fighting record of American troops.

As for Kaiserist propaganda, it started out with the twin curses of amateurishness and bureaucracy, each of them crippling but deadly when paired. German writers and scholars ran wild in 1914 and 1915 in trying to put the blame on the Allies; amateurish in public relations, they succeeded in arousing a tremendous amount of antagonism. They were handicapped by the ponderosity of the German Imperial Government, by the intervention of persons unfamiliar with news or advertising (at that time the most obvious sources of civilian propaganda personnel), and by a military stodginess which made German press communiqués infuriating even to anti-British readers. Overseas propaganda developed through poorly secured clandestine channels, and was mixed up with espionage and sabotage personnel. Inescapable "breaks" gave all German agents a bad name. George Sylvester Viereck, who has enjoyed the odd distinction of being our most vocal pro-German sympathizer in both wars with Germany, later wrote a naïve but revealing account of his operations under the title Spreading Germs of Hate (Boston, 1930). (No British information officer was guilty, even after the war, of a comparable breach of taste.) Viereck praises the British for their sang-froid and skill; coming from him, the praise is more than deserved.

More seriously, German propaganda lacked both organization and moral drive. Lieutenant Colonel Nicolai, the Imperial German General Staff officer responsible, puts part of the blame on the German press and on the press officers of the Army and the Reich: "In fact, the enemy remained virtually untouched by any kind of German propaganda. This reproach falls against the press, it would seem, as well as on the responsible officials. … Internationally minded papers themselves failed to cooperate. Yet it was precisely these which were circulated and esteemed abroad. Newspapers with other (pro-militarist) editorial policies, failing to get leadership from the Government, could not aim at any unified effect. … Instead, the goal of the governmental press leadership remained a thoroughly negative one: to prevent the press from doing harm to national policy."23

Without developing his theme into systematic doctrine for psychological warfare, the German colonel stated the basic defect of World War I from the German point of view. Writing in 1920, he went on to say: "The enemy alleges simply to have copied our front-line propaganda when he initiated his. In so doing, he is guilty of a deliberate untruth, made for the sake of removing the moral blot which is attached to his victory. … " Nicolai could not overcome the supposition that propaganda was a dirty and unsoldierly device and that it was much more honorable for armies to exchange loss of life than to save men on both sides by talking the enemy into surrendering, but he went on to the real point at issue. "Furthermore, it was not moralistic misgivings which kept us from applying to the enemy front lines a propaganda campaign as successful as theirs, but very sober practical obstacles. There were available to us none of the (psychological) points of attack at which propaganda would have been effective against the enemy forces, points such as the enemy found in our own domestic conditions. What was lacking was political propaganda as precursor of military."

What the Germans failed to learn in World War I, they later learned and applied in World War II. The German Imperial Government started in 1914 with a defiant assurance of its own power. Power was not sought among the masses so far as Kaiser Wilhelm was concerned; one inherited it from one's ancestors, along with an army, and the masses had better keep their noses out of it. The Hitlerite German government of 1939 began its world war only after two decades of shrewd, conscienceless, bitter domestic propaganda. Hitlerism had come to power by first wooing and then bullying the common man, and the Nazi chiefs, in their strategy of terror or "warfare psychologically waged," subsequently applied the same tactics to the international community. Hitler conquered Europe with these tactics; he started with flattery, made scenes, and ended with cold brutality. These were the skills of the urban slum.