Читать книгу The History of Psychological Warfare - Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger - Страница 12

Moving across the centuries for an example, it is interesting to note that John Milton, author of Paradise Lost and of other priceless books of the English-speaking world, went blind because he was so busy conducting Oliver Cromwell's psychological warfare that he disregarded the doctors' warning and abused his ailing sight. And the sad thing about it was that it was not very good psychological warfare.

Milton fell into the common booby-trap of refuting his opponents item by item, thus leaving them the strong affirmative position, instead of providing a positive and teachable statement of his own faith. He was Latin Secretary to the Council, in that Commonwealth of England which was—to its contemporaries in Europe—such a novel, dreadful, and seditious form of government. The English had killed their king, by somewhat offhanded legal procedures, and had gone under the Cromwellian dictatorship. It was possible for their opponents to attack them from two sides at once. Believers in monarchy could call the English murderous king-killers (a charge as serious in those times as the charge of anarchism or free love in this); believers in order and liberty could call the British slaves of a tyrant. A Frenchman called Claude de Saumaise (in Latin form, Salmasius) wrote a highly critical book about the English, and Milton seems to have lost his temper and his judgment.

In his two books against Salmasius, Milton then committed almost every mistake in the whole schedule of psychological warfare. He moved from his own ground of argument over to the enemy's. He wrote at excessive length. He indulged in some of the nastiest name-calling to be found in literature, and went into considerable detail to describe Salmasius in unattractive terms. He slung mud whenever he could. The books are read today, under compulsion, by PhD. candidates, but no one else is known to find them attractive. It is not possible to find that these books had any lasting influence in their own time. (In these texts written by Milton in Latin but now available in English, Army men wearying of the monotonous phraseology of basic military invective can find extensive additions to their vocabulary.) Milton turned to disappointment and poetry; the world is the gainer.

The vocabulary of seventeenth-century propaganda had a strident tone which is, perhaps unfortunately, getting to be characteristic of the twentieth century. The following epithets sound like an American Legion description of Communists, or a Communist description of the Polish democrats, yet they were applied in a book by a Lutheran to Quakers. The title of the tirade reads, in part:

… a description of the … new Quakers, making known the sum of their manifold blasphemous opinions, dangerous practices, Godless crimes, attempts to subvert civil government in the churches and in the community life of the world; together with their idiotic games, their laughable action and behavior, which is enough to make sober Christian persons breathless, and which is like death, and which can display the lazy stinking cadaver of their fanatical doctrines. …

In its first few pages, the book accuses the Quakers of obscenity, adultery, civil commotion, conspiracy, blasphemy, subversion and lunacy.8 Milton was not out of fashion in applying bad manners to propaganda. It is merely regrettable that he did not transcend the frailties of his time.