Читать книгу The History of Psychological Warfare - Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger - Страница 17

Good propaganda can be conducted by persons with no knowledge of formal psychology. The human touch, the inventive mind, the forceful appeal—things such as these appear in the writings of gifted persons. Thomas Paine never read a word of Freud or Pavlov, yet Paine's arguments during the Revolutionary War played subtly on every appeal which a modern psychologist could catalogue. But war cannot, in modern times, assume a statistical expectation of talent. Psychology makes it possible for the able but ordinary statesman or officer to calculate his persuasion systematically and to obtain by planning those results which greater men might hit upon by genius.

What can psychology do for warfare?

In the first place, the psychologist can bring to the attention of the soldier those elements of the human mind which are usually kept out of sight. He can show how to convert lust into resentment, individual resourcefulness into mass cowardice, friction into distrust, prejudice into fury. He does so by going down to the unconscious mind for his source materials. (During world War II, the fact that Chinese babies remain unimpeded while they commit a nuisance, while Japanese babies are either intercepted or punished if they make a mess in the wrong place, was found to be of significant importance in planning psychological warfare. See below, page 154.)

In the second place the psychologist can set up techniques for finding out how the enemy really does feel. Some of the worst blunders of history have arisen from miscalculation of the enemy state of mind. By using the familiar statistical and questionnaire procedures, the psychologist can quiz a small cross section of enemy prisoners and from the results estimate the mentality of an entire enemy theater of war at a given period. If he does not have the prisoners handy, he can accomplish much the same end by an analysis of the news and propaganda which the enemy authorities transmit to their own troops and people. By establishing enemy opinion and morale factors he can hazard a reasoned forecast as to how the enemy troops will behave under specific conditions.

In the third place, the psychologist can help the military psychological warfare operator by helping him maintain his sense of mission and of proportion. The deadliest danger of propaganda consists of its being issued by the propagandist for his own edification. This sterile and ineffectual amusement can disguise the complete failure of the propaganda as propaganda. There is a genuine pleasure in talking back, particularly to an enemy. The propagandist, especially in wartime, is apt to tell the enemy what he thinks of him, or to deride enemy weaknesses. But to have told the Nazis, for example, "You Germans are a pack of murderous baboons and your Hitler is a demented oaf. Your women are slobs, your children are halfwits, your literature is gibberish and your cooking is garbage," and so on, would have stiffened the German will to fight. The propagandist must tell the enemy those things which the enemy will heed; he must keep his private emotionalism out of the operation. The psychologist can teach the propaganda operator how to be objective, systematic, cold. For combat operations, it does not matter how much a division commander may dislike the enemy; for psychological warfare purposes, he must consider how to persuade them, even though he may privately thirst for their destruction. The indulgence of hatred is not a working part of the soldier's mission; to some it may be helpful; to others, not. The useful mission consists solely of making the enemy stop fighting, by combat or other means. But when the soldier turns to propaganda, he may need the advice of a psychologist in keeping his own feelings out of it.

Finally, the psychologist can prescribe media—radio, leaflets, loudspeakers, whispering agents, returned enemy soldiers, and so forth. He can indicate when and when not to use any given medium. He can, in conjunction with operations and intelligence officers, plan the full use of all available psychological resources. He can coordinate the timing of propaganda with military, economic or political situations.

The psychologist does not have to be present in person to give this advice. He does not have to be a man with an M.D. or Ph. D. and years of postgraduate training. He can be present in the manuals he writes, in the indoctrination courses for psychological warfare officers he sets up, in the current propaganda line he dictates by radio. It is useful to have him in the field, particularly at the higher command headquarters, but he is not indispensable. The psychologist in person can be dispensed with; the methods of scientific psychology cannot. (Further on, throughout this book, reference will be made to current psychological literature. The general history of psychology is described in readable terms in Gregory Zilboorg and George W. Henry, A History of Medical Psychology, New York, 1941, and in Lowell S. Selling, Men Against Madness, New York, 1940, cheap edition, 1942.)

Propaganda can be conducted by rule of thumb. But only a genius can make it work well by playing his hunches. It can become true psychological warfare, scientific in spirit and developed as a teachable skill, only by having its premises clearly stated, its mission defined, its instruments put in systematic readiness, and its operations subject to at least partial check, only by the use of techniques borrowed from science. Of all the sciences, psychology is the nearest, though anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, area studies and other specialties all have something to contribute; but it is psychology which indicates the need of the others.