Читать книгу The History of Psychological Warfare - Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger - Страница 20

Education is a process usually institutional by which the people of a given area transmit to their successors, their own children, the purely practical information needed in modern life, together with a lot of other teachings designed to make good men and women, good citizens, good Christians or other believers, of them. In the democratic states this process is ideological only in some parts of the curriculum; elsewhere in the field of opinions, the government seeks to control ideology only negatively—through laws concerning obscenity, blasphemy, subversion, and so on.

In the states which are ideologically self-conscious and anxious to promote a fixed mentality, the process of education is combined with agitation and regulation, so that the entire population lives under conditions approximating the psychological side of war. Heretics are put to death or are otherwise silenced. Historical materialism and the Marxian "objectivity," or the Volk, or Fascismo, or Yamato-damashii, or "new democracy" is set up as the touchstone of all good and evil, even in unrelated fields of activity. Education and propaganda merge into everlasting indoctrination. And when such states go to war against states which do not have propaganda machinery, the more liberal states are at a disadvantage for sheer lack of practice in the administrative and mechanical aspects of propaganda. Education is to psychological warfare what a glacier is to an avalanche. The mind is to be in both cases captured, but the speed and techniques differ.