Читать книгу The History of Psychological Warfare - Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger - Страница 21

Salesmanship is related to psychological warfare. Propaganda is often compared to another art of our time—industrialized salesmanship through mass printing and telecommunications. This bad parallel was responsible for much of the inept American propaganda overseas in the early part of the war; some of our propagandists had a fundamental misconception of the nature of wartime propaganda.

Allegiance in war is a matter of ideology, not of opinion. A man cannot want his own side to lose while remaining a good citizen in all other respects. The desire for defeat—even the acceptance of defeat—is of tragic importance to any responsible, sane person. A German who wanted the Reich to be overthrown was a traitor to Germany, just as any American who wished us to pull out of the war and exterminate American Jews would have been a traitor to his own country. These decisions cannot be compared with the choice of a toothpaste, a deodorant, or a cigarette.

Advertising succeeds in peacetime precisely because it does not matter; the choice which the consumer makes is of slight importance to himself, even though it is of importance to the seller of the product. A Dromedary cigarette and an Old Coin cigarette are both cigarettes; the man is going to smoke one anyhow. It does not matter so much to him. If Dromedaries are associated in his mind with mere tobacco, while Old Coins call up unaccountable but persistent memories of actresses' legs, he may buy Old Coins. The physical implements of propaganda were at hand in 1941–1942, but we Americans had become so accustomed to their use for trivial purposes that much of our wartime propaganda was conducted in terms of salesmanship.

In a sense, however, salesmanship does serve the military purpose of accustoming the audience to appeals both visual and auditory. The consequence is that competing, outside propaganda can reach the domestic American audience only in competition with the local advertising. It is difficult for foreign competition to hold attention amid an almost limitless number of professionally competent commercial appeals. A Communist or Fascist party cannot get public attention in the United States by the simple expedient of a "mass meeting" of three hundred persons, or by the use of a few dozen posters in a metropolitan area. Before the political propagandist can get the public attention, he must edge his media past the soap operas, the soft drink advertisements, the bathing beauties advertising Pennsylvania crude or bright-leaf tobacco. The consequence is that outside propaganda either fails to get much public attention, or else camouflages itself to resemble and to exploit existing media. Clamorous salesmanship deadens the American citizen to his own government's propaganda, and may to a certain extent lower his civic alertness; but at the same time, salesmanship has built up a psychological Great Wall which excludes foreign or queer appeals and which renders the United States almost impervious to sudden ideological penetration from overseas.