Читать книгу The History of Psychological Warfare - Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger - Страница 23

All modern armies, in addition to public relations, also employ morale services facilities—officers or employees whose function it is to supply troops with entertainment, educational materials, political indoctrination, and other attention-getting materials. Morale services are the prime overt defense against enemy psychological warfare, and by a program of keeping the attention of the troops, can prevent the enemy from establishing effective communication. During World War II, the Armed Forces Radio Service of the United States established global radio service for Americans, and incidentally turned out material of top importance to United States propaganda. Naturally, enemy and allied peoples would pay more serious heed to communications from Americans to Americans than they would to materials which they knew had been concocted for themselves. The American morale services in the last war indignantly rejected the notion that they were a major propaganda facility, rightfully insisting that their audience counted on getting plain information, plain news, and plain education without ulterior propaganda content. The fact that in a theater of war all communication has propaganda effect was not always taken into account, and only on one or two critical occasions was there coordination of stress and timing.

It must be said, however, that propaganda by any other name is just as sweet, and that the conviction of the propagandist that he is not a propagandist can be a real asset. Morale services provided the American forces with news, entertainment, and educational facilities. Most of the time these morale facilities had huge parasitical audiences—the global kibitzers who listened to our broadcasts, read our magazines, bought our paper-bound books on the black markets. (It was a happy day for Lienta University at Kunming, Yünnan, when the American Information and Education set-up began shipping in current literature. The long-isolated Chinese college students found themselves deluged with good American books.)

The morale services lost the opportunity to ram home to their G.I.-plus-foreign audience some of the more effective points of American psychological warfare, but they gained as propagandists by not admitting, even to themselves, that they were propagandists. Since the United States has no serious inward psychological cleavages, the general morale services function coordinated automatically with the psychological warfare function simply because both were produced by disciplined, patriotic Americans.

In the experience of the German and Soviet armies, morale services were parts of a coordinated propaganda machine which included psychological warfare, public relations, general news, and public education. In the Japanese armies, morale services were directed most particularly to physical and sentimental comforts (edible treats, picture postcards, good luck items) which bore little immediate relation to news, and less to formal propaganda.