PROPAGANDA FROM THUCYDIDES TO THATCHER:

SOME PROBLEMS, PERSPECTIVES & PITFALLS

Philip M. Taylor
University of Leeds

This lecture was the opening address to the Social History Society of Great Brit
ain's conference in 1992.

Some time ago, an American information technologist discussing the potential use
s of computers and inter-active television in educating children declared that a
n individual reading one issue of the New York Times from cover to cover today w
as expected to absorb more information in one sitting than someone from the time
of Christopher Columbus was expected to absorb in their entire lifetime. Now he
didn't say how he measured this precisely, but it seems to me that, this aftern
oon, I can really only assume the posture of a contemporary of Columbus who read
s The Sun.
What I should like to do, therefore, is simply to provide an general indication
of the sort of issues which will undoubtedly surface in our more specialised ses
sions over the next few days, and perhaps to raise a few questions for our colle
ctive deliberation. If I misrepresent the intentions of colleagues delivering mo
re specialised papers, I can only apologise in advance.
In a sense, the title of this conference is both a little too specific and a lit
tle too vague (I can talk with the title of this lecture). Rumour, News and Prop
aganda could all in themselves make excellent subjects for conferences as separa
te topics, but Rumour and News are in fact essential ingredients of Propaganda.
They are, however, only two aspects, as I am sure Stephen Richards will undoubte
dly show later this afternoon when he looks at the type of personality cults pro
moted by the Hapsburgs and that Peter Burke will reinforce when he looks tomorro
w at the all embracing efforts to which Louis XIV was prepared to go in manufact
uring his image as The Sun King. Whether we shall therefore be able to confine o
urselves solely to rumours and news without discussing other techniques such as
art and architecture, or such other key factors as the role of censorship, disin
formation, technological availability and so on I very much doubt.
Nonetheless, Rumours and News are techniques of Propaganda that imply opposite e
nds of a spectrum of persuasion which ranges from Truth at the one side to False
hood at the other. This was certainly the interpretation adopted in the Second W
orld War when Allied propagandists working in the Political Warfare Executive em
ployed rumours, or 'sibs' as they called them, as part of their black propaganda
activities to confuse and disorientate the enemy. But we will need, I suspect,
to distinguish in the first instance between manufactured rumours that serve a p
ropagandist purpose and those which are generated almost like spontaneous combus
tion. It is the difference, I suppose, between deliberate and accidental propaga
nda, and I shall be confining myself largely to talking about deliberate propaga
nda - although no doubt the papers of Colin Richmond, Michael Harris, David Moon
and Gordon Daniels will serve as a valuable corrective to the errors of my ways
.
Both sides in the Second World War recognised the inevitability of rumours, espe
cially in wartime; indeed Goebbels described rumour-mongering as 'the soul openi
ng its bowels', a phrase for which he was apparently for some strange reason ver
y proud of inventing [Balfour, p191]. While certain rumours have always resulted
from perhaps inevitable speculations reflecting the sort of concerns which agit
ate people at times of crisis, it was the propagandists' job to counter their ad
verse effect at home on the one hand ('Careless Talk Costs Lives' and 'The Silen
t Column') but they also recognised their value as weapons of psychological warf
are and strategic deception on the other (as in the case of Operation FORTITUDE
accompanying the D-Day landings). The underlying assumption was that because the
re was a limit to what could be done with spontaneously generated rumours, this
very limitation conversely made rumours valuable additional weapons of offense i
f they could be specifically deployed in the service of the war effort, and part
icularly of military operations.
Apart from the extent to which these operations were systematically organised in
psychological warfare between 1939 and 1945, there was nothing new in all this.
The Ancient Greeks, for example, recognised that rumours could actually be manu
factured for propagandistic purposes. One need only recall the action of Themist
ocles at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC who circulated a rumour which he knew w
ould reach Xerxes that suggested that most of his outnumbered Greek troops were
about to flee. According to Herodotus, Xerxes promptly deployed half of his flee
t to trap the supposedly deserting Greeks, whereupon it encountered Themistocles
' navy on terms much more favourable to the Athenian commander. Herodotus, inter
estingly, did not speculate as to why Xerxes should fall for the deception, with
such fatal consequences for the Persian assault on Greece. This was probably be
cause this type of disinformation was so common in Ancient Greece where methods
of verification were so limited that rumours were often treated as actual news.
Under such circumstances, why shouldn't Xerxes believe the rumour?
Are then rumours simply unverified speculations or manufactured lies? Apart from
raising several issues about the importance of credibility in propaganda, this
question also raises several key issues about the nature of news which, as a com
modity, is influenced by a whole host of complex processes which determine not j
ust whether an event is publicised but the way in which it is presented.
In a sense the point was neatly made by whoever said that when a man bites a dog
that is news but the other way round is not. For an event to become news, it no
t only has to become known about or reported in the first instance, but it is th
en subjected to all sorts of editorial criteria concerning the prominence and em
phasis which is to be given to it. Understanding this editorial process is vital
to our understanding of the collective 'reality' perceived at any given time. I
ts significance in shaping our perception of that 'reality' has been brilliantly
charted by Philip Schlessinger in his study of BBC News Broadcasts, Putting 'Re
ality' Together. Back in the 1930s, the American journalist Will Irwin did the s
ame thing with his book Propaganda and the News: Or What Makes You Think So? The
essential point made by both these works is that News is a commodity which is a
major factor helping to shape a collective perception of the outside world that
does in fact conform more to the requirements and values of journalists and new
s organisations than it does to our own individual perception of reality had we
as individuals been physically present when the event was taking place. It is a
pity Thomas Hobbes is not here to help us out with this philosophical conundrum.

The problem has been adopted by UNESCO which, for the past thirty years, has bee
n unsuccessfully hammering away at the idea of creating a New World Information
Order which will tackle this issue in so far as the Developed and Underdeveloped
World are concerned. Prompted by the concern of Third World countries which fee
l that events of immediate importance to themselves receive only inadequate or s
pasmodic coverage in the western media, much recent scholarship by political sci
entists has pointed to notions of 'media imperialism' and 'cultural hegemony' wh
ich serve, through the west's control of news and information technology and dis
tribution, not just to perpetuate the status quo but to actually increase the ga
p between the have and have-not nations. This is done by controlling the news fl
owing in and out of the Underdeveloped world, picking up only on such events as
disasters, and thus providing a distorted - usually unfavourable - view that har
dly represents the real situation in any given Third World country. Because only
floods, famine, earthquakes and the like tend to be picked up by western news o
rganisations, a particular type of image tends to be created that serves the int
erests of western media organisations more than it does the national self-intere
sts of Third World countries.
A field ripe for Marxist scholars, the issue nonetheless neatly illustrates some
of our central issues of concern here, namely the relationship of news to propa
ganda, and the processes by which news historically has been selected and distri
buted for specific propaganda purposes.
News, in Lord Reith's memorable phrase, is 'the shocktroops of propaganda'. What
he meant by this was that news must form the very heart of any attempts to pers
uade in a world where people crave understanding of the confusion and complexiti
es around them. Any successful propaganda effort, therfore, must be able to cont
rol the output of news and information upon which opinions are formed. The news
must be credible and verifiable but the opinions which form as a result are, in
a sense, predetermined by the selection process. Reith was however talking about
white propaganda because black propagandists, by virtue of the fact that their
output is not directly attributable to them, have a much greater latitude in the
ir employment of the truth. Even so, black propaganda also needs to be based upo
n at least a semblence of credibility if is not to backfire at some stage. It wa
s for this reason that the axiom of the highly successful British propaganda in
the Second World War was to tell 'the truth, nothing but the truth, and as near
as possible, the whole truth'.
I shall talk about the 'as near as possible' part of that quotation in a moment.
What I should like to say first is that historians are uniquely well equipped t
o tackle the issues raised by the whole question of news selection. Through thei
r empirical work into sources from a wide variety of viewpoints, they are consta
ntly aware of the significance of omissions and bias. No matter how hard they tr
y to be objective in their conclusions, they recognise that there is really no s
uch thing as complete objectivity because there is no such thing as an historica
l certainty. Ultimately, because there are always more archives to search, and t
hat no Total Archive exists, their judgments are invariably determined by which
side side you are on in any given issue at any given time. Thus equipped, they a
re ideally placed to scrutinise the media of persuasion not just because propaga
nda is inherently biased but also because the media themselves are by definition
selective and thus inherently biased as well. The fine line which historians ha
ve to tread in teaching people how to think as distinct from the propagandists'
job of telling people what to think may well be illustrated in Keith Grieves' pa
per on history as propaganda after this introductory lecture.
But, surprisingly, modern historians have really only just begun to appreciate s
ome of the difficulties involved in evaluating how this bias works. When, for ex
ample, historians began some 20 years ago seriously to investigate film as a ric
h source of historical evidence unique to the twentieth century, the pioneers (i
ncluding Ken Ward, who was among the first to teach the subject seriously in a B
ritish University) initially concentrated on newsreels and documentaries, perhap
s partly out of caution since that other principal type of film - feature films
- comprised largely of works of fiction. Given the natural preoccupation of hist
orians with sources, non-fiction film offered a more familiar entree into the br
ave new world of film as evidence. Early work on documentaries and newsreels in
the 1930s quickly revealed that even these supposedly factual sources were not s
imply windows on the past; although they used actuality footage, they did not pr
ovide us with unbiased records. They were the end products of a production proce
ss that was affected by the same sort of biases affecting other, more traditiona
l, historical sources.
John Grierson, the effective founder of the British documentary film movement at
the onset of the sound era, had provided a clue to those who may still have bel
ieved that the camera never lied when he described his task as the 'creative tre
atment of actuality'. And when historians such as Nicholas Pronay and Tony Aldga
te began to investigate newsreels they too began to show just exactly how far th
ese supposedly simple visual newspapers went beyond mere recorders of events. Wh
en the likes of Pierre Sorlin, Charles Wenden and Ken Short turned to feature fi
lms, they quickly learned that 'there was no intrinsic difference between "ficti
on" and "factual" films as records of mass communication and that there was no d
istinction in terms of importance made between them by the politicians, civil se
rvants and others whose business it was deal with what was then a new factor in
national life'. They also came to realise that the intrinsic power of film as co
mmunicator rested on its repetetive and cumulative ability to emphasise stereoty
pes; the impact of a single film was limited compared to to the constant repetit
ion of certain themes over a period of time to a mass audience - which I am sure
Jill Hulme will address in her analysis of national identity in the Second Worl
d War.
The point about this is that historians have only recently begun to understand t
he inherently persuasive nature of the media, and particularly the cinema, altho
ugh greater attention is now being given to the broadcast media of radio and tel
evision. Prior to this work, of course, much had been done on the printed media
but historians more familiar with written evidence tended to look more at the me
aning of the message rather than the operational workings of the medium. This wo
uld be something I would be grateful to hear more about in the sessions offered
by colleagues addressing the print media at this conference, such as Aled Jones,
Terrence Rodger, Dilwyn Porter and Mark Ellis. To understand, for example, the
media of film and television, so vital for the twentieth century historian, we n
eed to first understand the nature of the medium - how it works as an interactio
n of words and images, how camera positions can affect the perceptions of the vi
ewer, the enormous significance of editing, and so on - before we can even begin
to study the message.
For those growing numbers of historians displaying an interest in film and telev
ision, one way to do this is to learn the basic skills of the professional commu
nicators, to actually make films. I don't mean appearing on Newsnight or even pr
esenting a television series. Although that is a start, it is rather like seeing
how a journalist adapts your considered judgements to the needs of his newspape
r editor. I mean actually making a film, from idea through to research through t
o final edit. Some of you can no doubt detect a plug coming. It was for this pur
pose that the InterUniversity History Film Consortium was established back in 19
68 and several historians who have taken advantage of its avowed aims are here t
oday. I feel sure that Peter Stead, Philip Bell and Ralph White would all agree
that, in the process of making what is tantamount to an illustrated historical l
ecture, at some stage of editing their films suddenly understood more about the
nature of film as an instrument of persuasion as they compromised their material
to the requirements of the medium. The very first time they had to cut a piece
a film to make a particular historical point fit a particular piece of commentar
y, they understood the power of the cinema as an instrument of propaganda.
There is nothing wrong with that if you would accept my suggestion that propagan
da is a practical process of persuasion and, as a practical process, it is an in
herently neutral concept. It must be defined by reference to intent. We should d
iscard any notions of propaganda being 'good' or 'bad', and use those terms mere
ly to describe effective or ineffective propaganda. Value judgements about the p
rocess are more profitably directed towards the motives which lie behind it sinc
e, as an organised process of persuasion, we are mainly dealing with deliberate
attempts to persuade others to think and behave in a manner desired by the sourc
e. It is essential therefore not to look at Propaganda in a vacuum, but always b
y reference to the ideological and policy-making processes that prompt its emplo
yment. This needs to be done in both short-term campaigns, as Michael Winstanley
will no doubt show in his session, and over longer-term periods in which the em
ployment of popular culture over a sustained period of time will be a subject ad
dressed by Nick Hiley in his session. After all, what is propaganda if not the p
resentation of policy and ideology? I'm sure I don't need to emphasise the point
that judgements concerning the rightness or wrongness of a cause should therefo
re be directed at the policy not the presentation.
Policy and propaganda, therefore, must go hand in hand and effective propaganda
is that which is conducted in close conjunction with the policy-making process.
Whichever comes first, the policy or the presentation, is something we might con
sider as being a recipe for success or failure in our historical case studies. T
here are however two very good examples of the significant dangers of this proce
ss getting completely out of synch in each of the World Wars of this century. An
example of propaganda dictating policy, rather than vice versa, with disasterou
s consequences comes at the closing stages of the First World War. When Lloyd Ge
orge decided to create a specific Department of Enemy Propaganda in February 191
8 under the controversial direction of Lord Northcliffe, he did so at a time whe
n Allied war aims towards the Central Powers were only just beginning to be form
ulated. Following Lloyd George's announcement of the most comprehensive declarat
ion of British War Aims to date on 5 January 1918, President Wilson duly announc
ed his Fourteen Points in the following month. At last, Allied propagandists had
something to present. Northcliffe and his staff decided to target the Dual Mona
rchy in the first instance, as the weak lin in the Central Powers' chain, for wh
ich Cabinet approval was given on 5 March with the proviso that 'no promise shou
ld be made to the subject races in Austria which we could not redeem' [cab 23/5,
359(6)]. The problem was that, beyond the generalities of the Wilson and Lloyd G
eorge speeches concerning national self-determination for the 'oppressed nationa
lities', the field operational requirements of propaganda needed a good deal mor
e than vague promises of liberation if Crewe House's propaganda was to stand a r
eal chance of promoting internal disaffection and chaos amongs the Slavs, Poles,
Rumanians and the like, which was felt to be the key to the underming of Austri
a-Hungary. When such details were not forthcoming from the policy-makers, the pr
opagandists went ahead anyway and made all sorts of promises about the post-war
settlement that were yet to be agreed by the Allied governments. As a result, ha
ving conducted what was regarded as a highly effective propaganda campaign again
st Austria-Hungary, when the Paris Peace Conference was convened in 1919, repres
entatives of the subject nationalities turned up clutching all sorts of leaflets
and demanding that the promises therein be fulfilled. The result was an almight
y mess which not only affected the creation of the newly independent states of C
entral and Eastern Europe but which also helped to enhance the disillusionment o
f the Italians who promptly witnessed a swing to the right and Mussolini's rapid
ascendancy. The extreme conclusion to be drawn is that, due largely to British
propaganda having been conducted in advance of policy during 1918, all sorts of
half-worked out and compromised solutions had to be found that merely served to
destabilise Eastern Europe during the inter-war period. Well you might say that,
but I couldn't possibly comment. Mark Cornwall might well do so in his session
on this topic.
An example of the reverse happening, namely of policy-decisions of monumental im
portance being made without any reference to the problems of presentation, can b
e found in the Second World War. When the Allied policy of Unconditional Surrend
er was announced almost, it has to be said, as an afterthought at the Casablanca
Conference of January 1943, Allied propagandists knew their policy-makers had h
anded Joseph Goebbels a propaganda bombshell. No longer would it be possible for
them to do what their predecessors in the Great War had fought so hard and succ
essfully to do, namely to divide the German people from their leaders. The annou
ncement of Unconditional Surrender all but suspended the debate on war aims at h
ome but, more significantly, it enabled Goebbels to unite the German people behi
nd the Nazi Party like never before, especially in the aftermath of Stalingrad,
and it was an essential prerequiste of Goebbels' Total War speech at the Sportsp
alast on 18 February 1943. It enabled him to convert the experience of indiscrim
inate allied bombing (called 'strategic bombing' by the British and Americans) i
nto a perceptional reality, namely by pointing out that, in so far as the Allies
were concerned, all Germans were regarded as Nazis and that, as Vansittartism h
ad suggested all along without it ever being overt government policy, the only g
ood German was a dead German. Goebbels could now legitimately call for an all-ou
t German commitment to the Nazi war effort safely armed with an Allied assurance
that Germans and Nazis would all be treated the same way, and so the only cours
e remaining was for the German people to throw in their lot with the destiny of
the Nazi Party. No doubt David Welch will have something to say on this aspect i
n his workshop session.
As you might have gathered, I am taking my examples mainly from the twentieth ce
ntury simply because that is where my chief research has been conducted. Many of
you are far better equipped to judge whether my generalisations can be applied
to earlier periods. It is, however, important to recognise that propaganda has b
ecome a dirty word, at least in the western democracies, only since the First Wo
rld War. Before 1914, propaganda meant simply the means by which an adherent of
a religious doctrine disseminated his ideas to a wider audience. The religious c
onnotations, of course, derive from its 17th Century semantic origins in the con
text of the Counter Reformation although, as a process of persuasion, propaganda
is as old as human communication itself. Since the First World War, however, an
d chiefly because of the British reputation for successfully organising this old
wartime weapon using newly available communications technologies, the meaning h
as changed somewhat and has assumed all sorts of perjorative connotations.
This was largely because of a massive post-World War I reaction to the British w
artime use of propaganda on the part of its two principal 'victims' or targets,
namely Germany and the United States. General Ludendorff wrote in his memoirs of
how the German armies had been hypnotised as if like a rabbit by a snake. How f
ar British propaganda was in fact successful either in bringing the United State
s into the war in 1917 or in defeating the Central Powers the following year nec
essarily remains the subject of much historical debate. Mark Cornwall, for examp
le, has added considerably to that debate through his work on the role of Allied
propaganda in helping to undermine Austria-Hungary in 1917-18. Scholars such as
Mike Sanders, Nicholas Reeves, Peter Buitenhaus and Nick Hiley have all added t
o our understanding of how British propaganda operated in allied and neutral cou
ntries during and before the same period. This modern scholarship has helped to
expose various significant contemporary and near contemporary notions that had r
emained firmly in place until their work during the past decade. Although they h
ave suggested, through their application of the historical method, that British
propaganda by itself may not have been quite as successful as contemporaries bel
ieved in achieving its various wartime aims, the real importance of their work l
ies in its analysis of propaganda in conjunction with policy.
What they have also done to varying degrees is to provide a variety of possible
measurements for that most difficult of historical problems, namely how to asses
s the effectiveness of propaganda. Even so, in the absence of any direct evidenc
e of how the human mind thinks, they have had to resort to measuring tangible ou
tput rather than behaviour - how many column inches were given over to a particu
lar topic or how many prisoners of war possessed propaganda pamphlets, for examp
le. Even here, we fall short of definitive evidence - we still don't know how ma
ny of the readers who read the column inches actually behaved in the desired way
as a result, and even when we look at specific issues such as recruitment campa
igns, we cannot categorically say that X number of people signed up because of t
his or that poster. And prisoners of war are notorious for saying what they thin
k their captors want to hear rather than what they really think. I can't offer a
ny solutions to this problem, especially for periods in which the records of pub
lic opinion, limited they even they often are, are few and far between. The work
that has been done on propaganda policy and output, on techniques and methods,
needs to be continued if we are to understand what policy-makers wanted audience
s to believe, but what those audiences actually believed as a result is a minefi
eld loved by undergraduates because of its fertility as a field for often counte
r-factual speculation. Perhaps one of my own got it right when, after arguing vi
gorously for the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda to a group who kept saying 'pr
ove it worked', she replied 'prove it didn't work'.
I have found that the first problem is how to overcome almost a genetically inco
ded suspicion of the word 'propaganda'. To understand this, we must look at the
propagandistic uses to which the word itself was put in order to appreciate that
its changed meaning has not served historians positively, particularly in Victo
rious America and Defeated Germany. In Weimar Germany, the notion that German ar
mies had not been defeated on the field of battle but had been forced to submit
due to a collapse in domestic morale - a stab-in-the-back caused by Allied propa
ganda - was seized upon by The Disenchanted, and most notably by Adolf Hitler wh
o devoted two chapters of Mein Kampf to the study of British propaganda. His con
clusion was that 'all that matters is propaganda'. Rightly or wrongly, the birth
of the greatest propaganda state in history was conceived on the leaflet-strewn
battlefields of the First World War and Nazi Germany turned the meaning of prop
aganda into a whole new, all-embracing, Total Seduction.
In the United States during the same period, where the study of propaganda was b
lossoming as an academic subject through the works of Harold Lasswell, Edward Be
rnays and Walter Lippmann, the notion that the United States had somehow been du
ped into entering the war in 1917 by the skillful use of British propagandists o
perating out of Wellington House was seized upon by isolationist elements who ar
gued that America must quarantine itself from the evils of modern propaganda if
it was to avoid future entanglements. In 1938 the Foreign Agents Registration Ac
t was passed outlawing the unregistered dissemination of foreign propaganda in A
merica and, if the message was not clear, Americans need have looked no further
than the preface of H.C. Peterson's timely 1939 book Propaganda for War: the Cam
paign for American Neutrality, 1914-17.
In Britain itself, all this was greeted with embarassement and puzzlement. But a
lthough the British chose to dismantle almost in its entirity their wartime prop
aganda machinery, the emergence of a genuine pluralistic democracy following the
Representation of the People Act of 1918 and the Equal Franchise Act of 10 year
s later against the backdrop of advancements in the new mass media of radio and
film saw British political parties develop new and more sophisticated propaganda
techniques for persuading the massively expanded electorate to adopt a democrat
ic course rather than emulating the example of the peoples of the Soviet Union,
Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Never before had so much information been availa
ble to so many people with so many means open to them to express their point of
view. Never before had their opinions counted for so much in the survival of the
state or, conversely, in its destruction. Never before had there been quite suc
h a need for governments of all kinds to devote themselves to the struggle for t
he hearts and minds of the politicised masses.
For the British, propaganda had been a useful wartime weapon but now, in peaceti
me, it fostered the illusion that there was no role for such activity amidst a c
limate epitomised by Lord Ponsonby's assertion that 'the injection of the poison
of hatred into men's mind's by means of falsehood is a greater evil in wartime
than the actual loss of life. The defilement of the human soul is worse than the
destruction of the human body'.
So the stigma remained in a nation which had proved itself to be the masters of
the craft between 1914 and 1918, or at least had provided the model upon which a
ll other modern propaganda systems were to be based. In fact, by fostering the i
llusion that propaganda was an 'un-English' activity which had no place in a mod
ern democracy, the British were conducting the most effective propaganda campaig
n of all. They could do this because they had long been masters of the siamese t
win of propaganda: censorship. Censorship, the deliberate omission of undesirabl
e information or opinions, is just as essential to the process of persuasion as
is the credibility of the information and opinions which are actually being empl
oyed. Again, there is a tendency to regard censorship as a rather sinister activ
ity, implying something to hide or the admission of a bad cause. But, as the neg
ative aspect to the process of persuasion, it lies at the very root of any attem
pts to present a given case in a desired manner; it is, in other words, not just
what is said but what is not said which is, and has always been, recognised as
an important element in achieving or sustaining power.
In his discussions with Socrates at the time of the Peloponnesian War, Plato was
concerned to censor adverse images of Greece's spiritual mentors stating: 'Nor
can we permit stories of wars and plots and battles among the gods; they are qui
te untrue, and if we want our prospective guardians to believe that quarrelsomen
ess is one of the worst of evils, we must certainly not .... tell them the tales
about the many and various quarrels between gods and heroes and their friends a
nd relations'. And, even if Plato did not see the inherent contradiction in this
statement, he returned to this theme in The Republic when he stated that 'the p
oets must be told to speak well of that other world. The gloomy descriptions the
y now give must be forbidden, not only as untrue, but as injurous to our future
warriors'. In advocating censorship as an essential part of the democratic proce
ss, Plato left it to his pupil Aristotle to develop another fundamental axiom of
modern democratic propaganda, namely his statement in Rhetoric that 'the truth
tends to win out over the false'.
John Grierson was a notable thinker about the relationship between propaganda an
d modern democracy, stating that the secret of Britain's success was due to the
belief that, 'out of her liberal tradition, telling the truth must command goodw
ill everywhere, and in the long run, defeat the distortions and boastings of the
enemy....[in the] hope that an appeal to the Platonic principle of justice will
triumph'. Grierson was, of course, writing at a time when, thanks to technologi
cal innovations in the mass media, propagandists like himself had at their dispo
sal an unprecedented degree of social penetration.
And the extent to which propaganda has been able to widen its potential audience
is, of course, directly related to the availability of communications technolog
y. If the social advancement of human beings is linked directly to the developme
nt of mobility, from two legs to the wheel to the sail, internal combustion, fli
ght and telecommunications, then the evolution of propaganda is linked to speech
, architecture, printing, telegraphy, radio telegraphy, cinematography and compu
ters. An understanding of the technology of communications is therfore vital if
we are to appreciate the way in which, as I have already suggested, say images f
or example, are creatively utilised and transmitted for persuasive purposes. Whe
n images were confined to specific locations, whether it be a cave drawing, a st
atue or a painting, their propagandistic employment was limited to the capacity
of an audience to visit that location. Mobility changes the nature of the game.
Hence the importance of coins as the supreme form of mobile propaganda in the an
cient world - although we should not gain much from analysing images of ancient
Greek vases since they were the tin cans of antiquity; what was contained in the
m was of much greater significance than any by-products of artistic or cultural
achievement which their decorative images may have projected. But coins were val
uable and thus valued and their message could be spread wherever trade flourishe
d. Alexander the Great's coins for example not only reflected his wealth but, th
rough the use of religious symbolism, his deified greatness. Julius Caesar was o
ne of the first Romans to have his portrait stamped on coins during his actual l
ifetime, rather than posthumously as hitherto, because he recognised the importa
nce of money as not only a motivational factor in sustaining the support of his
troops during the Civil War but also as a convenient method of reminding them wh
ich side their bread was buttered. And the Emperor Augustus continued the tradit
ion even though he was as physically as ugly a man as you will find, you would n
ever guess it from the idealised portraits and statues of him that were as widel
y disseminated throughout the known world as images of the Pope are on souvinir
stalls today.
But it is the creative utilisation of communications technology which gives it i
ts propagandistic significance. Even News, that ostensibly most bland of commodi
ties, is subject to creative processes which determine its shape and structure.
Historically, policy-makers have employed artists and architects, poets and prea
chers, to transfer their intentions to a wider audience. Iconography, of static
or moving images, was of course perfected by the Medieval Church which owed its
very influence to the utilisation of simplified images and messages, backed up b
y the threat of Eternal Damnation, and I am sure Ann Laurence will have some int
eresting things to say about this in her session on English visual images in Ire
land in 1641.
The need to suggest quite complex messages in the form of simplistic, readily id
entifiable, images and to transmit those images and messages to wider audiences
was, of course, revolutionised with the advent of printing in the 15th and 16th
centuries. Johann Gutenberg's invention served as a quantum leap for propaganda
as the shift from script to print was accompanied by the development and the com
pass and gunpowder, all of which served, in Francis Bacon's words, to change the
appearance of the whole world. Armed with the new artillery of the printing pre
sses, the Reformation was unleashed across Europe as a revolutionary movement wh
ich fuelled the agitators who were convinced that printing was Heaven sent in th
at it permitted author to speak directly to reader without the aid of the interm
ediary interpretor in the pulpit. Not that that principal medium of medieval pro
paganda went into decline - quite the reverse in fact as priests used the newly
available texts as guidebooks for their ideological messages shouted out from th
e pulpits in a world being subjected increasingly to competetive ideologies. Bob
Scribner is in a far better position to tell you more about this in his session
on Saturday.
Propaganda is invariably judged to be an activity which somehow forces people to
think and behave in a way they might not otherwise have done had they been left
to their own devices, and that the desired behaviour somehow serves only the in
terests of the propagandist. I would like to suggest that because we have yet to
come up with an effective method of measuring the precise impact of propaganda,
we do not know whether it succeeds in forcing people to think and behave in a g
iven way. We suspect that it does this, but we do not know for sure. It is this
suspicion borne of ignorance which gives the process a bad name and we would do
well, therefore, to return to its original meaning. Moreover, it is important to
recognise that propaganda can serve the interests of the target audience, as no
doubt Virginia Berridge's session on AIDS will demonstrate.
Whether that campaign succeeded or not, it has generated extreme views about the
techniques it employed. Depending on which side you are on, it was either too s
oft or too hard. Its use of scare tactics fell short of atrocity propaganda, alt
hough the message is the very stuff of that particular phenomenon. Perhaps it ca
nnot yet do this because the moral issues are yet to be resolved. The point abou
t atrocity propaganda historically is that it is a time-honoured device for esta
blishing and maintaining the moral high ground against a targetted enemy. We are
already seeing the beginnings of its use in the Gulf Crisis with spasmodically
leaked reports of Iraqui behaviour in Kumait. At the dawn of recorded history, i
nterestingly in the same area, the ancient Assyrians erected stone monuments at
strategic points depicting the brutal behaviour of their troops in battle as a w
arning to others who might accordingly think twice about attacking them. Atrocit
y propaganda is therefore a double-edged sword. On the one hand it is designed t
o frighten opponents and on the other to justify why we fight.
If we look at the Crusades, we can see how it was used to paint a particular ima
ge of the enemy who must be destroyed. When Pope Urban II called for a 'great st
irring of heart' to launch the First Crusade at Clermont in 1095, the Saracens,
according to Robert the Monk's version, had circumcized the Christians in the Ho
ly City of Christ, spread their blood on the altars or poured it it into baptism
al fonts. He went on to describe in graphic detail all sorts of horrors and ende
d with the words: 'What shall I say of the appalling violation of women, of whic
h it is more evil to speak than to keep silent'? Similar efforts have been made
throughout the centuries, with the Thirty Years War being particularly notable f
or this kind of propaganda.
Atrocity propaganda has always relied heavily upon rumour. But in the twentieth
century, we have become increasingly more sceptical about its credibility. Durin
g the First World War, the Bryce Report was at pains to 'document' testimony to
German atrocities committed in Belgium, even though it kept the word 'alleged' i
n its title. The Amenian massacres, the death of Edith Cavell, the burning of li
brary at Louvin, the sinking of the Lusitania - all these were presented in a ma
nner designed to portray a particular image of 'Prussian militarism' and Hunnish
barabarity which could provide Allied propagandists with the essential focus th
ey required to sustain their moral offensive against the enemy, largely on the h
ome front it must be stressed. Robert Graves described in Goodbye to All That th
e huge gap in perception of the nature of the enemy which existed between a civi
lian population bombarded with atrocity propaganda and returning soldiers who ha
d actually experienced combat at the front line. Perhaps the most infamous atroc
ity story of the First World War was the so-called 'corpse conversion factory',
rumours of which began to surface in 1917 based upon the absence of war graves a
t Vimy Ridge, the sighting of a train loaded with the corpses of dead German sol
diers and a report of a Berlin factory boiling down kadavers to make soap. Two a
nd two was put together to make five and even the Foreign Secretary concluded fr
om the evidence before him that 'while it should not be desirable that His Majes
ty's Government should take any responsibility as regards the story pending the
receipt of further information, there does not in view of the many atrocious act
ions of which the Germans have been guilt appear to be any reason why it should
not be true'.
It would be too easy to conclude that Mr Balfour had simply swallowed his own co
untry's propaganda. He was able to draw his conclusions because of the prevailin
g climate of the war, even though afterwards countless investigations were unabl
e to verify any of the atrocity stories beyond those usually associated with com
bat. Lord Ponsonby's influential book, from which my earlier quotation of his wa
s take, was responsible for discrediting their use and Parliament backed him up.
The level of public scepticism was raised to such a point that when stories beg
an to emerge in the 1930s and 1940s about the Nazi treatment of the Jews, there
was a general disinclination to believe what were thought to be simply more rumo
urs.
It took the filmed evidence to verify the full scale of the Holocaust. If anybod
y had had any doubts about declaring war on Germany in 1939, footage from Belsen
, Dachau and Auschwitz could provide no better justification for why we had foug
ht. And with the advent of television and the transmission of instantaneous pict
ures, propagandists might have thought that now had an ideal instrument of atroc
ity propaganda. Well, in a sense they did, but not in the way they had thought.
Images of a Vietcong suspect being executed by Saigon Police Chief Loan during t
he Tet Offensive, or of a little naked girl screaming in pain from her napalm bu
rns may be the very stuff of which atrocity propaganda is made, but the problem
was that such atrocities were being committed by the American side, not by the e
nemy and was being witnessed in full colour on 100 million television sets throu
ghout America.
In 1970, Robin Day stated:
Television has a built-in bias towards depicting any conflict in terms of the vi
sible brutality. You can say, of course, that that is what war is - brutality, c
onflict, starvation and combat. All I am saying is that there are other issues w
hich cause these things to come about, and television does not always deal with
them adequately....One wonders if in future a democracy which has uninhibited te
levision coverage in every home will ever be able to fight a war, however just.
In 1982, Margaret Thatcher was able to answer this question. Strict restrictions
on reporting the conflict, even for the limited numbers of journalists sailing
with the Task Force who anyway quicky began to identify with their military trav
elling companions, combined with a rigourous censorship system forced the BBC to
use Argentinian pictures, which promptly met the wrath of the Prime Minister wh
o accused it of being 'unacceptably even handed'. There was clearly going to be
no possible Vietnam effect in the Falklands War. Given the frenzied patriotism o
f the British press, there was little likelihood of this anyway.
If I can do anything sensible with this lecture, I should therefore like to de-s
tigmatise the word itself and to re-establish 'propaganda' in a sense to its pre
-1914 meaning. Propaganda is a means to an end. As a process of persuasion, usua
lly a deliberate process, it matters not for purposes of definition whether the
desired behaviour results from the effort; that is the difference between succes
sful and unsuccessful propaganda. Propaganda is simply an attempt to influence t
he attitudes of a specific audience, through the use of facts, fiction, argument
or suggestion - often supported by the suppression of inconsistent material - w
ith the calculated purpose of instilling in the recipient certain beliefs, value
s or convictions which will serve the interests of the source, usually by produc
ing a desired line of action. Success should be measured against intent and we w
ould do well to avoid such issues as to whether the means justifies the end. We
are chiefly concerned here at this conference, as its title suggests, with means
, with propaganda methods such as rumours and news, and, when we consider ends,
I suspect that we will once again encounter the inevitable brick wall encountere
d by all historians of propaganda, namely how to correlate the connection betwee
n propaganda output and human behavior.
We will never know for certain whether any given behaviour might have been diffe
rent if more or less propaganda had been directed at the target audiences. For t
he second half of the twentieth century, we do at least have access to greater r
ecords of public opinion against which we can at least begin to measure the succ
ess of any given propaganda campaign, provided the records of policy and propaga
nda output are available to us. But public opinion as a concept remains an amorp
hous amalgam of individual opinions which in itself provides all sorts of method
ological problems. Perhaps we need more microcosmic studies of the kind relating
to local campaigns before we can draw more general conclusions about the macroc
osm. In the meantime, we would do well to stick to analysing techniques of persu
asion as a means of providing us with an indication of the sort of issues which
leaders and interest groups feel they need to transmit to a wider audience, and
why. The analysis of propaganda can tell us much about such people, how they per
ceived themselves and how they wanted others to perceive them. It can tell us mu
ch about how predominant ideologies tend to win out over minority representation
s, and the methods they employ in the process, such as censorship and the manipu
lation of such factors as news and rumour. It can, in other words, tell us much
about ourselves.
The media, by their very nature, are instruments of persuasion; they are not, an
d never can be, simply objective purveyors of information. The very process of s
electing the words or images, their inclusion or omission and even their locatio
n on the page or the screen, is part of the process of persuasion that is propag
anda. There is nothing to fear in this as such although, historically, it is the
power to mould opinion, to invite criticism or create consensus, that has made
governments through the ages attempt to control what media were available. It wa
s Napoleon who admitted after closing down nearly every newspaper in France that
'if I had a free press I wouldn't last more than three months'. Restricting the
flow of news and information is an attempt to restrict opinion. This is, howeve
r, really the admission of a bad cause. It reflects a fear of the public and usu
ally derives from an assumption that the public is gullible and highly susceptib
le to persuasive influences. As the power of the public increases, so also do of
ficial attempts to influence or control the principal means by which the public
is informed in an effort to co-ordinate the views of governors and governed. How
successfully this is achieved, it is increasingly felt, depends upon the utilis
ation of modern public relations techniques, advertising agencies and press agen
ts. And, perhaps inevitably, the sheer increase in the volume of information ava
ilable has also led to an increased use of censorship.
The alleged historical functions of propaganda have been to promote homogeneity
of thought and deed and to restrict the development of the individual's capacity
to think and act for him or herself. But, as I have attempted to show today, it
is the motives behind the propaganda which deserve closer historical scrutiny,
not the propaganda itself. What we really need is more propaganda, not less. We
need more attempts to influence our opinions and to arouse our active participat
ion in social and political processes. We need more attempts to involve us in ma
tters which are important to all of us and not just to a select few who have his
torically utilised propaganda for self-serving purposes. In an ever more complex
information society, this is more desirable than allowing a return to a world i
n which a little was enough, and a little knowledge was enough to keep us in the
position into which others found it more desirable. It is also more inevitable
with the proliferation of media technology which provides us as individuals with
increased access to ever more information that can either prove our individual
salvation or our collective downfall.
But there are several important qualifications. Increased propaganda must be acc
ompanied by increased education. We must, for example, remove the mystique of th
e 'hidden persuaders' by analysing their historical employment of propaganda tec
hniques so that we can understand how our perceptions have been, and are still b
eing influenced by them. We must, in other words, first understand the medium an
d then look at how the message was transmitted and to do this we need increased
education as to how the medium works and what the message means. I can think of
no better justification for the historical analysis of propaganda in conferences
such as this.
Secondly, increased propaganda must be accompanied by an increased access to inf
ormation upon which educated opinions can be formed. It is unacceptable to allow
public opinion to be any longer bombarded with news and views from a restricted
number of controlled sources. For every propaganda source, there must be a coun
ter-propagandist source. And, through education, the target will be better equip
ped to evaluate the merits of those differing cases. There is no point emulating
Canute and trying to hold back the mounting tidal wave of information and persu
asion; telecommunications and digital data technology already provide us with mo
re news and views than ever before, and the process is not going to stop suddenl
y before the next century. The challenge, therefore, is to ensure that no single
propaganda source gains a monopoly over the information and images that shape o
ur thoughts. Otherwise we will remain susceptible to the tyrannies of the hidden
persuaders.