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Propaganda from Thucydides to Thatcher by Prof Taylor


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 Britain's conference in 1992.



Some time ago, an American information technologist discussing the potential uses of computers and inter-active television in educating children declared that an individual reading one issue of the New York Times from cover to cover today was 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 afternoon, I can really only assume the posture of a contemporary of Columbus who reads 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 sessions over the next few days, and perhaps to raise a few questions for our collective deliberation. If I misrepresent the intentions of colleagues delivering more specialised papers, I can only apologise in advance.

In a sense, the title of this conference is both a little too specific and a little too vague (I can talk with the title of this lecture). Rumour, News and Propaganda could all in themselves make excellent subjects for conferences as separate 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 undoubtedly show later this afternoon when he looks at the type of personality cults promoted by the Hapsburgs and that Peter Burke will reinforce when he looks tomorrow at the all embracing efforts to which Louis XIV was prepared to go in manufacturing his image as The Sun King. Whether we shall therefore be able to confine ourselves solely to rumours and news without discussing other techniques such as art and architecture, or such other key factors as the role of censorship, disinformation, technological availability and so on I very much doubt.

Nonetheless, Rumours and News are techniques of Propaganda that imply opposite ends of a spectrum of persuasion which ranges from Truth at the one side to Falsehood at the other. This was certainly the interpretation adopted in the Second World War when Allied propagandists working in the Political Warfare Executive employed 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 propagandist purpose and those which are generated almost like spontaneous combustion. It is the difference, I suppose, between deliberate and accidental propaganda, and I shall be confining myself largely to talking about deliberate propaganda - 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, especially in wartime; indeed Goebbels described rumour-mongering as 'the soul opening its bowels', a phrase for which he was apparently for some strange reason very proud of inventing [Balfour, p191]. While certain rumours have always resulted from perhaps inevitable speculations reflecting the sort of concerns which agitate people at times of crisis, it was the propagandists' job to counter their adverse effect at home on the one hand ('Careless Talk Costs Lives' and 'The Silent Column') but they also recognised their value as weapons of psychological warfare and strategic deception on the other (as in the case of Operation FORTITUDE accompanying the D-Day landings). The underlying assumption was that because there was a limit to what could be done with spontaneously generated rumours, this very limitation conversely made rumours valuable additional weapons of offense if they could be specifically deployed in the service of the war effort, and particularly 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 manufactured for propagandistic purposes. One need only recall the action of Themistocles at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC who circulated a rumour which he knew would reach Xerxes that suggested that most of his outnumbered Greek troops were about to flee. According to Herodotus, Xerxes promptly deployed half of his fleet to trap the supposedly deserting Greeks, whereupon it encountered Themistocles' navy on terms much more favourable to the Athenian commander. Herodotus, interestingly, 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 because 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 commodity, is influenced by a whole host of complex processes which determine not just 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 not only has to become known about or reported in the first instance, but it is then subjected to all sorts of editorial criteria concerning the prominence and emphasis 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. Its significance in shaping our perception of that 'reality' has been brilliantly charted by Philip Schlessinger in his study of BBC News Broadcasts, Putting 'Reality' Together. Back in the 1930s, the American journalist Will Irwin did the same 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 news 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 been 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 feel that events of immediate importance to themselves receive only inadequate or spasmodic coverage in the western media, much recent scholarship by political scientists has pointed to notions of 'media imperialism' and 'cultural hegemony' which serve, through the west's control of news and information technology and distribution, not just to perpetuate the status quo but to actually increase the gap between the have and have-not nations. This is done by controlling the news flowing in and out of the Underdeveloped world, picking up only on such events as disasters, and thus providing a distorted - usually unfavourable - view that hardly 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 organisations, a particular type of image tends to be created that serves the interests of western media organisations more than it does the national self-interests 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 propaganda, and the processes by which news historically has been selected and distributed 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 persuade in a world where people crave understanding of the confusion and complexities around them. Any successful propaganda effort, therfore, must be able to control 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 their employment of the truth. Even so, black propaganda also needs to be based upon at least a semblence of credibility if is not to backfire at some stage. It was 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 to tackle the issues raised by the whole question of news selection. Through their empirical work into sources from a wide variety of viewpoints, they are constantly aware of the significance of omissions and bias. No matter how hard they try to be objective in their conclusions, they recognise that there is really no such thing as complete objectivity because there is no such thing as an historical certainty. Ultimately, because there are always more archives to search, and that 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 are ideally placed to scrutinise the media of persuasion not just because propaganda is inherently biased but also because the media themselves are by definition selective and thus inherently biased as well. The fine line which historians have 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' paper on history as propaganda after this introductory lecture.

But, surprisingly, modern historians have really only just begun to appreciate some of the difficulties involved in evaluating how this bias works. When, for example, historians began some 20 years ago seriously to investigate film as a rich source of historical evidence unique to the twentieth century, the pioneers (including Ken Ward, who was among the first to teach the subject seriously in a British University) initially concentrated on newsreels and documentaries, perhaps partly out of caution since that other principal type of film - feature films - comprised largely of works of fiction. Given the natural preoccupation of historians with sources, non-fiction film offered a more familiar entree into the brave 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 simply windows on the past; although they used actuality footage, they did not provide us with unbiased records. They were the end products of a production process that was affected by the same sort of biases affecting other, more traditional, 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 believed that the camera never lied when he described his task as the 'creative treatment of actuality'. And when historians such as Nicholas Pronay and Tony Aldgate began to investigate newsreels they too began to show just exactly how far these supposedly simple visual newspapers went beyond mere recorders of events. When the likes of Pierre Sorlin, Charles Wenden and Ken Short turned to feature films, they quickly learned that 'there was no intrinsic difference between "fiction" and "factual" films as records of mass communication and that there was no distinction in terms of importance made between them by the politicians, civil servants 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 communicator rested on its repetetive and cumulative ability to emphasise stereotypes; the impact of a single film was limited compared to to the constant repetition 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 World War.

The point about this is that historians have only recently begun to understand the inherently persuasive nature of the media, and particularly the cinema, although greater attention is now being given to the broadcast media of radio and television. 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 meaning of the message rather than the operational workings of the medium. This would 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 need to first understand the nature of the medium - how it works as an interaction of words and images, how camera positions can affect the perceptions of the viewer, 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 television, one way to do this is to learn the basic skills of the professional communicators, to actually make films. I don't mean appearing on Newsnight or even presenting 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 newspaper editor. I mean actually making a film, from idea through to research through to final edit. Some of you can no doubt detect a plug coming. It was for this purpose that the InterUniversity History Film Consortium was established back in 1968 and several historians who have taken advantage of its avowed aims are here today. 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 lecture, 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 commentary, 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 propaganda is a practical process of persuasion and, as a practical process, it is an inherently neutral concept. It must be defined by reference to intent. We should discard any notions of propaganda being 'good' or 'bad', and use those terms merely to describe effective or ineffective propaganda. Value judgements about the process are more profitably directed towards the motives which lie behind it since, 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 source. It is essential therefore not to look at Propaganda in a vacuum, but always by reference to the ideological and policy-making processes that prompt its employment. 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 employment of popular culture over a sustained period of time will be a subject addressed by Nick Hiley in his session. After all, what is propaganda if not the presentation 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 therefore 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 consider as being a recipe for success or failure in our historical case studies. There are however two very good examples of the significant dangers of this process 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 disasterous consequences comes at the closing stages of the First World War. When Lloyd George decided to create a specific Department of Enemy Propaganda in February 1918 under the controversial direction of Lord Northcliffe, he did so at a time when Allied war aims towards the Central Powers were only just beginning to be formulated. Following Lloyd George's announcement of the most comprehensive declaration of British War Aims to date on 5 January 1918, President Wilson duly announced his Fourteen Points in the following month. At last, Allied propagandists had something to present. Northcliffe and his staff decided to target the Dual Monarchy in the first instance, as the weak lin in the Central Powers' chain, for which Cabinet approval was given on 5 March with the proviso that 'no promise should 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 George speeches concerning national self-determination for the 'oppressed nationalities', the field operational requirements of propaganda needed a good deal more than vague promises of liberation if Crewe House's propaganda was to stand a real 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 Austria-Hungary. When such details were not forthcoming from the policy-makers, the propagandists 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, having conducted what was regarded as a highly effective propaganda campaign against Austria-Hungary, when the Paris Peace Conference was convened in 1919, representatives of the subject nationalities turned up clutching all sorts of leaflets and demanding that the promises therein be fulfilled. The result was an almighty mess which not only affected the creation of the newly independent states of Central and Eastern Europe but which also helped to enhance the disillusionment of 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 importance being made without any reference to the problems of presentation, can be found in the Second World War. When the Allied policy of Unconditional Surrender 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 handed 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 successfully to do, namely to divide the German people from their leaders. The announcement of Unconditional Surrender all but suspended the debate on war aims at home but, more significantly, it enabled Goebbels to unite the German people behind 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 Sportspalast on 18 February 1943. It enabled him to convert the experience of indiscriminate allied bombing (called 'strategic bombing' by the British and Americans) into 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 had suggested all along without it ever being overt government policy, the only good German was a dead German. Goebbels could now legitimately call for an all-out 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 course 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 in his workshop session.

As you might have gathered, I am taking my examples mainly from the twentieth century 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 become a dirty word, at least in the western democracies, only since the First World 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 connotations, of course, derive from its 17th Century semantic origins in the context of the Counter Reformation although, as a process of persuasion, propaganda is as old as human communication itself. Since the First World War, however, and chiefly because of the British reputation for successfully organising this old wartime weapon using newly available communications technologies, the meaning has 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 wartime 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 far British propaganda was in fact successful either in bringing the United States into the war in 1917 or in defeating the Central Powers the following year necessarily remains the subject of much historical debate. Mark Cornwall, for example, 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 to our understanding of how British propaganda operated in allied and neutral countries during and before the same period. This modern scholarship has helped to expose various significant contemporary and near contemporary notions that had remained firmly in place until their work during the past decade. Although they have suggested, through their application of the historical method, that British propaganda by itself may not have been quite as successful as contemporaries believed in achieving its various wartime aims, the real importance of their work lies 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 assess the effectiveness of propaganda. Even so, in the absence of any direct evidence of how the human mind thinks, they have had to resort to measuring tangible output rather than behaviour - how many column inches were given over to a particular topic or how many prisoners of war possessed propaganda pamphlets, for example. Even here, we fall short of definitive evidence - we still don't know how many 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 campaigns, we cannot categorically say that X number of people signed up because of this or that poster. And prisoners of war are notorious for saying what they think their captors want to hear rather than what they really think. I can't offer any solutions to this problem, especially for periods in which the records of public 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 audiences to believe, but what those audiences actually believed as a result is a minefield loved by undergraduates because of its fertility as a field for often counter-factual speculation. Perhaps one of my own got it right when, after arguing vigorously for the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda to a group who kept saying 'prove it worked', she replied 'prove it didn't work'.

I have found that the first problem is how to overcome almost a genetically incoded 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 Victorious America and Defeated Germany. In Weimar Germany, the notion that German armies 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 propaganda - was seized upon by The Disenchanted, and most notably by Adolf Hitler who devoted two chapters of Mein Kampf to the study of British propaganda. His conclusion 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 propaganda into a whole new, all-embracing, Total Seduction.

In the United States during the same period, where the study of propaganda was blossoming as an academic subject through the works of Harold Lasswell, Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann, the notion that the United States had somehow been duped into entering the war in 1917 by the skillful use of British propagandists operating out of Wellington House was seized upon by isolationist elements who argued that America must quarantine itself from the evils of modern propaganda if it was to avoid future entanglements. In 1938 the Foreign Agents Registration Act was passed outlawing the unregistered dissemination of foreign propaganda in America 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 Campaign for American Neutrality, 1914-17.

In Britain itself, all this was greeted with embarassement and puzzlement. But although the British chose to dismantle almost in its entirity their wartime propaganda machinery, the emergence of a genuine pluralistic democracy following the Representation of the People Act of 1918 and the Equal Franchise Act of 10 years 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 democratic 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 available 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 such a need for governments of all kinds to devote themselves to the struggle for the hearts and minds of the politicised masses.

For the British, propaganda had been a useful wartime weapon but now, in peacetime, it fostered the illusion that there was no role for such activity amidst a climate 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 all other modern propaganda systems were to be based. In fact, by fostering the illusion that propaganda was an 'un-English' activity which had no place in a modern democracy, the British were conducting the most effective propaganda campaign of all. They could do this because they had long been masters of the siamese twin of propaganda: censorship. Censorship, the deliberate omission of undesirable 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 employed. Again, there is a tendency to regard censorship as a rather sinister activity, implying something to hide or the admission of a bad cause. But, as the negative aspect to the process of persuasion, it lies at the very root of any attempts 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 quite untrue, and if we want our prospective guardians to believe that quarrelsomeness 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 and 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 poets must be told to speak well of that other world. The gloomy descriptions they 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 process, 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 and 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 goodwill 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 technological innovations in the mass media, propagandists like himself had at their disposal 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 technology. If the social advancement of human beings is linked directly to the development of mobility, from two legs to the wheel to the sail, internal combustion, flight and telecommunications, then the evolution of propaganda is linked to speech, architecture, printing, telegraphy, radio telegraphy, cinematography and computers. 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 for example, are creatively utilised and transmitted for persuasive purposes. When images were confined to specific locations, whether it be a cave drawing, a statue 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 ancient 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 them was of much greater significance than any by-products of artistic or cultural achievement which their decorative images may have projected. But coins were valuable and thus valued and their message could be spread wherever trade flourished. Alexander the Great's coins for example not only reflected his wealth but, through the use of religious symbolism, his deified greatness. Julius Caesar was one of the first Romans to have his portrait stamped on coins during his actual lifetime, rather than posthumously as hitherto, because he recognised the importance 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 which side their bread was buttered. And the Emperor Augustus continued the tradition even though he was as physically as ugly a man as you will find, you would never guess it from the idealised portraits and statues of him that were as widely 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 its propagandistic significance. Even News, that ostensibly most bland of commodities, is subject to creative processes which determine its shape and structure. Historically, policy-makers have employed artists and architects, poets and preachers, 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 by the threat of Eternal Damnation, and I am sure Ann Laurence will have some interesting things to say about this in her session on English visual images in Ireland in 1641.

The need to suggest quite complex messages in the form of simplistic, readily identifiable, 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 compass 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 presses, the Reformation was unleashed across Europe as a revolutionary movement which fuelled the agitators who were convinced that printing was Heaven sent in that it permitted author to speak directly to reader without the aid of the intermediary interpretor in the pulpit. Not that that principal medium of medieval propaganda went into decline - quite the reverse in fact as priests used the newly available texts as guidebooks for their ideological messages shouted out from the 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 interests 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 given 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 soft or too hard. Its use of scare tactics fell short of atrocity propaganda, although the message is the very stuff of that particular phenomenon. Perhaps it cannot yet do this because the moral issues are yet to be resolved. The point about atrocity propaganda historically is that it is a time-honoured device for establishing 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, interestingly in the same area, the ancient Assyrians erected stone monuments at strategic points depicting the brutal behaviour of their troops in battle as a warning to others who might accordingly think twice about attacking them. Atrocity propaganda is therefore a double-edged sword. On the one hand it is designed to 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 image of the enemy who must be destroyed. When Pope Urban II called for a 'great stirring 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 Holy City of Christ, spread their blood on the altars or poured it it into baptismal fonts. He went on to describe in graphic detail all sorts of horrors and ended with the words: 'What shall I say of the appalling violation of women, of which 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 for 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. During 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' in its title. The Amenian massacres, the death of Edith Cavell, the burning of library at Louvin, the sinking of the Lusitania - all these were presented in a manner designed to portray a particular image of 'Prussian militarism' and Hunnish barabarity which could provide Allied propagandists with the essential focus they required to sustain their moral offensive against the enemy, largely on the home front it must be stressed. Robert Graves described in Goodbye to All That the huge gap in perception of the nature of the enemy which existed between a civilian population bombarded with atrocity propaganda and returning soldiers who had actually experienced combat at the front line. Perhaps the most infamous atrocity 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 at Vimy Ridge, the sighting of a train loaded with the corpses of dead German soldiers and a report of a Berlin factory boiling down kadavers to make soap. Two and two was put together to make five and even the Foreign Secretary concluded from the evidence before him that 'while it should not be desirable that His Majesty'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 actions 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 country's propaganda. He was able to draw his conclusions because of the prevailing climate of the war, even though afterwards countless investigations were unable to verify any of the atrocity stories beyond those usually associated with combat. Lord Ponsonby's influential book, from which my earlier quotation of his was 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 began 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 rumours.

It took the filmed evidence to verify the full scale of the Holocaust. If anybody 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 fought. And with the advent of television and the transmission of instantaneous pictures, propagandists might have thought that now had an ideal instrument of atrocity 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 the Tet Offensive, or of a little naked girl screaming in pain from her napalm burns 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 enemy and was being witnessed in full colour on 100 million television sets throughout America.

In 1970, Robin Day stated:

Television has a built-in bias towards depicting any conflict in terms of the visible brutality. You can say, of course, that that is what war is - brutality, conflict, starvation and combat. All I am saying is that there are other issues which 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 television 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 travelling companions, combined with a rigourous censorship system forced the BBC to use Argentinian pictures, which promptly met the wrath of the Prime Minister who 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 of 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-stigmatise 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, usually a deliberate process, it matters not for purposes of definition whether the desired behaviour results from the effort; that is the difference between successful and unsuccessful propaganda. Propaganda is simply an attempt to influence the attitudes of a specific audience, through the use of facts, fiction, argument or suggestion - often supported by the suppression of inconsistent material - with the calculated purpose of instilling in the recipient certain beliefs, values or convictions which will serve the interests of the source, usually by producing a desired line of action. Success should be measured against intent and we would 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 encountered by all historians of propaganda, namely how to correlate the connection between propaganda output and human behavior.

We will never know for certain whether any given behaviour might have been different if more or less propaganda had been directed at the target audiences. For the second half of the twentieth century, we do at least have access to greater records of public opinion against which we can at least begin to measure the success of any given propaganda campaign, provided the records of policy and propaganda output are available to us. But public opinion as a concept remains an amorphous amalgam of individual opinions which in itself provides all sorts of methodological problems. Perhaps we need more microcosmic studies of the kind relating to local campaigns before we can draw more general conclusions about the macrocosm. In the meantime, we would do well to stick to analysing techniques of persuasion 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 perceived themselves and how they wanted others to perceive them. It can tell us much about how predominant ideologies tend to win out over minority representations, and the methods they employ in the process, such as censorship and the manipulation 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, and never can be, simply objective purveyors of information. The very process of selecting the words or images, their inclusion or omission and even their location on the page or the screen, is part of the process of persuasion that is propaganda. 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 was 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, however, really the admission of a bad cause. It reflects a fear of the public and usually derives from an assumption that the public is gullible and highly susceptible to persuasive influences. As the power of the public increases, so also do official 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 utilisation of modern public relations techniques, advertising agencies and press agents. And, perhaps inevitably, the sheer increase in the volume of information available 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 participation in social and political processes. We need more attempts to involve us in matters which are important to all of us and not just to a select few who have historically utilised propaganda for self-serving purposes. In an ever more complex information society, this is more desirable than allowing a return to a world in 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 accompanied by increased education. We must, for example, remove the mystique of the 'hidden persuaders' by analysing their historical employment of propaganda techniques so that we can understand how our perceptions have been, and are still being influenced by them. We must, in other words, first understand the medium and 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 information 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 counter-propagandist source. And, through education, the target will be better equipped 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 persuasion; telecommunications and digital data technology already provide us with more news and views than ever before, and the process is not going to stop suddenly 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 our thoughts. Otherwise we will remain susceptible to the tyrannies of the hidden persuaders.






© Copyright Leeds 2014