Propaganda
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This and all other quotes by Dorothy Thompson: “Political Dictionary” (March 19, 1936), in Let the Record Speak (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1939), 17–20. ↩︎
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Erich Ludendorff, Der totaler Krieg (Ludendorffs Verlag, 1935). ↩︎
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Good historical background: Geoffrey Best, Honour among Men and Nations: Transformations of an Idea (University of Toronto Press, 1981). ↩︎
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Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (PublicAffairs, 2019). ↩︎
This Italian fascist poster prefigures the disgusting rhetoric of Putin and Trump: “On them rests the blame!” by Gino Boccasile, ca. 1942–45.
Via David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4bp0064p.
🇺🇦 Friends of Ukraine might learn something from how the Second World War was portrayed in American movie theaters before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Britain and its friends did important publicity work to open Americans' eyes and to counter the poison of the fascist German American Bund.
📽️ If you want to watch a thriller set in 1939 before Germany’s invasion of Poland, “Man Hunt,” dir. Fritz Lang (20th Century Fox, 1941), holds up. Only the ending was unsatisfactory, if appropriate to a time when embattled Britain needed Americans to understand what was going on.
📽️ Watched “‘Pimpernel’ Smith,” dir. Leslie Howard (British National Films, 1941), which imagines The Scarlet Pimpernel set in Germany in 1939.
'The Iron Curtain' (1948 Spy Film)
📽️ Tonight I watched “The Iron Curtain,” dir. William A. Wellman (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1948). The film was based on Igor Gouzenko’s memoir of his time working as a military cypher expert in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, “I Was Inside Stalin’s Spy Ring,” Hearst’s International–Cosmopolitan (February–May 1947).
Related News from 1948
The excerpt below from a news item in a trade journal uses the term “appeasement” to describe attempts to block the film’s release. And it recalls accusations “of war-mongering because of alleged anti-Nazi films” before the U.S. entry into World War Two. Disinformation campaigns by hostile governments are nothing new, it seems.
MPAA Pins Red Label on “Curtain” Protest
Reaffirming his continued resistance to any attempts to dictate what appears or does not appear on the screen, Eric A. Johnston, MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] president, has rejected the protest of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship against release of 20th-Fox’s forthcoming “The Iron Curtain.” At the same time Johnston questioned the motives of the National Council and coneluded that “the purpose of your organization is to create in this country an atmosphere of appeasement and acceptance of Russia’s policy of aggression and expansion."…
Johnston pointed out … that the issue of free speech in relation to the screen was challenged seven years ago before a Senate committee, when the producers were accused of war-mongering because of alleged anti-Nazi films. “Producers then insisted upon and maintained their constitutional right to make films on any subject, free from dictation,” Johnston reminded. “Their position was vindicated. They stand on that right today, and I back them up."…
Source: The Film Daily February 3, 1948, p. 5.
📽️ Rewatching “Mrs. Miniver,” dir. William Wyler (UK, 1942) for the first time in maybe 20 years. In its day it was an effective propaganda film in the early months of the U.S. entry into the war. Now, for me, it’s an escape from a world in which the Nazis are in Washington, DC, itself.
I watched the Ukrainian movie “Sniper: The White Raven,” dir. Maryan Bushan (Ukraine, 2022), which was filmed before Russia’s full-scale invasion. The protagonist comes to this work after Putin’s little green men invade his country and murder his family. The film offers a moving counterpoint to the dark comedy, “Donbass,” dir. Sergei Loznitsa (Ukraine, 2018). The latter presents glimpses of life in territory controlled by Russia, mixing local politics, disinformation, and violence in ways that blur the boundary between reality and alternative factuality. 🇺🇦
Poster from the Spanish Civil War, ca. 1936–39. The main text reads, “We charge the rebels as assassins! Innocent children and women die. Free men, repudiate all those who support fascism in the rearguard.” The text, bottom right, with the arrow pointing at the mother and child reads, “Here are the victims.” Note, too, the black and red triangle of the Anarchists in the lower right-hand corner.
Source of image and main text translation: Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego, https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb5188576r. This page also offers historical context and analysis.
Who would the strongman past and present be without those crowds that form the raw material of his propaganda? His secret is that he needs them far more than they need him.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
Propaganda is also a system of attention management that works through repetition.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
At its core, propaganda is a set of communication strategies designed to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking, and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
We sometimes describe aggressors as “brainwashed” by propaganda that dehumanizes their victims, so much so they are “hypnotized” into committing atrocities. But what if the “dehumanising” propaganda rather legitimizes cruelty, makes it ordinary, and the aggressor sees the victims' humanity all too clearly?
– Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024), chap. 4.
Did the [Ukrainians'] Russian relatives really “believe” [that the Bucha atrocity was fake]? That’s the wrong question. We are not talking about a situation where people weigh evidence and come to a conclusion but rather one where people no longer seem interested in discovering the truth or even consider the truth as having considerable worth.… Polls in Russia concluded that Putin’s supporters thought that “the government is right, solely because it is the government and it has power.” Truth was not a value in itself; it was a subset of power.
– Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024), chap. 4.
U.S. Government Caricature of Nazi Propaganda
This 1942 poster was designed to counter the effects of Nazi propaganda in the United States. It is fascinating in its own right, but parts of the text reveal startling similarities to Russian disinformation in our own time.
Accessibility: Description and full transcription of poster.
Started reading Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024).
We Need a New Political Translation Dictionary (English–English)
In 1936, Dorothy Thompson observed in her newspaper column that “dictatorships often have quite different interpretations of words from liberal democracies. . . . In the dictionary of democracies,” for example, “peace is a desirably permanent condition of amicable relations with other nations. In the dictionary of dictatorships peace means: a quiet undisturbed period in which to prepare for war . . ."1
The phrase “between nations” excluded asymmetric colonial conflicts, so the difference Thompson painted was quite real. In fact, it was the entire argument of Erich Ludendorff’s 1935 screed Der totale Krieg (Total War). In that book, Ludendorff flipped Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum on its head. Instead of understanding war as the pursuit of political aims by other means, states had to understand war as the driving force behind all politics.2
Regarding “nonaggression” in international relations, Thompson wrote,
liberal democracies mean . . . simply the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy. Both Russian and German dictatorships mean by it the substitution of revolution for other weapons. Neither Russia nor Germany considers the fomenting of internal strife in countries which they want to bring under their influence to be aggression.
In our own time, Russia, now a different creature, is playing a similar game inside NATO countries. Observers in these democracies refer to Russia’s current suite of activities as “hybrid warfare,” although their governments often play down these activities. Thompson’s discussion of “war” itself can help to explain why, provided we keep the “between nations” qualification in mind. “For the democracies war is armed conflict between nations, to be avoided as an unmitigated catastrophe. Above all, war is regarded as an abnormal condition. In the Russian dictionary,” on the other hand, “war is either an inevitable byproduct of the struggle of capitalist countries for markets, or the permanent, unremitting and inevitable struggle between classes for power.” The first theory of war came from Lenin’s interpretation of imperialism and the World War (1914–18). The second was the basic dialectical understanding of history as class conflict posited by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century.
In contrast to the USSR’s take on war, “in the Fascist dictionary it is the necessary and normal condition in which heroic nations and personalities reach their highest potential. . . .” Such thinking could be found in the democracies, too, especially in the two decades or so before the First World War. After all, the educated learned Latin everywhere in the west, including the Roman poet Horace’s phrase, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.) During that war, Winfred Own referred to that sentiment as “the old Lie." And many politicians did everything they could to avoid the next war, leading to the catastrophic extreme of Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler, while the United States pursued an isolationist foreign policy.
Two related terms for Thompson were “honor” and “dishonor.” We do not consciously use them much in twenty-first-century international relations, but Thompson’s explanation is not hard to understand.3
Honor in England means allegiance to accepted standards of conduct. Honor in Germany and Italy means prestige. Dishonor in the Anglo-Saxon dictionary is a crime which one commits against oneself; in the Fascist dictionary it means a crime which is committed against one.
Following this logic, the U.S. dishonored itself when it turned to torture in Iraq. Similarly, our former and next president dishonored our country, our military, and his office by pardoning American war criminals. In the process, he didn’t honor international treaty obligations either. That is because his understanding of honor is more like that of the fascists of the 1930s. Anyone who takes him down a peg has injured him and faces retribution, much like a gang member who can’t afford to lose face. Looking weak is unbearable to this man, whereas conventional rules and fair play are for suckers. The current Russian president follows a similar gangland code, restoring his injured honor by having opponents poisoned or fall out of windows. There might well be a sense of injured honor involved in his attempt to destroy Ukraine.
Thompson’s column underlined something with which we are all too familiar these days. We speak the same language as our enemies. We use the same words. But our common language both obscures and fosters different perceptions of reality that leave us at cross purposes. The Russians talk about “information war."4 And Alex Jones spread disinformation in the United States with a profitable website called InfoWars. Perhaps the problem goes even deeper, and individual words themselves have become players in our fight for the soul and honor of this nation. Maybe we need a comparative political dictionary to bridge the gap or at least bring the conflict into sharper focus.
The Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) in Warsaw has put out two interesting reports on YouTube that analyze Russia’s initially incoherent propaganda response to Ukraine’s Kursk incursion and how this propaganda interacts with ordinary Russians' reactions.
Delirious Television Propaganda
“Forms of Delirium” is the third act of Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014). Now deep in the section titled “A Brief History of Sects in Post-Soviet Russia,” it dawns on me that this material provides useful context for the bizarre, messianic, wartime rhetoric I’ve heard come out of Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov’s mouth in the television clips that Julia Davis translates for English-speaking audiences.
This is not to say that Solovyov necessarily believes all the poison he spews. The first act of the same book, “Reality Show Russia,” provides plenty of background on that subject, even if it is based on prewar Russia. Still, the combination of mysticism, religion, ethnic Russian nationalism, and ostensibly anti-imperialist imperialism dripping from parts of the final act of this excellent book offers at least some reason for not dismissing a talking head like Solovyov out of hand. He may use the privilege of the fool to say extreme things, but he knows his words are landing.
Russian Anti-Austrian War Propaganda, 1914–15
“An Austrian went to Radziwill and came right on to a peasant woman’s pitchfork,” Russian print by Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, 1914–15, New York Public Library Digital Collections. The library has digitized five more prints in this series.
Assault on Facts and Credibility
All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself.
The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
– Charles J. Sykes, ”Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying,“ New York Times, February 4, 2017.
Communism, Consumerism, and Currency
Seen at an upscale mall in Guiyang, China this summer. (Photo by author)
Donald Duck Goes to War
Here’s an interesting piece of American propaganda from the Second World War. The working man pays “taxes to sink the Axis.”
Update: I've removed my YouTube embeds because I don't want to set up consent notices for their trackers. Clicking the above screenshot will take you to the video on their site. Unfortunately, it's resolution is very low by today's standards. (June 2, 2024)
Good Old Stalin
History can be used to justify all manner of circumstances in the present. Want to justify an authoritarian regime in Russia? Referring to Russia’s present conditions can help, but even more effective can be skillful tradition-building that shows Russia’s long line of great authoritarian rulers. And what better place to start than with history teachers in the schools?
The New York Times published a remarkable article yesterday about a new history guide for high school teachers in Russia. After a brief introduction, it offers verbatim excerpts on Stalin, who comes away smelling like roses, despite his massive purges.
Stalin followed Peter the Great’s logic: demand the impossible from the people in order to get the maximum possible. . . . The result of Stalin’s purges was a new class of managers capable of solving the task of modernization in conditions of shortages of resources, loyal to the supreme power and immaculate from the point of view of executive discipline. . . .
Thus, just like Chancellor Bismarck who united German lands into a single state by “iron and blood,” Stalin was reinforcing his state by cruelty and mercilessness.
It is quite an intellectual feat to bring Stalin into line with both Peter the Great and Otto von Bismarck. Indeed, such relativism reveals something about the Kremlin’s self-image these days. It would be helpful to see the rest of the guide before drawing broader conclusions. Still, does not the following statement recall some of Putin’s own criticisms of democracy in the United States in recent years?
Political and historical studies show that when they come under similarly serious threats, even “soft” and “flexible” political systems, as a rule, turn more rigid and limit individual rights, as happened in the United States after September 11, 2001.
Yes, history textbooks matter.