Philosophy offers an opportunity for the reexamination of cultural values. The indoctrination of those professors who will teach the teachers of the generation after next will influence the capacity of future Americans to have a world-view which will give them the utmost opportunities for action in the military field while retaining as far as possible the blessings of U.S. civilian civilization. That U.S. civilization is still civilian and not military is, of course, beyond cavil.

The William Jackson committee was a voice crying in the wilderness when it asked for new terms and new ideas against which to set U.S. propaganda operations in the world of modern strategy. Philosophers may have had the capacity for finding some of the answers, but philosophers, of all people, do not like to be jostled or hurried. The author has never heard of a philosopher employed on a confidential basis by the United States Government to think through the historical and cultural rationale of a U.S. military victory for the future. Writers such as F. S. C. Northrop and Erich Fromm—to name only two sharply contrasting personalities—have written books which possess high significance for the international propaganda field. The connection appears, however, to be tangential.

Though literary men have converted their writing to propaganda purposes, few of them have gone on to define the characteristics of a specific conversionary literature or to compile canons of literary style applicable to the propaganda field. The contributions may lie in the future.

A good argument can be presented to the effect that the skills brought from the social-science into the propaganda field are more valuable once they are employed full time in that field than an attempt to apply political science, or sociology, or economics, each as an individual compartment, to the field of propaganda. There is still no book available with the title The Politics of Knowledge,60 even though the reception, control, prohibition, and dissemination of knowledge is a major factor in all modern governmental processes both in and out of the propaganda field.

One of the most conspicuous developments since World War II has been the application by psychologists, sociologists, and persons in related field of quantifying techniques. The introduction of rigorous scientific requirements of number into the attempted reportage of propaganda behavior or propaganda results is having a significant effect. Quantification may not obtain everything which its devotees claim for it. There is a wide area of human behavior which is significant to the ordinary person, or even to the expert in descriptive terms, and which loses much of its significance if the descriptive and allusive terms are replaced by measurements, tables, and graphs. There is, however, no danger that quantification will replace description as the sole tool of research in the propaganda field.

What quantification does do is develop a common area of discussion between propagandists and nonpropagandists. In many instances quantification can demonstrate results where allegations of failure or of success would have nothing more than personal authority to support them. Within our own particular kind of civilization quantification has a special appeal because of the American trust in engineering and in numbers. The conclusions of the Kinsey reports on men and on women seem much more authoritative to the ordinary man because they are presented with an ample garniture of numbers, even though Havelock Ellis's pioneer works in the psychology and behavior patterns of Western sex life may have been much more tangible and much more revolutionary in their time.

Another aspect of projection is left unexplored because of its immense difficulty and its dangerously unscientific character. Consider the problem this way: the United States one day before the outbreak of war with a hypothetical enemy, such as the Soviet Union, will possess a certain group of characteristics. Representative individual lives within this country can be determined to possess certain habits concerning mass communication, trust in mass communication, and response to symbols which may come through press, radio, or other mass devices.

One day after the outbreak of war the United States will change because the war has broken out.

One month after the outbreak of war the United States will no longer be the USA₁ which existed on war-day. It may well have become USA₂₅ because of the rapidity and variety of change. Three Soviet hydrogen bombs and twelve Soviet atomic bombs might change many of our national, economic, political, and psychological characteristics, and no one, not even an American, could predict this change in advance. The best he could do would be to get ready to study the change as it occurred, to understand the rate and direction of the change, and to assess the meaning of the change in light of the conduct of war.

The same would be true of the USSR; that country, like any other major country, would change under the impact of war. Who could have predicted the renascence of Russian patriotism and traditionalism resulting from the Nazi invasion of 1941? Even if we know where the Russians are as of the outbreak of war, we won't know where they will head or how fast they will head there, once war has broken out.

The scientific problem presented by attempted serious study of a U.S.-Soviet war is therefore very difficult indeed. It is really a problem involving three clusters of moving bodies. The first cluster will be the American people, their behavior, and their institutions; the second cluster, the Russians and allied peoples, their behavior and their institutions; the third cluster, the changing methods of communication existing between them.

It can be said even now, simply by referring to the character of the American people and their past history, that if the Communist leaders of the USSR start a general war, the end of that war is sure (under sets of words and ideas which have yet to be developed in the future) to involve the reconciliation of the inhabitants of the USA with the Russian people. In other words, USA_v and USSR_v can and must have certain relationships with each other, preeminent among which are attempts at undoing war damage, at political and cultural reconciliation, and the undertaking of the rebuilding of a world which both these great peoples can support with enthusiasm and hope.61

USA_v and USSR_v are imaginable. USA₁ and USSR₁ for the day preceding the outbreak of war, or, alternatively, the day on which the war occurs, will be known elements. American science in many fields can help U.S. mass communications and therewith help our armed forces if we learn how to ascertain how the Soviet leadership changes, how Soviet élite groups change, and how the Soviet population changes during the course of the war. We must not only be able to guess what is happening to them physically, but must try to appreciate and to understand what is happening to them psychologically and semantically. This is an immense task. It is by no means certain that our research and development facilities can give us an adequate research program to handle the problem.

This much can be said: if the Americans understand the Russians before the war and during the war, it will be the first time that a nation has kept its enemy in wide-awake sight.

The usual process in the past has been the acceptance of a few exaggerated stereotypes of the national characteristics of the potential enemy, the ascription of every possible kind of infamy and inhuman characteristic to the enemy during the war, and the redefinition of the enemy as a friend after the war. It would be strange and wonderful if the U.S. Government and the U.S. propagandists (or conceivably as much as a large minority of the U.S. population) could learn how to fight the USSR in order to help the Russians escape from a tyranny which has already hurt them much more than it has hurt us.

The Germans suffered a tragic, overwhelming, and perhaps decisive psychological defeat in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic and in the Ukraine, when they carried with their field forces such naïve and tragic Nazi misconceptions of Russian and Ukrainian character as to defeat every opportunity they may have had for a serious anti-Communist alliance of Germany with the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. They destroyed themselves not through ignorance, but through what they thought they knew. If they had been more calm, less assured, more willing to learn from immediate experience, and less indoctrinated with their own preposterous misconceptions of Russian and Ukrainian character, they might have found Russian and Ukrainian allies who would have joined them in the final extermination of the Soviet system.

The world Communist movement has already suffered very serious setbacks because of its failure to project U.S. behavior successfully from the summer of 1950 onward. If the Russian and Chinese Communists had understood Americans well and had made a correct evaluation of the American response to the invasion of South Korea, they would not have driven the United States from lethargy to alertness, from weakness to military strength, from vulnerability toward Communist and crypto-Communist propaganda to sharp and angry recognition of Communist manipulation of symbols such as "progressives," "people's governments," and "liberation."

Sociologically it would seem that the Russian Communists attempted definite improvements of the techniques of Communist revolution and that these improvements have in large part failed in the European satellites. The governments of Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany have turned out to be poor governments—despite the fact that from the Soviet point of view it was a sharp innovation to leave them in pseudo-parliamentary form instead of creating outright Soviet facsimilies.

At the Chinese end of the Moscow-Peking axis the sociology of revolutionary propaganda and organization appears to have worked out much more successfully than at the Russian end. The Chinese Communists, perhaps because they were Chinese, perhaps because they were tougher and more experienced Communists than the Russians, got their country under rigid control and then undertook social and political experiments on a very audacious scale. They have managed not to be un-Chinese while creating in China the kind of pervasive dictatorship which Communist control appears to require.

In the manipulation of satellites and in particularization of propaganda, the North Korean Communist army, the Viet Minh army in Indochina, and the Malayan Races Liberation Army on the Malay peninsula, appear to have near-optimum localism and particularism without suffering serious deviation from the main Communist world-wide pattern. In North Korea, of course, Chinese intervention and Soviet support have sharply modified the position of the North Korean People's Army, but the Annamite and Malay Communist forces appear to be fighting with high morale and considerable success, despite the duality of control from Peking and Moscow, and despite the difficulties of reconciling Asian nationalism with Marxian-world doctrine.

Another Communist technique is now known through Edward Hunter's provocative pioneer book62 by its correct name of "brain-washing." This involves the transformation of a human personality. The author has himself interrogated victims of brain-washing and can attest to the terrifying depth to which this process is carried. The victim of brain-washing is subject to very slight persuasion at the rational level. He is not even given much propaganda as U.S. propagandists of recent years might recognize the product. Instead, the process of brain-washing consists of a frontal attack on all levels of the personality, from the most conscious to the most hidden. The Communists seek through fatigue and sustained interrogation to create a condition similar to what is called "nervous breakdown" in popular parlance. Then they rebuild the personality, healing their victim into Communist normality.

One victim to whom the author talked had been so subject to Communist brain-changing that he thought himself a real Communist even though he had been reared a Catholic. He was completely convinced of the Communist cause and of his own life and place in that cause after the brain-washing had been completed. Unfortunately for Communism, the man got into serious sexual difficulties, difficulties of a kind which any American psychiatrist would recognize as potentially devastating.

As a result of his sexual frustrations he suffered a mild equivalent of the medically recognized phenomenon of the schizophrenic break—that terrible moment of false enlightenment in which the psychotic personality cuts loose with a truth of his own and shuts off most or all communication with normal people—with the consequence that he was walking along Nanking Road in Shanghai, a normal Communist in one instant of time and (as he put it to the author) in a millionth of a second he suddenly realized he was a Catholic, an anti-Communist, the enemy of every man, woman and child in sight—and at war with his entire environment. As this writer understood it, the poor man, though adjusted to the Communist environment after brain-washing, happened to go crazy—crazy enough to come back to our side.

Who can say which is sane, which insane? When two social and cultural systems are completely at odds with one another it may be impossible to be "normal" in both of them.

Scientifically the Chinese process of personality transformation lacked some of the pharmaceutical features apparent in the Western Communist conversions for purposes of confession. It appears to be a combination of audacious practical experimentation with well-known procedures from textbooks of Pavlovian psychology. It is, of course, an interesting scientific question to ask one's self: could Communist psychological researchers do enough psychological research to understand their own difficulties and to de-Communize themselves in the very act of seeking better psychological weapons for Communism? If the people in charge of Communist psychological techniques were scientists, as American psychologists generally are, there might be a real point of discussion. Unfortunately, most of them appear to be artists, believers, and fanatics. The history of the fanatical religions which have inflamed and ripped so much of mankind across the centuries is not such as to suggest that Communism will de-Communize itself by becoming more Communistic or more scientific.

Logically considered, the United States remains the largest extant revolutionary experiment in the world—the first immense human community which survives without profound dogma or profound hatred and which attempts to make short-range, practical, and warm-hearted (though ideologically superficial) concurrence the foundation for a political and industrial civilization. If the United States wins a few more wars it may be that the rest of mankind will be persuaded that our kind of practicality is not only humanly preferable, but scientifically more defensible than the philosophies of competing civilizations. It seems unlikely that Communist research can outstrip us in the propaganda field so far as the race is run in purely scientific terms; artistically and gadget-wise the Communists are just as inventive as we are and often more enthusiastic.

On the other side of the coin, it is very hopeful to note that the many and dangerous techniques developed by OSS for covert propaganda, some of which were applied with considerable success in Europe, have not been introduced into domestic U.S. politics, commercial competition, or other forms of private life. After each war there is often a danger that the coarsening of a culture by the war will lead to the application of wartime skills to peacetime situations. This was emphatically not the case in the Presidential campaigns of 1948 and 1952, even though persons of rich PsyWar experience in World War II were on the staffs of both Stevenson and Eisenhower.

It is often forgotten that some of the deadliest and most effective revolutionary enterprises in the nineteenth century were undertaken without the consent or assistance of the existing governments. Karl Marx was certainly not an invention of Lord Palmerston. Bakunin did not operate out of the French Foreign Office.

In the postwar discussion of USA-Communist rivalry, recommendations were often made on the U.S. side that we should counter Soviet covert operations with our own covert operations against the USSR. What has been forgotten in this context is the fact that such operations have been made illegal and dangerous under United States law. Under Federal law as it exists today no Underground Railway could be developed to assist Soviet escapers in the way that Negro slaves were relayed across the Free States to Canada in the years before Emancipation. One of the chief blocks to U.S. covert operations is the immense growth in all directions of the power, authority, and responsibility of the Federal Government; this growth makes it almost impossible to wage revolutionary or conspiratorial operations from U.S. territory without the prior approval of U.S. authorities—which the authorities, under traditional international law, cannot give and cannot afford to give.

It would seem desirable, if the Cold War situation persists over a long period of time, for Americans to reexamine the restraints which they have placed upon their own citizens and to attempt a revision of the laws which would permit pro-American secret activities to be launched without permitting anti-American activities of the same kind to be carried on. One immediately comes to the conundrum:63

How can the Government say yes to the one and no to the other without being cognizant of what happens?

The answer would appear to lie in the older body of our law in that a withdrawal of governmental authority from some fields would leave the individual responsible and subject to indictment and trial if his enterprises should prove deleterious to the United States Government, but not subject to punishment if his enterprises hurt the known antagonists of the USA.

Phrased in another way, this means that the USA might, in a long-range Cold War situation, be required to make some domestic recognition of the fact that the Communist states are the antagonists but not the military enemies of the U.S. system of government and that as antagonists of this system of government such states, their representatives, their property, and their organizations, should not be afforded any more protection under our laws than is given to the National City Bank of New York in the laws applicable to the city of Moscow, or the American Telephone & Telegraph Company in the laws which apply in Budapest. For a long time the Communist states have treated even the most innocent business enterprise and social club on our side as though they were attainted with an inherent factor of criminal and subversive intent. The withdrawal of U.S. legal protection from all things Communist might allow the American people—or those among them who so chose—to develop proclivities for adventure and trouble-making against the Communists. These proclivities are now sternly repressed by Federal statute.

This is not the end of the story.

One of the paradoxical but deeply true factors in the study and conduct of propaganda is this: the more people know about propaganda, the better they can resist it.

Propaganda was a tremendous bogey in the 1920s. It probably seems very ugly and frightening to most people born before 1920. It does not seem too frightening, so far as the author can judge, to Americans born after 1930. Those born in the period 1920-30 appear to be divided in their emotional reactions to mass persuasion situations.

PsyWar is not magic. It is a valuable auxiliary to modern warfare and a useful concomitant to modern strategy. If a particular strategic policy is sanely and effectively devised as a feasible deterrent to war, the PsyWar procedures supporting that strategy will contribute to the prevention of war. Psychological warfare represents a recognition and acceptance in the military and strategic field of skills which grow about us every day.

In so far as ultra-destructive weapons may have increased the tenseness and bad temper of people who must live under the perpetual but remote threat of atomic bombing, one can say that physicists have upset the nerves of mankind and that it is now up to the propagandists to reassure and to reconcile the peoples.

Whatever PsyWar does, it certainly does not and should not increase the bitterness of war. Fighting itself is the supreme bitterness. Radio broadcasts and leaflets even in wartime only rarely should promote hatred. The situation which the world faces is dangerous because of technological development, not because of psychological knowledge. PsyWar ranks as a weapon, but it is almost certainly the most humane of all weapons.

Apart from PsyWar, what military weapon destroys the enemy soldier's capacity to fight by saving his life? PsyWar tries to bring him over alive and tries to send him home as our friend. No rival weapon can do this.

PsyWar, no matter what it may be called in the future, cannot be omitted from the arsenal of modern war. Neither can it outlast war. Its improvement is a cheap, valuable, and humane way of increasing the military potential of any country whether we think that country to be politically right or politically wrong.

Since 1945 we Americans have written more, studied more, and talked more about PsyWar than have any of the other free peoples. This is a hopeful sign. It can be read as an indication that the American love of the gadget, the American quest for a novelty, can be turned to the arena of the soul. The Communists are better liars, better schemers, better murderers than we shall ever be; they start off by being better fanatics. Is it not in the American spirit that we should out-trick them, out-talk them, and out-maneuver them? We have a very creative and resourceful civilization at our backs. We have no Führer to guide us and no party line to comfort us; we don't even want such things. Hard though it may be, we can live with our own consciences and not seek for keepers.

The Communists have started a fight with us. That fight may go on a long time. If they want to stop fighting we shall certainly try to find peace with them. But if they push the fight to its bitter end—

We shall not fail.

APPENDIX
Military PsyWar Operations, 1950-53

On 25 June 1950, when the invasion of the Republic of Korea began, no real military PsyWar organization was tangibly evident. A planning staff headed by Colonel J. Woodall Greene had been re-created in the Far East Command's GHQ in 1947, but it was hardly prepared to direct full-scale propaganda operations on such short notice, especially with a total lack of field operating units. Yet the staff with hasty augmentation did go into action—in effect, became its own operating unit—two days following the invasion, using both leaflets and radio in a strategic campaign that was continued without interruption for over three years.

At the same time that General MacArthur made provision for the PsyWar planning staff in the Far East Command, the Department of the Army's G2 in 1947 directed the inauguration of a long-range program of extension courses to be administered primarily to the specialists of the Military Intelligence Reserve. One such specialty in the military intelligence career program was psychological warfare.64

Parallel with the development of training literature based on World War II experience, the Army experimented with the use of PsyWar in field maneuvers. A special unit, called the Tactical Information Detachment,65 was formed at Fort Riley, Kansas.

Headquarters and Headquarters Company, containing the command, administrative, supervisory and creative personnel necessary for propaganda operations.

Reproduction Company, containing intricate equipment and skilled personnel capable of producing leaflets and newspapers of varying sizes and multiple color.

Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company, designed to replace or augment other means of broadcasting radio propaganda.

In 1953 a fourth type company was activated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina—the Consolidation Company. This unit was very flexible and had the job of creating and conducting PsyWar in support of consolidation operations in areas under Military Government control.

Figure 75: UN Propaganda. In some leaflets used in Korea, the United Nations emerged as a major point. Here UN lavishness to South Korea is contrasted with Communist rapacity in the North. The scene does not remind the reader of slums on our side.

Figure 76: Korean Leaflet Bomb, Early Model. An M16A1 cluster adapter being loaded at the FEC printing plant in Yokohama (1 November 1950). The bomb type adapter will contain 22,500 (5″ by 8″) psychological warfare leaflets.

The Tactical Information Detachment, moving from Fort Riley to Korea in the fall of 1950, was reorganized as the 1st Loudspeaker and Leaflet Company and, attached to EUSAK, served as Eighth Army's tactical propaganda unit throughout the campaign. It adjusted its location, equipment and propaganda tone to keep pace with the ups and downs of the Korean war.

At the same time, reserve officers whose civilian specialties were in or related to mass communications were recalled to PsyWar assignments. Several RB&L groups and L&L companies were activated and trained at Fort Riley. One of these, the 1st Radio Broadcasting and Leaflet Group, was deployed to Japan to become the strategic propaganda support unit in FEC, thereby relieving the hard-pressed Psychological Warfare Section of its operational functions. The Group left Fort Riley in July 1951 at the height of the Missouri Valley floods, forcing the unit to take emergency detours by bus and train in order to meet its scheduled port of embarkation call. The 1st was the only group to have been used in active operations. Other groups were employed in training missions. In addition, Reserve groups and companies trained periodically at key locations where sufficient specialized personnel were available to keep the units on a ready, stand-by basis.

In April 1952, the PsyWar training activities at Fort Riley were moved to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where the new Psychological Warfare Center was located. This Center not only provided unit training supervision and facilities, but it fathered a new activity, the Psychological Warfare Board, designed to evaluate and test new PsyWar equipment and techniques. And the Psychological Warfare School, an outgrowth of the classes conducted by the Army General School, was formally recognized and established as one of the Army's specialist schools. More than four hundred officers have received diplomas as PsyWar officers at the time of this writing (1953). Most of the graduates have been Army officers, although successfully completing the course have been students from the Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, U.S. Information Agency, and from nine Allied nations.

Figure 77: UN Themes. This Korean-language leaflet states: "No soldier would attempt to fight 54 men, yet Communist China is attempting to fight 54 nations. Don't fight for Communist enslavement—Join your comrades who have surrendered into safety."

Early in 1953 PWS was transferred to the staff of the commander, Army Forces Far East (AFFE), a paper transaction to put the staff in a closer position to coordinate the plans and operations of the supporting army PsyWar units.

Throughout the Korean conflict, PWS, like its area commander, wore two hats: PWS was also the PsyWar operations coordinating agency for the United Nations Command.

Broad objectives made possible throughout the war years the development of literally thousands of appropriate themes. One theme so prominent in World War II propaganda, that of unconditional surrender, was never used. UN policy denied its use, and PWS enforced the prohibition.

Eighth Army's PsyWar division of G3 had the 1st Loudspeaker and Leaflet Company under its operational control. EUSAK's PsyWar officer kept a tight control over the propaganda output of the L&L Company by physically moving the propaganda platoon into his EUSAK staff office.

Figure 78: Home-front Morale. When South Korean communications were interrupted, leaflets such as this provided on early boost to Korean civilian morale.

Each of the corps PsyWar officers had under his operational control one loudspeaker section (with a varying number of teams) from the L&L Company.

Tremendous quantities of leaflets were printed. The 1st RB&L Group on many occasions averaged better than twenty million pieces of printed propaganda every week. To this, the 1st L&L Company in Korea added an average of three and a half million leaflets per week.

Some critics of the PsyWar operations in the Far East Command charged that there were exaggerated claims of prisoners of war who surrendered as a result of propaganda. They pointed out that a head count of prisoners is an inaccurate measure of direct effects of PsyWar used in support of military operations, because rarely is the taking of prisoners the sole goal of any major PsyWar campaign.

Other critics expressed the belief that emphasis had been placed on quantity rather than quality of propaganda. By quantity they meant propaganda measured by bookkeeping statistics. By quality they meant propaganda that, planned with potent intelligence, was capable of exploiting propaganda opportunities with maximum psychological impact.

Did PsyWar achieve its goal?

The effects of planned persuasion in a thousand days of radio broadcasts, in tens of thousands of loudspeaker appeals, in billions of leaflets, may be measured only in retrospect . The question may be answered when reaction in the target area has reached (or fails to reach) favorable proportion, provided that the tangible results of the military operations can be clearly separated from those of concurrent and subsequent strategic international information operations.

Figure 79: The Famous Airplane Surrender Leaflet. This is the controversial Far East Command leaflet that in April 1953 offered "the sum of 50,000 U.S. dollars to any pilot who delivers a modern, operational, combat-type jet aircraft in flyable condition to South Korea. The first pilot who delivers such a jet aircraft to the free world will receive an additional 50,000 U.S. dollars bonus for his bravery." The leaflet was printed in three languages—Russian, Chinese and Korean. In this example of the Russian language leaflet, there are added notations in both Korean and Chinese that "this is a message from the Americans to any jet pilot who can read Russian. If you know such a person, please give it to him. It tells him how to escape to the UN Forces."

FOOTNOTES: