Figure 28: Nostalgic Black. Soldiers in all wars have gotten homesick. Propaganda appeals to homesickness in many ways. One of the simplest is the device shown in this German black leaflet, which shows the husband turning off the alarm clock while the wife wakes up. The printed message on the reverse makes out a discouraging case for the soldier's opportunity to return home, pointing out that the GI in Europe, even after victory, will face "that nasty jungle war ... in the Far East." No identification of the leaflet is given.

Figure 29: Nostalgic White, Misfire. Figure 30 was carefully adapted to Japanese customs. The mere fact that the Americans knew enough about Japan to celebrate a homey Japanese holiday was probably enough to make the Japanese reader examine the leaflet carefully. Here is a combined nostalgic and surrender leaflet showing how surrender leads the Japanese soldier back to his wife and children. The drawing looks American rather than Japanese, and it is not likely that a genuine Japanese could have been made homesick by use of this leaflet.

Figure 30: Nostalgic White. On March 5 of every year the Japanese celebrate the colorful custom of Boys' Day. Kites in the form of carp are flown over the cities and countryside and millions of families set out to give their little sons an excursion or some other treat. (It is characteristic of the Japanese that there is no Girls' Day.) This leaflet, from Psychological Warfare Branch, USAFPA, was designed for dropping on May 5. It ends with the appeal, "You must guard the strength of the new Japan, your treasure, your children." Thus it combines homesickness, patriotism, and pre-surrender indoctrination.

The official propagandist is not a newspaperman. Since he speaks for an army or a government, his utterance is officially responsible. He must be as timely as the peacetime press, but must at the same time be as cautious as a government press agent. He is torn between two responsibilities: his responsibility to the job of propaganda, which requires him to get interesting information and get it out to the enemy quickly; and his responsibility to the official policies of his own government, which requires him to release nothing unconfirmed, nothing that could do harm, or that might embarrass or hurt the government. (A sort of institutional schizophrenia is common to all propaganda offices.)

The sources of news are various. Classified incoming operational reports of the Army and Navy contain material of high interest to the enemy. There are obvious reasons for denying access to such information to the propaganda people. Propaganda men might think of their audience first and security second. If they do not know the secret information, but are advised by military consultants who do, security will be better maintained and the propagandist will not labor under the handicap of a double standard of information—what they know, and what they dare to tell.

In technically advanced countries, the regular commercial facilities of press and radio continue to do a normal news job, and usually do better work than the drafted amateurs in the government. (What intelligence agency in Washington could compile a weekly report as comprehensive, well edited and coldly planned as Time magazine?32 The author often yearned to paraphrase Time, rearranging it and classifying it TOP SECRET, in order to astound his associates with the inside dope to which he had access.) The nature of news is not affected by its classification, and the distinction between news produced on the Federal payroll and news produced off it often consists of the superior professionalism of the latter.

The intelligence that goes into the making of propaganda must compete for attention with the home newspaper of the enemy. It must therefore be up-to-date, well put, authentic. There is no more space in propaganda for the lie, farce, hoax, or joke than there is room for it in a first-class newspaper. Even if exaggerations or nonsense appear in the commercial press of his own country, the propagandist must realize that he is Honorary G-2 to the enemy—a G-2 whose function consists of transmitting news the ultimate effect of which should be bad but which should go forth with each separate item newsworthy and palatable. (A little trick of the human mind helps all propagandists in this regard. Most people have a streak of irresponsibility in them, which makes bad news much more interesting than good. There is a yearning for bad news and a genuine willingness to pass it along. Bad news increases the tension upon the individual and tickles his sense of the importance of things; good news relieves the tension, and to that extent has the effect of a let-down.)

The palatability of news is not concerned so much with its content as with its trustworthiness to the enemy, its seeming to deal with straight fact, its non-editorialized presentation. (One of the reasons why Soviet Communist propaganda, after all these years, is still relatively unsuccessful , lies in the incapacity of the Communists to get out a newspaper with news in it. They put their editorial slant in all their news articles. "Man bites dog" would not make the front page in Russia unless the dog were Stalinist and the man reactionary.)

Figure 31: Oestrous Black. Young human beings, especially young males, are apt to give considerable attention to sex. In areas of military operations, they are removed from the stimuli of secondary sex references which are (in America) an accepted part of everyone's daily life: bathing beauty photos, magazine covers, semi-nudes in advertisements, etc. Our enemies tried to use the resulting pin-up craze for propaganda purposes, hoping that a vain arousal of oestrum would diminish morale. This choice Japanese item is from the Philippines. (The best collection of these is kept in a locked file—for experts only—at the Library of Congress.)

The Japanese who obediently hated the Americans when it was their duty to do so nevertheless could not help looking at maps that showed where the Americans actually were. Nazis who despised us and everything we stood for nevertheless studied the photographs of our new light bombers. The appeal of credible fact is universal; propaganda does not consist of doctoring the fact with moralistic blather, but of selecting that fact which is correct, interesting, and bad for the enemy to know.33

On the friendly side of the battle lines, the procurement of our own news is a budgetary matter. The propaganda office can subscribe to the news tickers, newspapers, telegraph services, and so on. How much is a matter of administrative housekeeping. In the field, the communications officer can frequently steal news from the news agencies of his own country or allied countries by the process of picking it out of the air. It would be highly unpatriotic of the news agency to send him a bill in the zone of operations, and he can classify his record copies of his material RESTRICTED so that the owners of the material would have no legitimate business acquiring copies that could later be taken into court to support a claim. (Americans would not do this, of course; the reference is to Byzantines.)

Figure 32: Oestrous Grey. This and the succeeding illustration show a series of four leaflets which the Nazis used against American troops in Europe. Anti-morale in intent, they rely on the illustrations to get attention and then develop their malicious, salacious anti-Semitic story. The series illustrates the strength and weakness of Nazi propaganda.

Figure 33: Oestrous Grey, Continued. Concluding the series begun in the preceding illustrations, these Nazi leaflets tried to lower American morale by combining oestrum, resentment, discouragement and inter-American hatred. The Dr. Mordecai Ezekiel mentioned in No. 2 is a real person, a splendid American and conscientious official. The Nazis used his name because it was so plainly Jewish, hoping that the ignorance of the American troops would permit their lies to spread.

This need may be called timeliness.

It can be served by obtaining all the most recent enemy publications that may be available, by listening attentively to enemy prisoners and captured civilians, and by carefully analyzing the enemy's current broadcasts to his own people. The Nazis made the unnecessary mistake of assuming that isolationism used the same old language after Pearl Harbor. They were right in assuming that there was considerable anti-internationalist and anti-Roosevelt sentiment left in the United States, but they were hopelessly wrong in using the isolationist language of mid-1941 as late as mid-1942. Pearl Harbor had dated all that and the isolationist-interventionist argument had shifted to other ground. When the Nazis went on using the old language, they were as conspicuous as last year's hat at a women's club. Instead of making friends and influencing people, they made themselves sound ignorant and look silly. They lacked the element of timeliness. They could have gotten it by procuring representative American publications in Lisbon and studying them.

Propaganda is like a newspaper; it has to be timeless or brand-new. In between, it has no value.

Figure 34: Obscene Black. One of the wildest adventures of World War II concerns this now rare "Chinese Federal Reserve Bank" one-dollar bill. The bank was a Japanese puppet outfit in Peiping. The Japanese had banknotes engraved by Chinese artists, and only after the new pro-Japanese banknotes had been issued all over the city did they notice what the "ancient scholar" was doing with his hands. The engraver had disappeared and the Chinese enjoyed a rare, morale-stimulating laugh. Propaganda gestures such as this—spontaneous, saucy, silly—achieve effects which planned operations rarely attain.

To be useful, opinion analysis must be systematic. For a while the author had the interesting job of interviewing all the latest arrivals from Tokyo at a certain headquarters. The travelers would usually be pumped up with a sense of their own smartness in having evaded the Japanese and arrived at Allied territory. You could almost hear them thinking, "Oh, boy, if Gendarmerie Chief Bakayama could only see me now!" They were ready, in Army parlance, to spill their guts. The only item on which most of them maintained one-man security was the question, "Why, chum, did you yourself go to Tokyo in the first place?" Outside of that, they were eager to talk. (Some of them had frightfully good reasons to be eager; the adverb is literal.) With such sources of information, the author thought that he could find out in short order what the Japanese were thinking.

He found out, all right. He found out every single time. The refugee engineer said the Japanese were so depressed that there was a bull market in butcher knives. The absconding dairyman said the Japanese were ready to die with gloom. The eloping wife said she never saw happy Japanese any more. The military school deserter said the Japanese lay awake all night every night listening for American air raids. The reformed puppet said the Japanese had just gone to pieces. Then each of them grinned (the interviews were individual, of course), and expected to be patted on the head for bringing such good news.

Figure 35: Informational Sheet. This British leaflet combines a message for Arabs with instructions for British pilots forced down in the desert. The propaganda content is closely associated with the practical mission of the leaflet.

Their comments were worthless. What the enemy thinks in general is worth nothing unless your troops are already in his suburbs. What an informant thinks the enemy thinks is worth even less. What do you, reader, think right now? What do you think you think? See? the question is nonsensical. To work, it has to be specific: What do you think about the price of new suits? What do you think about Senator O'May and Congressman MacNaples? Do you think that we will ever have to fight Laputa? Are you satisfied with your present rate of pay? Why?

What a person thinks—his opinion—is workable in relation to what he does. In practical life his opinion takes effect only when it is part of the opinion of a group. Some groups are formed by the common opinion and have nothing else in common: at a spiritualist meeting you may see the banker sitting next to his own charwoman. Most groups are groups because of things which the people are (Negroes, descendants of Francis Bacon, the hard-of-hearing); or things they do (electrical workers, lawyers, farmer, stamp collectors), or things they have (factory owners, nothing but wages, apartment houses) in common. The community of something practical makes the group have a community of opinion which arises from the problems they think they face with respect to their common interests. Such groups are not only opinion groups, they are interest groups. It is these groups that do things as groups. It is these groups that propaganda tries to stir up, move, set against each other, and use in any handy way. (Few individuals belong to just one group at a time; the groups are almost illimitable in number.)

The propagandist should not get the idea that just because a group exists it is a potential source of weakness or cleavage. Workers are not always against employers, nor the aged against the young, nor women against men, nor shippers against railwaymen. In a well run society, groups have interest only for limited purposes. Railwaymen are not permanently hostile to truckers, shippers, fliers, canal operators. At the moment they may be maddest of all at the insurance companies because of some quarrel about insurance premiums and risks.

The poor propagandist tries to butt in on every fight, even when there is none. Often his propaganda is received the way an intervenor is received in most family quarrels, with the bland question, "What fight? We ain't mad." Sound propaganda picks only those group issues which are acute enough to stand a little help from outside. If outside help would be a kiss-of-death to the group that is helped, then black propaganda instead of white is indicated. In any case, sound operating intelligence is the first precondition to the attempted psychological manipulation of enemy groups.

Figure 36: Counterpropaganda Instructions. The Wehrmacht in the West had a unit bearing the code designation Skorpion. This unit combined the functions of offensive and defensive propaganda, which remained separate throughout the war in the U.S. Army. The information service sheet shown provides clear, simple leads for counterpropaganda by selecting usable (usable for the Germans, that is) items from Allied sources. From this raw material, morale officers could make up their own leaflets, lectures, or broadcasts.

The profile obtained from civilian polls or from propanal can then be paralleled in the field. Set up a graph showing the entire enemy army. Use several graphs if the army splits along racial, national or plainly sectional lines. On each graph, enter the component groups. From the poll or from the interrogations, list the dissatisfaction in terms of seriousness with which the dissatisfyee attributes to it; it is not what you think he should worry about that is important. It's what actually he does worry about. His weighting counts. Make up a scale, quantitative on the actual count of mentions of particular gripes. (For example, out of 699 prisoners, of whom 167 were union members in civil life, there were 234 separate voluntary mentions of dissatisfaction with the enemy government's labor union policy). When that quantitative count changes up or down, you have a definite guide with which to control your own propaganda policy.

Figure 37: Defensive Counterpropaganda. The "National Socialist Leadership Staff of the Wehrmacht" got out this Communications for the Troops as a guidance sheet for company talks. The content includes "Thoughts About the Volkssturm," "The Celebrated American Freedoms," and "Small Requests, but Important." This issue is dated from January 1945.

Or you can proceed qualitatively. List enemy dissatisfaction under terms such as these for any one issue (shoe rationing, health facilities, minority rights, esteem for government leaders, etc.): Prisoner—

• (1) is completely satisfied and has no complaints.
• (2) has a few complaints but is generally satisfied.
• (3) has many complaints and does not expect improvement.
• (4) is despondent about the whole situation.
• (5) is definitely antagonistic to home authorities in this matter.

Rate each prisoner or captured civilian according to your best judgment. Then make up percentage lists of the grounds for dissatisfaction of each component group in the enemy society. (This latter figure will be impressive in documents but will not mean as much for practical purposes as will the more specific percentages under each separate head.)

If you feel like showing off, average everything into everything else and call it the Gross Index of Total Enemy Morale. This won't fool anyone who knows the propaganda business, and you won't be able to do anything with or about it, but you can hang it on a month-by-month chart in the front office, where visitors can be impressed at getting in on a military secret. (Incidentally, if some smart enemy agent sees it and reports it back, enemy intelligence experts will go mad trying to figure out just how you got that figure. It's like the old joke that the average American is ten-elevenths White, 52% female, and always slightly pregnant.)

• (a) news;
• (b) military intelligence which can be released as news;
• (c) military intelligence which cannot be released as news, but knowledge of which will prevent the propaganda operator from making mistakes or miscalculations in reporting the news;
• (d) enemy news;
• (e) up-to-the-minute enemy slang, hobbies, fads, grievances, and other matters of current public attention;
• (f) specific grievances of specific groups and of the nation as a whole, should these arise;
• (g) information about probable inter-group conflicts;
• (h) types and forms of discontent with enemy authority;
• (i) identification of unpopular or popular enemy personalities;
• (j) all other information that will enable the psychological warfare operator to act promptly and sympathetically in taking the side of specific enemy individuals against their authorities or other enemy groups.

Figure 38: Black "Counterpropaganda." Seeing that the Germans had a good counter propaganda medium, the Allies decided to use it themselves. They issued this "counterpropaganda" sheet, shown in original and facsimile in English. The "blackness" is not very black, since few Germans would consider this to be German in origin, once they had read it.

Enemy opinion cannot be manipulated in general. It must be met on its own ground—the current everyday thoughts of enemy citizens and soldiers. These thoughts do not usually concern grandiose problems of political ethics. They are practical like your own.34 They must be appealed to in a way which makes the listener really listen, makes the reader stop and reread, makes them both think it over later. Getting the attention of the enemy is not enough. Most enemies will pay plenty of attention to you—too much, at times. Getting sympathetic attention is what counts.

This can be done only with specific grounds. With the news, you and he have a genuine common interest. Using his real troubles as a link, you must create that common interest. The force, the effectiveness of your argument may make him forget that it is the enemy who has brought his attention to this issue. You must leave him with the feeling, "By golly, that fellow is right!"

But to talk about his troubles, effectively, you must know what they really are. You must see it his way before you start showing him that his way is your way, that you think that he is really on your side, and that his bosses' side is wrong, incorrect and doomed to get whipped, anyhow. Propaganda can operate only on the basis of specificity. Real persuasion can be sought only on the basis of real sympathy with real troubles. Old, incorrectly guessed, or poorly described issues are worse than none at all.

CHAPTER 9
Estimate of the Situation

In physical warfare, the inherent instability of every situation is concealed by the apparent definiteness of the operation. Panic, revolt or dissolution of regiments is not normally figured into the situation. The assumption is made—and for professional military purposes must be made—that all identical units are of equal quality unless proved otherwise, that all men in a unit will respond with psychological uniformity unless they are reported out physically by medical reports, that the unit will be capable of doing tomorrow what it did yesterday. The terrain comes in as a constant factor and even such variables as weather can be calculated in terms of a predictable risk. Nevertheless, every experienced soldier knows that things do not always work out the way they should, that unexplained or unforeseen factors sooner or later complicate or frustrate the best plans, and that warfare is a huge gamble with a superficial but very necessary coating of exactitude.

In psychological warfare, these considerations apply even more sharply. Combat at least has terrain, order of battle, logistics, estimated capabilities and other concrete factors with which to figure. There is a known degree of difference between one enemy division and five enemy divisions. There is the possibility of computing the time which the enemy will need to fulfill this capability or that, and the equally good possibility of computing time on our side for countermeasures. Even in such very long-range operations as strategic bombing, economic factors can be figured out to give the operation at least the coloration of precision. With propaganda, none of this is possible.

The propagandist never knows the terrain, because his terrain is the enemy mind in its entirety—a factor beyond the understanding of any man. The enemy can have strongholds of faith to be shaken but the propagandist can never say, "This factor is finished. Therefore we proceed to the next." There is neither victory nor defeat, only the endless seesaw of probable accomplishments or probable blunders. The honest psychological warfare operative will admit that he does not know where he is at any given moment, how far from his start, how near to his goal. Even with surrender of the enemy, propaganda cannot be judged to have met with complete failure or complete success, because propaganda is an interminable stream going on into international affairs and carrying over to the next war. Psychological warfare can be given apparent certainty only by the creation of assumptions on the part of the planner. The assumptions will not stand up if questioned by a clever philosopher, any more than did the basic assumptions of the German General Staff when questioned by the sardonic Trotzky at Brest-Litovsk. Nevertheless, the assumptions can work for planning purposes.

For field operations, the goal of the propagandist is to sap the resistance of enemy troops. If the troops are moving forward and are not likely to be in a mood to surrender, then other goals, such as conflict between officers and men, encouraging desertion, informing enemy troops of bad news elsewhere in the war, or morale-depression may be sought. In each case, the propaganda must be aimed at a goal, and a goal is as essential to the operation of psychological warfare as is definition of a target for artillery or bombing. No one ever accomplishes anything shooting "somewhere or other"; no one propagandizes successfully unless he seeks the attainment of a state of mind or series of actions which may actually happen. Most times, it is thus impossible to aim at the total surrender of the enemy armies or state. One can aim for concrete operational purposes only at specific enemy troubles or effects. For the field, troop surrenders; for the home front, interference with the enemy war effort—these are about as general as goals can be made.

They can be made very specific indeed. A situation reported by intelligence may provide an almost perfect opening for psychological warfare. If the enemy press reports that twenty-three embezzlers have been detected in food supply and have been shot, it is a perfect opening for the black propaganda goal, "to conduce to enemy mistrust of food control, to increase food spoilage, to lower efficiency of enemy food consumption through enhancing misuse of food supply." Some of the means might be these. An alleged enemy leaflet could be prepared warning quartermasters to destroy canned foods that have lost labels; another leaflet describing diseases that come from partly spoiled food; an "enemy" allegation (from your side or, better, from neutral territory) that the political chiefs of the enemy country are the biggest food embezzlers of all; getting a black-radio and rumor campaign under way describing the seven hundred and eighty-three people who died last month as a result of eating musty food (even though your own doctors say the mustiness may not interfere with the wholesomeness of that particular food); describing common diseases that actually occur in the enemy country, such as arthritis, stomach ulcers, sinus headaches or infectious jaundice, and blaming them all on the foods the enemy government distributes to the enemy people. On white radio, features could be put on describing the unhappy plight of your own side, where people may get their rashers of bacon for breakfast only every other day, and where nobody can have more than three eggs at a time; point out that the government is worried that food prices have risen 5.3%, without mentioning at that time the fact that enemy prices have gone up 45% or more. The definite goal gives the propaganda boys something to work on. Propaganda to the allies or satellites of the enemy can point out that the enemy government is apt to dump the spoiled food onto the foreign market, that food spoiling in territory of the big enemy will make him requisition more food from his little allies, et cetera.

When the topic has been worked for a while, stop; keep it up only if actual news from the enemy country shows that they are having enough real trouble with food to make your improvements on the fact thoroughly credible.

Propaganda cannot function in a vacuum framed by moral generalities. The goal must be defined in the light of authentic news or intelligence. The operation can be sustained only if there is enough factual reality behind it to make the propaganda fit the case known or credited by the majority of the listeners, counted one by one.

Since no trouble-free, wartime country has been known to exist, the goals should be tailored to the troubles of the particular enemy, and should aim at increasing real difficulties, building up pre-existing doubts, stimulating genuine internal hostilities. Propaganda which invents pure novelty gets nowhere. The Russians did not hesitate to appeal to Bismarck in order to show the professional German soldiers what a rotter Hitler was, and how stupid the Nazi strategy. But if Bismarck had actually said nothing on the subject of the army in general or an Eastern war in particular, they would have been wise to leave him alone. If the Japanese had tried to make the ex-Confederate States secede all over again, they would not have gotten anywhere because they would not have started with a real grievance. But if they had alleged that the Negro units were used for stevedoring because Whites regarded Negroes as unworthy of carrying weapons, they might have hit on a real grievance. The goal must be deeply bedded in reality.

The first thing to do with the hypothetical man is to make him fit the kind of person who does get propaganda. In dealing with China, for example, it would be no use to take a statistically true Chinese, who lived on a farm 1.3 acres in size, went to town 5.8 times a year, had 3.6 children, and never read newspapers. The man to be set up would be the reachable man, the city, town or village dweller who had an income 2.1 times greater than that of the average in his county, who owned 1.7 long coats, and who shared one newspaper with 6.8 neighbors. Take this lowest-common-denominator of a man who can be reached by enemy propaganda and by yours. Name him the Propaganda Man. (Realistically speaking, modal and not arithmetical classes should be set up.)

Make up the prewar life of the Propaganda Man. Use your regional experts as informants. What kinds of things did he like? What prejudices was he apt to have? What kind of gossip did he receive and pass along? What kind of words disgusted him? What kind of patriotic appeal made him do things? What did he think of your country before the war? What things did he dislike you and your people for? What myths did he believe about America—that all Americans drove sports convertibles while drinking liquor? that all had blonde sweethearts? that all exchanged gunfire periodically? Of what American things did he think well—food, shoes, autos, personal freedom, others? What is he apt to be thinking now?

To this add what the enemy propaganda is trying to do to its Propaganda Man. That is, size up the domestic propaganda of the enemy in terms of the concrete individuals at whom it is aimed. This may reveal the enemy's vital necessities and his concealed weaknesses. What are the leaders trying to do? Are they trying to make the Propaganda Man get to work on time? Are they trying to make him give up holidays willingly? Are they trying to make him think that your side will kill him if you win? Are they trying to keep him from being worried about his city going up in an incandescent haze? Are they trying to make him believe that the concrete shelters are good? Why are they harping so on the safety of the shelters? Has the Propaganda Man been muttering back about the flimsiness of the shelters? Does he want to be evacuated from target cities? Are the police being praised for their fairness and speed in issuing leave-the-city permits? Are illegal évacués being treated as scum and traitors and cowards?

Then go after the Propaganda Man yourself. He is your friend. You are his friend. The only enemy is the enemy Leader (or generals, or emperor, or capitalists, or "They"). How is the Propaganda Man going to hear from you? Leaflets? Short-wave—and if so, why is he listening to the enemy in the first place? Standard-wave? Speaker planes? Rumors? Get things to him that you know he will repeat, things which will interest him. Make up a list of the things he worries about each month, a list of the things which the enemy propaganda is trying to do to him currently, a list of the things your propaganda is trying to do. Do the three lists fit? Would they work on an actual living breathing thinking human being, with the prejudices, frailty, nobility, greed, lubricity, and other motives of the ordinary human being? If your list fits his real life, if your list spoils the enemy propaganda list, if your list builds up a psychological effect of confusion, gloom, willingness-to-surrender which accumulates month after month, the terrain is favorable. It is in your Propaganda Man's head.

There are no maps of the human mind, but in certain special cases sociology and psychology can provide leads which even the most acute untrained observation would otherwise overlook. During World War II, for example, Mr. Geoffrey Gorer, a British anthropologist, was able to provide character analyses of the Japanese that stood up under the rigorous analysis of experts long resident in Japan. Gorer took as base data the experience of the Japanese infant in the first forty-odd months of life. How was the baby given toilet training? how was it weaned? how was it disciplined into the family life? how did the small child learn what it was? Gorer found that Japanese domestic life started the child out with a mixture of uncertainty and defiance—that the infant soon learned he was in a definite position in the human queue, where all above him had to be respected on the threat of immediate and condign reprisal, while all below him could be mistreated almost with impunity—that the Japanese had sad dirty little private thoughts about himself to a degree unknown to ourselves or the Chinese—that the Japanese was in adult life the inevitable fulfillment of what he had been made in infancy: arrogant, timid, insanely brave, deferential, fearful of foreigners and overtly cruel to them.

Furthermore, the Japanese identified persons, nations, or institutions as Female (peaceful, possessing enjoyments, subject to bullying) or as Male (fierce, counteraggressive, superordinate). The U.S.A. of Admiral Perry seemed Male; that of Cordell Hull, Female. These findings, applied to propaganda, gave British-American operations an audience unlike the Japanese whom missionaries, soldiers, diplomats, businessmen, and journalists had portrayed in such varied and inconsistent terms. This Japanese Propaganda Man (analyzed at a distance, since Gorer had never been nearer Japan than Indo-China) became a believable person. It was uncanny to see Japanese propaganda movies after reading the Gorer analyses, and to find the Japanese government propagandists, by hunch and instinct, appealing to the same Propaganda Man whom Gorer, by bold but permissible extrapolations, had revealed to Allied propaganda planners.

War eases the motive-switching operation because the leaders and people on each side derive moral exhilaration from the common effort. Ostensibly, politicians become statesmen; all higher-ranking officers become strategists; ordinary men become heroes, martyrs, adventurers. The lofty process of war is one which psychologists will not explain in our time; it transposes ordinary persons and events to a frame of reference in which individuals are less self-conscious and also less critical. Among European and American peoples, particularly, there arises the assumption that because of war men should be brave and unselfish, women kind and chaste, yet alluring, officials self-sacrificing, and so on, even though the facts of the case in the particular country involved may be very much to the contrary. The cruel futility inherent in war is so plain to all civilized men that when war does come men overcompensate for it. They set up illusions.

This need not be taken as a criticism of war or of mankind. The world would be a more inspiring place in which to dwell if people generally lived up to the wartime standards they impose on themselves. That these standards are felt to be real is attested by the distinct drop of the suicide rate in wartime, and the increase in suicide, murder, and crimes of delinquency after every war; that the change of role is largely illusory is attested by the fact that no nation appears to have undergone permanent sociological change as a result of improvement during war. Many wartime changes carry on, of course; but they rarely comprise, by the standards of the people concerned, improvements. The upswing is genuine, when it occurs, but it is rarely permanent, and it seldom affects all levels of the entire population with the same degree of exhilaration.

The propagandist thus has an ideal situation. In the enemy country everyone is trying to be more noble, more unselfish, more hard-working. Everyone applies a higher standard of ethics and performance than in peacetime. Businessmen are not supposed to make too much money, politicians are supposed to work around the clock, officials are supposed to cooperate, housewives to save, children to scavenge, and so on. Yet a certain percentage of the enemy population is not taken into this. Sometimes minorities feel themselves emotionally excluded; at other times private temperamental differences make some persons skeptic while others remain believers. The ground is ready for rumor, for tearing down inflated personages, for breaking the illusion by the simple process of attributing normally selfish motives in wartime.

It is easier to attribute bad motives to civilian leaders than to military. The ceremonialized discipline of modern warfare makes the military figure a little mysterious; his normal peacetime obscurity shielded him and his family from exposure, cheap publicity, gossip. The civilian leader does not have this protection. The very process of becoming prominent has involved his seeking publicity, for the one part, and his pretense of avoiding it, for the other. Furthermore, the man who serves his nation serves himself. It is not possible for a man to lead a large country without benefiting himself, since the act of leadership is itself intensely pleasurable. Also, prominence possesses a characteristic of vice; even when it loses its value for positive enjoyment it retains withdrawal pains. The once-prominent individual hates to leave prominence though he may be genuinely weary of it. He is willing to be tired of the country, but not willing for the country to be tired of him. In wartime old leaders remain and new ones come in. Fame and obscurity shift with even greater rapidity than before. The personality-politics condition of the country is highly mobile. Personalities are tense with interpersonal conflict.

Then comes the propagandist.

First, he attributes normal human motives to the leaders who so obviously possess them. In this job, he is doing what the famous little boy in the Hans Christian Andersen story did when he said of the Emperor, "Mamma, he hasn't any clothes on!" The propagandist need only say what everyone knows: that this man is notoriously fond of money; that another one has been a poor sportsman; that a third has betrayed some old friends; that a fourth has sought power in a selfish, vindictive way. The response which the propagandist seeks is a simple "That's so."

The next step in propaganda is to show that these persons do not measure up to the tragic, heroic, historic roles war has imposed on them. That too is not difficult, especially if the war is not going decisively one way or the other. Defeat or victory serves equally well to make leaders into heroes; Churchill and MacArthur were never more splendid than when they were whipped, the one after Dunkirk, the other after Bataan.

The final approach is the total discrediting of leaders. If the internal politics of the country have been bitter enough, some of the leaders may even come over voluntarily to the enemy. Quisling in Norway; Wang in China; Doriot and Laval in France; Vlassov in the U.S.S.R.; Laurel from the Philippines—such men all possessed a certain amount of standing in their own countries but through capture, impatience, or seduction decided to continue their careers with enemy backing. The propagandist can now pretend to be tolerant. It is he who believes in peace, in reconciliation, in easygoing live-and-let-live attitudes. He describes his protegés, the quislings, in warm complimentary terms; he lightens the tenor of his attack on the non-quisling enemy leaders. He takes the attitude that war continues because of private stupidity, vengefulness, greed, unreasonableness on the other. For his part, he is willing to let the politicians, both quisling and patriot, "settle it between themselves." Let them form a coalition government.

Personal smearing is effective. If the war situation runs in the enemy's favor, the easing of the enemy position permits the population the privilege of backbiting, and even within the leader-group some leaders may feel more free to destroy the positions or reputations of the others. The impossible and foolishly heroic stances which the leaders have taken in time of strain now make most of them look a little silly. Conversely, in a downgrade situation, the leaders may gain stature in the first tragic weeks of defeat, but soon the ignobility of defeat sweeps over them all. The propagandist need only be a good reporter, and the leaders of the defeated country will provide him with good propaganda material.

In estimating the propaganda situation, the vulnerability of the leaders to personal attack is one of the major elements. Properly handled, it can be of real value. In the American Revolution, the personal character of George Washington was a very substantial asset. A. very rich man, he could scarcely be accused of a gutter revolution. A slave owner, he could not be accused of wanting the overthrow of the social order. An experienced soldier, he could not be attacked as a military amateur. A man of patience, correct manners, and genuine modesty, he was not easily described as a bloody empire-builder, an immoral sycophant, or a power-drunk madman. British propaganda accordingly went after the Continental Congress, of which there was a great deal to be said. On the other side, the Americans had duck soup when it came to George III and most of his Cabinet—personalities which included boors, fuddy-duddies, too-little-and-too-laters, and conspicuous nincompoops.