Guns, tanks, and bombs were the principal weapons of World War II, but there were other, more subtle forms of warfare as well. Words, posters, and films waged a constant battle for the hearts and minds of the American citizenry just as surely as military weapons engaged the enemy. Persuading the American public became a wartime industry, almost as important as the manufacturing of bullets and planes. The Government launched an aggressive propaganda campaign with clearly articulated goals and strategies to galvanize public support, and it recruited some of the nation's foremost intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers to wage the war on that front. Posters are the focus of this online exhibit, based on a more extensive exhibit that was presented in the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, from May 1994 to February 1995. It explores the strategies of persuasion as evidenced in the form and content of World War II posters. Quotes from official manuals and public leaders articulate how the Government sought to rally public opinion in support of the war's aims; quotes from popular songs and sayings attest to the success of the campaign that helped to sustain the war effort throughout the world-shaking events of World War II.
President Roosevelt was a gifted communicator. On January 6, 1941, he addressed Congress, delivering the historic "Four Freedoms" speech. At a time when Western Europe lay under Nazi domination, Roosevelt presented a vision in which the American ideals of individual liberties were extended throughout the world. Alerting Congress and the nation to the necessity of war, Roosevelt articulated the ideological aims of the conflict. Eloquently, he appealed to Americans' most profound beliefs about freedom. The speech so inspired illustrator Norman Rockwell that he created a series of paintings on the "Four Freedoms" theme. In the series, he translated abstract concepts of freedom into four scenes of everyday American life. Although the Government initially rejected Rockwell's offer to create paintings on the "Four Freedoms" theme, the images were publicly circulated when The Saturday Evening Post, one of the nation's most popular magazines, commissioned and reproduced the paintings. After winning public approval, the paintings served as the centerpiece of a massive U.S. war bond drive and were put into service to help explain the war's aims.
Propaganda Technique In The World War Pdf Pdf
This paper analyzes propaganda leaflets in different wars. The importance of propaganda and its use and creation in different wars indicates its significance in terms of success. Every war has used certain different tactics and strategies in wars to win and influence the people through their war strategies and different types of leaflets. Following wars are discussed with their powerful propaganda during the war. For instance, the Korean war propaganda leaflets, German propaganda leaflets, Franco-Prussian War 1870 propaganda leaflets, Vietnam war 1954-75 propaganda, World War I Propaganda, and Spanish American War Propaganda. Propaganda has been used in these wars through different method either through leaflets, posters, music, through women, or yellow journalism etc. diverse impact of different propagandas were witnessed on the civilians and soldiers in these wars. That means that propaganda has remain an important element of war and has its strong crucial role in the winning war.
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The greatest lure of propaganda, for those using it to achieve total victory in the so-called war on terror, is that on surface it may appear to pose no intellectual problems about what it is and what it does. Drop leaflets on enemy territory; place pro-U.S. articles in newspapers abroad; broadcast radio programs that attack the enemy and praise American values -- and hearts and minds in hostile lands will be won over, like a salivating Pavlov dog reacting to food-related stimuli. But propaganda is not as simple as that. In fact, with its long history, it is a complicated topic that has been the subject of intense debate since antiquity.
Allow me to touch the tip of the propaganda iceberg and suggest two basic ways of looking at propaganda: moralist and neutralist. The moralist school argues that propaganda is intrinsically misleading and therefore morally reprehensible. This point of view, popular among philosophers and pedagogues, harks back to Plato. True, Plato did not use the word propaganda, a term coined by the Catholic Church in the 16th century ( ), during the Counter-Reformation, to describe the propagation of the faith. Rather Plato spoke about rhetoric, the art of persuasion, which he contrasted to philosophy, the love of truth. In Gorgias Plato leaves little doubt that rhetoric aims at domination, not instruction, and is therefore intellectually and morally unacceptable. Prodded by Socrates, the rhetorician Gorgias, stating that rhetoric has the "power ... to persuade the multitude," is left no choice but to admit that it is an art that does not give knowledge, but "belief without knowledge."
In the Republic Plato argues myth-making is essential to the existence of the state. But his condemnation in Gorgias of rhetoric as in itself immoral and domineering lives on in Western thought. It is reflected in the modern era in a classic of propaganda studies, Jacques Ellul's Propaganda: The Formation Of Men's Attitudes (U.S. edition, 1965), where this French philosopher writes that "[t]he force of propaganda is a direct attack against man ... a menace which threatens the total personality." A similar line of thinking was recently expressed in Stanley B. Cunningham's The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction (2002):
[B]ecause of propaganda's systematic mistreatment of truth and information and their procedural safeguards, its virtually imperceptible erosion of individual capability and social freedom, and its unnerving magnitude -- because of all these, it is simply myopic to regard all this as an ethically neutral state of affairs.
In his attack on the "myopic" view that propaganda is an "ethically neutral state of affairs" Cunningham is challenging a second way of looking at propaganda that can be traced to Aristotle, who is far more tolerant and accepting of rhetoric than Plato is in Gorgias. The best known twentieth-century representative of this neutralist school is the social scientist Harold Lasswell, whose widely read work, Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927), sought to look at propaganda objectively and scientifically in the aftermath of World War I, when the public in former combatant countries expressed moral outrage at the lies and atrocity stories that had been perpetuated by governments in that bloody conflict, giving propaganda a negative connotation that is still has today.
The no-nonsense view of Lasswell that propaganda "as a mere tool is no more moral or immoral than a pump handle" (Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 1937, vol. 11) was shared -- with certain variations -- by a large number propaganda scholars with a social-science or historical bent, among them (to cite the best among many) Daniel Lerner, Leonard W. Doob, Lindley Fraser, and Terence Qualter. (The father of American PR, Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was a supporter of this approach, but for reasons that had far more to do with business success than the expansion of knowledge). Today the neutralist view is alive and well in propaganda studies, and is reflected in the works of the historian Philip M. Taylor, who has written that "propaganda is a practical process of persuasion and, as a practical process, it is an inherently neutral concept." ("Propaganda from Thucydides to Thatcher: Some Problems, Perspectives & Pitfalls" [1992]).
Both views of propaganda can be defended as ways of trying to understand it. The first reminds us that it might be an illusion to make what could be artificial distinctions between man and the mind-tools that he creates and uses; that these very tools themselves, because they are made by man, remain a "part" of him even after he has made them, and that they can be an expression, or a continuation, of himself, in some cases of his hubris if not madness. Certainly Hitler's propaganda suggests this. It was not, one could argue, simply a "tool," or pump of Nazi rule; it had a symbiotic relationship with the Führer; it was another dimension of his living self, the incarnation of his nightmarish view of the world (just as, for Ellul, propaganda is an intrinsic part of all-controlling technological society that cannot be separated from -- or understood without -- it). Finally, an important fact stressed by Plato and other moralists cannot be overlooked: when propagandists use falsehoods, it is, after all, falsehoods they are using, and that is hard to justify morally.
As for the results of propaganda, the schools also differ. The first, which stresses the hypnotic, diabolical power of propaganda, tends to argue that it can control behavior and manipulate entire populations without their being aware of it, as is the case in Orwell's 1984; the second school, with its stress on the concrete and definable (and emphasis on the limitations of propaganda as a tool of policy), as a rule is more skeptical about what propaganda can actually achieve and how its influence can be accurately measured.
The tensions between the two schools -- and of course I am simplifying by calling them so, as every scholarly view is unique -- are unlikely to be resolved, in part because propaganda, like pornography, is so difficult to define. But such disagreements can be instructive, for they remind us that propaganda is a complex issue the use of which raises more questions than provides answers. Perhaps Pentagon planners could keep this in mind as they prepare more "information warfare" at taxpayers' expense. So could Under Secretary of State Karen Hughes, whose "public diplomacy" programs are, to many, indistinguishable from propaganda. 2ff7e9595c
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