| Was this one really used?
" American Soldiers and Marines. While you are far from home and lonely. (Bart Simpson: i think it would say: someone else) is in America sleeping with your wives and girl friends."
It's remarkable as it is the propaganda used by the germans in WW II to influence english soldiers:
" English Soldiers. While you are far from home and lonely(substitute dying) Americans are sleeping with your wives and girl friends."
I wonder if this kind of propaganda would work as it requires a certain difficulty in veryfing the facts: with modern mass communication you can easily call you parents/wife/friend/family to check(if you would believe it). In the days of the WW II if would be more difficult to check.
About propaganda I observed these points:
- start small and close at home.
- use something people find believable.
- use a source that people find reliable.
- use something which is easy to prove and difficult to disprove.
- use a logic or fear which is inescapable.
- use a source which is difficult to miss.
- offer the people something
Most propaganda is striving towards the unbelievable. The reason propaganda is often unbelievable, is because those who make propaganda don't understand those who are the target of the propaganda. And this is maybe the major obstacle: you need feedback to see if your propaganda is working.
Propaganda maybe exists in two forms:
a negative one:
a positive one:
The negative has as purpose to create doubt. Try to make someone doubt himself, his friends and allies. Doubts about who you are supposed to achieve. Or doubts about you environment: will you be our next target? Or doubt if it is al worth it: is all this killing, maiming etc worth it? It is usually aimed at the enemy.
The positive one is to promote your own case and has exact the opposite function: create certainty. What we do is right. We will not surrender etc.
An insidious way was used by Goebbels: the allies want to exterminate the german people/state. We can't surrender! Thus one is usually aimed at your own people.
The difficulty is when the propagandist is to successful: stressing that his enemy is the devil incarnate will pose a great problem when dealing with them in diffusing a situation or taking them prisoner. It has the danger of uniting your adversaries, when it might be better to divide them.
The challenge of modern mass communication is that obvious lies are easily discovered. You can't claim a war is going successfully or that thousands of soldiers are dying each day when it is easy to find information that the opposite is true.
But while this is true the vice verse is also true: more ways are opening to manipulate, deceive and spread wrong and worrying information. It wasn't easy for instance for germans to spread propaganda in the US or in the UK. Now it's possible to overstep the boundary and spread lies and deceit across the borders out of control.
One can even imagine that people will be called by terrorists who then will tell them that they (or their family) will be next to die. Sort of like the japanese or vietnamese used to do in broadcast now is possible by phone or mobile phone: a very scary thought indeed.... |