On Propaganda
Propaganda, although it has not always gone by this name, has existed since antiquity. Oftentimes a capable and demagogic individual would win over so many adherents through disclosures and promises and an ability to provide the people with bread and circuses that he would succeed in achieving absolute power. With a certain schadenfreude one can say that every leader, every regime prefers the darkening of the minds of its subjects (called citizens in modern times). More precisely, the subjects should possess only enough knowledge to confirm the rule of those who hold power.
Whereas democracies seek ways to limit the tendencies of governments to transform their citizens into a mere assenting mob, totalitarian regimes try to achieve the opposite.
These regimes have a certain number of loyal citizens, often even fanatically devoted adherents (and approximately the same number of determined opponents). They attempt to acquire the rest of the citizenry for their goals or at least compel them to obedient silence. First they must protect each of their subjects from the influence of all enemy elements and ideas, and all thoughts that do not support the vision upon which the dictatorship is built are considered enemy ideas. Then they must besiege their opponents with correct thoughts. In his first speech as newly appointed chancellor, Adolf Hitler announced his cultural (or, better, anticultural) program. Concurrently with the political purification of our public life, the Reich government will undertake a thorough moral purification of the country. All cultural bodies, theaters, cinemas, literature, the press, and radio — all of this will be used as a tool to fulfill this goal. . Blood and race will once again become the source of artistic inspiration.
A few weeks after this, purges were under way in all cultural organizations, in all media outlets, even in churches. Bonfires of “harmful” books blazed on city squares and in front of universities. Books vanished from libraries and bookstores.
Over the course of a few months, the ground was laid for the dictator and his helpers to gain control over the people’s minds via propaganda in all media.
In modern times, propaganda has become an essential element of totalitarian power. In the first stages there is always the corruption of the people through the generous distribution of property, which was at one time stolen from the nobility, another time from the Jews, and still another from the capitalists. Then follows the attempt to control the minds of the citizens.
The clearest (and most cynical) function and mission of propaganda, as it is understood today, was defined by one of its creators, Joseph Goebbels, the author of the infamous dictum that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth:
The goal of the National Socialist revolution was to seize power because the idea of revolution remains empty theory if not combined with power. Revolutionary political propaganda brought the ideas of National Socialism to the masses, and therefrom arose Adolf Hitler’s iron soldiers who, through faith in the gospel of his teachings, brought revolution all the way to the threshold of power.
Propaganda is a matter of practice, not of theory. . In other words, propaganda is good if it leads to the desired results, and propaganda is bad if does not lead to the desired results. . Its purpose is not to be decent, or gentle, or weak, or modest; it is to be successful.
The Communists were somewhat less direct in their speeches, but propaganda occupied the same essential position. According to Stalin:
There is probably no need to mention the great significance of party propaganda and the Marxist-Leninist education of our workers. I have in mind not only the workers in the party. I also have in mind the workers of youth organizations, trade unions, business unions, cooperatives, financial and cultural institutions, and others. . The attention of our party must be concentrated on propaganda in the press and in the organization of a lecture system of propaganda.
In reality, Marxist-Leninist “education” concentrated not only on party members but on all of society. Over the course of a few generations, it became the basis of education in the Communist empire, from preschool to doctoral students, and one could not receive a degree without successfully passing an exam on Marxism.
Modern means of communication transformed propaganda into a powerful medium; therefore, every totalitarian regime sought to bring them under its power as quickly as possible. The day after the Austrian anschluss, Goebbels, now the powerful Nazi minister of propaganda, noted: I am giving Dr. Dietrich precise instructions for the reform of the Austrian press. We must initiate an enormous reshaping of personnel. . We are establishing a Reich radio in Vienna. At the same time, we are creating a Reich Ministry of Propaganda.
In the days immediately following the February coup in Czechoslovakia, the Communists occupied the editorial offices of all newspapers and radio stations. They instituted action committees to expel tenacious editors and replace them with vetted personnel willing to cooperate. News organizations were purged, and those belonging to the party took power. Frightened non — party members often hastily joined their ranks.
In all totalitarian systems, the news media are directed by some sort of office (called varying names); however, it is always in the hands of the ruling party, or, more precisely, the group that rules in the party’s name. The office dispenses orders concerning what may be written about and what may not.
In the first half of the twentieth century, when radio was the most important news medium, the Nazis condemned to death anyone listening to “enemy” broadcasts. A few years later, Communists made it impossible to listen to foreign radio broadcasts by installing a net of jammers — this was not for humanitarian reasons; it was simply more effective.
A sort of canon of propaganda quickly arises. The fundamental means, policies, and goals can be condensed into a few points.
First, propaganda must name and define the basic idea it is implicitly to serve. It does not matter whether the idea is called National Socialism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, or Muslim fundamentalism. What is crucial is that it be transformed into Goebbels’s aforementioned gospel. The idea is holy, that is, unimpugnable, all-explaining, and eternal. Regimes based upon it will last for all time imaginable.
It is necessary to convince the citizens to willingly accept the fact that what has happened is irrevocable. The Soviet Union will endure forever because it embodies the most progressive and advanced societal order. Therefore, our friendship with it will endure forever. The Nazi empire will assume the rule of Europe. Nothing will change during those thousand years (a thousand years and eternity mean the same thing in the life of an individual), and from this it follows that only an idiot or someone on the enemy side would oppose it.
Article number two of the canon proves the existence of a cunning, deceitful, malevolent enemy intent on committing atrocities. (Without it, as I have indicated, no dictatorship can exist.) All effective propaganda is dualistic: It must battle for something the people long for, something to which they can fasten themselves, and at the same time it must battle against something or someone that is interfering with their desires and ideas. The enemy can be Jews, international imperialism, the United States, Israel, kulaks, the bourgeoisie, Trotskyites, plutocrats, Bolshevism, Zionism, cosmopolitanism, degenerate capitalism, seditious transmitters of Radio Free Europe, the CIA, German revanchists, Masons, or religious sects. The enemy can change shape over time too. It cannot, however, disappear from the world because the sanctity of propaganda is always strengthened by doing battle with satanic forces. The enemy is a pariah: deceitful, disgusting, dirty, corrupt, cunning, crafty, inordinately ambitious, treacherous, insidious, intriguing, destined to vanish from history. No comparisons are powerful enough. The enemy is a blood-letting dog (Stalin for Goebbels, Tito for Stalin). For Hitler the Romanian peasant is a miserable piece of cattle, Churchill an unprincipled pig. When Lenin writes his furious polemic with the foremost Social Democrat, the theoretician Karl Kautsky, he showers him with ever-new curses — Kautsky is a renegade, a parliamentary cretin, a bourgeois lackey, a sweet idiot. For Stalin, those he needs to divest himself of, the pariahs, are a handful of spies, murderers, and cankerworms slinking in the dust before foreign countries, infected by a slavish feeling of groveling humility before every foreign stooge.