Abstract
Now we no longer trust politicians, we are more open to believing propoganda from other sources, argues
THE FIRST CASUALTY of war is the truth. So said, well… lots of people actually. So many people that I really didn’t want to start this article with it. It’s a cliché. Such a ubiquitous and timeless expression of cynicism that no one can even agree on who said it first – the candidates including an Ancient Greek playwright, a long-dead US Senator and Samuel Johnson. But just as politicians, essayists and satirists throughout the ages have kept coming back to it, so in the end, did I. Because, like so many clichés, it is a simple and transparent truism. The reality is that when the stakes are as high as they surely must always be in warfare, lying and misleading and emitting and embellishing are all just too tempting to be resisted. Propaganda, in short, will always find a space in the nooks and crannies of battle.
The two world wars offer a master-class in how governments can sustain public consent to self-sacrifice
It is easy to understand why propaganda matters in war. The sacrifices and burdens that war places on the citizenry – from rationing to mass bereavement to the fear of imminent destruction – can be excruciating. The consequences of apathy amongst your soldiers can be devastating. The benefits of winning over as-yet ambivalent or neutral governments and peoples to your cause can be decisive. All of these audiences require encouragement, reinforcement and persuasion – and that’s before one even gets to the possibilities contained in convincing one’s enemy of the futility or injustice of their own cause.
The two great conflicts of the twentieth century, World War I, whose centenary we commemorate and mourn this year, and World War II, which ended 69 years ago, witnessed huge innovation and investment in the strange art of propaganda.
These efforts succeeded in mobilising 65 million active combatants in World War I and nearly 100 million in the second. What is more, propaganda played a huge role in keeping the home fronts of countries on both sides on board with these gargantuan exercises in total conflict. In the UK in 2011 riots on the streets of London were widely diagnosed as symptoms of welfare reform – the people saw a benefits cap of £26,000 a year looming and took to the streets. During World War II British citizens were restricted by government edict to measly weekly allocations of meat, tea, jam, biscuits, breakfast cereals, cheese, eggs, lard, milk and canned and dried fruit. They did not smash up central London in outrage – partly because the Germans were doing that for them but mostly because the majority was sufficiently convinced of the necessity of their suffering.
ABOVE: A child collects food with a ration book during World War II
Credit: MPVHistory / Alamy
The two world wars offer a master-class in how governments can sustain public consent to self-sacrifice. The British government spent much of World War I mixing fear and outrage into a potent and highly effective mood enhancer for the British people. Tall tales of German barbarism were told – in exercises straight out of the “atrocity propaganda” playbook – in order both to inspire a humanitarian urge to intervention and to remind voters of the consequences of defeat for themselves and their families. The Ministry of Information (which Western government would dare such a name in our post-Orwell world?) pumped out literature, press releases, movies and posters – much of them balancing a narrative of British pluck with Germanic inhumanity.
The classic of the genre remains the Bryce Report on German “war crimes” which brilliantly and vividly terrified the public of Britain and America with its depiction of the systematic rape, mutilation, murder and cannibalism deployed by German soldiers on Belgian civilians. It was bone-chilling stuff for British people who, when it was published in 1915, were also subject to constant warnings from their government that invasion by the Germans was a real and present danger. This work of – at the very least – exaggeration was also transformative when it came to American public opinion. Hot on the heels of the Germans’ sinking of a ship sailing from New York to the UK, the Bryce Report gained sensational coverage in the US and helped swing America into action.
Tall tales of German barbarism were told – in exercises straight out of the “atrocity propaganda” playbook – in order both to inspire a humanitarian urge to intervention
How true the accusations in the Bryce Report were remains a bone of some considerable contention. A significant percentage of the witness statements describing the mass-brutalisation of Belgium by German troops came from defeated Belgian soldiers – and many historians and scholars argue that the Bryce Report hugely inflated the systemic nature of German barbarism and the level of deliberate suffering imposed on the Belgian civilian population. But whatever its questionable worth as a historic document, the Bryce Report was gold dust for the whizz kids at the Ministry of Information – who ensured sensationalist headlines at home and abroad, depicted German soldiers bayonetting children in posters and reminded, none-too-subtly, British mums and dads that should we lose, this would be the fate of little Jimmy and Sally too.
There is no real point in arguing about the ethics of using the faults of one’s enemies – often grotesquely exaggerated faults – to win and to keep support. It is, when the stakes are so high, an inevitable temptation. And the Germans were at it too – producing some of the most ludicrous scare stories about British troops ever to grace the written word. But the point I am trying to make is that, back then, it was effective – supremely so at times. But it just isn’t effective anymore.
The world of 1915 is gone forever. It is impossible now to imagine a government in the democratic world able to wield so much influence over the mind-sets, hopes, fears and beliefs of their public with such ease. The Bryce Report was a shaky dossier of dodgy evidence sexed up to suit the cause of war. And on the whole, folk bought it. Coverage was blanket and was emphatic in its faith in the conclusions of the government – for millions in the UK in 1915 it simply became the truth that German soldiers bayonetted and, perhaps, ate children. Compare that with 2003, when the government released a report on another despotic regime intent on regional domination. That document too was, at best, unreliable in its sourcing and heavy on the red alert messaging. It, too, was a small part of a larger case for standing up to tyranny – one that was perhaps a tad over the top about the imminent terror the enemy represented. But the infamous “dodgy dossier” that formed part of Prime Minister Blair’s justification for invading Iraq was mocked and monstered almost from the start.
Allegation and innuendo about how the “dodgy dossier” had been constructed meant that, even as Blair won his vote on intervention, the British public were already closing their ears. It’s hard to win a propaganda war when your public won’t even listen to your elegant reconstruction of the truth.
That’s not to say that Blair was undone by some particular “crime” committed by him or his staff. But rather, it is to point to a sad but surely unarguable truth – we’re just more cynical about government communication now. We’re more sophisticated. We have access to a myriad of alternative sources of comment and analysis – for better or for worse – and we presume our politicians are lying to us all the live long day. Only 18 per cent of the British public trust politicians to tell the truth. Which means that when a government minister starts trying to tell us that there’s a big bad wolf at the door, 82 in every 100 of us is already turning to our neighbour and saying, “he’s probably making this up you know”.
And there’s another factor at play here. Because we no longer believe what our governments tell us we are left open and available to misinformation and disinformation from other sources instead. Propaganda hasn’t died as we’ve become less credulous of our political class – it has blossomed. But the propagandists now live entirely outside any pretence of democratic accountability. NGOs, lobby groups, corporations and media outfits funded and controlled by foreign governments but with a mask of independence, compete to convince us – on questions of war and peace more than on almost anything else. Whether these organisations represent a Dovish point of view or a Hawkish one is besides the point – what matters is that they fill the vacuum created by our mistrust in our politics and our governments. And they can say whatever they want because we no longer have any mutually agreed base line of impartiality.
So it is that Iraq Body Count could say in 2006 that 50,000 Iraqi civilians had died in Operation Enduring Freedom and its aftermath, while The Lancet said it was over half a million. A host of interventionist lobby groups claim it was far fewer than either. In a 2008 poll more British people agreed that the invasion of Iraq was “to gain control of Iraq’s oil” than signed up to any other rationale. In the absence of a trusted government to tell us stories about why we go to war there is instead a free-for-all fog of conspiracy theories, lies, third-party propaganda and outright fantasy. All competing for our attention. All drowning out the enfeebled voices of our leaders.
I know that many will shout “hurray”. A competition of voices, ideas and explanations can surely only be a good thing? Well yes – to a point. And of course it is not necessarily better to have a government that lies to you than to have an NGO or a pressure group do the same. But here’s the thing. When I think of the sacrifices that were made by the everyday man and woman in order to defeat German domination in World War I, and the plague of Nazism in World War II, I am – like many people – moved. Together, millions sacrificed themselves – flesh, freedom, food and so much more – in order to accomplish great things that were only truly achievable through war. It might not be fashionable or reassuring to say so but there are some evils that can only be triumphed against by use of force and by mass suffering. In a democracy consent needs to be won in order for these things to be doable. We have to volunteer to suffer. And in the absence of a political elite capable of inspiring us to believe their propaganda over the hubbub of everyone else’s, I think we have good cause to be frightened that we shall never again be able or willing to stand up and be counted as once we were.