R. Wilcox
3/11/01
“Whoever controls the past controls the present,” George Orwell wrote. “Whoever controls the present controls the future.” While the ruthless and amoral society he describes in his novel 1984 may remain far-fetched, a certain eerie recognition comes through of the effect carefully constructed advertising can have on a believing public. As the main character Winston learns in reading a book he believes to have been written by an opposition leader, the propagandistic slogans used to manipulate public sentiment—for instance, war is peace—are actually not so far from the truth. Indeed, it is this sort of propaganda—which is mostly true, almost true, but not quite true—that, combined with the silencing of further truth, is the most dangerous—and the most effective.
During World War I, public opinion was “controlled” on more than one front and in more than one way. The most obvious example would be what the word “propaganda” itself tends to conjure in most minds—for instance, in the forms of posters, caricatures, and films. It was on these fronts that the most blatant battle over public opinion was fought, and it was here that the way propaganda, or control of public opinion, moved away from written, verbal denunciations or extollings and on to statements that were far more visual. Language was simple, even catchy, and the images were often symbolic and emotionally provocative. J.M. Winter states that “The best way to see its mixture of moral outrage, selective reporting, and misleading or untrue assertions is to see propaganda as a state-dominated lawyers’ brief”. This “brief”, especially during the years of 1914-16, was dominated by the message that the war was defensive, and each country was only defending itself against an “enemy” (which itself was more than adequately vilified by the same messages). There was even no shortage of religious language and insinuation, which, combined with the wide backing of the churches within each opposing country, fired the public imagination into seeing the war as a moral more than political conflict. Pacifists became traitors to both soldiers and “the cause”. Finally, there was a control focusing not on what was said but on what was not said—and censorship stretched from “official” sources all the way down to individual—like journalists—who submitted with a self-imposed tendency to omit “bad” news.
With so many influences striving to shape public opinion, the next question must certainly be with regards to just how effective the intended influence really was. What, after all, was the point of it to begin with? In the same article quoted previously, J. M. Winter offers an explanation: “consent was an essential element of mass warfare”. The public had to be rallied to support, and then the support had to be maintained—and propaganda can be seen in playing a large part in doing so. By creating a villain out of the “enemy”—whatever sort of villain he was made out to be—the moral outrage and obligation of the people could be mustered, and the drive to continue fighting a war which was as hellish in its conditions as in its conflicts could continue. Did it work?
The war did continue—it continued for 4 years and through 8 million casualties. Somewhere there was enough public support to continue feeding soldiers through the gears that drove the war. Was there moral outrage against a thoroughly vilified enemy? If the posters reflected the public opinion they were influencing—an idea to be treated further along—then there was. Yet the balance of influence between propaganda and the populace—if there was a balance of influence—and the factors that made the control of public opinion effective—must be also examined.
First let us treat the most difficult of subjects dealing with the control of public opinion—not examining the effects of fabrication, misleading, and exaggeration, but rather the effects of what was not said. Can the effects of something that did not happen be measured? It is easy to identify, perhaps, a direct correlation with public reaction after a reported atrocity—but what about the lack of public reaction when a thing was not reported? Indeed, the very nature of the subject makes it almost impossible to estimate the effect of what was not there. What can be seen, however, is that censorship did play a role in the fight over public opinion—if only helping to further throw off-balance reports and statements that were already one-sided. Among the more infamous cases of missing information is the military disaster at Gallipoli—the irony, of course, being that we only know it to be an infamous example of censorship because the silence was broken. Journalists, however, generally showed far less concern for getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth out to the public (it was a reporter who broke the story of what was happening at Gallipoli, despite being arrested and having his papers confiscated). A sort of self-imposed censorship, combined with misinformation and exaggeration, spread through the war coverage—the result of which was really not so different from the messages on the posters and the films: right versus wrong, the evil enemy, inciting moral outrage, and sending out the troops.
The newspapers were not the only promoters of the War According to the Posters. The aspect of moral outrage was, often, only further kindled by the churches. The churches in each of the different warring nations helped buoy the believer’s belief in the correctness of his position in the cataclysmic slaughter taking place. The ideals many churches were based on—charity, tolerance, loving one’s enemy, forgiveness—woven into a sermon would be seen as undermining the war effort (which, arguably, is exactly what they ought to be doing). Moreover, and what J.M. Winter in his book The Experience of World War I went so far as to call the “inevitable” consequence of the war, the clergymen were both patriotic and in the difficult position of counselling those grieving after losing loved ones. How much higher were their ideals than those of their countrymen? How different were they in their desire to see the enemy they may have equally believed in conquered? Were they in a position to say that the lost had been lost in an unjust and unnecessary war? Whatever the reasons—and, arguably, there are several—the churches, far from being entirely separated from the state, not only stepped aside instead of standing against the tide of the war and all its ugly home-front repercussions, but often ushered it on.
Finally, the most blatant and directly influential of the forms of control was direct, media-enhanced propaganda itself. It came in more than one form—posters, caricatures, and films were all highly engaged in the onslaught. The posters themselves marked most clearly the shift from verbal to visual forms of advertising to the public morality. Its images were often symbolic and evocative, using images of justice, soldiers, women, and children to conjure up for the public the image of war, the enemy, and what they were surely fighting for. In the first 3 years of the war the advertising campaign—whose product, says J. M. Winter, was the “justification of war”—focused predominantly on the defensive nature of the conflict, and how the country for which the advertising was produced was defending itself against the enemy that stood threatening at its doorstep.
The images helped to fuel the view of the war as a moral rather than political conflict. This was more than just countries with diplomatic disputes battling it out—this—or rather, the enemy, whoever it was—was somehow lower and depraved and threatening all that was good. Soldiers were portrayed as defending the homefront and the cause—what precisely this cause was not always necessarily being spelled out but certainly having something to do with the enemy, its depravity, and its necessary defeat. Women and children were portrayed as victims and the defended, and, particularly the women, as a staple of morale support for the men at the front. The enemy, meanwhile, was portrayed in caricatures and brutal, dehumanised forms. Every country’s cause was portrayed as just, and every country’s enemy portrayed as the age-old counterpart of the evil in contrast to the countries good. Just such distinctions and simplifications of the conflict into right versus wrong only further reinforced through the film industry. Here, even more than on paper, could the cry for continued support to the moral conflict be generated, as the influence of full-on suspended reality could be brought to bear. Charlie Chaplin, for instance, made a number of films that were blatantly propagandistic, to promote either something specific such as Liberty Bonds or the ideology of the war in general—and the films’ enormous successes, as previously stated, served to reinforce the public mind.
Indeed, the attempts to mould the public opinion to continue supporting the war—for truly, above all, that was what the advertising and the omissions were trying to do—were plentiful and direct. But was it these controls alone that shaped public opinion, or were other factors already in place to make the advertising campaign’s job easier? And was it purely a matter of public opinion being influenced by propaganda, without influence the other way around? First of all, just how effective were the controls in influencing public opinion? The persuasion to see the war as moral, the enemy as immoral, and to continue supporting the conflict may be isolated as the overwhelming themes of the campaign. Certainly there was at least enough support to continue the war for four years. Much of it may indeed be said to be have been driven by a desire to stop the enemy—for instance, much allied propaganda relied on the message that brutal Germany was a menace that had to be stopped. But, if the messages were effective, was it due to effective indoctrination or effective reinforcement?
For one, there must have been enough public sentiment from other sources to launch Europe so enthusiastically into conflict, before the war propaganda could even be properly started (as the high number of soldiers who volunteered and the low number who avoided the call to arms may testify). Rather than steering public opinion towards the desired state of mind, it would seem rather that the controlling was more geared towards keeping and reinforcing sentiments and mindsets that were already there. People were outraged at reported atrocities—newspapers and posters embellished them. Men felt a wave of patriotism and reported for duty—posters and films depicted them fighting valiantly and called upon others for support. A sort of cycle may be seen—take raw public opinion, influence it a little, take new concoction of public opinion + its new influence, mould it a little more…the propaganda seemed to play off public opinion, which in turn played off what it was told it believed.
This idea—that the public opinion was effectively controlled insofar as it was being steered and maintained in the same general direction it would be going anyway—seems to be held up in a comparison between British and German propaganda as set out in The Experience of World War I. British propaganda—and Allied propaganda in general—by and large only reinforced what the public already felt. The countries did not need much convincing of Germany’s impending threat and the necessity of driving the German army back. Moreover, the wartime public seemed to be, for all intents and purposes, more or less united. Germany, on the other hand, may be seen as suffering from internal domestic schisms growing deeper between the social classes, and resulting in a working class less willing to listen to its “superiors”. These same “superiors”, unfortunately, were those who were responsible for churning out the advertising campaign to influence the masses that were growing less willing to listen. The language directed to a public whose opinion was not entirely trusted by the higher tiers tended to come off as condescending or elitist rather than rallying and united.
The main point, however, remains. While Adolf Hitler claimed that it was British propaganda that was so influential in defeating the Germans, the truth seems to be more that the propaganda—as with any advertising—was only effective insofar as the people listened to what they were told. That Germany lost the war because they were defeated on the field seems far more likely than that they were overwhelmed by an onslaught of posters. Meanwhile, one further question still remains: how many people were actually influenced by the different controls in the first place? Those in the cities most likely were—but what about the countless others who saw few posters, no films, and read no newspapers? Were their opinions duly influenced as well?
Nevertheless, where the public opinion was influenced directly—or even indirectly, such as person-to-person instead of poster-to-person— the influence of control over public opinion inevitably always depends on the public. Propaganda is always more effective if the people already largely believe what they are being told, and is only effective as long as they keep believing it. The shift in propaganda messages by 1917—from justification and defense to particular war aims and hopes for peace—further attests to the fact that the means of influencing public opinion tends to change as that opinion changes. Yet fabrication, exaggeration, justification, and omission are also great influencers—and working together can indeed take a public opinion, shape it, and display it once more—and, being told what they believe, people will, even despite themselves, believe it. Yet a personal lesson is spelled out through all the study—that, while truth may be broken, twisted, and swallowed, the truth itself remains. Justifying evil by painting it good does not change what is beneath the paint. And the concept of a sort of “holy” war—of slaughter and hellish fighting justified by the Almighty—seems, especially in the face of modern-day history, nearly inconceivable. “Right”, “wrong”, “winning”, “losing”—one cannot help but wonder if, down in the trenches, the arguments were quite so clear. It is hard to draw such clean conclusions in the mud.
Demarco, Neil. The Great War (Hodder 20th Century History). London: Hodder & Stoughton Education, 1997.
The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War; ed. Hew Strachan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Winter, J.M. The Experience of World War I. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Internet Sources:
http://killeenroos.com/link/ww1.html
http://members.aol.com/TeacherNet/WWI.html
http://www.lib.byu.edu/ rclh/wwi/1915/propleaf.html
http://www.efn.org/ bsharvy/chomsky/html