Mind-Munitions

Introduction 3
against the challenge of the Protestant Reformation, the heretics
shouted foul at such outside interference in the development of
their ‘natural’ religious thought processes. The legacy of distrust
against the word in Protestant societies remains to this day. But its
recent pejorative connotations date mainly from the excesses of
atrocity propaganda during the Great War of 1914-18 when the
modern ‘scientific’ use of propaganda came of age. It was that
development – and particularly its association with falsehood –
which Lord Ponsonby denounced so vehemently. The odour got
worse when it was employed by the Nazis, the Soviets and other
thoroughly nasty regimes ever since. However, it is all too easily
forgotten that it was the British who, during the First World War,
set the standard in modern propaganda for others to follow.
As we shall see, falsehood was not a watchword of that experiment,
the first to attract considerable scholarly attention. It was no
more the policy of the official British wartime propaganda machinery
to lie deliberately than it was to tell the whole truth. Facts were
deployed selectively yet rationally, while falsehoods were eschewed
in the belief that they would ultimately be exposed and thereby
jeopardize the credibility of those facts that had been released. The
government preferred to lie by omission, not by commission. The
majority of wartime falsehoods – and there were many – were in
fact circulated by a free and highly jingoistic press, not by the
official propagandists, but the damage had been done. Nor were
matters helped by the great praise subsequently heaped on the
British use of propaganda by the likes of Adolf Hitler in Mein
Kampf who went on to adapt the lessons of the British experience
for his own, quite different, purposes. Moreover, in the United
States, isolationist elements were quick to seize upon post-First
World War revelations about the extent of British propaganda
directed against neutral Americans between 1914 and 1917.
Washington, they argued, had been ‘duped’ into joining the allied
side and this, in turn, was used to reinforce their own arguments
about the need to avoid future foreign entanglements. Propaganda
thus bred propaganda. It might seem ironic, therefore, that it is the
Americans who today stand as the masters of its art, science and
craft. But even though both Britain and the United States, as
pluralistic democracies, normally fight shy of the word, that does
not mean that they do not engage in it. Nor does it automatically
mean that they are wrong to do so.