Mind-Munitions

The Thirty Years War 115
Attempts at censorship were sporadic but failed to stem the rising
tide of invective, sponsored in the main by warring factions,
especially when captured documents fell into the hands of one side
or the other. The most celebrated occasion of this happening took
place after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 when King
Frederick V of Bohemia was defeated by the Catholic League and
Spanish and Imperial troops. Letters written by the Emperor to
Spain concerning the transfer of Protestant lands were intercepted
by supporters of Frederick, published, and distributed to demonstrate
the Spanish-Imperial Catholic conspiracy.
The intervention of Sweden on the side of the Protestant forces
in 1630 was the occasion of a renewed propaganda campaign.
Gustavus Adolphus’ War Manifesto, justifying his involvement to
the German people as an act of religious liberation, was widely
circulated, together with other justificatory leaflets. Swedish propaganda
played on words, using Sued spelled backwards as ‘deus’ as
a trick to present Gustavus as a Homeric heroic figure. Such support
as may have initially greeted the Swedish ‘liberators’ dwindled as
his opponents launched a wave of terror that was accompanied by
a propaganda campaign with the theme ‘Where was your liberator
when you needed him most?’ Following Gustavus Adolphus’
death, Germanic enthusiasm dwindled as the ‘liberators’ came
increasingly to resemble ‘invaders’ who had merely made
conditions worse for the peasantry by their intervention. However,
it would be inaccurate to suggest coherence on the part of the
propagandists; even the Protestants waged paper war against one
another – to the delight of the Catholic Church – as the Lutheran
stronghold of Saxony launched a psychological war against the
Calvinist forces in the Palatinate. Changing military fortunes
demanded changing propaganda explanations and exhortations.
As one writer put it, ‘the pen and the sword can do great things.
They can both make war and peace again. It is true that the pen
precedes the sword, but sometimes progress is quicker with the
sword.’ After thirty years of conflict, however, the pen and the
sword had forged a formidable alliance in which the one was now
recognized to be invaluable to the other for its success. Although
there was nothing new about this combination of warfare and
propaganda, it was the scale on which the alliance was formed, and
the extent to which the material was distributed, which marks this
period as a genuine turning point in the history of war propaganda.