Mind-Munitions

8
Introduction
when all these issues are stripped of their theoretical flesh, perhaps
human beliefs are really a matter of faith. Hence propaganda
appears most effective when it preaches to the already converted.
This book is therefore concerned simply with means – with
persuasive methods – not with ends. It does not address whether a
product (such as a war or a religion) is itself needed or unwanted,
or whether it is right or wrong, just or unjust. It simply examines
the means by which those products were marketed, successfully or
otherwise. There is no real point, in other words, in making moral
judgements concerning whether propaganda is a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’
thing; it merely is. Rather, one needs to redirect any moral
judgement away from the propaganda process itself and more to
the intentions and goals of those employing propaganda to secure
those intentions and goals.
Similarly, with psychological warfare – propaganda directed
usually against an enemy – the same sort of pejorative connotations
need to be peeled away before we can begin to understand the
process fully. After all, why should there be such a stigma surrounding
a process of persuasion designed to get people to stop fighting,
and thus preserve their lives, rather than having their heads blown
off? Today, as we learn more and more about the workings of the
human mind in an era where nuclear weapons could readily destroy
all human life on the planet, propaganda and psychological operations
(as they are now called) have become genuine alternatives to
war. As this book will argue, that is what the Cold War was really
all about, as are indeed many of the contemporary ‘information
wars’ which now accompany international crises. Propaganda is
part of the struggle for perceptions in which words attempt to
speak as loud as actions, and sometimes even to replace the need
for action. It works most effectively when words and deeds (the
propaganda and the policy) are synchronous, but the ‘propaganda
of the deed’ is in itself a powerful persuader. When Rome destroyed
Carthage, for example, or when the Americans dropped atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or when battleships are despatched
to the coastline of a weaker adversary, such actions send powerful
messages that form part of the persuasive process that operates in
the psychological dimension of human communication.
But we do need constantly to bear in mind why we as individuals
believe what we do. A great deal of theory works on the
assumption that information is power, and whoever controls the