MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
OF the many phenomena which perplex our unhappy age, perhaps the most formidable and the least understood is mass propa- ganda. In a sense, of course, this is no new invention. Thersites, we may suppose, had his supporters and adherents to whom he relayed many subversive statements on the subject of Agamemnon and the absurdity of spending long and dangerous years upon the Troad for the sole purpose of avenging a conjugal infidelity. Isaiah unquestionably would have made a magnificent propagandist or Minister of Enlightenment ; and, after all, we all went to war once for Jenkins' ear. Yet, although propaganda has always existed among men, it is our recent inventiveness which has rendered it so gigantic an element of policy ; the spread of primary education, the ever decreasing number of blessed analphabets, the popular Press, the film and above all the wireless have placed in the hands of the rulers weapons which they use ruthlessly, violently and without restraint. All this, I admit, is a truism and can, as such, be dismissed from most men's minds. "But that," they will smile, "is merely propa- ganda "—as if one were to dismiss cholera as a minute invisible germ. One would have supposed that those who have read the great Bible of the propagandists, Mein Kampf, and who have ob- served the terrible effects produced by the technique therein advo- cated upon millions of sentient beings, would have realised that in the 'emotional appeal to the masses we have one of the most sinister problems of our age. Hitler in the pages of his autobiography has set down in most explicit terms his recipe for mass excitation. The appeal must be emotional always and never rational ; the same slogans and phrases must be repeated continuously until they obtain an almost automatic response ; everything must be stated in extreme terms, without qualification or reservation, so that there shall be no grey zones between the utterly black and the utterly white ; and the emotions of the masses must be so stimulated as to arouse among them a form of group hysteria "which will carry them along."
We are apt, in our easy-going, optimistic island, to contend that Nazi propaganda was in the end ineffective because the Nazis failed. We can contend that the majority of the German people have now regained their senses and that the poisons have ceased to work. I admit that the Germans despise failure and are prepared to repudiate, and to dissociate themselves from, any doctrine which has not achieved success. But he would be a bold man who would assert that the poisons of the Hitlerian myth had been in fact eliminated from the veins and arteries of the German people, or that there are not millions of them today who look back with longing to the happy days when they could surrender to group hysteria and fuse their uncertain individualities into the strong warm stream of a mystic destiny. We are apt also to contend that German propaganda, as directed abroad, was invariably clumsy and lacking in psychological insight. True it is that during the war German propaganda was most ineffective ; but was it because it was in itself so inefficient or merely because we all knew in our bones that we were fighting for our lives? It is salutary to reflect upon the immense hold which German propaganda obtained in this country between the two wars. They managed to convince us that the Treaty of Versailles was the most iniquitous ever framed ; that the Polish Corridor was a geo- graphical absurdity ; that they had a " right " to be united with their brethren in Austria and the Sudetenland ; and that the free city of Danzig was not worth the bones of a single British Grenadier. So pervasive were their persuasions that, when they violated the Locarno Treaties and militarised the Rhineland, there were many sensible men in Great Britain who hailed this outrage as "a chance to rebuild." For German propaganda between 1920 and 1939 was aimed at the soft under-belly of the British public, namely their tender conscience ; it was not so much that they persuaded us that they were right ; it was that they succeeded in persuading us that we were somehow wrong. * * * * We are now being subjected to a similar form of mass propaganda on the part of Soviet Russia and her satellites. The crudity of their methods—and they are indeed far cruder than those employed by
the Nazis—should not conceal from us the fact that we are ex- periencing an intense, concerted, utterly ruthless and most dangerous offensive. Our tragic attempts to fulfil our duties under the Palestine mandate are represented as a violent and brutal orgy of imperialism; the Cyprus camps are compared to Belsen ; the clash between the Hindus and the Moslems in Calcutta is described as "women and children being mown down by British-tanks " ; we and the Americans are accused of having made vast fortunes out of the war, and our services during the war, the tremendous help we gave to Russia, are all ignored. Such attacks do not even pretend to bear any relation to the true facts ; they are designed solely to arouse mass emotion. Thus Signor Togliatti, the Italian Communist, on his return the other day to Rome from Paris, accused England of desiring to render Trieste "a second Gibraltar." He must have known that this was a mis-statement ; he must have known, even if he attributed to us the most sinister intentions in the Adriatic, that no sane man would create a fortress at the end of a bottleneck. Yet finding it doubtless very difficult to explain to his comrades the pro-Slav attitude of Russia in this matter, he uses the word " Gibraltar " as some wild cry to scare the birds.
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What is so disturbing, and indeed confusing, about the propaganda of Russia, her satellites and confederates, is the utter distortion of what one supposed to be accepted values and of what one supposed to be accepted meanings. We may smile when we hear our Labour Government (a Government which is engaged on evacuating India and Egypt) being described as reactionary and imperialist. We may become angered when we compare our impending sacrifices with the vast areas over which Russia has extended her sway. We may be surprised at Russia's appetite for reparations and her refusal to execute vital clauses in international agreements. But the fact remains that, although in many respects we believe ourselves to be right and Russia to be wrong, the Russians are seeking to convince the world that every one of our actions is dictated by evil motives and that they alone have at heart the happiness and the peace of the world. This distortion of reality assumes at the Paris Peace Con- ference the most fantastic forms. The Soviet Six have even sought to create the impression that, whereas in some manner Bulgaria and Albania are worthy of Europe's love, Greece is in disgrace. I am not, I confess, a passionate admirer of the Tsaldaris Govern- ment, but I find it difficult to believe my ears when I hear Bulgaria (who has for the last thirty-three years behaved as the sneak of the Balkans) lauded as in some way meritorious, when Greece, whose heroic sacrifice did so much to save Moscow and the war, is repre- sented as a country with which decent people should be unwilling to consort. Such distortions of reality may or may not have an effect upon the people for whom they are immediately devised ; all I know is that in the Conference as a whole they create feelings of depression, hopelessness and, what is worst of all, a diminution of self-confidence. It may be for that very purpose that they are
designed. * * * *
There are those, I know, who excuse these attacks by contending that they "are just Russia's way." The Russians themselves profess to be surprised that we should take their polemics seriously. Yet one is obliged to take seriously a propaganda which aims, with much success, at identifying Communism with nationalism. Nor can one remain permanently indifferent to the deliberate perversion of truth and the constant attribution of false motive. As one who believes that the happiness of the world depends upon our being able to reach, if not a full agreement with Russia, then at least a friendly agreement to disagree, I regard these polemics as a miserable mis- fortune. To counter them by similar methods would be to Play poker with a man having L600 in his purse when you have only ‘6; our stock of misrepresentation would soon run out. Our onlY course is to proclaim and to execute our own liberal principles, al the hope (and it can never be a vain hope) that what in the end men most desire is the pursuit of their own happiness in conditions of freedom, security, privacy and repose.
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