The propaganda problem
Sir: What Philip Stevens calls in his letter last week 'a vast amount of unimpeachable evidence' [about the alleged Armenian genocides] was actually produced as part of the British government's propaganda campaign during the first world war. And in being convinced 'beyond a shadow of a doubt' by the 2005 republication of Bryce and Toynbee's 1916 Blue Book, The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-1916, he seems totally unaware of the less than unimpeachable forces at play in it, just as they were in other products from the same Wellington House source, such as The German Terror in Belgium or the film Once a Hun, Always a Hun.
Mr Stevens might now consider reading British Propaganda During the First World War 1914-1918 by M.L. Sanders and P.M. Taylor. May I commend their general conclusion to all your readers: 'The effect of British atrocity propaganda during the first world war and the failure to substantiate the stories in the years that followed led to a general disinclination in the 1930s and 1940s to believe atrocity stories about the Nazi treatment of the Jews. The distortions of the first world war therefore served to obscure the realities of the second.'
Osman Streater London NW3
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