Milton fell into the common booby-trap of refuting his opponents item by item, thus leaving them the strong affirmative position, instead of providing a positive and teachable statement of his own faith. He was Latin Secretary to the Council, in that Commonwealth of England which was—to its contemporaries in Europe—such a novel, dreadful, and seditious form of government. The English had killed their king, by somewhat offhanded legal procedures, and had gone under the Cromwellian dictatorship. It was possible for their opponents to attack them from two sides at once. Believers in monarchy could call the English murderous king-killers (a charge as serious in those times as the charge of anarchism or free love in this); believers in order and liberty could call the British slaves of a tyrant. A Frenchman called Claude de Saumaise (in Latin form, Salmasius) wrote a highly critical book about the English, and Milton seems to have lost his temper and his judgment.
In his two books against Salmasius, Milton then committed almost every mistake in the whole schedule of psychological warfare. He moved from his own ground of argument over to the enemy's. He wrote at excessive length. He indulged in some of the nastiest name-calling to be found in literature, and went into considerable detail to describe Salmasius in unattractive terms. He slung mud whenever he could. The books are read today, under compulsion, by Ph.D. candidates, but no one else is known to find them attractive. It is not possible to find that these books had any lasting influence in their own time. (In these texts written by Milton in Latin but now available in English, Army men wearying of the monotonous phraseology of basic military invective can find extensive additions to their vocabulary.) Milton turned to disappointment and poetry; the world is the gainer.
The vocabulary of seventeenth-century propaganda had a strident tone which is, perhaps unfortunately, getting to be characteristic of the twentieth century. The following epithets sound like an American Legion description of Communists, or a Communist description of the Polish democrats, yet they were applied in a book by a Lutheran to Quakers. The title of the tirade reads, in part:
... a description of the ... new Quakers, making known the sum of their manifold blasphemous opinions, dangerous practices, Godless crimes, attempts to subvert civil government in the churches and in the community life of the world; together with their idiotic games, their laughable action and behavior, which is enough to make sober Christian persons breathless, and which is like death, and which can display the lazy stinking cadaver of their fanatical doctrines....
In its first few pages, the book accuses the Quakers of obscenity, adultery, civil commotion, conspiracy, blasphemy, subversion and lunacy.[8] Milton was not out of fashion in applying bad manners to propaganda. It is merely regrettable that he did not transcend the frailties of his time.
Other Instances From History.
- Naval psychological warfare techniques used by the Caribbean pirates to unnerve prospective victims.
- Cortez's use of horses as psychological disseminators of terror among the Aztecs, along with his exploitation of Mexican legends concerning the Fair God.
- The failure of Turkish psychological warfare in the great campaigns of 1683 which left the issue one of purely physical means and cost Turkey the possible hegemony of central Europe.
- The propaganda methods of the British East India Company in the conquest of India against overwhelming Indian numerical superiority. (Edmond Taylor mentions these in his Richer by Asia.)
- The preventive psychological warfare system set up by the Tokugawa shoguns after 1636, which bottled up the brains of the Japanese through more rigorous control than has ever been established elsewhere over civilized people.
- The field psychological warfare of the Manchus, who conquered China against odds running as much as 400 to one against them, and who used terror as a means of nullifying Chinese superiority.
- The propaganda of the European feudal classes against the peasant revolts, which identified the peasants with filth, anarchy, murder, and cruelty.
- The Inquisition considered as a psychological warfare facility of the Spanish Empire.
- The agitational practices of the French Revolutionaries.
- Early uses of rockets and balloons for psychological effect.
- The beginnings of leaflet-printing as an adjunct to field operations.
Such a list just begins to touch on subjects which can and should be investigated, either as staff studies or by civilian historians. Collection of the materials and framing of sound doctrines for psychological warfare are no minor task.
