One of the points examined was surrender as a process. Surrendering does not depend upon the disposition of the individual enemy soldier to say yes or no to the war as a whole. He could say no a thousand times and still be on the other side shooting at us.
The actual physical process of surrender is an elaborate one consisting of the psychological processes of getting ready to give up on the other side, the physical capacity to surrender when the opportunity for getting captured presents itself, and the alternative, more difficult process of deliberately leaving the other side and getting to our side alive. In 1951 and 1952 there were considerable developments along this line. Americans learned much about how to teach enemy soldiers to surrender. Late in 1952 and early in 1953 the front had become so static that it took extraordinary heroism for soldiers—outside of a tiny minority engaged in reconnaissance patrols—to get away from their own side and surrender to the enemy without being killed by their friends as deserters or by the enemy as sneak attackers.
The U.S. public did not realize that throughout the Korean war the Communists—Russian, North Korean, and Chinese—enjoyed a distinct radio advantage over the UN side both as to funds available for programs and as to number of station-hours on the air. The language gap between the Americans and Chinese was so extreme that it was hard for Americans to realize that the Chinese broadcasts covered wider audiences and covered them better than did our own. American restraint in this field may have been dictated in part by the fact that the war was a limited war consisting of combat only with those armed Chinese Communists on North Korean territory, but not with armed Chinese Communists elsewhere in the Far East.
Philosophy and Propaganda Development.
Philosophy offers an opportunity for the reexamination of cultural values. The indoctrination of those professors who will teach the teachers of the generation after next will influence the capacity of future Americans to have a world-view which will give them the utmost opportunities for action in the military field while retaining as far as possible the blessings of U.S. civilian civilization. That U.S. civilization is still civilian and not military is, of course, beyond cavil.
The William Jackson committee was a voice crying in the wilderness when it asked for new terms and new ideas against which to set U.S. propaganda operations in the world of modern strategy. Philosophers may have had the capacity for finding some of the answers, but philosophers, of all people, do not like to be jostled or hurried. The author has never heard of a philosopher employed on a confidential basis by the United States Government to think through the historical and cultural rationale of a U.S. military victory for the future. Writers such as F. S. C. Northrop and Erich Fromm—to name only two sharply contrasting personalities—have written books which possess high significance for the international propaganda field. The connection appears, however, to be tangential.
Literary Contributions.
Though literary men have converted their writing to propaganda purposes, few of them have gone on to define the characteristics of a specific conversionary literature or to compile canons of literary style applicable to the propaganda field. The contributions may lie in the future.
The Social Sciences.
A good argument can be presented to the effect that the skills brought from the social-science into the propaganda field are more valuable once they are employed full time in that field than an attempt to apply political science, or sociology, or economics, each as an individual compartment, to the field of propaganda. There is still no book available with the title The Politics of Knowledge,[60] even though the reception, control, prohibition, and dissemination of knowledge is a major factor in all modern governmental processes both in and out of the propaganda field.