How can the Government say yes to the one and no to the other without being cognizant of what happens?
The answer would appear to lie in the older body of our law in that a withdrawal of governmental authority from some fields would leave the individual responsible and subject to indictment and trial if his enterprises should prove deleterious to the United States Government, but not subject to punishment if his enterprises hurt the known antagonists of the USA.
Phrased in another way, this means that the USA might, in a long-range Cold War situation, be required to make some domestic recognition of the fact that the Communist states are the antagonists but not the military enemies of the U.S. system of government and that as antagonists of this system of government such states, their representatives, their property, and their organizations, should not be afforded any more protection under our laws than is given to the National City Bank of New York in the laws applicable to the city of Moscow, or the American Telephone & Telegraph Company in the laws which apply in Budapest. For a long time the Communist states have treated even the most innocent business enterprise and social club on our side as though they were attainted with an inherent factor of criminal and subversive intent. The withdrawal of U.S. legal protection from all things Communist might allow the American people—or those among them who so chose—to develop proclivities for adventure and trouble-making against the Communists. These proclivities are now sternly repressed by Federal statute.
The Future of Psychological Warfare.
This is not the end of the story.
One of the paradoxical but deeply true factors in the study and conduct of propaganda is this: the more people know about propaganda, the better they can resist it.
Propaganda was a tremendous bogey in the 1920s. It probably seems very ugly and frightening to most people born before 1920. It does not seem too frightening, so far as the author can judge, to Americans born after 1930. Those born in the period 1920-30 appear to be divided in their emotional reactions to mass persuasion situations.
PsyWar is not magic. It is a valuable auxiliary to modern warfare and a useful concomitant to modern strategy. If a particular strategic policy is sanely and effectively devised as a feasible deterrent to war, the PsyWar procedures supporting that strategy will contribute to the prevention of war. Psychological warfare represents a recognition and acceptance in the military and strategic field of skills which grow about us every day.
In so far as ultra-destructive weapons may have increased the tenseness and bad temper of people who must live under the perpetual but remote threat of atomic bombing, one can say that physicists have upset the nerves of mankind and that it is now up to the propagandists to reassure and to reconcile the peoples.
Whatever PsyWar does, it certainly does not and should not increase the bitterness of war. Fighting itself is the supreme bitterness. Radio broadcasts and leaflets even in wartime only rarely should promote hatred. The situation which the world faces is dangerous because of technological development, not because of psychological knowledge. PsyWar ranks as a weapon, but it is almost certainly the most humane of all weapons.