CHAPTER 6
Psychological Warfare in World War II
Bolshevik accomplishments in psychological warfare were often regarded as part of the peculiar mischief of Marxism, not as techniques which could be learned and used by other people. Similarly, the history-making sweep of the Chinese Nationalist armies northward in 1922-1927 was considered to be specially and incomprehensibly Chinese; possible lessons which might have been learned from Chinese Communist psychological warfare were left unheeded by officials and students in the West. Meanwhile Germany, the greatest power of Europe, had been fighting bitter internal psychological warfare battles[24] which looked like heated internal politics. Not until Adolf Hitler assumed the Reich's Chancellorship and began using his Brown-shirt methods for foreign affairs did other people wake up to the existence and application of the new weapon.
(The War College files, for example, show that not one single officer was assigned full-time to study of these problems during 1925-1935. For the entire period 1919-1929, there are listed only two War College research papers on the subject. Yet the American Army was far from negligent. It was an excellent army, though crippled by outright poverty of personnel and materials. The Army was simply American, and like the rest of America for a while took the world for granted.)
The National Socialist German Workers' Party, as Hitler called his movement, was a conglomerate built up around a few determined fanatics. The Nazis do not appear to have believed their own doctrines to anything like the degree to which the Communists believed theirs. From the first, the Nazis regarded propaganda very consciously as a new, fierce instrument which led to the accomplishment of modern power. The Communists had proclaimed that democracy was a fake; the Nazis agreed. The Communists had shown that a minority with a sacred mission of its own invention could get mass support for a government that claimed to be for the people, even though it was obviously not by the people nor of them. The Nazis took this as a model. The Communists had shown that a modern man-god could be set up and worshipped in a twentieth-century state, and called leader (Vozhd in Russian). The Nazis elevated the Soviet practice all the way into a principle, the principle of the leader (Führer in German).
The Communists had shown that an organization calling itself a party, actually a quasi-religious hierarchy with strong internal discipline, definite membership, and active organizational components, could control fifty times its own membership. The Nazis organized the same general sort of party, copying the Italian Fascists in part, but copying more from the direct example of the German Communists right in front of them. The Communists had shown that such a movement needed to have youth branches, women's organizations, labor sections, clubs of its own, and so on, calling this "mass organization." The Nazis copied this too.
The machinery of Naziism was in many ways a copy of Communism, applied to allegedly different ends, (the Nazis had an Aryan myth; the Communists had their pseudo-economics). But the important thing about them both was the destruction of the end by the means; the problem of getting and keeping power despite the people was so obsessive that propaganda became all-important. Theoretically, the end (to the Nazi, German world rule; to the Communist, the fulfillment of history in universal communism) was the most important thing. But since any means at any time which led to that end was good, and since the Party bosses were the sole ones who could determine whether a particular action led to the very remote end or not, the outcome in both Russia and Germany became the conscienceless seeking of power for its own sake.
The new psychological warfare, a cause as well as a means of World War II, arose from the subjection of other considerations to propaganda. The propaganda addict takes everything with a ton of salt; what he does believe is lost in what he doesn't believe. The ordinary controls of civilized life—regard for truth, regard for law, respect for neighbors, obedience to good manners, love of God—cease to operate effectively, because the propaganda-dizzy man sees in everything its propaganda content and nothing else. Everything, from a girl dancing on a stage to an ecclesiastic officiating in a cathedral, is either for him or against him. Nothing is innocent; nothing is pleasurable; everything is connected with his diseased apprehension of power. Before he gets power, he hates the people who have power; he does not trust their intelligence, esteem their personalities, believe in their good will, or credit their motives.[25] They must be scum, because they hold power when he, the propaganda-infatuated man, is a member of the group that should hold it. Yet when such a man comes to power he hates his colleagues and comrades. Remembering the cold cynical way in which he himself sought power, knowing that his brother fanatics have the same ruthless arrogance, the propaganda-using Party man cannot trust anyone. Blood purges, mass trials, liquidations, removal of families, concealment of crimes—all these result from the establishment of propaganda in an overdeveloped role.
It is against such people that we—ordinary folk, Americans—dared wage psychological warfare during World War II. Propaganda had grown into ideology; the world was convulsed with monstrous new religions. For instance: the greatest journalist of the Soviet Union, Karl Radek, was placed on trial for treason. He was asked by the prosecutor, Vyshinsky,
"These actions of yours were deliberate?"
Radek answered: "Apart from sleeping, I have never in my life committed any undeliberate actions."[26]