To be useful, opinion analysis must be systematic. For a while the author had the interesting job of interviewing all the latest arrivals from Tokyo at a certain headquarters. The travelers would usually be pumped up with a sense of their own smartness in having evaded the Japanese and arrived at Allied territory. You could almost hear them thinking, "Oh, boy, if Gendarmerie Chief Bakayama could only see me now!" They were ready, in Army parlance, to spill their guts. The only item on which most of them maintained one-man security was the question, "Why, chum, did you yourself go to Tokyo in the first place?" Outside of that, they were eager to talk. (Some of them had frightfully good reasons to be eager; the adverb is literal.) With such sources of information, the author thought that he could find out in short order what the Japanese were thinking.
He found out, all right. He found out every single time. The refugee engineer said the Japanese were so depressed that there was a bull market in butcher knives. The absconding dairyman said the Japanese were ready to die with gloom. The eloping wife said she never saw happy Japanese any more. The military school deserter said the Japanese lay awake all night every night listening for American air raids. The reformed puppet said the Japanese had just gone to pieces. Then each of them grinned (the interviews were individual, of course), and expected to be patted on the head for bringing such good news.
Figure 35: Informational Sheet. This British leaflet combines a message for Arabs with instructions for British pilots forced down in the desert. The propaganda content is closely associated with the practical mission of the leaflet.
Their comments were worthless. What the enemy thinks in general is worth nothing unless your troops are already in his suburbs. What an informant thinks the enemy thinks is worth even less. What do you, reader, think right now? What do you think you think? See? the question is nonsensical. To work, it has to be specific: What do you think about the price of new suits? What do you think about Senator O'May and Congressman MacNaples? Do you think that we will ever have to fight Laputa? Are you satisfied with your present rate of pay? Why?
What a person thinks—his opinion—is workable in relation to what he does. In practical life his opinion takes effect only when it is part of the opinion of a group. Some groups are formed by the common opinion and have nothing else in common: at a spiritualist meeting you may see the banker sitting next to his own charwoman. Most groups are groups because of things which the people are (Negroes, descendants of Francis Bacon, the hard-of-hearing); or things they do (electrical workers, lawyers, farmer, stamp collectors), or things they have (factory owners, nothing but wages, apartment houses) in common. The community of something practical makes the group have a community of opinion which arises from the problems they think they face with respect to their common interests. Such groups are not only opinion groups, they are interest groups. It is these groups that do things as groups. It is these groups that propaganda tries to stir up, move, set against each other, and use in any handy way. (Few individuals belong to just one group at a time; the groups are almost illimitable in number.)
The propagandist should not get the idea that just because a group exists it is a potential source of weakness or cleavage. Workers are not always against employers, nor the aged against the young, nor women against men, nor shippers against railwaymen. In a well run society, groups have interest only for limited purposes. Railwaymen are not permanently hostile to truckers, shippers, fliers, canal operators. At the moment they may be maddest of all at the insurance companies because of some quarrel about insurance premiums and risks.
The poor propagandist tries to butt in on every fight, even when there is none. Often his propaganda is received the way an intervenor is received in most family quarrels, with the bland question, "What fight? We ain't mad." Sound propaganda picks only those group issues which are acute enough to stand a little help from outside. If outside help would be a kiss-of-death to the group that is helped, then black propaganda instead of white is indicated. In any case, sound operating intelligence is the first precondition to the attempted psychological manipulation of enemy groups.