Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Volume One: A Reckoning Chapter VI: War Propaganda applies to
religious war
EVER since I have been scrutinizing political
events, I have taken a tremendous interest in propagandist activity. I
saw that the Socialist-Marxist
organizations mastered and applied this instrument with astounding
skill.
And I soon realized that the
correct use of propaganda is a true art
which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only
the Christian-Social movement, especially in Lueger's time, achieved
a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its
successes.
"Those of us who love peace
must organize as effectively as the war hawks. As they spread the
propaganda of war, we must spread the propaganda of peace. ~ Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr."
But it was not until the War that it became
evident what immense results could be obtained by a correct
application of propaganda. Here again, unfortunately, all our
studying had to be done on the enemy side, for the activity on our
side was modest, to say the least. The total miscarriageof the German
'enlightenment ' service stared every soldier in the face,and this
spurred me to take up the question of propaganda even more deeply
than before.
There was often more than enough time for
thinking, and the enemy offered practical instruction which, to our
sorrow, was only too good.
For what we failed to do, the enemy did, with
amazing skilland really brilliant calculation. I, myself, learned
enormously from this enemy war
propaganda. But time passed and left no
trace in the minds of all those who should have benefited; partly
because they considered themselves too clever to from the enemy,
partly owing to lack of good will.
Did we have anything you could call
propaganda?
I regret that I must answer in the negative.
Everything that actually was done in this field was so inadequate and
wrong from the very start that it certainly did no good and sometimes
did actual harm.
The form was inadequate, the substance was
psychologically wrong: a careful examination of German war propaganda can
lead to no other diagnosis
There seems to have been no clarity on the very
first question: Is propaganda a means or
an end?
It is a means and must therefore be judged with
regard to its end. It must consequently take a form calculated to
support the aim which it serves.
It is also obvious that its aim can vary in
importance from the standpoint of general need, and that the inner
value of the propaganda will vary accordingly. The aim for which we
were fighting the War was the loftiest, the most overpowering, that man can
conceive: it was the freedom and independence of our nation, the
security of our future food supply, and-our national honor; a thing
which, despite all contrary opinions prevailing today, nevertheless
exists, or rather should exist,
since peoples without honor have
sooner or later lost their freedom and independence, which in turn is
only the result of a higher justice, since generations of rabble
without honor deserve no freedom.
Any man who wants to be a cowardly slave can
have no honor, or honor itself would soon fall into general
contempt.
The German nation was engaged in a struggle for
a human existence, and the purpose of war propaganda should have been
to support this struggle; its aim to help bring about victory.
When the nations on this planet fight for
existence-when the question of destiny, 'to be or not to be,' cries
out for a solution-then all considerations of humanitarianism or
aesthetics crumble into nothingness; for all these concepts do not
float about in the ether, they arise from man's imagination and are
bound up with man. When he departs from this world, these concepts
are again dissolved into nothingness, for Nature does not know them.
And even among mankind, they belong only to a few nations or rather
races, and this in proportion as they emanate from the feeling of the
nation or race in question. Humanitarianism and aesthetics would
vanish even from a world inhabited by man if this world were to
lose the races that have created and
upheld these concepts.
But all such concepts become secondary when a
nation is fighting for its existence; in fact, they become totally
irrelevant to the forms of the struggle as soon as a situation arises
where they might paralyze a struggling nation's power of self
preservation. And that has always beentheir only visible
result.
As for humanitarianism, Moltke said years ago that
in war it lies in the brevity of the operation,
and that means that the most aggressive
fighting technique is the
most humane.
But when people try to approach these questions
with drivel about aesthetics, etc., really only one answer is
possible: where the destinyand existence of a people are at stake,
all obligation toward beauty ceases.
The most unbeautiful thing there can be in
human life is and remains theyoke of slavery. Or do these Schwabing 2
decadents view the present lot of the German people as 'aesthetic'?
Certainly we don't have to discuss
these matters with the Jews, the most modern
inventors of this cultural
perfume. Their whole existence is an
embodied protest against the aesthetics of the Lord's image.
And since these criteria of humanitarianism and
beauty must be
eliminated from the struggle, they are
also inapplicable to propaganda.
Propaganda in the War was a means to an end,
and the end wvas the struggle for the existence of the German people;
consequently, propaganda could only be considered in accordance with
the principles that were valid for this struggle. In this case the
most cruel weapons were
humane if they brought about a
quicker
victory;
and only those methods were beautiful which helped the nation to
safeguard the dignity of its freedom.
This was the only possible attitude toward war
propaganda in a life-and-death struggle
like ours.
If the so-called responsible authorities had
been clear on this point, they would never have fallen into such
uncertainty over the forma nd application of this weapon: for even
propaganda is no more than a weapon, though a frightful one in the
hand of an expert.
The second really decisive question was this:
To whom
should propaganda be addressed? To the
scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated
masses?
It must be addressed always and exclusively
to the masses.
What the intelligentsia-or those who today
unfortunately often go by that name-what they need is not propaganda
but scientific
instruction.
The content of propaganda is not
science any more than the object represented in a poster is art.
The art of the poster lies in the designer's
ability to attract the
attention of the crowd by form and
color. A poster advertising an art exhibit must direct the attention
of the public to the art being exhibited; the better it succeeds in
this, the greater is the art of the poster itself.
The poster should give the
masses an
idea of the significance of the exhibition,
it should not be a substitute for the art on
display.
Anyone who wants to concern himself with the
art itself must do more than study the poster; and it will not be
enough for him just to saunter through the exhibition. We may expect
him to examine and immerse himself in the individual works, and thus
little by little form a fair opinion.
A similar situation prevails with what we
today call propaganda.
The function of propaganda does not lie in the
scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses' attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose
significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of
vision.
The whole art consists in doing
this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the
fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc.
But since propaganda is not and cannot be the
necessity in itself, since its function, like the poster, consists in
attracting the attention of the
crowd, and not in educating those who
are already educated or who are striving after education and
knowledge, its effect for the most part must be aimed at the
emotions
and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.
All propaganda must be popular and its
intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence
among those it is addressed to.
Consequently, the greater the mass
it is intended to reach,
the lower its purely intellectual level will
have to be.
But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a
war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual
demands on our public, and too much
caution cannot be exerted in this direction.
The more modest
its intellectual ballast, the more
exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses,
the more effectiveit will be.
And this is the best proof of the
soundness or unsoundness of a propaganda campaign, and not success in
pleasing a few scholars or young aesthetes.
The art of propaganda lies in understanding the
emotional
ideas of the great masses and finding,
through a psychologically correct
form, the way to the attention and
thence to the heart of the broad masses. Thefact that our bright boys
do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited
they are.
Once we understand how necessary it is for
propaganda to be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule
results:
The receptivity of the great masses is
very limited, their intelligenceis
small, but their power of forgetting is
enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda
must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in
sloans until the last member of the
public understands what you want him to
understand by your slogan.
As soon as you sacrifice this
slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd
can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the
result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out.
Thus we see that propaganda must follow a
simple line and correspondingly the basic tactics must be
psychologically sound.
For instance, it was absolutely wrong to
make the enemy
ridiculous, as the Austrian and German
comic papers did. It was absolutely wrong because actual contact with an
enemy soldier was bound to arouse an entirely different conviction,
and the results were devastating; for now the German soldier, under
the direct impression of the enemy's resistance, felt himself
swindled
by his propaganda service. His desire to fight, or even to stand
film, was not strengthened, but the opposite occurred. His courage
flagged.
By contrast, the war propaganda of
the English and Americans was psychologically sound. By representing
the Germans to their own people as barbarians and
Huns, they
prepared the individual soldier for the terrors of war, and thus
helped to preserve him from disappointments.
After this, the most terrible weapon that was
used against him seemed only to confirm what his propagandists had
told him; it likewise reinforced his faith in the truth of his
government's assertions, while on the other hand it increased his
rage and
hatred against the vile enemy For the cruel effects of the weapon,
whose use by the enemy he now came to know, gradually came to confirm
for him the 'Hunnish' brutality of the barbarous enemy, which he had
heard all about; and it never dawned on him for a moment that his own
weapons possibly, if not probably, might be even more terrible in
their effects.
And so the English soldier could never feel
that he had been
misinformed by his own countrymen, as
unhappily was so much the case with the German soldier that in the
end he rejected everything coming from this source as 'swindles' and
'bunk.' All this resulted from the idea that any old simpleton (or
even somebody who was intelligent ' in other things ') could be
assigned to propaganda work, and the failure to realize that the most
brilliant psychologists would have been none too good.
And so the German war propaganda offered an
unparalleled example of an 'enlightenment' service working in
reverse, since any correct psychology was totally lacking.
There was no end to what could be learned from
the enemy by a man who kept his eyes open, refused to let his
perceptions be ossified, and for four and a half years privately turned the
storm flood of enemy propaganda over in his brain.
What our authorities least of all understood
was the very first axiom of all propagandist activity: to wit,
the basically subjective and
one-sided attitude it must take toward every question it deals with.
In this connection, from the very beginning of
the War and from top to bottom, such sins were committed that we were
entitled to doubt whether so much absurdity could really be
attributed to pure stupidity alone.
What, for example, would we say about a poster
that was supposed to advertise a new soap and that described other
soaps as 'good'?
We would only shake our
heads.
Exactly the same applies to political
advertising.
The function of propaganda is, for example, not
to weigh and ponder the rights of different
people, but exclusively to emphasize the
one right which it has set out to argue
for.
Its task is not to make an
objective study of the truth, in so far
as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with
academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right,
always and unflinchingly.
It was absolutely wrong to discuss
war-guilt
from the standpoint that Germany alone could not be held responsible
for the outbreak of the catastrophe;
it would have been correct to load
every bit of the blame on the shoulders
of the enemy, even if this had not
really corresponded to the true facts, as it actually did.
And what was the consequence of this half
heartedness?
The broad mass of a nation does not consist of
diplomats, or even professors of political law, or even individuals
capable of forming a rational opinion; it consists of plain mortals, wavering
and inclined to doubt and uncertainty.
As soon as our own propaganda
admits so much as a glimmer of right on
the other side, the foundation for
doubt in our own right has been laid.
The masses are then in no position to
distinguish where foreign injustice ends and our own begins. In such
a case they become uncertainand suspicious, especially if the enemy
refrains from going in for the same nonsense,
but unloads every bit of blame
on his adversary.
Isn't it perfectly understandable that the
whole country ends up by lending more credence to enemy propaganda,
which is more unified and coherent, than to its own? And particularly
a people that suffers from the mania of objectivity as much as the
Germans.
For, after all this, everyone will
take the greatest pains to avoid doing the enemy any injustice, even
at the peril of seriously besmirching and even destroying his own
people and country.
Of course, this was not the intent of the
responsible authorities, but the people never realize that.
The people in their overwhelming
majority
are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines
their thoughts and actions far less than
emotion and feeling.
And this sentiment is not
complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have
multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate,
right or wrong, truth or lie never half this way and half that way,
never partially, or that kind of thing.
English propagandists understood all this most
brilliantly-and acted accordingly. They
made no half statements that might have
given rise to doubts.
Their brilliant knowledge of the
primitive sentiments of the broad masses is shown by their atrocity propaganda, which
was adapted to this condition. As ruthless as it was brilliant, it
created the preconditionsfor moral steadfastness at the front, even
in the face of the greatest actual
defeats, and just as strikingly it
pilloried the German enemy as the sole
guilty party for the outbreak of the
War: the rabid, impudent bias and persistence with which this lie was
expressed took into account the emotional, always extreme, attitude
of the great masses and for this reason was believed.
How effective this type of propaganda was is
most strikingly shown by the fact that after four years of war it not
only enabled the enemy to stick to its guns, but even began to nibble
at our own people.
It need not surprise us that our propaganda did
not enjoy this success. In its inner ambiguity alone, it bore the
germ of ineffectualness. And finally its content was such that it was
very unlikely to make thenecessary impression on the masses. Only our
feather-brained 'statesmen'
could have dared to hope that this
insipid pacifistic bilge could fire men's spirits till they were willing to
die.
As a result, their miserable stuff was useless,
even harmful in fact.
But the most brilliant propagandist technique
will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in
mind constantly and with unfiagging attention.
It must confine itself to a
few points
and repeat them over and
over. Here, as so often in this world,
persistence is the first and most important requirement for
success.
Particularly in the field of propaganda, we
must never let ourselves be led by aesthetes or people who have grown
blase: not by the former, because the form and expression of our
propaganda would soon, instead of being suitable for the masses, have
drawing power only for literary
teas; and of the second we must beware,
because,
lacking in any fresh emotion of
their own, they are always on the lookout for new stimulation.
These people are quick to weary of
everything; they want variety, and they are
never able to feel or understand the needs of their fellow men who
are not yet so callous.
They are always the first to criticize a propaganda
campaign, or rather its content,
which seems to them too
old-fashioned, too hackneyed, too out-of-date,etc.
They are always after novelty, in
search of a change, and this makes them mortal enemies of any
effective political propaganda.
For as soon as the organization and the content
of propaganda begin to suit their tastes, it loses all cohesion and
evaporates completely.
The purpose of propaganda is not to provide
interesting distraction for blase young gentlemen, but to convince, and what I
mean is to convince the masses.
But the masses are slow moving, and
they always require a certain time before they are ready even to
notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.
When there is a change, it must not alter the
content of what the propaganda is driving at, but in the end must
always say the same thing. For instance, a slogan must be
presented from different
angles, but the end of all remarks must
always and immutably be the slogan itself. Only in this way can the
propaganda have a unified and complete effect.
This broadness of outline from which we must
never depart, in combination with steady, consistent emphasis, allows
our final success to mature. And then, to our amazement, we shall see
what tremendous results such perseverance leads to-to results that
are almost beyond our understanding.
All advertising, whether in the field of
business or politics, achieves success through the continuity and
sustained uniformity of its application.
Here, too, the example of enemy war propaganda
was typical; limited to a few points, devised exdusively
for the masses, carried on with indefatigable persistence.
Once the basic ideas and methods of
execution were recognized as correct, they were applied throughout
the whole War without the slightest change.
At first the claims of the propaganda
were so
impudent that people thought it insane;
later, it got on people's nerves;
and in the end, it was believed.
After four
and a half years, a revolution broke out in Germany; and its slogans
originated in the enemy's war propaganda.
"All truth passes through three
stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and
third, it is accepted as self-evident."~ Arthur Schopenhauer
