Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger

“ Since the free world is not committed to victory as much as is the Communist world, it can afford more defeats without a corresponding loss of morale. Since the free world has not promised a Utopian future, it can go from the reality of the 1950s to whatever realities the 1960s or the 1970s may bring without a sharp letdown in morale or widespread heartbreak among its most gifted advocates. In Cold War terms the free world is committed to fighting, but not to victory, while the Communists are committed to the actual though remote promise of triumph for their system throughout the world. ”

“ A British side which, like the Communist side, would welcome the makers of the future, the builders of the next civilization, the arbiters of history.
The Communists have presented a high bid against the U.S. and Britain as well as the other Western powers. We have not yet overbid them. The high bid is the opportunity to join, to belong, really to be equal, not just legally equal, and, above everything, to share, to struggle, and to work under conditions of heroism for a common goal. ”

“ Call it propaganda, call it information, call it international communication—under any name the major point remains: Americans can find trustworthy future allies through commitment to common interest or common danger. Friendship is pleasant, but not of the essence. In some cases it might be desirable for leaders or key groups in important foreign areas to realize that the United States could be a worse enemy than the Soviet Union, rather than to realize that the U.S. is a friend. ”

“ War is the highest exercise of that violence, and modern war is no simple reversion to savagery. The General Staffs would not be needed if war were only an uncomplicated orgy of homicide—a mere getting-mad and throat-cutting season in the life of man. Quite to the contrary, modern war—as a function of modern society—reflects the institutional, political complexity from which it comes. A modern battle is a formal, ceremonialized and technically intricate operation. ”

“ Since war is waged by and against all parts of the human personality—physical condition, skills, intelligence, emotions, and so on—it is impossible to distinguish between the performance of one kind of weapon and the other in the attainment of a goal itself complex—governmental surrender. Only a weapon which left no enemy survivors could claim for itself undisputed primacy in victory.
Propaganda came to prominence in war because the nations involved had made mass-communications part of their civilian lives. ”

“ Thus if an American fire-raid burns up a Japanese city, the burning is calculated to dissuade the Japanese from further warfare by denying the Japanese further physical means of war and by simultaneously hurting them enough to cause surrender. If, after the fire-raid, we drop leaflets telling them to surrender, the propaganda can be considered an extension of persuasion—less violent this time, and usually less effective, but nevertheless an integral part of the single process of making the enemy stop fighting.
Neither warfare nor psychology is a new subject. Each is as old as man. ”

“ How should he act if his men were told by an enemy broadcast that they would be exposed to radiation which would cause anemia, cancer, or death—if they did not surrender immediately? What should he do if he finds himself cut off from all American supplies, operating a lonely unit in contaminated or dangerous areas, and then discovers that his own men are the victims of enemy black propaganda? ”

“ The desire for defeat—even the acceptance of defeat—is of tragic importance to any responsible, sane person. A German who wanted the Reich to be overthrown was a traitor to Germany, just as any American who wished us to pull out of the war and exterminate American Jews would have been a traitor to his own country. ”

“ You must kill just the right people, in just the right way, with the right timing, in the proper place, for avowed purposes. Otherwise you make a mess of the whole show, and—what is worse—you lose.
Why must you fight just so and so, there and not here, now and not then? The answer is simple: you are fighting against men. Your purpose in fighting is to make them change their minds. It is figuratively true to say that the war we have just won was a peculiar kind of advertising campaign, designed to make the Germans and Japanese like us and our way of doing things. ”

“ Apply this concept to Communism. Communism loses strength every [Pg 286] day that it exists: each day deprives it of novelty, each day makes it a littler more familiar, each day makes its leaders one day older. If Americans can learn how to be flexible and imaginative and to understand themselves as they really are, they might find that the real American appeal to the youth of the world would be much greater than the Communist appeal. ”

“ They waged commando warfare, adding the word commando to international military parlance, and sent small units deep into the British rear, setting off a mad uproar and making the world press go crazy with excitement. When they finally gave in, it was on reasonable terms for themselves; they left the British with an internationally blacked eye.
Nobody remembered the Burmese; everybody remembered the Boers. The Boers used every means they could think of; they did everything they could. They even captured Winston Churchill. ”

“ It can be read as an indication that the American love of the gadget, the American quest for a novelty, can be turned to the arena of the soul. The Communists are better liars, better schemers, better murderers than we shall ever be; they start off by being better fanatics. Is it not in the American spirit that we should out-trick them, out-talk them, and out-maneuver them? We have a very creative and resourceful civilization at our backs. We have no Führer to guide us and no party line to comfort us ”

“ There is no more space in propaganda for the lie, farce, hoax, or joke than there is room for it in a first-class newspaper. Even if exaggerations or nonsense appear in the commercial press of his own country, the propagandist must realize that he is Honorary G-2 to the enemy—a G-2 whose function consists of transmitting news the ultimate effect of which should be bad but which should go forth with each separate item newsworthy and palatable. ”

“ Today the spiritual, psychological, logical, and scientific inconsistencies and paradoxes within each system are so deep as to make the definition of long-range goals almost impossible. Any one goal, such as the establishment of peace, the appreciation of an international system of alliances against aggression, the maintenance of national sovereignty, the protection of a free-enterprise economy, the assurance of self-determination to non-self-governing peoples, or the like, may, if emphasized, contradict the concomitant goals which support it. ”

“ This won't fool anyone who knows the propaganda business, and you won't be able to do anything with or about it, but you can hang it on a month-by-month chart in the front office, where visitors can be impressed at getting in on a military secret. (Incidentally, if some smart enemy agent sees it and reports it back, enemy intelligence experts will go mad trying to figure out just how you got that figure. It's like the old joke that the average American is ten-elevenths White, 52% female, and always slightly pregnant.) ”

“ If the Western powers had not attempted to deal amicably with the Soviet Union at Yalta the Western peoples, already hypersensitized in matters of conscience, might have attributed to themselves and to their posterity an unbearable burden of guilt. We and our children might have gone down fighting while wondering in our innermost hearts, "Why didn't we make a real try to avoid war with Soviet Russia?" ”

“ It was unfortunately characteristic of the United States in the early 1950s of the Cold War that U.S. propaganda was based on ideals and standards older than the ideals and standards competitively presented by the Communists, and that therefore in many parts of the world the struggle between Americans and Communists appeared to be a struggle on our side of the old against the young. Nothing could be farther from the truth. ”

“ Once war breaks out, the American people have in the past shown a very good capacity to unite in winning and finishing the war. There is no reason to suppose that the situation will be different in the future. What is perplexing, and for the present insoluble, is this: how can the American people, short of getting involved in war, become so purposeful, so decisive, so nearly unanimous, as to take actions which will prevent a war? ”

“ There is neither victory nor defeat, only the endless seesaw of probable accomplishments or probable blunders. The honest psychological warfare operative will admit that he does not know where he is at any given moment, how far from his start, how near to his goal. Even with surrender of the enemy, propaganda cannot be judged to have met with complete failure or complete success, because propaganda is an interminable stream going on into international affairs and carrying over to the next war. ”

“ War and peace depend upon survival. Any veteran will remember men whom he disliked intensely in his own wartime outfits: he never day-dreamed of turning them over to the enemy just because he was personally antagonistic to them. A common danger from something—more complicatedly, a common interest in something—is a far more potent assurance of future strength and strategic action than is friendship. ”

“ If you shoot your neighbor, you will be committing mere murder; but if you gather twenty or thirty friends, together, tie a red handkerchief around the left arm of each man, announce that you are out to overthrow the government of the United States, and then shoot your neighbor as a counterrevolutionary impediment to the new order of things, you can have the satisfaction of having waged war. ”

“ The Germans suffered a tragic, overwhelming, and perhaps decisive psychological defeat in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic and in the Ukraine, when they carried with their field forces such naïve and tragic Nazi misconceptions of Russian and Ukrainian character as to defeat every opportunity they may have had for a serious anti-Communist alliance of Germany with the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. They destroyed themselves not through ignorance, but through what they thought they knew. ”

“ But Bulgaria never did enough against the United States to count as an enemy, and even succeeded, by diplomatic ineptitude, in getting into a state of war with all the Axis Powers and all the United Nations simultaneously; Bulgaria escaped the fame which goes with hostility. Contrast this with Japan: thousands of Americans have learned Japanese; Japanese national character is known to us; war has done in a five-year span what education could not have accomplished in a generation. ”

“ Characteristic American strengths have been, are, and will be the strengths of patience, endurance, versatility, and curiosity. It is foolish to ask Americans to be strong in bitterness, strong in hatred, strong in a cruel or proud self-righteousness. We are not Japanese, or Prussians, or Russians; we are not Irish, or English, or French; we are mostly European and yet un-European. Our propaganda will be effective only if it springs from the simplest and strongest aspects of our life at home. Our material prosperity is beyond doubt ”

“ Such abstruse doctrines of Hegelianism and Marxism were used by the majority-Socialists (known by their Russian name, Bolshevik) to give themselves a sense of unconditional rightness. From the first phase of the revolution on, the Bolsheviks pitilessly sabotaged all other democratic groups. There was no point in helping other groups, when Bolsheviks alone had the inner secrets of history at their command.
In the geniuses Lenin and Trotzky, the Bolshevik movement found its leadership. Lenin had no use for democracy as it was known in America. ”

“ The limitations of the United States as a source of propaganda are sharp. There is no U.S. party line; it is virtually impossible to imagine that within our civilization as we now know it there could be one. There might be an official U.S. line, unanimous and binding upon all federal departments, but the federal government itself is, after all, only one among the forty-nine separate governments operating within the continental USA. The state governments, the cities within them, and the people at large are free to contradict what the federal government may say at any given point. ”

“ The official propagandist is not a newspaperman. Since he speaks for an army or a government, his utterance is officially responsible. He must be as timely as the peacetime press, but must at the same time be as cautious as a government press agent. He is torn between two responsibilities: his responsibility to the job of propaganda, which requires him to get interesting information and get it out to the enemy quickly ”

“ The Communist magic is strong, bad magic. In North Korea it created officers in an unreasonably short time, developed fanatics while we were trying to develop gentlemen, and came close to defeating us in the perilous weeks of the Pusan perimeter. In China soldiers of whom many Americans despaired when they fought on the Nationalist side became desperate assault infantry under Communist training. The timid and quarrelsome Annamites who had given the French so little trouble before Communism organized them, fought like leopards once they read Marx, Lenin, Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi-minh. ”

“ The Communists, on the contrary, have unreasonably, provocatively, and untruthfully raved, screamed, shrieked, and lied to bring about that better world which, curiously enough, their most effective cadres considered to be an inevitable world. Thus the UN prisoners held by the Communists during the Korean war were subjected to a constant bombardment of Communist propaganda concerning their personal responsibilities before history and the opportunities which they would have to serve peace and mankind, as these noble concepts are set forth on the Red side. ”

“ It lies, rather, in the immense probabilities of American life, in the virtual certainty that the American people will react in such and such a fashion to a new aggression, that the American people will (if attacked) in all probability destroy their attackers, whoever those attackers may be, and that the American people, despite their occasional shortcomings in matters of racial tolerance, political freedom, and economic injustice, will in the long run be solidly ranged behind whatever policies seem to promise equality, prosperity, and freedom for all mankind. ”

“ Can the British make revolution in Malaya when they are rather fatigued with their own Labor revolution at home? Can we Americans, who have made nothing, absolutely nothing, out of the heroism and romance and tradition that might have been reconstituted as the ancient kingdom of Ryukyu (Okinawa) , be in a position to chide the British for not doing that which we ourselves do not undertake? ”

“ If the United States wins a few more wars it may be that the rest of mankind will be persuaded that our kind of practicality is not only humanly preferable, but scientifically more defensible than the philosophies of competing civilizations. It seems unlikely that Communist research can outstrip us in the propaganda field so far as the race is run in purely scientific terms; artistically and gadget-wise the Communists are just as inventive as we are and often more enthusiastic. ”

“ Since the first lesson of all propaganda is reasoned disbelief, it would be sad and absurd for anyone to believe propaganda about propaganda. The "propaganda boys" in every army and government are experts at building up favorable cases, and they would be unusual men indeed if they failed to work up a fine account of their own performance. Propaganda cannot be given fair measurement by the claims made for it. It requires judicious proportioning to the military operations of which it is (in wartime) normally a part. ”

“ 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.
Apart from PsyWar, what military weapon destroys the enemy soldier's capacity to fight by saving his life? ”

“ This mentality makes it possible for the ruler to control his own people enough to undertake "warfare psychologically waged." Without domestic fanaticism and domestic terror, governments have to fall back on "psychological warfare"—that is, the mere supplementing of politics and military operations by propaganda. It is vain to expect a free people in a free country to submit to such humiliating control, even for the purpose of winning a war. ”

“ Nothing is as smart as a human being except another human being. What any one man can try to achieve in the way of deceit, another man can try to figure out. The bulk of propaganda, short of peremptory tactical leaflets, is filled with information about the enemy's personnel, his opinion of himself, his opinion of you, his state of mind, his order of battle, his economic system, and all the rest. The Japanese government, throughout the war, kept the United States informed in English of the changes of ministers and other high officials in the Japanese government. ”

“ Education and propaganda merge into everlasting indoctrination. And when such states go to war against states which do not have propaganda machinery, the more liberal states are at a disadvantage for sheer lack of practice in the administrative and mechanical aspects of propaganda. Education is to psychological warfare what a glacier is to an avalanche. The mind is to be in both cases captured, but the speed and techniques differ. ”

“ Even though World War II erased most of the distinctions between military and civilian, leaving civilians in the vertical front line of all air war, psychological warfare gained. It became a more useful instrument for bettering war. Civilian interest in propaganda became no mere matter of emotional loyalty or philosophical preference, but a life-and-death matter to its recipients. After fire raids it would be a madman who would disregard an enemy bomb-warning leaflet without trying to figure out its application to himself and his children. ”

“ Like all limitations, these are handicaps only to the person who lacks the courage and resourcefulness to turn them into assets. Propaganda is dependent on politics, even for such front-line requirements as "definition of the enemy," yet intelligent exploitation of political goals yields valuable results. Security is an asset to any army; its price is rarely too high a price to pay for protection, but a selective and flexible censorship can lead to positive advantages. Media—that is, the actual instrumentalities by which propaganda is conveyed—are the ordnance of psychological warfare. ”

“ Another significant connection between politics and propaganda is found in definition of the nature of the enemy. For combat operations, it is easy (most of the time) to tell who the enemy is; he is the man with the other uniform, the foreign language, the funny color or physique. For psychological operations, it is not that easy. The sound psychological warfare operator will try to get enemy troops to believing that the enemy is not themselves but somebody else—the King, the Führer, the élite troops, the capitalists. He creates a situation in which he can say, "We're not fighting you." ”