+1 862 207 3288 CASE STUDY 1 – TYPE A CONCISE OPINION PIECE ON “THE PROPAGANDA BATTLE” WAGED DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR – No more than 2 pages in Word – BE SURE TO FOLLOW THE RUBRIC – A two page, double spaced essay on the Propaganda Battle waged during World War II – you can discuss any *one* area of propaganda (posters, radio, film, flyers) and compare and contrast one Allied Nation and one Axis Nation (for example, the U.S. vs Germany in the use of posters).
Propaganda
If it’s not true or based on half-truths, if it moves someone to act, if it creates attitudes and molds behavior by presenting just one side’s idea or side of the story, and if it has an ideology or belief system involved, it’s propaganda.
The word comes from the church.
In 1622, there was a committee of Cardinals established by Pope Gregory XV to train other cardinals for the propagation and spreading of the faith – called The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faithful.
In the 20th century, with the creation of the superstate came technology which put into the hands of propagandists a power beyond the dreams of anyone from ancient times through the end of the 19th century – film, radio, television – modern mass media. Until the advent of modern mass media, people had to be won over by individual PERSUASION or in crowds. Modern mass media changed all this…
History
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, pamphlets and newspapers could be produced quickly and inexpensively. Spread throughout all sectors of society, pamphlets discussed views on everything from immigration, slavery, and the treatment of Native Americans. Most newspapers in the United States had definite editorial points of view, usually predicated on the political orientation of the editor. One merely has to look at contemporary reports of the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral to see which newspaper supported which contingent. John Clum, a Republican, owned “The Tombstone Epitaph” and was firmly in the corner of Wyatt Earp and his brothers (all were members of a radical branch of the Republican party called “The Law and Order Party”) while the Tombstone Chronicle, owned by a Democrat, supported the so-called Cow Boys, themselves southern democrats.
Of course, newspapers could be utilized for propaganda – Horace Greeley’s Tribune fought for the abolition of slavery (the paper hired a fellow named Karl Marx to report on European politics, a job he held for eleven years until Greeley cut his salary from ten dollars to five dollars a week – at which point, the creator of Communism quit his job).
With the end of the nineteenth century, “Yellow Journalism” reigned (today, we’d refer to it as Tabloid Journalism or any newspaper or magazine owned by the Murdoch organization). William Randolph Hearst’s “Journal” and Pulitzer’s “World” duked it out in a circulations war using large lurid headlines, comics, and photographs. In other words, the era of modern journalism had begun.
Hearst was not above using his “Journal” for propaganda purposes. His paper published articles about supposed atrocities being committed by Spanish authorities in Cuba against Cuban and American citizens. A story, shown cinematically in Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane”, concerns Hearst having sent artist Fredrick Remington down to Cuba to send back pictures of Spanish atrocities and the Spanish army and navy preparing for war. The story goes (denied by Hearst’s estate) that Remington cabled back that he couldn’t provide pictures of something that wasn’t happening to which Hearst was supposed to have replied: “You provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war.”
Within a few years, it became obvious that even Hearst’s editorials and headlines would not be able to compete with the images seen by millions on motion picture screens. In an article written in the mid-60s called “The Print Panic” – it was noted that most of our modern ideas about the uses of intellect were formed by the printed word – as were ideas about education, knowledge, truth, and information. “The decay of the written word, of which the Saturday Evening Post’s death is a symbol, is surely a tragedy.” New York started the 20th Century with fifteen major newspapers – it started the decade of the 60s with 7. It started the decade of the 70s with three.
By the 1980s, with USA Today, newspapers began to resemble television screens. Today, magazines and papers resemble computer screens.
War of Ideas
The 1930s and 40s saw a war of ideas along with the second great world war – the war of ideas was fought with images and symbols.
In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin broadcast a radio show every Sunday from his Shrine of the Little Flower at Royal Oak, Michigan. He became second in popularity only to Franklin Roosevelt, and his views became more rabid as his power grew:
“I ask you to purge the man who claims to be a Democrat from the Democratic party, and I mean Franklin Double-Crossing Roosevelt.”
– Father Coughlin, radio address, July 1935
In 1934 Coughlin launched his own political party, the Union for Social Justice and more than five million listeners signed up within two months.
“I say to the good Jews of America, be not indulgent with the irreligious, atheistic Jews. . .who promote the cause of persecution in the land of the Communists, the same ones who promote the cause of atheism in America. Yes, be not lenient with your high financiers. . .”
Coughlin might have given Roosevelt a run for his money as a third-party candidate, had he not been a Canadian citizen (the Constitution allows for only U.S. citizens to run for office). As war clouds gathered in Europe, the father’s views were met by a rising storm of protest. By the mid-40s, he was off the air.
After D.W. Griffith’s film, “Birth of A Nation,” the two most powerful propaganda films of the pre-World War II era were made in Germany by Helene Berta Amalie Riefenstahl. Leni Riefenstahl was a film actress who turned to directing in the early 1930s. Her technical virtuosity, her use of hand-held cameras, jump-cuts, and impressionistic sound continue to impact on film and video today. Riefenstahl, however, would be more than just a filmmaker: she came to symbolize what happens when an artist decides to make a deal with a devil in order to promote their art.
In Riefenstahl’s case, the devil was Adolph Hitler who, impressed by her early sound film, chose her to document the first Nazi Party Rally following his accession to power. Using 36 cameramen and assistants, she created “Triumph of The Will,” a monstrous yet mesmerizing film promoting Hitler and Nazism. From its opening shots of Hitler’s plane descending from the skies like some Norse god, to constant cutaways of children’s faces beaming at Hitler, to its panoramic shots of the huge rally itself (a few of which were copied by George Lucas for the final scene in “Star Wars”), “Triumph of The Will” is an incredible visual work, utilizing parading men and the symbols of Nazism as architecture.
Though touted as a documentary, some scenes were compiled from separate events and the closeups of Nazi leaders addressing the crowds from the podium were reshot in a studio. Riefenstahl would follow up “Triumph of The Will” with “Olympiad” in 1937. A documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympic games, the film marked possibly the only time Hitler ever compromised. He agreed to allow Riefenstahl to show the black American athlete Jesse Owens win his race on condition that he would not be shown receiving his gold medal.
Another German filmmaker to utilize mass media for purposes of propaganda was Fritz Hippler, who, by 1936 had become head of German produced “newsreels,” and I use the term loosely. He soon became head of the entire German film industry, a post originally offered to filmmaker Fritz Lang, the director of “Metropolis” (Lang caught the first plane out of Germany when offered the post – his wife, however, became an ardent Nazi). Hippler made one of the worst hate films of all time – “The Eternal Jew”.
Along with Hippler’s horrible film, came an actual exhibition with the same title.
The Eternal Jew
By the late 1930s, the increasingly fanatical tone of Nazi propaganda reflected the growing radicalization of the regime’s anti-Semitic policies. The Jewish stereotypes shown in such propaganda served to reinforce anxieties about modern developments in political and economic life, without bothering to question the reality of the Jewish role in German society.
In November 1937 ‘The Eternal Jew’ exhibition opened in Munich, and ran until 31 January 1938, claiming to show the ‘typical outward features’ of Jews and to demonstrate their allegedly Middle Eastern and Asiatic characteristics. The exhibition also attempted to ‘expose’ a world-wide ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ conspiracy.
The striking poster for the exhibition contrasted Jewish individualism and ‘self-seeking’ with the Nazi ideal of a ‘people’s community’. It did this by revealing an ‘eastern’ Jew – wearing a kaftan, and holding gold coins in one hand and a whip in the other. Under his arm is a map of the world, with the imprint of the hammer and sickle.
The exhibition attracted 412,300 visitors, over 5,000 per day. The Secret Police reports claimed that it helped to promote a sharp rise in anti-Semitic feelings, and in some cases violence against the Jewish community.
A figure who knew the importance of the utilization of mass media for the purposes of propaganda was Joseph Goebbels – the Nazi’s Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda.
The secret of propaganda according to Goebbels was to simplify the complex and then repeat it. Simplification and Repetition. Hitler himself said “The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big
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