Post-war Propaganda Research Articles

Voicing the Malayan Emergency: Ventriloquizing Subjectivity in British Colonial Film and Radio

British colonial film and radio broadcasting initiatives are described as a foundational context for shaping the Malayan Emergency (1948–60). The development and deployment of counterinsurgency techniques become a means by which to wage war against what came to be identified as the Communist insurgency, previously trained and allied with Anglo‐American forces against the Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945. Key British figures associated with propaganda tactics during World War II, such as Hugh Carelton Greene, were instrumental in developing a new array of techniques for postwar propaganda. This article considers the extent to which film and radio programming were elemental to managing popular aspirations for independence just as economic and political authority became increasingly consolidated within the terms of Anglo‐American economic and political interests. It considers how film and media programs contributed to the construction of the “Communist terrorist” by reference to several radio segments and films that were produced during this period. A significant part of the Malayan Emergency was associated with a large‐scale population resettlement program known as the Briggs Plan. It was conceived as an effective population‐centric strategy of political control that relied upon a biopolitics of security that became integral to Cold War political objectives. It is within the terms of a Cold War media complex that this discussion addresses the context for “radio‐cinema governmentality.”

Deported Lemkos in the Nets of Soviet Post-war Propaganda

The article reveals the complex pages of the notoriously planned Soviet propaganda among the deportees in the post-war period. It shows its detrimental effect on the preservation of the ethnic foundations of the Lemko group.
 Considering that Lemkivshchyna today had lost its integrity as a historical and ethnographic region, and the Lemkos were settled around the world - these only actualize the task to a comprehensive and thorough analysis of the socio-political and national-cultural processes in the region and Lemkos in their context in the new era; to ascertain the role of Lemkivshchyna and Lemkos in the ethnopolitics of the states and, accordingly, their contribution to the development of various Ukrainian public, political, cultural and state organizations, institutions and entities, and generally assess their role and significance in the history of Ukraine of XX - early XXI century.
 It is claimed that the whole catastrophe of modern times for the Lemkos was their deportation from their native ethnic areas, first to the USSR in 1944 - 1946, where they found themselves among their people, but not on their land, and later - in 1947 those who remained were settled in Poland. New powerful political-administrative and ideological factors against the local population during the Soviet-Polish negotiations were used. The most brutal action against local Ukrainians was Operation Vistula in April-July 1947, which unjustifiably had the task of erasing traces of their national image in peacetime.
 The difficult stages of life in the Lemko region in the conditions of deportation actions of the 1940s, carried out as a result of the Soviet-Polish conspiracy of 1944 are traced, and pointed out their territorial, social, cultural and mental consequences.А reflection of Russian and later Soviet propaganda, at first, in the Lemkos region, and later among the deported Lemkos, is carried out.
 The deportation of the local population has led to irreversible territorial, demographic, cultural and mental losses. The analysis of the sources allows us to suggest that the policies of both Poland and the USSR aimed at eradicating Lemko natives from their ethnic areas. And this was done by various methods, starting with propaganda, in the initial stages, to using force at later stages.
 Having been deported to the Ukrainian SSR from their ethnic territories in Poland, autochthonous Lemkos fell into the nets of total Soviet propaganda. Soviet ideologues tried to involve the most diverse methods, which even in the interwar period manifested in different ways (from public influences, populist calls for a better future, active agitation for leaving the USSR), were well supported materially. At the beginning of the Second World War, we observed a transition to more pragmatic measures through the organization of a special centre and the activities of special agitator instructors. In the post-war period, meetings and conversations with the population took place in almost every village, in which Soviet agitators contrasted poverty in Lemkivshchyna with prosperous life in the USSR. Such oral propaganda, moreover, in all regions of the Ukrainian SSR where the Lemkos arrived, the Bolsheviks reinforced with various slogans, brochures and appeals.

Between Hospitality and Hostility: The Experience of Migration Through Things

ABSTRACT In this article, I propose the category of ‘hospitable things’, and argue that it can improve our understanding of the relationships between subjects and objects in the situation of migration. The analysis uses a case study of Polish migration to territories of pre-war Germany and the Free City of Danzig – the so-called Recovered Territories [Ziemie Odzyskane] – in the twilight of World War II. Based on primary sources from the time, I scrutinise how the new Polish settlers transformed German property into ‘hospitable things’ with substantial help from the post-war propaganda. I reconstruct the affective atmosphere of the period and confront these expectations with the actual experience of hostility materialised by everyday things. The image of ‘hospitable things’ – waiting and ready to be taken – has been formed through the experience of migration in radically inhospitable circumstances. ‘Hospitable things’ enable people to cope with the emotions accompanying the fragile experience of displacement; they help to form and transform fears and insecurities, but also desires and wants.

‘The country is full of wishful thinkers’: Britain’s Information Research Department and its post-war propaganda operations in Japan, 1948–70

ABSTRACT This article examines British propaganda efforts in post-war Japan, focusing on the scope of activities and limitations of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD). Although the IRD built a wide network of recipients for its anti-communist material in Japan, it soon faced difficulties in conducting operations when the British embassy officials started to question its influence in Japanese society – since they believed it was a culture so unique that pro forma IRD materials were unsuitable. Assessing the tensions between London and Tokyo contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the seemingly monolithic propaganda policies of the IRD.

Aldous Huxley and Soviet Post-War Propaganda

Aldous Huxley and Soviet Post-War Propaganda

‘Pride and Joy’: Propaganda Wars, ‘Projections of America’ and the Dismantling of the Office of War Information at the Close of World War II

The OWI was the key agency for the distribution and dissemination of US film and propaganda during World War II. But it was the Overseas Branch of the OWI that dominated activity and the Motion Picture Unit (MPU) of the OB that helped shape documentary production through the portrayal of American values and society. The OWI’s winding up at war’s end has long been seen as part of a natural reversion to peacetime government policy. Yet, as this article argues, events within the MPU/OWI in the last year of the war throw up evidence that suggests the agency was being deliberately sidelined – even undermined – in preparation for a more rigorous and ideological post-war propaganda apparatus. This revised propaganda philosophy was set in train by a select number of individuals, principally historian Edward Lilly, newspaperman C.D. Jackson, and the army’s Brig Gen Robert McClure. Their scrutiny of the MPU/OWI – accessed via private correspondence and archival papers – is revealed for the first time in this article and is explained away as a self-conscious move away from civilian and towards military propaganda authority and control in the emergent Cold War era.

Jolyon Thomas, Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan

American Religion 1, no. 2 (Spring 2020), pp. 157–159 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.1.2.07 Book Review Jolyon Thomas. Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) Anne M. Blankenship North Dakota State University, Fargo, USA Jolyon Thomas’s book serves as an astute religious history of the US occupation of post-WWII Japan, and also provides a powerful corrective to misperceptions about religious freedom broadly and about prewar religious freedom in Japan specifically. Contrary to claims made by occupying forces, Thomas argues that “prewar and wartime Japan actually exemplified the normal functioning of legal regimes characterized by religious freedom” (3). The book interrogates the concept of religious freedom, citing the reality that “freeing religions” invariably requires defining religion, a task necessitating the determination of which practices and beliefs “count” as religious and which do not. In the case of the rapidly modernizing nation of Japan, some Buddhists attempted (and failed) to label certain practices as superstition, not religion, to permit their eradication. Simultaneously, it allowed Japan to define certain Shinto rites as patriotic secularism in order to mandate their practice. These intransigent complications of regulating religious freedom are the puzzles that Thomas explores during the prewar decades and into the US occupation, when American officials launched a problematic mission to inculcate a desire for religious liberty in all Japanese while simultaneously abolishing various Shinto rites. American Religion 1:2 158 Faking Liberties is organized by pairing the first four chapters with the final four chapters, creating a parallel discussion of the pre- and postwar periods. The first half of the book succinctly defeats claims that the Japanese had no concept of religious freedom prior to the occupation. Thomas assembles plentiful evidence from Japanese-language sources to show that a robust discourse on religion began soon after the enactment of the Meiji Constitution of 1898. Similar to laws elsewhere, it allowed free religious belief “within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects.” His argument for the existence of secularism is buoyed by reports of Japanese who failed to privilege certain groups or establish an official state religion. These conversations existed in clear contradiction to postwar propaganda that claimed that the Meiji Constitution was uniquely and inextricably flawed. The book’s second half speaks more directly to the interests of scholars of American religion. Thomas details the acrobatics American officials performed to declare religious liberty and insist on its application, while simultaneously de- and reconstructing religious organizations. Beginning with the premise that “legitimate” religions had been widely oppressed and a national religion had been forced upon the people, occupying forces cranked out pseudo-academic studies to reach that conclusion, ignoring insistent claims by the Japanese that religious freedom was already protected by existing laws. That the nation’s constitution guaranteed that right and no existing laws declared a national religion complicated matters only in the short term. As Thomas writes, “State Shinto had to be created to be destroyed” (150). The US government relied on American and British religious scholars who labeled both shrine rites and imperial ritual as “religion” and attempted to eradicate it from schools, while US officials sought to convince the Japanese people to value religious freedom. Their regulations also replicated aspects of the 1939 Religious Organizations Law that they had so harshly criticized. While notable differences existed, both governments found that they could communicate more effectively if small religious groups merged under umbrella organizations. This created unique problems for new religious movements, which had struggled under Meiji law as well. In both sections, Thomas focuses on the roles of academics within these debates and how politicians and other government officials used their work. He is critical of the complicity of both Japanese and American scholars and states from the outset that his “project is unabashedly politically motivated” (5). However, while Thomas critiques resulting policies, he offers generous portrayals of the individual scholars involved. The conclusion includes a cautionary note to current religious studies scholars. While the book makes significant contributions to the field, it has some notable problems. First, Thomas limits the Japanese perspective...

COMPUTATIONAL PROPAGANDA: IF YOU MAKE IT TREND, YOU MAKE IT TRUE

1 2 Y C O M P U T A T I O N A L P R O P A G A N D A I F Y O U M A K E I T T R E N D , Y O U M A K E I T T R U E R E N E E D I R E S T A There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. – Edward Bernays, Propaganda The pioneering public relations consultant Edward Bernays’s words are nearly a century old, but today, in an era of rampant misinformation and insidious disinformation campaigns online, they seem startlingly apt. The rulers Bernays was talking about were public relations specialists, and at the time propaganda was not a pejorative. But when we consider this statement in the context of the current information ecosystem, replete with manipulative narratives spread by bots and human operators alike, it’s somewhat jarring. Now the ‘‘invisible rulers’’ are the people who control the algorithms that populate the feeds of two billion users, and the strategists who are most adept at gaming them. In Bernays’s time, propaganda was used somewhat interchangeably with public relations. The concept has evolved since then; modern and postwar propaganda can perhaps be defined in the simplest terms as information with an agenda. The information is not objective, but it also isn’t necessarily false – in fact, to be most 1 3 R e√ective, propaganda is often anchored in a partial truth. Regardless of whether it’s true or false, propaganda has a consistent aim: to influence the target to feel a certain way or form a certain opinion about a concept or entity. Propaganda is most often associated with governments, but activist groups, companies, and the media also produce it. Propaganda has been a tool of rulers since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans; the term itself comes from an administrative body of the Catholic Church that was dedicated to ‘‘propagating ’’ the Catholic faith in non-Catholic countries. Kings used it, religious leaders used it, and even the American Founding Fathers used it to shape opinions and influence societies. In fact, Bernays believed that propaganda was essential to the functioning of a democracy: The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. This manipulation took the form of informing people, persuading people, or integrating people with people. ‘‘Of course,’’ Bernays noted, ‘‘the means and methods of accomplishing these ends have changed as society has changed.’’ The methods changed rather dramatically decades after Bernays ’s death; the internet was born, and it transformed and upended the stranglehold that rulers and elites traditionally had on the flows of information. And as the internet itself changed, with the emergence of a handful of social platforms that serve two billion people, a series of unintended consequences stemming from design choices and business models democratized propaganda and helped it evolve into what Phil Howard and Sam Woolley of the University of Oxford called computational propaganda: ‘‘the use of algorithms, automation, and human curation to pur- 1 4 D I R E S T A Y posefully distribute misleading information over social media networks .’’ Most people have heard of, and experienced, misinformation: it’s false information, and on the early internet it often took the form of email chains, perhaps from your gullible uncle, telling you that if you forwarded a message to ten people, Bill Gates would send you money. This kind of misinformation is the raison d’être of the hoax-buster Snopes, the site that explains what’s going on when things are wrong on the...

Explaining the occupation: Israeli hasbara and the occupied territories in the aftermath of the June 1967 war

Israeli rule over the territories it occupied in the June 1967 war has been the subject of animated international debate in the past half century. This article explores the policy-making process behind Israel’s immediate postwar propaganda and public diplomacy, or “hasbara” in Hebrew, intended to put before foreign audiences the necessity and legitimacy of the occupation. Based on unpublished archival sources, this paper will delineate and analyze the Israeli government’s numerous difficulties in explaining the occupation, faced by media and other reports of Palestinian postwar hardship and resistance to Israeli rule, as well as the harsh measures enforcing Israeli military control and the beginning of Israeli settlement. It also demonstrates the problem of conflicting demands placed on the Israeli government by its domestic audience. It finally argues that the perceived dent to Israel’s image so often discussed by its government and public, has much to say generally about the limits of any propaganda and public diplomacy.

Rewriting Institutional Narratives to Make Amends: The French National Railroads (SNCF)

In 1940, France, threatened with total annexation by Nazi Germany, signed an armistice agreement with Germany that placed the French government in Vichy France and divided the country into an occupied and unoccupied zone. The Armistice also requisitioned the rolling stock of the SNCF—French National Railways—which became a significant arm in the German effort, transporting soldiers, goods, and over 75,000 deportees crammed into merchandise wagons toward Nazi extermination camps. Between 3,000-5,000 survived. Of the roughly 400,000 SNCF employees, Nazis murdered a couple of thousand for resistance or alleged in subordination. Railway men who resisted the Germans also often has to resist their employer as well. After the liberation of French at the end of WWII, the company—not simply the brave individuals -- received France’s Medal of Honor for its alleged role in the ultimate defeat of the Germans. This medal, along with other postwar propaganda in the form of films and books, instilled a singular narrative about the company’s heroic wartime role. This narrative continued uninterrupted until the 1980s. Those who returned, along with the relatives of many who did not, increasingly challenge the company’s simplified wartime narrative. In the 1990s, lawsuits against the company began in France and continue through 2016 in the United States. In response, the SNCF made efforts to intertwine story of deportation with the company narrative of resistance. One key forum for this attempt was a colloquium held in 2000 at the Assemblée Nationale in Paris.That colloquium is examined here through the lenses of three forms of narrative analysis: structural, functional, and post-structural. Each analytic frame illuminates different challenges to that colloquium’s attempts at revising history through altering a mystified institutional narrative. Through the analysis of this case, the author establishes the power of these analytic frameworks when examining problematic discursive spaces that hold in place master narratives and limit moral work.

Propaganda komunistyczna wobec Armii Krajowej w latach 1943–1955

Communist Propaganda Relating to the Home Army in 1943–1955More is known about the image of the Home Army in wartime and post–war communist propaganda from publicistics and a priori theses dealing with simple declarations about anti– AK attitudes and the falsification of history than from strictly scientific studies. Publications that would depict the creation and fluctuation of this image in collective memory are also lacking. It is thus worth drawing attention to a definition of the research theme as such. During the period in question the communists did not make a considerable distinction between AK, WiN (Freedom and Independence), NSZ (National Armed Forces) and other pro–independence organisations, on the one hand, and actual gangs of armed bandits who after the war acted the guise of the Underground, on the other hand.The image of the AK in post–war propaganda was a continuation of the accusatory stance devised by the PPR (Polish Workers’ Party) already in 1943, i.e. at the time of the German occupation. After the war equally negative slogans about AK responsibility for the „sanacja” government and defeat at the time of the September 1939 campaign, wartime passivity, affiliation with fascism, nationalism, and fratricide were furthered with accusations of murdering democrats, banditry, and collaboration with anti–Polish agents in the West.It is essential to indicate the changing perspective. During the so–called amnesty period the impact of anti–AK propaganda was diminished in order to encourage the conspirators to come out into the open. Soon, however, the campaign regained its previous state. The next stage proved even more important; note that at the end of the 1940s and especially during the early 1950s the communists changed their strategy and acknowledged the necessity of deploying a totally different method, i.e. remaining silent. The Home Army became mentioned in the media increasingly rarely and in time the attacks launched against it ceased almost entirely. They reappeared sporadically, e.g. upon the occasion of anniversaries of the Warsaw Uprising, which entailed the functioning of a division into „good” soldiers and „bad” commanders, with General Tadeusz „Bór” Komorowski as the symbolic archenemy.This is not to say that the attitude towards the Home Army actually changed. Pro–independence soldiers were imprisoned, investigated or remained unemployed. The new method aimed at a different target: the relegation of the existence of the underground army from collective memory and its replacement with communist formations. The ultimate goal was probably the creation of an image of communists monopolising the armed struggle and of small fascist bandits groups, which hindered armed struggle and which, for all practical purposes, were not even worthy of recollection.

Le immagini vaganti. Migrazioni iconografiche tra destra e sinistra

Parties frequently appropriate propaganda images from other movements, which all too often belong to the opposite end of the political spectrum. This article considers the main forms of visual appropriation and illustrates them with examples drawn from Italian and French post-war propaganda. It argues that the phenomenon is widespread especially among right-wing parties, which tend to adopt the imagery created by well-established political organisations to legitimate themselves, to present themselves to the voters in a more modern and appealing way or to attempt a dialogue with them. The technique of imitation may also be used to create a sense of confusion with the ultimate aim of neutralising the messages of other parties, or to steal votes from their natural constituencies. Left-wing parties too at times mimic the images (and slogans) of the right, but usually with parodying intentions which can escape the public at large.

A Study on Postwar Propaganda Activities of the Self Defense Forces

A Study on Postwar Propaganda Activities of the Self Defense Forces

Postwar propaganda as public relations: British containment of militant nationalism in Nigeria, 1945—60

This article studies postwar propaganda as an instrument of British containment of militant nationalism in Nigeria, 1945—60. It seeks to elucidate the mechanisms, dynamics and impacts of the stratagems, subsumed under propaganda but presented as public relations for acceptability, which characterized the decolonization process in Nigeria. By using the historical method based on archival and newspaper sources ignored by previous scholars, the article establishes, contrary to conventional wisdom, that propaganda was not a temporary expedient, but a major feature of British colonial imperialism. It concludes that British application of this strategy in Nigeria led to the defeat of postwar militant nationalism, and the transfer of power to the pliable wing of the emergent elite at independence.

The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945–1955. By Shawn J. Parry-Giles. (Westport: Praeger, 2002. xxx, 230 pp. $61.95, ISBN 0-275-97463-4.)

Shawn J. Parry-Giles has written a well-researched, carefully conceived book of interest to students of the U.S. propaganda apparatus and students of presidential rhetoric and communications strategies. Pointing to the target audience, Parry-Giles argues that study of the rhetorical presidency must include greater attention to the modern presidential orchestration of both covert and overt propaganda strategies. Centering this study “on how the Truman and Eisenhower administrations strengthened the power of the rhetorical presidency through their institutionalization of a governmental peacetime propaganda program,” the author argues that both presidents restructured use of the bully pulpit and, most significant, “increased the clandestine means by which to thwart such congressional supervision over their … Cold War policies, relying on multiple media channels to achieve such ends” (p. xviii). Parry-Giles refers to that consolidation of presidential control as a militarization of propaganda policy. The book is divided into three main sections. Part 1 explores the successes and failures of the “journalistic paradigm” shaping the Truman administration's loosely coordinated postwar propaganda policy. President Harry S. Truman's use of journalists and prestigious news sources was necessary to legitimize peacetime propaganda activities, but eventually the journalistic paradigm seemed too ineffective, inviting congressional attacks and investigations. Both Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower faced those attacks, and both countered with greater centralization—“militarization”— of propaganda policies in the Oval Office. Part 2, titled “The Period of Militarization,” contends that increased Soviet propaganda, combined with the perceived ineffectiveness of U.S. strategy, led Truman to avoid congressional control through use of covert channels, especially the cia (Central Intelligence Agency) in 1947 and the National Security Council's Psychological Warfare Board (1951). Parry-Giles argues that by 1951 most psychological warfare activity was “subject to the guidance and control of the president as commander-in-chief ” (p. 55) and was known about by very few members of Congress.