As a designation. psychopolitics is preferable to psychological warfare. Which. Though correct. is often taken to mean only operations directed against an enemy nation in the course of armed conflict.
The tactical and strategic use of psychopolitics that the. Soviet recommends to its allies and agents in the United States and other nations of the. West yet uncaptured has been set forth in a remarkable document of which several copies appear to have reached the. United States in the 1930’s and later. It is most widely known and generally available as a booklet. Brain-washing. a Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics.
which seemed plausible to persons addicted
to idealistic fantasies and romantic fiction. is credited with having broken the will of the German people and induced them to surrender in 1918. After which. Of course. It was easy to inflict on them suffering and starvation. So enormous that the international people then in Germany could “legally.” Appropriate most of the property in Germany that they had not already acquired. “Legality” being observed by handing a few. American dollars to famished and despairing Germans in return for land. buildings. or factories worth a thousand or a million times that price.
The “fourteen points” are justly
regarded as one of the great triumphs phone number list of psychological warfare. But under modern conditions verbal bombardments. Unlike artillery fire. cannot be aimed in one direction. Clever as the “fourteen points” were. we may legitimately wonder whether they would have made the German populace simper. if the populace had not been made susceptible to such gabble by the long and patient work of enemy aliens and their hirelings. What is more significant. substantially the same drivel was used. through Wilson and other mouthpieces.
To pep up the American people understanding what it means to be value driven and make them glad to furnish cannon fodder and money to “make the world safe for democracy” by devastating Europe in a “war to end wars. ” Wilson’s ideological barrage was directed against Americans as much as against Germans. and we may wonder which nation. in the long run. was the more damaged.
Under modern conditions. psychological
Warfare is necessarily waged by a business to consumer marketing government against its own subjects and only secondarily against a foreign country. and the real beneficiary is invariably the international nation that controls both sides in the war that it has arranged for its own purposes. Only if we keep that fact in mind can we use the term psychological warfare correctly.