Propaganda and Morale

Since the morale of the front line derives directly from the morale of the civilian population from which the armed forced drawn, the ming of a nation must be mobilized no less than its man-power. Particularly today, when wars are a trial of stregth between opposed ideals as well as opposed armies, public opinion is a major force, and the one sure way to form a steadfast, enduring public opinion is to inform it. Any form of censorship and any attempt to suppress, twit, or conceal will result inevitably in an impairment of the popular confidence that is the very heart of morale. A free people cannot be told what to think but must be given every fact in the case and permitted to do their own thinking. Propaganda-the fight for the promotion and maintenance of morale-can have no other basis than honesty and candor, for in every human being there is an instinct for truth. Tom-tom beating and tribal incantations, built on lies, deceit, corruption megalomania, and national egotism, may rusha nation into war and whip up passions for a while, but froth and dregs are bound to be the ultimate result. The justice of a nation's cause must be proved and preached, but even that is not enough. If the struggle is to enlist heart and mind and soul, the bloody business of wholesale slaughter must be illumined by the hope of a new and better world-order. Hitler may sneer at the "idealistic note" in propaganda, but it is only to high idealism that free peoples respond

Honesty · Passions · Political science · Population · Power (physics) · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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  Open Access•Penelope Graham, Philip Graham et al.•Body & Society•2003

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