Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

World War II witnessed the greatest propaganda campaigns in history. Often referred to as the “Fourth Arm” after the army, navy, and air force, →  propaganda was conducted by all belligerents and was essentially designed to sustain domestic civilian morale during a long war at home while undermining enemy civilian and military confidence in the ability to achieve victory. Although propaganda was becoming a characteristic of peacetime politics in the first half of the twentieth century, it was still seen largely as a weapon of war, especially in democracies. Dictatorships in the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany more readily embraced its peacetime use as a form of coercion of mass populations instead of the individualistic democratic predisposition toward →  Persuasion and consensus-building. These different ideologies eventually went to war against each other in 1939, in a conflict that began with a cavalry charge in Poland and ended, six years later, with atomic explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It became a war of national survival – total war – in which propaganda was used by all sides as a psychological weapon to supplement, reinforce, or counter the destructive power of military force. Ultimately, however, World War II was won by military power – which prompts the question of what role propaganda actually played in determining the final outcome (→  War ... log in or subscribe to read full text