The crutch of the Warfare State is propaganda. We must be taught to fear and to hate or we will not agree to regiment out lives, to bear the enormous burdens of ever heavier taxation to pay for ever more costly Military hardware - and to do this at the expense of domestic programs like medical care and education and healthy urban development. As Goebbels had demonstrated so well under Hitler, propaganda is the art of induced belief; and if you propagandized vociferously enough, if you hammered the message home with endless repetition, the public could be brainwashed to believe almost anything the government wanted it to believe. In the end, what had started out as a madman's illogic became the sane man's common sense.
Never had the American people been subjected to such a propaganda barrage. Their first experience with it was to come in the years immediately after World War II, and the underlying objective was to be the establishment of that "permanent war economy" so ardently desired by both the Military and Big Business. If this war economy was to become a reality, if it was to insure the blessings of continued prosperity, it was obvious that we must have a large and permanently established Military to consume the materiel the factories would supply. And if this was to be the order of the new day, the American people must be brought to break with all the traditions of their past; their innate distrust of militarism must be overcome. This could only be done if they could be convinced of the reality of that ever-present menace Hamilton had perceived to be the culture ground of military castes. It was, obviously, a tremendous job for propaganda. And propaganda went quickly to work.
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The extent to which the American people had been propagandized to induce them to discard the nonmilitary tradition of centuries has been but imperfectly understood. Even less appreciated has been the significance implicit in the mere use of propaganda on such a scale by the Military. This signified nothing less than a radical shift in the basis of power. The voting booth would be retained, so would the democratic trappings of our society; but, increasingly, all the vital decisions would be influenced and pre-determined by the uniform - by men whose professional judgment it would be positively unpatriotic to question.
It would not matter which of the major parties happened to be in power, for each was equally vulnerable to the pressures generated by the new propaganda techniques. The people's money, funneled into the hands of the Military in prodigious amounts, could and would be used to indoctrinate the people in the desired patterns of belief. Let's consider for a moment how radical was this entire procedure, how complete was the break with every lofty American ideal. Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, virtually all the Founding Fathers, had agreed on the conception that the Military should be strictly limited in its power; that its function should be solely to executethe policies laid down by controlling civilian authority - not to determine them. But once the Military entered the propaganda field, this fundamental philosophic tenet of American democracy was discarded. Congress could no longer hold a check-rein on the Military, for the Military now went over the heads of Congressmen to propagandize the electorate on whom those Congressmen depended for votes. Popular attitudes would be molded and determined by men trading upon the prestige of the uniform. In essence, this meant that the Military servant, with Madison Avenue as his shield and torch-bearer, had acquired the whip hand over his supposed civilian masters.
This fateful and inevitable sequence was clearly foreseen at the time, and it says much for the budding power of the military-industrial complex that even perceptive vision and a forthright statement of principle by a Congressional committee could be buried, practically unnoticed, under the propaganda avalanche.
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In the rabbit warren of the Pentagon, publicity branches and bureaus spread in octopus fashion. Each was designed to pluck a special nerve controlling a segment of public reaction. No media that was influential in creating and channeling public opinion was overlooked. Even the most legitimate of these publicity tentacles often played a subtle role in purveying the views of the Brass. This was the special press department which maintained newsroom in the Pentagon for major newspapers and wire services. It issued news releases to daily and weekly newspapers, but it also managed to suggest ideas, to ploant questions that might be asked appropriate representatives of the Military to get into the headlines the particular Pentagon line of the moment. If this line was startling enough, it would then create its own snowballing pattern of news, requiring comment from civilian secretaries, Congressmen, perhaps even the President.
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The members of Congress were not alone in exhibiting this worshipful complex of our times. Big businessmen and the preponderance of the nation's press have joined the claque that cheers on the Brass. This conjunction of high-level interests showed itself revealingly on April 26, 1951, at the annual dinner of the Bureau of Advertising of the American Newspaper Publishers Association. Charles E. (General Electric) Wilson, who had been called back to Washington by Truman as Defense Mobilization Director, was the speaker. He congratulated the publishers for their co-operation in publishing "millions of words laying down the premise . . . that the free world is in mortal danger . . . If the people were not convinced of that it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent to avert that danger . . . With the support of public opinion as marshalled by the press, we are off to a good start. But the mobilization job cannot be completed unless such support is continuous . . . It is our job - yours and mine - to keep our people convinced that the only way to keep disaster away from our shores is to build America's might."
Yes, sir, we were "off to a good start" on that "permanent war economy" Wilson had visualized in 1944, but it would take "continuous" effort to "keep our people convinced."
