Propaganda, Inc. by Nancy Snow

Author:Nancy Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2010-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

THE USIA’S COLD WAR ORIGINS

In June 1942, President Roosevelt coordinated all public information into the Office of War Information (OWI) which set up twenty-six posts overseas known as the US Information Service (USIS). By 1948, the US had passed the Smith-Mundt Act to establish the first peacetime propaganda agency whose purpose was “to promote a better understanding of the United States in other countries, and to increase mutual understanding.” 19 With it, Truman initiated his “Campaign of Truth” to direct US propaganda activities against the spread of international communism. By June 1950, Truman’s cold war propaganda machine was put to the test as US forces entered South Korea under the United Nations banner to fight North Korea. The US military was not used to working closely with propagandists who employed psychological warfare tactics to influence rather than kill the enemy.

Fitzhugh Green explains a noteworthy exception to this lack of military faith in “psywar” action in his book, American Propaganda Abroad. An American officer who had fought in Korea “recalled how the US artillery fired some leaflet-loaded shells set for high burst over a steep-sloped valley in North Korea. The surrender tracts floated gently down onto the forested ravine. Moments after they landed, one or two Chinese infantrymen appeared from the trees, picked up the papers, and studied them. Sure enough, they started in the direction of the UN command headquarters. The leaflets promised a safe conduct to the rear and good treatment as prisoners of war until peace could be restored. Minutes later, he observed from his artillery post that hundreds of enemy soldiers were striding south. Finally, there appeared to be two or three thousand of them. ‘What happened then?’ I asked. ‘Oh,’ he laughed uneasily, ‘we reloaded our guns with antipersonnel ammunition and wiped out the whole lot.’ ‘So you would agree that psywar is effective?’ I pursued. ‘Why yes, you might say that it can be devastating. . . .’”20

Aside from that bloody war account, the USIA’s origins were more cold war in emphasis. When the Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957, the US Advisory Commission on Information responded with a plea for more propaganda, not less. Like President Kennedy’s missile-gap theory that justified increased military spending and began the US arms race with the Soviets in the 1960s, a culture gap in the late 1950s would justify increased expenditures in propaganda. “The United States may be a year behind in mass technological education. But it is thirty years behind in competition with communist propaganda . . . each year sees the communists increase their hours of broadcasting, their production and distribution of books, their motion pictures and cultural exchanges, and every other type of propaganda and information activity. . . . We should start planning to close the gap in this field before it widens further.”21

In many parts of the world today, and in most dictionaries, propaganda has no inherent negative connotation. It is widely accepted that advertising and public relations employ propagandistic techniques in order to sell merchandise or image.

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