War propaganda

War propaganda  (Propaganda)

Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defence against a homicidal maniac. In our time political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. (On the manipulation of language for political ends.) We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
George Orwell

War propaganda is used by nation states to justify their own engagement in a war and to uphold morale and support for the war throughout. It can continue afterwards when certain narratives that have been constructed are important to the power-structures that are the victors. A Casus belli has historically been used to justify one's own entry into it (see Patrick Clawsons remarks at a QA of the Washington Institute in 2012).

Slate wrote in 2005 during the 2nd Iraq war:

A calculated and systematic effort to manage public opinion, it transcends mere lying and routine political dishonesty. When the Bush administration manufactures fake “news,” suppresses real news, disguises the former as the latter, and challenges the legitimacy of the independent press, it corrodes trust in leaders, institutions, and, to the rest of the world, the United States as a whole.

The Basic Principles of War Propaganda

Anne Morelli summarized and systematized the contents of Arthur Ponsonby's classic on war propaganda in "ten commandments of propaganda":

1. We do not want war.
2. The enemy alone is to be blamed for the war.
3. The enemy is inherently evil, resembling the devil.
4. We defend a noble cause, not our own interest.
5. The enemy commits atrocities on purpose; our mishaps are involuntary.
6. The enemy uses illegal weapons.
7. We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous.
8. Artists and intellectuals back our cause.
9. Our cause is holy, it has a sacred character.
10. Whoever doubts our propaganda, is a traitor.

 

Examples

Page name	Description
"Iraq/WMD"	"Iraq has WMDs" was a claim made by the US and UK establishments in the run up to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, a deception cooked up by MI6 as part of Operation Mass Appeal that played on the public's hypocrisy and fear
'A Gay Girl In Damascus'	A false media personality to create a mood in Western liberal opinion for regime change in Syria
Authors' Declaration of September 1914	An declaration in support of World War 1 by 53 leading British authors. One of the earliest efforts of the nascent War Propaganda Bureau to craft a coherent intellectual message in support of the war effort.
Casus belli	A pretext for war, typically a false flag attack
Jessica Lynch/Rescue	Special forces rescue operation that was not actually necessary, but initiated to bring some uplifting news from Iraq.
Operation Horseshoe	war propaganda fake news from 1999
Operation Mass Appeal	An effort by MI6 to facilitate the UK's invasion of Iraq.

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