On Propaganda in America

Far more important to Europe than the propaganda about domestic affairs in America is that about foreign affairs.

The numen “democracy” is used also in this realm as the essence of reality. A foreign development sought to be brought about is called “spreading democracy”; a development sought to be hindered is “against democracy,” or “fascistic.” “Fascism” is the numen corresponding to evil in theology, and in fact they are directly equated in American propaganda.

The prime enemy in the propaganda picture was always Europe, and especially the Prussian-European spirit which rose with such self-evident force in the European Revolution of 1933 against the negative view of life, with its materialism, money-obsession, and democratic corruption. The more surely it appeared that this Revolution was not a superficial political phenomenon, a mere transfer of one party-regime for another, that it was a deep spiritual, total revolution, of a new, vital spirit against a dead spirit, the more violent became the hate propaganda directed against Europe. By 1938, this propaganda had reached an intensity, both in volume and in emotional frenzy, that could not be surpassed. Ceaselessly the American was bombarded with the message that Europe was attacking everything worth-while in the world, “God,” Religion,” “democracy,” “Freedom,” “peace,” “America.”

This excessive use of abstractions was itself indicative that there was a lack of concrete realities to use. The failure to arouse excitement, despite the propaganda bombardment, led to the thesis that Europe was planning to invade the United States with fleets and armies. Ideas like these indeed conquered the intellectual side of the American mass-mind, but did not penetrate to the emotional level of rousing genuine apprehension or effective hate.

“Aggressor” was another leading word in the intellectual assault. Again, it did not relate to facts, and was only allowed to work one way as a term of abuse. “International morality” was invented and formulated so that the enemy of the Culture-distorter became ipso facto immoral. If they could not find political reasons for their politics, they were all the more resourceful in creating moral, ideological, economic, and esthetic reasons. Nations were divided into good and bad. Europe as a whole was bad when it was united, and if Culture distortion was able to secure a foothold in any European land, such land became thereby good. The American propaganda machine reacted with venomous hatred against the European partitioning of Bohemia in 1938. Every European power which had participated in the negotiations was denounced as evil, aggressive, immoral, anti-democratic, and the rest of it.

Fundamental in this political picture was the thesis that politics was a matter of “forms of government” struggling against one another. Not nations or States, but abstractions like “democracy” and “fascism” were the content of the world-struggle. This imposed the necessity of calling the opponent of the momentary situation as “democratic” or “fascistic,” and changing it from month to month, year to year. Serbia, Poland, Japan, Russia, China, Hungary, Rumania, and many other units, have been both “fascist” and “democratic,” depending upon precisely what treaty they had made, and with what power.

The division into “democratic” and “fascistic” corresponded exactly with that into treaty-breaking and treaty-observing powers. Supplementing it was the dichotomy: peace-loving nations, and – the other kind. The phrase “international law” was popularized, and it was used to describe something which has never existed, and cannot exist. It had no connection whatever with the real international law of 500 years of Western practice. It was popularized to mean that any change in the international territorial status quo was “forbidden” by “international law.”

Any words whatever that had good connotations were linked with the leading catchwords of the picture. Thus Western Civilization was too impressive to treat as a hostile term, and it was used to describe parliamentarism, class-war, plutocracy, and finally – Bolshevik Russia. It was insisted by the propaganda machine during the time of the battle at Stalingrad in the Fall of 1942 between Europe and Asia that the Asiatic forces represented Western Civilization while the European armies were the enemies of Western Civilization. The fact that Siberian, Turkestani, and Kirghizian regiments were being used by the Bolshevik regime was adduced as proof that Asia had saved Western Civilization.

To Europeans, this sort of thing testifies to two great facts: the total lack of any political or cultural consciousness whatever in the masses of the American population, and the deep, total, and implacable enmity toward Europe of the Culture-distorting regime in America. Japan was also treated in the propaganda picture as an enemy, but not as an irreconcilable enemy, like Europe. The propaganda against Japan was never allowed to take a racial form, lest the racial instincts of the American population be awakened into a storm that would sweep away the distorter. The generally milder tone of the anti-Japanese propaganda was owing to the fact that Japan had not experienced, and could not possibly experience, anything like the great European Revolution of 1933.

Because of the primitive intellectuality in a country whose population had been mentally uniformized, this propaganda was able to adopt extremely crude expedients. Thus during the war-preparation, 1933-1939, the press, cinema, and radio were filled with stories of insults to the American flag abroad, of secret documents accidentally discovered, of conversations heard over tapped wires, of discoveries of arms caches in the possession of American nationalist groups, and the like. “Newsreels” purporting to have been filmed abroad were actually made in some cases in Hollywood. So fantastic did it all become that when, a year before the Second World War, a wireless program carried an imaginative story of an invasion from Mars, there were symptoms of widespread panic among the propagandized masses.

Because America had never come strongly under the impression of the Spanish cabinet-politics usages which became engrafted on the European spirit, the Culture-distorting regime was able to engage in propaganda attacks of an extremely repulsive and vile kind directed against the private lives and characters of European leaders who represented the 20th century world-outlook. These leaders were represented as having been panders, homosexuals, dope-fiends, and sadists.

The propaganda was entirely free from any cultural basis, and was completely cynical with regard to facts. Precisely as the cinema-factories of Hollywood ground out lying plays and “newsreels,” the propagandists of the press created what “facts” they needed. When the Japanese air forces attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, the Culture-distorters did not know that Europe would take this occasion to retaliate against the undeclared war which the Culture-distorting regime in Washington had been waging against Europe. The regime therefore at once decided to exploit the Japanese attack as a European military measure. To this end, the propaganda organs at once spread the “news” that European planes with European pilots had participated in the attack, and had even led it. Although every capital ship in the base was sunk in this attack, the regime officially announced that only slight damage had been done. These fact-creations were as nothing, however, to the massive, post-war, “concentation-camp” propaganda of the Culture-distorting regime based in Washington.

This propaganda announced that 6,000,000 members of the Jewish Culture-Nation-State-Church-People-Race had been killed in European camps, as well as an indeterminate number of other people. The propaganda was on a world-wide scale, and was of a mendacity that was perhaps adapted to a uniformized mass, but was simply disgusting to discriminating Europeans. The propaganda was technically quite complete. “Photographs” were supplied in millions of copies. Thousands of the people who had been killed published accounts of their experiences in these camps. Hundreds of thousands more made fortunes in post-war black-markets. “Gas-chambers” that did not exist were photographed, and a “gasmobile” was invented to titillate the mechanically-minded.

We come now to the purpose of this propaganda which the regime gave to its mentally-enslaved masses. From the analysis in the 20th Century Political Outlook, the purpose is seen to be only one: it was designed to create a total war in the spiritual sense, transcending the limits of politics, against the Western Civilization. The American masses, both military and civilian, were given this mental poison in order to inflame them to the point where they would carry out without flinching the post-war annihilation program. In particular: it was designed to support a war after the Second World War, a war of looting, hanging, and starvation against defenseless Europe.

(The above article was excerpted from Imperium [pp. 529-534], which is published by The Noontide Press and available for purchase from the Institute for Historical Review.)