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Article Excerpt
Propaganda is an expression of a particular doctrine, whether through the use of visual image, statements and other verbal methods, or persistent policies. But more than just an expression, propaganda has a purpose: an attempt or "scheme" intended "for propagating a doctrine or practice" (Brown 10). In fact, the Latin root of the word is propagare, which describes the act of transplanting young plant shoots "in order to reproduce new plants which will later take on a life of their own" (Brown 10). In the same way, the authors of wartime propaganda plant an idea in the minds of the audience so that the idea becomes a part of the audience's own mind and ideology, thereby influencing not only their attitudes but also their actions.
Despite the abundance of World War II propaganda on television documentaries, in books, and on the Internet, the effect of propaganda is a little-explored topic. The small amount of propaganda analysis in existence leans heavily upon the work done by John Dower (War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, 1986). The theme of his book is that war propaganda portrays the enemy as "the other" (they are not like us), inferior (incompetent: we are capable of defeating them militarily), sub-human (there is nothing morally objectionable to killing something that is not human), and evil (therefore, it is our duty to eliminate them). The sources and the effects of this propaganda effort, however, are left largely unexplored.
My interest is the realm of human persuasion: the use of wartime propaganda, intensifying and focusing the racist attitudes that already existed in pre-war American society, to influence the attitudes and actions of soldiers. I will focus on the perspective of the American soldier toward his Japanese enemy during World War II.
Dower noted that policymakers were well aware of the stakes involved in World War II: nations were waging war in the name of good versus evil, and national survival literally depended upon retention of territory and resources (3). Such high stakes may have given nations the incentive to manipulate their populations toward the will to eliminate the enemy. The case for intentional persuasion of populations was more explicitly stated by J. Glenn Gray, a U.S soldier in Germany during World War II who wrote that All forward-looking governments have learned to rate psychological preparations for war as of equal importance, at least, with the physical training of citizens and soldiers. As a consequence, the image of the enemy a contemporary, soldier takes with him to the front is certain to be a synthetic product of the mass media, more or less consciously instilled in him by his government to make him a better fighter. (Gray 133) In other words, soldiers often enter battle with distorted views of the enemy because of intentional propagandistic influence. This distorted view assisted the soldier as an aggressor and met his need to justify his actions against the enemy. The view of the enemy endorsed by this propaganda served to persuade soldiers-and society-that the enemy can be and must be eliminated: individual men must be convinced to kill other men on a large scale, and societies must be convinced to support this aggression.
In this type of propaganda, it is common to highlight race as a very visual and very concrete means of distinguishing friendly from enemy. In fact, using wartime propaganda to highlight racial features as a characteristic of the enemy seems to play on man's natural racist inclinations and seems to increase the already-present tendency to pair violence with racial hatred. It must be noted however, that Americans were not unique in their wartime hatred for an enemy of distinct race: the World War II commander of Britain's 14th Army, Sir William Slim, treated Japanese prisoners with contempt and aimed to destroy the Japanese army, "an evil thing" (Holmes 277). Grouping according to racial characteristics and discriminating against people with different racial characteristics from our own is a human trait, not a uniquely American trait. Seemingly "hardwired into the human psyche" (Monteith 46), xenophobia is the fear of people who are not like us and this fear is more pronounced when we are under stress. A human tends to define the "in" group, or the good group, as comprised of members who share his own characteristics, including race (Montieth 48). Therefore, the "out" group, the "other," is a group comprised of people who do not share the in-group's characteristics--and this out-group is necessarily "bad" in contrast to the definitive goodness of the in-group.
While a focus on the enemy's race is typical of wartime propaganda, this focus sometimes produces extreme and negative results. If hatred is aroused against a racial group, noncombatant members of that race may be targeted in addition to the military members. Additionally, in a situation that involves justifiable military violence, demonization of the enemy's race can magnify and distort a soldier's actions into tragic atrocities and barbaric behavior.
Two common wartime conditions make apparent the fact that propaganda is often inaccurate and misleading and that it influences soldiers' beliefs about, and actions against, the enemy. First, it is sometimes the case that soldiers nearer the front line and in more direct contact with the enemy become less barbaric toward the enemy than are soldiers in rear support...
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