by Propaganda
against total disintegration in other places.”81
Plekhanov and Tkachev have both been credited with defining the distinction
between propaganda and agitation, which is built into Lenin’s theory. The social-dem-
ocratic theory of revolution, in all its Marxist economic trappings, is complicated and
needs careful explaining to the few individuals who can understand it. However, since
revolution requires enlistment of the masses, the latter’s support has to be obtained
through agitation, which involves focusing on concrete injustices and wrongdoings
and bringing home to selective audiences that these injustices are not unavoidable
facts of life but the result of an oppressive system, which can be overthrown. Kremer
makes the point that agitation must derive from an intimate knowledge of condi-
tions prevailing in factories. Agitators need to “catch the pulse of the proletarians and
attune their appeals to the keenly felt grievances and immediate needs of the work-
ers in the mass.”82 By reaching out in this way to the masses, revolutionaries make it
difficult for a government to control the revolutionary activity.
In his book What Is to Be Done? , Lenin further developed the idea of agitation-propaganda, or agitprop as it has come to be known. A conscious vanguard of the
proletariat must engage in political education to develop in the people a sense of com-
monality of interest between all kinds of different workers normally concerned only
about benefits to their narrow group. The agitator identifies the most striking concern
of his audience—for example, the death through starvation of a group of the unem-
ployed—and, building on this well-known fact, puts all his efforts into getting across
a single idea: that of the absurd contradiction between the simultaneous increase in
riches and of poverty. He will then incite discontent and mass indignation against this crying injustice, leaving to the propagandist the task of providing a more complete
explanation of this contradiction. Consequently, the propagandist operates chiefly by
means of the printed word; the agitator by means of the spoken word.
Lenin employed the idea of revelation, which was the only way capable, he
said, of arousing a political consciousness among the masses. This meant expos-
ing what was wrong with society, which, in turn, involved agitators reaching into
all sectors of society. This idea was not totally new. St. Paul, after all, considered it necessary to “become all things to all men”; Aristotle had stressed the need to
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tailor arguments to the preconceptions of an audience; and Quintilian, following Aristotle, had noted the potential of emotion-arousing examples. But Lenin applied
these principles to mass persuasion not through individual rhetoric but through an
organized campaign involving an army of agitators at all levels. The task, he wrote,
must be to utilize every manifestation of discontent and to make the most back-
ward worker understand or feel that the student, the sectarian, the peasant, and
the writer are exposed to the harms and arbitrary acts of the same dark force that
oppresses and weighs on him at each step of his whole life. Having felt that, he
will irresistibly react on his own initiative. Today he will create an uproar against
the censors, tomorrow he will demonstrate against the governor for putting down
a peasant revolt. What is needed are vivid public charges of wrongdoing, catch-
ing people red-handed, and stigmatizing them everywhere and before the whole
world.83 This would be much more effective than any “appeal.” The daily newspaper
Pravda was founded on April 22, 1912 and, after a rocky start, eventually earned
Lenin’s approval, carrying out powerful agitation work on a nationwide scale, incit-
ing industrial workers and peasants alike.84
Following the Bolshevik victory, Lenin had to deal with the problem that shortages
and injustices could no longer be blamed on the Czarist autocracy. In El ul’s terms, agita-
tion propaganda had to yield to integration propaganda. In August 1919, Lenin signed
a decree nationalizing al cinema enterprises. The propaganda value of a film such as
Eisenstein’s classic Battleship Potemkin lay in reminding people how terrible things were under Czarist Russia so as to deflect attention from shortcomings under Communism.
Lenin is reported to have said “of all the arts, for us cinema is the most important,” and
Stalin claimed it was the “greatest means of mass agitation.” Despite this, Trotsky was
to lament that the Party leadership, nearly six years after the revolution, had not “taken
possession of the cinema.”85
Given that such a large proportion of the Soviet peasantry was illiterate, a great
effort was made to encourage reading. Village reading rooms were set up, and a literacy
train crossed the country. Peter Kenez reminds us that, at that time, trains were seen
as symbols of the new age of technology.86(This, incidentally, gives us reason to reflect
on how space-age imagery is used today—to sell vacuum cleaners designed like space
vehicles, for example.) Posters by talented artists such as D.S. Moor were distributed
widely to enlist public support for an officially sanctioned cause. The pictures conveyed
a message even when the words could not be read. Lenin made clear that his reasons
for emphasizing literacy had an ulterior motive: “As long as there is such a thing in the
country as illiteracy, it is rather hard to talk about political education. To overcome illiteracy is not a political task, it is a condition without which one cannot even talk about
politics.”87As El ul has commented, contrary to some deeply embedded ideas of progress,
literacy is not an unmixed blessing.88Kenez points out that someone recruited to head
a branch of the youth group Komsomol, for instance, might not fully agree with Party
doctrine: “But as the person was carrying out propaganda on behalf of the new regime,
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he or she was won over. The propagandists usually were the first to become victims of their own propaganda. There is no better method of convincing someone than by asking him or her to convince others.” Kenez thinks it is “indisputable that the Bolshevik
regime was the first to not merely set itself propaganda goals but also through politi-
cal education to aim to create a new humanity suitable for living in a new society. No
previous state had similar ambitions, and no leaders had paid comparable attention to
the issues of persuasion.”89This claim may be challenged by considering the educational
reforms instituted in revolutionary and Napoleonic France.
Bekhterev and Reflexology
Peter Kenez thinks that people were not rationally persuaded under Leninist propa-
ganda but that they succumbed to it all the same. The constant repetition of slogans,
for example, gradual y brought on a “proper consciousness.” Expressions such as “we
will storm the bastions of illiteracy” were repeated so often the words were emptied of
meaning. His analysis is interesting in the light of the work of Vladimir Mikhailovic
Bekhterev, a Russian psychiatrist, neurologist, and, as he called himself,
“reflexologist.”
He was also head of the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg. Bekhterev was
the author of Suggestion and Its Role in Social Life, published in 1908, and The Subject Matter and Goals of Social Psychology, published in 1911. His writings left their imprint on both Soviet and Nazi forms of persuasion and on the methods of recruitment
used by some cults today. Bekhterev’s theory, to which he gave the name “reflexology,”
explained how three objective conditions affect the suggestibility of crowds. First,
there is “confinement to the same position for long periods of time, which, besides
restricting active movement, leads to physical exhaustion”; in other words, “the more
stationary the target, the greater the fatigue, the less the resistance, in both the per-
sonal and the general sphere, to the attempt to influence and the more vivid the ultim-
ate psychic event.” Secondly, there is “prolonged concentration on the same subject
(usually on the leader and his speech) [which] undermines the ability to concentrate.”
This works because “the more prolonged the required attention of the target, the
greater the loss of control of conscious attention and the less the possible resistance
through mustering counter-arguments to the influence attempt.” Thirdly, there are
“the leader’s demagogical methods, accompanied by appropriate gestures and facial
expressions [which] determine the uniformity of the mood, which in turn defines the
direction of the active attention of the crowd, since a rise in mood is associated with
readiness for action.”90
One notable case where principles of reflexology were clearly at work, whether or
not with full consciousness of Bekhterev’s principles, were the Nazi Party ral ies.
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nAZI PRoPAgAnDA
Given the extent of British World War I and Soviet propaganda before World War
II, it might seem difficult to surpass either. Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels, who
studied the propaganda of both, provided the world with mass manipulation and
multi-layered propaganda in a variety and scale never before seen. All the mass media
of communication—radio, newspapers, cinema, theatre, books, magazines, etc.—came
under Nazi control in 1933. The educational system, the Hitler Youth, the displays of
posters and uniforms, Nazi Party rallies, and the existence of loudspeakers in pub-
lic places to broadcast martial and patriotic music and speeches in the streets—all
contributed to a saturation of propaganda in everyday existence. For those who were
recalcitrant, there were the death camps. Behind all this orchestration was a calculated
plan, based on an understanding of the behaviour of the masses and their susceptibility
to simple ideas repeated endlessly. Nazi propagandists knew about organization and
about telling a simple story that would appeal to pride among the German people after
the humiliation of Versailles.
To understand Nazi propaganda, we need first to look at Hitler’s theory, which
was published in Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in 1925 and 1927. It is filled with the
spirit of what Nietzsche called ressentiment, a deep-seated resentment, and it seems
to have resonated well with the spirit of the times. It is also worth studying the tactics
Goebbels used to bring the Nazi Party into power. Finally, some particular propa-
ganda tactics used in World War II deserve attention.
Propaganda and Mein Kampf
Hitler devoted two chapters of Mein Kampf to propaganda, which clearly fascinated
him. He was not the first to see that human beings in a mass can act like lemmings,
but he was perhaps unparalled in the strength of his determination to understand and
orchestrate such behaviour. His success should give liberals and democrats a powerful
reason for analyzing his theory with a view to finding what might be done to prevent
mass consciousness from being similarly hijacked in future.
The “Big Lie”
Hitler’s theory of the “big lie” is not found in either of his two chapters on propa-
ganda, for reasons that are not difficult to fathom. Had he suggested that his own
side was making use of the “big lie,” he would have damaged his future credibility. In
discussing the causes of Germany’s downfall in World War I in Chapter X of Mein
Kampf,91 he singles out the “Jews and their Marxist fighting organization” for blaming General Erich Ludendorff for losing the war. This was one example of what he called
the big lie, another being the pinning of the entire war guilt on the Germans by the
British and the Americans. Still today, unscrupulous politicians run mud-slinging
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election campaigns on the basis of the principle semper aliquid haeret (“always something sticks”), the same principle the Nazi propaganda machine used on a grand scale.
The value of knowing about the big lie theory is that once the principle is under-
stood, the knowledge can be used to expose this technique, and thus disarm it, or
cause the propaganda to boomerang.
Appealing to the Masses
The real art of propaganda consisted of “understanding the emotional ideas of the
great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the atten-
tion and thence to the heart of the broad masses” (MK 180). Hitler thought the British
and Americans had produced more psychologically sound propaganda in World War
I than his own side. By thinking of the enemy as barbarous and thereby convinced
of the justice of their cause, their soldiers had fewer qualms about killing and more
acceptance of risks entailed in the fighting.
Propaganda, then, does not work through half-measures. “It does not have mul-
tiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing” (MK 183).
It is a means to the end of convincing a target group. The masses are “slow-moving, and
they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only
after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember
them” (MK 185). In this connection, a change in tactic is needed, one that can accom-
modate change; hence, the need for a sufficiently flexible central doctrine. Propaganda
must be designed so that it always says the same thing: “For instance, a slogan must be
presented from different angles, but the end of all remarks must always and immutably
be the slogan itself. Only in this way can the propaganda have a unified and complete
effect” (MK 185).
In Chapter XI of the second volume of Mein Kampf, Hitler paid careful attention
to the relationship between propaganda and party organization. The number of sup-
porters of the movement cannot be too great, he wrote, but the number of members has
to be kept manageably smal . Supporters are those who declare their agreement with
the party’s aims, while members are those who fight for them (MK, 581–82). The future
of the movement will be conditioned by the militancy, exclusivity, rigidity, and fanati-
cism (MK 5
82, 337) with which its adherents present it as the only right one. Hitler saw
it as important to have a geopolitical centre, as in the case of Rome and Mecca (MK
347). For Hitler, the chosen centre was Nuremberg.
Propaganda was so important for Hitler that he saw the accomplishment of his
Nazi goals in two stages. The first task of propaganda, he said, is winning people for
the organization; the first task of the organization is winning people for propaganda.
The second task of propaganda is to destroy existing conditions to achieve acceptance
of the new doctrine. The second task of the organization is the fight for power, to
achieve the final success of the doctrine. In saying this, Hitler drew on his experience
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as propagandist for the Nazis in 1921. He noted that the skills of a theoretician are not at all the same as those needed for a good organizer. The latter has to be a shrewd
judge of human psychology, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of different peo-
ple. The great danger he saw was the dilution of the membership by unrestricted entry
of mere supporters to the position of party workers (MK 584–85).
Hitler himself understood the emotional make-up of his audiences, and he
manipulated them with powerful metaphors and imagery. For example, he made use
of the symbols of fire and wind to convey the idea of burning away the old and bring-
ing in the new. As Elias Cannetti has pointed out, the symbol of fire is also one of
friendliness, when it is in the hearth. Flags are important for making the wind visible.
The symbol of the swastika represents power: it is the waterwheel driven by a current.
Wind gathers things up in a storm and drives them where it is headed. In his speech
“Art and Politics,” given in 1934, Hitler provided the groundwork for genocide with
his metaphorical linkage of Jews to disease and pestilence.92 We can learn from this
to take seriously the impact of words on consciousness and action and not to ignore
incitement when it occurs.
The Road to Power
Goebbels, who was later to take charge of Nazi propaganda, also knew and under-