Review: Review Article: The Power of Propaganda

Reviewed Work(s): Britain's Secret Propaganda War 1948-1977 by Paul Lashmar and
James Oliver: Foward Soviet! History and Non-Fiction Film in the USSR by Graham
Roberts: European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda,
1914-1918 by Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites: Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and
Nazi Germany by Richard Taylor
Review by: James Chapman
Source: Journal of Contemporary History , Oct., 2000, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Oct., 2000), pp.
679-688
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.

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Journal of Contemporary History Copyright ? 2000 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and
New Delhi, Vol 35(4), 679-688.
[0022-0094(200010)35:4;679-688;014356]

James Chapman
Review Article
The Power of Propaganda

Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain's Secret Propaganda War 1948-1977,
Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 1998; pp. xvi + 223; ISBN 0-7509-1668-0
Graham Roberts, Foward Soviet! History and Non-fiction Film in the USSR,
London, I.B. Tauris, 1999; pp. xii + 195; ISBN 1-86064-282-9
Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (eds), European Culture in the Great War:
The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914-1918, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1999; pp. xii + 430; ISBN 0-521-57015-8
Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, revised
edn, London, I.B. Tauris, 1998; pp. xiv + 266; ISBN 1-86064-167-9

In the first edition of his important work Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and
Nazi Germany (1979), Richard Taylor began with the observation that 'the
significance of propaganda in the politics of the twentieth century continues to
be underestimated'.' The repetition of the remark in the second, revised edition
of Taylor's book, however, should perhaps have been qualified, in that where-
as the role that manipulation of public opinion plays in modern politics is still
not fully appreciated, even within supposedly media-sophisticated societies,
the study of propaganda history is now a growing area of scholarly investiga-
tion. In the two decades since the first publication of Taylor's book, academic
interest in the history of propaganda has been exemplified by the publication
of a wide range of monographs and articles in learned journals, including the
Journal of Contemporary History.
This is not to say, of course, that the role of propaganda was ignored by
academics before the 1970s, but rather that it tended to be the domain of
political and social scientists, not historians. During the interwar period in
particular, there was much interest, especially in the USA, in the role of propa-
ganda as a means of mass persuasion. The level of academic interest was itself
a direct reflection of the increased prominence and visibility of propaganda in
international politics. The leading British propaganda historian, Philip M.
Taylor, has identified the context which allowed propaganda to flourish:

1 Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London 1979), 15.

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680 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 35 No 4

Essentially, there are three main reasons why propaganda became a regular feature of inter-
national relations between the wars: (1) a general increase in the level of popular interest and
involvement in political and foreign affairs as a direct consequence of World War I; (2)
technological developments in the field of mass communications which provided the basis
for a rapid growth in propaganda as well as contributing towards the increased level of
popular involvement in politics; and (3) the ideological context of the inter-war period,
sometimes known as the 'European Civil War', in which an increased employment of inter-
national propaganda could profitably flourish.2

It was in the 'totalitarian' regimes of Soviet Russia and nazi Germany that
propaganda was most visible as a weapon of the state for the purposes of
political indoctrination and social control. The important role that propa-
ganda had to play in the revolutionary struggle for both Soviet communism
and National Socialism was recognized by both governments, resulting in the
establishment of centralized state apparatuses for the control and dissemina-
tion of political propaganda: the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment in
Soviet Russia, the Ministry for Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment in nazi
Germany. It was the perceived success of totalitarian propaganda - one
thinks here of the celebrated 'revolutionary' films of Sergei Eisenstein such as
The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927) and of Leni Riefenstahl's
hymn to nazi might in the notorious Triumph of the Will (1935) - that in
large measure caused academics in the western democracies to think seriously
about the role that propaganda could play in their own societies. American
political scientists such as Harold Lasswell and William Albig argued that
propaganda could be an important element of democratic political culture in
that the widespread dissemination of information was necessary for mass
participation in democratic politics. The management of information, and the
attempt to influence public opinion, were, after all, parts of the democratic
process.3 Two points arise from this discourse which have wider implications
for any study of propaganda. First, the political scientists of the interwar
period tended to elide the distinction between propaganda (the attempt to
persuade) and public opinion (what people actually thought) but, as the new
propaganda history has shown, propaganda has rarely if at all been totally
successful in determining public opinion. Second, the arguments of the
political scientists that the dissemination of information for public discussion
and debate was essential to participation in the democratic process assumes
the existence of a reasoning and intelligent public - something that the
propagandists of nazi Germany and Soviet Russia certainly did not believe.
Hitler, notoriously, believed that 'the receptivity of the great masses is very
limited, [and] their intelligence is small'. 'In consequence', he wrote in Mein
Kampf, 'all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and

2 Philip M. Taylor, 'Propaganda in International Politics, 1919-1939' in K.R.M. Short (ed.),

Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II (London 1983), 19-20.
3 These discourses on propaganda are usefully analysed in Kevin Robins, Frank Webster and
Michael Pickering, 'Propaganda, Information and Social Control' in Jeremy Hawthorn (ed.),
Propaganda, Persuasion and Polemic (London 1987), 1-17.

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Chapman: The Power of Propaganda 681

must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands
what you want him to understand by your slogan.'4
The divergent views of American political scientists and Hitler over the
intelligence and powers of understanding of the masses were not the only
differences between the democracies and the totalitarian states over the role of
propaganda. The emphasis placed on propaganda by the European dictator-
ships was such that 'propaganda' became a distinctly dirty word in the western
democracies. 'In America the word propaganda has a bad odor', observed
Professor Leonard Doob. 'It is associated with war and other evil practices.'5
Erik Barnouw, a broadcaster who worked for the US Office of War
Information during the second world war and later became a leading film and
radio historian, remarked that 'propaganda was what others did, especially
the Germans'.6 In Britain, propaganda theory was dominated by a liberal
academic discourse that is exemplified by the work of Frederick Bartlett, a
Cambridge University Professor of Psychology from whom the Ministry of
Information commissioned a monograph entitled Political Propaganda
(1940). Bartlett suggested that one of the key differences between democracies
and dictatorships was the relationship between propaganda and the state:

In the modern world, political propaganda may be said to have been adopted as a weapon of
State, but very nearly everywhere it has been adopted as the tool of a single political party
within the State. This is precisely what cannot happen, except in a very incomplete way, in a
democratic country.7

Bartlett argued, furthermore, that 'the basis of all effective propaganda in a

democracy is a reliable news service', a view that was to underlie the MOI's
policy of 'propaganda with facts' during the second world war.8
The new propaganda history, as it has emerged over the last two decades or
so, has taken the study of propaganda away from the psychologically-oriented
work of the social scientists and has placed it firmly in the camp of the
modern, professional, empiricist historian. The emphasis has been very much
on analysing the institutional organization of propaganda, looking at the
structure and policies that determined the nature of propaganda, usually
focusing on a single nation state and more often than not concentrating on the
second world war as a period when propaganda was put to its most thorough-
going use for trying to create a sense of popular ideology in support of the war
effort. The focus on primary sources, especially official records, is one reason
why the new propaganda history did not emerge until it did. In Britain, for
example, it was the release of the wartime records of the MOI under the Thirty
Year Rule that enabled Ian McLaine to write his definitive history of the

4 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. James Murphy (London 1939), 162.
5 Leonard W. Doob, Propaganda: Its Psychology and Technique (New York 1935), 3.
6 Quoted in 'Preface' to Short (ed.), Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II, 1.
7 F.C. Bartlett, Political Propaganda (Cambridge 1940), 16.
8 Ibid., 134.

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682 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 35 No 4

ministry's home propaganda work, Ministry of Morale.9 More recently, the

opening of Russian archives following the end of the Cold War has shed new
lights on many aspects of Soviet government and society, including its propa-
ganda activities. Graham Roberts's Forward Soviet! - the first in a welcome
series of monographs published by I.B. Tauris under the banner of 'KINO:
The Russian Cinema Series', edited by Richard Taylor - is one of the works
of film and propaganda history that would have been virtually impossible to
research until the last decade.
Historians of propaganda initially concentrated on nazi Germany and
Soviet Russia, which, as Taylor observes, were 'the two best documented
examples of highly - and overtly - politicized societies the world has
ever seen' (p. 3). There are other historiographical reasons why these two
states in particular should have received so much attention. For one thing, in
closed political systems such as these, propaganda can be seen relatively
unproblematically as the expression of an official ideology. The expression of
dissenting points of view through the state-controlled media was impossible
due to the stringent exercise of censorship; thus films like The Battleship
Potemkin or Triumph of the Will can be read as presenting the 'party line' to
the cinema-going public. This was not the case in the democracies, where the
media did not come under direct state control and where film-makers and
other cultural providers were not always necessarily in line with official
propaganda policy. In Britain, for example, Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger made their film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) in
the face of intense hostility from the MOI, War Office and even Churchill him-
self. The point about the Colonel Blimp affair was that although Churchill
wanted to suppress the film, he was prevented from doing so by a combination
of legal principle and political necessity - his Minister of Information,
Brendan Bracken, persuaded him that to ban the film would be a highly
inexpedient move when so much British propaganda was arguing that the war
was being fought in defence of freedom of expression and other democratic
principles. Neither Hitler nor Stalin was restrained by such considerations.
This is not to say that there were no disagreements and policy battles in the
totalitarian states; Goebbels, for instance, initially had misgivings about
Triumph of the Will and was privately furious when Hitler commissioned it
himself without recourse to his Propaganda Minister, while Sergei Eisenstein
spent much of the 1930s out of favour with the Soviet authorities for not
abiding by the tenets of 'Socialist Realism'. But, nevertheless, it is the case that
nazi and Soviet propaganda were, as Bartlett recognized, 'the tool of a single
political party within the State'.
Another reason for the interest in Soviet Russia and nazi Germany is that
unlike the western democracies, which were generally antipathetic to the
whole idea of propaganda because of its unpleasant connotations, the

9 Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in
World War II (London 1979).

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Chapman: The Power of Propaganda 683

dictatorships readily embraced state propaganda, which they saw as being a

positive force for mass persuasion and social control. Nowhere is this more
evident than in their attitude towards the use of film as a medium of propa-
ganda. Taylor quotes both Lenin ('Of all the arts, for us cinema is the most
important') and Goebbels (who called film 'one of the most modern and far-
reaching media that there is for influencing the masses') on the nature of film
propaganda (15-16). The reason why the cinema was held in such esteem by
propagandists, Taylor suggests, is due to its status as 'the only truly mass
medium' (16). In the first place, film is a visual medium, and is therefore not
restricted by the considerations of language and literacy that affect the other
mass media of the early twentieth century, the press and the radio. The
montage techniques of Soviet film-makers in the 1920s represented perhaps
the first detailed consideration of how the relationships between shots and the
juxtaposition of images could be used to create meaning in the cinema. It is
often forgotten that the montage theories of Eisenstein and his contem-
poraries, such as Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov, were developed
originally in the context of propaganda policy. Even in sound cinema, where
the language of the sound-track narrows the audience ('reading' a subtitled
film demands a more active participation on the part of the spectator), the
impact is still largely through the visual image - consider the powerful
symbolism of flags and uniforms in Triumph of the Will - rather than the
spoken word. For propaganda to be effective, moreover, it needs to be dis-
seminated as widely as possible, and film fulfils this objective through being a
medium with wide popular appeal. Finally, the nature of the cinema-going
experience is such that it appeals to an audience en masse - the individual
spectator is part of a crowd, influenced not only by what he or she sees on
the screen but by the reactions of others in the audience. This is a crucial
difference between cinema and other media, including television, which
latterly has supplanted cinema in the size of its audience, but which is viewed
in the private space of the home rather than in the public space of the cinema
auditorium.
The first edition of Taylor's book was one of the pioneering scholarly works
on the role and nature of film propaganda; the second edition, with a revised
text and appendices of 'trophy' films captured by the Red Army in 1945, is a
welcome addition to the expanding historiography of both Soviet and nazi
cinema. The extent of Taylor's scholarship is impressive: he has researched in
Russian, German and British archives, and his arguments are well supported
by detailed references to primary sources. For a film historian, of course,
primary sources include the films themselves in addition to the documentation
on their production and reception, and Taylor is as astute in his analysis of
individual films as he is thorough in his establishment of the historical con-
texts. Taking Soviet and nazi cinema in turn, he outlines the organization of
the state propaganda machinery, showing how the film industry was brought
under political control, and explores the general themes of film propaganda.
There follow four detailed cases of individual films for each cinema. For nazi

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684 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 35 No 4

cinema these are the same as in the first edition: Triumph of the Will, the anti-
semitic 'documentary' The Eternal Jew, the anti-British Uncle Kriiger and the
would-be inspirational historical epic Kolberg, produced at the very end of the
war. For Soviet cinema a new chapter on the recently available The Fall of
Berlin (1949), which did for the cult of Stalin what Triumph of the Will had
done for Hitler, has replaced the more familiar 'revolutionary' film Mother
alongside two films by Eisenstein, October and Alexander Nevsky, and one by
Vertov, Three Songs of Lenin. It might seem unusual that Taylor, the leading
British expert on Eisenstein, should have omitted the director's most famous
film, but The Battleship Potemkin is promised as one of the titles in the same
publisher's 'Kinofiles' series of studies of individual films.
The importance of Taylor's book to the history of film propaganda
notwithstanding, however, his case studies reflect the more obviously propa-
gandist films produced in Soviet Russia and nazi Germany. On one level, of
course, it could be argued that any film produced under the Soviet and nazi
regimes was propaganda of a sort in that it had to meet with the official seal of
approval. But on another level, film was still essentially a medium of popular
entertainment, even in these highly politicized societies, and only a minority of
the films produced had an obvious or overt propaganda content. Film theorist
Steve Neale has made the distinction between films which are 'propaganda'
and others which may serve 'a propagandist function' but which in themselves
are not necessarily any different from the classical narrative feature film,
represented pre-eminently by Hollywood but also the dominant mode of film
practice in most European national cinemas. Thus, in Neale's terms, while The
Eternal Jew would be categorized as propaganda, Jew Siiss, made in the same
year (1940) by a director from the commercial film industry, Veit Harlan,
would not, even though both films are 'closely related in producing an anti-
Semitic position'.10 The trend in recent work on nazi cinema, exemplified in
books by Eric Rentschler and Linda Schulte-Sasse, has been directed towards
reclaiming the 'entertainment' films of the Third Reich, examining the rela-
tionship between ideology and escapism as represented in hitherto neglected
popular genre films such as comedy, romance and melodrama, and exploring
the popular film culture in which these films circulated (i.e. the extent to which
German audiences continued to base their choice of films on traditional
factors such as stars and stories rather than ideology)." In this context of
widening historical investigation beyond the relatively small core of key
propaganda films, it should be noted that Richard Taylor's next project,
apparently, is a study of Stalinist musicals.
Stalin, like Hitler, was an avid viewer of films. While Hitler's favourites
were allegedly Jeanette MacDonald musicals, Stalin preferred non-fiction
according to one contemporary, he 'watched every documentary, every news-

10 Steve Neale, 'Propaganda', Screen, 18, 3 (1977), 9-40.

11 Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA
1996); Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema
(Durham, NC 1996).

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Chapman: The Power of Propaganda 685

reel . . . every single one. He loved documentaries' (Forward Soviet!, 140).

Graham Roberts examines the history of the Soviet non-fiction film (or
'unplayed film' as it was referred to in Soviet parlance) between the Russian
Revolution and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, focusing especially on
the 1920s and 1930s when the nature of film propaganda was hotly contested
with the emergence of 'Socialist Realism' and the fall from grace of the
formalist theories which had previously held sway. Drawing on the fruits of
thorough research in Russian archives, Roberts sets out to extend the
historical investigation of Soviet cinema beyond the revolutionary classics of
the 1920s. The newsreel did not disappear from cinema programmes in the
Soviet Union until the 1980s, persisting some 30 years longer than it had in
Britain and the USA where its role had long since been supplanted by tele-
vision. The crux of Roberts's argument is that the 'agenda-setting function' of
Soviet cinema was 'usually situated in non-fiction representation' - an impor-
tant point of contrast, he suggests, with nazi cinema, where Goebbels 'pre-
ferred to get the regime's message across in popular entertainment' (149). This
is not to say, however, that there was consensus over the form and content of
non-fiction films. One of the particular strengths of this highly scholarly
monograph is the way in which Roberts brings out the tensions that existed
within Soviet film propaganda policy. Soviet film-makers were far from being
mere conduits through which the regime expounded its ideological agenda; at
various times even the two 'greatest talents in the field' of non-fiction film,
Dziga Vertov and Esfir Shub, found themselves compromised by unhelpful
and obstructive interventions on both aesthetic and ideological grounds from
the world of Soviet officialdom.
Both Roberts and Taylor adopt an essentially contextualist approach to film
propaganda: they are concerned with placing it within the wider political and
social contexts in which it operated. This is what distinguishes the approach of
the historian from the approach of the social scientist or the cultural theorist.
The historical approach is also very much to the fore in the essays collected by
Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites for their weighty tome on European
Culture in the Great War. There has recently been much interest in the
'reconstruction' of war in 'popular memory', entailing, in large measure, the
analysis of accounts, texts and narratives produced after the war itself.12 In
the cinema, for example, our impressions of the Western Front are determined
as much by Hollywood's film of Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on
the Western Front (1930) as by any of the actuality film produced at the time.13
The contributions to European Culture in the Great War, however, refocus

12 See, for example, Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford 1977); Samuel
Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London 1990); Jay Winter,
Sites of Memory, Sites of Meaning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge
1995).
13 On the film representation of the first world war, see Andrew Kelly, Cinema and the Great
War (London 1997), and Michael Paris (ed.), The First World War and Popular Cinema: 1914 to
the Present (Edinburgh 1999).

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686 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 35 No 4

attention on the cultural artefacts produced during the war itself rather than
looking again at the perceptions that arose in hindsight of the supposed 'war
to end all wars'.
There are many reasons to recommend European Culture in the Great War,
not least among which is that the contributors, a heavyweight collection of
mostly American with some European scholars, for the most part avoid the
jargon-ridden language of cultural studies when discussing concepts such as
'modernism'. That is refreshing in itself. Otherwise there are two particular
strengths. One is the geographical range of the contributions, which extend
beyond the familiar cultural landscape of western Europe to embrace develop-
ments in eastern and central Europe as well. The fruits of much new research
are brought to light through essays on, amongst others, the wartime cultures
of Italy, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Austria (the 162 footnotes of the
latter, by Steven Beller, testify to the thoroughness of the research), as well as
Roshwald's own piece which argues that the war enhanced rather than dis-
placed the sense of Jewish cultural identity in eastern and central Europe, its
diasporic nature transcending the geopolitical boundaries of nation states. In
contrast to the specialist nature of these essays, the final chapter on 'Popular
culture in wartime Britain' by Jay Winter is a disappointment, doing little
more than a synthesis job of existing work. Taken as a whole, however, the
contributors add much to our knowledge of the cultural history of the war and
the collection will undoubtedly provide the basis for further research.
The second particular strength of the book is that it does not privilege 'high'
culture over 'mass' or 'popular' culture. The editors assert that 'we are con-
cerned with the cultural experience and expression of people, and not just
forms of creativity that were invested with the status of "national art"' (5).
Thus, while the work of, say, the Italian and Russian Futurists illustrates how
members of the artistic avant-garde responded to war, the claims of the avant-
garde that their work was a true expression of popular culture is treated with
due scepticism. When it came to the popular culture of wartime (films, songs,
novels, cartoons), the editors conclude that what all participants in the war
shared was 'a claim to innate or genetic "culture" that was seen as the anti-
thesis of the enemy's' (352). British, French and German troops were all
'constantly exposed to a familiar home-oriented culture that boosted morale
and frequently crossed the class divide' (350). Usually this took the form of
promoting a sense of the cultural superiority of the home nation in contrast to
the supposed barbarism of the enemy. However, the editors question whether
all wartime culture was necessarily propaganda, recognizing that 'one must
avoid the equation of wartime culture with propaganda as if that were the
pre-eminent, or even only, mode of cultural expression of a nation at war'
(349). Propaganda assumes the intention to persuade others to hold a parti-
cular viewpoint or follow a particular course of action desired by the propa-
gandists. Many of the forms of cultural expression during the war were
hardly propaganda at all in that sense: trench newspapers, for example, repre-
sented the views of ordinary soldiers rather than the general staff, though they

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Chapman: The Power of Propaganda 687

were often edited by junior officers who saw them as a means of maintaining
morale.
Roshwald and Stites endorse the view, held by Hitler amongst others, that
the British were the most successful propagandists when it came to influencing
opinion overseas: 'The success or failure of propaganda for foreign consump-
tion - Britain being the leader in this enterprise - had little to do with its
veracity' (350). After the war, a belief grew amongst Americans that Britain
had 'tricked' the USA into joining the war in 1917 through a concerted cam-
paign of covert propaganda to influence American opinion. When the second
world war broke out, Americans proved understandably suspicious of British
information and publicity activities in the USA, while the British themselves
had to tread a delicate path both before and after the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbour and Hitler's declaration of war on America had done what Churchill
had hoped all along would happen in bringing America once more into a war
on Britain's side. Recent scholarly works by Nicholas Cull and Susan Brewer
have shown how the distinction between propaganda and secret intelligence
operations was often blurred when it came to the influencing of American
opinion.14 Figures such as Alexander Korda, the Hungarian-born, British-
domiciled film-producer knighted by Churchill in 1943, bridged the gap
between propaganda and secret intelligence: a propagandist as producer of the
overtly pro-British film Lady Hamilton (1940), but also, it has long been
rumoured, a courier for the British intelligence services.
Other prominent figures who at one time or another 'fronted', knowingly or
otherwise for British intelligence, included George Orwell, Bertrand Russell
and Stephen Spender, all of whom were involved in the work of the Foreign
Office's Information Research Department (IRD), an organization set up by
the Labour government in 1948 to conduct a vigorous campaign of anti-
communism around the world. The IRD is the subject of Britain's Secret
Propaganda War, a fascinating study by two investigative journalists, Paul
Lashmar and James Oliver, whose research is as meticulous in its own way as
any of the professional historians mentioned hitherto. The authors have found
more information than one might expect in the FO (Foreign Office) and CO
(Cabinet Office) files in the Public Record Office, supplemented by interviews
with numerous participants in the IRD's covert activities, although one would
do well to be sceptical of the press release claim that this is 'the only book ...
to uncover revelations about government-sponsored Cold War propaganda'.
Lashmar and Oliver do an impressive job of showing how the IRD used
the press, publishing industries, television and radio broadcasting, and even
academia, in its anti-communist propaganda activities both at home and
abroad. A notable omission from the book, however, is the role of the film
industry in taking up the anti-communist message, for which we have to await
the publication of Tony Shaw's forthcoming study of British Cinema and the
14 Nicholas John Cull, Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign Against American
'Neutrality' in World War II (New York 1995); Susan A. Brewer, To Win the Peace: British
Propaganda in the United States During World War II (Ithaca 1997).

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688 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 35 No 4

Cold War, to be published by I.B. Tauris, which promises to explore the part
played by the Foreign Office and other official agencies in promoting anti-
communism in the cinema.
Ultimately, the problem that faces all propaganda historians is how to
assess the effectiveness of propaganda. While there are abundant sources from
which to reconstruct the organization and direction of propaganda policy, evi-
dence for the success of propaganda is much more partial. It is difficult enough
to assess accurately the precise nature of public opinion; it is even more diffi-
cult to gauge the extent to which public opinion may have been influenced by
specific instances of propaganda. The effectiveness of propaganda can be
determined only by its results, but there are no reliable quantitative mecha-
nisms for evaluating those results. The verdicts of historians, therefore, are
inevitably rather speculative. Lashmar and Oliver conclude that 'although few
specific operations can be identified where a particular effect is clear, the
evidence suggests that IRD's influence was enormous' (175). Roberts is
probably the most sceptical about the effectiveness of propaganda, arguing
that the constraints placed on Soviet film-makers were such that they 'would
almost certainly fail' to please everyone (140). But there is a broader issue,
which concerns the extent to which the intended recipient of propaganda
recognizes what the propagandist is trying to do. Sir Kenneth Clark, the
former Director of the National Gallery who was briefly employed as Director
of the Films Division of the Ministry of Information, believed that 'film
propaganda will be most effective when it is least recognisable as such'.'5 For
Taylor, the academic study of propaganda has a wider objective:

As Goebbels himself knew, the best defence against propaganda is awareness: awareness of
ourselves and of our strengths and weaknesses, and awareness of the methods and aims of
others who might wish to manipulate our opinions for their own ends. That awareness is
perhaps even more crucial in a liberal society than in an authoritarian political system, for in
the former propaganda is likely to be not only less prominent in its role but also less obvious
in its techniques and therefore, at least potentially, more effective. (210-11)

If the emergence of the new propaganda history has done nothing else, it has at
least raised our own awareness of the uses to which propaganda can be put.

James Chapman
is Lecturer in Film and Television History at the Open University. He
is the author of The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda,
1939-1945 (London 1998) and Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History
of the James Bond Films (London 1999), and is co-editor, with
Anthony Aldgate and Arthur Marwick, of Windows on the Sixties:
Exploring Key Texts of Media and Culture (London 2000).

15 Public Record Office, INF 1/867: Co-Ordinating Committee Paper No. 1, 'Programme for
Film Propaganda'.

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