A question of propaganda

Cate Haste informs us that the term ‘propaganda’ originated during the ministry of Pope Gregory XV in 1622, when he founded a Congregation de propaganda fide to instruct trainee Catholic clerics to extend the Christian faith and gospel across the Asian and African continents. ¹ The twentieth-century experience has taught modern scholars to view propaganda primarily as a political and government activity aimed at the management of public opinion. At the opening of the First World War the British government regarded propaganda as a rather distasteful activity, and preferred to leave the task of generating pro-war feelings to a variety of voluntary and religious bodies, commercial advertisers, patriotic organizations, public rumour and gossip and, of course, the press. Even when the prolonged war finally pulled the government into the propaganda business, it still attempted to hide its presence behind the facade of a cross-party organization. But the need to counter the spread of war-weariness and pacifism, and the dangers of civil and industrial unrest, dragged ministers into the hitherto unknown arena of attempting to influence the everyday activities and attitudes of its citizens. Shifting circumstances thus brought shifting imperatives. What began in 1914 as an effort to emphasize the values of duty and patriotism, defending the weak and dehumanizing the enemy, became, by the war’s end, a sophisticated state machine designed to both sustain support for the war and guide people’s behaviour, with government leaders treating propaganda as a new war weapon and ‘truth’ becoming a concept relative to wartime priorities and the national interest. ²