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THE TECHNIQUES OF SOVIET PROPAGANDA

What had to happen? The ignorance, the laziness, the
pusillanimity, the perpetual fickleness and the credulous-
ness of Western governments enabled Russia to achieve
successively every one of her aims.
Karl Marx.

New York Tribune, April 19, 1853.

Politics is war without bloodshed. War is politics with

bloodshed.

Mao Tse-tung.

IMPORTANCE OF THE THEME

In the West, people are often heard saying about this or that Soviet whim: "Oh, it's only propaganda." For us to try and reassure ourselves in such a way is very harmful, for, with the Soviets, it is when propaganda is involved that things become serious.

In many respects it can be said that democracy has introduced the Western World into the age of politicism, in which bosses of public opinion determine events even more than factory bosses or military forces. But by a strange and serious paradox this crucially important change has been better understood by the enemies of democracy than its makers.

Democratic statesmen are still numerous who act as at the time when beliefs prevalent among the people hardly influenced authority at all and essential matters were decided in chancelleries. But totalitarians have understood that where democracy reigns it gives considerable weight to public opinion. That is why they who trample it underfoot in their own domain have no greater concern than to win it over in the other camp, while the democracies who respect it abandon it to enemy propaganda without reacting. That is why propaganda is the primary front for the Soviets. That is why it matters little to Mr. Mikoyan that the State Department gave him the cold shoulder when, at the Waldorf Astoria, the welcome was warm. For eventually the State Department, being democratic, will act according to what ripens at the Waldorf.

The result is that, in the present antagonism between the free and the Soviet worlds, the political front is as decisive as the military front. The main weapons of political warfare being those of propaganda, the study of these techniques is becoming a central theme of the free world's resistance.

DIRECT PROSELYTISM AND INDIRECT PROPAGANDA

On the question of propaganda another nefarious mistake is made. in the West, which is to believe that the seriousness of the danger can be gaged by the strength of Communist parties. Like all political systems whose appeal is not to support based on reason, Communist

totalitarianism moves ahead less on the conviction of its members than on the confusion of its opponents. Communist parties are merely firebrands, and the main effort of the Kremlin is to pervert or weaken the fabric it sticks them into. That is the governing idea behind active minorities, which Bolshevism put, in theory and into practice, from its inception. It has always won power-even in the U.S.S.R. and China-with parties very much in the minority, but in a tottering, undermined and deluded society.

Furthermore, the aim for years has no longer been to promote communism as an ideology, but to further the international game of the Soviet state. It is therefore a dangerous illusion to think that a country is safe because its Communist Party is weak, if pro-Soviet views meet with a wide response.

This paper will consequently devote only little space to direct propaganda whose aim is to win over members or voters for the Communist Party, the more so as it is pretty well known. We will chiefly be concerned with indirect propaganda or the contamination of minds which is intended to atrophy defensive reactions in nonCommunist quarters.

I. DIRECT PROSELYTISM

SIZE OF COMMUNIST ORGANIZATIONS

Among members of NATO, only France and Italy have mass Communist Parties. Outside NATO, the chief mass CPs are those of Indonesia, India, and Finland. In about 20 other countries like Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Greece, Argentine, Uruguay, Chile, some Middle Eastern countries, CPs have a large membership. In the rest of the world they are weak or hardly more than sects, as in England and the United States. The total membership of CPs in all free countries amounts to 6 million, of which 31⁄2 million are in the five mass parties, 2 million in the 20 or so "sturdy little parties," and half a million scattered in tiny groups. But whether of one size or another, there is not a single country in the world without its legal or underground Communist Party.

1

Weak or strong, CPs are characterized everywhere by the following specific features:

1. They are strictly controlled by the Kremlin, whose orders they blindly carry out, whatever zigzags or disavowals that may mean. 2. They are not organized as parties, but as totalitarian states. They are fanatical, monolithic, intolerant. The top rules and manipulates the bottom, which only serves as a striking force. Even Fascist parties were only clubs of amateurs next to these barrack-ministries.

3. Its apparatus, in proportion to its membership, is 50 to 100 times better equipped with material and means of propaganda than that of any other party. Thus a CP has on the average 1 permanent (i.e., a paid activist) for 25 to 50 members, while other parties have 1 per 1,000 or 5,000 members. Its turnout of printed matter-newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, leaflets, posters, home bulletins, booksis also on the average 100 times greater per member than that of any other party, however rich it may be. The same proportion holds true for premises, card files, printing presses, and a still higher one

Open.

for study groups, party schools, political meetings, protection services, et cetera.

The size of the apparatus in charge of this "direct proselytism" for communism throughout the world can be seen from the 2 following figures: 150,000 permanents aside from unpaid activists; 500 million dollars of annual expenditures.

PROFESSIONAL PROPAGANDISTS: THE PERMANENTS

The system of permanents, an outgrowth of Lenin's professional revolutionaries, determines the strength of CPs much more than their members or voters. For these jobs as paid agitators the party preferably enrolls persons of humble extraction or without ties, who will owe their rise to it and feel lost outside of it. It trains them in special schools, of which it has a complete range for the different spheres to be worked upon. Thus the CP has elementary schools of Leninism and advanced institutes, schools to train activists for the country, others for activists in towns, still others for activists overseas.

In these schools the future propagandists are first depersonalized, then reshaped according to a strict orthodoxy, trained to be "bodies. in the hands of the leaders, instructed in the techniques of organization and agitation. The party teaches them to like handling men more than mental gratification, power more than money, and power behind the scenes more than overt power. This makes it possible to confine them to anonymous tasks, to pay them as little as possible, and to assign them to any duty. It is easy to see the advantages that propagandists so trained represent for the Soviets, compared to the propagandists of bourgeois democratic parties, who value financial ease or abstract speculation.

These carefully trained and constantly supervised cadres-counterparts of the "professed" of the Jesuit Order-are the prime movers of the propaganda and life of CPs. In every country of the world they are numerous enough, if not for mass action, at least to take over the vital machinery of public life in case of a crisis. This ability to provide the staff for a coup at any time makes CPs, even when small, highly dangerous. An example of this was Guatemala, where the Communists seized power through third parties when their own membership was only about a thousand.

CP members are systematically maneuvered, deceived, intimidated. Of the mass of citizens fooled and misled by communism the most grossly fooled and misled are members of CPs. Once a person is caught in the Communist net through demagogy or myth (the Revolution, the Soviet paradise, liberation of workers, higher and higher labor demands) he is kept there by the threat of reprisals if he leaves, either moral (slander, quarantine) or material (bodily harm, economic boycott). The basic formula can be stated as follows: Attract by intoxication and keep by fear. The main thing is to take away the member's free will, which makes the CP just the opposite of what a party should be. For the role of democratic parties is to educate citizens through free discussion. With the Communists the party is transformed from a home into a prison for ideas.

In summing it up, it may be said that, in the totalitarian style of their internal life as in the enormous size of their material means 51120-60- -2

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