Propaganda and 'manufactured hatred': a reappraisal of the ethics of First World War British and...

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World War British and Australian atrocity propagandaPropaganda and 'manufactured hatred': A reappraisal of the ethics of First

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Propaganda and ‘manufactured hatred’: A reappraisal of the ethics of First World War British and Australian atrocity propaganda

Emily RobertsonThe University of New South Wales, Australia

AbstractFollowing the end of the First World War, British and Australian atrocity propaganda fell into disrepute. Progressive liberal authors such as British parliamentarian Arthur Ponsonby condemned atrocity propaganda as a series of manipulative lies designed to dupe a naïve populace into supporting a morally meaningless war. However, atrocity propaganda, which focused on the abuse of Belgian women and children at the hands of German soldiers, was not all lies. Yet because propaganda had come to be regarded as a synonym for ‘lies’, very few historians from the mid-20th century onwards were willing to entertain the idea that some aspects of atrocity propaganda were truthful. Therefore, the just war elements contained in atrocity propaganda, which maintained that the British and Australians fought for the rights of small nations and the protection of non-combatants from military abuse, have not been given appropriate consideration until recently. This article contributes to the revision of Australian and British home front attitudes to the war by using atrocity propaganda as valuable primary source material, rather than merely dismissing it as lies, which to date has been the main approach of historians.

KeywordsAtrocity, ethics, history, humanitarian, propaganda, war

Corresponding author:Emily Robertson, Department of History, The University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy, Northcott Drive, Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia. Email: [email protected]

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Out of all of the horrific wars of the last century, the First World War has attained the reputation among many historians of both conservative and liberal persuasions as having been one of the most unnecessary and wasteful wars ever to have been conducted (Evans, 1987; Ferguson, 1998; Gammage, 1990 [1974]; Keegan, 1999; Lake, 1975; Robson, 1982 [1970]; McKernan, 1980; Winter, 2012). The sheer scale of the loss of life, con-trasted with the Imperial ambitions that seemingly drove the war, became by the latter half of the 20th century emblematic of the pointless cruelty of war itself (Gregory, 2008; Todman, 2005). Across British and Australian histories of the Great War, the atrocity propaganda which supported it has attained a correspondingly poor reputation, partly because it had promoted a subsequently reviled war, and partly because it came to sym-bolise the mendacious qualities of propaganda itself. Atrocity propaganda alleged that during the German invasion of Belgium in 1915, German soldiers committed appalling acts of violence against non-combatant Belgians, including women and children. It made its most forceful allegations through cartoons that de-humanised the Germans and exag-gerated the pure moral qualities of the British and the Allies (Figure 1). Following the conflict, intellectuals and the general public reassessed the war and its supporting atroc-ity propaganda not in the light of triumphant victory, but with a grim sense that the butcher’s bill and resulting economic hardship had rendered the victory meaningless, and the word ‘propaganda’ began to assume the negative meaning that it has today. In the 1920s, British parliamentarian Arthur Ponsonby asserted that all atrocity propaganda was based on lies (Ponsonby, 1971 [1928]). Despite his landmark book Falsehood in Wartime: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated throughout the Nations during the Great War lacking credible evidence, Ponsonby’s work had a profound effect, as historians accepted his argument that atrocity propaganda manufactured hatred against the Germans by spreading lies about the German invasion of Belgium (Gullace, 2011: 690). By the latter half of the 20th century, the notion that Great War atrocity propaganda was nothing but a series of untruths that had ‘duped’ the population into ‘fighting a war it didn’t understand’ had come to dominate Australian and British historians’ perspec-tives (Todman, 2005: 126). The grotesque nature of much atrocity propaganda, with its vile depictions of the German soldier as a mad sexually crazed beast, became inextrica-bly linked to the apparent meaninglessness of the war (Evans, 1987; Kingsley Kent, 1995; Lake, 1975; Messinger, 1992; Ponsonby, 1971 [1928]; Shute, 1976). This article will explore how the negative reputations of the war and of atrocity propaganda pro-duced a distorted representation of Australian and British views of the ethics of the war itself. It will challenge the notion that propaganda ‘manufactured hatred’ against the German enemy among a naïve audience (Evans, 1987: 31), and instead explore the his-torical circumstances which made British and Australian audiences receptive to atrocity propaganda.

The dominance in Great War histories of the notion that propaganda ‘manufactured hatred’ to stir up support for an ignoble war has had the consequence that the historical context of atrocity propaganda, and the environment in which it was viewed and believed, has until recently largely been dismissed or neglected by scholars. Since the close of the Great War, many historians have denied claims of German atrocities – for example, as will be discussed later, there was a strong belief among some historians that propagan-dists had lied about Belgian women having been raped by German soldiers. It is only



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comparatively recently that scholars have reassessed the claims contained in atrocity propaganda, and concluded that some were based on reality (Gregory, 2008: 308; Horne and Kramer, 2001: 71).

Despite these investigations into German atrocities in the First World War, atrocity propaganda has not been the subject of any thorough inquiries. While there have been reappraisals of the ethics of First World War propaganda in the work of Phillip Taylor (2003, 1990), Adrian Gregory (2008), David Monger (2012) and Catriona Pennell (2012), there is a significant gap in the literature. This is because the crucial problem of how the negative reputation of propaganda and its attendant impact on historians’ per-ceptions of the ethics of atrocity propaganda has not been written about. Atrocity propa-ganda has, however, been the subject of some historical revision. In his chapter on First World War propaganda, Taylor connects atrocity propaganda to German military attacks on civilians, but his discussion of the topic is very brief. Gregory has produced the most comprehensive piece on the topic, writing, ‘any discussion of atrocity propaganda must bear in mind the reality of atrocities’ (p. 40), but does not investigate the negative inter-pretations of atrocity propaganda that have been produced by scholars over the past 90 years. And other recent treatments by Pennell and Monger have only very briefly discussed the topic. Catriona Pennell’s work is important, as she has connected propa-ganda to the prosecution of Just War and broader moral belief systems present in the British polity, yet her neglect of the most forceful element of Just War propaganda

Figure 1. Emilio Kupfer, The Soul of the Hun, Call to Arms, Anzac Day 1916, published by the New South Wales State Recruiting Committee, p. 13.




– atrocity propaganda – has left her chapter a little thin (Pennell, 2012). Monger’s work is equally important, as it rejects the condescension of previous historians by engaging with propaganda’s greater role as an extension of community values. He concludes his book thus:

What this book has hopefully shown is the value of taking such patriotic language seriously as an expression of sentiments considered valid and meaningful by their proponents and at least some portions of the population at large. Rather than an ‘obsolete language’, explorers of First World War patriotism may find a set of ideas that remained vibrant, relevant and resonant to those who lived through the period. (2012:247)

However, again Monger canvases the atrocity propaganda produced by the National War Aims Committee only very briefly.

The only investigation of the history of the negative reputation of atrocity propaganda to date does not examine the problem of how negative definitions of propaganda impacted on perceptions about whether or not atrocity propaganda contained elements of truth. Gullace’s (2011) survey was limited by its focus on how questions of war guilt and the heavy reparations demanded by the Allies at the end of the war contributed to historians dismissing atrocity propaganda as inherently untruthful.1 Essentially, her article argued that the negative reputation of the war impacted on people’s willingness to deny that the Germans committed atrocities in Belgium. Her article does not investigate how defini-tions of propaganda as an inherently unethical medium may have influenced negative perceptions of atrocity propaganda.

While this article will briefly examine the reputation of the war and its impact on the reputation of atrocity propaganda, the primary focus will be upon how historians’ sim-plistic perceptions of the ethics of propaganda have resulted in the neglect of the broader cultural, moral and military context of atrocity propaganda. There are two ways that historians have interpreted propaganda simplistically. First, those being scrutinised have used the ‘hypodermic needle’ model of propaganda when considering Great War atrocity propaganda. In this interpretation of propaganda, information comes solely from the top down, forming the mind altering poison with which the government injects the popula-tion (Welch, 2003: xviii). Second, historians have often drawn upon the definition of propaganda as an inherently unethical form of communication in their writing. This excerpt from Raymond Evans’ book about the Queensland home front during the war is an excellent example of this phenomenon:

Censorship and propaganda were tools to manipulate collective passions into responding towards the enemy as a monstrous presence and the war as the singular justifiable means of obliterating this scourge … Germany and the war itself represented ultimate barbarity – the butcherer of women and children. The war, waged courageously and sportingly by the Allies ‘to a clean finish’ would alone put a stop to such atrocities. (1987:31)

As was stated in the introduction, the negative reputation of the word ‘propaganda’ had its origins in how atrocity propaganda from the Great War came to be perceived fol-lowing the end of hostilities. This understanding of the function of propaganda became the dominant one in both scholarly and popular circles: a compelling example of how



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propaganda has become a synonym for ‘bad’ or ‘untruthful’ is the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2011 definition of propaganda on the Amazon Kindle – ‘Propaganda: infor-mation, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view’ (author’s emphasis). This definition of propaganda has been pervasive across disciplines and within the discipline of public relations itself, which is often equated with propagandistic activities. As L’Etang noted, propaganda is often regarded (in opposition to public relations) as the ‘telling of a public lie’ (2008:258). The corollary of this is that if propaganda is based on lying, then those who believe those lies are naïve. This conception of propaganda means that the Great War was supported by war people fed only upon the dubious nourishment of lies. However, atrocity propaganda at the time was highly credible to many people, mostly because it was not based solely upon risible stories such as the Corpse Conversion Factory (in which the Germans turned Allied sol-diers into soap), but was connected to a series of historical events in which civilians were killed by the German military (Taylor, 2003; 1990: 180–181). This context leant atrocity propaganda the aura of authenticity, largely because it was related in some instances to ‘the truth’.

This article will argue that simplistic notions about the ethics and function of propa-ganda have resulted in an inaccurate representation of the moral content of First World War atrocity propaganda and by extension, a misrepresentation of how the public under-stood the war. Through an exploration and redefinition of the word ‘propaganda’, cou-pled with a consideration of the historical context in which atrocity propaganda was produced and received, this article will demonstrate that propaganda had a more nuanced genesis and reception in Great Britain and Australia then has previously perceived to have been the case. The reality was complex, as atrocity propaganda drew not just upon racial hate stereotypes of Germans but also upon existing moral ideals within the com-munity about what constituted a ‘just war’. While it is certainly true that atrocity propa-ganda was violently anti-German, this was not the only type of atrocity propaganda that was produced, although it is the main angle from which it has been analysed (Gullace, 2010; Robertson, 2014). Moreover, even the most hate-filled anti-German atrocity prop-aganda drew on a number of moral beliefs that were based on strong convictions about the rights of non-combatants during wartime. For many people during the war, the dehu-manisation of the barbaric ‘Hun’ in atrocity propaganda was not unethical because men who committed violent crimes against women and children were no longer human or civilised – they had become barbaric and un-Christian (Robertson, 2014: 222). Viewed from this perspective, atrocity propaganda was highly moralistic and was a vital contri-bution to the British and Australian perspective that the war they were waging was just – in other words, it was a Just War to protect the innocent. It is not the purpose of this article to argue that the First World War was a just one, rather to assert that the atrocity propaganda promoting the war sheds light on why so much of the populace of both Great Britain and Australia was committed to supporting a prolonged and exacting war.

Just War and atrocity propaganda

As Nicoletta Gullace noted in 1997, atrocity emerged as part of an ‘international lan-guage of “just war” that has been indispensable in addressing Western public opinion




ever since’ (p. 715). While Just War has been central to mobilising support for conflicts throughout the 20th century, the terminology of Just War – its origins and ethics – is extremely complex and dates back to Cicero.2 Thus, there are multiple definitions and understandings of what constitutes Just War. First World War atrocity propaganda drew upon this particular understanding of Just War: when ‘the offense of aggression [was] committed against a nation or a people incapable of defending themselves against a determined adversary’, it was permissible for another country to intervene (Elshtain, 2002: 8). In this particular case, the conduct of military once the war had commenced was as important as what started the war, and the well-being of civilians was absolutely central to the notion of a justly conducted war – discrimination must be exercised by the military and force applied only to legitimate targets – that is, combatants (Elshtain, 2002: 6). On the other hand, a war that was conducted in an unjust manner targeted civilians (non-combatants) under the aegis of military necessity. This was the very crime of which Germany was accused by atrocity propaganda.

While Britain did not in actuality enter the war because it was a just one – it largely entered for more complex geo-political reasons (e.g. its treaty with France), as did other nations (Steiner and Nelson, 2003 [1977]: 252) – the realpolitik interpretation of Britain’s involvement in the war has meant that the atrocity propaganda which contained the heart of Britain’s just war defence for its involvement has frequently been dismissed as having been disingenuous (Evans, 1987; Haste, 1977; Ponsonby, 1971 [1928]; Wilson, 1979). This article will demonstrate that atrocity propaganda was successful not because it was a cynical ploy, but also because it engaged with the moral issues raised by the war. As Lang and O’Driscoll asserted, ‘the just war tradition is the predominant moral language through which we address questions pertaining to the rights and wrongs of the use of force in international society’ (2013:1).

Methodology

A comprehensive study of the intersection between war and propaganda must of neces-sity be interdisciplinary. This article will draw upon philosophical engagements with rhetoric and propaganda, studies of military doctrine and the laws of armed conflict (as discussed above in the section about Just War), and basic historical methodologies (gath-ering of primary source material and comparing it to secondary source analysis of that material) in its pursuit of an understanding of the phenomenon of First World War atroc-ity propaganda. The historical discipline provides an excellent framework which can tie together information from numerous disciplines to provide a coherent explanation of the context in which atrocity propaganda functioned.

History is a broad church, and within it are multiple subsets of specialities and approaches, from Marxist to military history. The specific historical discipline used in this article is cultural history, which is concerned with ‘the symbolic and its interpreta-tion’ (Burke, 2010 [2008]:3). Thus, this article asks the following questions: What is the cultural context of the inflammatory images and words used in Great War atrocity propa-ganda? What did these symbols of monstrous ‘Huns’ assaulting women mean to the people of Great Britain and Australia, and why did they have power? How did these images resonate with moral codes that were already dominant in British and Australian



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culture? What historical events were occurring alongside the production of these images that might have reinforced their credibility in the viewers’ mind? How has the negative interpretation of the word ‘propaganda’ impacted on how these symbols were interpreted by historians? And finally, how has the negative reputation of the Great War itself, some-thing twined deeply into both Australian and British cultures influenced readings of atrocity propaganda?

The scholarly reputation of the First World War in Great Britain and Australia

The historiography of the First World War from the last four decades in both Great Britain and Australia has been dominated by moral condemnations of the war. However, the historiography of Australian historians’ viewpoints about the Great War was in some ways more politically complex than the British one, as nationalistic historians became increasingly critical of Australian ties with Great Britain. The influence of atrocity prop-aganda and its message of Just War was largely dismissed by Australian historians, who chose instead to focus on the idea that Australians were solely inspired to fight by the idea of Empire, which rendered the war especially absurd and meaningless. In 2010, Henry Reynolds wrote,

It is a thought that haunts me every time I see a war memorial in a small country town and am reminded again of the terrible loss of life in World War One. They are not just monuments to Australia’s loss, but to the folly of a generation of leaders who thought that loyalty was a sufficient reason to go to war and believed in the empire, right or wrong.(2010:70).

The concept that the war caused irreparable damage to Australian democracy was also a dominant theme shared across the historiography (Evans, 1987: 183; Lake, 1975: 96; McKernan, 1980: 48; Robson, 1982 [1970]: 1). Among Australian historians, the vio-lence of the war was especially horrific because it served no moral purpose. As Bill Gammage wrote,

there never was a greater tragedy than the First World War. It engulfed an age, and conditioned the times that followed. It contaminated every ideal for which it was waged, it threw up waste and horror worse than all the evils it sought to avert, and it left legacies of staunchness and savagery equal to any which have bewildered men about their purpose on earth. (1990 [1974] xviii)

Many influential British historians of the past two decades have also questioned whether or not the war was in Britain’s self-interest – a war which John Keegan stated was a ‘a tragic and unnecessary conflict’ (1999:3). The previous year, Niall Ferguson had asked in The Pity of War,

What were all these deaths – more than 9 million in all – really worth … was Britain truly confronted by such a threat to her security in 1914 that it was necessary to send millions of raw recruits across the Channel and beyond in order to ‘wear down’ Germany and her allies? (1998:xlii)




After vigorous questioning over many pages, Ferguson concluded his book with this final sentence – that the First World War ‘was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history’ (1998:462). Ferguson’s book was a further contribution to the popular and scholarly legend of the First World War as the ‘bad, futile war’ that destroyed a gen-eration of men (p. xxxiii). Thus, the violence of the war and its futility were as fused together in some corners of British academia as they were in Australian. Jay Winter, for example, closed a review of Michael S. Neiberg’s book The Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I, ‘the population of Europe was frogmarched into an unnecessary war, and learned that the only way to win was with hatred and violence of a depth and intensity the world had never seen before’ (Winter, 2012: 21).

In his introduction to his book The Last Great War, Adrian Gregory suggested that the tendency of both the public and scholars to condemn the war came from possessing the benefit of hindsight, which in turn distorted perceptions of why the war was fought in the first place. He observed that

… hindsight carries risks when applied to understanding the thoughts and actions of people in the past … We might choose to condemn the First World war as a human tragedy and an error of colossal proportions, but in doing so we must be aware that there is something essentially anachronistic about this. (Gregory, 2008: 1)

The reputation of First World War atrocity propaganda

The poor reputation of the war and the atrocity propaganda that supported it have rein-forced the other since the close of the war. As stated earlier, it was the events of the First World War that changed the word ‘propaganda’ from having a reasonably neutral mean-ing to a word with sinister overtones. Before 1914, propaganda was ‘simply… the means by which the converted attempted to persuade the unconverted’ (Taylor, 2003: 4). Yet by 1921, it had altered greatly in meaning. American author Agnes Repplier wrote, ‘One of the ill turns done us by the war was the investing of this ancient and honourable word with a sinister significance, making it at once a term of reproach and the plague and tor-ment of our lives’ (1921:5). While the word had mildly negative connotations previous to 1914, it simply did not have the ‘miasmic aura’ that it attained following its use during the Great War (Irwin, 1936: 3). During the 1920s, several landmark publications began to challenge the entire moral edifice upon which the Great War had been built, partly by attacking the veracity of atrocity propaganda.

Two books were central to cementing the negative reputation of Great War atrocity propaganda: Lasswell’s 1927 book Propaganda Technique in World War One, and Ponsonby’s Falsehood in Wartime: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated throughout the Nations During the Great War, which followed a year later. Harold D. Lasswell’s study was ‘the first major scholarly publication to attempt to naturalise the presence of propaganda in everyday life’ (Finch, 2006: 4). Lasswell condemned atrocity propaganda as a mechanism used by governments to manipulate men into fighting:

A handy rule for arousing hate is, if at first they do not enrage, use an atrocity … stress can always be laid upon the wounding of women, children, old people, priests and nuns, and upon sexual enormities, mutilated prisoners and mutilated non-combatants (1974 [1927]::81–82).



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Lasswell’s text was highly influential throughout the 20th century, and was frequently quoted in the many books on propaganda that followed. Ponsonby was possibly one of the most vehement and influential critics of First World War atrocity propaganda and asserted first that atrocity propaganda consisted only of lies, and second, that people believed these lies because they were credulous and naive. He wrote in his book Falsehood in Wartime:

Exposure, therefore, may be useful, even when the struggle is over, in order to show up the fraud, hypocrisy, and humbug on which all war rests, and the blatant and vulgar devices which have been used for so long to prevent the poor ignorant people from realizing the true meaning of war (1971 [1928]): 26).

While Lasswell had a more nuanced approach, Ponsonby’s assertion that stories were manufactured and then fed to a compliant populace had a long shadow, and led to sys-tematic denial about German atrocities in Belgium. The majority of the criticism directed at atrocity propaganda by historians was in relation to the allegations about the rape of women in wartime. Australian historians Carmel Shute and Marilyn Lake condemned atrocity propaganda as an inherently sexist activity in which the titillating helplessness of the female acted to lure men into supporting the war. Marilyn Lake wrote, ‘Often people’s interest in atrocity stories seemed to have a distinct sado-sexual tinge’ (Lake, 1975: 22). For Shute, the stories of rape were ‘in the main fabricated – their propaganda value lay in the sexual intimidation they induced in women and the opportunities they presented for fantasies of male lust’ (1976:17). By 1995, the notion that the Bryce report was a series of outrageous falsehoods had become unassailable fact in many histories of the war. Rather than being regarded as one of the first serious (albeit flawed) investiga-tions into human rights abuses during war, the report was again dismissed as a document designed to inflame the lusts of Allied men. In a book chapter titled Love and Death: War and Gender in Britain, 1914-1915, Susan Kingsley Kent launched an extraordinary attack on the report, describing it as a ‘pornographic orgy that fostered voyeurism and made war sexually “exciting”’ (1995:158).

The Bryce report (Government of the United Kingdom, 1915) was the source of his-torians’ dissatisfaction with atrocity propaganda, as all of the allegations contained within this official investigation into German atrocities in Belgium came to be dismissed as lies. Published both as an act of propaganda and also as a serious report into humani-tarian abuses in wartime, it has been judged by numerous historians as a highly manipu-lative document. During the conflict, it endowed atrocity propaganda with the imprimatur of truth, as allegations were seemingly vindicated by the detailed report. In the late 1970s, historian Trevor Wilson comprehensively sealed the Bryce report’s negative repu-tation when he demonstrated that the report had been flawed as a legal inquiry (1979:373–375). Significantly, however, some of the criticisms of the Bryce report have simply been historically inaccurate themselves. Both Cate Haste and Gary S. Messinger, who to date have written two of the most influential books about British Great War propaganda, made strong assertions about the inaccuracy of the Bryce report without actually inves-tigating whether or not their assertions were true.




Haste set the tone in 1977, writing of the Bryce report:

While it is the case that modern warfare produced casualties and mutilation on an enormous scale, and that the Germans were hard in their treatment of civilian resistance, there is very little evidence from German sources to support the assumption of large-scale organized terrorization and incendiarism as part of German military policy. (1977:94)

Haste does not supply any references to back up this statement – indeed, in her entire chapter about British atrocity propaganda, Haste only refers to one German source as part of her enquiry into German military practice (1977:206–207). As will be discussed in more detail later, historians John Horne, Alan Kramer and Isabel Hull all demonstrate that terrorisation of civilians was in fact part of German military policy. As Hull wrote,

the atrocities occurred because two forces converged: the unintended consequences to ordinary soldiers of a far too ambitious war plan, and the conscious and customary acceptance among officers that making the risky plan work might require using terror against civilians (2005: 211, author’s emphasis).

However, Messinger and Haste exonerate German military policy without serious con-sultation of German sources. The consequence is that these historians are unduly harsh towards the Bryce report. In the early nineties, Gary S. Messinger wrote,

… the stories which the Bryce Report invited readers to believe were so sensationalistic that their negative effects upon public understanding should have been obvious. The report accused German soldiers of such atrocities as using Belgian civilians as human shields in combat; indiscriminately destroying buildings; raping women and young girls; cutting off the heads of babies; cutting off women’s breasts; thrusting bayonets into children and then hoisting the children as if on a spit; cutting off children’s hands and ears while their parents were forced to watch; shooting at children; and nailing a child to a farmhouse door (1992: 73).

The great tragedy of the Bryce report is that because it reported some of the more outlandish allegations amongst the absolutely true ones, the entire report came to be regarded as totally unreliable. However, many of its accusations were correct – Germans did execute civilian hostages in Belgium, and use them on occasion as human shields – this was even acknowledged by American historian James Morgan Read (who was extremely hostile to atrocity propaganda) as early as 1941 (108, 286). The German army did indiscriminately destroy cultural property. And of course women and young girls were raped. It is absurd to contemplate the notion that the German army was the first invading force in the history of mankind not to commit rape. As French historians Audoin-Rouzeau and Beckerasserted in their re-assessment of sexual violence during the Great War, rape is a fundamental instrument of war: ‘women are victimised twice over, as human beings and as future child-bearers, and they are the first whom invaders want to humiliate. Their tortured, raped bodies become proof of the conqueror’s power’ (2000:47). Why Messinger asserted that rape was a highly unusual activity in a country occupied by an invading army is therefore an interesting question.

The criticisms of atrocity propaganda surveyed in this section contain two fundamen-tal assumptions about the nature of propaganda: first, it is untruthful, and second, that



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propaganda appeals to people’s emotions and therefore circumvents their rational decision-making abilities. These two assumptions combine to make the ‘hypodermic needle’ theory, in which the populace is altered and manipulated by exposure to manu-factured messages. The following section will analyse these criticisms, which are com-mon in communications and philosophical studies of propaganda, and then offer an alternative definition which more accurately reflects the role played by atrocity propa-ganda during the war.

Propaganda, ethics and rhetoric – Reframing atrocity propaganda within its historical context

In order to resolve how propaganda can provide important information about the past, a redefinition of its ethics must take place. This article suggests that propaganda should be regarded as a neutral ‘persuasive discourse’, and an extension of rhetoric. However, to relate propaganda to rhetoric is not to automatically exonerate it. As we will see, the two pivotal charges levelled against propaganda are the same ones that have been levelled against rhetoric. These issues with propaganda are ethical ones, and the origins of these criticisms lie in the ancient distrust of rhetoric. The first problem with propaganda (and rhetoric) is its lack of ‘sincerity’ and truthfulness, its tendency to exaggerate and hyper-bolise in order to bring the subject around to the propagandist’s opinion. Philosopher Stanley B. Cunningham condemned all propaganda on the grounds that it ‘disregards superior epistemic values such as truth and understanding’ (2002:4). Thus, propaganda is an unethical form of persuasion, because unlike ‘honest persuasion’, it stoops to manipu-late information in order to encourage ‘others to adopt one’s position’ (White, 1985: 6, 17). The second ethical problem with propaganda is that it does not appeal to people’s rational faculties, but to their emotional faculties. Again, Cunningham provides a good example in his criticism of propaganda writing that ‘it corrupts reasoning and the respect for evidence’ (2002: 4). Furthering this line of reasoning, David C Bryant claimed propa-ganda meant ‘some men can impose their wills on others through language in despite of reason’ (1953:426). Communications scholar Randall Marlin followed this philosophical line of reasoning, and defined propaganda as ‘the organised attempt through communica-tion to affect belief or action or inculcate attitudes in a large audience in ways that cir-cumvent or suppress an individual’s adequately informed, rational, reflective judgement’ (2002: 22)

The first charge against propaganda – that it is untruthful – is reasonably easy to dis-pense with. As was discussed in relation to the question of wartime rape (and will also be discussed in the next section in relation to other atrocities committed by the Germans during the war) a surprising number of assertions in atrocity propaganda have transpired to be truthful. Therefore, the definition of propaganda as being inherently untruthful is very misleading and simplistic. Naturally, an enormous amount of propaganda is untruth-ful, but this is not always the case. As Phillip Taylor asserted, lies are not useful: ‘to be completely convincing… shadow does require some substance and myth needs to be rooted in some reality if propaganda is to succeed’ (2003 [1990]: 4).

The second charge, being that propaganda robs people of their ability to reason and therefore make good decisions, is more complex to deal with and requires some careful




unpacking. Because propaganda appeals to the emotions of the listener/viewer the infer-ence is that propaganda interferes with the audiences’ free will. Of propagandists, Bryant wrote, they ‘do not seek to balance or overbalance alternative ideas or courses of action; they seek to obliterate them, to circumvent or subvert the rational processes which tend to make men weigh and consider’ (1953:417). These concerns about the emotional power of propaganda were the same ones levelled against persuasion by Plato (O’Shaughnessy, 2004: 5). Therefore, extending the definition of propaganda to include rhetoric does not exonerate the medium. As Nicholas O’Shaughnessy observed, ‘the wicked charm of rhetoric has long been feared’ (2004:66).

Essentially, there is a schism between those who believe that ethical persuasion only uses logic, and those who acknowledge that persuasion using emotions can also be ethi-cal. Propaganda, like rhetoric, is presumed to be bad because it is illogical and ‘moves the soul’ (Weaver, 1968: 68). This charge is repeatedly raised against propaganda. However, not all propaganda scholars take the Platonic side, and instead are more sym-pathetic to Aristotle’s defence of rhetoricians use of emotions. By arguing that propa-ganda is an extension of Aristotelian rhetoric, Taithe and Thornton thereby refute the notion that appealing to people through their emotional faculties is unethical (Bennett and O’Rourke, 2006: 62). This is because Aristotle first does not believe that decisions arrived at through emotions lack logic. Writes Nussbaum, ‘In Aristotle’s view, emotions are not blind animal forces, but intelligent and discriminating parts of the personality, closely related to beliefs of a certain sort, and are therefore responsive to cognitive modi-fication’ (1996:303) For example, a person may become angry based on a particular belief – these beliefs can be altered through the presentation of facts, and the anger will therefore diminish or find a different target (1996:304). In Aristotle’s reasoning, ‘belief and argument’ in fact lie at the heart of what stirs emotions, and the rhetorician must appeal first to these aspects of the audiences minds, rather than simply expecting he can stir emotion through manipulation of people’s irrational faculties (1996: 305–306).

A propagandist’s arguments must therefore be very carefully crafted in order to con-vince his audience. First, his accusations must be credible, and be based to some extent on observable events that the audience can affirm have occurred. Second, his arguments must resonate with pre-existing belief systems to be successful. Observed L’Etang, ‘propaganda is that which affects social construction to such a degree that its assump-tions are welded to the taken-for-granted norms and values of the host culture and makes it difficult for deviant views to be expressed’ (2006:24). People who did not believe in atrocity propaganda during the war were subject to enormous pressure, largely because atrocity propaganda reflected the ethical norms about war. During this period, ‘the widely held moral principle of civilian immunity was gradually translated into a shared ethical norm’ (Bellamy, 2012: 42). Therefore, when an image was shown of a German soldier attacking a Belgian woman to a British civilian in 1915, the propagandist was appealing to the viewer’s already present belief system, which is that it is fundamentally wrong for a soldier to take advantage of a woman in such a manner. However, the belief was not just rooted in the ethical systems of the viewer, it was also present because the image was related to stories from credible sources (which the Bryce report was regarded as at the time) and because attacks on other civilians by the German military had occurred not just overseas, but also on British soil. Yet were the same image shown to the same civilian 15



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years later, the response may have been very different, as the viewer had been convinced by anti-war propagandists such as Arthur Ponsonby that these atrocities had not occurred. Ponsonby’s accusations were highly credible at the time in the aftermath of the war, particularly as ashamed women refused to come forward after the war and testify about what had happened to them (Gregory, 2008: 308).

The story of atrocity propaganda and its engagement with belief systems and histori-cal events demonstrates that rather than treating propaganda ‘as decontextualized phe-nomena’, it is more useful to engage with it as a product of numerous processes (the manipulation of belief) and context (what is occurring at the time) (Marková, 2008: 49). Therefore, in order to seriously assess the role of atrocity propaganda in the British and Allied home fronts during the war, one must first recognise that propaganda is not an independent entity capable of manufacturing hatred out of thin air. It is instead a medium which draws upon the concerns and hopes of its time – in short, it is a historically situated form of communication. As David Blaazer wrote, ‘the successful propagandist must understand the values, anxieties, and idiom of his or her audience, just as the historian must who wishes to understand the operation and importance of a propaganda campaign’ (1992:7).

A more useful way of engaging with the ethics and function of propaganda is to assess it case by case, rather than dismiss it with a blanket definition as ‘unethical and untruth-ful’. Just as Aristotle regarded rhetoric as ‘a neutral tool that can be used by persons of virtuous or depraved character’, so too is the case with propaganda (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 2008:Online). While propaganda can help to influence historical outcomes, it is also a product of history, events and existing moral structures. In the historical period under examination in this article, it formed part of the narrative of sense making that emerged as the moral confusion of war took hold. Certainly, propa-ganda influenced history through the broadcast of particular viewpoints – but these view-points were not just created by propagandists – they drew upon centuries of discussion about the laws of war. In order to be effective, propaganda must ‘make sense of political and social reality to the point that the propaganda message will become significant of a whole political cosmology’ (Taithe and Thornton, 1999: 2). In a democratic nation, prop-aganda simply cannot be persuasive if it does not contain existing societal morals and fears. As Jacques Ellul explained, ‘Propaganda must not only attach itself to what already exists in the individual, but also express the fundamental currents of the society it seeks to influence’ (1973:38). Thus, not only does propaganda influence society, it is influ-enced by society.

This article suggests propaganda can be usefully regarded as a persuasive discourse which has ethical properties that are situated upon a continuum from ‘bad’ to ‘good’. For example, as part of the continuum, propaganda may at one extreme end attempt to per-suade only through falsehoods, and at the other end, persuade through the use of truth. Atrocity propaganda sits at various points on the continuum, utilising both truth and falsehood to make moral assertions about the war. As the next section will demonstrate, not all atrocity propaganda consisted of outrageous falsehoods. Indeed, much of it was reasonably measured and engaged with real world events. This may account for why the outrageous falsehoods (the previously mentioned accusation that Germans turned Allied soldiers into soap) were believed by many during the war.




The historical context of atrocity propaganda: Military doctrine and attacks on civilians

As stated previously, by 1914, the notion that non-combatants should not be the targets of military aggression had become a norm. By extension, it was a potent force in the propaganda wars between the Allies and Germany, and it was the Allies’ contention that they possessed the higher moral ground. And the higher moral ground was an important position to occupy, as it was from here that the sympathy of neutral countries (such as America until 1917) could be courted. In a cartoon by British artist ‘Poy’ (Percy Fearon), the Kaiser and his minions are viewing the devastation wrought by a Zeppelin bombing raid. Their target is not in fact France or England, but ‘Neutral Pro-Germanism’, a smok-ing city from which the words ‘disgust’ and ‘indignation’ rise. The caption reads, ‘The only result of Zeppelin raids has been to shatter what remained of pro-German sentiment in neutral countries’ (McCartney, 1915–1918: 27).

Atrocity propaganda therefore represented ideas that were relevant to those who lived through the Great War. The ideals contained in atrocity propaganda were particular to those of the early 20th century. Because of the legacy of the 1899 Peace Conference and the 1907 Hague Conventions, wars of the 20th century were different from previous wars (Finch, 2006: xii). In many nations, there was a growing sense of optimism, among paci-fists and socialists that war itself could be prevented. More pragmatically, it was believed by many that war could be limited in a way that would make it more humane (Kramer, 2007: 25). Some countries such as the United States (who remained neutral until 1917) were strongly committed to the humanitarian ideas contained in these new laws. Allan Kramer (2007) explains,

The shock and outrage felt by contemporaries in the countries of Germany’s victims and in neutral states can be explained not only by the breach of international law. It was also because the killing of civilians and the destruction of cultural monuments during the entire war did not, with the exception of aerial bombardment, even involve complex modern technology or long-range artillery fire, but unsophisticated weapons … most of such killing was done face to face … In this sense, too, German warfare was held at the time to represent a reversion to barbarism. (p. 27)

During the First World War, there was a gulf of understanding between the Allies and the Germans about what constituted the ‘best’ way to conduct military operations. In the case of Germany, it did not include the protection of non-combatant civilians or their property. Horne and Kramer have argued that ‘from the outset, the German response was endorsed, regulated and generalised’ through to the very top of the government – the Kaiser. In a telegram from the Kaiser to President Wilson on 7 September, German atroc-ities against Belgians were defended by him: Germans had been forced to ‘take the most drastic measures in order to punish the guilty and to frighten the blood-thirsty [Belgian] population from continuing their work of vile murder and horror’. Further to this Horne and Kramer (2000) quoted the diary of General Karl von Einem, who noted in his diary that he had ordered ‘“all the houses burned and the inhabitants shot” in reprisal for sup-posed Belgian resistance’ (War Between Soldiers and Enemy Civilians, p. 158). Isabel Hull goes even further in relation to German atrocities in Belgium and France:



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Neither the Wartime German government nor the Weimar parliament denied them. Instead, they defended them as regrettably necessary reprisals against illegal franc-tireurs (whom subsequent scholarship has shown did not exist) the object of the atrocities was to force civilian obedience and to re-create in the occupied zones the reliable order of home. (pp. 210–211)

Conversely, among the British (and many Allied nations), there was a genuine belief that war had been made more civilised, and that those who indulged in violence against civilians had regressed into medieval barbarism. Of course, as Dan Todman points out, these ideals were never put to the test – had Britain been the invading army, perhaps they would have behaved in the same manner. However, they were not ‘trying to gain a posi-tion of dominance in Europe by force of arms’. And the fact that the grim consequences of starvation caused by the British blockade against Germans was not apparent to outsid-ers, meant that the differences in doctrine could remain in the minds of the public, at least, very clear during the course of the war (p. 125).

These differences in official doctrine are reflected in two documents, one from Australia and one from Germany, which relate to international law and the conduct of the military. So important were the concepts laid out in Hague in 1899 and 1907 to the Just War narrative that they were distributed to Australian troops in a booklet. In the Notes on the Laws and Customs of War, which was written for the Australian Imperial Force in 1914, Ambrose Pratt wrote ‘The British Empire is making war against German soldiers, not against peaceful German citizens’. Pratt continues,

Civilians – men, women and children – were in olden times at the mercy of an invading army. This cruel doctrine has been abolished. Under the modern laws of war, civilians are entitled to enjoy security for their persons and property so long as they shall remain quiescent and refrain from hostile attempts against the invading troops. (1914:1)

The German doctrine, however, stated the opposite. In the German Handbook of International Law, it stated that ‘war is in its essence violence, [and] the violent force of the conqueror in the conquered land is completely unlimited’ (author’s emphasis, German Handbook of International Law, 1915, quoted in Kramer, 2007: 26).

Thus, the Germans and the British and Australians had profoundly different concep-tions of the best way to ideally conduct a war. Where German military doctrine was dangerously pragmatic towards civilians, Australian and Great British doctrine strove to encompass the violent contradictions of war by creating a rule bound theatre of war in which the line between the military and civilians was clear, and never to be blurred. Allied atrocity propaganda reflected these differences in doctrine. In Great Britain and Australia, idealism about the moral responsibilities of soldiers towards civilians pro-vided a vital propaganda message, which was that ‘the enemy of the Allies [was] a brutal barbarian whose defeat was essential to the survival of civilised life on the planet’ (Roetter, 1974: 66).

This deep abhorrence of military harming civilians meant that atrocities committed by the Germans dominated how the war was discussed. Even committed opponents of the war had to acknowledge the atrocities that were taking place. E.D. Morel, a vehement opponent of the war, wrote in a Union of Democratic Control leaflet after the sinking of the Lusitania,




We meet this afternoon our minds still tense with horror and indignation at the latest and most barbarous outrage of which innocent civilians have been the victims since hell was let loose. All the attendant circumstances have combined to invest the tragedy of the ‘Lusitania’ with a poignancy of pathos and a dramatic force which no other single incident of war has yet equalled. (1915:1)

The sinking of the Lusitania had a powerful and enduring effect on public opinion. The civilian liner was torpedoed by a German U-boat on the 7 May 1915, and 1200 civil-ians perished (Gregory, 2008: 61). This event occurred around the same time that the now notorious Bryce report was released. It must be remembered that the public did not receive news pertaining to German atrocities as individual primary sources secreted in an archive, but generally as a news item amongst many others. Thus, the backdrop to the launch of the Bryce report was the sinking of the Lusitania. In Australian newspapers, these news items were often on the same page. For example, in The Sydney Morning Herald on the 13 May 1915, a story titled ‘International law its vindication: Britain’s Clear Duty’ (which refers to the Bryce report) is situated close to a story about the out-raged reaction to the sinking of the Lusitania in Pretoria (1915 a 9; 1915b:9). The pub-lishing of the Bryce report alongside news of the Lusitania is repeated in many Australian newspapers. That these two stories emerged in tandem can only have made the Bryce report seem highly credible in the mind of the reader at the time, and it must be stressed that both news stories, of course, concerned German military action against civilians.

However, too often atrocity propaganda has been neatly separated by historians from its surrounding context. An early article by Gullace claimed that the British government used atrocity propaganda to ‘explain the arcane language of international law to a demo-cratic public increasingly empowered to support or reject its enforcement’. In her argu-ment, she envisaged First World War propaganda as following a logical trajectory, in which atrocity propaganda was part of a symbolic domestication of the war for a British audience (Gullace, 1997: 716). This is a somewhat problematic statement: in the case of the British, the Germans themselves ‘domesticated’ atrocity propaganda in 1914 when they shelled Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, killing numerous non-combatants. ‘Remember Scarborough’, a poster produced by the British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee (PRC) just before the close of that year, was a ‘typical’ atrocity poster, tying together events in Belgium with those occurring in Britain. The poster invoked the deaths of women and children at the hands of the German barbarian: ‘the Germans who brag of their “CULTURE” have shown what it is made of by murdering defenceless women and children at SCARBOROUGH’ (IWM PST 5089, 1914). Another poster published in 1915 contains the following text under the image of a bombed out house (Figure 2):

No.2 Wykenham street, SCARBOROUGH, after the German bombardment on Dec.r 16th. It was the Home of a Working Man. Four People were killed in this House including the Wife, aged 58, and Two Children, the youngest aged 5. 78 Women and Children were killed and 228 Women and Children were wounded by the German Raiders ENLIST NOW.

Yet, Gullace did not mention these particular items of atrocity propaganda in her arti-cle, and only fleetingly refers to attacks on ‘unarmed towns’. In this manner, Gullace creates the impression that the attacks on towns were merely part of a semi-constructed



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narrative produced by British propagandists who ‘skilfully played on humanitarian senti-ment’, rather than real events with serious consequences for unarmed civilians (pp. 737–738). Thus, by focusing only upon the atrocity propaganda about sexual violence in Belgium, and omitting the British posters that had been produced in response to direct attacks against British civilians, Gullace neglected to engage with the broader historical context in which atrocity propaganda about the rape and murder of women was produced and received.

However, the accusation that the Germans had abandoned their humanity through attacks on Belgian civilians was made much more credible when their navy attacked

Figure 2. IWM PST 5119, PRC, Great Britain, 1915.




small British towns. German Zeppelin raids in Great Britain also added credibility to the idea that the German Military had little respect for civilian lives. During the war, aerial bombardment killed 1413 Britons and wounded 3408, many of whom were civilians. This is a significant number of people, and as James Morgan Read speculated, galva-nised support for the war in that more men attended recruiting centres immediately after Zeppelin raids (1941:192).

This belief in the contents of atrocity propaganda assisted governments to inspire the populace to support and sustain a long and relentless war and was shared by many of the propagandists themselves. Atrocity propaganda of the Great War therefore was more than a simple series of hate messages manufactured by the government to manipulate the populace. The enduring perception in histories of the First World War that atrocity propa-ganda was inherently mendacious is extremely problematic, particularly as it has left a historiographical legacy of misinterpretation about why people supported the war. Through rejecting the ‘hypodermic needle’ model, and adopting a more complex one which acknowledges that propaganda is historically situated, this article has contributed to the formation of a broader picture of how atrocity propaganda functioned during the Great War. It was not a series of lies; instead, it portrayed real military actions conducted by the Germans against civilians, as evidenced by the posters about attacks on civilian British towns. Moreover, it did not simply create fantasies about the rape of Belgian women by German soldiers, as these events also occurred. Propaganda from the war is therefore an important historical source for modern historians, as it reflected the deep and enduring moral convictions held by both the populace and government at the time about how war should be conducted – the principle point being that non-combatants should be immune from military aggression. Hate was therefore not the only emotion drawn upon by propagandists to fuel a war in which broke the old imperial orders of Europe, and shaped ‘the world in the 20th century’ (Strachan, 2003: 332). However mis-placed, a sense of duty drove it too.

Conclusion

This article has demonstrated that there are a number of benefits to historians, communi-cations and public relation experts in studying the topic of propaganda through an inter-disciplinary approach. For historians, this article has established that propaganda is not an isolated force which acts as an independent historical actor, but rather has a much more complex function, drawing upon existing moral convictions in order to provide compelling arguments. By seeking out the context in which propaganda is produced and received, and investigating the cultural origins of propaganda, new insights can be gained into how societies relate to important questions raised by conflict.

However, this article has also demonstrated that the historical discipline has much to offer to communications and public relations scholars, as it is through the historical dis-cipline that assertions about the nature of propaganda can be tested and proven. Engaging with the historical context and circumstances in which propaganda functions opens up possibilities for future areas of research for communications and public relation scholars, particularly if propaganda is not regarded as an ‘unethical’ form of communication, but instead as an extension of various values and moral convictions. The use of atrocity



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propaganda in more recent conflicts, such as Syria, and its use on social media as well as more traditional media would be a particularly important area of future research, as would a continuing investigation into the impact of First World War atrocity propaganda on the reception and handling of news of German and Japanese atrocities in Australia in the Second World War.

Acknowledgements

A version of this paper was presented at the International History of Public Relations Conference in Bournemouth 2013.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. Essentially, atrocity propaganda was credited by some historians as having provided the moral basis for the prosecution of German war guilt, and the ‘making of a severe peace’ that was responsible for the Second World War. (Read, 1941: vii–viii).

2. For a definition of the origins of the term Just War, see Kolb R (1997). Origin of the twin terms jus ad bellum/jus in bello. International Review of the Red Cross 37(320): 553–562.

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Author biography

Emily Robertson is pursuing a PhD at the University of New South Wales Canberra. She is inves-tigating the historical context of First World War atrocity propaganda in Australia and Great Britain, the relationship of atrocity propaganda to Just War theory, and the broader ethical prob-lems raised by the function of propaganda in wartime. Previous to this, she curated the poster col-lection at the Australian War Memorial. She also worked for a period in the public relations field in the Australian government and as a journalist with The Canberra Times.



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