Psychological WarfareLinebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
History
Psychological Warfare
Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
Psychological warfare
The psychological warfare operation must be gauged to the personnel
facilities no less than to the material facilities. (In China, the
author sat in with an expert on medieval and modern Japanese art, who
was writing leaflets which were to be dropped on the Japanese garrisons
of the Yangtze cities. The expert wrote pure, dignified Japanese, but
the Chinese-Japanese language experts brought up the point, "Would the
Japanese common soldier understand this kind of talk?" For a while, we
had no plain-spoken Japanese at hand, and we had to send our Japanese
leaflets from Chungking up to Yenan, where the Japanese Communists read
the leaflets and wrote back long detailed criticisms.)
Whenever the politico-military situation permits, it is sound procedure
to check output with live enemies, either interned civilians or captured
military personnel. A shrewd interrogator can soon find out whether the
comments from the enemy jury are honest or not.
Intelligent psychological warfare procedures have often turned
liabilities into assets. Absence of a good orchestra has compelled
propagandists to make up current music schedules by recording enemy
musical programs, re-broadcasting them with new spoken commentary.
Failure to obtain native speakers (such as genuine home-grown Japanese,
or Chinese with the properly slurred Wu dialect) has led to the use of
substitutes that proved better than the original. There is no point in
trying to establish _rapport_ with the enemy unless you talk his
language with effortless perfection on the one end of the scale--or else
admit that you really are a foreigner, on the other end of the scale. It
is easier to build up the image of a trustworthy enemy than it is to
create trust in a traitor. Frequently the attempt to talk the enemy's
own language is less successful than a frank acceptance of handicaps.
In actual practice this means that either--
(a) the speaker should be authentically perfect in use of the enemy
language, whether spoken or written as script; _or_
(b) the speaker should make no effort to conceal his foreign accent.
In British broadcasts to Germany, for example, it was found to be
desirable for the radio announcers to have British accents in their
German, rather than the Viennese or Jewish lilt which many of them did
have. A Nazified audience was so infected with anti-Semitism that no
Jewish speaker could carry much weight, no matter how cogent his
arguments nor how eloquent his appeals. The British tone in the voices
of other speakers actually helped carry conviction. The Germans were
prepared to listen to a genuine Britisher, and might have been
disappointed if he had spoken letter-perfect _German_.[21]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account