HOW TO KEEP OUR FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE OUR ENEMIES
Waldeck, R. G.
How To Keep Our Friends And Influence Our Enemies By R G. WALDECK HERE is one of the $64 questionsof this war: Why do we bother to keep up the tremendous apparatus of a Ministry of Propaganda...
...This mood, which under normal circumstances would confine itself to incertitudes and disappointments, is apt to grow into bitter distrust and even hatred of us in the climate of physical deprivations and moral terror in which most Europeans have lived now for years...
...The idea of Europe, if presented right, could give a worthwhile war aim to the European peoples...
...And here is the rub...
...Well Want To Be Loved A Little Now where is a positive political idea which will appeal to the imagination of the Europeans, arouse them from their stupor of hopelessness and make them turn towards us with new enthusiasm...
...And Mr...
...pawns not even represented at the conferences where the fate of their continent was being decided...
...The positive idea can only be the "idea of Europe...
...Yet what good are all the talents and technical facilities in the world when they operate in the void...
...It is a .means of offering something positive to Europe-and thus possibly shortening the war...
...In short, the idea of Europe has everything...
...It would show our friends in Europe that they are not just pawns to us, whose cities we bomb and whose children we let starve from military necessity...
...The sentiment which Unconditional Surrender and the rest of our political propaganda provokes in responsible German circles is: "Let's hang on to the war as long as we can, because peace wiU be worse...
...Goebbels...
...It would show them that we are thinking of them, in gratitude and respect for all that they have stood for through the ages...
...Where, too, is the idea which, if materialized, will be favorable to our own national interests...
...In short, they see Spengler's Decline of the West come true...
...But'if our political warfare has not succeeded in persuading the enemy into capitulation, it has proved equally inept in safeguarding the enormous eapital of good will which was ours in the occupied and neutral lands of Europe- not so long ago...
...In order to revolt, one must know what one is revolting to...
...But the net result of this magnificent show is that it has actually stiffened the resistance of the enemy and has alienated our friends or sympathetic neutrals...
...Neither Unconditional Surrender nor Mr...
...The implication is, "So better don't give up...
...But Unconditional Surrender has not only served to frighten the German masses into continuing to fight on...
...But there is also another objective—and this is to prepare a postwar world favorable to one's own national interests by forging the bed-fellowships of the war into lasting friendships of the peace and by laying foundations for a passable modus vivendi with the enemy of yesterday and his satellites...
...Churchill's recent statement, which rejects the validity of the Atlantic Charter for Germany, implements the Unconditional Surrender formula...
...And yet it is essential that we get around to offering the European peoples, friends and enemies, a positive idea...
...She could not at the armistice negotiations in 1918...
...it has also proved a superb means to rally to Hitler the very groups which might consider moving for a peace...
...It is in the line of our moral obligations towards this poor tormented continent...
...300 millions of Europeans and a civilization which for 2,000 years or so stood for Western civilization as such...
...Unconditional surrender," he hammers into the minds of his Germans, "that's what you have to face if you give up...
...But in practice such a procedure is known as lengthy and exceedingly costly in blood...
...A political strategy based on the idea of a United Europe is the only political strategy which has a chance to shorten the vwir...
...Quite a few German generals might have contemplated doing a Badoglio, but the incentive was lacking...
...They feel that our attitude is anti-European...
...To these Europeans Russia is not even a European power but an Asiatic one...
...Once Germany concedes defeat, she can't make conditions of any importance anyway...
...It might possibly go too far to say yet that Moscow and Teheran made for a new political alignment on the European continent, but the potentialities for such a new alignment are all there...
...This hopelessness has its roots, in part, in their fear that we save Europe from Hitler's clutches only in order to deliver her to Stalin's...
...For, here are some facts of life which our political strategists chose to overlook: Millions and millions of Europeans, whether we like it or not, are at least as afraid of Stalin as they are of Hitler...
...There is no doubt that the conferences of Moscow and Teheran, and what the Europeans rightly or wrongly described as our betrayal of Europe to the Kremlin, have hurt and alienated wide and important circles in Europe...
...They feel that we are selling out...
...The consequences of the Unconditional Surrender formula are a case in point...
...It prepares the best possible postwar Europe with which to live in peace for a long time after...
...But just because Unconditional Surrender is not as definite as it sounds, its unfortunate effects are doubly regrettable...
...Now why should any German risk his life listening to the illegal radio in order to hear the OWI version of old Bren-nus' Vae Victis—"Woe to the Vanquished...
...And after such a tremendous war effort one does want to be loved a little...
...The necessity of political warfare alongside the military one has been an accepted fact in all great wars...
...It would rekindle their enthusiasm for the war—an enthusiasm we urgently need once we start the enormous undertaking of the invasion...
...All over Europe there are anti-Hitler big business and generally conservative forces and even trade-union minded workers and liberals who up to now have fought German domination but "whose earlier enthusiasm for us and our cause is corroded by suspicions...
...Moreover, it might be rather nervewracking to do business with a communist Europe...
...A Europe for the Europeans...
...Churchill's recent rejection of the Atlantic Charter is likely to put at ease any generals or others wondering what the victors have in store for their country and for them...
...A unified Europe that is not the pawn of a Britain out to establish a new balance of power, nor of a Germany bent on enforcing a "New Order" on unwilling people, nor of a Russia clutching for new spheres of influence...
...It is no exaggeration to say that the hearts and minds of the European peoples have lately reached a depth of hopelessness which is hardly conducive to their active and efficient cooperation with our effort to beat Hitler...
...How To Keep Our Friends And Influence Our Enemies By R G. WALDECK HERE is one of the $64 questionsof this war: Why do we bother to keep up the tremendous apparatus of a Ministry of Propaganda (OWI) if we have no real policy to propagandize...
...Only political warfare based on the idea of Europe could assuage European uncertainty toward us—uncertainty which might come fully to the fore only after the war is over, once our last bottom billion of Lend-Lease and relief is spent...
...These Europeans are by no means all dirty capitalists who view the approaching Russian colossus in the alarmed terms of private capitalistic interest...
...A Weapon For Dr...
...Such political strategy, too, would take the wind out of the sails of Hitler's propagandists who go around the occupied and neutral countries featuring what they call our betrayal of Europe and pointing to their "New Order" as the only really European idea in being...
...What they are mainly terrified of is for Europe to be swallowed up by the invincible forces of Asia...
...Theoretically, it is, of course, deemed possible to win a war by military means alone...
...Thousands of able-bodied men and women are busy beaming words at a long suffering continent, writing pamphlets to be dropped on enemy cities, producing movies and magazines designed to make friends and influence people...
...Basically it really is a meaningless formula...
...It was the "Unconditional Surrender" formula that knocked the props out from under it in the first place...
...Lacking such a positive idea, we are liable not only to lengthen the war quite unnecessarily, but to jeopardize beforehand our chances for a peace worthy of our sacrifices and our hopes...
...The sad fact is that so far this war has not produced one constructive idea of political warfare...
...For there is no doubt that Unconditional Surrender is the greatest boon to Dr...
...In the long run our knack of losing friends might become even more distressing than our failure to influence our enemies...
...Hence one main objective of political warfare: to shorten the war by (1) propagandizing the enemy into putting down his arms, (2) by converting neutrals into allies, and (3) by prodding allies into ever more active participation in the war effort...
...Outwardly political warfare has been glamorized and streamlined beyond anything known in earlier wars...
...Goebbels Alas, the story of Allied political warfare in World War II has been the story of the laboring mountain which brings forth a mouse...
...Nor is our political strategy in regard to the neutral and occupied countries of Europe of a less negative nature...
...There is only one such idea and this is the idea of Europe...
Vol. 8 • March 1944 • No. 13
