Twelve Decisive Battles of the Mind
By
GREYSTONE PRESS $3.50
THIS book bears the subtitle “The Story of Propaganda during the Christian Era with Abridged Versions of Texts That Have Shaped History.” The phrase “Christian Era” is clearly an error. It is true that Mr. Munson begins with Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, but from this he skips to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Communist Manifesto, and so forth. It would seem that the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds, the writings of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, Magna Charta, and the utterances of Luther come well within the scope of Mr. Munson’s book and there are others. The author excludes art from the category of propaganda, but there is a fallacy or at least a contradiction here; for at the same time he asserts that the more successful the instrument of propaganda the more story or drama quality does it contain. By the same token, one may argue that the most successful propaganda is sure to take on a form that fails to reveal any tangible propaganda. In this sense, contrary to Mr. Munson’s idea, a work of art may be the purest form of propaganda, all the more because it is bound to influence persons or masses without their knowing how or why.
Mr. Munson defines propaganda as “the art and science of controlling the mind of mankind by overwhelming insistence upon a point of view.” The point of view may be a right or a false one; it may be even a downright lie —which need not militate against its acceptance; indeed, as Hitler well knows, “a thumping big lie,” if repeated often enough, will be welcomed as gospel truth. Air. Alunson rubs in this point with Hitler’s own speeches and with The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, both successfully designed to stimulate the duped masses to bloodthirstiness. The remaining examples included are Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Zola’s J’accuse, Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Lenin’s Theses of April 4th, Mussolini’s We or They declaration, and The Mind of America (1941), in which Mr. Munson calls for a new Thomas Paine to drown out the noise made by totalitarians. There is no reason why an authentic anthology of propaganda should not contain a thousand examples, but Mr. Munson’s dozen are fairly representative, and sufficient unto the day is the propaganda thereof. J. C.
W. H. C. WIILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN
J. C. JOHN COURNOS
R. E. D. RICHARD ELY DANIELSON
W. F. WILSON FOLLETT
R. M. G. ROBERT M. GAY