Propaganda is emotionally appreciating contradictory or near contradictory propositions and that is what happens in the stories of German and Japanese POWs sent to North America during World War II.
Here is how propaganda works. It shows contradictory things to be held at the same time. Peace is war. Trump lauds Hispanics while chastising Hispanic immigrants as drug smugglers. Propaganda is different from ideology, which can be consistent. Hitler thought Jews a mongrel race by placing them within the range of races some of which are purebreds and some, like the English and the Germans, exhibiting superior civilizations. Such ideologies can be answered while propaganda is merely asserted so as to feel comfortable with the contradiction, by experiencing the two contradictory terms. John Calhoun is ideological in tuning that slavery is necessary so as to allow a democracy for the elite. Ideology may be self serving but it is rational. Thinking as some do that the slave and master cooperated for their mutual benefit is propaganda because it allows experience with each one of the sides of the contradiction that slaves are involuntary and mutually beneficial. Propaganda is a verbal assertion like that of a square circle where the term has no meaning but is saved by simultaneously feeling both sides of the opposition as valid. Propaganda is an answer to cognitive dissonance, which is the psychological theory that people have to resolve contradictions. To the contrary, people can always find a way of emotionally sensing the truth or the existence of what is logically or empirically impossible or just extremely unlikely. .The idea of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” is propaganda because it is clearly contradictory even if people assert it as a necessary historical development. That phrase is wishful thinking because dictatorship is by definition unenlightened and arbitrary unless it was temporary and was a transition to the time when all government would no longer be necessary because it had been replaced by a technocracy.
Here are a series of videos that have appeared on YouTube that purport to be anti-prapaganda but are in fact good examples of it. The narrator tells unknown stories about German and Japanese prisoners of war sent in the later years of the Second World War to stockades in Texas, Utah and Alberta, and documented from diaries, letters, memoirs and official military records.The stories are illustrated with photographs of the time of prison camps, hospitals and prairies, though the photos seem rigged because the military insignias are wrong and tears seem added to the faces portrayed. But never mind. The stories are the stuff of legend and so will be authentic because of the inevitable alterations of the past.
Each story has the same trajectory. The prisoners arrive famished and shrunken and fearful of brutality and rape, most of the prisoners women who had been nurses or radio operators rather than combatants. They are unnerved to find that the guards were methodical but did not shout or threaten. They found cots with clean sheets and blankets and barracks that were clean and well heated and with electricity and flush toilets. They were even more surprised the next morning to find breakfast with bacon and eggs and bread and butter and real coffee and even orange juice in abundance and dinner would include meat and potatoes more ample than home rations had been for years. The prisoners were afraid they were being poisoned or lulled into a false security because the propaganda back home had said that Americans were monsters and that their own people were starving, which could not possibly be true because even prisoners were given such abundance. The prisoners hesitate but finally cannot avoid the temptation of eating. The prisoners set into a routine of food, medical care and assignments to voluntary work duty and so meet civilians who treat them kindly.
The prisoners find that the Americans treat them well because they see even prisoners to be human, caught into a bigger picture for which they are not responsible. The lesson is that being nice is not weakness but strength and that slowly undermines their sense of things, that the Axis had been full of lies and cruelty and that America was so full of abundance that it would inevitably win. Some of the rangers or guards fell in love with the female prisoners and married or just returned to a defeated Germany so as to rebuild it as a democratic society, though the disparity between a rancher and his young prisoner suggests that the marriage had been at the start an arrangement of convenience even if it resulted in a long lasting union that allowed couples to raise American children and grandchildren. There are reunions decades later to celebrate the prison camp as a source of enlightenment and mutual respect, especially about in a Canadian brown with a number of ethnic Germans who had come there before WWI and taught the prisoners they could remain German culturally, singing German songs and using the German language without identifying with the ideology of the German government. This was a happy ending. Harrowing war experience had been replaced through human decency so as to be restored to humanity.
There is something wrong about these accounts, as salubrious as they might be. The Americans were nice and also very well off and so had luxuries even in a war, none of their cities bombed or heavily rationed, Yes, the allies won the war but that did not mean they were right, only victorious. Bacon doesn’t drive ideology, Some independent ideational force makes people decide that the losing side was on the wrong side. It took a hundred years of history to allow that the Confederacy had been on the wrong side and the rehabilitation of the Lost Cause has resurfaced in Trump renaming army bases to confederate names and rewriting American history. Moreover, it might not be that Americans were both strong and niceand so worthy of winning the war.Rather, it might be that the war going well allowed the Americans the luxury of being nice. They were not pushed to the test though German soldiers preferring to surrender to Americans than Russians was evidence to that fact. The Germans voted with their feet. At any rate, winning a war does not make it just, just as losing an election does not mean that the winning sideways right much less than that humanity will prevail, There are many dystopian novels and films where the bad side wins and creates misery for the defeated nation: Oceana in Orwell’s “1984” and the United States occupied by Germany and Japan in Phillip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle”.
So this set of stories about prisoners redeemed to and by their humanity is propaganda, Ittells wishfull and perhaps larelyaccuratstories with a clear political agenda, which is to say that humanity is more important than nationalism. Maybe that is true enough in the second world war. But what if the allies lost? They had to win the war for its humane ideology to prosper, and that meant more American liberty ships and fire bombings that a later humanism might decide was unnecessary. And the Second World War is a special case where virtue combined with efficiency wins the day and the temperament. Are we on the side against Iran and in favor of Israel? Israel is cruel so it can survive even if some think Israel has been too cruel and the war on Iran is muddled. Use those test cases as to what wars are, when nations for sufficient reason embark on the disasters of war.
A real sign that a story is propaganda is that the moral at the end of all stories is the same one and so Trump was always right no matter what he undertook or what befell him. That is why “Deuteronomy” is propaganda. Every event retold there was shown to be preordained because it was foretold or said to be inevitable. That is so because it cannot be otherwise because a contradiction is experienced as simultaneously true even if contradictory. That is different from a mystery whereby a person wonders how a contradiction, such as the Virgin Birth or the father and son being coterminous could possibly be true. That is a dilemma while propaganda is purely verbal, words losing meaning in the emotional sense that contradictory things like squared circles are both true. There is only a political reason for assuring the truth of the contradiction as when Tachel Maddow asserts that Trump is weaker than after even though Congress does his bidding, he foments questionable wars and engages in unconstitutional interference in congressional mandates. She wants it to be true and so senses it as true even though she also knows what the facts are.
A good example of the same moral for different questions is another one of those Youtube narratives about World War II, though this one not about Japanese and German POWs resettled in stockades in North America, This one was about a rear admiral at the end of the war sent by submarine with men and supplies to hold a post in a remote island off Norway waiting notice to resume operations after being rescued because the Nazi regime was reasserting itself. That, of course, never happened. The incoming transmission never happened and two years later everyone there had died of starvation. A terrible Poe like story in which a redoubt had become a tomb. This was the opposite of a Robinson Crusoe story where isolated people triumph through ingenuity.
The moral of the story, however, as supposedly related by the commander in his diary before ingesting cyanide tablets to end the last life of the company was to say that he had been betrayed by the Nazi government because they hadn’t started fighting again or eventually prevailed over the allies. That was the same message that the POWs said as to the meaning of the war: betrayal rather than just defeat. The moral seemed added on, required by the message rather than by the story. There could have been a different message to associate with that story. Two soldiers had tried to escape the island but were killed by the turbulent waters. The radio instrument had broken and so could not have allowed for reverse engineering to make it into a transmitter whereby the group could surrender before they all died of starvation by 1947. These details seem a bit rigged but treat the story as a legend, which is an exaggeration for effect, like Paul Bunyan or John Henry. The real aspect of the story is that the men sent to that isolated place had remained organized and disciplined to the very end. No rebellions recorded, only slow starvation. And so a tribute to the dedication of people to their duty regardless of the outcome and perhaps an admirable German trait or perhaps German fatal flaw, but nevertheless different from the single message that human decency as combined with affluence is the key to American and Canadian societies,