ys "an essential characteristic of propaganda is that it rarely tells the whole truth" (10).
With reference to the use of espionage, Winston Churchill said at the Tehran Conference in November, 1943, "In war-time,
truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies" (Brown 10). Wartime propaganda in support of clandestine activities involving outright lying and deception is commonplace in war. Good examples are false rumors spread by the Greek naval commander Themistocles about the size and disposition of his forces which helped the Greeks to defeat the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. (Taylor 27-28). More recently, the British staged an elaborate scheme of deception known as the Double Cross System during World War II, which fooled the Nazis into believing that the Allied invasion of France would not take place on the coast of Normandy (Weinberg 680). Few people would take issue with the ethics involved in either case.
In modern warfare, propaganda entails the manipulation of the mass mind on the home front of each belligerent power, among neutrals and the enemy. In totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the art of propaganda took on a much more "scientific character," to use Ellul's phrase, and at the time had terrifying effects (5). Ellul says that "the aim of propaganda is no longer to modify ideas but to stimulate action" (25). He points out that the condition of the masses in modern states provides fertile ground for the psychological manipulation of their collective psyche. Ellul argues that the processes of urbanization, industrialization and other forms of technological progress have rendered modern people "more susceptible to suggestion, more credulous, more easily excited" (143). At the same time, according to Ellul, the development of the mass media and other means of communication have facilitated efforts to tap deep unconscious forces which ar...