When I was growing up, I heard about Hitler and Nazi Germany a great deal at a time when I was at a most impressionable age. The news media in this country had many stories about the burning of books, the Hitler Youth, the Gestapo, the SS, the Luftwaffe, and the Propaganda Ministry, run by Josep Goebbels. When you learn a word, you tend to think when you learned it was the first time in history it was ever used. I thought for a long time propaganda was a word unique to the totalitarian state of Nazi Germany.
The way we were being informed about the propaganda of the Nazis was in itself a form of propaganda. Propaganda is what might be termed an organized method of putting out information to prove a particular point of view, or to promote a particular idea, or set of ideas. If a particular set of ideas is proposed in some way to the public every day, in a variety of ways, over an over, with enough truth in it to make it acceptable, pretty soon the people who get that message every day begin to believe it. In the case of the Nazis, we were told if one tells a big enough lie, loudly enough, and long enough, people begin to believe it. That, we were told, is propaganda.
It helps to have a captive audience. In the case of the Germans, they were not allowed to get news from outside sources because that would put an element of doubt in their minds. The government had total control of what people heard on the radio, or read in their newspapers, and what kids learned in school. Whatever Goebbels put out was all there was to believe, and the German people eventually believed it. Those brave souls who knew enough to challenge the information were ferreted out by the Gestapo and either imprisoned, or "liquidated". That added an additional element...fear!
On our side, all the very worst descriptions available of the repressive methods of the Nazis, of which there was more than an ample supply, were used to turn us against them with a vengeance! Our people didn't have to work at that too hard because the Nazis were bestial! Any civilian resistance to them was crushed by their taking hostages and simply shooting them down in the streets, so people could see what happens to those who resist. Two men assassinated the second in command of the Gestapo, and it was learned they were from the Czech village of Lidice. The Nazis took all able bodied men from there and put them in labor camps, all younger women were put into brothels for the entertainment of Germans on the Eastern Front, and all the rest machined-gunned and buried in a common grave. Then the village was destroyed, burned, and covered over with dirt, then new maps issued of the area which did not show the location of Lidice! They literally erased a whole village from the map! U-boats would often torpedo a ship, then surface and machine-gun any survivors so they wouldn't have to rescue them and take them to port.
You probably have the idea about propaganda by now. It was an important psychological weapon in the war. The Axis had people who broadcast to the Allied troops throughout the war; Lord Haw Haw, Tokyo Rose, and some others. Those people always told our troops how badly it was going for them on the front, and how useless it was to keep fighting. Then they played sentimental music to make our people think of home. Americans in particular were thought to be sentimentalists, too soft to be formidable opponents. While the Axis Powers were considered masters of propaganda, we got the idea that our governments always told us the truth about everything. That, too, was propaganda.
The Soviets were very much the same as the Nazis in fact, but the communist propaganda claimed their form of existence was a "classless, stateless, democracy". Once we learned more about them, we added "Godless" to that description. The ideas of Marx were to produce a socialist society in which everyone worked according to their ability, and received according to their needs. Since most people did not know how to live in such a society, they would be guided by a dictatorship of the Proletariat until they learned to live under socialism. There was no time-frame attached to that dictatorship. They would be the educated elite who already knew how to live under socialism. In fact, that "Proletariat" was the ruling class, and they exerted the same totalitarian control over the people the Nazis did. Tass and Pravda were the "news agencies" - the equivalent of the propaganda ministry. The secret police had several names, but the most prominent one was the K.G.B. - the equivalent of the Gestapo. The Soviets also took the children of the people and put them into school where they were indoctrinated with the revised education system the Soviets had developed.
The point is, though they were mortal enemies, the Nazis and the Soviets ruled in very much the same fashion. Only the chosen few were allowed to profit from their industrial power in the fascist states of Germany and Italy. Only the Proletariat were allowed to enjoy the product of the labors of the many. Both systems were determined to conquer the world, and install their systems as the system of rule for all people. (A form of socialism.) The Germans would conquer key areas of the world, from which they could control the people within those areas. The communists would instigate "people's revolutions" in all countries and install people who would take their orders from Moscow.
Though we were always told that the 2 systems were diametrically opposed to each other, they were almost identical in the way they did things. In both, their goals were to rule the entire world with a socialist system, the Nazis being led by the superior Aryan Race, and the Communists being ruled by the "dictatorship of the Proletariat", their idea of the elite ruling class. In fact, socialism was the key word; both wanted to establish a world socialist order, with their leadership ruling the world.
Propaganda did not die with the defeat of the Axis Powers, nor the "defeat" of communism. Someone said after the U.S.S.R. collapsed there are no more communists to be afraid of. We are told the People's Republic of China is no longer a communist threat. We are told Cuba, under the leadership of Castro, is no longer a threat to our security. You have to remember the communist influence in Angola and South Africa. And Vietnam is still under the influence of communists. Make no mistake about it, there are still those around who would be happy to see the demise of the United States. We have other sources of information than the propaganda machine we have in our own country, the major media.
The reality of that statement has come to the fore with the stories about the false stories published by the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and particularly the lies put forth by C.B.S. and Dan Rather using fraudulent documents as their proof. Rather even said the documents may be a fraud, but what they said is the truth. Even Walter Cronkite was guilty of such propaganda when on a recent Larry King TV program he said the man who organized the Bush Campaign probably was responsible for late issuance of another Osama Tape. Propaganda should have some semblance of the truth to be accepted, but when such obvious falsehoods are put forth, it loses its effectiveness.
It becomes necessary for us all to learn the truth about what is happening around us. One of the measures is to find the information from at least three sources, or rely on what you see for yourself. Depend on reliable sources for basic information, and check out what you get from them.