The History of Psychological Warfare. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
the Genghis Khan—effected his Mongol conquests with "limitless hordes" of wild Tatar horsemen, who flooded the world by weight of sheer numbers. Recent research shows that the sparsely settled countryside of Inner Asia could not have produced populations heavy enough to overwhelm the densely settled areas of the great Mongol periphery by weight alone. The empire of the Khan was built on bold military inventiveness—the use of highly mobile forces, the full use of intelligence, the coordination of half-global strategy, the application of propaganda in all its forms.6 The Mongols were fighting the Sung Dynasty in China and the Holy Roman Empire in Prussia four thousand miles apart when neither of their adversaries knew (in more than rumor) that the other existed. The Mongols used espionage to plan their campaigns and deliberately used rumor and other means to exaggerate accounts of their own huge numbers, stupidity, and ferocity. They did not care what their enemies thought as long as the enemies became frightened. Europeans described light, hard-hitting numerically inferior cavalry as a "numberless horde" because Mongol agents whispered such a story in the streets. To this day most Europeans do not appreciate the lightness of the forces nor the cold intelligence of command with which the Mongols hit them seven centuries ago.
Genghis even used the spies of the enemy as a means of frightening the enemy. When spies were at hand he indoctrinated them with rumors concerning his own forces. Let the first European biographer of Genghis tell, in his own now-quaint words, how Genghis put the bee on Khorezm (Carizme):
And a Historian, to describe their Strength and Number, makes the Spies whom the King of Carizme had sent to view them, speak thus: They are, say they to the Sultan, all compleat Men, vigorous, and look like Wrestlers; they breathe nothing but War and Blood, and show so great an Impatience to fight, that the Generals can scarce moderate it; yet though they appear thus fiery, they keep themselves within the bounds of a strict Obedience to Command, and are intirely devoted to their Prince; they are contented with any sort of Food, and are not curious in the choice of Beasts to eat, like Mussulmen [Mohammedans], so that they are subsisted without much trouble; and they not only eat Swines-Flesh, but feed upon Wolves, Bears, and Dogs, when they have no other Meat, making no distinction between what was lawful to eat, and what was forbidden; and the Necessity for supporting Life takes from them all the Dislike which the Mahometans have for many sorts of Animals; As to their Number, (they concluded) Genghizcan's Troops seem'd like the Grasshoppers, impossible to be number'd.
In reality, this Prince making a Review of his Army, found it to consist of seven hundred thousand men. … 7
Enemy espionage can now—as formerly—prove useful if the net effect of it is to lower enemy morale. The ruler and people of Khorezm put up a terrific fight, nevertheless, despite their expectation of being attacked by wolf-eating wrestlers without number; but they left the initiative in Genghis' hands and were doomed.
However good the Mongols were in strategic and tactical propaganda, they never solved the problem of consolidation propaganda (see page 46, below). They did not win the real loyalty of the peoples whom they conquered; unlike the Chinese, who replaced conquered populations with their own people, or the Mohammedans, who converted conquered peoples, the Mongols simply maintained law and order, collected taxes, and sat on top of the world for a few generations. Then their world stirred beneath them, and they were gone.
The Blindness Of John Milton.
Moving across the centuries for an example, it is interesting to note that John Milton, author of Paradise Lost and of other priceless books of the English-speaking world, went blind because he was so busy conducting Oliver Cromwell's psychological warfare that he disregarded the doctors' warning and abused his ailing sight. And the sad thing about it was that it was not very good psychological warfare.
Milton fell into the common booby-trap of refuting his opponents item by item, thus leaving them the strong affirmative position, instead of providing a positive and teachable statement of his own faith. He was Latin Secretary to the Council, in that Commonwealth of England which was—to its contemporaries in Europe—such a novel, dreadful, and seditious form of government. The English had killed their king, by somewhat offhanded legal procedures, and had gone under the Cromwellian dictatorship. It was possible for their opponents to attack them from two sides at once. Believers in monarchy could call the English murderous king-killers (a charge as serious in those times as the charge of anarchism or free love in this); believers in order and liberty could call the British slaves of a tyrant. A Frenchman called Claude de Saumaise (in Latin form, Salmasius) wrote a highly critical book about the English, and Milton seems to have lost his temper and his judgment.
In his two books against Salmasius, Milton then committed almost every mistake in the whole schedule of psychological warfare. He moved from his own ground of argument over to the enemy's. He wrote at excessive length. He indulged in some of the nastiest name-calling to be found in literature, and went into considerable detail to describe Salmasius in unattractive terms. He slung mud whenever he could. The books are read today, under compulsion, by PhD. candidates, but no one else is known to find them attractive. It is not possible to find that these books had any lasting influence in their own time. (In these texts written by Milton in Latin but now available in English, Army men wearying of the monotonous phraseology of basic military invective can find extensive additions to their vocabulary.) Milton turned to disappointment and poetry; the world is the gainer.
The vocabulary of seventeenth-century propaganda had a strident tone which is, perhaps unfortunately, getting to be characteristic of the twentieth century. The following epithets sound like an American Legion description of Communists, or a Communist description of the Polish democrats, yet they were applied in a book by a Lutheran to Quakers. The title of the tirade reads, in part:
… a description of the … new Quakers, making known the sum of their manifold blasphemous opinions, dangerous practices, Godless crimes, attempts to subvert civil government in the churches and in the community life of the world; together with their idiotic games, their laughable action and behavior, which is enough to make sober Christian persons breathless, and which is like death, and which can display the lazy stinking cadaver of their fanatical doctrines. …
In its first few pages, the book accuses the Quakers of obscenity, adultery, civil commotion, conspiracy, blasphemy, subversion and lunacy.8 Milton was not out of fashion in applying bad manners to propaganda. It is merely regrettable that he did not transcend the frailties of his time.
Other Instances From History.
Innumerable other instances of propaganda in warfare and diplomacy could be culled out of history; these would not mean much if they were presented as mere story-telling. The cultural factors would have to be figured out; the military situation would need to be appraised in realistic terms; the media available for psychological warfare would have to be charted pretty carefully, before the instances would become usable examples. Here are some of the most promising topics:
Naval psychological warfare techniques used by the Caribbean pirates to unnerve prospective victims.
Cortez's use of horses as psychological disseminators of terror among the Aztecs, along with his exploitation of Mexican legends concerning the Fair God.
The failure of Turkish psychological warfare in the great campaigns of 1683 which left the issue one of purely physical means and cost Turkey the possible hegemony of central Europe.
The propaganda methods of the British East India Company in the conquest of India against overwhelming Indian numerical superiority. (Edmond Taylor mentions these in his Richer by Asia.)
The preventive psychological warfare system set up by the Tokugawa shoguns after 1636, which bottled up the brains of the Japanese through more rigorous control than has ever been established elsewhere over civilized people.
The field psychological warfare of the Manchus, who conquered China against odds running as much as 400 to one against them, and who used terror as a means of nullifying