Positive Images Certainly propaganda needs positive aspects as well: The art of circulating positive images even if the actual situation is unsuccessful, like in a war or before elections, when all opinion-polls are negative, is one which needs talent. Napoleon obviously possessed this talent. Another master of this was Adolf Hitler and the people working next to him. The way how he was portrayed as the father of the nation, the sensitive guide through that war - even at a moment when it should have been clear that there was nothing left to win for the Germans/Austrians in that war - is quite extraordinary and demonstrates a hard piece of work. But more than anything else it need the population's will to believe those propaganda-messages. And the Germans preferred to believe in Hitler than to look for another truth.

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Napoleon Napoleon I. (1769-1821) was French King from 1804-1815. He is regarded as the master of propaganda and disinformation of his time. Not only did he play his game with his own people but also with all European nations. And it worked as long as he managed to keep up his propaganda and the image of the winner. Part of his already nearly commercial ads was that his name's "N" was painted everywhere. Napoleon understood the fact that people believe what they want to believe - and he gave them images and stories to believe. He was extraordinary good in black propaganda. Censorship was an element of his politics, accompanied by a tremendous amount of positive images about himself. But his enemies - like the British - used him as a negative image, the reincarnation of the evil (a strategy still very popular in the Gulf-War and the Kosovo-War) (see Taylor, Munitions of the Mind p. 156/157).

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