With World War I an entire system of ideas how wars work collapsed. Suddenly it was no longer mostly soldiers who had to fight. War became an engagement of every day's life. Everybody got involved.
Propaganda therefore changed as well. The campaigns were no longer temporarily and recent but had to be planned for years. Who failed in organizing it or used the wrong keywords failed. Masters of modern propaganda became the British, whereas the Germans failed completely in the beginning.
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Disinformation was seen as an appropriate tool of politics and rhetoric in ancient Greece. Most of all persuasion was used, which then was considered a type of art.
Religion was (and in many ways still is) the best disinformer or manipulator; prophecies were constructed to manipulate the population. The important thing was to use emotions and more than anything else fear as a tool for manipulation. If the oracle of Delphi said a war was to fight and would be won, then the Greek population - because of religious motives - was prepared to fight that war.
Propaganda was not only used in wars but also in daily life to bring people together and create a nation.
But poets, playwrights and other artists were manipulating as well. Their pieces of literature and plays were full of political messages with different ideologies behind. In the way how theatre at that time was part of life, it can be understood easily that those messages had not only entertainment's character but also a lot of political and social influence.
A different and very famous part of disinformation in ancient Greek history was the story of
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Between the two World Wars the radio started becoming more and more important; as well in education (e.g.
By hearing unconsciously, without listening, while concentrating on something else, it is easy to spread ideas and emotions. This fact was taken advantage of.
The German Minister for Propaganda,
Radio Moscow, which started working in 1922, tried to intervene in innerstate-affairs in Britain as well as in other countries. The radio was supposed to push ahead the idea of communism.
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After World War II the importance of propaganda still increased, on the commercial level as well as on a political level, in the era of the Cold War. The propaganda institutions of the different countries wanted their people to think the right way, which meant, the national way. In the USA the McCarthy-era started, a totalitarian system in struggle against communism.
Cold War brought the era of spies with it, which was the perfect tool of disinformation. But the topic as a movie-genre seems still popular today, as the unchanged success of James Bond-movies show.
A huge net of propaganda was built up for threatening with the nuclear bomb: pretending that the enemy was even more dangerous than the effect of such a bomb.
And later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, disinformation found other fields of work, like the wars of the 1990s showed us.
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The German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and author believed in the duty to educate people (including children) politically. In the German radio he had a series where he tried to do this. These texts are most important for Radio work - even today. Still he is more famous for his critiques on literature and art. Benjamin immigrated to Paris in 1934 and killed himself in 1940 at the boarder between Spain and France as he was afraid to get caught by German troops.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), probably was the most influential German dramatist and
theoretician of the theater in the 20th century. During the existence of the Third Reich he fled from Germany to Scandinavia and to the USA, where he tried to go on with his work. In the 1950s he became director of the newly founded Berliner Ensemble, in East Berlin.
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Josef Goebbels (1897-1945) was Hitler's Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. He had unlimited influence on the press, the radio, movies and all kind of literary work in the whole Reich. In 1944 he received all power over the Total War. At the same time he was one of the most faithful followers of Hitler - and he followed him into death in 1945.