This kind of mentality was found chiefly in the National Socialist and Communist states, and to a lesser degree in dictatorships such as Italy; by contrast, reactionary Japan was almost democratic. This mentality makes it possible for the ruler to control his own people enough to undertake "warfare psychologically waged." Without domestic fanaticism and domestic terror, governments have to fall back on "psychological warfare"--that is, the mere supplementing of politics and military operations by propaganda. It is vain to expect a free people in a free country to submit to such humiliating control, even for the purpose of winning a war. What made the psychological warfare of World War II peculiar was the fact that our enemies fought one kind of war ("warfare psychologically waged," or total war) and we fought them back with another. Theoretically, it is possible to argue that we had no business succeeding.
=The Pre-Belligerent Stages.= The propaganda-conscious Axis states had first to control their own people enough to wage aggressive war. They then had to split their possible enemies, to make piecemeal victory possible. They had to stay on good terms with the Soviet Union (Hitler till 1941; Japan till the last week of war). They had to frighten their immediate enemies while assuring their eventual enemies. This called for a great deal of propaganda.
Pre-belligerent operations required extensive use of "black" propaganda. Since their political systems aroused hostility and anger in audiences which they wished to address, the aggressors sought to disguise their propaganda. They used pacifist groups to keep the democracies from rearming. Militarist groups were encouraged to keep the democracies from undertaking domestic reforms or discussing military matters with Russia. Financial groups were contacted to preserve the fiction of normal international relations. Cultural groups were employed to preserve friendliness for their respective nationalities as such. The Japanese did a little global propaganda and for a while subsidized several magazines in this country, but in general they concentrated their main effort in the immediate area of their military operations.
It was the Germans who developed world-wide pre-belligerent propaganda to a fine art. They exploited every possible disunity which could contribute to the weakness of an enemy. They were not choosy about collaborators. If the Communist Party of the United States lent a hand (as it did between September, 1939 and June, 1941, terming the war "an imperialist war"; after Russia got in, the war was called "the democratic anti-fascist war"), the Nazis did not object. They willingly listened to men who had fantastic schemes for world peace and later used such men as aids in getting appeasement. They tried to rouse Catholics against Communists, Communists against democrats, Gentiles against Jews, whites against negroes, the poor against the rich, the rich against the poor, British against Americans, Americans against British--anyone against anyone, as long as it delayed action against Germany and weakened the enemy potential. They went to special pains to organize German-speaking minorities in non-German countries, but they never neglected using people who had no open connection with Naziism at all.