Propaganda During World War One

¶ … war can never truly be called a humane practice, the atrocities of World War One were in many ways unprecedented. The program of "total war" that dominated military discourse enabled and in many cases actively advocated the killing of civilians, something that had not before been considered traditional military strategy. Moreover, significant technological developments in warfare made it possible to annihilate large numbers of people at once. Propaganda campaigns became integral to the "total war" theater.

Atrocity propaganda was "employed on a global scale" during the first world war to serve four key functions: the mobilization of hatred against the enemy, to "convince" the population of their own righteousness in the cause, to enlist support from otherwise neutral parties or countries, and to strengthen support for allies.[footnoteRef:1] During the peak of the age of nationalism, national identities fueled the power of propaganda during the First World War, making the enforcement of ethnicity, race, and nationalism underlying functions of political propaganda.

Coupled with new technologies, the result was the beginning of horrifically inhumane military campaigns. [1: David Welch. "Depicting the Enemy." British Library. Accessed: http://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/depicting-the-enemy] During the First World War, civilians were proposed to be targets based on their race, ethnicity, or national identity. It was proposed, through the aggressive use of propaganda, that anyone from target populations was inherently an enemy who could not be trusted and who deserved-indeed needed to die -- in the interests of national defense.

This xenophobic mentality plays itself out in the posters circulating at the time, such as the "Arch Enemy" poster from Russia and the cartoon maps depicting stereotypes of people from different nations.[footnoteRef:2] By caricaturizing people, targeting ethnicity and nationality in this way, a campaign of dehumanization had begun. No longer were civilians innocent people, but rather, they had been turned into the epitome of evil on the part of their enemies.

As a result of dehumanization, soldiers and military leaders alike could become desensitized to the campaign of total war. Propaganda created nationalistic and xenophobic mentalities that propagated racism. [2: Welch. "Depicting the Enemy."] Total war meant the annihilation of villages and the wiping out of entire populations. Primary source accounts testify as to the horrors of the First World War.

One observer wrote, "it would seem that there could not have been enough boiling water in all Belgium, even had it all been flung at German soldiers, to make it a military necessity to burn, to slay, to sack and to pillage on such a scale."[footnoteRef:3] Through the use of propaganda, pillaging became normalized. The introduction of new weapons and technologies like planes and tanks made it so that large-scale pillaging was possible.

As Fitzgerald points out, the First World War gave rise to the first uses of chemical warfare: "The first large-scale use of a traditional weapon of mass destruction (chemical, biological, or nuclear) involved the successful deployment of chemical weapons during World War I."[footnoteRef:4] The general population had no means of defending itself from such inhumane practices as the use of chemical weapons. Furthermore, World War One changed the norms of war so that chemical and other types of weapons of mass destruction would be used more.