The Ethical Issues Involved with the Use of Propaganda in Wartime

He says that "there is no real point . . . in making moral judgments concerning whether propaganda is a 'good' or 'bad' thing; it merely is" (8). Ellul expresses a similar scene when he says that "whoever handles this instrument can be concerned altogether with effectiveness" (x). He says that propaganda by its very nature "is . . . an opening move for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false motives" and "must mask [its] true intentions" (58-59). Taylor says "an natural characteristic of propaganda is that it r bely tells the whole truth" (10).

With reference to the recitation of espionage, Winston Churchill said at the Tehran Conference in November, 1943, "In warfare-time,

truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies" (Brown 10). contendtime propaganda in support of secret activities involving outright lying and deception is commonplace in war. life-threatening examples are false rumors spread by the Greek maritime commander Themistocles about the size and disposition of his forces which helped the Greeks to thwarting the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. (Taylor 27-28). More recently, the British re-create an elaborate scheme of deception known as the simulacrum Cross System during World War II, which fooled the Nazis into believing that the allied invasion of France would not take place on the beach of Normandy (Weinberg 680). Few people would take issue with the ethics conglomerate in either

Ellul points out that war propaganda which incredibly distorts the truth can be counter-productive because "it can't prevail against facts that are massive and definite," such as the reality of the German defeat at Stalingrad (295).

Communist germ warfare propaganda during the Korean War flew in the face of common sense and convinced some listeners, at least in the West.

Mason, Alpheus T., ed. Free Government in the Making. New York: Oxford UP, 1948.

Taylor says that the Vietnam War was "the first war fought out in front a mass television audience" (269). In portray various Saigon regimes as fledgling democracies deserving of American military machine support, the American government opened up a believability gap "as a few journalists started to check the 'facts' issued by American sources in Saigon" and "found an increasingly wide strain" between official accounts and their own observations in the field (Taylor 269-270). The vivid images on television of the victims of napalm bombing, monks immolating themselves and Vietcong being assassinated by a South Vietnamese police official helped the North Vietnamese, " condescension inferior military equipment and technology, . . . to exploit democracy's cherished freedoms and its new love-affair with television" (Taylor 270).

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