PROPAGANDA’S WORK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 August 1941, Page 6

PROPAGANDA’S WORK

POST-WAR DISILLUSIONMENT. Much the greater' part of America’s deep dissilusionment about the last war and Versailles can be traced directly to the reckless way in which British and American propaganda, in that other war, created extravagant, impossible hopes in the minds of the plain people everywhere, writes Mr O. H. Taylor, of Harvard University, in discussing peace aims in the “Christian Science Monitor.” Disillusionment is the penalty of having cultivated illusions in the first place. To promise more than can be achieved, or to make reckless promises before careful study of what can be achieved, and encourage the people to make their sacrifices with light-hearted enthusiasm in the expectation of quickly gaining Utopia—to do these things is to play with men’s hearts and to court disaster. I believe that after this war is won America and Britain can go on and build a better world. It will not be Utopia, and its outlines will not be clearly visible to anyone until thousands of the best leaders have laboured in concert, hard and long, at the task of planning it. Constructive peace aims can be announced only at a future, more advanced, stage of the work now under way.