- We do not want war.
- The opposite party alone is guilty of war
- The enemy is the face of the devil.
- We defend a noble cause, not our own interest.
- The enemy systematically commits cruelties; our mishaps are involuntary.
- The enemy uses forbidden weapons.
- We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous.
- Artists and intellectuals back our cause.
- Our cause is sacred.
- All who doubt our propaganda, are traitors.
Anne Morelli has summarized and systematized the contents of Arthur Ponsonby’s classic “Falsehood in War-Time” in “ten commandments of propaganda.”
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Anne Morelli did not invent the ten commandments of war propaganda herself. She gathered them from the work of the British Lord Arthur Ponsonby, deputy of the Labour Party in the House of Lords in the early last century. Ponsonby was opposed to Britain taking part in the First World War. A critic of the war rhetoric of his government, he tried to show how lies are spread and how the population was being dragged along in a war hype fed by hatred, national pathos, and populism. In ‘Falsehood in Wartime’, he described several essential mechanisms of war propaganda.