I’ve been reading a bit about World War I (long story how that happened). The subject is really quite fascinating in a tragic sort of way, and there are occasional disturbing resonances between that time and today.
For instance, propaganda.
Of course, propaganda then was far less sophisticated and far less intrusive than it is today, but the governments did see the benefits of controlling what their populations learned of the enemy and of the governments’ own conduct.
The need for propaganda intensified as the war dragged on. It had been expected to last weeks or months (no one was foolish enough to claim “days or weeks”), but it continued for years with no end in sight, and people had to be encouraged to keep feeding their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers into its maw.
The propaganda backfired, though. To quote a book I read called A World Undone,
People everywhere were being told that this war was no continuation of politics by other means, no traditional struggle for limited objectives. It was a fight to the death with the forces of evil, and the stakes were survival and civilization itself. It is no simple thing to make people believe such things and later persuade them to accept a settlement based on compromise.
The results of all the propaganda would be tragic. By raising the stakes of the war beyond the limits of reason, the propagandists ensured that whichever side lost would feel terribly, irredeemably wronged. And that whichever side won would find it difficult to deal rationally with the populations it had defeated.
I doubt our modern propagandists, who throw around accusations of Naziism and white supremacy, see any lessons to be learned from World War I.