World War 2 Vs Propaganda

If a person were to see a picture of an adorable puppy, what would he do? What if the image showed the aftermath of a bloody battle? Images and pictures produce an immediate and powerful response within a person's brain, and consequently this is why visual propaganda is so powerful. Some who live with more social freedoms like to believe that propaganda is less effective than it actually is because they can recognize the biases within it, and that propaganda is different because of the moral messages it holds. However, visual propaganda is essential to swaying public opinion during times of war, and fundamentally there are no differences between propaganda produced by different countries. Propaganda can be loosely defined as the spreading …show more content…
The Nazis are notorious for their intense propaganda campaigns that enveloped every aspect of German society; for example, they had a Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, a Ministry of Science, Education, and Popular Culture, and the Reich Chamber of Culture (Axelrod, "Propaganda"). All of these organizations broadcast anti-Allied propaganda and strictly regulated the information that was released to the public, which additionally caused a grave effect known as mithridatization. Mithridatization occurs when a propagandist shovels massive quantities of propaganda into the many mouths of the public, and after "having suffered too many propaganda shocks, [the public] becomes accustomed and insensitive to [it]," which means that the Germans had to produce more intense propaganda in order to get a reaction (Ellul). However, this intense propaganda also became so much a part of the people that they needed it to function, and thus they began to believe and spout forth the ideas presented to them to fill the void that the propaganda left within them (Ellul). Similarly, Great Britain had several agencies that disseminated propaganda domestically and abroad, too. The Department of Propaganda to Enemy Countries created radio broadcasts and used airborne pamphlet drops in the hope of turning citizens in Axis controlled territories against their rulers. Also, the British Ministry of Information, which operated through all forms of media, had the responsibility of creating and spreading it domestically to influence the minds of the people and make them believe in its cause by inundating them with propaganda (Axelrod, "Propaganda"). The United States also had several propaganda agencies of its own, but the most important was the Office of War