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The Economist reads


SIX BOOKS YOU DIDN’T KNOW WERE PROPAGANDA


GOVERNMENTS INFLUENCE A SURPRISING AMOUNT OF LITERATURE. SOME OF IT PRETTY GOOD

image: Landmark Media
Nov 3rd 2023
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“ALL ART is propaganda”, wrote George Orwell in 1940, “but not all propaganda is
art.” Few people would argue with the second part of that aphorism. There is
nothing artistic about the dreadful ramblings of “Mein Kampf”. But the first
seems true only if you are using a broad definition of propaganda. These days
great works of art rarely set out to serve the purposes of a government. They
may promote causes, but that is not normally why people esteem them. The books
on this list, however, partially vindicate the first part of Orwell’s assertion.
Governments or ideological groups either encouraged their authors to write them
or promoted their writings for political ends. During the cold war Western
intelligence agencies subsidised authors, sometimes very good ones. The CIA set
up literary magazines in France, Japan and Africa. One purpose was to counter
censorship by autocrats. Another was to make global culture friendlier to
Western aims. British intelligence services commissioned works of fiction that
supported empire. Some writers consciously offered their pens to the state;
others did not realise that governments or groups would promote their work. Here
are six books, all by authors of merit, that are works of propaganda in one way
or another.

Rudyard Kipling’s role as a propagandist for the British empire is often
forgotten. British intelligence recruited the author during the first world war
to write fiction that sought to undermine Indian nationalism. In 1916 James
Dunlop Smith, a British official, sent Kipling the private letters of Indian
soldiers fighting in France. Smith asked Kipling to rewrite them to erase any
pro-Indian or revolutionary sentiment. The Saturday Evening Post, an American
magazine, published four between May and June 1917. (Three appeared in the
London Morning Post.) Kipling put his name to them only when he packaged them
together in a book, “The Eyes of Asia”. The author told Dunlop Smith that in
rewriting the letters he had “somewhat amplified the spirit [he] thought [he]
saw behind” them. In fact, his revisions were more inventive than that. In
turning the soldiers’ epistles into fiction he sanitised them. He excised
complaints like “we are like goats tied to a butcher’s stake”, and inserted
admiring descriptions of Britain as filled with “gilt furniture, marble, silks,
mirrors”. British intelligence liked what it read. Kipling asked Dunlop Smith
whether he found any “error in caste or mental outlook in the characters”. It
appears he did not. Many readers have admired what one critic (writing about the
novel “Kim”) called Kipling’s “positive, detailed and non-stereotypic portrait”
of Indian people. His role as a propagandist clouded his vision.

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