Your Country Needs You: Propaganda A Potent Weapon In ‘Total War’
Paris (AFP) Friday, February 21, 2014 4:56:26 AM
As the bombs and grenades ripped through the trenches, the Great Powers were also waging another deadly battle, using the power of words and images to recruit, cajole and shock in "the first modern propaganda war".
"Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?" wholesome children ask a red-faced father in one of Britain's most famous propaganda posters, playing on the shame that would haunt men who failed to sign up in their country's darkest hour of need.
And hundreds of thousands rushed to enlist, entranced by the brooding image of Lord Kitchener starring expectantly down at them with piercing eyes and bristling moustache and insisting: "Your country needs you."
While British propaganda, at least in the early stages of the War before conscription, was focused mainly on recruitment, Germany and France sought to bolster morale on the home front and in the trenches as thousands perished daily.
Propaganda in Germany tended to portray a battle between the brave and "superior" German soldier and an enemy caricatured as morally degenerate and physically inferior.
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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/02/21/your-country-needs-you-propaganda-a-potent-weapon-in-total-war/