Censorship enables authoritarianism
The US government once believed that a free flow of news and information across borders was essential to international peace and freedom
Before the end of World War II, the US government believed that the free flow of news and information within and across borders was essential for maintaining peace, promoting freedom, and upholding democratic principles.
The key lesson from a dozen years of Nazi propaganda was not that the malign information existed. No, the key lesson at the time was that the willful disinformation and exploitation of misinformation and information gaps were enabled by the elimination of alternative voices by the National Socialists, as well as those who curried their favor. Newspapers, radio stations, academics, politicians, business owners, and the general public who spoke out against the party line to expose the lies, corruption, hypocrisy, failings, and inconsistencies of the regime were either bought out, threatened, or removed from the public discourse, either voluntarily or otherwise.
Such suppression or elimination of voices that told truth to power, that threatened a regime’s hold on people’s awareness and knowledge, was seen as a threat to US national security because it meant those regimes were not accountable to their people and could, and were likely to, threaten international relations.
The US response to this lesson was essentially threefold. I’ve described these lines of effort over the past two decades through writing on this Substack, as well as on my blog at mountainerunner.us, in published articles, lectures, conference presentations, and academic papers. The three were: technical, scientific, and educational exchanges to build mutual understanding, socio-economic capabilities, and state capacity; international organizations, from Bretton Woods to the UN, especially UNESCO; and informational programs, of which radio was a small part.
Regarding the information programs, with the Smith-Mundt Act in the news due to outright illogical, nonsensical, and demonstrably false claims, it is essential to understand a few key points. First, any person claiming the original legislation purposefully or intended to prevent the government from “propagandizing” the American public is flat wrong. They are projecting Sen. Fulbright’s attacks on USIA and VOA in 1972, reinforced by Sen. Zorinsky’s 1985 amendment to close a “loophole” of Fulbright’s amendment to the Smith-Mundt Act, backward in time, conveniently ignoring inconvenient facts and setting aside logic, the wording of the law, and how laws work. The postwar international information programs, beginning in September 1945, and subsequently authorized by the Smith-Mundt Act, were not “propaganda” in the modern use of the word, and whoever uses that word to describe these programs and their output, notably academics, without clarification, is guilty of misinformation, at the very least, as they reveal their ignorance of the domestic and foreign environment in which these efforts operated.
Second, the same illogical, nonsensical, and demonstrably false claims on the origin of the Smith-Mundt Act are applied to the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012. A narrative established through poor scholarship and officials asserting the false “firewall” was something it wasn’t, for bureaucratic reasons, including not to take action abroad, led to an accepted narrative that journalists and pundits found hard to resist. Add in Citizens United and the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and you have snake oil salesmen and disinformation entrepreneurs, somehow—again, based on illogically, nonsensically, and demonstrably false claims—asserting the rise of disinformation within the US is partly, if not mostly, the result of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012.
In 1944, the head of the Associated Press argued for the need to ensure “freedom of information” across borders after the war. “Every war of aggression in modern times has been preceded by distrust, then fear, and finally hatred, all created by a systematic poisoning of the news by the aggressor state.” With international freedom of information, he added, “there can never be another Goebbels.”
Information freedom was, even then, broader than the press. In December 1944, the nominee to be the State Department’s first assistant secretary of public affairs in charge of domestic and foreign information activities and the interchange of people and ideas, stated that, “It would not be too much to say that the foreign relations of a modern state are conducted quite as much through the instruments of public international communication as through diplomatic representation” abroad.
In precisely the same spirit, the State Department pushed for the words of UK Prime Minister Attlee to open the UNESCO Charter: “Wars begin in the minds of men, and it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” The value and vulnerability of an organization like UNESCO, intended at its founding to be a bulwark against authoritarianism, are remarkably similar to today’s information environment, with its variety of trusted (or merely digested) sources. This concern is reflected in the comment by the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs in 1946 that UNESCO could become a “hotbed of politics” because “Men will struggle to control it, for ideas are weapons.”
More later.
Image for the post header comes from a November 24, 1946, transcript in my collection:
