Race as a Military Propaganda Theme


URL: http://www.psywar.org/race.php

"During wartime psychological operations, propagandists often search for powerfully emotional themes and vulnerable groups within the enemy military and civilian populations. In other words, they search for a weakness in the enemy society that allows them to exploit and divide their forces.

American society has always carried with it the weakness of an early slave culture. Although in theory slavery has not existed since Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 (and that did not free all the slaves regardless of what is widely believed), a form of racism has continued to exist in the United States just as it does in many other countries around the globe.

The most visible and extreme example of American racism is the lynching of a black individual. Although I would question the accuracy of any numbers in regard to lynching, one that has been posted is 3,345 blacks killed between 1882 and 1968. Whites were sometimes lynched too. It is believed that there were 4,732 recorded lynchings between 1882 and 1951, although there were certainly many undocumented lynchings before and during that period. Most of the recorded lynchings occurred before 1930. The vast majority of lynchings took place in the South and the Border States, although lynchings were not unknown in the North and Midwest. About three-fourths of the victims were black."

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