World War 1 Propaganda Essay

British propaganda during World War 1

During the First World War Government propaganda played a crucial role during war and it also played and important role in the nation’s culture and society. Propaganda took form of posters, paintings, photographs, books, articles, leaflets, pamphlets, and newspapers and sometimes letters. It targeted specific audience such as women, young men, rich people and factory owners. Britain had a unique system of propaganda which affected Germany, they had an strategy that was able to discourage people and make Germany lose its power of propaganda, the strategy was to drop fake publicity that arrived to the people and made them believe false information. At first the recruiting posters were mostly texts with
Another technique they started applying was the demonization of German people and Germany by social shaming techniques, the poster tried to provoke guilt and people started realizing that the posters had become especially invidious, on 1915 people started criticizing this propaganda system which got to the point that in October the effectiveness in the recruitment effort was questioned. Fifty- four million copies of two hundred different posters were produced during wartime. The war posters were never meant to be historical documents but historians nowadays use those posters to explore the mindset of the people who believed in the rightness of the cause and the necessity to start the war. Going back t government propaganda we need to know that the government needed to achieve some objectives, we can say that the most important one was the wartime recruitment department, other objective was to publish posters to influence people’s thoughts towards war. Government controlled the information that the public could know, it means that the government twisted the truth, people supported war because propaganda allowed them to believe war was worth fighting for and just to leave this completely clear government used propaganda in order to manipulate