Why War Propaganda Always Works

Like erotic imagery, war propaganda activates the brain's most powerful, archaic circuitry.

In the 2004 film Troy, Brad Pitt plays a very pretty and very deadly Achilles. In Homer’s telling of the Trojan war, it started because the Trojan prince Paris stole the wife (Helen) of the Spartan king Menelaus. In reality, the war was probably fought for control of marine traffic entering the only entrance to the Dardanelles—i.e., the Greeks wanted to wrest control of this valuable maritime shipping lane from the Trojans.

Nevertheless, the erotic casus belli of the Homeric story strikes me as apt. In the same way that erotic imagery always works in selling products, war propaganda always works in persuading people to believe that their nation should participate in war.

Especially in the male brain, the arousal to fight seems to originate in the same neural circuitry as sexual arousal, and the closely related desire of young men to prove themselves in the eyes of young women.

Shortly after the British government declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914, young women were deployed in British cities to approach young men on the streets and ask them why—by all appearances—they hadn’t yet enlisted.

When a German U-Boat torpedoed the Lusitania—which was carrying over 4 million rounds of machine gun ammunition from the U.S. to Britain—the British government created potent propaganda using various imagery of drowned maidens and young mothers clutching their infants as they sank to the bottom of the Atlantic.

In the United States, various parties who wanted American participation in the war—especially banking interests—published equally potent propaganda to drum up fear and loathing of Germany.

No matter how many U.S. military adventures abroad fail and are later revealed to have been launched under false pretenses, large swaths of the American public can be easily manipulated to support yet another foolhardy and costly adventure. Humans are absolute suckers for war propaganda.