The Basis of Future Operations
ning of 1918 onwards, propaganda worked ever more clearly for the social revolution, side by side with the political revolution. The war was painted as being waged by the upper ten thousand at the expense of the workers, and the victory of Germany as the workers' misfortune.
The enemy propaganda and Bolshevism, which aimed at a world revolution, were working for the same ends in Germany. England gave China opium ; our enemies gave us the revolution, and we accepted the poison and distributed it as the Chinese distribute opium.
While Entente propaganda was doing ever more harm to the German people and the army and navy, it succeeded in maintaining the determination to fight in its own countries and armies, and in working against us in neutral countries.
Responsibility for the war, the Belgian atrocities, the ill-treatment of prisoners, our political immorality and treachery, our mendacity and brutality, despotism in Prussia, the enslavement of the German people, all these reproaches, cleverly invented for the benefit of the campaign of lies against us, had the greatest effect all over the world. Side by side with these were the catchwords of the fight for democracy against militarism, autocracy and the Junker, of the war for civilization and for the freedom of the smaller nations, and other phrases of the sort, idealized and of infinite effect on men who do not see too clearly. The public opinion of the world was mesmerized by them. For the American soldiers the war became, as it were, a crusade against us.
In the neutral countries we were subjected to a sort of moral blockade, The way to the soul of the neutrals was barred to us. We did not know how to open it. We alone did wrong; everything that the Entente did was morally right and the obvious course to follow. Germany was the world-oppressor, and the policy of the Entente, and that alone, was pursuing true moral aims, at once freeing the world and making it happier. In neutral countries, which now must know the truth, we lost all credit, while that of the enemy rose immeasurably. We had cm friends, it is true, but they had no influence.
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