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p The use of socio-psychological stereotypes is of supreme importance to the bourgeoisie in its manipulations to bolster the bourgeois value orientation and fight the teaching of communism.

p The socio-psychological stereotype is an attitude, firmly entrenched in social psychology, to matching or similar phenomena, facts, people, and so on (for instance, a stereotype Englishman has reddish hair and is imperturbable). This phenomenon is on the borderline, as it were, of all forms of psychical generalisations, being their most general expression, the sum of personal and social experience on the one hand, and the influence of definite forms of ideology and definite systems of culture, on the other. The stereotype settles in the human memory and is, in the long run, shared by many people as an emotional sensation. This 306 sensation affects many people (simultaneously or at different times) under the impact, in the process of communication, of symbols that necessarily evoke an image and which are similarly assessed by them and given a synonymous, though not always coincidental, sense.

p The synthetic character of the socio-psychological stereotype is seen in a coinciding reaction to an external social fact: whether it is important or not, positive or negative, just or unjust, advantageous or disadvantageous.

p As the sum of resultant diverse experience, both personal and social, and as a kind of reflection of the value orientations prevailing in the mass consciousness, the stereotype is unusually stable, inflexible and highly resistant to new views, notions and assessments. In order to restructure, shatter or destroy it, all—or, in any case, most—of its components must be modified. That is what makes the struggle for new values so complex. That is why depreciated ideals cling so tenaciously to life despite the obvious crisis of the bourgeois consciousness, above all of its basic values. Life in capitalist society is still unable to destroy all the components of the stereotype of individualism or build up the image of true collectivism.

p The bourgeois ideologists and propagandists are therefore endeavouring to construct images of attractive individualism and repellent collectivism. The implantation of these emotion-charged stereotypes in mass consciousness through capitalist-nurtured habits, prejudices, illusions and spontaneous feelings and moods provides a guarantee for the preservation of the bourgeois way of life. The construction of spurious stereotypes, where emotion suppresses the rational and cognitive, and the development of ways of manipulating minds with the aid of these stereotypes are a method of bourgeois propaganda.

p The stereotypes cultivated by bourgeois propaganda divert people from an objective, scientific understanding of the deep-lying crisis processes, social contradictions and class conflicts hidden behind the facade of capitalism and push 307 them into ill-considered, hasty conclusions and actions. They make them easy prey to delusive suggestions, whose aim is to compel them to follow the ruling circles of the capitalist countries blindly.

p Imperialist propaganda, designed to delude people, uses stereotypes that are particularly close to the lowest level of human psychology and spontaneously evoke elementary emotional sensations—and the more primitive they are (fear, hatred, envy), the better. These stereotypes are most easily stirred, manifest themselves most turbulently and lend themselves poorly to inner self-control. These emotion-charged stereotypes help to sustain the bourgeois way of thinking and life by erecting a wall of unreceptivity to anti-capitalist views in the minds of rank-and-file members of society. A low level of spiritual culture, artificially maintained by the ruling circles of the capitalist countries, is a prerequisite to the dissemination and assertion of these stereotypes.

p As a psychical element, the stereotype embraces the unity of two opposites—knowledge and attitude, of which one or the other prevails.

p The content put into a stereotype is extremely important. It may express essential links of phenomena, the basic, typical features and specifics of events and people. However, if it becomes the main, dominant element in the consciousness, a stereotype may prevent understanding essential links, features and specifics and rivet attention on links, features and specifics that are inessential, superficial and casual. These stereotypes catch only what is most garish and conspicuous, what produces an external effect and stirs emotions most strongly, exciting the most stormy reaction in people’s minds.

p Anti-communist propaganda eagerly utilises this reaction. It makes use of the various spontaneous, “blind” feelings that are characteristic of people who have not mastered profoundly scientific forms of ideology. Feelings of this kind are directed into the needed channel, displaced and artificially attributed to the object of ideological attacks. 308 Moreover, the various stereotypes are used for demagogic purposes.

p This was the socio-psychological mechanism that was used by imperialist propaganda in 1967-1968 in instigating the Czechoslovak people to rise against the very foundations of socialism in their country. In Czechoslovakia there was objective discontent with the unsatisfactory course of socialist construction. With verbiage about a desire to help Czechoslovakia build “genuine socialism”, the British Broadcasting Corporation, Deutsche Welle, Radio Free Europe and other Western radio stations urged the Czechoslovak people to attack Communists, incited Czechs against Slovaks, and Slovaks against Czechs, and provoked acts of sabotage, acts that were detrimental to the stability and strength of socialist society.

p As we have noted, the predominance of the emotional, “committed”, appraising element in the stereotype is what makes it a socio-psychological phenomenon. Had it been governed by knowledge and a sober evaluation, it is quite evident that it would have been a purely ideological phenomenon.

p In the stereotype “better dead than Red” the meaning is given in concentrated form. It does not offer any deep reflection of life, and its purpose is to create only an illusory, artificial background, a real sense of specific failures and a negative reaction from the environment. Combined, this gives a momentary reaction in a definite direction, namely, that it is better to keep one’s distance, that it is better to condemn, that it is better to be of any other colour. An attitude is at once formed to everything associated with “Reds”, “Pinks” and “Light-Pinks”, with “Bolshevik”, “Communist” and “Soviet”, with everything that may be associated with these concepts.

p Anti-communist propaganda makes wide use of this relative ease in shaping false stereotypes, for this allows it, for instance, to divert people from pressing problems and concentrate their attention on secondary issues. The propaganda 309 media are in an exclusive position in a situation where people are ignorant of the problems and facts on which their destiny depends, and have no source of personal information. Essentially, any verisimilar version of events broadcast or set in print acquires the character of an indisputable fact. Let us emphasise, it does not have to be truthful. It is enough that it is accepted for the truth. And once that happens it is assured a place among the notions that, stretching in a row and relying on each other, form a new stereotype or a new variety of an old stereotype.

p As regards spurious information on questions that easily square with proliferated stereotypes, bourgeois propaganda is confident of success. In all the NATO countries, when military budgets are debated, propaganda, as if by a command, raises a howl about a “Soviet threat”, mysterious Soviet submarines off the shores of these countries, and so on.

p Let us recall by analogy how rumours are manufactured, how panic is sown, how an electrified atmosphere of mass hysteria is momentarily created. People do not know the truth, but the need for any, at least some, explanation of what is happening blunts critical perception, especially as the bourgeois propagandists have learned to dress any lie with verisimilar demagoguery and attune it to people’s knowledge and outlook. “One can lie in two cases: if you are never caught and if exposure comes long after you have achieved the desired result”—this Goebbels principle is much in vogue among bourgeois propagandists, not only among journalists but also among the ideologists of psychological warfare.

p False stereotypes are easily shaped not only in situations where people are confused and disturbed. They are hatched just as easily in a normal situation if they are based on existing norms of perception built into broader standardised image-stereotypes that have sunk deep roots in people’s minds.

p The superficiality of the notions locked into false stereotypes makes it possible to pass the secondary for the 310 primary, the insignificant for the essential, create an erroneous impression of a familiar but not studied object, and so on.

p The exploiting classes have been using this method from time immemorial. There have been innumerable instances when having brought their country to an impasse, rulers, whether slave-owners, feudal lords or bourgeois, looked for salvation in predatory wars, in adventures alien to the masses, in the kindling of racial and nationalist passions. Other nations or social groups were branded enemies. To arouse hostility for them they projected a slogan whose constant repetition created a stereotype image.

p Take the example of Germany under the nazis. The Hitlerite ideologists declared the German Jews enemies of the German people, the cause of all the countless calamities that befell the Weimar Republic, especially during the economic crisis of 1929-1933. All the sins of capitalism were attributed to them and, in addition, they were accused of lacking patriotism. The nazis succeeded in rallying a considerable number of philistines in Germany to the banner of antiSemitism. These people believed that Hitler was out to liberate the German nation from exploitation, which nazi propaganda projected as being embodied by the Jewish capitalist, the Jew “sucking” the blood of the German nation. The petty bourgeoisie and the social forces linked with them, who formed the mainstay of Hitlerism, did not, for example, see that the persecution of the Jews was playing into the hands mainly of the richer and more powerful Aryan capitalist-exploiters. The petty-bourgeois element of Germany took the demagogic bait only because the stereotype of the capitalist drummed into it by propaganda was greatly impoverished as solely the image of the Jewish capitalist. In this stereotype the “patriotism” of the magnates of the Ruhr and the Rhineland, which boiled down to the protection and multiplication of their wealth at the expense of their competitors, the working people and the petty bourgeoisie, was given out as part of the interests of the German people, of every ordinary German.

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p With equal facility imperialist propaganda in Germany of that time created an image of the “communist threat” that was attractive to the same petty-bourgeois philistines. The duality of these strata’s social condition, which Lenin had repeatedly warned about and which is explained by the position of the petty bourgeois as a potential capitalist, allowed the nazi ideologists to appeal to their class “ subconsciousness”. The fear of being deprived of private property— small, insignificant but “my own”—and the fear of having to subordinate their individualism to the communist norms of collectivism closed the eyes of millions of petty bourgeois, the pillar of Hitlerism, to the fact that the Fiihrer’s anticommunist slogans were hypocritical lies and pure demagogic verbiage.

p These false slogans—stereotypes of anti-communism and anti-Semitism designed to deceive the masses and subordinate millions of petty-bourgeois elements to national socialism—strengthened Hitler’s social base.

p With time socio-psychological stereotypes take their place among all the established norms, customs, rules and notions sanctioned by social requirements and social practice and taken for granted. Constant repetition for an unchanging audience turns stereotypes consonant with the established socio-psychological patterns into analogues.

p As an example, let us refer to social life in the United States of America. In no other country of the capitalist world, except, perhaps, Britain, are traditions, fossilised thought and fixed social standards and relations cherished so highly. All this is built into one broad stereotype—the “American way of life”—so broad that it becomes diffused. This stereotype is the foundation onto which it is possible to graft innumerable daughter-stereotypes, which have the appearance of being habitual and part of the value- normative system of education. It is only necessary to find or create the means and excuse for graphically tying these new stereotypes in with the principal, foundation stereotype.

p This was precisely how in the USA the stereotypes fitting 312 into the cliché “better dead than Red” were formed and put in circulation. For many decades it was dinned into the heads of the American people that the Communists were imperilling their welfare and fighting all the ideals of US society, the ideals to which the average American would subscribe. Special emphasis was placed on peddling the thought that the Communists were enemies of individualism, the prime American value.

p Trials that received nationwide coverage were inspired in order to discredit the Communists and the Communist Party of the USA and reinforce the negative stereotype created against them at the height of the cold war. At these trials phoney witnesses charged the American Communists with unpatriotic, un-American activity in favour of a “foreign power”. The Communists headed the lists of “un-American” organisations that were known to every schoolboy. As persons allegedly opposed to the American way of life, the Communists are, under the McCarran-Wood Internal Security Act, barred from government institutions and the defence industry. The Taft-Hartley Labour Management Relations Act bars the Communists from trade union leadership.

p The fabricated “un-Americanism” of the Communist Party of the USA has received such wide publicity that the ordinary American feels he had better have nothing to do with anything that contains even a hint of communism, especially as this is linked with deprivation of material well-being and with persecution. It is no secret that in the USA special concentration camps were built for the Communists and their sympathisers to be used “in case of an emergency”.

p Here we have a case of “substitution” of stereotypes that is typical of imperialist propaganda. This happens when new notions begin to be propounded under the guise of habitual stereotypes with an established content. For this stereotypes, as social images of multiform phenomena that cannot always be described in one word, are given a new content or a new interpretation of the former content, and the attitude and 313 feeling fostered by a customary stereotype to an object are transferred toward a similar or entirely different object.

p This was precisely how the concept “genuine socialism” was manipulated by anti-communist propaganda. Its content and meaning were distorted. It was turned into a typical bourgeois (or petty-bourgeois) notion, and as a stereotype it was used for the propagation of the traditional values of individualism.

p The invention of illusory stereotypes has become a major method of bourgeois propaganda precisely by virtue of these objective specifics of the stereotype as a socio-psychological phenomenon. It opens the way to the manipulation of the mass mind by diverting the working people from a reasonable, critical approach to life. In the practice of Western propaganda stereotypes are becoming the guides of mass behaviour when, by playing on passions and emotions, they neutralise man’s intrinsic ability to think intelligently.^^2^^ As seen by the proponents of “social control”, people with insular views, who are unassuming and have no attraction for anything outside their direct requirements and interests, outside their direct environment, are the ideal targets of propaganda. It is not difficult to suggest to these people that one thing is good and another bad, and they, “saving” time and energy, are happy to file the few concepts in their minds with the aid of familiar stereotype symbols.

p The bourgeoisie has accumulated vast experience of deluding and misleading people in this manner, and has learned to apply this experience in a great diversity of forms.

p The audience in socialist countries differs in having higher cultural standards and a broader outlook, and of course an incomparably higher ideological consciousness. Taking these into consideration the leaders of the anti- socialist ideological war resort to different ways and methods of employing cliches than they use in their home propaganda.

p In their anti-socialist propaganda the imperialists have adopted the line of discrediting the way of life in the 314 socialist countries. But fearing to come out openly in view of the high cultural level of the audience in these countries, its broad outlook and keen ideological awareness, they are trying to achieve this goal indirectly. They are setting up a system of false stereotypes that together form the image: “The West is the promised land with a carefree life and unlimited freedom.” Underlying this image is the striving to create in the minds of the people in the socialist countries a positive (or at least tolerant) attitude to the bourgeois way of life, a way of life embedded in the psychology of entire social groups. In the calculations of the bourgeoisie, this attitude must evolve into a negative attitude to the socialist way of life. In order to expose and demolish this method of bourgeois propaganda it is necessary to ascertain the basic orientations along which it fabricates the specific stereotype images forming the foundation and skeleton of the main stereotype. This will make it possible to select the needed information to inhibit the creation of these false stereotypes among people in the socialist countries.

p For instance, the main stereotype that Western propaganda presses on Soviet young people is that in the West young people have an easy life. This stereotype “(easy, carefree, entertaining life in the West”) is offered in parallel with the stereotype that “a spirit of rebellion is inherent in young people” (in other words, if young people do not rebel there is no freedom of self-expression in society).

p These stereotypes take into consideration the specific interests of young people (desire of entertainment) and its specific mood (striving for self-expression). By accentuating these points, the bourgeois propagandists respond to the fact that young people are inclined to be more susceptible to emotional than to rational influences, that lacking the necessary knowledge, life experience and settled views, young people are inclined towards hasty judgements and conclusions, and may succumb easily to the lure of simple solutions and ways of satisfying their requirements.

p In order to forestall and nullify the creation of such 315 stereotypes it is necessary not only to refute and discredit the main arguments underlying the build-up of these stereotypes. It is extremely important to give the masses a credible and (this is very essential) more vivid notion of the subject than that given by the adversary. Moreover, it is important to explain why bourgeois propaganda is endeavouring to proliferate precisely this and not some other stereotype. For example, young people must be told how the class enemy is trying to exploit their age and other specifics.

p The higher a person’s intellect, the broader his world outlook, the better his knowledge of the question, and the more stable his convictions, especially ideological convictions, the clearer, more realistic and objective is his concept of the stereotype of the object with all its merits and demerits.

p And, conversely, a narrowness of outlook in cognitive, ideological and political matters produces an impoverished, primitive, limited, subjective view of the subject, hidden by a stereotype image.

p The more precise a person’s knowledge of his (and his class’s) place in society’s life, the richer his inner world and imagination and the more profound his knowledge of the subject, the more versatile and omniform is his picture of the phenomenon mirrored in general outline in a stereotype, the more freely he operates with the concept built into it and the less place there is for biassed, superficial and unconsidered assessments and conclusions.

p The higher the level of a person’s education, information and consciousness, the better is his understanding of whose interests propaganda fosters. Vagueness about the content of a stereotype and the system of value-norms distorts the vision of the true picture and allows hostile class ideas to infiltrate into a person’s consciousness.

p However well defined and widespread the pathological tendencies and phenomena in the social psychology of capitalist society on which the reactionary forces rely and play under the slogans of anti-communism, these tendencies and 316 phenomena constitute only one aspect of the destiny of capitalism.

p The other aspect is linked with the emergence and growth of progressive elements and tendencies in the consciousness of millions of people in capitalist countries, with the struggle for social progress, peace and the democratic rights of working people, against fascism and militarism. A prominent role in the progressive development of this consciousness is played by the growing political, ideological and moral prestige of the world socialist system.

History’s inexorable logic is leading to the awakening of socialist tendencies in the minds of millions of people, to the growth of anti-capitalist feeling, to the enhancement of scientific socialism’s standing. This logic is shattering the prejudices, illusions and “converted” forms of consciousness, which the reactionary forces in the imperialist states are trying to utilise.