p The struggle for peace at the present stage is multiform in character. An important aspect of this struggle is the repulsion of what in the US is now called "psychological warfare", which includes the propaganda of war.

p In conditions of intensified ideological struggle the ruling quarters in the West spare nothing in their bid to weaken or else erode the socialist world. "Resorting to lies and slander," the resolution of the June (1983) Plenary Meeting of the CPSU Central Committee stressed, "bourgeois propaganda is attempting to tarnish the socialist system, and to undermine the socio-political and ideological unity of our society.”  [315•1 

p The escalation of war propaganda should be examined together with the intensified aggressiveness of US imperialism. Forms of propaganda such as the campaign concerning a "Soviet military threat", the hullabaloo surrounding the “dissidents” and "human rights in the socialist countries", accusing the USSR of "international terrorism", subversive actions, which in effect signify interference in the internal affairs of other countries with the aim of impairing socialism, alternate with attempts to discredit the anti-war, above all the anti-missile movement in Western Europe, outright calls for a war against socialism and a virulent slander campaign designed to facilitate the preparation for and the launching of such a war. This propaganda is a direct consequence of the policy of the Reagan administration towards the USSR. It is based, writes The Washington Post, "on forcing a change in the Soviet system; on achieving military superiority; on name-calling and icy indifference to anything short of capitulation to American terms.”  [315•2 

p Propaganda has long been used as a means of preparation for war.

p The imperialists began setting up centralised state propaganda agencies during World War I.

p At that time the US imperialists were already playing the leading role in the dissemination of such propaganda. "If the great generalissimo on the military front was Foch, the great generalissimo on the propaganda front was Wilson," wrote Harold Lasswell, a prominent US specialist on propaganda.  [316•1 

p President Woodrow Wilson’s hypocritical phraseology, which masked the plunderous plans of the US imperialists, was fully disclosed by Lenin. The chief characteristic of Wilson’s propaganda—its pharisaical mask which covered the rapacious aspect of militarism, its rabid hatred of the socialist country—is inherent in present-day US propaganda.

p When analysing the US conception of propaganda, Lasswell emphasised that the US already during that period considered it one of the three chief means of preparing for and conducting war, along with economic and military means. ,

p In the interim between the world wars the imperialist states, above all the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis, conducted active ideological preparation for new acts of aggression. Its chief instruments were anti-Soviet slander and the propaganda of militarism.

p Hitlerite propaganda, as was established at the Nuremberg trial, which tried the chief German war criminals, greatly facilitated the creation of conditions leading to the emergence and fostering of the Hitlerites’ crimes.

p The propaganda of war in Italy and Japan was also conducted by a huge state apparatus and hundreds of fascist organisations.

This short excursion into the past is necessary to show how the measures now being adopted by the White House for the formation and wide-scale reconstruction of the propaganda apparatus have followed and continue to follow tendencies long in evidence, especially those typical of the period of the US-launched cold war.