Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part 1 The National War Aims Committee
- Part 2 Patriotism for a Purpose: NWAC Propaganda
- 4 Presentational Patriotisms
- 5 Adversaries at Home and Abroad: The Context of Negative Difference
- 6 Civilisational Principles: Britain and its Allies as the Guardians of Civilisation
- 7 Patriotisms of Duty: Sacrifice, Obligation and Community – The Narrative Core of NWAC Propaganda
- 8 Promises for the Future: The Encouragement of Aspirations for a Better Life, Nation and World
- Part 3 The Impact of the NWAC
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Local Case Studies
- Appendix 2 Card-Index Database
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Adversaries at Home and Abroad: The Context of Negative Difference
from Part 2 - Patriotism for a Purpose: NWAC Propaganda
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part 1 The National War Aims Committee
- Part 2 Patriotism for a Purpose: NWAC Propaganda
- 4 Presentational Patriotisms
- 5 Adversaries at Home and Abroad: The Context of Negative Difference
- 6 Civilisational Principles: Britain and its Allies as the Guardians of Civilisation
- 7 Patriotisms of Duty: Sacrifice, Obligation and Community – The Narrative Core of NWAC Propaganda
- 8 Promises for the Future: The Encouragement of Aspirations for a Better Life, Nation and World
- Part 3 The Impact of the NWAC
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Local Case Studies
- Appendix 2 Card-Index Database
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Unquestionably, of all the presentational patriotisms employed, NWAC propaganda most extensively used adversarial patriotism. Harold Lasswell's claim that there ‘must be no ambiguity about whom the public is to hate’ is amply demonstrated in NWAC propaganda, though its adversarial patriotism was more refined than simply ensuring that that ‘all the guilt [was] on the other side of the frontier’. Britain's military enemies, especially Germany, received considerable opprobrium, but so did Bolshevik Russia, for betraying the allied cause, the so-called ‘peaceat-any-price’ movement at home and, less extensively, anyone at home who, by striking for work conditions to match the realities of wartime Britain, or simply through war-weariness, undermined the progress of Britain's war effort. By presenting the public with a range of adversaries varying both in their proximity and their degree of threat to Britain, the NWAC could produce a more complex adversarial patriotism than with a sole, over-arching adversary.
Adversarial patriotism is one of several interactive and mutually dependent presentational sub-patriotisms which together construct an image of patriotic identity. Marjorie Morgan is undoubtedly correct to suggest that middle-class Victorian travellers ‘exhibited a flexible repertoire of national identities rather than a single one’, but her study nonetheless assumes, like Linda Colley, that this flexible identity depended upon the recognition of difference, ‘the proximity, real or imagined, of the Other’. Unlike an ‘otherness’ approach, the concept of adversarial patriotism does not suggest that ‘we usually decide who we … are by reference to who and what we are not’.
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- Information
- Patriotism and Propaganda in First World War BritainThe National War Aims Committee and Civilian Morale, pp. 113 - 139Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012