Word: britain
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...University of Edinburgh, was admitted to the Scottish bar at 24 and became editor of a legal review at 27. Then his career hit an eleven-year gap of unpublicized performance from which it emerged in 1918, to reveal the young lawyer as Assistant Director of Intelligence in Britain's Wartime Ministry of Information. After the War, Scot Macmillan was a congenital committee chairman: of committees investigating lunacy and mental disorders, street offenses, the coal dispute, the wage dispute in the wool industry, income-tax revision-plodding jobs that won him the confidence of British officials...
...Lord Macmillan's first task was to undo Britain's reputation for cleverness, he could not have started more brilliantly. Nobody could accuse Britain's propaganda of functioning smoothly last week. It was clumsy, amateurish, slow-starting, gave an impression like that of a sincere but badly staged show in which stagehands dropped things during big speeches, and the curtain came down at the wrong time...
...Britain's first air-raid scare produced two flatly conflicting stories passed through the censor to the U. S. before the War Office's own propaganda agency (under oldtime Hackwriter Ian Hay) got out the third or "official version" (see p. 15). Foreign correspondents were driven into a frenzy by the slow and clumsy handling of news of the torpedoing of the Athenia; Britain's feat-of-the-week, the bombings of German naval bases, was announced as laconically as the results of target practice; in line with British belief that false hopes should not be raised...
Main line of Britain's publicity as it appeared outside Great Britain during Lord Macmillan's first week was not to arouse hatred against Germany, but to show that normal European life was impossible unless Hitler was overthrown; not to arouse awe of Britain's military might, but to win confidence in Britain's aims...
Speed. While Britain drowsed in the propagandist shadows last week, whipped to full speed was Dr. Goebbels' powerful Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, which even in peacetime spends some $100,000,000 a year, employs 25,000. Twenty-four hours after German troops entered Poland, neutral newsmen had photographs of German troops on the march. Tanks, big guns, bombers, ruined villages, prisoners, wounded, mutilated bodies, charred houses, refugee children, smashed bridges, all added up to create an impression of overwhelming military strength, dramatized the speed of Germany's advance...