Propaganda – A True Reflection?
In the book All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, propaganda wounded everyone, including the young teenage boys and the adults distanced from the war, physically, emotionally, and mentally; by filtering out the horrific aspects of war which weren’t recognized until it was too late to back out. Those involved in the actual feud were sitting the farthest away from the harshness of war and through means of propaganda, they got others to fight for them. Propaganda serves to convince the public into something one group of people want everyone else to believe in. In the case of All Quiet on the Western Front, this group of people were the rich, high-status government officials and administrators driven by economic and political greed. Their one and only goal was to get young German boys to enlist and whether they knew the reality of war or not, they refused to inform the public about it. Innocent and gullible, people of all ages began to believe that fighting for their country was a patriotic and heroic
…show more content…
Everyone was getting hurt and these wealthy officials kept their hands clean from miles away. They used the idea of patriotism for the fatherland to get people to enlist for the war. Patriotism, in no way, is a bad thing, however, when one is guilt tripped into believing that their fear of dying in war is actually a lack of devotion to their country, it becomes entirely wrong. One must understand that the majority of the soldiers fighting in World War I had no dispute with the other side and they had only joined, to protect the country they had grown up in and learned to love. These citizens should have been shown the reality because, painful or not, the soldiers who died on the battlefield a decade ago, deserved to know what they were signing up