The Writer as Psychological Warrior: Intellectuals, Propaganda, and Modern Conflict

The tendency of the modern state is to wipe out the freedom of the intellect, and yet at the same time every state, especially under the pressure of war, finds itself more and more in need of an intelligentsia to do its publicity for it.

George Orwell, ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ (1943)

Writing in 1943, George Orwell reflected upon the challenges posed for both governments and intelligentsia by the rapid growth in wartime propaganda production. If the British government had begun the war ‘with the more or less openly declared intention of keeping the literary intelligentsia out of it […] after three years of war almost every writer, however undesirable his political history or opinions, has been sucked into the various Ministries or the BBC’. As Orwell recognised, the recruitment of cultural actors by government information and psychological warfare departments changed both spheres, since the ‘tone and even to some extent…