The subtitle recommends its "usability in case of cold, hot or lukewarm war" (Utilisables en cas de guerre froide, chaude ou tiède).
The ten "commandments" of propaganda which Anne Morelli elaborates in this work are, above all, an analytical framework for pedagogical purposes and for media analysis.
As Rudolph Walther in his review in Die Zeit shows, Morelli in this work adapts the typical forms of various contents of propaganda to news of her time.
"Daladier assures in his 'Call to the Nation' on September 3, 1939 - taking over the responsibility of France for the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles -:' Germany has already refused to respond to the people with a good heart at this time have raised their voice for peace in the world.
"(p. 16 in the French original) In the same sense, on January 9, 1991, we could read about the Gulf War in Le Soir: "The peace that the whole world desires more than anything else, can not be built on simple concessions to an act of piracy.
She comments: "The victor will always portray himself as a pacifist who loves peaceful agreements and mutual understanding, but is forced into war by the opposing camp, as Bush or Blair did."
"The enemy camp is most certainly run by a maniac, a monster (Milosevic, Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein), (...) which challenges us and from which one must free humanity.
"[4] The first step in the process of demonization, according to Morelli, is the reduction of a whole country to a single person, as if nobody lived in Iraq, except Saddam Hussein with his "scary" Republican guards and his "frightful" weapons of mass destruction.
She opposes this view with a dialectical and materialistic one, in which history is explained from the basis of the relations between people and from social movements.
Thus, Le Vif in L'Express on April 8, 1999, depicts the "terrible Milosevic", she quotes no statement or written document of the "ruler of Belgrade", but highlights his abnormal mood swings, his morbid and brutal outbursts of anger: "When getting in rage, his face is distorted.
Morelli analyzes that the economic and geopolitical goals of war must be masked by an ideal, by moral and legitimate values.
But not only at the end of this war you can see that none of these goals have been achieved, you have moved remarkably far away from a multi - ethnic society and from violence against minorities, this time Serbs and Roma.
Moreover, Morelli goes on, war propaganda is not content with the actual incidents, it needs to invent inhuman atrocities in order to make the enemy look like Hitler's alter ego.
For the period of the First World War, Ponsonby portrays the rendering of gang rape, murder, mistreatment and mutilation of children by German soldiers.
Morelli explains this principle or commandment as follows: "With rare exceptions, people tend to join the victorious cause.
"This type of information enhances morale in both camps and makes public opinion convinced of the effectiveness of the conflict.
This criterion is understood by Morelli in two different ways: in the literal sense, war presents itself as a crusade, backed by a divine mission.
Whole groups are considered anti-American, Pierre Bourdieu, Régis Debray, Serge Halimi, Noam Chomsky or Harold Pinter.
Therefore, Morelli says, it is made impossible to give a dissenting opinion without running the risk of a "lynching process of the media".
He finds it startling "that Morelli does not describe how the gears of media interlock, she does not research into the mechanisms and details, but argues exclusively with quotes, basing her criticism on the products of propaganda themselves.
This type of superficial criticism of the media has long since become an integral part of the infotainment machinery, Stöckman maintains.
To those who are so "enlightened", but actually rather hardened to criticism, each war reporting must appear as propaganda as long as it is not based on a pacifist attitude.
But its effectiveness is likely to be exhausted quickly, as the historian sees almost every piece of news contaminated by the poisonous products of the right way of thinking which are poured out by media every day.
[10] In his review in H-Soz-Kult on June 29, 2005, Lars Klein from the University of Göttingen writes after praising the relevance of the topic and the usefulness of her analysis, Morelli lacks clarification of whether "the media" themselves are acting independently, whether they follow political or commercial interests and if they consciously or only unreflectingly abuse the "good faith" of the citizens.
"Precisely because she uses the entire tenth chapter [...] to show how important media stick to their 'own side', further and clearer explanations would have been desirable."