David Lloyd George Quotes
If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know. The correspondents don't write and the censorship wouldn't pass the truth. What they do send is not the war, but just a pretty picture of the war with everybody doing gallant deeds. The thing is horrible and beyond human nature to bear and I feel I can't go on with this bloody business.
George was referring to the brutal realities of war (during the First World War).
David Lloyd George, 1863-1945, British Prime Minister (Liberal), Statement to C. P. Scott, December 27, 1917
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The French manipulated the war news more than the other nations but nations all did to some extent tending to exaggerate the positive and minimize the negative.
This has been true in just about every conflict. In WWII however, there were a highly disproportionate ration of atrocities with those of the axis forces dwarfing those of the U. S. and its allies. Further, after the war, those allied atrocities that did take place were published. In addition, one basic difference is in the policies of the fighting forces and their governments as opposed to individual actions by soldiers. In WWII, the allied atrocities were of the latter type, but the axis atrocities involved both.
Wikileaks had just released 400,000 classified American documents relating to the Iraq War. Many accused him and Wikileaks of endangering the lives of not only soldiers, but Iraq civilians who might be identified as cooperating with the coalition forces by the released documents. The heart of the problem is that governments tend to use classification to hide embarrassing facts or policies that might be controversial as well as to protect legitimate national security secrets and sources and methods of information. The majority of the 400,000 leaked documents, when examined, were clearly not protecting any legitimate people or secrets but just staved off criticism or embarrassment; in many cases, there was no value to the contents and the maw of the censorship and classification process was applied indiscriminately to many documents. A much better argument than Assange made, can be gleaned from the vast number of WWII documents that America, England, France, Russia and others still keep secret, when the people who might have been protected have already died and the methods are long since obsolete.
Theodore Roosevelt was the Presidential nominee. See {634097} and {585962}--Samuel Johnson, for a 1758 version of this idea.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Most CIA Directors have not had this extreme attitude, but because Casey did, journalists, members of Congress, other government officials and even Presidents have often distrusted the CIA and their personnel more than was necessarily warranted.
The queen was a lot more sophisticated about the newspapers than politicians in the 21st century.
This quotation shows how large the American Post WWII German Propaganda Effort was. See {589369} for an earlier description.
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, OM, PC was a Welsh statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922. He was the final Liberal to hold the post of prime minister, but his support increasingly came from the Conservatives who finally dropped him.
