PROPAGANDA: In the Era of the Big Lie

Last January the British Foreign Office released a hair-raising document called “Protocol M” (TIME, Jan. 26). It purported to be a Cominform blueprint for a Communist-led general strike in the Ruhr aimed at crippling coal production and hampering the Marshall Plan. Its deadline for action was March.

But March passed without a Ruhr general strike. Last week the New York Times’s persistent Chief European Correspondent Cyrus L. Sulzberger reported, from a “completely reliable source,” that Protocol M was a forgery. The British government, which in January had stoutly asserted “[we] believe this document to be genuine,” responded to Sulzberger’s report with a limp and embarrassed “no comment.”

Twenty years ago such a bloomer would have raised a Grade A scandal. But today, in the era of the Big Lie, the collapse of Protocol M was rather like the bursting of a bubble-gum balloon. One reason was that, even if Protocol M was itself a forgery, its contents squared with probable Communist aims and tactics. But Sulzberger put his finger on another, bigger reason: “This incident is characteristic of one phase of the present-day nervousness and suspicion in Europe. A network of forgers and falsifiers—some clever and some not—are busily peddling allegedly secret documents to embassies, intelligence officers, ministries and newspaper correspondents. . . . Judging from the Soviet press … it is likely that documents are being peddled with equal facility on the other side of the Iron Curtain. . . . The market for such ‘phonies’ is probably better today than ever before in history.”