When I consider history as an unfolding phenomenon expanding behind and around us I generally reckon it as a thing of progress. That progress isn’t always positive, but it is generally more and more complex. Consider combat during the middle ages, then the Napoleonic wars, the first world war, the second, and on to today. The complexity of weapons and tactics is staggering, and the increase of complexity has only accelerated. 

Granted, things have had to take unusual turns since nobody is, so far and thank God, willing to use nuclear weapons, but that just means the complexit is oblique. Instead of larger nuclear weapons, we have to get clever about how we kill one another.

I think something similar has happened with the way propaganda works. 

The incredibly loud and incredibly obvious (though perhaps not at the time) flash and appeal of the Nazi party’s aesthetics had as brusk and clobbering an effect as the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. We realize the power of propaganda and are unwilling to release it at full power again. 

So we must be clever about how we kill one another.