Quote:
Originally Posted by Legbreaker
Propaganda also doesn't have to be verbal. A few posters stuck up on trees here and there, newspaper reports and just about any other form of communication (right up to smoke signals!) could and probably would be used.
They're not new to the game. They know what they're up against and how best to go about their work. Will they be 100% successful? Highly doubtful, but they will have an important impact.
Meanwhile, Nato, not being there on the ground where it counts, isn't going to make a lot of headway with the hearts and minds campaign.
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Very important, the Soviets will have had 40+ years of peacetime and 3+ years of war to sink their message in. My vision of the 1997 NATO invasion of Poland has lots of Poles, individually, welcoming the Americans and British (tolerating the Germans at best) forces, hundreds if not thousands joining the Polish forces in exile or volunteering as translators and the like.
BUT when the Soviets push NATO back to the Oder in the autumn, and the nukes are used by both sides, nearly all of whatever goodwill the NATO/anti-Soviet forces had built up would have disappeared. When NATO doesn't come back in '98 or '99, there's darn few opportunities to stoke it up again. I still hold to a failed Polish attempt to organize mass defections as a keystone to planning the summer '00 offensive, and this is a piece of that.