The European Information War In The Muslim World Prior To WWII

An excerpt from, “Europe and the Islamic World: A History” By John Tolan, Gilles Veinstein, and Henry Laurens; Translated by Jane Marie Todd, Princeton University Press, 2013, Pg. 385-86:

Although the Great War had given the Europeans a sense that their civilization might be mortal, the appeal of their culture remained strong in the Muslim world. The essential transformation in that period was that the European model was no longer unique. For a time, the prestige of the victors consolidated the image of the liberal institutions. For the mandates, such institutions remained the price of admission to the League of Nations and the most prominent sign of modernity.

But the crisis of liberal democracies was already perceptible in the 1920s. The Soviet Union had spread the watchword of anti-imperialist struggle, which the various Muslim nationalist movements adopted. Moscow, however, held little attraction during that period. The Sovietization of what were becoming the “Muslim republics” of the Soviet Union occurred with extreme violence and produced a new exodus of residents, who dispersed throughout the Middle East (a small current settled in Europe as well). Kemalist Turkey and Reza Shah’s Iran maintained cautious relations with their powerful neighbor, who was still also their hereditary enemy. The first Turkish and Iranian Communists were considered traitors.

In the Arab East, the first Communists were recruited from among minorities (especially Jews and Armenians) and did not manage to make inroads in Muslim circles. The first labor unions were offshoots of the nationalist movements. Although some Muslim intellectuals had socialist leanings, they were more attracted to democratic socialism than to Bolshevism.

It was through the migration of Maghrebian labor to France that the Communists were able to reach the North African population. But relations between the French Communist Party and Étoile Nord-Africaine rapidly reached the point of collapse. Even as Messali Hadj radicalized his pro-independence discourse by giving it a more Islamic dimension, the Communists, in shifting toward anti-Fascism, found it indispensable to moderate their own anti-imperialist struggle in order to constitute popular fronts. Although some European intellectuals supported the anticolonial struggle, by far the majority current among the so-called progressive forces merely sought to correct the “abuses” of colonialism and not to abolish it. Only the North African settlers equated pro-independence nationalism with the international Communist movement.

European nationalism remained the most appealing element. Although the Italian nationalism of the Risorgimento had traditionally been a source of inspiration for the nationalist movements in the Arab world, there was considerable mistrust of Fascist Italy, because of its brutality in Libya and its proclaimed designs on the Mediterranean as a whole. Nazi Germany appeared more effective and less dangerous. In the Arab world, it was the beneficiary of the Germanophilia left behind by Wilhelm II’s Germany. In the 1930s, the Fascist model seemed to be working much better than the tired liberal democracies in retreat all over Europe. Everywhere, nationalist youth movements adopted the garb of politicized European youth (blue or green shirts). But the borrowings remained superficial: above all, “the enemy of one’s enemy” was seen as a potential “friend.” The fact that, until the war, Nazism left the monopoly on Mediterranean policy to Fascist Italy fostered the mistrust.

In 1934, with the Arabic broadcasts of Radio Bari, Fascist Italy launched a propaganda war in the Arab world. In 1935 (the Italo-Ethiopian War), the attacks against British policy turned violent. In response, in January 1938 the BBC began to broadcast in Arabic as well. The network was particularly anxious to maintain its independence from the government. In March 1938, it was Nazi Germany’s turn for Arabic broadcasts.

Fascist Italy sought primarily to exploit the Palestinian issue in order to embarrass the British. It succeeded in that respect, but without creating a particularly favorable climate for its own cause. By contrast, the German broadcasts on the eve of war were openly anti-Semitic (even though Berlin was simultaneously encouraging the Jewish emigration to Palestine), but within the broader context of identifying the Jews with liberal democracy (plutocracy) and proletarian internationalism.

People tuned in to these broadcasts primarily because they broke the monopoly on information that the Franco-British had held in the Middle East.