Wars and propaganda machines
by Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay
Global Research, October 9, 2006
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"The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust [our own]
government statements -- I had no idea until then that you could not
rely on [them]." --James W. Fulbright (1905-1995), former US senator
Third sorrow: "The replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation,
and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions." --
Chalmers Johnson, (Sorrows of Empire)
?If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will
eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such
time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic
and or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally
important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent,
for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension,
the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.? --Joseph Goebbels, Nazi
Minister of Propaganda
Propaganda machines are dangerous, even more so in a democracy than in
a totalitarian regime, because their goal is to confuse, disinform,
lie, raise fear and manipulate the opinions of the people.
Indeed, those few hands that control the media have the power to turn
lies into truth and truth into lies, without being contradicted,
because they also have the power to silence any competing voices. This
is the worse monopoly one can find, much worse than any economic
monopoly. Indeed, when a small elite in power start using propaganda
intensively, it makes a mockery of the democratic principle of self-
government by the people. In fact, people begin to distrust the
government because it has become a source of half-truths, lies and
disinformation. Discouragement and apathy follow because people know
that their views do not count and that the oligarchy in power will do
whatever it wants, no matter what the supposedly 'sovereign' people
thinks. It is only when the media are free and independent that people
can hope to be honestly informed and be free from government
manipulation.
We have a clue about how powerful political propaganda can be when we
consider that, more than a year after the Iraq invasion, just before
the 2004 presidential elections, a Harris Poll reported that 62 percent
of all American voters, and 84 percent of those planning to vote for
Bush II, still were of the opinion that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had
''strong links" to al Qaeda, and 41 percent of all voters, and 52
percent of Bush backers, believed that Saddam had ''helped plan and
support the hijackers" who attacked the USA, on 9/11. What's more, as
an amazing tribute to the force of political propaganda and the tactics
of big lies, a whopping 85 percent of the American soldiers themselves
still believed, in 2006, three years after the invasion, the falsehood
that they were fighting in Iraq ?to retaliate for Saddam?s role in the
9-11 attacks," while 77 percent thought that a major reason for the war
was ?to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq."
Today, a solid majority of Americans think that the Iraq war was a
mistake and many are lucid enough to know they have been misled.
Indeed, nearly two-thirds of Americans, an overwhelming majority, are
now opposed to the war. But, it is too late. The damage has been done,
and the U.S. is now solidly bogged down in Iraq. In fact, what is the
Bush-Cheney administration's answer to popular rejection? Its response:
"Stay the course," "Full speed ahead!" Indeed, notwithstanding the
tremendous pro-war propaganda originating from the partisan American
media, 61 percent of Americans now oppose the war in Iraq. What is even
more damning, a vast majority of Iraqis are turning against the
invaders and occupiers. Seventy-one percent of Iraqis see the U.S.-led
coalition not as "liberators" but as "occupiers," and 78 percent
consider the U.S. military presence in Iraq to have a destabilizing
influence. And, not surprisingly, a solid majority of them support an
immediate military pullout of foreign troops from their country.
In their grandiose plan, the neocon Bush team intends to have American
troops occupy the country of Iraq illegally for as long as one can
foresee. They built 14 permanent military bases there and they are
constructing a military fortress disguised as an embassy to host the
equivalent of a medium-size American town. That way, the United States
is sure to be at war in the Middle East for decades to come.
Before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the neocon propaganda machine
in the media, led by Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News (News Corp),
assisted by ABC (Disney), NBC (GE), CBS (Viacom), TBS (Time Warner),
CNN (Time Warner), MTV (Viacom), plus the Weekly Standard (News Corp),
the National Review, the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal (Dow
Jones), the New York Post (News Corp), the New York Sun, the Washington
Times (Sun Myung Moon), etc., initiated an all-out propaganda campaign
to persuade the American people that Saddam Hussein was really the
villain behind the 9/11 attacks, not the Taliban of Afghanistan or bin
Laden's alleged al Qaeda terrorist network. They succeeded so well in
this endeavor that many Americans believed the fabricated fable and
swallowed the bait -- hook, line, and sinker.
Then the neocons persuaded born-again George W. Bush that he had a
mission from 'God' to fight the evil of Islamist terrorism. They
whispered in his ear that the 'Devil' was in Iraq, not in Afghanistan.
Thus, Bush II could enthusiastically proclaim that "Across the world,
and across the years, we will fight these evil ones, and we will win."
Canadian neocon David Frum introduced in a Bush speech the idea of
targeting three countries -- Iran, Iraq, and North Korea -- as the
evils he had to fight, without even mentioning Osama bin Laden or al
Qaeda. And, just as with the monkey on the elephant's back, the neocons
led the American elephant into the Iraqi quagmire. Even today, most
Americans ignore what really happened and why they have soldiers in
Iraq to kill and to be killed.
As a rule, professional news media in a democracy should be
independent, objective and, as much as possible, factual and neutral in
reporting news and events. This means that they should not have a
systematic bias and should not be under government control or under the
total control of special interest groups. Indeed, to be informed is a
prerequisite for the citizenry to be able to exercise its democratic
rights. If the media systematically slant the news or remain content to
serve as conveyor belt for state propaganda, this results into a direct
attack on democracy itself.
Unfortunately, over the last decade, American corporate media have
developed the lazy tendency of being "embedded" with the government and
of presenting uncritically the government spin on things and events, as
if this was always the truth. Some have gone so far in that direction
that they seem to be reproducing the relationship that existed in the
former Soviet Union between the government and the media, the latter
being a simple extension of the former. A case in point: they have no
qualms about accepting selective invitations to secret meetings in the
Oval Office to be 'briefed' and cheered up in their public support of
the Bush-Cheney administration.
The results of this government-inspired disinformation is all there to
be seen:
Three years after this was officially disproved, half of Americans
still believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) before Bush II
decided on his own to launch his war of aggression;
Close to one-quarter of Americans still cling to the idea that the
government of Iraq was behind the attacks of 9/11. Since no such
misinformation exists in other countries, this could only mean that
public government officials, assisted by the neocon media and
government propagandists, have consciously spread and perpetuated the
disinformation and are, therefore, mainly responsible for the abysmal
and dangerous ignorance found in a large and probably decisive segment
of the American electorate.
There is no area where general information is as profoundly at odds
with what is known in the United States compared to what is known in
the rest of the world as with questions dealing with the state of
Israel and the Middle East. Thanks to the powerful pro-Israel Lobby and
its propaganda (Hasbara) machine, Americans seem to live on a different
planet than the rest of the world. -- Americans, for example, are far
more likely than Europeans to side with Israel in the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict. A Pew Global Attitudes survey taken between March
and May (2006) found that 48 percent of Americans said that their
sympathies lay with the Israelis; only 13 percent were sympathetic
towards the Palestinians. By contrast, in Spain for example, 9 percent
sympathized with the Israelis and 32 percent with the Palestinians. The
main reason for this cleavage is the fact that Americans do not receive
the same news as the rest of the world. In the U.S., news directly or
indirectly involving Israel is filtered, slanted and adjusted by spin
organizations in order to present Israel as the innocent victim, even
when it does the killing and the destruction, as its indiscriminate
bombings of civilian areas in Lebanon, during the summer of 2006, amply
demonstrated.
For this purpose, for example, the Lobby has its own propaganda
coordinating organization, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East
Reporting in America (CAMERA). Its mission is to see that American
media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines) toe the line on Israel and on
American policies toward Israel, not hesitating in the process to smear
journalists or authors who dare criticizing the actions of the Israeli
government or who offer more balanced viewpoints. It also takes the
necessary political steps to make sure that the Federal Communications
Commission [FCC] does not impede the move toward concentration of media
ownership in the U.S.
What are the conclusions to be drawn from all this?
First, there is the need for free societies to be aware when they are
subjected to incessant and systematic campaigns of indoctrination and
disinformation, the more so if it is to wage wars of aggression abroad.
Second, the threat of excessive concentration of media ownership should
always be a paramount preoccupation in a democracy, if freedom of
information is to be preserved.
Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University
of Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@ yahoo.com. He is
the author of the book 'The New American Empire'. Visit his blog site
at www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
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