Wars and propaganda machines


by Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay
 
Global Research, October 9, 2006 
Online Journal  


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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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