October
9, 2006
"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. —71 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 build 14 permanent military
bases there and they construct 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 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 interests 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:
1- 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;
2- 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% of Americans said that their
sympathies lay with the Israelis; only 13% were sympathetic towards the
Palestinians. By contrast, in Spain for example, 9% sympathized with the
Israelis and 32% 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 usually 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.
Author's
Website:www.thenewamericanempire.com/
_________________________________________________
Posted, October
9, 2006, at 5:30 am
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