War and Propaganda
Propaganda: Manipulation of the Mind
Abstract
© 2003 Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Thursday, 10 April 2003
The Propaganda Industry
Of course, the people do not want war. But it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.Herman Göring, at his Nuremberg Trial
On 21 March, the day after American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an embedded CNN correspendent interviewed an American soldier. Private AJ told him:
I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty. I wanna take revenge for 9/11.
The CNN correspondent mildly suggested that no evidence had been found to link the Iraqi government to the 9/11 atrocities. Private AJ gawped with his tongue out then replied:
Yeah? Uh, well that stuffs way over my head, bud!
Propaganda has become a large-scale state industry, an industry that always thrives whatever the economic situation. Press, cinema and radio have been mobilized to delude people. The last several decades have witnessed a revolution in the mass information and comunication media. Half a billion copies of newspapers are printed daily, and for those who are unable to read through illiteracy, in Asia, Africa and Latin America, radio, cinema and TV are available for propaganda use. Radio has for long been the information medium of preference for backward countries. The internet is now the main channel for freedom of speech.
The main reason for the propaganda industry is social rather than technical. In 1955, the highly respected US journalist, Walter Lippmann noted that public opinion was growing in importance. In modern democracies, people have to be controlled carefully in what they know. Public opinion cannot be allowed to be free. That has been the purpose over the last decades of the growth of spin doctoring, that, in the UK at least, has been decried by the ordinary people, who have seen through it, perhaps because Blair’s spin doctors were inept.
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Rulers have always maintained their rule as much by deception as by coercion. And when it comes to war, it is all the more important to befuddle the people. Who is happy to shed their blood for the profits of oil barons, like those comprising the present Bush administration? A noble purpose has to be found for wars even though they are essentially for aggrandisement, especially as modern warfare always involves the death of innocent civilians.
In this respect, propaganda is linked to the replacement of open colonialism by neo-colonialism. The twentieth century saw the end of plain honest colonialism, so the US has to disguise its colonial ambitions. Countries with essential resources, like oil cannot be allowed to take an independent path. They cannot be allowed to be democratic, but have to be run by puppets dependent on the real colonial power, or they have to be carefully controlled economically to keep them on side.
The state has to be made to look strong. The USA under Bush is in deep economic trouble, and the Fundamentalist Christian President seems to think God will ultimately suffice, for his economic policy is just to cut taxes, leaving the states bereft of income. Meanwhile, the people can be fooled with a phony war that is akin to an elephant sitting on an ants’ nest. There is no justification for it, so one has to be found. 9/11 was it. A few brave critics are still trying to question the whole sequence of events on that day, with the implication that the authorities knew much more than they are letting on about, but, in any event, it became just the excuse Bush wanted and within a few days the decision to invade Iraq had been taken. It is the Washington Post no less that has revealed this.
Diverting pubiic attention is a central purpose of propaganda. Nothing is more successful in this respect than whipping up the rednecks in society into a ferment of nationalist and chauvinistic fervour. It will then be easy to launch any militaristic adventure that the politicians had in mind. That is precisely what we have seen. The fact that Saddam, nasty though he is, had nothing to do with 9/11 ceases to matter. Fat barmaids and sad drunks suddenly become five star generals, experts in bunker busting bombs, and masters of psi-ops. The war is featured non-stop in the bars of the land and woe betide anyone who disagrees with the experts. They are plainly not experts on propaganda!
The output is crude stereotyping, but even the professional presenters and journalists, except a tiny minority like Robert Fisk, are either coerced or bribed into delivering suitable propaganda material. The good guys complain that the bad guys parade POWs on TV, oblivious to the fact that they did the same, even making the POWs lie flat on the floor, face down and handcuffed—but it is all right for the good guys to do it. Don’t mention Guantanamo Bay! By the end of the first week, at least hundreds of enemy civilians were killed and injured, but we have reports of British and US towns in mourning because a single soldier was killed in the line of his or her supposed duty. Richard Dawkins rightly has described this as the most disgusting racism. As in the Vietnam war, the Gooks are subhuman and do not count, even though the propaganda message is that the aim of the war is to save them from a dictator.
Those who pursue ulterior self-seeking objectives cannot reveal their motives to public scrutiny. Sleight of hand compensates for the dishonesty of the message. The US authority on propaganda, Charles S Seely wrote:
Clever propaganda techniques, designed to confuse and mislead the ignorant are necessary for effective dissemination of discredited and obsolete ideas…
Seely says that these methods are essential for the system to be propped up. According to Bruce L Smith, who was a Michigan State university professor, and consultant to the United States Information Agency (USIA), propaganda campaigns are conducted in mathematically calculated ways. Psychologists, psycho-analysts, sociologists and anthropologists, not to speak of whole armies of technical specialists are engaged in them. Specialists sample public opinion trends, compile forcasts and advise spin doctors.
Glenn A Basset, an industrial psychologist and consultant for General Electric saw three basic techniqoes:
- Out and out twisting, distorting or invention of facts—the oldest and most elementary method.
- Withholding information.
- Distortion of probabilities.
Po1itical salesmanship draws on the experience of commercial advertising, aimed at getting the punters to part voluntarily with their money. Propagandists fear nothing more than exposure, and hence the pains taken to conceal its bias, and the levels of defence in case something should slip out. C Chisholm, a British industrial relations expert warns:
There must never be the slightest suspicion in [the punter’s] mind that he is being preached at or talked down to.
The experts have, of course, ceased to use the word propaganda because it is something they do not use. They call themselves any number of names but popular ones are public relations experts, information managers, media advisers, and so on. Former USIA director, Thomas Sorensen, says in his book, The Word War, that propaganda is…
…a label most people apply to the utterances of their opponents, but never to their own… To propagandize means in many minds to lie, to exaggerate, to manipulate, to subvert.
The US Psychological Warfare Casebook recommended avoiding the words “propaganda”, “psychological strategy” and “psychological operations”, and offered eighteen substitutes including “peace”, “security”, “prosperity” and “co-operation”. Evidently, “psychological operations” became too popular a phrase for it and has now come out of the closet in this war as “psi-ops”. The book recommends that “capitalism” is not a good word to use, and all good propagandists use “free-world” to mean the bulk of the world that is capitalist. “Western world”, “civilised society” and “industrial society” are other options for those countries which follow the leadership politically and economically of the USA. War-time reporting is chock-a-block with euphemistic words for horrible things, and scarcely a journalist bats an eyelid in adopting these weasel words in their reports for popular consumption.
Intelligent and targetted bombs are rarely either, and they are so rare in practice that generals are always delighted to be able to show one that worked on video. An intelligent bomb destroyed a market place in Baghdad, and the excuses had to be brought out. They are not too intelligent and are easily distracted! The bombs, that is! For all anyone knows propaganda videos of the successes are taken in exercises months or years before they need be shown. Who knows anything other than whatever we are told when a square object, supposedly a tank, on the screen disappears in a puff of smoke.
The Goebbels “Big Lie” technique is still the model. For Goebbels the point of propaganda was one only—to control the mass of the people. Propaganda also plays on prejudices such as racism, nationalism and religion. Those are all prominent in this war against Iraq. They are Arabs, Moslems and disgustingly foreign!
No absurdity is too ludicrous for propaganda, but crude lies are easily shown up, so the preference is naturally for something more subtle. People believe in facts and the news media as a rule operate with “facts”. They choose them carefully, touch them up, interpret them in their own way, in a word, produce a mixture of truths, half-truths and deliberate lies—all “facts”.
Propaganda even involves counter-propaganda. The western propagandists are conscious that the tin-pot dictators, their governments often sponsor, lie so much that it becomes incredible and counter productive. Good propagandists therefore lace their propaganda with unfavourable facts, but ones that are relatively trivial. A battery of unfavourable trivia can hide a single favourable big lie.
Brainwashing is simple, and is seen continuously. The newspapers are full of the war and so too are the broadcast media. The method is simple repetition. The lies are repeated over and over until they are just accepted.
Propagandists prefer to appeal to emotion rather than reason. Dr Samuel A Stoufler, when he was director of the Havard University Laboratory of Social Relations told us—people’s attitudes are more easily reached through their emotions than through their intellects. Psychologists have found that human beings are more susceptible to suggestion when swayed by strong emotions like fear, sadness and insecurity. The emotion diminishes their reasoning power.
200 Iraqis die in raids and two UK soldiers in a crashed helicopter. The grieving wives, mothers, children, aunties, best friends and comrades are brought in to show the terrible loss the “coalition” has suffered with the death of its two crewmen. Who cannot be moved by this genuine sorrow? Yet 200 Arabs were killed, and do not register on the scale of human sorrow. They are not human for propaganda purposes, and to refer to them is merely reason, not emotion. The fact that the two soldiers were professional soldiers and entered upon their profession knowingly whereas the dead Arabs were mainly civilians who did not choose to be bombed from B52s is also nothing but logic. Do not mention it! Propagandists want tears and anger to motivate the punters. They must not be reminded of the deaths of Arab mothers in the bombing in case they begin to think of the human parallels. That would be a propaganda disaster.
The Intelligence Establishment
For many years, Professor Harry Howe Ransom of Vanderbilt University studied the US intelligence system, reporting it in a book, The Intelligence Establishment, now outdated but still fascinating. Ransom revealed that the USA has a vast espionage and subversion community, members of which have included the CIA, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) with subordinate services in the army, air force and navy, the National Security Agency, the State Department’s Office of Research and Intelligence, the intelligence branch of the US Atomic Energy Commission, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as other departments and offices, among them the US Information Agency (USIA) and the Agency for International Development (AID) not officially associated with the intelligience community but play a part. The annual budget of the intelligence establishment is literally billions, of which the CIA and the National Security Agency had half.
“The CIA problem” is the most urgent problem of US foreign policy. The CIA was more than an intelligence outfit, it had far greater powers than were foreseen by the National Security Act of 1947. The CIA often violated norms of international law. It:
- interfered in the internal affairs of other states,
- prosecuted undeclared wars,
- engineered the overthrow of governments undesirable to the US,
- maintained dictatorial regimes
- influenced elections,
- sent its agents into public organizations in the US and abroad to control their activity,
- directed the work of free radio stations,
- secretly organized the publication of books and articles,
- created “private” companies notably airlines used for espionage purposes.
Espionage, plots, political provocations, and so on, euphemistically called “clandestine political actions”, have given the CIA an unsavoury reputation. The CIA used diplomatic and official US agencies for espionage and subversion. According to the American journal Foreign Affairs, of the tens of thousands of people on the staffs of 263 US diplomatic missions, only 15 per cent were employed by the State Department. The remaining 85 per cent worked for the intelligence and propaganda departments.
Intelligence circulated by CIA spies influence government policy decisions. Independent of US administrations, intelligence assesses situations in foreign countries and the plans of their governments. The President might not know what the intelligence agencies are up to but, whatever it is, he has to consent to it. Intelligence activities are notionally directed by top men in Washington, but Ransom wanted stricter government control over them, implying that there was no adequate control, or perhaps none at all. Yet the intelligence people, in Ransom’s opinion, “interpret events in terms of how they prefer things to be rather than as they actually are”. Consider the early example of Guatemala.
A member of the Guatemalan opposition to Colonel Carlos Araña Osorio, who came to power supported by the US government, went to Washington to complain that in Araña’s first year in office, his police and army had assasinated 800 people. In the first two weeks, he had arrested 1600 people, many of them opposition politicians who could not even be labelled as Communists—the evil people before they were labelled as Moslems. The Guatemalan police were then getting $2 million a year from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The State Department officials were not impressed by this argument. Araña was “carrying out messy but necessary housecleaning”, the Nation reported. It added:
That the victims include ostensibly respectable politicians is dismissed as an operational necessity.
In fact, six members of the USAID were employed in Guatemala as “public safety advisers”, and trained the police. More advisers from the Pentagon trained and equipped Araña’s army. The budgetary aid for the army was a secret, but Chicago Daily News reporter, Georgiana Geyer had already written that there were over 1000 police and military instructors in Guatemala. A Uruguayan reporter wrote:
The US exercises parallel rule in Guatemala. This is clearly to be seen in the presidential palace, where to each Guatemalan, there is at least one American, who is the one who decides.
The situation had pertained since 1954 when the US CIA moved in, under Mario Sandoval Alarcon—a member of the Mano Blanca gangsters—to protect US “interests!” Guatemala became a test bed for US terrorist practices curiously called by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the “Indonesian Method”. It essentially meant assassination. Since most of the population are Indians descended from the Mayas or mixed race people, they are evidently disposable.
Psychological Warfare
The term “psychological warfare” gained currency during World War II when propaganda became an integral part of military operations. It implies more than a war of wnrds. William B Daugherty says in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences:
There is the view that psycbological warfare involves an even wider range of activity, including symbolic acts of violence and terror designed to intimidate or to persuade an adversary to adjust his behaviour. Those who hold to this view of psychological warfare would include within its scope various undercover activities, such as espionage and subversion, assasinatibns and other forms of terrorism… when they are designed to mould the opinion or behaviour of specific groups.
In other words, psychological warfare is inseparable from espionage, subversion and state terrorism. Psychological warfare has become one of ihe main weapons used by the US against other countries. As long ago as 1950, President Truman established the Pycbological Strategy Board taking in an Under Secretary of State, a Deputy Secretary of Defence, and the Director of Central Intelligence. In 1953, the USIA, set up on the initiative of Foster Dulles was subordinated to this Board and was charged with assessing reactions abrond to US policies and softening their impact. The USIA became the main channel for the dissenination of favourable impressions of “the American way of Life”. It had branches world wide.
Of the methods of propaganda, black propaganda is the top drawer, intended to be provocative. Its sources are carefully concealed. It is often made to seem as if it comes from the enemy. This camouflaged channel is used for spreading the crudest lies, so that if they are exposed, official sources are not discredited. There is also grey propaganda, the source of which is sinply not indicated. For years people believed that such organisations as Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe were independent voices of democracy and fairness in the face of communist propaganda, until Senator Clifford P Case admitted that they were run by the CIA for propaganda purposes.
Although the term itself is relatively new, psychological warfare has been waged for almost three thousand years with little in its fundamental arguments changing. In this war, Bush and Blair present themselves as saviours of the Iraqi people. Cyrus the Persian, 2500 years ago did the same when he invaded the same country, and still was doing the same when he occupied Jerusalem, as the bible makes clear time after time. Cyrus was the Jewish messiah, their Saviour, before Christians invented a new one. What Bush and Blair and other Christians will not face up to is that the whole of the Jewish scripture is propaganda presented in just the same way as the pious pair present theirs. The Persians were saviours of the people, but had to have force in reserve to keep their saved peoples in order! The God they taught to the Jews was Yehouah Sabaoth—the God of the Armies!
Rather than simply denigrate a whole people and their values, the propagandists offer them faint praise but dig up negative features they then pass off as typical. They are not against the Moslems or the Arab people, just against certain leaders—leaders that they put in place, supported for decades and refused to get rid of when they had the chance. Now all that is needed, to make these countries prosperous and democratic, are a few reforms—principally, reforming the distribution of Iraqi oil into the hands of US ministers like Dick Cheney.
Psychological warfare is as often as not plain lying. It damages relations between states and sows distrust and enmity. The barrage directed against France when Chirac refused to approve the so-called second resolution is typical of this. The second resolution was thought to be needed particularly by Blair, who perhaps has a modicum more conscience than Bush, because Resolution 1441 did not approve warfare to remove Saddam. The French rightly said the mere threat of warfare—which the US had credit for—was working, Saddam was disarming and no actual war was yet necessary. They frankly and honestly refused to approve a war that we have seen led in only a few days to hundreds of deaths—and ultimately to thousands—of the people being saved!
The Big Lie was that the French had sabotaged the diplomatic effort, as if the diplomatic effort was to secure a peaceful solution. The diplomatic effort the French sabotaged was to legalise the war. Bush and Blair were annoyed because they were obliged to launch a plainly illegal war, and now have to show somehow that the ends will justify illegal means. The power of the Big Lie spread by news and broadcast media is shown by the fact that large numbers of people were taken in to believing that the French had sabotaged peace talks, making the warmongers look like the good guys!
Differences of understanding and the means of achieving ideals shared by human beings, and the merits of one approach compared with another, are quite different from the modern use by the USA of propaganda. Advocating war and hatred between peoples, slander, and incitement to murder and sabotage is what propaganda is used for above all. Propaganda is not a political matter, because politics needs openness—supposed to be a central plank of the free world. Propaganda is subversive and hypocritical. It implies interference in the internal affairs of states. Non-interference—at least openly—was sacrosanct until Bush came along to destroy it, as he has destroyed almost every international agreement that he has read. A new colonialism has replaced peaceful co-existence, and it cannot be to the benefit of the US or the world at large.
The record shows that the propaganda of the old imperialism—even though it was not as subtle, diversified and lavishly financed as it is today—in combination with terror and provocation, succeeded in stirring up chauvinism and war hysteria. The modern version is obviously more powerful and more subtle, but it is still not too hard to discern. The claim that the dastardly Arabs in Iraq are dressing up as civilians when they are really guerilla soldiers generates the appropriate shock horror response, but it is not hard to see that it offers the military a cover and an excuse for killing civilians. That is its propaganda purpose.
The French resistance against the Nazis was not fought in uniform. The Maquis were guerillas and were regarded as brave people for taking on, as civilians, the might of the German Wehrmacht. No doubt the Wehrmacht called it unfair and dastardly too. This double standard is another aspect of propaganda. Most of it depends on ignorance, and the ignorant are the target. Those who are not ignorant, whatever they might be politically or culturally, are in propaganda terms wishy-washy liberals, or loony lefties. Dissent is not permitted in the politics of propaganda, as the pompous and risable Lawrence Eagleburger proved on TV.
With what can the aggression in Iraq be justified? What sleight of hand can erase the image of the grossly unfair if not murderous US imprinted in the minds of people the world over—especially Moslems? How will the aggressors stop the well known Boomerang Effect of these adventures, an effect that the US strategists know well but always ignore? The war is supposed, after 9/11, to be against terrorism but the Bomerang Effect will generate many many recruits for Al Qaida, and other organisations who will not accept that death at the hands of infidels is salvation.
The US ignored the incineration of US assets by angry locals abroad—terrorists in propaganda terms—over a period of decades. Years ago, the US columnist, Joseph Alsop described burning USIA libraries as warning signals. Even a Republican Party committee report published at the time said that the effectiveness of US psychological operations abroad depended on US actions, abroad but also at home. The sharp growth of distrust of tbe US in recent years, it said, was more due to changes for the worse in US policy than to shortcomings in the work of the United States Information Agency.
Who bothered? The propaganda is that these terrorists simply oppose or at least do not appreciate the American Way of Life. Well, the terrorists are not enjoying it. They and their people are just paying for it. Yet, if the US leadership genuinely gave a fraction of the expenditure they make on warfare to the people they prefer to oppress with missiles, they would be well loved.
Futurologists Herman Kahn and Anthony J Wiener predicted direct government control over public thinking by means of technical devices by the year 2000. It seems they must have been wrong, but do we know it? Speaking of the content of the mainstream of mass propaganda, American ideologist, M Choukas, wrote that the idea is to produce a man utterly devoid of a critical faculty, a man incapable of thinking for himself, reacting only to external, artificial stimuli and guidance. Sounds like a Christian!
Present-day American mass information eulogizes individualism, personal success, wealth and dynamism. The publications and radio and TV programmes designed for mass readership and audiences simplify international political issues to the utmost. The role of villain is assigned to the current evil empire, for long communist countries, now Moslem ones, and the role of hero to the United States, as a bulwark of freedom, democracy and legality.
A basic method of American propaganda is to gloss over the socio-political nature of events. Youth demonstrations are presented, not as social protests, but as juvenile delinquency, undisciplined behaviour, and faulty upbringing. Recent anti-war protests by schoolchildren in the UK have been shown in just this way. Social changes are easily denigrated by showing them as plots engineered by subversives.
Many ordinary Americans live in a partly imaginary world painted by government propagandists. Modern mass media offer ample opportunity for disseminating illusory ideas, then skilfully kept alive. Washington soin doctors make wide use of advertising methods. It is no accident that many of them are former advertising agents. The aim of advertising is to sell brands, and not necessarily good ones. The Washington Post once wrote that an uninitiated person attending a conference of White House propagandists would wonder what they were discussing—national problems or a cereal ad—for the words they use come directly from the advertising jargon.
Marketing specialists hold that the important thing in winning over people to brand loyalty is not the idea but the way it is packaged. Bernard Cohen wrote:
In the political realm what is thought to be true is often a more relevant source of political inspiration than what is true.
Despite its vast scale and excellent organization, the US propaganda machine often breaks down, yielding results far from those expected by its owners. The press coined the phrase, “credibility gap”. This expression, referring to relations between the US administration and the people, was first applied in President Johnson’s day. The US ruling caste have now realized that people do not believe them on a whole number of issues and reject the official interpretation of events despite the efforts of the propaganda machine.
The credibility gap may be explained by the discrepancy between propaganda and the policy actually followed by governments. One cannot but agree with James Reston’s observation:
Bad products can be put over by good advertising but the more you argue bad policies… the more resistance you are likely to get.
Whatever the Washington ruling cognoscenti proclaim to be the interests of America does not have to accord with the interests of most Americans, and so Washington resorts to artifice, lies and deceit. A small handful deceive not only the people, but often parliament itself, as a Parliamentary observer once observed. People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deceptlon in politics, and they always will be until they have learned to be skeptical of the motives of our moral, religious and political leaders.
It might not seem easy to do, but, actually, few people generally trust politicians at all. They are the constant butt of comedians. They promise everything when out of office and immediately swap corners when in office. Why then should anyone believe people like Bush and Blair when they take us into an illegal war that few wanted anyway? They need to be reminded that these opportunists are no more trustworthy in war than in peacetime, and are even less honorable.
They tell us that now the war has started, the people are rallying round “our boys”, and the least critical in society—the drunks, bums and most media hacks—are indeed. For the rest, we can cheerfully accept that the opinion pollsters are among the chief propagandists, so we should take not a whit of notice of anything they say. They gather opinions for money, and the source of the money determines the result they present.
