The American journalist, Edward Bernays,
is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda. The
nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays
who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its
deceptions.
In
1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking
in the New York Easter Parade – behaviour then considered outlandish.
One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of
freedom! Fight another sex taboo!” Bernays’ influence extended far
beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the
American public to join the slaughter of the First World War.
The secret, he said, was “engineering the consent” of people in order
to “control and regiment [them] according to our will without their
knowing about it”.He described this as “the true ruling power in our society” and called it an “invisible government”.
Today,
the invisible government has never been more powerful and less
understood. In my career as a
journalist and film-maker, I have never
known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go
unchallenged.
Imagine two cities. Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people. But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties.
In
the second city – in another country nearby – almost exactly the same
is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by
the same breed of fanatics. The difference is that these fanatics are
supported, supplied and armed by “us” – by the United States and
Britain. They even have a media centre that is funded by Britain and
America. Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege
to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the
city – which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city.
Confusing?
Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of
propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city
of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United
States and Britain and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces
of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad.
What
is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by
fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not
invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies
strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding
of the civil war in Syria. Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed
up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaida and al-Nusra and the rest of
the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be
fighting for their lives today.
Some
may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the
camera and telling us that Blair was “vindicated” for what turned out to
be the crime of the century. The US television networks produced the
same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger
to effuse over Colin Powell’s fabrications. The same year, soon after
the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis,
the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, “What would
have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged
what turned out to be crude propaganda?”
He replied that if journalists had done their job, “there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq”.
It
was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists
to whom I put the same question — Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer
and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain
anonymous. In other words, had journalists done their job, had they
challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it,
hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today,
and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul. There would
have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7th July 2005. There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps.
When
the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President
Francoi Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria – and more
terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande’s bombast about
France being “at war” and “showing no mercy”. That state violence and
jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national
leader has the courage to speak.
“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”
The
attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened
because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the
West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant.
They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country.
The
same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an
“agreement” that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to
a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The
Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable. As WikLeaks has
revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009
rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to
Europe, that he was attacked.
From
that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with
jihadist fanatics – the same fanatics currently holding the people of
Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage. Why is this not news? The former
British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for
operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists
factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is
how it worked.”
The
West’s medieval client, Saudi Arabia – to which the US and Britain sell
billions of dollars’ worth of arms – is at present destroying Yemen, a
country so poor that in the best of times, half the children are
malnourished. Look on YouTube and you will see the kind of massive bombs
– “our” bombs – that the Saudis use against dirt-poor villages, and
against weddings, and funerals. The explosions look like small atomic
bombs. The bomb aimers in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side with British
officers. This fact is not on the evening news.
Propaganda
is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine
education – Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia — and with careers on
the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post.
These organisations are known as the liberal media. They present
themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist.
They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.
And they love war.
While
they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the
rights of countless women, including the right to life. In 2011, Libya,
then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Muammar Gaddafi
was about to commit genocide on his own people. That was the incessant
news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie.
In
fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like to
call “regime change” in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa.
Gaddafi’s influence in the continent and, above all, his independence
were intolerable. So he was murdered with a knife in his rear by
fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France. Hillary Clinton
cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring, “We came, we saw,
he died!”
The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian:
“Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains
strong.” Intervention — what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real
meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction.
According
to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya,
of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They
included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the
rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red
Cross. The Unicef report on the children killed says, “most [of them]
under the age of ten”. As a direct consequence, Sirte became the capital
of ISIS.
Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian,
and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have played a
critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and
dangerous cold war. All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a
malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the
work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.
This
inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military
intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and
scare campaign of the kind I grew up withduring the first cold war. Once
again, the Ruskies are coming to get us, led by another Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil.
The
suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news
blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev
are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in
1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in
Europe, no leader ever mentions the fascists in Ukraine – except
Vladimir Putin, but he does not count.
Many
in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic
Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own
country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a
federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a
foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.
There is almost the joie d’esprit of a class reunion of warmongers. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post
inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who
published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
To
most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show,
in which Donald Trump is the arch villain. But Trump is loathed by those
with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with
his obnoxious behaviour and opinions. To the invisible government in
Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America’s design
for the 21st century.
This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia, and, if possible, China.
To
the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in
his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to
talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he wants to talk
with the president of China. In the first debate with Hillary Clinton,
Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a
conflict. He said, “I would certainly not do first strike. Once the
nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.” That was not news.
Did
he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is
clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status quo
maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the United
States, regardless of who is in the White House. The CIA wants him
beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even
his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the
world – unlike Clinton who has left no doubt she is prepared to go to
war with nuclear-armed Russia and China.
Clinton
has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a
senator, she backed the bloodbath in Iraq. When she ran against Obama
in 2008, she threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran. As Secretary of
State, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and
Honduras and set in train the baiting of China. She has now pledged to
support a No Fly Zone in Syria — a direct provocation for war with
Russia. Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the
United States in my lifetime –a distinction for which the competition is
fierce.
Without
a shred of evidence, she has accused Russia of supporting Trump and
hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that
what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is
the opposite of what she says in public. That is why silencing and
threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks,
Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he
is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all cylinders.
Today,
the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is
under way – in the Caucasus and eastern Europe, on the border with
Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target. Keep
that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on
November 8th, If
the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will
celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for women. None will
mention Clinton’s victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the
women of Libya. None will mention the civil defence drills being
conducted in Russia. None will recall Edward Bernays’ “torches of
freedom”.
George Bush’s press spokesman once called the media “complicit enablers”.
Coming
from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the
media, caused such suffering, that description is a warning from
history.
In
1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media:
“Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign
calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people
psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the
daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”
This text is adapted from an address to the Sheffield Festival of Words, Sheffield, England.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © John Pilger, Global Research, 2016
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