/** propaganda.rev: 19.0 **/ ** Topic: Propaganda Review 8 ** ** Written 8:05 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Propaganda Review 8, Table of Contents PROPAGANDA REVIEW A publishing project of the Media Alliance, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization of 2800 media professionals. Fall 1991, Number 8 Note: The following Table of Contents is 137 lines long and contains 831 words. TABLE OF CONTENTS Response No. Article Title, Author, Length ____________________________________________________________ EDITORIAL 1 Editorial by Johan Carlisle (1120 words) Brave New World Order -- Is the only hope of radical transformation in the US the empowerment of the "alternative" media? 2 Propaganda Watch by Stephen Leiper, Rory Cox, Jeanine Olson (Part 1 of 2, 1113 words) News, quotes, and examples of propaganda from the Gulf War and elsewhere. 3 Propaganda Watch (Part 2 of 2, 4464 words) 4 MediaActive -- a new PR department by Johan Carlisle (1174 words) Our first report examines a controversial article on radical environmentalists and details the successful protest of the San Francisco Examiner' s publication of the article. SPECIAL GULF WAR FEATURES 5 Twentieth Century American Propaganda by Noam Chomsky (Part 1 of 3, 2366 words) Chomsky explains how it all began with WWI. American leaders have perfected the art of manipulation and deception at the people's expense. 6 Twentieth Century American Propaganda by Noam Chomsky (Part 2 of 3, 1580 words) 7 Twentieth Century American Propaganda by Noam Chomsky (Part 3 of 3, 3302 words) 8 Myths, Lies, and Videotape by Stephen Leiper (Part 1 of 2, 2437 words) A checklist of Gulf War lies exposed and analyzed. 9 Myths, Lies, and Videotape by Stephen Leiper (Part 2 of 2, 2057 words) 10 Amherst University Knowledge Poll by Professors Sut Jhally, Justin Lewis, and Michael Morgan (Part 1 of 2, 1532 words) In February, University of Massachussetts professors conducted a knowledge poll and found that the more TV news one watches, the less one knows. 11 Amherst University Knowledge Poll by Professors Sut Jhally, Justin Lewis, and Michael Morgan (Part 2 of 2, 1645 words) 12 Women Soldiers: The Mommy Track by Nell Bernstein (1773 words) Why were women soldiers consistently portrayed in the mass media as mothers while males were the heroes? 13 War and Metaphor by George Lakoff (Part 1 of 2, 2838 words) UC Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff reveals how a complex web of commonly accepted metaphors prepared Americans to go to war. 14 War and Metaphor by George Lakoff (Part 2 of 2, 2691 words) 15 SIDEBAR to War and Metaphor (818 words) REGULAR FEATURES 16 Black Hats for the "Politically Correct" by Gary Grass (Part 1 of 2, 2500 words) While there have been several cases of unreasonable restrictions on freedom of speech by the so-called "PC" student activists, student-author Gary Grass explores the genesis of the hyped media myth and discovers a right wing agenda. 17 Black Hats for the "Politically Correct" by Gary Grass (Part 2 of 2, 2729 words) 18 Exxon's Public Relations SWAT Team by Mark Dowie (1790 words) After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Exxon and other oil companies asked their public relations experts to devise rapid deployment damage control units for future environmental disasters. 19 Operation Pedro Pan by Joan Didion (1050 words) In 1960, Cuban families were tricked by a US propaganda campaign into sending their children to live in a camp in the Florida Everglades run by Jesuits. This excerpt from Joan Didion's book, Miami, sheds light on a little-known US operation and reveals that many of these orphaned children grew up to become pro-Castro activists in the middle of Miami's Exilio. 20 SIDEBAR to Operation Pedro Pan by Joan Didion (776 words) DEPARTMENTS 21 MediaWatch by Gloria Channon, Rory Cox, Roger Smith (Part 1 of 4, by Channon, 1022 words) NYT's "liberal" columnist, Anthony Lewis exposed; Gannett Foundation's critique of the media's coverage of the Gulf War; TV Reality vs. Everyday Reality. 22 Media Watch by Rory Cox (Part 2 of 4, 1500 words) 23 SIDEBAR to Media Watch by Rory Cox (Part 3 of 4, 556 words) 24 Media Watch by Roger Smith (1219 words) 25 Resources (906 words) A list of organizations and publications which provide propaganda analysis. South and Meso American Indian Information Center; The Data Center; Feminist Teacher; Political Ecology Group; Speak Out!; War Crimes Tribunal. 26 Masthead (223 words) RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Propaganda Review 8 Table of Contents Next, Response 1, Editorial by Johan Carlisle ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.1 **/ ** Written 8:07 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Editorial EDITORIAL *** Brave New World Order by Johan Carlisle The Gulf War has been over for a few months now, according to the White House anyway. Tens of thousands of US troops are still in Iraq and Kuwait and US bases will probably remain indefinitely. The Kurdish refugee disaster is still unresolved and the devastation in southern Iraq is seldom mentioned in the press. Kuwait is more repressive than before the war, although information about the situation there is hard to come by. The plight of the Palestinians is also worse than before the war and yet our leaders celebrated the "Death of the Vietnam Syndrome" with one victory parade after another (one-half to one million in Los Angeles, the L.A. Times estimated on 5/20/91). Most of the serious questions about casualties and policies remain unanswered. PR editor Stephen Leiper takes a look at some of these questions along with the more blatant myths and lies of the war on page 12. As I travel around California talking with community groups, I constantly hear agonized and frustrated people asking, "What does this all mean? What can we do?" This issue of Propaganda Review attempts to answer some of those questions. Noam Chomsky maps out the history and evolution of propaganda techniques and operations of the US government and corporate elite from WWI to NWOWI (New World Order War I). It is clear that the manipulation of public understanding of major issues and the promotion of support for government and corporate policies is a fundamental issue in our political reality. Until we solve the problem of constantly being voices in the wilderness trying to communicate with what Chomsky calls the "bewildered herd" we will not have much impact on the course of American politics. We at PR have always felt that understanding the nature of a problem is prerequisite to solving the problem. The Gulf War revealed for all to see the immense proportions of the propaganda systems that control our society and consequently endanger sovereign peoples all over the world that get in the way of US corporate interests. The media, obviously, is one of the biggest problems. But media analysis and activism are not enough. We need to devote more energy and financial resources to empowering the existing alternative media with the larger goal of creating a national TV and radio network as widely available and as well funded as NPR and PBS. We also need a national daily newspaper which will enable progressives to not only communicate with each other but begin the process of creating an alternative paper of record for journalists and future researchers. And we need to develop new ways to make computer networks like PeaceNet more available to "non-keyboard" people. During the war, it was virtually impossible to watch network TV -- the blatant cheerleading and jingoistic news analysis was revolting. PBS and NPR showed their true colors and revealed that they are not a real alternative. There were only a few antidotes to the almost total pro-war propaganda: Pacifica Radio (and other community radio stations), the alternative print media, Deep Dish TV, and PeaceNet, the San Francisco-based computer network. Here at PR we are attempting to expand our efforts to comprehend and combat government and corporate propaganda. We need your financial support now more than ever. With the current level of subscribers and funding, it is just barely possible to publish this magazine sporadically. This is frustrating because we have the skills and energy to produce a much more mainstream type of publication, on a truly quarterly schedule, that could reach more people. We are also working with PeaceNet, numerous activists and journalists to help create a truly alternative news service on PeaceNet. This will ultimately serve the alternative, or community-sponsored, media in the same way that Associated Press and UPI serve the corporate media. We need your support for our volunteer involvement in this project as well. Several groups are trying to create alternative TV programming and even a national cable channel. We are discussing ways to work with these groups to make propaganda analysis a fundamental component of their programming. The government now uses, without hesitation although discreetly, the same scientific techniques to sell their policies, wars, and candidates that Madison Avenue uses to litter the planet with consumer goods. Some recent examples of government/corporate marketing campaigns, other than the obviously successful Gulf War, are: Strategic Defense Initiative, the contra war, the Reagan presidency, nuclear power and weapons, the drug war, deregulation of the banks, etc. Most of these examples stand out from normal government policies in that they are patently stupid and were opposed by not only progressives and liberals but by large groups of establishment experts. And yet they and many other programs continue to plague the American people and the world. That these types of absurd programs and policies continue to receive political and popular support suggests that propaganda is perhaps a more fundamental and somewhat invisible problem than is commonly recognized. This is why we feel that the propaganda analysis project which we started in 1984 needs to become a national priority for activists and concerned citizens. We need to raise the issue of deceptive communication and political manipulation to the level of discourse it deserves. To do this, we need your support. Write or call us today for more information on how you or your community group can help to make this effort succeed. If propaganda is exposed more effectively, all activist efforts for peace and justice will have a much greater chance of succeeding. And to all of you who have supported us in the past, thank you. [Note: PR is listed as a resource in a fine new book, 50 Ways to Fight Censorship, by Dave Marsh, Thunder's Mouth Press, NY, NY, 1991, $5.95.] Help Wanted: PR is looking for a free-lance fundraiser. You will keep a percentage of the funds you raise. Call (415) 332-8369. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Editorial Next, Response 2, Propaganda Watch (Part 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.2 **/ ** Written 8:08 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Prop Watch (Part 1 of 2) PROPAGANDA WATCH By Stephen Leiper, Rory Cox, Jeanine Olson *** Operation Desert Smarm Following the end of the Gulf War, CBS-TV presented an "All-Star Salute to Our Troops," direct from Andrews Air Force Base, which was criticized as being a preview for George Bush's re-election campaign . The April 3 program starred Barbara Mandrell, Charlton Heston, and Randy Travis, with President Bush and the First Lady in front-row attendance. Not prominently displayed was any mention that this propaganda extravaganza was produced by Roger Ailes, who ran Bush's media campaign in 1988, and is the well-known author of the Willy Horton TV ad credited with helping sink the chances of presidential hopeless Michael Dukakis with its not so subtle appeal to racism. This one should be rated V for Vomitous. Randy Travis sang a song called "Point of Light" which was commissioned by President Bush, complete with lyrics like "If you see what's wrong and you try to make it right, you will be a point of light." Bush was presented by Sophia Loren, who let him kiss her on the cheek. Bush proclaimed that "America rediscovered itself in the Gulf War" and told the assembled troops that "when you freed Kuwait you uplifted the American spirit." Comic Howie Mandel fawned over the troops, saying that for him it was "a chance to thank you for our freedom." The high point (of light) was Charlton Heston (formerly Moses) intoning a pastiche of suitable patriotic blurbs culled from famous speeches by Lincoln, JFK and others, seemingly smoothed into a seamless whole by computer. Religious and patriotic music was interwoven throughout the program, with occasional visual close-ups of individual servicepersons in the audience and their spouses, a sea of tiny waving plastic flags behind and in front of them. Not to be outdone, Miller Brewing Co. and Dodge division of Chrysler Motors provided flagwaving ads. Ginny Terzano, spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee told New York Times reporter Robin Toner that "the whole concept of doing a salute to the troops is a terrific idea. The difference is, Ailes is Bush's hired gun."-- SL Be All You Can Be: Deceptive Excerpted from "The War in Military Ads? What War?" in the New York Times, 3/8/91, p. C4: For all the glamour and accolades that came with the allied victory over Iraq, overt references to the operation may never appear in advertising for the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines. Military marketing and advertising officials say they fear depictions of combat or even allusions to the reality of warfare could scare away more potential recruits than they would attract. "We don't plan to use it at all," said Lieut. Col. R. E. Wilson, the branch head of marketing and advertising for the Marine Corps. "We're not going to exploit and capitalize on it." From an advertising standpoint, the armed services might seem to be in an enviable position: a quick, decisive victory, relatively few people killed or wounded and lots of flashy technology. It would appear to be a copywriter's dream. Maybe not this time. "You've got to be careful how combat, or the potential for combat, is displayed in your commercials," said Col. John Myers, director of advertising and public affairs for the Army Recruiting Command. "We don't want to be misleading, but too much combat footage interferes with the long-term attributes of Army service that we want to portray: money for college, skills training and relevance to a civilian career." Like major corporations, the four service branches have signed contracts with Madison Avenue agencies, and their advertising budgets are considered lucrative: In the late 1980s, the Army alone spent as much as $100 million a year to promote itself. Last year, the Army spent $83 million with its agency, Young & Rubicam; the Navy spent $25 million with BBDO; the Air Force spent $15 million with Bozell Inc., and the Marines spent $15 million with J. Walter Thompson. In addition, the Department of Defense has its own advertising account that promotes all four branches of the service, with an annual budget of about $10 million. The account, currently held by Grey Advertising, is under review. Military advertising officials say that even if they were inclined to exploit the Persian Gulf victory, they are not convinced it would be their most effective lure. The Army, for its part, plans research on how teenagers, their parents and their guidance counselors -- its principal recruiting targets -- would respond to commercials that refer to the Persian Gulf success. "If we're going to use Desert Storm as any kind of an example," Colonel Myers said, using the military's term for the Gulf offensive operation, "we need to emphasize that because of high-quality forces, equipment and training, we managed to perform with an astonishingly low number of casualties." Dr. Carol Moog, a psychologist and consultant who specializes in the psychological impact of advertising imagery, cautioned that the Army could easily turn the war into a recruiting turnoff. "You have to be very subtle," Dr. Moog said. "People died over there. People who were in the Reserves, who didn't want to go over there, were yanked over there. You don't want to use Desert Storm imagery that is so graphic that it evokes the very negative downside of what went on." On the other hand, the war has given the Army a treasure trove of patriotic images, said Prof. Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University. "If you have people waving American flags and blowing kisses at American GI's, I think that is the ultimate high," Professor Moskos said. "They don't have to show combat. They can show 'hail the conquering hero' stuff. That can't help but be a plus." Tiny Propaganda for Tiny Minds A recently published children's paperback, Don't Steal My Blocks!, purports to explain the Persian Gulf War to the pre-school set. The 12-page $4 book was written by 22-year-old Ash Jain of Fort Wayne, Indiana who interned at the US State Department this summer. It was underwritten and distributed by the Desert Storm Homecoming Foundation, who sponsored the June 8 military parade in Washington, DC. The book supports US intervention in the Mideast. The back cover blurb states that "America fought this war, not out of aggression, not for oil, but for a very simple, everyday value: one should not take things that belong to others without their permission." Ten thousand free copies were given to children whose parents served in the Gulf War, and 10,000 more are being marketed. (Source: KRTN News Wire)--SL End, Prop Watch (Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 3, Prop Watch (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.3 **/ ** Written 8:11 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Prop Watch (Part 2 of 2) Self-Inflicted Propaganda One of the most pervasive images of the Gulf War was the swollen and bruised face of Navy Lieutenant and POW Jeffrey Zaun which, as broadcast on Iraqi TV, appeared throughout the media, in newspapers, on TV, and on the covers of news magazines like Time. It was held up as an example of the brutality of our Iraqi foes, though at the time there was no evidence of what caused the wounds. By reading deep into a March 14 page 1 article in the San Francisco Examiner with the misleading headline "Ex-POW's Say Iraqis Beat, Tortured Them," one finds out that Zaun admitted that 90% of his wounds were sustained upon ejection from his plane. The rest of the disfigurement was self-inflicted, as he assumed the Iraqis wouldn't put him on TV if he looked bad enough, and he preferred physical pain to public humiliation. A follow-up story on the Time magazine cover-boy appeared on June 10 on the much less visible page A10 of the San Francisco Chronicle. In the piece "Former POW Doesn't Want to Kill Again," Zaun is now courageous enough to show his dovish side, stating "I don't ever want to kill anybody again. This country didn't get to see the cost of the war. . . they didn't see the Iraqi mothers get killed . . ." Zaun said he also believes that Iraqi guards beat prisoners only to get information, not just to injure them. "All in all, I didn't feel they were the bloodthirsty, amoral people we had heard they were."--RC Newsweek Goes to War Recent events, well-documented in this and other publications, have demonstrated the bias and general lack of journalistic integrity of the major news weeklies. As jaded as we've become as media critics, nothing could prepare us for Newsweek's commemorative edition, "America at War," released soon after the cease-fire. Coming off like a cross between Soldier of Fortune magazine and a high school yearbook whose student body's only achievement was a winning football team, Newsweek set aside all pretensions of professionalism for a full-color feast of patriotic fever. On the cover, superimposed over a detail of an American flag and fiery orange sky, is a youthful, hopeful looking African-American soldier, raising his gun in victory. The first ad, from Nynex, has ad copy which is a classic case in unintentional surrealism: "Never is information more crucial to democracy than at times like these." It starts with a photo essay titled "Target: Total Victory." Shown in the colorful layout are spectacular shots of various military hardware, some soldiers-as-hero shots, an Iraqi tank burning, and some shots of Schwarzkopf and Bush hanging around with the troops. In full glory are a war of explosive fireworks-like action, efficient, sleek hardware, dozens of pensive, sincere solders, a very few mourning Iraqis, and two dead Iraqi soldiers. There are several photos of American flags and one of what may vaguely be interpreted as an anti-war protester. A lengthy article follows about how President Bush and his inner circle recovered from a series of major errors to organize total victory against Saddam Hussein. Throughout this and subsequent articles a posture of "our team won" prevails. A few examples of text from the articles, which speak for themselves: On a photo caption: "A marine tanker preparing to deflate Saddam's hubris and mangle his Army"; in reference to one of the first "smart"bombing missions: "At long last, a successor had emerged to the mushroom cloud as the emblem of America's military prowess, and good riddance"; "The anti-war coalition enlisted a fantastic amalgam of groups from the left and fringe right of American politics -- mainstream peace groups such as SANE/Freeze; Palestinians, taking their cues from the PLO; Jewish-conspiracy theorists such as the Liberty Lobby and the Lyndon LaRouche organizations; environmentalists who considered it ridiculous to fight for something as useless as oil; gay-rights and AIDS advocates who never quite made it clear how their causes were linked to the Persian Gulf War but were happy for the opportunity to wave their banners in front of television cameras"; "Even if some of these (reports about Saddam) -- like the babies supposedly yanked from their incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital -- turned out to be apocryphal, the repulsive delight the Iraqis seemed to take in blowing up apartment houses in Tel Aviv won them few friends in America"; "Not even Iraq's own people, those phlegmatic habitues of the souk constantly being interviewed by CNN, seemed gullible enough to be convinced by such a crude display"; "The press, for its part, showcased its blockheaded ability to refuse to bow to reality by asking the same question six times in a row"; "Yassir Arafat, demonstrating his unfortunate knack for backing losers, paid a call on Saddam and predicted that the war might go on for three more years"; "Norman Schwarzkopf won the Gulf War and buried the legacy of Vietnam." Under a picture of James Baker: "A master negotiator and dealmaker"; and, in conclusion, "For half a generation the memory of defeat in Vietnam -- and the deep national divisions exposed and fed by that defeat -- haunted the United States at home and abroad. A 'can't do' spirit seemed to dog the government's efforts. But suddenly, Americans believe again that they can, and should, solve nagging problems at home as competently and resolutely as the US military dealt with Saddam Hussein." Did anyone tell the reporter that Saddam remains unscathed and still in power? Or that you can't take care of critical ongoing domestic issues with "smart" bombs?--RC "Victory in the Desert" Video The home video market is already sporting tapes of the Persian Gulf war. Northern Lights Communications, an interactive voice technology company, and NFL Films, a subsidiary of the National Football League, jumped on the propaganda bandwagon before the war even started. Northern Lights had been commissioned in May 1990 by the Air National Guard to produce a promotional tape on fighter pilots, retaining the services of NFL Films for the post-production work. Cameras were in place on aircraft before Kuwait was invaded. Northern Lights and NFL Films didn't foresee a "war spectacular" opportunity when they took the job, but as soon as Operation Desert Shield began, film crews and equipment were sent to the Gulf, cameras were strapped to the inside and outside of tanks, General Schwarzkopf was wired for sound like some head coach participating in a Sunday afternoon game, and the cameras rolled. In addition to combat footage "shot by the soldiers themselves," the video will include behind-the-scenes military activities, families, supporters back home, military victory parades, and July 4 celebrations, and will feature orchestral music "that will not be as upbeat or bouncy like our [NFL Films] football music," according to Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films. NFL Films plans to distribute the videos to over 600,000 Operation Desert Storm personnel as a gift by next Memorial Day. "It's our way of saying thanks to the troops . . . to give them a sense of pride in what they did. Ten years from now they can look at it and be proud of their part in it," claims Sabol. He said it will be months before all footage can be declassified for use in their video, but the Pentagon "knows what we do and how I feel . . . they like our taste and style and how we do our football films." He is counting on an estimated 25 major corporations and possibly the Saudi government to underwrite distribution of the video which will cost well over $1 million to produce. Entitled "Victory in the Desert," the video is named after Sabol's favorite WWII documentary film, Victory at Sea. According to Sabol, the film will steer clear of references to death and injury, instead focusing on the "human interest angles." Lt. Col. Steve Titunick said he will screen the film before its final release "to make sure it portrays the Department of Defense in a positive light." (Santa Rosa Press Democrat 3/27/91 p.A7) Robin Templeton, a national anti-war leader, comments: "I think it's the most beautiful example of US propaganda yet. It feeds people images of teamwork and national unity against an inhuman enemy. This war has been covered from the beginning as if it were a sporting event." (San Francisco Chronicle 3/29/91 p. E1) "Football is obviously the military's sport of choice," Sabol said. "The TV newscasters certainly portrayed it that way, and you heard references to football throughout the war. President Bush even called it his 'Super Bowl' . . . . I don't want to say that war is the same as football, but our talent as filmmakers can very easily be transferred to this sort of venture. The military likes the way we have presented and mythologized pro football." (Santa Rosa Press Democrat 3/27/91 p.A1) It came as no surprise to many that the network news coverage of the war appropriated the jargon of professional football, but the fact that the people who make promotional films for the NFL were given access to the war zone when the regular news media were denied it, raises questions of priority. The parallel between football and war mythology cannot be overlooked. Who better than established football propagandists like NFL Films to perpetuate the myth that war is glorious, as long as you are safe at home watching it on your VCR! Take for example the 1976 NFL exhibition game in Tokyo. At that time, one of the most popular TV shows in Japan was the weekly program of football highlights produced by NFL Films. The NFL decided Tokyo would be an ideal place for an exhibition game. But as Ben Yagoda of the New York Times reported, "Once the game started, the fans were outraged. This wasn't the game they were familiar with. As shown by NFL Films, football was nonstop grandeur, drama and pathos; the spectacle in front of them was unintelligible and violent . . ." (New York Times Magazine 12/14/86 p.70) Is it not easy to imagine a similar kind of revelation occurring for a young man in the midst of a bloody war, having only experienced it on video with glorious combat footage and heroes' welcome home parades, complete with orchestral music? Sabol admits NFL Films are propagandists for the NFL: "We see ourselves as myth makers and creators of legends . . . if we get a little pompous or pretentious . . . the fate of the universe is not at stake . . . To call the video propaganda is like reviewing a film before you see it. It's being criticized before it's even made. I don't think anyone will be offended. Well, anti-war folks won't like it of course . . ."--JO Gulf War Propaganda Flashes . . . During the war, San Francisco Ch. 4's Pete Wilson in a promo for their war news coverage: "For the first time in history we see the events as they happen." Oh yeah? . . . Edward Epstein's "World Insider" reports that Japanese consumers can avail themselves of a new soft drink called "Desert Storm." The camo-clad cans have labels that read "New carbonated beverage for active people with fighting spirit." . . . Craig Fuller, a former aide to George Bush, was a lobbyist for Citizens for a Free Kuwait in his capacity as a public relations executive at Hill and Knowlton. The PR outfit developed the "rape of Kuwait" theme, organizing lunches for reporters, a hearing on Capitol Hill, and political ads in major newspapers prior to the onset of the Persian Gulf War. Fuller also quarterbacked the first half of Bush's 1988 presidential campaign . . . If you need something to get you through the night, consider buying a 60-minute audio cassette tape of 50 people -- one at a time -- reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Among those droning the 31-word pledge are none other than President Bush, "Wheel of Fortune" letter-turner Vanna White, Joan Rivers, and Sally Jessy Raphael. The "Patriotic Pledge Program" is the brainchild of 21-year-old Kevin Newman of upstate New York. The proceeds benefit the National Pledge of Allegiance Foundation, according to Newman . . . If that's too soporific for you, how about a set of special-edition Topps trading cards ballyhooing Operation Desert Storm? The series consists of 88 cards and 22 stickers, selling in packs of eight cards and one sticker. They all come complete with a Desert Storm, Coalition for Peace insignia, and commemorate heroes like Patriot missiles and M-16 machine guns, and other assorted death-dealing mechanisms.-- SL This Is Your World on Anti-drug Slogans . . . Any Questions? Excerpted from the article "Stepping Up Drug Fight, from Toys to TV Shows" by Joseph B. Treaster in the New York Times, 3/16/91, p.7: The people who produced captivating, and sometimes shocking, advertisements that helped turn public opinion against cocaine and other drugs are expanding their reach into the American psyche with things like bumper stickers on toy cars and trucks, and videos that play as motorists pump gasoline. The volunteer group of executives, perhaps best known for an advertisement that equates an egg sizzling in a frying pan with the effect of cocaine on the brain, has persuaded toy makers, gasoline station owners, producers of television dramas and manufacturers of school supplies to use the many ways in which they communicate with the public to convey anti-drug messages. All this is intended to reinforce the blend of radio, television, and print advertisements the volunteer group, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, has been producing for four years -- an ad campaign that rivals in scale that of companies like the Coca-Cola Company and American Telephone & Telegraph Company. As part of the expanded campaign, Nikko America, which makes flashy, radio-controlled toy cars and trucks, will be putting out a group of vehicles over the next few months with bumper stickers declaring, "Drugs Are A Dead End." Grant Tinker, a former chairman of NBC and now an independent producer, said he would include anti-drug material in programs "whenever a story comes along that looks adaptable." A Massachusetts company is distributing book covers with anti-drug messages to high school students in 40 states, and some gas stations in Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma are showing 30-second videotapes on the dangers of illegal drugs on television screens peering down from banks of self-service pumps. Richard D. Bonnette, the executive director of the Partnership, said the Walt Disney Company has agreed to create an animated character to help reach children. Artists and copywriters are working up designs for anti-drug messages for cereal boxes and milk cartons, and David A. Miller, the president of the Toy Manufacturers of America, said the members of his organization are devising ways to send out anti-drug messages with the roughly one billion toys they produce annually. "We're playing with several ideas," he said, including games and contests that would go on or into toy packages. "We're looking for something that has impact," he said, something that might be able to compete for a child's attention in the excitement of receiving a new toy. Marsha Cathey, the creative director and advertising manager for Nikko America, said the anti-drug bumper stickers "give the cars more realism," adding, "and we thought it was a good thing, the responsible thing, for a toy manufacturer to do." Is Prince William Sound? Although some scientists, fishermen and area residents dispute Exxon's claim that Prince William Sound has recovered from the nation's largest oil spill, the mayor of Valdez, Alaska is appearing in a series of Exxon TV commercials saying that the Sound is nearly restored. A March 28 AP story quotes the Valdez mayor, Lynn Chrystal, as saying "the commercials are promoting the cleanliness of Prince William Sound, how it has nearly recovered with wildlife and sea life coming back." Earlier that same month, the federal government had released a report saying damage from the oil spill disaster was continuing to harm wildlife.-- SL Untruth in Advertising The color photo in a tourism advertisement of the pristine old growth forest in British Columbia is beautiful: mists rising behind magnificent fir trees, and Bambi-esque deer in the fern-filled foreground highlighted by rays of sunlight. Touting the sylvan vacation wonders in what is being billed as "Super, Natural British Columbia," the ad has run in Canadian and US magazines. The main message is its headline, taken from an old children's song: "If you go down to the woods today, you're in for a big surprise." But the real big surprise, according to an article in the Winter 1990 issue of Adbusters, a Vancouver quarterly, is that the photo was staged: The deer were from a petting zoo, the sun rays were from floodlights, and the mist generated by smoke machines. A spokesperson for the British Columbia Ministry of Tourism told Adbusters the photo, shot in a nature park, was not meant to be taken literally. Small wonder, given the fact that the Canadian timber industry is actually stripping the province of its forests at a pace that makes the deforestation of US timberlands seem mild by comparison. An article by Ross Anderson in the Seattle Times (reprinted by the San Francisco Examiner, 8/25/91) gives the gory details of an ongoing, unchecked, shortsighted rape of that country's forests. There is no Endangered Species Act in Canada, no Forest Practices Act, and there is not as easy a recourse to legal action to stop the onslaught. Timber companies are cutting about 1,000 square miles of forests there each year. The loggers, armed with low-cost, long-term government licenses, have cut more trees in the past 14 years than in the preceding 80, according to Vicky Husband, a Sierra Club volunteer in Victoria. But who needs forests when you can simulate them with a little help from petting zoos and smoke machines? -- SL A Thousand Points of Lobbying From an article by Jason De Parle in the New York Times, 6/12/91: As the savvy image maker who picks President Bush's camera angles, Sig Rogich does not usually set domestic policy. As a country star who travels around singing of cheating trains and Mama, neither does Randy Travis. But the two have collaborated on perhaps the oddest feature of the admin-istration's domestic agenda -- a country music hit detailing how the army of volunteers the president calls "a thousand points of light" can meet the needs of America's downtrodden. The song, No. 17 on the country charts and rising, is the latest example of how a snippet of campaign oratory has grown into a cottage industry that Bush says is central to his domestic agenda. There is a Points of Light Foundation a block from the White House, running "points of light" commercials on radio and television. There is a Point of Light coordinator in the White House to help the president pick his "daily point of light," a group or individual chosen every day but Sunday for outstanding volunteer service. Among the oddities of the situation is that some critics of the administration's Points of Light program have spent decades as advocates of volunteer work. Some of these critics see the Bush effort as nothing more than political opportunism. "The way they're using it is to cover up their absolute callous indifference about what's happening in this society," said Robert Bellah, a Berkeley sociologist who is a prominent advocate of voluntarism. He said the administration was using voluntarism as a cover for shirking government responsibility. Cracks in the Crack Baby Story Contrary to the blitz of drug war stories about the pathetic state of health of crack cocaine babies, a study presented on May 15 to the American Psychiatric Association shows that babies born to cocaine-addicted mothers are damaged more by their environment than by any effect of the drug. The study by Claire Coles at the Georgia Mental Health Institute, reported by Newsday, indicates that none of the newborns studied showed any abnormal behavior in the first month of life. "Nobody wants to believe our findings," Coles told Newsday. "They are convinced that cocaine has lasting cognitive effects on the developing brain."-- SL And Now, Pre-censored Films! Excerpted from the article "Oliver Stone's JFK Already Denounced" by Elaine Dutka of the Los Angeles Times, reprinted by the San Francisco Chronicle on 6/25/91: Halfway through the film's shoot and six months before it is scheduled to be released by Warner Bros., a number of publications have condemned both JFK and its director. The Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and Time magazine, basing their stories on a leaked early version of the shooting script, criticized Stone for purported factual inaccuracies, including the implication of an orchestrated coup d'etat and coverup. And he has been criticized for basing his movie on the ideas of former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, now a Louisiana Court of Appeals judge. The writers charge that Garrison is self-aggrandizing and unreliable, and that Stone legitimizes his investigation into Kennedy's murder and even glorifies it through the casting of Kevin Costner as Garrison. The controversy has thrown together believers in the Warren Commission Report and conspiracy theorists who have devoted their lives to challenging it. At issue is not only an artist's responsibility when dealing with a subject in the public domain, but also whether these critics -- in the press and elsewhere -- are curtailing creative freedom by prejudging a work-in-progress. "It's interesting that the Washington Post is applauding the Soviet media for its new openness, its willingness to expose Stalin's mass murders, while impugning my project before the American people can assess it," says Stone, whose edited point-by-point rejoinder ran in the paper early this month. "It's hypocritical, a double standard, ironic at best." Stone says he was informed by one Time magazine writer that three high-powered senior editors -- whom he alleges are anti-Garrison -- weighed in when it came to putting together the June 10 story. "There's an agenda here," he says. "Let's not be naive. They're the Establishment, Doberman pinschers trained to protect the government. In my mind, no topic is sacred. This controversy is meant to kill off the film, pre-censor it and maximize negative advance impact. It's hard enough to make a film without writing letters to the editor in the 15th and 16th hours of the day. It gets tiring having my neck in the guillotine all the time."--SL $mokin' in the Boys' Room Who's a bigger threat to your children, the corner crack dealer or "Smooth Joe," the omnipresent Camel cigarettes mascot? A recent lawsuit challenging Canada's Tobacco Products Control Act of 1988 has brought to light why it's not just an accident junior gets caught smoking cigarettes on the school yard. Internal tobacco industry documents describe the methods by which their products are marketed to ages as low as 12, according to Morton Mintz writing in The Nation magazine. The plaintiff in the lawsuit, The Imperial Tobacco Company, had indicated in its Fiscal '80 Media Plans that its first age bracket target group for Players Filters brand was ages 12 to 17. Another document, "Player's Filter '81 Creative Guidelines" indicates that "the activity shown (in advertising) should be one which is practiced by young people 16 to 20 years old, or one that those people can reasonably aspire to in the near future." Mintz concludes that the young are targeted as they must replace the millions of adult smokers who die or quit annually, thus the industry "must recruit non-smokers, including children." And it's working; it's estimated by the Advocacy Instititute that 52 percent of smokers begin by age 18. And despite laws disallowing sales to minors, research by an organization called Stop Teenage Addiction to Tobacco (STAT) found that in 75 percent of attempts, minors under age 18 were able to buy cigarettes from retailers or vending machines. Again, no accident, as a sales memo in the RJR Nabisco Tobacco Corporation promotes the marketing of cigarettes to stores "in close proximity to colleges, high schools, or areas where there are a large number of young adults who frequent the stores." The Harper's Index in the August Harper's magazine leads off with the following: "Amount pledged by the Tobacco Institute last year to a campaign to discourage smoking by minors: $10,000,000 . . . Estimated profit US tobacco companies earned last year from sales of tobacco products to minors: $250,000,000." Anyone know of any adults who are impressed with Smooth Joe, or his "smooth character" tag line? In a related item, according to the San Francisco Examiner of November 12, 1990, a federal report by the National Commission on Drug-Free Schools tells us the same thing any teenager could tell us: Booze and cigarettes are a bigger problem than illegal narcotics. This report has been downplayed because of pressure from former drug czar William Bennett, according to sources involved in preparing the report. Apparently Bennett had warned the commission that "most American people will think you missed the point" by focusing on legal over illegal drugs. The report is highly critical of the alcohol and tobacco industries targeting of youths, and cites as an example the beer mascot, Spuds McKenzie, and calls for equal time for counter-advertising.-- RC More Smoke: "Bill of Rights" Cigarettes The giant food and tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris Companies Inc. is touring the US with an original copy of the Bill of Rights in an effort to equate tobacco smokers' rights with those embodied in the 200-year-old political document. Though cigarette ads have been banned from radio and TV for 20 years, this road show allows the nicotine peddlers to get their name before the public as sponsor of the tour. What's next? Defunct S&Ls present the Constitution?-- SL Catholic Schools Launch Ad Campaign While the public school systems continue to erode, The National Catholic Educational Association has just announced a market-driven advertising campaign, AP reports. The slogan is "Discover Catholic Schools," and the advertising campaign will target students, parents, politicians, and financial contributors who now give to public schools. The campaign, the budget of which remains undisclosed, will use billboards, T-shirts, and newspaper ads which will focus on the schools' scholastic advantage.--RC -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Prop Watch (Part 2 of 2) Next, Response 4, MediaActive ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.4 **/ ** Written 8:13 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, MediaActive MEDIA ACTIVE "Examiner Buys CIA Lies!" by Johan Carlisle Johan Carlisle is the Managing Editor of Propaganda Review. *** Are there really "eco-terrorists" in our midst secretly plotting to destroy civilization as we know it or even to wipe out all humanity? The San Francisco Examiner seemed to think so. On Sunday, April 14, 1991, they published, on page A-2 of the news section, a wire service story entitled "Mad Scientists Plot End of Mankind." A teaser at the top of the front page warned, "Saving Earth by killing man - Ex-CIA agent tells of environmentalists' plot to wipe out the human race." Needless to say, the story was unfounded, undocumented, and seemed designed to inflame public opinion against radical environmentalists in general, and Earth First! in particular. It was based on statements made by an "ex"-CIA agent that there might be scientists plotting secretly to develop a virus which would kill humans while leaving all other species alive. Yet even this ex-spook, Vincent M. Cannistraro, admitted at the end of the article that this was a "potential threat." Here at Propaganda Review we responded quickly to what we perceived as one of the most blatant disinformation attacks against environmentalism we had ever seen with a phone call to the Examiner. Steve Cook, the Examiner's National/Foreign Editor, told us that he ran the story in the news section because he thought "it was a serious, well-written news story. . . which had some interesting ideas about population control." We briefly explained our criticism of the article and asked if we could meet with him to discuss the serious implications of this but he said, "I'm too busy. Why don't you write a letter to the editor like everyone else." Instead we got on the phone. Within hours we had organized an ad hoc group of environmentalists and media activists to stage a protest in front of the Examiner's office the next day. About 15 people showed up to carry signs that read, "Hearst First!" and "Examiner Buys CIA Lies!" We handed out flyers with the article on one side and a brief analysis on the other to over a hundred Examiner employees on their way in to work, a vast majority of whom were supportive of our protest and embarrassed by their employer's having published such an article. Finally, as we were packing up to leave, Jane Kay, the Examiner's excellent environmental reporter, came up to us and said, "I'm so glad you are here. This story should never have appeared in print." Kay said that she was amazed and shocked that virtually no phone calls protesting the article had been received by the Examiner. "It's really important that you are doing this [protesting]. I was beginning to think that no one cared what we publish!" It took a few days and a lot of persistence but we finally arranged a meeting with the Examiner to discuss the article. Representatives from Propaganda Review, Earth First!, Earth Island Journal, and Greenpeace met for one and a half hours with Steve Cook, along with Jane Kay and her editor Candice Bender. Each of us from the "alternative" press and the environmental groups pointed out the numerous journalistic and social problems with the "mad scientist" article. First, and most importantly, the article was an obvious attack on Earth First! in spite of the fact that the source of the article's main theme, Vincent Cannistraro, never mentioned Earth First! or any other groups. Finally, Cook agreed that the placement of a photo of Earth First! founder David Foreman and the mention of Earth First! eight times in the article was unfair. But his admission came only after an impassioned explanation by Earth First!'s Karen Pickett of how serious the climate of violence is in the Northern California timber country and how articles like this one, in a newspaper that is widely read and respected in that area, fan the flames of fear and hatred against groups like Earth First!. Pickett pointed out that the nearly-successful assassination attempt on Earth First! organizers Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, nearly one year to the day before the publication of this article, together with the repeated physical assaults on Earth First! activists by loggers might not seem as serious to an urban newspaper editor, but that to these activists violence was a grim reality. Greenpeace's Chet Tchozewski asked Cook rhetorically whether he would run an article by left wing conspiracy theorists about AIDS being a secret weapon created by the CIA. Everyone laughed at the prospect of the Examiner doing that. But I pointed out that the source of the "mad scientist" article was equally suspicious. Cannistraro, the source of this disinformation, is no ordinary spook. He claims he is an environmentalist. He was also a career CIA officer who, from 1981 until the Iran/contra scandal in 1986, was CIA Director William Casey's "man" at the National Security Council in charge of monitoring covert operations. 1 Cannistraro, who was described by Newhouse News Service reporter Jonathan Tilove in the "mad scientist" article as "a calm and amiable man," somehow slipped through his testimony unscathed at the Iran/contra hearings and moved to CIA headquarters where he was the head of counterterrorism until his early "retirement" in 1989. He now works for the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) in Washington, DC, a right wing think tank co-founded by William Casey in 1962. NSIC specializes in analyzing and publishing studies of intelligence-related issues. In the early 80s they held seminars and published a five-volume series, "Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s,"2 which was a blueprint for the Reagan administration's radical reorganization of the intelligence community. Not much is known about NSIC's new Counterterrorism Study Group (CSG) whose self-proclaimed mission, according to their press release, is: "to improve the effectiveness of Western efforts to neutralize State support and sponsorship of international terrorism."3 NSIC has been holding private seminars recently (it was at one of these that Cannistraro told the press about the "mad scientists") in Washington, DC where they have started to "identify the nature of the threat, devise new methodologies to analyze the problem, and develop and institutionalize innovative but practical legal, military, political, and intelligence responses."4 They claim that their "group is unique in two ways. First, it consists of both practitioners as well as academics. Approximately 20 former government officials who specialized in countering terrorism, academic specialists, and corporate officials are members of CSG. Second, it is an international coalition with members from France, Jamaica, Japan, Lebanon, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States." Cannistraro and other members of CSG worked as consultants to CBS's "60 Minutes" during the Gulf War, providing "expert" analysis of the alleged threat of major terrorism in the US from the Iraqis or "their US network of supporters." The influence of groups like the National Strategy Information Center on the media is hard to measure but is worthy of attention. The main source of funds for NSIC for a number of years has been Richard Mellon Scaife5, an heir to the Mellon fortune and one of the richest men in the US. Since the early 70s, Scaife has spread over $100 million of his inherited General Motors fortune around to dozens of right wing and conservative think tanks who specialize in forming public opinion. Karen Rothmyer, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, described Scaife in 1981: "Scaife could claim to have done more than any other individual in the past five or six years to influence the way in which Americans think about their country and the world." Rothmyer concluded that Scaife-funded groups disproportionately shape American public opinion by providing books, papers, and a large percentage of the "experts" who grace the major TV talk shows like "MacNeil/Lehrer" and "Nightline." "By multiplying the authorities to whom the media are prepared to give a friendly hearing," Rothmyer writes, "Scaife has helped to create an illusion of diversity where none exists. The result could be an increasing number of one-sided debates in which the challengers are far outnumbered, if indeed they are heard from at all." The Examiner's "mad scientist" article may seem like an isolated incident. But it should be seen as part of a growing trend in the media to portray radical environmentalists as "eco-terrorists." There's no space here to expand on that theme but those who are interested in a longer explanation are encouraged to check out my article, "Myths, Bombs, and Body Wires," in the Fall issue of Covert Action Information Bulletin. And, please send Propaganda Review examples of disinformation like the "mad scientist" article that you discover in your local media along with accounts of similar protests. We shouldn't underestimate the impact of these informed protests, for as Jane Kay told us, "we thought no one cared what we publish." Footnotes: 1 Covert Action, # 32, Summer 1989, p. 14. 2 The five books are: Elements of Intelligence; Analysis and Estimates; Counterintelligence; Covert Action; Clandestine Collection. NSIC can be reached at 111 East 58th St., New York, NY 10022 and 1730 Rhode Island Ave., NW, Washington, DC, 20036. 3 Press Release, March 19, 1991, National Strategy Information Center. 4 Ibid. 5 Scaife gave $6 million to NSIC between 1973 and 1981. He also donated tens of millions of dollars to dozens of conservative think tanks and media groups such as: the Center for Strategic and International Studies ($5.3 million); Hoover Institution ($3.5 M); Accuracy in Media, the Heritage Foundation, the Law and Economics Center in Atlanta, and Americans for Effective Law Enforcement, among others. See "Citizen Scaife," by Karen Rothmyer, Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 1981, p. 41. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, MediaActive Next, Response 5, 20th Century Propaganda by Noam Chomsky (Part 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.5 **/ ** Written 8:15 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, 20th Cent. Propaganda (Part 1 of 3) 20th Century American Propaganda: A Brief History of US Corporate & Government Propaganda Operations by Noam Chomsky Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology and a well-known critic of US foreign policy. He has written numerous books including Manufacturing Consent (with Edward Herman). *** INTRODUCTION [In March 1991, Noam Chomsky made three speaking appearances in the San Francisco Bay Area before thousands, all of which were sold out in advance. The following is from one of those appearances, an informal talk at the College of Marin in Kentfield. Since the end of the Gulf War, several of these types of events have been very well attended. With the absence of viewpoints opposed to the war in the mainstream media, the public's desire to hear alternative voices seems to be overwhelming. This was edited for length and clarity by PR editors Rory Cox and Stephen Leiper, and approved by Dr. Chomsky.] An alternative conception of democracy has been the belief that the public must be barred from management of its own affairs, and the means of information must be kept narrowly and rigidly controlled. That may sound like an odd conception of democracy, but it's important to understand that it is the prevailing conception, and in fact it long has been, not just in operation, but in theory. There's a long history that goes back to the earliest modern democratic revolutions in 17th century England which largely expresses this point of view. Let's begin with the first modern government propaganda operation. That was under the Woodrow Wilson administration. Wilson was elected president in 1916 right in the middle of World War I on the platform 'peace without victory.' The population was extremely pacifistic and saw no reason to become involved in a European war; the Wilson administration was committed to war and had to do something about it so they established a government propaganda commission called the Creel Commission, which succeeded within six months in turning a pacifistic population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world. That was a major achievement, and it led to a further achievement -- right at that time and after the war the same techniques were used to whip up a hysterical Red Scare, which succeeded in destroying unions, reducing such dangerous problems as freedom of the press and freedom of political thought. There was very strong support from the media and from the business establishment -- which in fact pushed much of this work -- and it was, in general, a great success. The means that were used were extensive. For example, there was a good deal of fabrication of atrocities by the Huns -- Belgian babies with their arms torn off, all sorts of awful things that you still read in history books -- all invented by the British propaganda ministry, whose own commitment at the time, as they put it in their secret deliberations, was to control the thought of all the world. But crucially they wanted to control the thought of the intelligent members of the community in the United States who would then disseminate the propaganda that they were concocting and convert the pacifistic country to wartime hysteria. And that worked very well. It taught the lesson that state propaganda, when supported by the educated classes, and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day. One of the groups that learned the lesson, naturally, was the business community. There had already been a public relations industry in the United States where it was pioneered. Its commitment was to control the public mind, as its leaders put it, having learned a lot from the successes of the Creel Commission. In creating the Red Scare and its aftermath, the public relations industry underwent a huge expansion at that time. It did succeed for some time in creating almost total subordination of the public to business rule. Through the 1920s this was so extreme that Congressional committees began to investigate it as we moved into the 1930s. That's where a lot of our information about it comes from. Walter Lippmann, a major theorist of liberal democracy, was involved in these propaganda commissions and recognized their achievements. He argued that what was happening was what he called a revolution in the art of democracy. Namely, it was now possible to manufacture consent -- that is, to bring about agreement on the part of the public to things that they didn't want by the new techniques of propaganda. He thought that this was a good idea, in fact necessary. It was necessary because, as he put it, the common interests elude public opinion entirely, and they can only be understood and managed by a specialized class of responsible men who are smart enough to figure things out. So a relatively small elite -- the most intelligent men of the community -- can understand the common interest, what all of us care about, but these things elude the general public. This is a view that goes way back, hundreds of years. It's also a typical Leninist view, in fact it has a very close resemblance to the Leninist conception that a vanguard of revolutionary intellectuals should take state power using popular revolutions as the force that brings them the state power, and then drive the stupid masses towards a future that they're too dumb and incompetent to envision for themselves. The liberal democratic theory and Marxism/Leninism are very close in their common ideological assumptions. I think that's one reason why so many people have found it so easy over the years to shift from one position to another without any particular sense of change; it's just a matter of assessing where power is. "Maybe there'll be a popular revolution and that'll put us into state power, or maybe there won't be, in which case we'll just work for the people with real power: the business community. But we'll do the same thing, we'll drive the stupid masses towards a world that they're too dumb to understand for themselves." Lippmann backed this up by a pretty elaborated theory of progressive democracy. He argued that in a properly functioning democracy there are two classes of citizens. First of all there is the class of citizens that has to take some active role in running the general affairs -- that's the specialized class. They are the people who analyze, execute, make decisions, sort of run things in the political system, in the economic system and in the ideological system. That's a small percentage of the population. Anyone who puts these ideas forward is part of that small group. The others, who are out of this small group, the big majority of the population, they're what Lippmann called the bewildered herd. And we (the specialized class) have to protect everyone from the trampling and rage of the bewildered herd. There are two functions in a democracy then: the specialized class, the responsible men who carry out the executive function, which means they do the thinking and the planning and understand the common interest. And then the bewildered herd, they have a function in a democracy, too. Their function, he said, is to be spectators, not participants in action. But they have more of a function than that because it's a democracy. They are allowed to lend their weight, occasionally, to one or another member of the specialized class. In other words, they're allowed to say 'we want you to be our leader,' or 'we want you to be our leader;' that's because it's a democracy, not a totalitarian state. That's called an election, but once they've lent their weight to one or another member of the specialized class, they're supposed to sink back and become spectators of action, not participants. That's in a properly functioning democracy, and there's a logic behind it, there's even a kind of compelling moral principle behind it -- that is that the mass of the public is just too stupid to be able to understand things. If they try to participate in managing their own affairs, they're just going to cause trouble, and therefore it would be immoral and improper to permit them to do this. The founder of the modern field of communications and one of the leading American political scientists, Harold Lasswell, explained that we should not succumb to what he called democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests, because they're not. "We're" the best judges of their interests, and "we" have to, therefore, just out of ordinary morality, make sure that they don't have an opportunity to opt to act on the basis of their misjudgments. In what is nowadays called a totalitarian state, it's easy -- you just hold a bludgeon over their heads and if they get out of line you smash them over the head. But as societies become more free and democratic you lose that capacity, and therefore you have to turn to the techniques of propaganda. The logic is clear -- propaganda is to a democracy what a bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. And that's wise and good, because the common interests elude the bewildered herd, they can't figure them out. The public relations industry not only took this ideology on very explicitly but also acted on it; that's a huge industry, spending by now something on the order of a billion dollars a year. Its commitment all along was to controlling the public mind. In the 1930s, big problems arose again as they had during World War I. There was a huge depression, there was substantial labor organizing; in fact in 1935, labor won its first major legislative victory, namely the right to organize with the Wagner Act, and that raised two serious problems. For one thing, democracy was misfunctioning. The bewildered herd was actually winning legislative victories, and it's not supposed to work that way. The other problem was that it was becoming possible for people to organize. People have to be atomized and separated and alone, they're not supposed to organize because then they might be something beyond spectators of action, they might actually be participants, as many people with limited resources could get together and get into the political arena. That's really threatening, and a major response was taken on the part of business to ensure that this would be the last legislative victory for labor, and that it would be the beginning of the end of this democratic deviation of popular organization. And in fact it worked, that was the last legislative victory for labor, and from that point on, although union membership increased for awhile, it started dropping after World War II and the capacity to act through the unions also began a steady drop. It wasn't by accident. We're talking about the business community which spends lots and lots of money and attention and thought on how to deal with these problems through the public relations industry and other organizations, like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable and so on. They set to work immediately to try to find a way to counter these democratic deviations. The first trial was a year later in 1936. There was a major strike, the Bethlehem Steel strike in Western Pennsylvania, and business tried out a new technique of destruction of labor which worked very well. It wasn't through goon squads and breaking knees and all that kind of business -- that wasn't working very well -- but through the more subtle and effective means of propaganda. The idea was to figure out ways to turn the public against the strikers, to present the strikers as disruptive, harmful to the public, against the common interest, and the common interests are those of "us": the businessman, the housewife, the worker, and so on, that's all "us." And we want to just be together, we want to have things like harmony and Americanism and working together and so on, and then there are those bad strikers out there who are kind of disruptive, they've been causing trouble and breaking harmony and violating Americanism and we have to stop them so we can all live together, the corporate executive and the guy who cleans the floor who all have the same interests. That was essentially the message and a huge amount of effort was put into presenting it. Recall, after all, that this is the business community, so they control the media, have massive resources, and so on. And it worked very effectively. It was later called the Mohawk Valley formula, applied over and over again to break strikes. These were called scientific methods of strikebreaking. They mobilized community opinion in favor of vapid, empty concepts like Americanism -- who could be against that? Or harmony -- who can be against that? Or, to bring it up to date, support our troops -- who can be against that? Or yellow ribbons -- who can be against that? If somebody asks you, "Do you support the people in Iowa?" can you say, "Yeah, I support them," or "No, I don't support them;" it's not even a question, it doesn't mean anything. The point of public relations slogans like "support our troops" is that they don't mean anything, they mean as much as whether you support the people in Iowa. Of course there was an issue, the issue was: Do you support their policy? But you don't want people to think about the issue, that's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, I suppose everybody will be for it, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. But it's crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: "Do you support their policy?" That's something you're not allowed to talk about. End , 20th Cent. Propaganda (Part 1 of 3) Next, Response 6, 20th Cent. Propaganda (Part 2 of 3) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.6 **/ ** Written 8:17 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Response 6, 20th Cent. Propaganda (Part 2 of 3) There is a conception of democracy behind all this, which is what I mentioned: The bewildered herd are a problem, we've got to prevent their rage and trampling, we've got to distract them, they should be watching the Super Bowl, or sit-coms, or violent movies. Every once in a while you call on them to chant meaningless slogans, like "support our troops," and you've got to keep them pretty scared because unless they're scared properly and frightened of all kinds of devils that are going to destroy them, they may start to think, which is very dangerous because they're not competent enough to think, and therefore it's important to distract them and marginalize them. After the war came the decline of unions and a very rich working class culture associated with the unions was destroyed. This is the only state capitalist industrial society which doesn't have even the normal social contract that you find in comparable societies. Outside of South Africa this is the only industrial society that doesn't have national health care, where there's no minimal standards for survival for the parts of the population that can't follow the rules and gain things for themselves individually. Unions and other forms of popular structure are very weak, there are no political parties, no political organization; it's a long way toward the ideal, at least structurally. The media are a corporate monopoly, at least they have the same point of view. The two parties are two factions of the business party. Most of the population doesn't even bother voting because it looks meaningless, and they're marginalized and properly distracted. At least that's the goal. The leading figure in the public relations industry, Edward Bernays, actually came out of the Creel Commission. He learned his lessons there and went on to develop what he called engineering of consent. This he described as the essence of democracy, and of course the people who are able to engineer consent are the ones who have the resources and the power to do it: the business community, and that's who we work for. Bernays is the one who ran the public relations campaign for the United Fruit Company in 1954 when the United States moved in to overthrow the capitalist democratic government of Guatemala and install a murderous, death squad society which remains that way to the present day with constant infusions of US aid to prevent the democratic deviation that had taken place there. It's constantly necessary to ram through domestic programs to which the public is opposed. There's no reason for the public to be in favor of domestic programs which are harmful to most of the public, and that, too, takes extensive propaganda -- we've seen a lot of it in the last ten years. The Reagan programs were overwhelmingly unpopular; even the people who voted for Reagan, by about three to two, hoped that his policies would not be enacted. If you take particular programs like armaments or cutting back on social spending and so on, almost every one of them was unpopular, but as long as the public is marginalized and distracted it has no way to organize or articulate its sentiments, or even to know that it has these sentiments. The people who answered in polls "I'd prefer social spending to military spending" -- as people overwhelmingly did -- assumed that they were the only people with that crazy idea in their heads because they never heard it anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that, and therefore if you do think it and answer it in a poll, you just assume, "Well, I'm sort of weird, that's what I think," and since there's no way to get together with other people who share that view or who will reinforce that view and help you articulate it yourself, you feel like an oddity, so you just stay on the side and you don't pay attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the Super Bowl. The bewildered herd never gets properly tamed, so this is a constant battle. In the 1930s, they kind of arose, and they were put down. In the 1960s there was another wave of dissidence. There was a name for that, the specialized class called it the "crisis of democracy." The crisis was that large segments of the population were becoming organized and active and trying to participate in the political arena. Here we come back to these two conceptions of democracy. By the dictionary definition, that's an advance in democracy, but by the prevailing conception that's a problem that has to be overcome. The population has to be driven back to the apathy, obedience, and passivity that is their proper state, and we therefore have to do something to overcome the crisis. Great efforts have been made to achieve that but it hasn't worked. The crisis of democracy is still alive and well, fortunately, not very effective in changing policy, but certainly effective in changing opinion, contrary to what a lot of people believe. Great efforts were made after the 60s to try to reverse and overcome this malady. One aspect of the malady actually got a technical name, the Vietnam syndrome. The Vietnam syndrome, a term that sort of began to come up around 1970, has actually been defined occasionally. The Reaganite intellectual Norman Podhoretz defined it as "the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force." There were these sickly inhibitions against violence on the part of a large segment of the public. People didn't understand why they should go around torturing people, killing people and carpet bombing them. It's very dangerous for a population to be overcome by these sickly inhibitions, as Goebbels understood, because then there's a limit on foreign adventures. It's necessary, as the Washington Post put it the other day rather proudly, to instill in people the respect for the martial virtues. If you want to have a violent society that uses force around the world to achieve the ends of its own domestic elites, it's necessary to have a proper appreciation of the martial virtues, and none of these sickly inhibitions about using violence. So that's the Vietnam syndrome, and it's necessary to overcome that one. It's also necessary to completely falsify history; that's another way to overcome these sickly inhibitions, to make it look as if when we attack and destroy somebody we're really protecting and defending ourselves against major aggressors and monsters and so on. There's been a huge effort since the Vietnam War to reconstruct the history of that. Too many people, including plenty of soldiers and a lot of young people involved in the peace movement and many others, got to understand what was really going on and that was bad. And it was necessary to rearrange those bad thoughts and to restore some form of sanity, namely a recognition that whatever we do is noble and right, and if we're bombing South Vietnam that's because we're defending South Vietnam against somebody (namely the South Vietnamese, because nobody else was there). It's what the Kennedy intellectuals called defense against "internal aggression" in South Vietnam; that was the phrase Adlai Stevenson used. It's necessary to make that the official picture and the well understood picture. That's worked pretty well, actually -- when you have total control over the media, the education system, scholarship is conformist, and so on, you can get that across. One indication of it was actually revealed in a study that was done at the University of Massachusetts on attitudes toward the current Gulf crisis, a study of beliefs and attitudes and television watching. [See article, page 14] One of the questions asked in that study was "How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate there were during the Vietnam war?" The average response on the part of Americans today was about 100,000. The official figure was about 2 million; the actual figure was probably around 3 to 4 million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question. They asked the question, "What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today, 'How many Jews died in the holocaust?', they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?" They leave the question unanswered, but you can pursue it. What does it tell us about our culture? It tells us quite a bit. It's necessary to overcome the sickly inhibitions against military force and other democratic deviations. In this particular case it worked. And the same is true on every topic. Pick the topic you like -- the Middle East, international terrorism, Central America -- whatever it is, the picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the most remote relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies. It's all been a marvelous success from this point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom. It's extremely interesting. It's not like a totalitarian state where it's done by force; these achievements are under conditions of freedom. If we want to understand our own society, we have to think about these facts, and they're important facts, and important for those who care about what kind of society they live in. End, Response 6, 20th Cent. Propaganda (Part 2 of 3) Next, Response 7, 20th Cent. Propaganda (Part 3 of 3) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.7 **/ ** Written 8:19 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Response 7, 20th Cent. Propaganda (Part 3 of 3) Despite all of this, the dissident culture survives, it's grown quite a lot since the 1960s. In the 1960s, dissident culture was extremely slow in developing. There was no protest against the Indochina War until years after the United States had started bombing South Vietnam. When it did grow it was a very narrow dissident movement, mostly students and young people. By the 70s that had changed considerably as major popular movements developed -- the environmental movement, the feminist movement, the anti-nuclear movement and others. In the 1980s there was an even greater expansion with the solidarity movements, which is something very new and important in the history of at least American and maybe world dissidence; these were movements that not only protested but actually involved themselves, often intimately, in the lives of suffering people elsewhere. People learned a great deal from it, and it had quite a civilizing effect right in mainstream America, and all of that has made a very large difference. Anyone who's been involved in this kind of activity for many years must be aware of this. I know myself that the kind of talks that I give today in the most reactionary parts of the country are talks of the kind that I couldn't have given at the peak of the peace movement in the 60s to the most active audience, and now I can give them anywhere. People may or may not agree, but at least they understand what I'm talking about, and there's some sort of common ground that can be pursued. That's all signs of a civilizing effect. One familiar example of this change is the gender gap. In the 1960s, attitudes of men and women were approximately the same on such matters as the martial virtues and the "sickly inhibitions against the use of military force." Few people, either men or women, were suffering from those sickly inhibitions; the responses were the same. Over the years it's changed, the sickly inhibitions have increased all across the board, but meanwhile a gap has been growing and by now it's a very substantial gap. According to polls it's something like 25 percent. What has happened is that there is some form of at least semi-organized popular movement that women are involved in, the feminist movement. An organization has its effects, it means you discover you're not alone, and others have the same thoughts that you do and you can reinforce your thoughts and you can learn more about what you think. This is a very informal movement, it's not like a membership organization or anything, it's just a mood that spreads and involves interactions amongst people and so on, and it has a very noticeable effect. That's the danger of democracy: If organizations can develop, if people are no longer glued to the tube alone, then you may have all these funny thoughts arising in their heads like sickly inhibitions against the use of military force, and that has to be overcome but it hasn't been overcome, they think. You can illustrate this wherever you turn. Instead of talking about the last war, let me talk about the next war, because sometimes it's useful to be prepared instead of just reacting. There is a very characteristic development going on in the United States now; it's not the first country in the world that has done this. There are growing domestic social and economic problems, in fact maybe catastrophes. In such circumstances, you have got to divert the bewildered herd, because if they start noticing this they may not like it, since they're the ones that are suffering from it. Just having them watch the Super Bowl and the sit-coms may not be enough, so you have to whip them up into fear of enemies. In the 1930s, Hitler whipped them into fear of the Jews and the Gypsies and so on -- you've got to crush them to defend ourselves. We have our ways, too. New enemies have to be conjured up. People have quite unfairly criticized George Bush for being unable to express or articulate what's really driving us now. That's very unfair. Until recently, one could always appeal to the Russian threat. But that reflex no longer works. So the enemy has been international terrorists and narco-traffickers and crazed Arabs and Saddam Hussein -- the new Hitler -- who is going to conquer the world, and so on. They've got to keep coming up one after another. You frighten the population, terrorize them, intimidate them so they're too afraid to travel and they start cowering in fear. Then you have a magnificent victory over Grenada or Panama or something like that, or over a defenseless Third World army that you can pulverize before you even bother to look at them, like what just happened in the Gulf. Then everybody feels relief. That's one of the ways which you can keep the bewildered herd from paying attention to what's really going on around them, and keep them diverted and controlled. And the next one that's coming along very likely will be Cuba. That's going to require a continuation of the illegal economic warfare, and perhaps a continuation of the extraordinary international terrorism which was initially organized by the Kennedy administration against Cuba. There's also got to be an ideological offensive and it's all got to build up until there's some other monster that we have to protect ourselves against, and if you can ensure that they're defenseless -- you can't go in if they can fight back, that's much too dangerous -- but if you can assure that they're defenseless, maybe we'll sort of knock that one off and breathe another sigh of relief. This has been going on for a while. In fact, the frenzy of the ideological offensive has been increasing. One interesting moment was in May 1986 when the memoirs of released Cuban prisoner Armando Valladares came out. They quickly became a media sensation. I'll give you a couple of quotes. The media described his revelations as the "definitive account of the vast system of torture and prison by which Castro punishes and obliterates political opposition." It was an "inspiring and unforgettable account" of the "bestial prisons," "inhuman torture," and "record of state violence" under "yet another of this century's mass murderers," who we learn at last from this book "has created a new despotism that has institutionalized torture as a mechanism of social control" in "the hell that was the Cuba" that Valladares lived in. That's all Washington Post and New York Times in repeated reviews. Castro was described as a "dictatorial goon." His atrocities were revealed in this book so conclusively that "only the most light-headed and cold-blooded intellectual will come to the tyrant's defense." This is from the Washington Post. This, remember, is the description of one man's account of what happened to him. Let's say it's all true. He was singled out for his courage in enduring "the horrors and the sadism" of this bloody Cuban tyrant by Ronald Reagan at a White House ceremony marking Human Rights Day. He was then appointed the US representative at the UN Human Rights Commission where he has been able to perform signal services defending the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments against charges of atrocities so massive that it makes anything that he suffered look pretty minor. And that's the way things stand. That was May1986. The month is interesting and it tells you something about manufacture of consent. In the same month, several of the surviving leaders of the non-governmental Human Rights Group CDHES in El Salvador were arrested and tortured, including Herbert Anaya who was the director. They were sent to a prison, La Esperanza, and while they were in the prison they continued their human rights work. There were 432 political prisoners in that prison, they got signed affidavits from 430 of them in which they described, under oath, the torture that they had received -- electrical torture and other atrocities, including in one case torture by a North American US major in uniform who's described in some detail. This is an unusually explicit and comprehensive testimony, probably unique in its detail about what goes on in a torture chamber. The 160-page report was sneaked out of the prison along with a videotape which was taken showing people testifying in prison about their torture. It was distributed by the Marin County Interfaith Task Force. The national press refused to cover it and television stations refused to run it. There was an article in the local Marin County newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner had an article, I think that's all. Nobody else would touch it. This was a time when there were more than a few light-headed and cold-blooded western intellectuals who were singing the praises of Napolen Duarte and Ronald Reagan. But Anaya was not the subject of any tributes, he didn't get on Human Rights Day, he wasn't appointed to anything, rather he was released in a prisoner exchange and assassinated, apparently by the US-backed security forces. Very little information about that ever appeared, and the media never asked whether exposing the atrocities instead of sitting on them and silencing them might have saved his life. That tells you something about the way a well-functioning system of manufacture of consent works. In comparison with the revelations of the one prison in El Salvador, Valladares' memoirs are a sandpile next to a mountain. But you've got your job to do. If you look carefully at the coverage of the Gulf War since the build-up in August, you'll notice there are a couple of voices missing. For example, there is an Iraqi Democratic Opposition, in fact a very courageous and quite substantial IDO. They, of course, function in exile because they couldn't survive in Iraq; they're primarily in Europe. They're bankers and engineers and architects, and people like that. They're articulate, they have voices, they speak. Last February [1990] when Saddam Hussein was still George Bush's favorite friend and trading partner, they actually came to Washington with a plea for some kind of support for a demand of theirs, calling for parliamentary democracy in Iraq. They were, of course, totally rebuffed because the United States had no interest in it, and there was no reaction to this in the public record. Since August, it became a little harder to avoid their existence; after all, in August we suddenly turned against Saddam Hussein after having favored him many years, and here is this Iraqi Democratic Opposition outside who ought to have some thoughts about the matter, they would be happy to see Hussein drawn and quartered -- he killed their brothers and tortured their sisters and drove them out of the country. They've been fighting against his tyranny the whole time that Ronald Reagan and George Bush were cherishing him. What about their voices? Take a look at the national media and see how much you can find about the Iraqi Democratic Opposition from August through February. You can't find a word. It's not that they're inarticulate; they have statements, proposals, calls and demands, and in fact if you look at them you find that they're indistinguishable from that of the American peace movement. They're against Saddam Hussein, and they're against the war against Iraq, they don't want their country destroyed. What they want is a peaceful resolution, and they knew perfectly well that that was achievable. That's the wrong view, therefore they're out, you don't hear a word about them. If you want to find out about them, read the German or British press. They don't say much about them, but they're less controlled than we are. That, again, is a pretty spectacular achievement of propaganda. First, that the voices of the Iraqi democrats are completely excluded, and second that nobody notices it. That's interesting, too. It takes a really deeply indoctrinated population not to notice that we're not hearing the voices of the Iraqi Democratic Opposition. And not asking the question why, and finding out the obvious answer -- because they have the wrong thoughts. They agree with the international peace movement, therefore they're out. Let's take the question of the reasons for the war. The reasons offered were: Aggressors cannot be rewarded, and aggression must be reversed by the quick resort to violence. That was the reason for the war. There was basically no other reason advanced. Can that possibly be the reason for the war? Does the United States uphold those principles? I won't insult your intelligence by running through the facts, but the fact is those arguments could be refuted in two minutes by a literate teenager. However, they were never refuted. Take a look at the media and the liberal commentators and the critics and the people that testified in Congress, and see whether anybody questioned the assumption that the United States stands up for those principles. Has the United States opposed US aggression in Panama and insisted on bombing Washington to reverse it? When the South African occupation of Namibia was declared illegal in 1969, did the United States impose sanctions on food and medicine? Did it go to war? Did it bomb Cape Town? No, it carried out 20 years of what it called "quiet diplomacy." It wasn't very pretty during those 20 years. In the years of the Reagan/Bush administration alone, about a million and a half people were killed by South Africa just in the surrounding countries. Somehow that didn't sear our sensitive souls, we continued with quiet diplomacy, we ended up with ample reward for the aggressors, they were given a major port in Namibia, plenty of advantages. Where is this principle that we uphold? Again, it's child's play to demonstrate that those couldn't possibly have been the reasons for going to war -- because we don't uphold the principles -- but nobody did it. And nobody bothered to point out a conclusion that follows: No reason was given for going to war. None. No reason was given for going to war that could not be refuted, again, by a literate teenager in about two minutes. That, again, is the hallmark of a totalitarian culture, and it ought to frighten us, that we are so deeply totalitarian that you can be driven to war without any reason being given for it, and with nobody noticing it or caring. It's a very striking fact. Right before the bombing started, in mid-January, a major Washington Post/ABC poll revealed something interesting. People were asked "If Iraq would agree to withdraw from Kuwait, in return for Security Council consideration of the problem of the Arab/Israeli conflict, would you be in favor of that?" About two-thirds of the population of the United States was in favor of that; so was most of the world, including the Iraqi Democratic Opposition. That was reported. The people who answered that question presumably thought "I'm the only person in the world who thinks this," because certainly almost nobody in the press had said that would be a good idea. The orders from Washington had been, "We're supposed to be against linkage," that is, diplomacy, and therefore everybody goose-stepped on command and everybody was against diplomacy. Try to find something in the press that says, "Yeah, that would be a good idea." Suppose the people that answered that question knew they weren't alone, that other people thought it, for example the Iraqi Democratic Opposition. Suppose they knew that this was not hypothetical, that in fact Iraq had made exactly such an offer. Here you have the great successes of propaganda. Virtually no one knew any of the things I just mentioned. Probably not one person who answered the poll knew any of these things. The people thought they were alone. And therefore it was possible to proceed with the war policy without opposition. This morning, Clayton Yeutter, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, said that if a Democrat had been in office, Kuwait would not be liberated today. He can say that, and no Democrat can get up and say, "Yeah, if I was president, Kuwait would have been liberated not only today but months ago, because there were opportunities then I would have pursued, and Kuwait would have been liberated without killing tens of thousands of people, without causing an environmental catastrophe." And no Democrat can say that because no Democrat took that position, with a few marginal exceptions. No leader of the Democratic Party can say, "Wait a minute, if you'd have followed my advice, Kuwait would have been liberated long ago in exactly the terms that had been proposed because I would have pursued them." Given the fact that no Democratic politician can say that, Yeutter is free to make his statements. Take the idea that Saddam Hussein is a monster about to conquer the world, widely believed in the United States. It was drilled into people's heads over and over again, "He's about to take everything, we've got to stop him now." How did he get that powerful? This is a small Third World country without an industrial base. For eight years Iraq had been fighting Iran (that's post-revolutionary Iran, which had decimated its officer corps and most of its military force). Iraq had a little bit of support in that war; it was backed by the Soviet Union, the United States, Europe, the major Arab countries, and the Arab oil producers. And they couldn't defeat Iran. But all of a sudden, Iraq is ready to conquer the world. Find anybody that pointed that out? The fact of the matter is, this was a Third World country with a peasant army. It is now being conceded that there was a ton of disinformation about the fortifications and the chemical weapons and so on, but did you find anybody who pointed that out? No, you found virtually nobody who pointed it out. And that's typical. Notice that this is not all that different from Woodrow Wilson's Creel Commission. The techniques are maybe more sophisticated and there's more television and so on, more money goes into it, but it's pretty traditional. I think the issue here is not simply disinformation and the Gulf crisis; it is much broader. It's whether we want to live in a free society, or whether we want to live under what amounts to a form of self-imposed totalitarianism with the bewildered herd marginalized and directed elsewhere, terrified, screaming patriotic slogans, fearing for their lives and admiring with awe the leader that saved them from destruction, while the educated classes goose-step on command, repeat the slogans that they're supposed to repeat, the society deteriorates at home, we end up serving as a mercenary enforcer state, hoping that others are going to pay us to smash up the world. Those are the choices. And that's the choice that you have to face, and the answer to those questions is very much in the hands of people exactly like you and me. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Response 7, 20th Cent. Propaganda (Part 3 of 3) Next, Response 8, Myths, Lies... (Part 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.8 **/ ** Written 8:21 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Myths, Lies... (Part 1 of 2) Myths, Lies and Videotape: A Checklist of Gulf War Lies Exposed and Analyzed by Stephen Leiper Stephen Leiper is a senior editor of Propaganda Review. *** In its hyper and inexorable rush to war, the Bush administration engendered a veritable propaganda hit parade. The nation and the world were quickly awash in myths and disinformation. Now, in the aftermath, the antidote of truth has begun to trickle out in bits and pieces at a time. While it comes too late to affect the outcome of a wholly unnecessary war, it is important to an understanding of what really happened in the Persian Gulf and, perhaps, to the prevention of future armed conflicts. Though the belated trickle of truth may make it appear that our press freedoms are still intact, the fact remains that the damage had already been done in the early days of the war when the mainstream media fell all over itself to do the Pentagon's bidding. As Holly Sklar pointed out in Issue Number 7 of this magazine, "Propagandists in the Bush administration have known that first impressions are often lasting impressions, and so they worked really hard to package the initial image of this war." Videos of direct hits by "smart" bombs were etched indelibly into the world's mindscreens as evidence of punishment rendered with surgical precision, whereas later information indicates that was nowhere near the full story. Further, the long delayed and piecemeal infusion of facts correcting earlier myths, lies, and disinformation cannot possibly compete with a propaganda blitz when it is going full bore and reverberating from every magazine cover, newspaper headline, and network news screen. Since the media hasn't uncovered the information and the government isn't likely to release it, Daniel Ellsberg, the former Pentagon analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, has called for government employees to follow his example by leaking the record straight about this ultra-packaged war. There is an astonishing number of separate entries in this panoply of propaganda. What follows is a quick look at some of the worst (i.e., most effective or most appalling) of the lot, presented in an effort to help dispel the fog of disinformation about the late great war in the Gulf. Myth #1) US bombing did not cause massive Iraqi civilian deaths and create a health disaster. Because of wartime censorship by the Pentagon and Saddam Hussein alike, and because the end of the war dissolved almost seamlessly into a US-instigated internal rebellion by the Kurds and Shiites brutally put down by Saddam's military, we may never know how many civilians died and at whose hands. But estimates of the number of civilians killed because of the the air war do run from 3,000 to as many as 100,000. Also, a FOIA request by the Natural Resources Defense Council forced the Defense Intelligence Agency to reveal their estimate of 100,000 Iraqi soldiers killed, according to a June 5 New York Times story. It is certain that the US and its coalition partners went far beyond the mandate of UN resolutions when they systematically destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq, bombing the nation back into the "pre-industrial age." The Gulf conflict, which was supposed to evict Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait, quickly became a war against the Iraqi people despite George Bush's protestations to the contrary. After the war, a UN report described the "near-apocalyptic" conditions caused by Operation Desert Storm, and called for a major mobilization and movement of resources to deal with the crises in the fields of agriculture, food, water, sanitation, and health. But little was said about this in the mainstream media until ABC's "Nightline" reported on May 30 - almost three months after the end of the war - that from 170,000 to 200,000 Iraqi babies and young children were likely to die from malnutrition and disease as a result both of the bomb damage to the infrastructure and the sanctions against Iraq that George Bush insists remain in place as long as Saddam Hussein is in power. In a powerful and graphic report, "Nightline" said that 500 children a day were already dying, over and beyond the normal mortality rate. Ironically, the revelations - long in coming - of this tragedy contrast starkly with the much-ballyhooed story of Kuwaiti incubator baby deaths at the hands of the invading Iraqis, a story later found to have been untrue. (See Myth #7 below). A New York Times story by Patrick E. Tyler the following week, while not zeroing in on the deaths of the Iraqi children, added to the tardy depiction of what really did happen as a result of the air war. The Times reported that a classified US report assessed the devastation of Iraq as being worse than the coalition forces intended, and was responsible for a potentially catastrophic health crisis. A June 10 Time magazine article, "Watching Children Starve to Death," while corroborating the suffering of the Iraqi children, contained not even a hint that the US had some responsibility - if not culpability - for this. Some 9,000 homes reportedly were destroyed in the bombing, and water, electricity, sewer lines, communication lines, and bridges were all targeted and either damaged or destroyed. The continued embargo has slowed the effort to avoid the likelihood of widespread disease, hunger and suffering of people whose only crime was to live under the regime of Saddam Hussein, and who had no possibility of overthrowing him. Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark has initiated a Commission of Inquiry leading to an International War Crimes Tribunal. According to Clark, the Tribunal "will seek and weigh all evidence about war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity, including making civilians the target of attack, the destruction of facilities essential to human life, the annihilation of military forces not in or capable of combat . . ." [See Resources, p. 69, for more information] Clark must have touched a nerve, because the New York Times published an article on June 14 by David Margolick which smeared and marginalized him, ostensibly chronicling his career but without mentioning the war crimes tribunal. The article, which was largely based on comments by editors of conservative publications, was titled "The Long and Lonely Journey of Ram-sey Clark," but the San Francisco Chronicle (6/17/91) retitled it "Ramsey Clark's Strange Career" with a jump headline "Critics: Clark Motivated by Hatred." Myth #2) The US press was overly critical of the war effort, if not downright unpatriotic. In fact, the mass media became cheerleaders for the Bush administration and the Pentagon. The press - cowed by the administration, the right wing, and public opinion polls, barely protested the unprecedented censorship, and swallowed whole the spoon-fed government line. The Pentagon was able to handpick the reporters who made up the press pools, and official "minders" accompanied them when they interviewed GIs. An excellent analysis and commentary on the collapse of American journalism in the Gulf is Lewis H. Lapham's Notebook in the May 1991 Harper's magazine. Lapham writes that within hours after the bombardment of Baghdad began on Jan. 17, "the newspaper and television correspondents abandoned any claim or pretension to the power of independent thought. It was as if they had instantly enlisted in the ranks of an elite regiment, sworn to protect and defend whatever they were told to protect and defend by the generals who presented them with their morning film clips and their three or four paragraphs of yesterday's news . . . The media accepted the conditions with scarcely a murmur of protest or complaint." [See "Too Little, Too Late" by Rory Cox on page 35 of this issue for an analysis of post-war self-criticism by the media] Myth #3) The US did not give Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait. The by now well-known remarks made by then-US Ambassador April Glaspie to Saddam Hussein on July 25, 1990 telling him, among other things, that the US "has no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border dispute with Kuwait" was never thoroughly investigated by a supine Congress. But the import of her remarks was amplified by reports that the State Department stopped the Voice of America from broadcasting an editorial warning Iraq that the US was "strongly commited to defending its friends in the Gulf." Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly told Congress on July 31, 1990 that the US had no formal commitments to defend Kuwait. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, in his recently published book The Commanders, says that Pentagon senior intelligence analyst for the Middle East Pat Lang warned Joint Chiefs chairman General Colin Powell two days before Iraq invaded Kuwait that Saddam Hussein was about to make such a move. Another top secret message from Lang and a similar warning from the CIA two days later prompted Powell to alert Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney to "sound the alarm at the White House." Either Bush & Co. did not get the message or chose to ignore it. According to Woodward, "As far as Powell could tell, either the White House had another idea about how to handle the problem, or the suggestion just fell through the cracks." No public or private warning was given to Hussein. Michael Massing, in the New York Review of Books (June 27), asks why Woodward - who claims to have known of General Powell's early opposition to the war - did not reveal it at the time in the Washington Post, where Woodward is an editor. Further, a group of senior Kuwaiti military officers are demanding a probe of why the Kuwaiti army failed to react to the Iraqi invasion and, in fact, pulled its tanks back from the border in the days before the invasion (New York Times, 5/24/91). Myth #4) The liberation of Kuwait advanced the cause of freedom and democracy. The true story with regard to several of these myths - particularly the story of Kuwait - changes with each passing day. As this magazine goes to press in mid-September 1991, the Bush administration is looking the other way while the restored Kuwaiti monarchy and vigilantes conduct a post-war reign of terror against Palestinians, foreign nationals and suspect Kuwaitis. Draconian martial law tribunals have aroused international criticism for their lack of due process of law and the severity of sentences. AP reported that the US would not interfere with the restored Kuwaiti emirate's plans to execute hundreds of people it had concluded were war criminals. According to a Pacific News Service story by Dennis Bernstein and Sandy Close (San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 26), martial law plans for Kuwait were drawn up by US and Kuwaiti officials before the war, and included the possibility of extending the initial three-month martial law period up to a year. Middle East Watch reported that an "indiscriminate campaign of revenge and retaliation" by goon squads was led by members of the all-powerful ruling al-Sabah family which terrorized minority groups. Amnesty International confirmed a "wave of arbitrary arrests, torture and killings" in Kuwait after the end of the war. Palestinians and other "undesirables" have been tortured, mutilated and their bodies dumped from trucks. US troops have been aware of this but have done nothing to prevent it. Robert Fisk of the London Independent tried to prevent the kidnapping of a Palestinian but was told by a US military supervisor, "This is martial law, boy. Fuck off!" The Bush administration apparently feared that public exposure of the massive human rights violations going on in post-war Kuwait would undermine the moral legitimacy of its war with Iraq. But the martial law tribunals which began in May created a worldwide storm of criticism after the first trials revealed a blatant lack of fairness with moves illegal even by Kuwaiti and martial law standards. Yet the violations and trials continued without due process of law - according to US and European human rights groups - and the al-Sabah family began to talk openly of their plans to purge Kuwait of most Palestinians, offering cynically to airlift them to the US if there is such concern here for human rights. According to a June 20 New York Times story by John H. Cushman, Jr., the New York-based Human Rights Watch released a letter to the Kuwaiti emir, asking that future trials be held in accordance with international standards, and that the Kuwaiti government grant new trials or release all those already convicted. Human Rights Watch "cited several shortcomings in the trials to date: the use of confessions obtained by torture, the lack of an appeals court, trials in absentia, the denial of adequate legal counsel, the use of martial law courts to try crimes such as petty theft, and the prosecution of people for offenses that were not specifically forbidden by any law." The French and German governments also urged the emir to pardon the alleged collaborators. Stung by media criticism, the Kuwaiti martial law government reacted by restricting the visas of Western journalists. George Bush, meanwhile, publicly avoided criticizing the al-Sabah family's actions, and in a June 16 story in the San Francisco Examiner by Jonathan Broder, is reported to have told the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the US (yet another al-Sabah) "Listen, Mr. Ambassador, we didn't fight this war for democracy or those trials. Don't be intimidated by what's going on." The unpopular and degenerate emirate was brought back to the throne with a big assist from the US Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps, with a $1.5 million contract from the Kuwaiti government, helped in the sumptuous restoration of the Bayan Palace - complete with gold-plated toilet paper holders and doorknobs - while the rest of the country still lay in blacked-out ruins. And there has been no more noble talk from Bush and Baker about introducing democracy in Kuwait, though at the end of the war the emir gave Baker vague assurances about democratizing that country. A meeting of a fledgling democratic opposition which calls for representative government was ended when the powers that be pulled the plug - literally. Earlier, one opposition leader was permanently paralyzed following an attempted assassination. An independent newspaper was closed by the government. In June of this year the emir promised elections in another 18 months - Allah willing - and meanwhile extended martial law another 30 days. The worldwide uproar over the direction Kuwait was taking caused the end of martial law and the commutation of death sentences. But little real difference is likely to occur unless and until the constitutional parliament abolished by the al-Sabah family in 1985 is re-established. End, Myths, Lies ..(Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 9, Myths, Lies... (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.9 **/ ** Written 8:23 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Myths, Lies... (Part 2 of 2) Myth #5) US aerial bombing was accurate and "smart." Former Pentagon systems analyst Pierre Sprey says the US military "shamelessly doctored" weapons accuracy figures. According to a post-war report by the Pentagon itself, only seven percent of the bombs and missiles dropped on Iraq and Kuwait by the US-led coalition were "smart." Ninety-three percent were unguided missiles, and 70 percent of those missed their targets. The highly acclaimed high-tech "hero" of the war - the Patriot missile - may have caused more damage than it prevented because it destroyed SCUD warheads only 44 percent of the time, according to the testimony of Israeli defense officials. Though the Patriots intercepted the missiles, the other 56 percent of the warheads fell intact onto Israeli and Palestinian territory where they caused considerable destruction. But the highly successful propaganda at the time - the adulation of "smart" bombs and missiles for their perceived infallibility - was in fact a successful advertising campaign for more US weapons dollars. [As we go to press, the August Harper's magazine reports in their "Index": Average number of Israeli apartments damaged in each SCUD attack before Patriot missiles were deployed: 219. Average number damaged in each attack after the missiles were de-ployed: 350.] Myth #6) Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Alan Simpson et al did not appease Saddam Hussein in the 80s. Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), in a speech to a Los Angeles audience aired by Pacifica radio on March 28, said that the real appeasement of Saddam Hussein went on between 1980 and 1990 under Reagan/Bush. "Until the day before the invasion of Aug. 2," Boxer said, "the Bush administration had approved the sale of $700 million worth of advanced technology to Iraq. From 1985 to 1990 the US sold Iraq $1.5 billion in advanced technology - some of military value - shipped directly to the Ministry of Defense. In 1988, the [US] Senate unanimously passed sweeping sanctions which would have denied access to most US technology. The Bush administration opposed it and it died in the House because of their opposition. . . . The Bush administration guaranteed $750 million in loans from the Commodity Credit Corporation." Rep. Boxer said that two weeks before Saddam Hussein went into Kuwait, [the House] "attempted to cut off these commodity credits from Saddam Hussein because of the [reported] use of chemical weapons on the Kurds. The Bush administration opposed us and fought us." Republican Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, who called CNN's Peter Arnett an Iraqi sympathizer for his reporting from Baghdad, had himself during the previous April kowtowed to Saddam Hussein, commiserating with him about criticism of Saddam in the US media. Simpson to Saddam: "I believe your problem is with the Western media and not with the US government." A pre-invasion Voice of America editorial had listed Iraq as a regime that held power "by force and fear." The Bush Administration formally apologized to Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz for the editorial. Myth #7) The invading Iraqi soldiers took Kuwaiti babies out of hospital incubators and left them on the floor to die. Amnesty International has backed off from its earlier highly publicized report, saying now that "it was not established how they died and the team found no reliable evidence that Iraqi forces had caused the deaths of babies by removing them or ordering their removal from incubators." Even ABC-TV news admitted this after the war. But before Operation Desert Shield exploded into Desert Storm, this atrocity tale helped fuel the demonization of Saddam Hussein. Myth #8) The UN Security Council vote was not manipulated/purchased by the US. US Secretary of States James Baker pushed through Resolution 678 - the so-called use-of-force resolution - on Nov. 29, 1990 while US delegate to the UN Thomas Pickering was president of the Security Council and thus could control its agenda. There were 12 votes for the resolution, two against (Cuba, Yemen) and one abstention (China). The resulting diplomatic victory for the US gave an aura of sanctity to the intimations of upcoming war, indicating that the conflict would pit "the whole world against Saddam Hussein." The US even cleaned up its act, paying its long-in-arrears dues to the UN. A special report on the resolution by Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times on Dec. 1 described "a frenzied month of activity in which the administration used arguments, rewards, a few veiled threats and crucial advice from President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to build a Security Council majority for a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq." President Bush tracked down the Malaysian Prime Minister "to brow beat him into getting his foreign minister to listen to Mr. Baker's arguments." Friedman described "the Bush administration's decision to encourage Saudi Arabia to give $1 billion in aid to Moscow to help the Soviets through the winter, [and] its decision to let the Chinese know that if they did not veto the resolution their Foreign Minister would be received at the White House after 18 months of isolation. . ." Friedman wrote that "the administration never hesitated to let other nations know that their support for this resolution was vital to Washington, which would remember its friends, and its foes. Minutes after the Yemeni delegate joined the Cubans in voting against the resolution . . . a senior American diplomat was instructed to tell him: 'That was the most expensive no vote you ever cast,' meaning it would result in an end to America's more than $70 million in foreign aid to Yemen." Even conservative columnist William R. Hearst, Jr. in the Dec. 2 San Francisco Examiner wrote that James Baker was "hitting the low road of making, in effect, deals with foreign governments to secure their support. It was no coincidence that on Friday, the day after China abstained from vetoing the Security Council ultimatum resolution, Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen arrived in Washington for 'comprehensive talks' . . ." The meeting with Bush and Baker was the highest official contact between China and the US since the Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators by Chinese troops in June 1989. Bush declared that Beijing and Washington had "made common ground in terms of standing up against aggression" by Iraq. On the same day, it was reported in the New York Times that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates had agreed to give the Soviets $3 billion in loans. Kuwait's Ambassador to Moscow found it necessary to maintain that it was not a payoff for the Soviets' part in isolating Iraq. In May, President Bush announced his decision to continue granting most favored nation status to China. Bush said he feared isolating that country but he also openly revealed that he wanted to reward China for not vetoing the UN Security Council resolution. This despite the continuing repression of the pro-democracy movement and of the Tibetan people, whose country has been occupied by the Chinese for 40 years without a peep of official US protest. By June, Bush had promised the Soviets another $1.5 billion in farm loans, following by six months another billion-dollar grain deal, both of which many experts believe constitute a handout that will never be repaid. Note that the five permanent members of the Security Council are the same nations already back in business as usual - peddling arms to the Mideast. Myth #9) Iraq was out to conquer the world (or at least Saudi Arabia) and the Iraqi army was powerful, "battle-hardened," motivated, and a match for coalition forces, if not even stronger. The Bush Administration originally justified the sending of US troops to Saudi Arabia in order to prevent the Iraqis from capturing that country's oil fields. According to Knut Royce of New York Newsday, the CIA said that Iraq had no intention of invading Saudi Arabia. The CIA had, however, predicted the invasion of Kuwait [see Myth #2]. The myth that the Iraqi army was a powerful opponent was best put in its proper perspective by Brigadier General Richard A. Neal, US deputy director of operations, on March 1, post "turkey shoot": "We might have created a picture that they had a better capability than they really possessed." Myth #10) Saddam Hussein was the only "environmental terrorist" at work in the Gulf War. The oil deliberately spilled into the Gulf by Saddam was compounded by coalition air raids on oil facilities and tankers. After blame had been placed totally on the Iraqis, and President Bush accused Saddam of "environmental terrorism," Saudi officials later estimated that the US-led coalition had caused as much as 30 percent of the spill. Scientific American's May 1991 issue revealed that the Department of Energy in January put an embargo on information relating to environmental impacts of fires and oil spills in the Middle East, and the policy remained in effect even after the war ended. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers were ordered to withhold satellite images or other information on the Gulf region. Though a DOE spokesperson claimed security and concern about war reparations as the reason for the news blackouts, another motive was suggested by environmental engineer John Cox, vice president of Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament: Satellite images would reveal that coalition bombing of Iraqi refineries and oil reserves had created a cloud of smoke temporarily comparable to that produced by the Iraqi destruction of Kuwait's oil wells. The US bears some responsibility for the environmental impact of the 550 Kuwait wells set on fire by the departing Iraqis, since Saddam Hussein warned he would carry out his threat to do so if he were attacked, yet the US went ahead with the war rather than rely on sanctions and diplomacy. The Kuwaiti oil fires have been called "the most intense burning source, probably, in the history of the world" (Joel S. Levine of NASA) and some experts foresee a "nuclear winter" if only one percent of the 100,000 tons a day of smoke reaches the stratosphere. Soot particles from the fires had already been detected on Mauna Loa in Hawaii by May. Black snow has been reported in the Indian state of Kashmir. Myth #11) There is definitive evidence that Saddam Hussein "gassed his own people." This particular mythical event played a key role in the demonization of Saddam Hussein, supposedly proving that he was "worse than Hitler." President Bush accused Saddam last Thanksgiving of being "a dictator who has gassed his own people, innocent women and children." But a February 1990 Army War College study, according to reports in New York Newsday by Knut Royce, and by Michael Wines in the New York Times, indicated that the Kurds in question at the town of Halbja in mid-March 1988 were gassed by the Iranians, not the Iraqis. The event occurred during the final months of the Iran-Iraq war. Myth #12) President Bush did not really encourage the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions against Saddam Hussein, which were crushed while Bush withheld support. In a speech at the Raytheon plant in Connecticut where Patriot missiles are produced, following the end of the "100-hour" ground war, Bush exhorted all Iraqis to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein. The reportedly CIA-operated Radio Free Iraq out of Saudi Arabia urged on the uprising. When their rebellion turned into a rout, causing the mass exodus of Kurds into Turkey and Iran, Bush abandoned them and went fishing in Florida on his ironically named boat, the Backlash. Only the glare of the media spotlight, out of Pentagon control at last, brought about more than a week of world outrage, finally causing the White House to start Operation Provide Comfort, the Kurdish rescue mission. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Myths, Lies. Next, Response10, Amherst Poll (Part 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.10 **/ ** Written 8:25 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, The Amherst Poll (Part 1 of 2) The Gulf War: a Study of the Media, Public Opinion and Public Knowledge: Summary Report by the Center for Studies in Communication (University of Massachusetts at Amherst) February 1991 By Sut Jhally, Justin Lewis and Michael Morgan The authors are professors of communication at Amherst. For further information contact Justin Lewis: (413) 545-1307, (413) 584-9460, (617) 742-7497. *** Introduction There is only one serious or credible way to evaluate the performance of the news media, and that is to assess its role as an information system. If the news media does its job well, the public will be well informed. A poorly informed citizenry, in turn, reflects badly upon the ability of the news media to communicate the pertinent facts. Despite the rather self-congratulatory findings of recent polls, you do not judge TV news by asking people whether they like what they are watching. You judge it by asking them what they know. This is not an idle question: It goes to the very core of a democratic system, since the quality of our democratic decisions depends upon the quality of the information on which those decisions are based. We are, during wartime, particularly dependent upon the news media to inform us -- not only because of the gravity of the event, but because most of us have no alternative sources of information. In the United States, the burden falls mainly upon television, which is the place where most of us get our news. This study was carried out, accordingly, to see just how well we have been informed about recent events in the Persian Gulf. Like other surveys, our aim was to investigate public attitudes about the war. Where this study differs from any other is that it also looks at the knowledge and understanding that underlies these opinions. There is more at stake here than the success or failure of ABC or CNN: The length and ferocity of this war will depend largely upon the measure of public support for it. It is vital, in a democracy, that the public are able to base their judgments on a clear understanding of the issues involved. Our study is based upon telephone interviews carried out, between February 2 and February 4, 1991, with 250 randomly selected individuals living in the metropolitan Denver area. [This summary was written February 11, 1991.] The findings we present here have been tested for standard measurements of statistical significance, and the relationships we explore have been isolated after running controls for other explanatory variables. The Untold Story Our survey, like most others, shows strong public support (84 percent of our respondents) for President Bush's decision to use military force against Iraq. This support, as other surveys have shown, was stronger amongst men, white people, and the young -- although not, as some have tried to suggest, amongst people with immediate family serving in the Gulf. Most people (over two-thirds) described their opinion on this subject as strongly held, and a majority of our sample (58 percent) were prepared to pay higher taxes to pay for the war. We would expect, or at least hope, that such firm views on a politically contentious issue to be based on a knowledge of the pertinent facts. In this case, we discovered, it is not. We asked our respondents a number of questions about events in the Gulf, including the recent history of US foreign policy in the region and basic facts about the Middle East. Despite the months of television coverage devoted to this story, we found that most people were alarmingly ill-informed. The most striking gaps in people's knowledge involved information that might reflect badly upon the administration's policy. The administration's failure to discourage Iraq from attacking Kuwait, for example, is now well-documented. At the very least, the administration's subsequent aggressive posture towards Iraq reflected a shift, rather than a consistency, of resolve. The overwhelming majority of our respondents were not only unaware of the administration's initial attitude of appeasement, they assumed a consistency in policy that was entirely fictitious. We asked people how the US State Department responded, in July 1990 (before the invasion), when Saddam Hussein indicated he may use force against Kuwait. Only 13 percent responded correctly (that the US indicated it would take no action), while 74 percent said the US threatened to impose sanctions, and as many as 65 percent said the administration vowed to support Kuwait with the use of force. This amounts to a quite extraordinary rewriting of history in the collective consciousness. There is no reason to doubt or question the Bush Administration's decision to go to war if you think the President has been consistent throughout. Critics of the war policy say that it is hypocritical for the US to react so violently to one occupation in the Middle East, while ignoring or supporting others in the region. In terms of public support for the war, this point is crucial, since a majority of our respondents (53 percent) stated that the US should intervene with military force to restore the sovereignty of any illegally occupied country (compared with only 18 percent who supported intervention to protect oil supplies). What this suggests is that most people are unaware of other occupations in the Middle East -- or anywhere else. Such an awareness would clearly undercut the moral cornerstone of the current war policy. This was indeed the case. Less than a third of respondents (31 percent) were aware that Israel was occupying land in the Middle East, and only 3 percent were aware of Syria's occupation of Lebanon. While this basic lack of knowledge about an area that has commanded the world's attention (or so we thought) in recent years would be worrying enough without the Gulf War, current events make it positively alarming. The plight of Kuwait is now common knowledge, and yet only 15 percent were able to identify the Palestinian protest against occupation, the Intifada. Moreover, only 14 percent were aware that the United States was part of the tiny minority in the UN to vote against seeking a political settlement to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. This limited understanding, once again, makes it much easier for the President to appear morally consistent, and to invoke international law as a basis for the attack on Iraq and occupied Kuwait. The war policy is also justified by the notion that Saddam Hussein is a madman who must be stopped. While we cannot comment on Hussein's inclinations toward megalomania, it is worth noting that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was motivated, at least in part, by an unremarkable economic rationale. One of the most well-documented reasons for the Iraqi invasion was Kuwait's insistence on lowering oil prices, a policy that was severely straining Iraq's economy. Yet only two percent of our sample were able to identify this as a reason for Hussein's action. While knowledge of this recent history would not, for most people, justify the invasion, it does make it more difficult to portray Hussein as a power hungry lunatic with a relentless, unprovoked lust for power. The failure to understand this history, on the other hand, makes the administration's attempt to portray Hussein as the most evil leader since Hitler (as opposed to, say, Pol Pot, Pinochet or Assad, who might also have a claim to this infamous distinction) seem much more credible. While most respondents had difficulty with questions about the Middle East or US foreign policy, there were a few areas that people were more confident about. Most of our sample (81 percent) knew the name of the missile used to shoot down the Iraqi SCUDs (the Patriot). Most people (80 percent) were also aware that Hussein had used chemical weapons against Iran and/or members of his own population. This knowledge suggests that the public are not generally ignorant -- rather, they are selectively misinformed. There are some things, in other words, that most TV viewers do know about. However, just as the unknown facts are not neutral, neither are the known ones. In particular, knowledge of Hussein's past atrocities (which, brutal as they are, are not uncommon in a world littered with dictators with scant regard for human life) clearly supports the administration's moral case against Hussein. So, for example, when asked whether the US should forcefully intervene against leaders who slaughter significant numbers of civilians, 58 percent responded positively (less than half this number, 27 percent, said no). If this moral position were applied consistently, the US would have invaded many countries that the administration has actually supported. This suggests that people's awareness of Hussein's abuse of human rights is combined with unawareness of other comparable human rights abusers. Knowing details about military hardware -- particularly one that, like the Patriot, has been celebrated for its defensive capabilities, may well help those who wish to promote the idea that the enormous Pentagon budget is "money well spent." Either way, it is extremely disturbing that this public expertise in aspects of military technology is not matched by any clear understanding of the circumstances that lie behind its deployment. End, Amherst Poll (Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 11, Amherst Poll (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.11 **/ ** Written 8:26 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Amherst Poll (Part 2 of 2) We cannot blame the Pentagon or the Bush Administration for only presenting those facts that lend support for their case -- it isn't their job, after all, to provide the public with a balanced view. Culpability for this rests clearly on the shoulders of the news media, particularly television, who have a duty to present the public with all the relevant facts. Our study suggests that they have failed, and failed quite dismally, in performing this duty. The Media, Knowledge and Opinion One explanation that might account for the media's failure to communicate certain basic information (particularly information, as we have suggested, that undermines the administration's war policy) is that people are certainly watching it. Moreover, as we have demonstrated, some information is undoubtedly getting through. In fact, our study revealed that TV news seems to confuse more than it clarifies. Even after controlling for all other variables, we discovered that the correlation between TV watching and knowledge was actually a negative one. Overall, the more TV people watched, the less they knew. The only fact that did not fit in with this pattern was the ability to identify the Patriot missile. This is a sad indictment of television's priorities. Our own monitoring of the coverage suggests that the problem here is one of proportion. All the facts that we asked people have, at one time or another, been reported. Their overall presence in the news coverage is, nevertheless, very low. When compared to the presence of information about the mechanics of war or the administration's view of the situation, it is clear that information gets lost. Whatever else this signifies, it is not good journalism. Television's tendency to present a one-sided view is compounded by the economic imperatives of a system funded by advertising. The upbeat tone of the coverage thus far [ed. note: as of February 1991] is seen as necessary to attract advertisers, since nobody wants their product surrounded by images of death, pain, and destruction. The problem, from the point of view of journalistic objectivity, is that this upbeat tone has played into the hands of the Bush administration's attempt to sell their war policy to the public. The question raised by our findings is a significant one: If the news media had done a better job of informing people, would there be less support for the war? Our study indicates that the answer to this question is yes. This is not to say that it is not possible for people to be aware of most of the relevant facts about the Middle East and recent US foreign policy and still support the Bush policy. What our study suggests is simply that they would be less likely to. This point is implicit in our description of those things the public, on the whole, do not know, since many of these facts undermine key parts of the administration's moral argument. What confirms it is that our study revealed a direct correlation between knowledge and opposition to the war. The more people know, in other words, the less likely they were to support the war policy. The argument we are making here is not based on politics, but on statistics. We are not saying that people against the war are right and those in favor of it are wrong, merely that since our study shows a clear relation between knowledge and opinion, it is reasonable to assume that an increase in knowledge would lead to an increase in the opinion more strongly associated with it. There are many examples of this correlation. Supporters of the war, for example, were more than twice as likely to wrongly assert that Kuwait was a democracy than non-supporters (25 percent to 12 percent). This suggests that a quarter of those supporting the war have been misled into supposing that this is a "fight for democracy." Similarly, only 11 percent of supporters were aware that the US had failed to warn Hussein of its response to an invasion, compared to 27 percent of non-supporters. Once again, the only fact that supporters of the war were more aware of was the name of the Patriot missile. It is also worth noting that supporters of the war also gave much lower estimates of the loss of life in the war thus far, particularly on the Iraqi side. The average estimate of Iraqi casualties was between three and four times higher amongst those who did not support the war. While we are not in a position to verify which estimate was more accurate, there is clearly a very different perception between the two groups about the effects of the war. Vietnam Revisited The Vietnam War was repeatedly invoked during the conflict. Supporters of the war voiced the concern that this should not be "another Vietnam." This point was especially prevalent during condemnation of anti-war protests. We were interested in examining some of the popular conceptions of Vietnam, to find out whether they have led to a greater or lesser understanding of the Vietnam War. We began by asking our respondents whether they agreed with President Bush's view that US forces fought the Vietnam War with "one hand tied behind their back." This idea is, in our judgment, instrumental in justifying the massive use of force engaged in the Gulf, and in discrediting anti-war protesters for weakening the national resolve. We discovered the majority (79 percent) agreed with the President's statement. We then attempted to devise a question to see whether this perception had influenced people's memory of the war itself. The best test, we decided, was to ask people to estimate the number of Vietnamese people killed during the war, since the number of Vietnamese casualties is a direct measure of the resolve with which the US fought the war (the higher the number, the greater the resolve). The figure for US casualties of the Vietnam War is approximately 55 thousand. The figure for Vietnamese casualties is just under 2 million. The median estimate of Vietnamese casualties by respondents in our survey was around 100 thousand, a figure nearly 20 times too small. This is a little like estimating the number of victims of the Nazi holocaust at 300 thousand rather than 6 million. What this suggests is that the ideological proposition "We fought the war with one hand tied behind our back" has induced us to rewrite our own history. The devastation inflicted upon the Vietnamese has been shrunk, quite drastically, so that it fits more easily with the image of an irresolute, half-hearted military campaign, made impotent by the objections of the anti-war movement. The news media, by reporting the Bush (and Reagan) view, rather than appraising the actual facts, are directly culpable for this rewriting of history. We hope they will redress this distortion, before it becomes too solidly fixed into our collective memory as the truth. One other finding that disturbed us concerns the question of US soldiers reported missing in action (MIAs). Apart from the various Rambo-style movies, the evidence that there are still MIAs being held as prisoners of war in Vietnam is, to put it charitably, decidedly flimsy. Vietnamese MIAs far outnumber those on the US side, and the only reason for supposing that Vietnam should spend time and money pointlessly incarcerating US soldiers is the racist perception that Vietnamese people are irrational and inherently evil. Nevertheless, 70 percent of our respondents said they thought that Vietnam was still holding US prisoners of war (only 16 percent disagreed, while 14 percent said they didn't know). If nothing else, this tells us that we should never underestimate the power of the media (in this case, the entertainment media) to affect the way we think. Conclusions and Implications Our findings suggest that the news media have failed, quite dramatically, in their role as information providers. Despite months of coverage, most people do not know basic facts about the political situation in the Middle East, or about the recent history of US policy towards Iraq. Television news, as the information source most people depend upon, is particularly responsible. While support for the war appears to be strong, it is built upon a body of knowledge that is either incorrect or incomplete. Support for the war looks even more fragile when correlated with what people know, since the more people know, the less likely they are to support the war. The news media have consequently failed in their duty to be objective, since they appear to be communicating facts that support the administration's policy and playing down those that do not. The implications of these findings suggest that the news media need to seriously re-examine the way they have covered the Gulf War. As our findings about the perception of Vietnam indicate, this means a greater concern for historical fact than for opinion and unsupported interpretations. Finally, we would suggest greater caution in the use of public opinion polls. Our study suggests that these polls do not validate the current policy, they simply reflect the failure of the news media to allow the public to reach an informed opinion. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Amherst Poll (Part 2 of 2) Next, Response 12, Women Soldiers ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.12 **/ ** Written 8:28 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Women Soldiers Women Soldiers: Mothers or Amazons? by Nell Bernstein Nell Bernstein is the editor of MediaFile and a free-lance writer living in Berkeley. This article previously appeared in Image magazine (San Francisco Examiner Sunday Edition). *** I went to the library recently and looked up "women soldiers" in the computerized periodical index. The first thing that appeared on the screen was this: "See Under: Amazons." I don't know when the subject headings for this index were last updated, but the array of images of women in the military that television and the print media have been giving us in the past few months seems to indicate the need for some new cross-references. How about "See Under: Tearful Mothers"? Or "See Under: Abandoned Children"? There is little room for Amazons in the barrage of masculine images that this war has generated: an "unflinching" George Bush eliminating the wimp factor once and for all by taking on the Bully of Baghdad, man to man; the parade of gruff retired generals whom the mainstream media has anointed its official interpreters; the disturbingly photogenic howitzers and Patriots whose presence increasingly overwhelms our television screens and front pages. Although we are told that there are moral, political and economic issues at stake in this war, we are really being asked to accept it on another level entirely. The rhetoric and images that are being used to explain and legitimize the war reduce it again and again to a battle between two men, a contest to see who is the manliest. The fact that there are more women involved in this war than in any past war, and that they are closer to the combat zone than ever before, threatens the purity of these masculine images. When women start eschewing yellow ribbons in favor of fatigues, the metaphors get muddled. The resultant confusion is evident in the imbalanced picture of women soldiers the media have been giving us. There were approximately 30,000 women serving in the Persian Gulf, comprising about six percent of the total troops. Though barred from direct combat, these women performed a wide variety of other jobs: loading and unloading equipment, digging bunkers, driving and flying troop transport vehicles, etc. But to judge by what we see on television and read in the newspapers, they actually spend most of their waking hours hugging their children goodbye, worrying about their families, and hoping to get home soon. People magazine, a publication not known for pulling its emotional punches, places military women firmly on the mommy track with a September cover story entitled "Mom Goes To War." "With tears and brave smiles, Air Force pilot Joy Johnson and thousands of American mothers are saying goodbye to their families to face unknown dangers in the Gulf. One 10-year-old's question: 'Mommy, what if you die?'" The accompanying cover photo shows Johnson, in uniform, gazing sadly into the camera while clutching a teary blonde moppet to her breast. The text of the article offers a series of similarly wrenching scenes: "Five-year-old Nicholas Vernoski clung to his mother's Navy uniform, sobbing. 'Mommy, don't go!' he cried, burying his wet face in her starched khaki slacks." The daily newspapers have, of course, been somewhat more restrained than the tear-jerking weekly, but it has still been nearly impossible to find an article that mentions women soldiers without also mentioning the children they leave behind. The New York Times, in a typical example, offers three-year-old Tychell, shipped off to a grandmother in the Virgin Islands while her mother serves in a military intelligence battalion in Riyadh. The Chicago Tribune shows us a five-year-old boy handing his tearful sergeant mother his toy gun to protect herself as she tells him she may never come home again. And, perhaps most tellingly, the same article gives us former Army Sergeant Penny Plante, who recently gave up her military career in order to be with her children. "It wasn't easy, " she told the Tribune, "But I know I made the right decision. The girls are very happy." Scenes like these are, of course, taking place, and there is no reason they should not be reported. But they are being reported with a frequency that is well out of proportion to their incidence. The majority of women in the armed forces are not mothers, and a higher percentage of male soldiers have children than do female, but you wouldn't know it from reading the paper or watching television. The current media fixation on the domestic element of the woman soldier's life reflects an ambivalence about the idea of women bearing arms that is deeper than we are generally willing to admit. Editorial writers and columnists may talk about equal opportunity and the inevitability of change, but whoever is pointing the cameras understands that Americans are still far more comfortable looking at a woman holding a child than a woman holding a gun. By repeatedly drawing our attention to the family lives of women in the military, the media are playing a version of the old "Would you want your sister to marry one?" trick. Women with guns are OK . . . but would you want the mother of your children to carry one? It is at the level of personal relationships - the level of the family - that our most deeply held feelings about women and their appropriate roles reside. By returning our attention again and again to the domestic aspect of women soldiers' experience, the media are encouraging us to respond to the issue at a gut level, the level of the child abandoned by the mother. Those who support the presence of women in the military, and advocate opening up combat positions to women, talk mainly about equal opportunity, equal access to jobs. But the army commercials get closer to the heart of the matter when they remind us that military service - and combat in particular - is not just a job, it's an adventure. War is among the most ancient of adventures, and the most male. Ever since Odysseus left Penelope to fend off her suitors while he fought his battles overseas, the hearth-tending female has been central to the male adventure. When women start muscling in on the action, the ancient paradigms of war and peace are threatened. If Penelope is sailing the high seas herself, who will make sure that the hearth fires are not extinguished? Our ability to tolerate war depends upon a paradoxical concept of balance: We commit and suffer violence in order to preserve our "way of life," which we view as intrinsically peaceful. Women are traditionally both caretakers and symbols of that peaceful "way of life." When women switch sides and align themselves with the forces of destruction rather than the forces of rebirth they threaten the very balance our vision of war as a tolerable condition depends upon. This brings us to another image we saw a lot of: a pretty young woman in a pink blouse, heavily made up, seen in three-quarters profile with an expression that might be described as pouting or even sultry. The photo looks like a soldier's pin-up; in fact, it is a picture of a soldier. This photograph of Melissa Rathbun-Nealy, the 20-year-old army specialist who is the first female American soldier to be missing in action, accompanied all the articles about her disappearance, and informed a number of subsequent columns and opinion pieces, most of which discussed whether America can "handle" news of a female POW. Why not? Why is the idea of women prisoners and casualties so wrenching? What is it that makes the lives of women - at least in this context - more sacrosanct than the lives of men? For one thing, there is the fact that in their capacity to bear children, women are often seen as representing life itself, a life force that will outlast any war. There is also the idea that women are instrinsically innocent of war; the ones wars are fought for, not by; the ones the soldiers are struggling valiantly to protect. And finally, there is the possibility that a woman POW could be raped. This possibility was, of course, inherently horrifying - but so were any number of things that have happened to men and women, Iraqi and American, during the course of this war. Our fixation on the possibility that this female soldier, a prisoner, could be raped had also to do with the sexual metaphors that dominated the public discourse about war in general, and this war in particular. Saddam's "naked aggression," we were told repeatedly by our president and our press, amounted to the "rape of Kuwait." America, therefore - represented by her president and her army - had to play the strong man who rescued the endangered, feminized victim. This metaphor has everything to do with why we wanted to see this POW as a woman rather than as a soldier: She became the personification of the rape victim we were fighting a war to save, instead of being herself among the saviors. In a controversial 1984 Esquire cover story entitled "Why Men Love War," William Broyles, Jr. attempts to explain what he sees as an essentially male passion. He reverts, after several pages of analysis and confession, to that unavoidable metaphor: "Sex is the weapon of life, the shooting sperm sent like an army of guerrillas to penetrate the egg's defenses - the only victory that really matters." No wonder we are confused. The presence of a woman soldier among this attacking army of sperm threatens the metaphor itself, just as it threatens the sexual metaphors that have been used to frame and sell the war in the Persian Gulf. This threat has led us to repress images of women warriors even as we repeat the rhetoric of equality; it is reflected in the ubiquitous media presence of mothers in uniform, and the conspicuous absence of Amazons. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Women Soldiers Next, Response 13, War and Metaphor by George Lakoff (Part 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.13 **/ ** Written 8:30 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Metaphors of War (Part 1 of 2) Metaphors of War: UC Berkeley linguistics professor Dr. George Lakoff reveals how a complex web of commonly accepted metaphors prepared Americans to go to war. By George Lakoff *** (The following was written in January 1991, just prior to the Gulf War. Thus, some of the information is outdated, and the war is referred to in the future tense. We've chosen to run it as is since many of the points made show a great deal of foresight. -- eds.) Metaphors can kill. The discourse that took place over whether we should go to war in the gulf was a panorama of metaphor. Secretary of State James Baker saw Saddam as "sitting on our economic lifeline." President Bush saw him as having a "stranglehold" on our economy. General Schwarzkopf characterized the occupation of Kuwait as a "rape" that was ongoing. The President said that the US was in the gulf to "protect freedom, protect our future, and protect the innocent," and that we must "push Saddam Hussein back." Saddam is seen as Hitler. It is vital to understand just what role metaphorical thought played in bringing us to the brink of war. Metaphorical thought, in itself, is neither good nor bad; it is simply commonplace and inescapable. There is an extensive, and mostly unconscious, system of metaphor that we use automatically and unreflectively to understand complexities and abstractions. The metaphorical understanding of a situation functions in two parts. First, there is a widespread, relatively fixed set of metaphors that structure how we think. For example, a decision to go to war might be seen as a form of cost-benefit analysis, where war is justified when the costs of going to war are less than the costs of not going to war. Second, there is a set of metaphorical definitions that allow one to apply such a metaphor to a particular situation. In this case, there must be a definition of "cost," including a means of comparing relative "costs." The use of a metaphor with a set of definitions becomes pernicious when it hides realities in a harmful way. Pain, dismemberment, death, starvation, and the death and injury of loved ones are not metaphorical. They are real and in a war could afflict tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of real human beings, whether Iraqi, Kuwaiti, or American. War as Politics -- Politics as Business Clausewitz's Metaphor: War is politics pursued by other means. Karl von Clausewitz was a Prussian general who perceived war in terms of political cost-benefit analysis. Each nation-state has political objectives, and war may best serve those objectives. The political "gains" are to to be weighed against acceptable "costs." When the costs of war exceed the political gains, the war should cease. There is another metaphor implicit here: Politics is business where efficient political management is seen as akin to efficient business management. As in a well-run business, a well-run government should keep a careful tally of costs and gains. This metaphor for characterizing politics, together with Clausewitz's metaphor, makes war a matter of cost-benefit analysis: defining beneficial "objectives," tallying the "costs," and deciding whether achieving the objectives is "worth" the costs. The New York Times, on November 12, 1990, ran a front-page story announcing that "a national debate has begun as to whether the United States should go to war in the Persian Gulf." The Times described the debate as defined by what I have called Clausewitz's metaphor (though it described the metaphor as literal), and then raised the question, "What then is the nation's political objective in the Gulf and what level of sacrifice is it worth?" The "debate" was not over whether Clausewitz's metaphor was appropriate, but only over how various analysts calculated the relative gains and losses. The same has been true of the hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Clausewitz's metaphor provides the framework within which most discussion has taken place. The broad acceptance of Clausewitz's metaphor raises vital questions: What, exactly, makes it a metaphor rather than a literal truth? Why does it seem so natural to foreign policy experts? How does it fit into the overall metaphor system for understanding foreign relations and war? And, most importantly, what realities does it hide? Part 1: The Systems The State-as-Person System A state is conceptualized as a person, engaging in social relations within a world community. Its landmass is its home. It lives in a neighborhood, and has neighbors, friends and enemies. States are seen as having inherent dispositions: They can be peaceful or aggressive, responsible or irresponsible, industrious or lazy. Well-being is wealth. The general well-being of a state is understood in economic terms: its economic health. A serious threat to economic health can thus be seen as a death threat. To the extent that a nation's economy depends on foreign oil, that oil supply becomes a "lifeline" (reinforced by the image of an oil pipeline). Strength for a state is military strength. Maturity for the person-state is industrialization. Unindustrialized nations are "underdeveloped," with industrialization as a natural state to be reached. Third World nations are thus immature children, to be taught how to develop properly or disciplined if they get out of line. Nations that fail to industrialize at a rate considered normal are seen as akin to retarded children and judged as "backward" nations. Rationality is the maximization of self-interest. There is an implicit logic to the use of these metaphors: Since it is in the interest of every person to be as strong and healthy as possible, a rational state seeks to maximize wealth and military might. Violence can further self-interest. It can be stopped in three ways: either with a balance of power, so that no one in a neighborhood is strong enough to threaten anyone else; with the use of collective persuasion by the community to make violence counter to self-interest; or with a cop strong enough to deter violence or punish it. The cop should act morally, in the community's interest, and with the sanction of the community as a whole. Morality is a matter of accounting, of keeping the moral books balanced. A wrongdoer incurs a debt, and he must be made to pay. The moral books can be balanced by a return to the situation prior to the wrongdoing, by giving back what has been taken, by recompense or by punishment. Justice is the balancing of the moral books. War in this metaphor is a fight between two people, a form of hand-to-hand combat. Thus, the US might seek to "push Iraq back out of Kuwait," "deal the enemy a heavy blow," or "deliver a knockout punch." A just war is thus a form of combat for the purpose of settling moral accounts. The most common discourse form in the West -- where combat settles moral accounts -- is the classic fairy tale. When people are replaced by states in such a fairy tale, what results is the most common scenario for a just war. The Fairy Tale of the Just War Cast of characters: a villain, a victim, and a hero. The victim and the hero may be the same person. The scenario: A crime is committed by the villain against an innocent victim (typically an assault, theft, or kidnapping). The offense occurs due to an imbalance of power and creates a moral imbalance. The hero either gathers helpers or decides to go it alone. The hero makes sacrifices; he undergoes difficulties, typically making an arduous heroic journey, sometimes across the sea to a treacherous terrain. The villain is inherently evil, perhaps even a monster, and thus reasoning with him is out of the question. The hero is left with no choice but to engage the villain in battle. The hero defeats the villain and rescues the victim. The moral balance is restored. Victory is achieved. The hero, who always acts honorably, has proved his manhood and achieved glory. The sacrifice was worthwhile. The hero receives acclaim, along with the gratitude of the victim and the community. The fairy tale has an asymmetry built into it. The hero is moral and courageous, while the villain is amoral and vicious. The hero is rational, but though the villain may be cunning and calculating, he cannot be reasoned with. Heroes thus cannot negotiate with villains; they must defeat them. The enemy-as-demon metaphor arises as a consequence of the fact that we understand what a just war is in terms of this fairy tale. As the Gulf Crisis developed, President Bush tried to justify going to war by the use of such a scenario. At first, he couldn't get his story straight. He was using two different sets of metaphorical definitions, which resulted in two different scenarios: The Rescue Scenario Iraq is villain, the US is hero, Kuwait is victim, the crime is kidnap and rape. The Self-Defense Scenario Iraq is villain, the US is hero, the US and other industrialized nations are victims, the crime is a death threat -- that is, a threat to economic health. The American people could not accept the second scenario, since it amounted to trading lives for oil. The administration therefore settled on the first, and that seemed to be accepted by the public, the media, and Congress as providing moral justification for going to war. The Ruler for State Metonymy [Metonymy: the use of the name of one thing for that of another to which it has some logical relation] There is a metonymy that goes hand-in-hand with the State-as-Person metaphor: The ruler stands for the state. Thus, we can refer to Iraq by referring to Saddam Hussein, and so have a single person, not just an amorphous state, to play the villain in the just war scenario. It is this metonymy that is invoked when the President says, "We have to get Saddam out of Kuwait." The Expert Metaphors Experts in international relations have an additional system of metaphors that are taken as defining a "rational" approach. The principal ones are the Rational Actor metaphor and Clausewitz's metaphor, which are commonly taught as truths in courses on international relations. We are now in a position to show precisely what is metaphorical about Clausewitz's metaphor. To do so, we need to look at a system of metaphors that is presupposed by Clausewitz's metaphor. We will begin with an everyday system of metaphors for understanding causation. The Causal Commerce System The Causal Commerce system is a way to comprehend actions intended to achieve positive effects, but which may also have negative effects. The system is composed of three metaphors: Causal Transfer An effect is an object transferred from a cause to an affected party. For example, sanctions are seen as "giving" Iraq economic difficulties. Correspondingly, economic difficulties for Iraq are seen as "coming from" the sanctions. This metaphor turns purposeful actions into transfers of objects. The Exchange Metaphor for Value The value of something is what you are willing to exchange for it. Whenever we ask whether it is "worth" going to war to get Iraq out of Kuwait, we are using the Exchange Metaphor for Value plus the Causal Transfer metaphor. Well-being is Wealth Things of value constitute wealth. Increases in well-being are "gains"; decreases in well-being are "costs." The metaphor of Well-being-as-Wealth has the effect of making qualitative effects quantitative. It not only makes qualitatively different things comparable, it even provides a kind of arithmetic calculus for adding up costs and gains. Taken together, these three metaphors portray actions as commercial transactions with costs and gains. Seeing actions as transactions is crucial to applying ideas from economics to actions in general. Risks A risk is an action taken to achieve a positive effect, where the outcome is uncertain and where there is also a significant probability of a negative effect. Since Causal Commerce allows one to see positive effects of actions as "gains" and negative effects as "costs," it becomes natural to see a risky action metaphorically as a financial risk of a certain type, namely, a gamble. Risks Are Gambles In gambling to achieve certain "gains," there are "stakes" that one can "lose." When one asks what is "at stake" in going to war, one is using the metaphors of Causal Commerce and Risks-as-Gambles. These are also the metaphors that President Bush uses when he refers to strategic moves in the Gulf as a "poker game," where it would be foolish for him to "show his cards," that is, to make strategic knowledge public. The Mathematicization of Metaphor The Causal Commerce and Risks-as-Gambles metaphors lie behind our everyday way of understanding risky actions as gambles. At this point, mathematics enters the picture, since there is a mathematics of gambling -- namely, probability theory, decision theory and game theory. Since the metaphors of Causal Commerce and Risks-as-Gambles are so common in our everyday thought, their metaphorical nature often goes unnoticed. As a result, it is not uncommon for social scientists to think that the mathematics of gambling literally applies to all forms of risky action, and that it can provide a general basis for the scientific study of risky action, so that risk can be minimized. Rational Action Within the social sciences, especially in economics, it is common to see a rational person as someone who acts in his own self-interest, that is, to maximize his own well-being. Hard-core advocates of this view may even see altruistic action as being one's self-interest if there is a value in feeling righteous about altruism and in deriving gratitude from others. In the Causal Commerce system, where well-being is wealth, this view of Rational Action translates metaphorically into maximizing gains and minimizing losses. In other words, rationality is profit maximization. This metaphor presupposes Causal Commerce plus Risks-as-Gambles, and brings with it the mathematics of gambling as applied to risky action. It has the effect of turning specialists in mathematical economics into "scientific" specialists in that they are acting rationally so as to minimize risk and cost while maximizing gains. Suppose we now add the State-as-Person metaphor to the Rationality-as-Profit-Maximization metaphor. The result is: International Politics is Business. Here the state is a Rational Actor, whose actions are transactions and who is engaged in maximizing gains and minimizing costs. This metaphor brings with it the mathematics of cost-benefit calculation and game theory, which is commonly taught in graduate programs in international relations. Clausewitz's Metaphor Clausewitz's metaphor, the major metaphor preferred by international relations strategists, presupposes these systems. Since politics is business, war becomes a matter of maximizing political gains and minimizing losses. In Clausewitzian terms, war is justified when there is more to be gained by going to war than by not going to war. Morality is absent from the Clausewitzian equation, except when there is a political cost to acting immorally or a political gain from acting morally. Clausewitz's metaphor only allows war to be justified on pragmatic, not moral, grounds. To justify war on both moral and pragmatic grounds, the Fairy Tale of the Just War and Clause-witz's metaphor must mesh: The "worthwhile sacrifices" of the fairy tale must equal the Clausewitzian "costs" and the "vic- tory" in the fairy tale must equal the Clausewitzian "gains." Clausewitz's metaphor is the perfect expert's metaphor, since it requires specialists in political cost-benefit calculation. It sanctions the use of the mathematics of economics, probability theory, decision theory, and game theory in the name of making foreign policy rational and scientific. Clausewitz's metaphor is commonly seen as literally true. We are now in a position to see exactly what makes it metaphorical. First, it uses the State-as-Person metaphor. Second, it turns qualitative effects on human beings into quantifiable costs and gains, thus seeing political action as economics. Third, it sees rationality as profit-making. Fourth, it sees war in terms of only one dimension of war, that of political expediency, which is in turn conceptualized as business. To bear in mind what is hidden by Clausewitz's metaphor, we should consider an alternative metaphor that is not used by professional strategists nor by the general public to understand war as we engage in it: War is violent crime -- murder, assault, kidnapping, arson, rape, and theft. Here, war is understood only in terms of its moral dimension, and not, say, its political or economic dimension. The metaphor highlights those aspects of war that would otherwise be seen as major crimes. There is an Us-Them asymmetry between the public use of Clausewitz's metaphor and the War-as-Crime metaphor. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait is reported on in terms of murder, theft, and rape. The planned American invasion is never discussed in terms of murder, assault, and arson. Moreover, the US plans for war are seen, in Clausewitzian terms, as rational calculation. But the Iraqi invasion is discussed not as a rational move by Saddam, but as the work of a madman. We see Us as rational, moral, and courageous, and Them as criminal and insane. End, War and Metaphor (Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 14, War and Metaphor (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.14 **/ ** Written 8:32 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, War and Metaphor (Part 2 of 2) War as a Competitive Game It has long been noted that we understand war as a competitive game like chess, or as a sport, like football or boxing. It is a metaphor in which there is a clear winner and loser, and a clear end to the game. The metaphor highlights strategic thinking, teamwork, preparedness, the spectators in the world arena, the glory of winning and the shame of defeat. This metaphor is taken very seriously. There is a long tradition in the West of training military officers in team sports and chess. The military is trained to win. This can lead to a metaphor conflict, as it did in Vietnam, since Clausewitz's metaphor seeks to maximize geopolitical gains, which may or may not be consistent with absolute military victory. The situation at present is that the public has accepted the rescue scenario of the Just War Fairy Tale as providing moral justification. The president, for internal political reasons, accepted the competitive game metaphor as taking precedence over Clausewitz's metaphor: He went for the military win over maximizing geopolitical gains. The testimony of the experts before Congress fell largely within Clausewitz's metaphor. Much of it was testimony about what would maximize gains and minimize losses. For all that was questioned in the Congressional hearings, these metaphors were not. It important to see what they hide. Part II: Application of the Metaphors Is Saddam Irrational? The villain in the Fairy Tale of the Just War may be cunning, but he cannot be rational. You just do not reason with a demon, nor do you enter into negotiations with him. The logic of the metaphor demands that Saddam be irrational. But is he? Administration policy is confused on the issue. Clausewitz's metaphor, as used by strategists, assumes that the enemy is rational: He too is maximizing gains and minimizing costs. Our strategy from the outset has been to "increase the cost" to Saddam. That assumes he is rational and is maximizing his self-interest. At the same time, he is being called irrational. The nuclear weapons argument depends on it. If he is rational, he should follow the logic of deterrence. We have thousands of hydrogen bombs in warheads. Israel is estimated to have between 100 and 200 deliverable atomic bombs. It would take Saddam at least eight months and possibly five years before he had a crude, untested atomic bomb on a truck. The most popular estimate for even a few deliverable nuclear warheads is ten years. The argument that he would not be deterred by our nuclear arsenal and by Israel's assumes irrationality. Saddam is certainly immoral, ruthless and brutal, but there is no evidence that he is anything but rational. Everything he has done, from assassinating political opponents, to using poison gas against his political enemies, the Kurds, to invading Kuwait can be seen as furthering his own self-interest. [Please see Stephen Leiper's article, page 12, for an alternative theory to the Kurd massacre -- Eds] Kuwait as Victim The classical victim is innocent. To the Iraqis, Kuwait was anything but an innocent ingenue. The war with Iran virtually bankrupted Iraq. Iraq saw itself as having fought that war partly for the benefit of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, where Shiite citizens supported Khomeini's Islamic Revolution. Kuwait had agreed to help finance the war, but after the war, the Kuwaitis insisted on repayment of the "loan." Kuwaitis had invested hundreds of billions in Europe, America, and Japan, but would not invest in Iraq after the war to help it rebuild. On the contrary, it began what amounted to economic warfare against Iraq by overproducing its oil quota to hold oil prices down. In addition, Kuwait had drilled laterally into Iraqi territory in the Rumailah oil field and had extracted oil from Iraqi territory. Kuwait further took advantage of Iraq by buying its currency, but only at extremely low exchange rates. Subsequently, wealthy Kuwaitis used that Iraqi currency on trips to Iraq, where they bought Iraqi goods at bargain rates. Among the things they bought most flamboyantly were liquor and prostitutes, widows and orphans of men killed in the war, who, because of the state of the economy, had no other means of support. All this did not endear Kuwaitis to Iraqis, who were suffering from over 70 percent inflation. Moreover, Kuwaitis had long been resented for good reason by Iraqis and Moslems from other nations. Capital-rich but labor-poor, Kuwait imported cheap labor from other Moslem countries to do its least pleasant work. At the time of the invasion, there were 400,000 Kuwaiti citizens and 2.2 million foreign laborers who were denied rights of citizenry and treated by the Kuwaitis as lesser beings. The "legitimate government" that we seek to reinstall is an oppressive monarchy. In short, to the Iraqis and to labor-exporting Arab countries, Kuwait is badly miscast as a purely innocent victim. This does not in any way justify the horrors perpetrated on the Kuwaitis by the Iraqi army. But it is part of what is hidden when Kuwait is cast as an innocent victim. What Is Victory? In a fairy tale or a game, victory is well-defined. Once it is achieved, the story or game is over. Neither is the case in the Gulf Crisis. History continues, and "victory" makes sense only in terms of continuing history. The president's stated objectives are total Iraqi withdrawal and restoration of the Kuwaiti monarchy. But no one believes the matter will end there, since Saddam would still be in power with all of his forces intact. General Powell said in his Senate testimony that if Saddam withdrew, the US would have to "strengthen the indigenous countries of the region" to achieve a balance of power. Presumably that means arming Assad, who is every bit as dangerous as Saddam. Would arming another villain count as victory? What will constitute "victory"? Since Saddam has wiped out all opposition, the only remaining effective government for the country is his Ba'ath Party. Would it count as a victory if Saddam's friends wound up in power? If not, what other choice is there? And if Iraq has no remaining military force, how could it defend itself against Syria and Iran? It would certainly not be a "victory" for us if either of them took over Iraq. If Syria did, then Assad's Arab nationalism would become a threat. If Iran did, then Islamic fundamentalism would become even more powerful and threatening. It would seem that the closest thing to a "victory" for the US, in case of war, would be to: drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait; destroy just enough of Iraq's military to leave it capable of defending itself against Syria and Iran; somehow get Saddam out of power, but let his Ba'ath Party remain in control of a country just strong enough to defend itself, but not strong enough to be a threat; and keep the price of oil at a reasonably low level. The problems: We would, by defeating an Arab nationalist state, strengthen Islamic fundamentalism. Iraq would remain a cruel dictatorship run by cronies of Saddam. By reinstating the government of Kuwait, we would inflame the hatred of the poor toward the rich throughout the Arab world, and thus increase instability. Even the closest thing to a victory doesn't look very victorious. In the debate over whether to go to war, very little time was spent clarifying what a victory would be. And if "victory" cannot be defined, neither can "worthwhile sacrifice." What is Hidden by Seeing the State as a Person? The State-as-Person metaphor highlights the ways in which states act as units, and hides the internal structure of the state. Class structure is hidden by this metaphor, as is ethnic composition, religious rivalry, political parties, the ecology, the influence of the military and of corporations (especially multi-national corporations). Consider "national interest." It is in a person's interest to be healthy and strong. The State-as-Person metaphor translates this into a "national interest" of economic health and military strength. But what is in the "national interest" may or may not be in the interest of many ordinary citizens, groups, or institutions, who may become poorer as the GNP rises and weaker as the military gets stronger. The "national interest" is a metaphorical concept, and it is defined in America by politicians and policy makers. For the most part, they are influenced more by the rich than by the poor, more by large corporations than by small business, and more by developers than ecological activists. When President Bush argues that going to war would "serve our vital national interests," he is using a metaphor that hides exactly whose interests would be served and whose would not. For example, poor people, especially blacks and Hispanics, are represented in the military in disproportionately large numbers, and in a war the lower classes and those ethnic groups will suffer proportionally more casualties. Thus war is less in the interest of ethnic minorities and the lower classes than the white upper classes. Also hidden are the interests of the military itself. It is against the military's interest to have its budget cut, or to diminish its own influence in any way. War justifies the military's importance and its budgetary needs. It is important that the military itself not play the major role in deciding whether to go to war, and hence to serve its own interests. Yet that may well be what has happened. Admiral Brent Scowcroft heads the National Security Council, and the military has a major influence there. The NSC has played a major role in advising the president to adopt a pro-war policy. In the process, the military may have played a decisive role in maintaining its own influence. Has the military, in the service of its own self-interest, advised the president to go to war? The question must be asked and answered. The "Costs" of War Clausewitz's metaphor requires a calculation of the "costs" and the "gains" of going to war. What, exactly, goes into that calculation and what does not? Certainly American casualties, loss of equipment, and dollars spent on the operation count as costs. But Vietnam taught us that there are social costs: trauma to families and communities, disruption of lives, psychological effects on veterans, long-term health problems, in addition to the cost of spending our money on war instead of on vital social needs at home. Also hidden are political costs: the enmity of Arabs for many years, and the cost of increased terrorism. And barely discussed is the moral cost that comes from killing and maiming as a way to settle disputes. And there is the moral cost of using a "cost" metaphor at all. When we do so, we quantify the effects of war and thus hide from ourselves the qualitative reality of pain and death. But those are costs to us. What is most ghoulish about the cost-benefit calculation is that "costs" to the other side count as "gains" for us. In Vietnam, the body counts of killed Viet Cong were taken as evidence of what was being "gained" in the war. Dead human beings went on the profit side of our ledger. There is a lot of talk of American deaths as "costs," but Iraqi deaths aren't mentioned. The metaphors of cost-benefit accounting and the fairy tale villain lead us to devalue the lives of Iraqis, even when most of those actually killed will not be villains at all, but simply innocent draftees or reservists or civilians. America as Hero The classic fairy tale defines what constitutes a hero: It is a person who rescues an innocent victim and who defeats and punishes a guilty and inherently evil villain, and who does so for moral rather than venal reasons. Has America functioned as a hero? It certainly does not fit the profile very well. First, one of its main goals was to reinstate "the legitimate government of Kuwait." That means reinstating an absolute monarchy, where women are not accorded anything resembling reasonable rights, and where 80 percent of the people living in the country are foreign workers who do the dirtiest jobs and are not accorded the opportunity to become citizens. This is not an innocent victim whose rescue makes us heroic. Second, the actual human beings who suffered from an all-out attack were for the most part innocent people who did not take part in the atrocities in Kuwait. Killing and maiming a lot of innocent bystanders in the process of nabbing a much smaller number of villains does not make one much of a hero. Third, in the self-defense scenario where oil is at issue, America is acting in its self-interest. But, in order to qualify as a legitimate hero in the rescue scenario, it must be acting selflessly. Thus, there is a contradiction between the self-interested hero of the self-defense scenario and the purely selfless hero of the rescue scenario. Fourth, America may be a hero to the royal families of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but it will not be a hero to most Arabs. Most Arabs do not think in terms of our metaphors. A great many Arabs will see us as a kind of colonial power using illegitimate force against an Arab brother. To them we will be villains, not heroes. America appears as classic hero only if you don't look carefully at how the metaphor is applied to the situation. It is here that the State-as-Person metaphor functions in a way that hides vital truths. The State-as-Person metaphor hides the internal structure of states and allows us to think of Kuwait as a unitary entity, the defenseless maiden to be rescued in the fairy tale. The metaphor hides the monarchical character of Kuwait, and the way Kuwaitis treat women and the vast majority of the people who live in their country. The State-as-Person metaphor also hides the internal structure of Iraq, and thus hides the actual people who will mostly be killed, maimed or otherwise harmed in a war. The same metaphor also hides the internal structure of the US, and therefore hides the fact that it is the poor and minorities who will make the most sacrifices while not getting any significant benefit. And it hides the main ideas that drive Middle Eastern politics. Final Remarks Reality exists. So does the unconscious system of metaphors that we use without awareness to comprehend reality. What metaphor does is limit what we notice, highlight what we do see, and provide part of the inferential structure that we reason with. Because of the pervasiveness of metaphor in thought, we cannot always stick to discussions of reality in purely literal terms. There is no way to avoid metaphorical thought, especially in complex matters like foreign policy. I am therefore not objecting to the use of metaphor in itself in foreign policy discourse. My objections are: first, to the ignorance of the presence of metaphor in foreign policy deliberations; second, to the failure to look systematically at what our metaphors hide; and third, to the failure to think imaginatively about what new metaphors might be more benign. It is in the service of reality that we must pay more attention to the mechanisms of metaphorical thought, especially because such mechanisms are necessarily used in foreign policy deliberations. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Metaphors of War (Part 2 of 2) Next, Response 15, Sidebar to Metaphors of War ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.15 **/ ** Written 8:33 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** SIDEBAR TO METAPHORS OF WAR The Arab Viewpoint by George Lakoff *** The metaphors used to conceptualize the Gulf crisis hide the most powerful political ideas in the Arab world: Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. The first seeks to form a racially-based all-Arab nation; the second, a theocratic all-Islamic state. Though bitterly opposed to one another, they share a great deal. Both are conceptualized in family terms, an Arab brotherhood and an Islamic brotherhood. Both see brotherhood as more legitimate than existing states. Both are at odds with the State-as-Person metaphor, which sees currently existing states as distinct entities with a right to exist in perpetuity. Also hidden by our metaphors is perhaps the most important daily concern throughout the Arab world: Arab dignity. Both political movements are seen as ways to achieve dignity through unity. The current national boundaries are widely perceived as working against Arab dignity in two ways: one internal and one external. The internal issue is the division between rich and poor in the Arab world. Poor Arabs see rich Arabs as rich by accident, by where the British happened to draw the lines that created the contemporary nations of the Middle East. To see Arabs metaphorically as one big family is to suggest that oil wealth should belong to all Arabs. To many Arabs, the national boundaries drawn by colonial powers are illegitimate, violating the conception of Arabs as a single "brotherhood" and impoverishing millions. To those impoverished millions, the positive side of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait was that it challenged national borders and brought to the fore the divisions between rich and poor that result from those lines in the sand. If there is to be peace in the region, these divisions must be addressed, say, by having rich Arab countries make extensive investments in development that will help poor Arabs. As long as the huge gulf between rich and poor exists in the Arab world, a large number of poor Arabs will continue to see one of the superstate solutions, either Arab nationalism or Islamic fundamentalism, as being in their self-interest, and the region will continue to be unstable. The current national boundaries keep Arab nations squabbling among themselves and, therefore, weak relative to Western nations. To unity advocates, what we call "stability" means continued weakness. Weakness is a major theme in the Arab world, and is often conceptualized in sexual terms, even more than in the West. American officials, in speaking of the "rape" of Kuwait, are conceptualizing a weak, defenseless country as female and a strong militarily powerful country as male. Similarly, it is common for Arabs to conceptualize the colonization and subsequent domination of the Arab world by the West, especially the US, as emasculation. An Arab proverb that is reported to be popular in Iraq these days is that "It is better to be a cock for a day than a chicken for a year." The message is clear: It is better to be male P that is, strong and dominant for a short period of time P than to be female P that is, weak and defenseless for a long time. Much of the support for Saddam among Arabs is due to the fact that he is seen as standing up to the US, even if only for a while, and that there is a dignity in this. If upholding dignity is an essential part of what defines Saddam's "rational self-interest," it would have been vitally important for our government to know this, since he might be willing to go to war to "be a cock for a day." The US does not have anything like a proper understanding of the issue of Arab dignity. Take the question of whether Iraq will come out of this with part of the Rumailah oil fields and two islands giving it a port on the Gulf. From Iraq's point of view these are seen as economic necessities if Iraq is to rebuild. President Bush has spoken of this as "rewarding aggression," using the Third-World-Countries-As-Children metaphor, where the great powers are grown-ups who have the obligation to reward or punish children so as to make them behave properly. This is exactly the attitude that grates on Arabs who want to be treated with dignity. Instead of seeing Iraq as a sovereign nation that has taken military action for economic purposes, the president treats Iraq as if it were a child gone bad, who has become the neighborhood bully and should be properly disciplined by the grown-ups. The issue of the Rumailah oil fields and the two islands were alternatively discussed in the media in terms of "saving face," which is a very different concept than upholding Arab dignity and insisting on being treated as an equal, not an inferior. -30- End, SB to Metaphors Next, Response 16, "Black Hats for the "Politically Correct" by Gary Grass (Part 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.16 **/ ** Written 8:36 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Black Hats for the Politically Correct (Part 1 of 2) Black Hats for the Politically Correct: Behind the PC Controversy Lurks a Conservative Propaganda Campaign by Gary Grass Gary Grass is Executive Director of the Latin America Studies Council of Wisconsin, and is pursuing a Master's degree in Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. *** There's a dangerous menace said to be seeking to take over our college campuses. Its prototypical representative, according to Newsweek, is "a student in a tie-dyed T-shirt, with open-toed sandals and a grubby knapsack." Exercise caution. This is a "powerful movement," and "seemingly at odds with what most Americans believe." Its driving force is political correctness (PC), a "totalitarian philosophy," "Marxist in origin," whose "thought police" are everywhere. (1) This menace exists more than anywhere else in the pages of the mass media and in the minds of the politically incorrect (PI), themselves a powerful movement. In essence, PC is said to be a doctrine holding that "all rules are unjust and all preferences are principled; that justice is simply the will of the stronger party; that standards and values are arbitrary . . . that individual rights are a red flag signaling social privilege, and should be subordinated to the claims of group interest; that all knowledge can be reduced to politics and should be pursued not for its own sake but for the end of political power . . ." (2) and so on. PI can be defined as opposition to all the manifestations of PC on college campuses. Particularly, PI opposes affirmative action and the recruitment of minority faculty. PI supports mandatory study of the "great books" of the West but opposes diluting this curriculum with works whose merit they dispute -- i.e. everything else. PI opposes restrictions on hate speech, but moreover, PI opposes almost any criticism of perceived racism as chilling to intellectual life. The PI line is a years-old theme of the right, with well-developed institutions and methods: research centers, corporate funding, even student shock troops. (3) But its greatest and most recent conquest has been the audience of the mass media through an 18-month propaganda blitz that reached its height in May 1991. (4) "Political Correctness" is not purely a phenomenon manufactured for the sake of propaganda. There are credible accounts of disruptive behavior, superficiality, and arrogance among the student left, to be sure. Some accounts are indeed disturbing, and all of this may fall under the abused rubric of PC. But these excesses constitute only a small part of the discourse conducted in the media. Real PC has been fused with fantasy to make minnows into monsters. Themes A basic PI theme originates from a 1984 memo outlining strategy for the academic right, which suggested "high ground articulation," that is, thoroughly reframing issues so that the right would no longer be seen as the champions of bigots and exclusion. Obviously, a huge advantage is obtained by the side of a debate which succeeds in "controlling the question." In this case, the Atlantic paraphrases John Searle as revealing the hidden debate by observing that "the underlying issue is not the inclusion of more [perspectives]. . . that broader representation is proper and justified has been conceded. The real issues [are whether it's true] that Western values are inherently oppressive, that the chief purpose of education is political transformation, and that all standards are arbitrary." (5) The next step is to list episodes, some disturbing, others imag-inary, that teach the PC doctrine "by precept and example." (6) These events are drawn as encouraging racial separatism and violence, and chilling intellectual freedom in universities which would otherwise be wholesome. In the PI essay on the ills of education, it is the students and the female, leftist and minority professors who, collected in thought and print into a single stereotyped entity, threaten the ivory tower, otherwise home to "open-ended disinterested inquiry." (7) The scars borne by the victims of racial attacks don't appear prominently in these stories. Nor do government-funded research projects, sexual harassment within the faculty, or other realities intrude to threaten the serenity of white male professors seeking knowledge for its own sake. Finally, the PI side is not made the topic of mainstream articles suggesting controversy. The frame is always around items that can be bound into a PC threat. Not only real episodes and struggles are lumped together, but another dimension as well. The phantom of PC is tied to communism, totalitarianism and anti-Semitism, because the intellectual history of PC is traced through an arcane literary theory called deconstructionism to European intellectuals of both the left and right. Thus PC can be both "the brittlest of orthodoxies" (8) and utterly relativistic, and can "deny any notion of objective reality." (9) Most articles on PC accept both views simultaneously, noting the "irony" of the other side's infinite contradictory views in a monolithic orthodoxy. The link between PC and radical politics is essential in that perhaps only in their approach to alternative political systems have Americans been trained to practice such remarkable doublethink. PC is said, therefore, to be proactive and antithetical to liberal beliefs, powerful, well-organized, secretive, unprincipled, widespread and growing. But these traits are more apt in describing PI. In the words of one scholar, "These charges -- as extravagant as they are baseless -- are an interesting example of projection, a psychological operation in which one's own feelings and intentions are simultaneously denied and attributed -- that is projected on -- to someone else." This quote is actually from one of the stars of the National Association of Scholars, the vanguard organization of Political Incorrectitude. It's a quote from Jeane Kirkpatrick, asserting in 1982 that the contras were a figment of Nicaragua's paranoid imagination.(10) Only it was Kirkpatrick willfully succumbing to "projection." This type of reversal is a "best defense" for the propagandist with an Achilles heel. Now, as then, the aggressor has claimed the mantle of protector. For many on the conservative side, the goal is not pluralism, but an affirmative shift to the right.(11) An Edifice of Lies The PI campaign reached a new milestone in May when President Bush commented on the PC "inquisition" in a statement covered by the major wire services. "The charge of PC," according to Thomas Spear, "was rarely heard on campus before the press picked it up."(12) By now, "PC" is an abbreviation known across America. Its road to prominence was a textbook case of how a propaganda theme can be built bit by bit through an organized campaign.(13) [See chart on page 24.] At the tip of this accumulated mass of anti-PC prose are straightforward assessments that would be dismissed as ludicrous if not for the support built for them in the preceding months. Bush warned students against the dangers of PC and may claim one day that tie-dyed T-shirts threaten the national welfare. Wild claims against PC cannot be made and supported in a single sentence. Even the syndicated columns and other short entries in the print media are dependent on a supporting structure of claims without which they would be difficult to take seriously. Their impact is strengthened by what has gone before -- long pieces which spelled out their case, making the inverted claims of PI plausible and warming up PC slogans to be future hot buttons for the right. Before laying implausible claims on the mass audience in April and May, literate subgroups were targeted with longer pieces of 10, 20, or 30 pages which introduced the themes of later short propaganda. By giving names to what they describe, these articles have introduced terms packed with the significance of pages of prose. The building of the edifice did not begin with the long treatments, however. A two-page article in the New York Times appeared nearly six months before the 20-page Atlantic Monthly cover story. There are reasons for this. First, most early newspaper items ostensibly treated specific events without warning of huge overblown trends. These building blocks are used to support the credibility of later accounts. But this support is sometimes circular: Reporters and columnists were clearly introduced earlier than the general public to the contents of the longer tracts. Before the Atlantic story or the book from which it was excerpted were published, the same obscure details found therein started appearing in the mass media. Newsweek essentially telescoped the breadth of the Atlantic article into six pages. These pages were more venomous than might have been anticipated, and were quoted back in the American Spectator and in widely broadcast talks by Charles Sykes.(14) Dinesh D'Souza, author of the Atlantic piece, had written earlier about the positive prospects he saw in Richard Bernstein's landing a position at the Times.(15) Bernstein subsequently authored the article mentioned above. Charles Sykes, a traveling salesman of PI snake oil, copiously cited D'Souza's book before its publication. Sykes' latest book treats the same themes, concentrating on Dartmouth, D'Souza's alma mater.(16) D'Souza's excerpt is introduced in the Atlantic by a quote from a review of another book of its ilk by Roger Kimball. The spiral feeds itself. Now at last the entire print universe is under the canopy of the thinnest discussion of PC, and the electronic media are now approaching this stage. Processed and Unprocessed Baloney Some of the episodes used to represent the work of PC are real, but these alone apparently would not have been enough to declare a full-blown crisis, so other episodes have simply been invented. At the root of many of PI's vast claims, there is often little more than lies. Linda Brodkey and Shelli Fowler helped develop a new syllabus for the English 306 course taught at the University of Texas at Austin. Court cases would have been the primary texts for "Writing About Difference." Before that work could be completed, it was gunned down as "the most massive attempt at thought control ever attempted on campus."(17) Brodkey and Fowler wrote the following about the way their work was greeted in the press: Not one of the many journalists who trotted out "Writing About Difference" as an example of the dangers of political correctness interviewed anyone who actually worked on the syllabus. Freedom from information (beyond the spin put on the course by its opponents) may explain why George Will felt free to tack "Race and Gender" onto the course title; why Richard Bernstein reported in the New York Times that "literary classics" had to be dropped to make room for the "p.c." materials; why Newsweek did not know in December that the "leftist" Rothenberg reader had been dropped in June; why Fred Siegel, writing for the New Republic, mistakenly claims that English 306 is a "remedial writing course" whose theme is "white male racism."(18) This is not the only instance in which arguments against PC have been horribly ill-informed. PI advocate Charles Sykes delivers a diatribe against a book by a Guatemalan Indian -- denounced as Western Marxism pure and simple. In the book, Marxism is mentioned once -- criticized, in fact -- a page before the end; the first 20 pages are more typical, dwelling on Mayan birth rituals. Sykes also gets the title of the book wrong, misunderstands its authorship, and misidentifies the nationality of its editor.(19) Propaganda is mostly about going beyond lies to sell a point without getting caught advocating it directly. It seems pointless to even go into subtle techniques in overbearing articles like the one in Newsweek, in which the voice of the reporter remarks that PC is totalitarian, without a second thought. New York and Atlantic show book burnings which, as illustrations, are separate from the text and don't commit the author to any facts at all. The manipulation of evidence, sources and quotations are techniques overshadowed in many of these tracts by bald assumptions that PI is asking the right question and PC is whatever PI says it is.(20) Mocking Strange Ideas The techniques employed in crafting the PI line are various, a veritable sourcebook of propaganda methods. What's remarkable about their use in attacking PC is the heady intensity of the double standards and hypocrisy involved. The propaganda techniques discard what its users claim to stand for, and indulge in what they claim to despise. A good example is when it comes to openness and intolerance. PI claims to represent, as PC does, an embrace of other cultures and points of view. It opposes only intolerance. But Sykes, citing D'Souza, can't resist a cheap shot against Rigoberta Mench, a Maya-Quich Indian. Mench was a peasant leader who lost her family to a military dictatorship in Guatemala and became an international celebrity when she escaped and authored a book about her experiences. That book is part of the canon at Stanford and Rigoberta has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. But strange ideas about Mench have proliferated among those who have read D'Souza. Jonathan Karl thinks she was "educated in France,"(21) though when her book appeared she was illiterate and wasn't very fluent in Spanish, much less French. Sykes goes further, speaking at length about Rigoberta's lack of qualifications to represent Guatemalan Indians. His audience in Milwaukee snickered and guffawed at Sykes' pandering account of how Rigoberta met the future editor of her book not in Guatemala but in Paris, "a somewhat unusual venue for your typical Guatemalan Indian," according to Sykes, who plays it for all it's worth. His conclusion, following D'Souza, is that Rigoberta is just a "mouthpiece" for what her Parisian hosts have to say. One piece of evidence for D'Souza is that Rigoberta uses the term "Molotov cocktail," a phrase no real Indian is allowed to acquire, even in the midst of civil war.(22) But all these diatribes are playing to racism and ignorance. Otherwise, what's the humor or the contradiction? If Sykes' audience had known that one or two hundred thousand Guatemalans have been killed in the last generation, and that millions have fled, then the view that real Guatemalan Indians belong in Guatemala, not Europe, would seem idiotic. It's nothing more than old, racist cant that when savages come to Europe, they, like Curious George or Babar the elephant, cease being primitive and typical and can no longer act as token representatives of their races. (Rigoberta lives in Mexico.) PI also panders to suspicions against the left. Opponents of PI are red-baited by the fact that PC is painted as "a totalitarianism of the left"(23) and other such things. Columnist Joel McNally suggested(24) that Wisconsin "Governor Tommy G. Thompson has exposed the Republican's game," naming a businessman notorious for his insensitive remarks as a University of Wisconsin regent and using the PC scare so that "Now opponents who object to his nominee merely because the candidate's views are vile and offensive can be accused of the new sin" of PC. End, Black Hats for the Politically Correct (Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 17, Black Hats for the Politically Correct (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.17 **/ ** Written 8:39 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Black Hats for the Politically Correct (Part 2 of 2) Follow Me. Follow Your Prejudices. Some articles cite acts of PC but leave them sitting on the page with no details attached. Newsweek raises the specter of a Rabelais scholar squeezed out by a piece on Toni Morrison. This may be a real concern somewhere, but no school is mentioned, or any names, so verification is impossible. Time analyzes PC thought by using concrete examples of texts placed on par (Shakespeare equated with Alice Walker) but is vague about who makes this equation. The American Spectator alludes to hypothetical attacks on Shakespeare scholars -- even "torture."(25) The problems raised aren't only those of verification, or even confusion between the actual and the hypothetical. Details allow for slower, more thoughtful examination of ideas. When articles sculpt away all the reason and purpose from suggested guidelines for writing or speech, they seem odd. Perhaps hoping to associate these innocuous hints with the constitutionally dubious speech restrictions enacted across campuses, they toss out wild prohibitions at their readers. Progressive stylebooks suggest one avoid "lady," "illegal alien," "community," "articulate," "leader," and "inscrutable." Of course, it's utterly absurd to most people that these be sensitive terms on par with "nigger" or "spic." But that's the whole point -- these guidelines are to help writers avoid unintended slurs. The listing of these terms creates a series of hit-and-run pokes at the reader's sense of the ridiculous. But what if it were slowed down and we could hear why and how these terms become objectionable? What if we knew the history of how "leaders" are used to stereotype a people's habits and beliefs into those of an eponymous figure and ignore all in the "leader's" shadow, or those who have other views? Or how "inscrutability" has been used to strip Asians of their scrutable humanity? Or how "illegal alien" is seen by people implied to be by nature alien and unsanctionable by law? Implicit in this style of argument is the assumption that one can learn enough to judge some topics by a skin-deep examination of them, and books should be read by their covers. Writers for Time, New York, the New York Times and the Atlantic all felt it worth mentioning that a paper was presented at a national conference entitled, "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl." (26) None of these tracts thought it necessary to elaborate beyond the six-word title, except that one gave the name of the author. But we all know familiar ideas take less space to argue for than new ideas. Why does a movement that seeks to protect unpopular views from intolerant ridicule encourage the least tolerant style for making its point? Or in the words of Ogden Nash, "Why did the Lord give us so much quickness of movement unless it was to avoid responsibility?" The emotional element of PI propaganda is manifested in many subtle forms. Many PI tracts make use of the second person to give their scare tactics greater force. New York entitles its piece, "Are You Politically Correct?" Newsweek warns, "Watch What You Say," as though most readers of either magazine were subject to campus codes of conduct. There are less striking examples of this which may help the message of personal jeopardy get through, but it seems extravagant to examine such fine points when pictures of Hitler youth burning books decorate PI manifestos.(27) Free Speech as Censorship It isn't only in placing mandatory and voluntary speech guidelines in proximity that PI propaganda suggests false censorship codes. On top of this is the mixture of disruptive incidents with polite reactions to unwelcome ideas. Disruptive responses include 50 or 75 students marching into a classroom and chanting slogans to drown out a professor in protest of something. This is censoring behavior. But also lumped in with these rare episodes are simpler cases of communication, where someone is upbraided, ridiculed or corrected for something they've said, not always politely. Thomas Bergin at the University of Virginia Law School apparently couldn't take it when he received an anonymous note calling him a racist for seemingly taunting a Black student with jive language. Bergin recited his civil liberties resum in rebuttal but was too "lacerated" to teach his class. Stephan Thernstrom stopped teaching race issues at Harvard after he was shaken by Harvard Crimson stories alluding to the racial insensitivity some perceived in his (quite moderate) work. At the University of Pennsylvania, a student sent a note to the administration questioning programming planned to encourage diversity. A response flagged her use of the word "individual" as having racist overtones. Students at Mount Holyoke were upbraided for mocking its Lesbian/Bisexual Awareness Week.(28) First amendment advocates like Nat Hentoff favor "demystifying" scornful epithets like racial slurs, arguing they will lose their force when confronted and understood. PC people are upbraided in the New Republic for "Thin Skins." In PI propaganda, all expression that attacks racism is lumped together as dangerous -- "McCarthyite" slander to be opposed. No repository of state power was attacking Thernstrom, who says criticism of his work was qualitatively worse than the 50s Red scare, because it came from a student newspaper instead of the state. But PI doesn't disarm the attack with logic, rather in fact, it draws no line between arguable race baiting and other examples of PC speech. It's all the "New McCarthyism." In all the cases above a comment earned a PC criticism, followed by a PI counterattack. Does this show, as PI would have it, that dialogue and exchange have become impossible and that PC speech is designed to censor? Probably the most chilling speech involved is the labelling from the PI side. If it's bad to be called a racist in America, imagine being labeled a totalitarian leftist neo-McCarthyite fascist! Statistical Manipulation There are 3,500 colleges in the United States, and many of the top schools are examined in PI tracts. In all, scores of schools are profiled in recent propaganda, excluding the D'Souza book, which claims to look at hundreds.(29) Here we can see techniques where the apparent national character of the PC threat is enhanced by hopping from campus to campus as much as possible. In some cases, this leads to desultory writing. Newsweek gives us three paragraphs on events at the University of Connecticut, but they're scattered throughout the article. In most cases, the universities seem to be perfectly healthy. Colleges are mentioned as former homes of PC professors or in order to quote the opinion of a single student on campus life there, so as to inflate the PC threat. Some incidents are so minor as to be silly. If a national network of professors and students at work for years can't dig up anything worse on a university than this, it can only demonstrate that the PC threat is minute. Still, tales collected over a period of years from 3,500 schools can carry some emotional weight when presented rapid-fire in the space of a few pages. The listing tactic gives the events a unity and dominance they lack in reality. Moreover, the difficulty inherent in checking such broadly dispersed data grants some leeway for distortion. D'Souza's book gives full treatment to just six campuses, and decidedly atypical ones, since they are the only ones that demonstrated potential for the PI propaganda mill. The Counterattack If one had scoured the media in March or April for a defense of multicultural curricula, affirmative action on campus, or other elements of the supposed PC threat, the reward would have been pretty slight. Since June, however, the pattern has shifted. The May/June issue of Extra!, produced by the media watchdog group FAIR, featured the PC story on its cover. In a much higher circulation market, the Village Voice weighed in with its June 5 cover story, "Wanted for Intellectual Fraud," a double-barreled assault from Richard Goldstein and Michael Berube which exposed a long series of PI lies. For them, John Taylor's story in New York "could not work as invective (far less as journalism) if it did not presume a high degree of ignorance." Newsweek's discussion "is characterized by confusion"30 and D'Souza is less subtle still: The claim that canon revision is universally accepted is "an outright false-hood." D'Souza continues to "misrepresent" Stanford curricula changes, because he "neglects to mention that this notorious revision affected only one of Stanford's eight core "tracks."(31) And where D'Souza laments the lack of deconstructive work on Marx, Foucault or Lacan, for example, Berube and Goldstein answer, "Because no one at the Atlantic, including even the journal's fact-checkers, is aware of the past 25 years' profusion of deconstructive work . . . (which Berube and Goldstein cite) . . . D'Souza is allowed to get away with this series of inanities . . . D'Souza has no idea what he's talking about."(32) In late July, some of the facts caught up with PI, as an American Council on Education survey found that on 359 campuses surveyed, only five percent had experienced any significant controversy over curriculum, classroom lectures or textbook content. Finally, the September/October Mother Jones is perhaps even more aggressive than the Voice in its "Return Fire! Special Multiculturalism Issue," with Molly Ivins trashing Camille Paglia ("Sheesh, what an asshole!"), Troy Duster sharing results from the Institute for the Study of Social Change's detailed study of campus diversity, and David Beers exposing how a State University of New York, Binghamton riot scandalized the Washington Post editorial board without ever actually occurring. But what of the original PI propagandists? Have they faded away? Yes and no. By the time the Village Voice came around to the defense of multiculturalism, John Taylor's PI screed had entered the international megacirculation of the Reader's Digest. Since then, there's been relative quiet from the newsmagazines. But while the big guns have fallen silent, it is likely that the myths of PI continue to propagate at a low intensity through other media. Newsweek is more influential than the Voice, and while it may comprehend its own errors well enough not to repeat them, it has not alerted its readership. The PI wave was strong enough that its tenets have become widespread, and will linger at the margins. Keep an eye out for recycled propaganda lying around your Good Housekeeping, or administered in small doses in Prevention. Footnotes: 1. Jerry Adler with Mark Starr, Farai Chideya, Lynda Wright, Pat Wingert, Linda Haac, "Taking Offense: Is This the New Enlightenment on Campus or the New McCarthyism?" Newsweek, 12/24/90, pp 48-55. All quotations in this paragraph are taken from Newsweek's statements about PC. 2. Dinesh D'Souza, "Illiberal Education," Atlantic Monthly, 3/91 p.79. 3. See Sara Diamond, "Readin' Writin' and Repressin'," Z Magazine, 2/91. 4. The Guardian called the left "ambivalent" toward the debate. (3/27/91) The Nation (5/27/91) and Extra! (May/June '91) have begun to respond to the issue, but only after immense sound and fury from the PI side. See Footnote 13. 5. D'Souza, op.cit. 6. Ibid. 7. "The Derisory Tower," editorial, The New Republic, 2/18/91. 8. "Political Correctness on Campus," speech by Charles Sykes, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 3/5/91. 9. D'Souza, op. cit. 10. 3/25/82. Her reference to "familiar patterns of doublespeak" could have been applied to her own speech. 11. Sara Diamond, op. cit. Some of this information and other facts appear in the UMW (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) Post, "Funding, Ideology Tie Times, CRs to Right Trend," 4/3/90, and "Conservative, Corporate Interests Trying to 'Win the Next Generation'." 4/5/90 by Sue Simensky and Ron Novy. 12. "Attacks on 'PC' are New McCarthyism," Christian Science Monitor, 4/24/91. 13. The following table gives essential data on anti-PC tracts that have surfaced in the past 18 months. There is a basic sameness in the mainstream treatments. The more esoteric journals revolve more around separate issues. PUBLICATION DATE LENGTH PLACEMENT CIRCULATION New Republic 2/91 37 pgs. Special Issue 93,000 Atlantic 4/91 20 pgs. Cover Story 325,000 American Scholar W/91 10 pgs. Lead Story 29,000 American Spectator 5/91 7 pgs. Special Feature 41,000 Newsweek 12/90 6 pgs. Cover Story 3,050,000 Village Voice 5/91 4 pgs. Cover Story 161,000 New York Times 10/90 2 pgs. Page one of Sec. 911,000 James Kilpatrick 4/91 column op-eds wire George Bush 5/91 column various wire George Will 9/90 column op-eds wire Time 4/91 4 pgs. #2 story 4,273,000 National Review 3/91 5 pgs. cover story 122,000 Intercollegiate Review F/90 18 pgs. Special Focus 40,000 Hudson Review 4/91 22 pgs. #2 story 4,000 Policy Review S91 6 pgs. #3 story 28,000 New York 1/91 9 pgs. Cover Story 434,000 New York 3/91 9 pgs. Cover Story 434,000 Christian Science Monitor 5/91 column 4 letters 160,000 New Republic 2/91 Cover Story 93,000 New Republic 4/91 9 pgs. Cover Story 93,000 Not noted in the chart are two pieces in the New York Review of Books, pieces in Fortune magazine, Harpers, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Public Interest, a Wall Street Journal editorial, and numerous other pieces. Electronic media have included a May 5 segment on "This Week with David Brinkley" and Charles Sykes talks broadcast over WUWM (Milwaukee), and carried on the CBN network. Other Sykes segments have appeared on CNN and presumably other outlets as he tours campuses across the country. Public radio stations nationally broadcast a speech by John Bunzel of the NAS. These are just the cases I've heard of; perhaps there are many more. 14. Each of these items appear in the table. Specifically, Richard Bernstein, "The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct," New York Times, October 28, 1990. Atlantic Monthly and Newsweek, op. cit. R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr., "PC People," American Spectator, May 1991. 15. "Dazzled by Jeane," box in Lies of Our Times, December 1990. 16. James Kilpatrick, "Poison in the Groves of Academe," Universal Press Syndicate column in April 22 Milwaukee Journal. 17. Letter, appearing in the Austin-American Statesman, cited in "Political Suspects," Linda Brodkey and Shelli Fowler, Village Voice, April 23, 1991. 18. Brodkey and Shelli Fowler, op. cit. 19. Rigoberta Mench, with Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, ed., "I, Rigoberta Mench, an Indian Woman in Guatemala," attacked by Charles Sykes in "Political Correctness on Campus," speech given at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, March 5, 1991. 21. Review of D'Souza's book, Illiberal Education, in the issue of American Spectator cited above. 22. D'Souza, "Multiculturalism 101," Policy Review, Spring 1991. 23. Camille Paglia, quoted in New York, op. cit. 24. "Ante up for your free speech," Milwaukee Journal, May 14, 1991. 25. All as noted on table. Op. cit. except for William A. Henry III, "Upside Down in the Groves of Academe," Time, April 1, 1991. 26. All op. cit. except John Taylor, "Are You Politically Correct?", New York, January 21, 1991. 27. New York, ibid. 28. Thernstrom's story is given in New York, ibid., others in Newsweek. The University of Pennsylvania case actually is cited in the Atlantic and New Republic and by Charles Sykes, all in the issues cited. 29. The figures are given in the Atlantic, though not in such proximity that the discrepancy becomes evident. 30. Michael Berube and Richard Goldstein, "Wanted for Intellectual Fraud," Village Voice, 6/5/91, p. 34. 31. Ibid., p. 35. 32. Ibid., p. 36. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Black Hats... (Part 2 of 2) Next, Response 18, Exxon's Public Relations SWAT Team by Mark Dowie (Part 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.18 **/ ** Written 8:40 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Exxon's PR SWAT Team Saving Face: Could Public Relations Have Rescued Exxon's Image? by Mark Dowie Mark Dowie is working on a book tentatively entitled Spin Control: The Triumph of Public Relations, at his Point Reyes Station, California, home. This article originally appeared in Texas Monthly. *** The Spring Of 1989 was definitely the worst of times for the Exxon Corporation. As oil from the ruptured tanker Valdez spread inexorably across Prince William Sound and the nightly news, the company's image as a good corporate citizen sank like an oil-sodden otter. The business that had once been synonymous with a friendly cartoon tiger almost willfully transformed itself overnight into a cynical and inept monster that fouled the environment, bungled the cleanup and shirked its responsibilities. Fifty thousand credit card holders sent their cards back to Exxon in disgust. Customers who had used their gasoline for years switched to other brands to demonstrate their indignation. Yet in the midst of all the doom and gloom, there was one group that interpreted what was happening to Exxon not as a fiasco but as a golden opportunity. It was a new branch of the public relations industry that appropriately call themselves " Crisis Communicators." "Catastrophes like Exxon's have brought to the attention of all CEO's the importance of good public communications," says Ketchum Public Affairs president John Paluszek, who is also the past president of the Public Relations Society of America. "Virtually all of the top ten PR firms now have crisis communications swat teams ready to go." With loving attention, Paluszek and his peers have studied every detail of Exxon's actions, analyzing what went right and what went wrong. Their theory is that, as in a political campaign, what the subject is doing matters less than what the public thinks he is doing. Accordingly, the new communicators have a new product ready for the Dow Chemicals and Union Carbides of the industrial world. The sales pitch sounds something like: "If our crisis manual had been on Exxon's desk, 'Exxon Valdez' would now be the answer to a trivia question." The revised doctrine of crisis communications itself -- a prepackaged response to future spills, explosions, crashes, poisonings, leaks, lawsuits, and melt-downs -- will probably read something like this: The CEO should be the first person on the scene In a sense Exxon started out all right in this area and then made a mess of things. Texan Frank Iarossi, the president of Houston-based Exxon Shipping, took control of catastrophe management. He wasn' t the top man, but he was very high in Exxon's corporate structure and he had a sincere, believable manner. Within an hour of his arrival in Alaska, and without a trace of guile, Iarossi committed the full resources of the world's largest oil company to the spill. "We take responsibility and we will make it right," he told an audience of fishermen, native Alaskans, recreational kayakers, and local merchants. People went home that night feeling pretty good about Frank Iarossi and Exxon. Then Exxon made what is now seen by many observers as its largest PR blunder. After ten days, Frank Iarossi was sent home. The company then made an even bigger blunder. It delayed the appearance of chairman of the board and CEO Lawrence G. Rawl. A media-shy petroleum engineer who had risen through the ranks, Rawl defended his decision not to visit Alaska immediately. It was the chief's duty, he solemnly declared, to stay at world headquarters and manage the crisis. Most Alaskans didn' t buy that argument, and by the time Rawl made his reluctant appearance, the reception was far less gracious than it would have been three weeks earlier. Over 10 million gallons of oil had escaped containment, and dead animals were being shown on the same news segments as the chairman. While granting that the public is suspicious of pseudo-events, the new PR gurus nevertheless recommend that once the boss is on the ground, he should don a hard hat and chopper out to the mess (whatever it is), letting at least one wire service photographer and a TV camera crew hitch a ride. Images of strong emotional responses must be captured (for which the chief will be trained by a crisis communicator). Executive hands and shoes must be soiled for the camera. A middle-management company official should not be made to seem a scapegoat (even if it is legally expedient to do so) Admittedly, it was not smart of Exxon to let Joseph Hazelwood, a man with a history of drinking problems who was not allowed to drive a Chevrolet in New York, captain a thousand-foot ship through the icy waters of Prince William Sound at midnight. But to abandon the man and let him become a scapegoat after having once tried to help him through a trying personal crisis highlighted what many saw as callous and insincere behavior -- even for Exxon. Press conferences should not be held at community meetings A company should never make it too easy for the press to hear the other side of the story. At his second meeting with the public in the town of Valdez, Alaska, Frank Iarossi was painting a fairly benign and reassuring picture of the still-unfolding disaster. Meanwhile, Alaska governor Steve Cowper and his commissioner of environmental conservation, Dennis Kelso, were also visiting Valdez. The two men had flown in over Bligh Reef and found that the slick from the Valdez was long, deep and moving toward the area's salmon hatcheries, an economic mainstay in the sound. That was a startling contradiction to what Iarossi had just said. The public trust that Iarossi had built in those critical opening hours of the response soon dissipated. In a few days the second floor of the Valdez Westmark Hotel, the company's command post, became an armed camp, and after a threat was made on his life, Iarossi was assigned a personal bodyguard. " I didn' t feel the danger," he recalled later, " but I certainly felt the pressure. There were two occasions where I just went and sat in my room. I shed a few tears, took a deep breath, and went on to the next press conference." Combining public meetings and press conferences seemed like a nice democratic idea. It backfired because the irate reaction of local citizens became the story that reporters filed. Crisis communicators now recommend that selected reporters be allowed to observe the meetings between the company and the community, but neither TV cameras nor questions from the press should be permitted. Representatives should attempt to identify the company with the aggrieved party As the compromising meeting in Valdez closed, Exxon officials noticed something interesting about Governor Cowper. He and Kelso were both dressed as if they had been out in the bush hunting grizzlies. Merchants in Valdez still remember a frenzied two-hour shopping binge that afternoon, during which hundreds of dollars' worth of jeans, flannel shirts, suspenders, and heavy boots were sold to strangers with credit cards. It was a savvy investment in image, a recognition of the importance of looking like one of the boys, but it should have been done before the first public appearance was made. The polluting company should be portrayed as a concerned citizen Besieged by charges that it wasn't doing nearly enough to clean the beaches, Exxon desperately needed a symbol of its humanity and corporate concern. Enter the Sea Otter Rehabilitation Program. Three rescue centers were established by Exxon to capture, clean and treat oil-soaked otters. Periodically a gaggle of photographers or a TV crew would appear to watch an Exxon executive roll up his sleeves and bathe an oily otter. About 225 of the animals were saved at a cost of over $50,000 per otter. Footage of frisky otters being released back into the deep-blue waters of the sound gave Exxon some valuable though extremely expensive countervailing PR in the lower 48 states. The company de-emphasized any news about the estimated 1,000 otters that perished. The company should, if at all possible, be portrayed as a victim The most frequently cited case of "correct" crisis control is Johnson and Johnson's handling of the Tylenol poisoning scare. In that instance the corporation was not at fault and was truly victimized -- quite a different case from the Valdez disaster. However, the corporation-as-victim advantage can work well under the right circumstances as it did for Union Carbide when its president stepped off a plane in New Delhi and was arrested. An outside expert in damage control should be engaged Exxon did approach Hill and Knowlton, the largest PR company in the world and the firm that represents the royal family of Kuwait, and the Vatican (in its anti-choice campaign) and managed image cleanup after Three Mile Island and the Kansas City Hyatt catastrophe (where a walkway collapsed and killed more than one hundred visitors in 1981). But the company's valuable experience was barely exploited. All the big firm was asked to do after the Valdez spill was place 166 newspaper ads (those embarrassing full-pagers that belatedly apologized for the mess while carefully declining to take responsibility). If Hill and Knowlton's expertise had been used, things might have turned out very differently for Exxon, even as well as it did for the emir of Kuwait. Nearly two years after the Valdez spill, a big question still remains: Could better PR have contained the damage to Exxon's image? Given that in any disaster the press will report its own probably unflattering story, publicity makeovers can go only so far. In the end, a big part of the answer depends on how much crow a company must eat to be suitably repentant and how much blame it can pass on to others. The post-Valdez nostrums and formulas that have been added to corporate crisis manuals nationwide are significantly changing the way environmental polluters massage and manipulate the public. There's only one catch: It will take another disaster to find out if they work. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Exxon's SWAT Team Next, Response 19, Operation Peter Pan by Joan Didion ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.19 **/ ** Written 8:42 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Operation Peter Pan Operation Pedro Pan: A Cold War Propaganda Operation by the Catholic Church and the US Department of State Convinced Cuban Parents to Send Their Children to Live in Camps in Southern Florida By Joan Didion Joan Didion is the author of numerous books including Salvador, Democracy, and Miami. Reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster. Copyright ) 1987 by Joan Didion. *** Excerpted from Miami, by Joan Didion (pp 122-125) On January 9, 1961, at a time when the Cuban revolution was two years under way and the 2506 Brigade was training in Guatemala for the April invasion, the United States Department of State granted to a Miami priest, Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh, the authority to grant a visa waiver to any Cuban child between the ages of six and 16 who wished to enter the United States under the guardianship of the Catholic diocese of Miami. According to Catholicism in South Florida: 1868-1968, by Michael J. MacNally, a Miami priest and professor of church history at St. Vincent de Paul Seminary in Boynton Beach, such waivers were issued, between January of 1961 and September of 1963, to 14,156 children, each of whom was sent alone, by parents or guardians still living in Cuba, to live in special camps established and operated by the Unaccompanied Children' s Program of the Diocese of Miami. There were, in all, six such camps, the last of which did not close until the middle of 1981. The reason that these camps were established and the Unaccompanied Children' s Program was initiated, Father McNally tells us, was that, by the end of 1960, " rumors were rife" that Fidel Castro planned to send Cuban children to work on Soviet farms, and that, during 1961, " rumors spread" that Fidel Castro had still another plan, " to have children ages three to ten live in state-run dormitories, seeing their parents for only two days a month." It was " to avoid these two possibilities" that parents dispatched their children to Miami and the Unaccompanied Children' s Program, which was also known, according to Father McNally, as " Operation Pedro Pan." No spread rumor goes unrewarded. In Contra Viento y Marea, edited by Lourdes Casal and published in 1978 by Casa de las Amricas in Havana, there appear a number of descriptions, under the joint byline Grupo Areto, of camp life as it was experienced by those who lived it. [Ed. Note: See sidebar for more on Grupo Areto.] These members of the Areto group who arrived in the United States as wards of Operation Pedro Pan characterized this experience, in Contra Viento y Marea, as " perhaps the most enduring" of their lives. They described the camps as the " prehistory" of their radicalization, the places in which they first formulated, however inchoately, the only analysis which seemed to them to explain the " lunacy," the " political troglodytism," the " traumatic experience," of having been banished by their parents to live in a barracks in a foreign country. The speakers in this part of Contra Viento y Marea are both those who spent time in the camps as children and those who worked in them as adults: It was said that Monsignor Walsh . . . had practically unlimited authority to issue visa waivers to children in order to " save them from communism." This episode in our recent history can be seen in retrospect as a period of near-delirium, based as it was on the insistent propaganda that the revolutionary government would strip parents of their authority and send their children to Russia. The first time I began to see through and re-evaluate a few things was when I was working at Opa-Locka, one of the camps where they brought the children who came alone from Cuba. Opa-Locka was managed by the Jesuits. Again and again I asked myself what had motivated these parents to send their children alone to the United States. . . . Sometimes we would give little talks to the American Legion Auxiliary ladies, who were fascinated to see these white Cubans who knew how to eat with knives and forks . . . but most of all they wanted to hear the horrible story of how and why we were there: the incredible and sad tale of how communism, in order to destroy parental authority, had been going to put us on boats bound for Russia. . . . We would sing Cuban songs and the old ladies would go home crying. It must be said that the Americans were using the Cubans: the mass emigration, the children who came alone . . . The departure of the children was used largely as a propaganda ploy. What came out of the camps would be a wounded generation. . . These accounts, however colored, are suggestive. The parents in Cuba had been, as the children put it together, the victims of una estafa, a trick, a deceit, since the distinction between being banished to camps in the USSR and banished to camps in the United States lacked, for the children, significance. The nuns in the camps, who had advised their charges that one day they would appreciate this distinction, were, as the children saw it, equally the victims of una estafa. The children themselves, some of whom had later become these Cubans outside Cuba but estranged from el exilio, these middle-aged scholars and writers whose visits to Miami necessitated metal detectors, had been, as they saw it then and saw it still, " used" by the government of the United States, " manipulated" by the government of the United States, made by the government of the United States the victims of a " propaganda ploy" ; a way of talking about the government of the United States, as it happened, indistinguishable from what was said every day in exile Miami. -30 RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Operation Peter Pan Next, Response 19, MediaWatch by Gloria Channon ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.20 **/ ** Written 8:43 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Sidebar to Operation Peter Pan SIDEBAR to Operation Pedro Pan by Joan Didion Grupo Areto (Excerpted from Miami, pages 116-119) "Somos Cubanos," the editors of Areto, published as a quarterly by the Crculo de Cultura Cubana in New York, had declared in their first issue, in April 1974. "While recognizing that the revolutionary process has implied sacrifices, sufferings and errors," the Areto manifesto had continued, "we maintain that Cuba in 1958 needed measures capable of radically transforming its political, social and economic structures. We understand that that process has established the basis for a more just and egalitarian society, and that it has irreversibly taken root in Cuban society." The editors of Areto had put the name of the Havana poet Roberto Fernndez Retamatheir masthead, and also that of Gabriel Garca Mrquez. In 1984, for the tenth anniversary issue, they had reprinted the 1974 manifesto, and added: "solidarity with the Cuban revolution was and is a position based on principle for our Editorial Board. . . . The ten years that have passed took us on a return trip to Cuba, to confront for ourselves in its entirety the complexity of that society, and by that token, to rid ourselves of the romantic notions which were typical of our group at that time. . . . Because of that, today we assume our position with more firmness and aware-ness of its consequences." Areto con-tributors thought of themselves less as exiles than as "Cubans outside Cuba," and of exile Miami, in the words of this tenth anniversary issue, as "the deformed foetus of Meyer Lansky, the Cuban lumpen bourgeoisie and the North American security state." The Grupo Areto, as Areto' s editors and contributors came to call themselves, had perhaps never represented more than a very small number of exiles, but these few were young, articulate, and determined to be heard. There had been members of the Areto group involved in the Washington lobby originally called the Cuban-American Committee for the Normalization of Relations with Cuba, not to be confused with its polar opposite, the Cuban American National Foundation. There had been members of the Areto group involved with Bernardo Benes in those visits to Cuba which constituted the dialogo. (Carlos Muniz Varela, the member of the Committee of 75 who had been assassinated in 1979 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, was a founder of Areto.) There had been members of the Areto group involved in the inception of the Antonio Maceo Brigadech was organized along the lines of the largely Anglo Venceremos Brigade and offered working sojourns in Cuba to, in the words of its 1978 statement of purpose, "any young Cubans who (1) left Cuba by family decision, (2) has not participated in counterrevolutionary activities and would not support violence against the revolution, and (3) defines him or herself as opposed to the blockade and in favor of the normalization or relations between the United States and Cuba." These children of el exilio who had taken to talking about the deformed foetus of the North American security state and to writing articles with such titles as "Introduction to the Sandinista Documentary Cinema" were not, in other words, pursuing a course which was likely to slip the attention of exile Miami, nor did it. There were bombings. There were death threats. Members of the Antonio Maceo Brigade were referred to as traidores, traitors, and the brigade itself as a demonic strategy by which Fidel Castro hoped to divide the exile along generational lines. Areto was said in Miami to be directly funded by the Cuban government, a charge its editors dismissed as a slander, in fact a cantinela, the kind of repeated refrain that set the teeth on edge. "It' s very difficult for people like us, who maintain a position like we do, to live in Miami," an Areto board member named Marifeli Prez-Stable told the Miami Hera in 1983, by way of explaining why she lived in New York. "Everybody knows everything, and it makes it difficult for those who are fingered as having a pro-Castro position to do something as simple as going to the market." Marifeli Prez-Stable was in 1983, when she spoke to the Herald, thirty-four. Lourdes Casal, a founder of Areto and for many people its personification, was in 1981, when sed in Havana, forty-two. Areto was published not at all during 1985 or 1986. Time passes and heat goes, although less reliably in Miami, where, at the "First Annual Festival of Hispanic Theatre," in May of 1986 all scheduled performances of a one-act play by a New York playwright and former Areto contributor named Dolores Prida were, after several days of radio alarms and a bomb threat, canceled. End, Sidebar to Peter Pan Next, Response 21, Media Watch by Gloria Channon ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.21 **/ ** Written 8:44 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Inside the Mainstream Media Mind [Media Watch] Inside the Mainstream Media Mind: or Adventures in the Black Holes of a Leftless, Classless Universe by Gloria Channon (with a lot of help from Anthony Lewis) Gloria Channon is a senior editor of Propaganda Review. *** Mainstream journalists appear to read only the mainstream press. Consequently, they sometimes display alarming Black Holes in their knowledge of political and economic life in America. For example, consider Anthony Lewis, the allegedly liberal columnist for the New York Times. On May 20, 1991, Anthony Lewis said, during an extended interview on KQED radio (San Francisco NPR), "There is no left in America." He elaborated on this, saying: "In general this is a conservative society . . . Europeans are much more class conscious . . . with political parties that are class based, socialist parties, left parties, labor parties. These have not succeeded in this country partly because of this vision of a classless society . . . Liberalism in this country has tended to be non-ideological." Such an analysis might surprise the invisible "third" parties mentioned in issue after issue of Ballot Access News, as it reports on legal roadblocks to third party existence. A recent issue mentioned at least 12 mostly left/libertarian parties. This does not include those still struggling to be born, like the Greens, who need 80,000 signatures to get on the ballot in just one state, California, or the still forming NOW party. Asked to comment on public distrust of media and on the concentration of media ownership, Mr. Lewis replied: "There is a danger . . . of not being sufficiently hardheaded economically and as you put it [not] identifying with the less affluent in American society . . . On the other hand, I . . . feel it strongly: We live in a society today [in which] the federal government has power undreamed of by James Madison, inconceivable that . . . he could have imagined the government with a president having nuclear weapons and the kind of communications and the vast federal power over all our lives -- unimaginable -- and to fight that kind of power and to compete with it I'm afraid you do need a powerful press. In Watergate, I will tell you that if the Washington Post had not been as rich and as powerful as it was it might very easily have been overawed by Richard Nixon and John Mitchell, who threatened . . . to take away, for example, the television licenses that the Post Company had. And I think that sometimes power is needed to counter power." [Not questioning, we may note, that separating press and TV ownership (or for that matter major defense contractors and TV ownership) might be a splendid idea.] When a listener asked if he did not think more regulation were advisable, requiring "TV and radio stations and even newspapers to perform in the public service and not necessarily what is in the best interest of the shareholders," Mr. Lewis replied, "It sounds good, Kevin, but I don't believe it would work . . . the attempts at regulation were blundering and I think ineffectual." Asked if reporters were intimidated by government power or the IRS, Mr. Lewis said, "I don't think on the whole reporters are intimidated by the fear of the IRS . . . I think there is a danger in being too comfortable. All of us, you know, are part of the owning class in this classless country and comfort isn't always good." On possibilities of an alternative press, "It's a tremendous difficulty. There's no doubt of that. The recession is really hurting the press, the press feels the loss of adver -- I mean advertising goes down first, it's the first wave of recession and I can tell you that newspapers are hurting." But there's hope at the end of the rainbow, if not a pot of gold. "On the other hand the techniques are very cheap now. There's the videotape of Mr. King -- it's now computers, word processors, and video cameras (which) allow for very cheap technology." ["Cheap" is a perception influenced by income, obviously, as any ad reader knows.] Nevertheless, where there is unimpeachable evidence of the existence of the left, the press shows astonishingly little interest. Note, a few days later, one of the undistinguishable Congressional beat reporters on a C-SPAN panel found it amusing that Bernie Sanders had identified himself as a socialist in the past, but had been elected as an independent. "I don't know what he calls himself now," she added, smiling, as if she had never heard of the telephone, and had not the slightest idea where a Congressman might be found in the nation's capitol. Certainly neither she nor we found much coverage anywhere in mainstream media of perhaps the only independent and self-declared socialist to win in generations, but she apparently does not read the left of center press, to find the missing information. Or if she does, does not believe it. As Anthony Lewis explained, "Publishers . . . don't usually (tell) reporters . . . how to report stories . . . .There is a problem, especially in Washington, of the highly paid members of the press, TV and print, mixing with the senators, the congressmen, the members of the cabinet, and having a kind of shared values and camaraderie which is a lot of fun and hard to resist. I really do not believe, and history bears this out, that a reporter who knew something dangerous and scandalous about a public official would withhold it. What I think is simply that because of the friendships there is a natural, unintended level of disbelief, of resistance to believing that people can do bad things . . . . I want to see the press as skeptical as possible and, as you do, I think distance is a good thing." It is not distance we need so much as a suspension of disbelief, as story after story is buried for years, until powerful news moulders and rots into ignorable history. Where, and how soon, do reporters learn how far is far enough? And who teaches them what questions it is politically correct or career wise for mainstream reporters not to ask? -30- End, Media Watch-Channon Next, Response 22, Media Watch by Rory Cox ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.22 **/ ** Written 8:46 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Media Watch by Rory Cox Too Little, Too Late: Gannett Foundation, Newspaper Editors Reflect on What Went Wrong in the Gulf by Rory Cox Rory Cox is a senior editor of Propaganda Review. *** It's often been said that some of the biggest losers of the Gulf War were members of the media. Dozens of reporters from mainstream media organizations have voiced protests of the strict Pentagon censorship at Middle East outposts. Their complaints have included lack of access, interview subjects (usually soldiers) being manipulated by their superiors, and intercepted or delayed communications with their bureaus. Some reporters claimed that lack of cooperation was threatened with violence or ejection from press pools. The mainstream media have in two instances actually attempted to be somewhat self-critical yet have been unwilling to do much other than lick their wounds, do some self-reflection, and attempt to negotiate a compromise with the Pentagon before the next US military adventure occurs. The Freedom Forum, formerly known as the Gannett Foundation, has published a comprehensive, slickly produced report entitled "The Media at War: The Press and the Persian Gulf Conflict." As well, the American Society of Newspaper Editors has come up with a set of proposals which they've submitted to the Pentagon. Considering the Freedom Forum is an offshoot of the same corporation that brought us Hitler and Saddam paired together all over US billboards, the Freedom Forum deserves a lot of credit. As a self-critical guide for mainstream journalists, the report makes a lot of very good points, yet misses a bigger target. For example, some of the statistics used are from dubious sources, the report fails to take that extra step in recognizing government/corporate media control, and the word "propaganda" only arises in reference to Iraq's alleged use of the US media for manipulation of Americans. FAIR, the leading left-leaning media activist group isn't mentioned once, despite the fact that they leveled many of the same charges found in the Freedom Forum report at the media while the war was still going on. Craig Le May, one of the editors of the report, told PR FAIR is "dreadful" and their analysis "off the mark. I agree with a lot of what they're doing, but I think in many respects their own analysis was off the mark. But more importantly they didn't have any quantitative data that I could use; they just don't have any." Steve Rhodes of FAIR calls the Freedom Forum report "wishy washy, but there's a lot of stuff in there that can be used to give a more radical critique." In the introduction, the report rightly points out that while the Pentagon has been training young officers in PR and press strategies since the Vietnam War, the press "gave relatively little thought to the subject." It goes on to say that the press should have learned from Grenada and Panama, and should speak more as a unified voice against press restrictions. It goes on at length about the oppressive treatment reporters faced on Saudi Arabia military bases as the Pentagon brutishly controlled the output of information through an impotent and bickering press pool. It also describes at length the various legal challenges to the press restrictions, especially the lawsuit by 13 mostly alternative news organizations (including the Nation, Mother Jones, and Pacific News Service). The suit contended that the press restrictions were an unconstitutional prior restraint on freedom of the press, and that they interfered with the ability to gather and report news. No mainstream news organization signed on with the suit and, on April 17, US District Judge Leonard Sand dismissed the suit, saying the issues were "too abstract and conjectural" and besides, the war was over. The report contains some very telling analysis of statistical data, though the sources for much of it are dubious. One statistical analysis found that from August 1, 1990 to February 28, 1991 the word, by far, mentioned the most often in broadcast and print news was "Vietnam," with 7,279 mentions. The runner-up, "human shields," was way behind with 2,588 mentions. In its list of the most quoted experts, the report fails to point out that most of the "experts" Q William Crowe, Anthony Cordesman, Judith Kipper Q had a very pro-military background. The newsletter "Media Monitor" is referred to several times, and the conservative bent of its publisher, The Center for Public Affairs, isn't hard to discern. Craig Le May's analysis: "One statistic backing up the war supporters is that in Media Monitor's coverage of 'ABC World News Tonight' during the first three weeks of the war, two out of every three sources cited opposed the decision to go to war, with nearly half of these being demonstrators or part of the anti-war movement." Though he states the obvious in the next paragraph Q "it cannot be overlooked that in the compilation of the statistics there is inevitably some form of subjective judgement involved," the use of such a source does damage to the credibility of the report, especially when there isn't a citation from a group like FAIR to provide balance. Asked why such dependence on a conservative group, Le May responded, "We were simply dependent on who had numbers, period. 'Media Monitor,' they're not to my taste, but if you take their spin off, they do a pretty good job of collecting data." Le May also cites the Tyndall Report to point out "Yellow Ribbonitis," and how stories of patriotism outnumbered those of controversy by 36 to 19. In his analysis of print editorials, Le May finds that editorials "did offer the public carefully thought-out positions which may have helped readers to better understand the stakes . . ." while also finding them, as a whole, "respectful toward the president and highly supportive." Le May doesn't see a moral vacuum, and claims it "is not surprising that the primary debate during the last weeks of the war was whether to continue bombing Baghdad into submission or to begin a ground attack . . ." failing to recognize that neither of these approaches posed any physical threat to Saddam Hussein, while both killed a lot of innocent people. Such a viewpoint is not within the parameters of the report's critique. The chapter on public perception of war coverage is most indicative of the success of the Desert Storm propaganda campaign. Eighty-nine percent of respondents received their news from TV, while 57 percent thought the military should have more control over the media. This is one point where the report is emphatic, as it recognizes the necessity of the public's awareness of free speech issues. The report failed to adequately address one aspect which contributed to the war-crazed environment prevalent during the war, and that is one of packaging. No criticism was made of the ultra-slick computer graphics on TV which seemed to reduce the war to a miniseries. Nothing was made of the major news magazines' covers which sometimes resembled military recruitment posters or advertisements for defense contractors. Was the media giving the Department of Defense some free advertising with detailed descriptions of the machines of this war? If so, you'd never know it from this report. No statistical analysis was made of how many photos of Iraqi or Palestinian casualties were shown to counterbalance government-approved pictures of proud US soldiers happily doing their duty or US citizens waving flags. A Deal With Cheney? In more fifth quarter, "we'll get 'em next time" posturing, the American Society of Newspaper Editors has drafted a statement of principles, which mostly deals with press pools on the battlefield. Among the principles: "Journalists will be provided access to all major military units," and "News material will not be subject to prior military review." These principles were sent to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, and they along with topics like how to train war correspondents will be discussed at a national conference this fall. ASNE was not interested in any lawsuit filed against the Pentagon during the war. Both the Freedom Forum report and the ASNE set of principles point to one thing: Fundamental change within the media is not too likely without an outside force pushing it in a more balanced direction. While the Freedom Forum report brings up some very valid, difficult issues for the working journalist to ponder between now and his or her next dispatch to a war, it fails to recognize the media's role in fostering and fueling a pro-war, pro-military environment in this country. Both ASNE and the Freedom Forum fail to realize that better access to US military encampments would probably have made little difference in the general coverage of the Gulf War. -30- End, Media Watch by Rory Cox Next, Response 23, Sidebar to Media Watch by Rory Cox ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.23 **/ ** Written 8:46 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Sidebar to Saving Face KETCHUM IF YOU CAN -- Clorox Corporation versus Greenpeace By Rory Cox The theme of a current Greenpeace campaign, "Chlorine Free by '93" is, as one would imagine, not music to the ears of CEOs at Oakland-based bleach manufacturer Clorox corporation. Though Clorox was not initially targeted by Greenpeace in this campaign, Clorox contacted Ketchum Public Relations to devise a contingent strategy just in case. Ketchum responded with a 60-page memo detailing how to handle a Clorox-directed Greenpeace campaign without having bleach sales drop due to public concern. What neither Clorox nor Ketchum counted on was that someone in Ketchum cared enough to leak the memo to Greenpeace, and the resulting publicity may have been worse than any of the scenarios in the report. The memo anticipates several hypothetical "crisis scenarios," including demonstrations at the Clorox headquarters, "unalterably green" columnists writing columns about the toxicity of chlorine, and scientific researchers discovering without a doubt the toxicity of chlorine. In all of the scenarios Greenpeace, it is assumed, would hold demonstrations and press conferences to call the public's attention to the dangers of chlorine. The report claims that Greenpeace is . . ."often associated with violent tactics, and with spurious research, generated more for its shock value and fund-raising appeal than scientific utility." In one worst-case scenario, a "Natural Toxicology Program (NTP) study analysis concludes that chlorine is, indeed, an animal carcinogen. On the same day as the NTP study, Greenpeace holds a satellite news conference in Washington, New York, and San Francisco to launch a concerted campaign to eliminate all uses of chlorine in the U.S." And, the response, "1) Work with other manufacturers and the Chlorine Institute, forestall any legislative and regulatory action . . . 2) Maintain customer loyalty,S and as for answering Greenpeace's claim, "wherever possible, ignore it and don't give it credence. Carefully develop messages, based on research, to help people understand that Greenpeace is not among the major players in this issue." Other worst case scenarios include Clorox boycotts and consumers shifting to environmentally sound cleaning products such as vinegar and Borax. Strategies to combat these include "Stop Environmental Terrorism" campaigns, enlisting support of the unions, workers, and their families, and the filing of slander lawsuits against "green" newspaper columnists. Sandy Sullivan, manager of consumer information and education for Clorox, told AP that Clorox was "not involved in (the plan's) preparation, and (is) not acting on its recommendations. The consulting firm's language and overly descriptive analysis detracts from its central theme." Ironically, Clorox's household bleach was not initially considered an environmental threat by Greenpeace in their chlorine campaign. Also ironic, but not surprising, is how the mainstream media has virtually ignored the story. It appeared only in a very few of the daily papers via AP, and nowhere in the broadcast media, according to The Guardian, August 14, 1991. In a PR battle between Greenpeace and Clorox the media would be the battleground. Considering that this document is an important inside look at the driving force behind corporate "greenwashing," and how environmental responsibility is sidestepped at all costs over profits, the fact that the mainstream media chose to ignore the story implies a certain amount of complicity and fear. End, Sidebar to Media Watch by R. Cox Next, Response23, Resources ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.24 **/ ** Written 8:47 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Sidebar to Saving Face KETCHUM IF YOU CAN -- Clorox Corporation versus Greenpeace By Rory Cox The theme of a current Greenpeace campaign, "Chlorine Free by '93" is, as one would imagine, not music to the ears of CEOs at Oakland-based bleach manufacturer Clorox corporation. Though Clorox was not initially targeted by Greenpeace in this campaign, Clorox contacted Ketchum Public Relations to devise a contingent strategy just in case. Ketchum responded with a 60-page memo detailing how to handle a Clorox-directed Greenpeace campaign without having bleach sales drop due to public concern. What neither Clorox nor Ketchum counted on was that someone in Ketchum cared enough to leak the memo to Greenpeace, and the resulting publicity may have been worse than any of the scenarios in the report. The memo anticipates several hypothetical "crisis scenarios," including demonstrations at the Clorox headquarters, "unalterably green" columnists writing columns about the toxicity of chlorine, and scientific researchers discovering without a doubt the toxicity of chlorine. In all of the scenarios Greenpeace, it is assumed, would hold demonstrations and press conferences to call the public's attention to the dangers of chlorine. The report claims that Greenpeace is . . ."often associated with violent tactics, and with spurious research, generated more for its shock value and fund-raising appeal than scientific utility." In one worst-case scenario, a "Natural Toxicology Program (NTP) study analysis concludes that chlorine is, indeed, an animal carcinogen. On the same day as the NTP study, Greenpeace holds a satellite news conference in Washington, New York, and San Francisco to launch a concerted campaign to eliminate all uses of chlorine in the U.S." And, the response, "1) Work with other manufacturers and the Chlorine Institute, forestall any legislative and regulatory action . . . 2) Maintain customer loyalty,S and as for answering Greenpeace's claim, "wherever possible, ignore it and don't give it credence. Carefully develop messages, based on research, to help people understand that Greenpeace is not among the major players in this issue." Other worst case scenarios include Clorox boycotts and consumers shifting to environmentally sound cleaning products such as vinegar and Borax. Strategies to combat these include "Stop Environmental Terrorism" campaigns, enlisting support of the unions, workers, and their families, and the filing of slander lawsuits against "green" newspaper columnists. Sandy Sullivan, manager of consumer information and education for Clorox, told AP that Clorox was "not involved in (the plan's) preparation, and (is) not acting on its recommendations. The consulting firm's language and overly descriptive analysis detracts from its central theme." Ironically, Clorox's household bleach was not initially considered an environmental threat by Greenpeace in their chlorine campaign. Also ironic, but not surprising, is how the mainstream media has virtually ignored the story. It appeared only in a very few of the daily papers via AP, and nowhere in the broadcast media, according to The Guardian, August 14, 1991. In a PR battle between Greenpeace and Clorox the media would be the battleground. Considering that this document is an important inside look at the driving force behind corporate "greenwashing," and how environmental responsibility is sidestepped at all costs over profits, the fact that the mainstream media chose to ignore the story implies a certain amount of complicity and fear. End, Sidebar to Media Watch by R. Cox Next, Response23, Resources ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.25 **/ ** Written 8:49 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Media Watch by Roger Smith MEDIA WATCH The TV War as a Game Show by Roger Smith Roger Smith is a Bay Area activist contact for FAIR, and a founder of F.O.R.U.M. (For Organized Response to Unfair Media), a grassroots media activist group in the Bay Area. *** The copious recent examples of overt bias and censorship only partially reveal how the media sold the Gulf War to the American public. In countless subtle ways, two generations of television have helped to produce a pro-war environment, a pro-war political discourse. American culture is TV culture is pro-war culture. The war, as presented on television, took on the corrupt values and stereotypes of the entertainment programs that surrounded it. The good guy-bad guy imagery of Bush and Hussein was lifted straight from cop shows, with all the racism intact. The retired generals with their pointers and maps were no more than mock meteorologists, giving us the man-made weather report. The genre of sports broadcasting may have been the overriding influence on the coverage of the war. The propagandistic use of sports to promote jingoistic attitudes has been well noted, the most famous example being the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. But in this case, war news was filtered through images of sports. Like the Super Bowl, the war on TV came complete with coaches, teams, opposing armies, statistics (plenty of them), ground attack and aerial bombardment, flags on the helmets of heroic warriors, and flags in the frenzied crowds. American conceptions of violence, death, mutilation -- ever-ything that war is -- have largely been constructed through the manufactured "reality" which TV disseminates. Television viewers have gotten used to ubiquitous images of violence, from shootouts on "action" shows to serial murders on the "news." The viewer can only be numb to this parade of images, because they seem to exist only as images. But how can we tell the difference between fictional deaths and "real" deaths presented on TV? Mass media violence, epitomized by Rambo movies, is a violence of pure discharge, a violence that dehumanizes, a violence that forbids conscience. In a recent public discussion of war coverage, KRON television reporter Tom DeVries chastised his audience by saying, "Masturbatory fantasies of wanting to see the gore is a mistake." His accusation shows his own bias, shows how he has internalized the implicit bias of TV itself. For if our fantasies are masturbatory, it's because TV's pictures are pornographic -- gratuitous, decontextualized, engineered to hook viewers and sell advertising. This is the project of commercial television in general, across the spectrum of issues and genres of programming. TV purports to reveal perceivable realities; its output, though, is nothing but ideological constructions, or what Roland Barthes calls "mythologies." All my reading and watching and thinking convinces me that Americans operate within two separate worlds: There's a media world, largely understood through TV, and there's a real world which is unmediated, immediate, interpersonal. In the real world we are citizens, with all the civic responsibilities implied by the term. But in the media world we are mere spectators -- distanced, disconnected, disempowered. The important events occur deep inside a screen, in another dimension, in echelons of power with which we have no contact. We are not actually in the media world; we just watch. All of us are familiar with both worlds. We all spend some time in each. The question is, which world do we accept as real? I fear that many Americans believe fervently in the reality of a world which they have no part in shaping, a world from which they are distanced, disconnected, disempowered. When we watch the war and the politics on TV, it becomes just another show, a continuing docudrama on all the stations. The president becomes a sort of master of ceremonies, the news anchors are all Ed McMahon ("Heeeere's George!"), and when the emcee brings on the soldiers and shiny weapons, the applause sign lights. In the media world, all we can do is applaud, or maybe jeer and hope somebody hears it, even though the wrong people are holding the mikes and can aim them wherever they please. In the media world, there is no difference between opinion polls and Nielsen ratings. Like all the other shows, the war continues as long as it has high ratings -- and we're incessantly asked to tune in tomorrow. Neil Postman writes about this phenomenon in his book Amusing Ourselves To Death. He says our culture may take on Orwellian characteristics, but it's actually more like Huxley's Brave New World. The oppressive society is structured not like a prison but like a burlesque: full of distractions and trivia, its people so saturated with entertainment that relevant questions appear irrelevant, and irrelevant issues relevant. Mark Crispin Miller puts it this way in his book Boxed In: "Big Brother is you, watching." We have learned to love the instruments that pacify and oppress us. No wonder there's so much explosive violence behind all that vacuity. We don't just watch TV; we're victimized by it. We're victimized by the vacuity it spews all around us, and how it degrades public discourse to its level. We're victimized by the Big Lie it concocts with so little effort. We're victimized by the detritus of advertising, which serves corporate interests and leaves people bitter and numb, though many of us claim to be immune to its manipulations. We're victimized by the disconnection of people from one another and from their communities, the atomization that convinces so many that they are alone in thoughtful dissent, or in a miniscule minority. We're victimized by the yellow ribbon, the propaganda of mass spectatorship. Finally, we're victimized by TV's control over how we see the world. Neil Postman argues in his book that a medium carries its own epistemology, its own definition and system of knowledge. Media don't simply convey information; they also determine the form by which information gets conveyed, and the way we receive it. The popular medium sets the pace and forms the texture of how people think. In television's case, the dominant way of understanding and showing the world is in short, rapid, disconnected pictures, with no room for context, no time for reflection, no respect for history, no space for dissent. This mode of understanding has had devastating consequences for the people of the Middle East, who have undergone a massacre for reasons which most of the warriors do not understand and cannot articulate. Until commercial TV begins to permit space for dissenting arguments and debate on a regular basis, TV will not raise public consciousness about war, racism or any meaningful issues -- certainly not about the nature of TV. Nor should democratically minded activists expect or try to coerce TV to serve these democratic purposes which so contradict the mandate of the corporate media. On the other hand, talking with people directly in their communities does influence public consciousness in desirable ways. As more of us operate more of the time in the real world instead of the media world, we gradually de-mainstreamize TV. Community action breaks the vicious circle of the stenographic media and the spectating public. We stop being spectators and become full citizens, revitalized and empowered to change our circumstances. -30- End, Media Watch by Smith Next, Response25, Resources ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.26 **/ ** Written 8:50 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Resources RESOURCES *** South and Meso American Indian Information Center South and Meso American Indian Information Center is "calling on all sectors of society to form an alliance to counter the planned Quincentennial Jubilee (of Columbus' arrival) and demand that governments, religious institutions and educational institutions tell the truth about what took place 500 years ago and examine how these injustices continue unabated today." As an organization, and through its 40-page newsletter, the SAIIC serves as a liaison between Indian people of South and North America, as they detail the struggles Indians face on both continents. Their newsletter includes reports on oil companies threatening Indian communities in Ecuador, how Bush's war on drugs affects the Indians in South America, how golf course construction is displacing Indians in Canada, and the Declaration of Quito, which details the stand on the Quincentennial by representatives of 120 Indian Nations. Contact: SAIIC at PO Box 28703, Oakland, CA 94604 (415) 834-4263 The DataCenter Those in the know often get that way with the help of the DataCenter, a unique user-supported library and information center in Oakland, California. The DataCenter collects, organizes, and provides access to a treasure trove of information on political, economic, and social issues. Its experienced staff can help you zoom in on the right files or resources, whether you walk in off the street or make use of its search service, corporate profile service, or customized clipping service. Now in its fifteenth year, the DataCenter serves journalists, investigative reporters, academic researchers, and activists; and--in its own words--"provides the tools for labor, community, church and political organizations working to gain control over their lives." The DataCenter has compiled as part of a teach-in packet, a collection of articles called "The Persian Gulf War: Iraq Under Fire" which is broken down into four sections: Background to the Current Crisis, The US Military, The War at Home, and Gulfspeak: The Media and the War. It includes the best articles on the Gulf War from various media sources including The Village Voice, Middle East Report, In These Times, The New Republic and FAIR. The DataCenter, 464 19th Street, Oakland, CA 94612, 415-835-4692, is a tax-deductible membership organization. Feminist Teacher Magazine Feminist Teacher Magazine seeks contributions dealing with "Feminist Education and War." Possible topics include the sexual, racial and cultural implications of the Gulf War; war and feminist ethics; women in war; descriptions of pedagogical efforts to address the war in the classroom; personal teaching experiences from different stages of the war. For further information, contact Feminist Teacher, 442 Ballantine Hall, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 Political Ecology Group (PEG) Political Ecology Group is an all volunteer, action-oriented research and public education group making the links between ecology, militarism, and social justice. Their first Action Paper, "War in the Gulf: An Environmental Perspective" is a 24-page report designed for activists, the press, students, or anyone concerned with the environmental impacts of the war. Topics covered include the toxic war, environmental terrorism, resource wars, and double standards. Contact: Political Ecology Group, 519 Castro St., Box 111, San Francisco, CA 94114 (415) 641-7835 Speak Out! Speak Out! is a national political speakers bureau affiliated with Z Magazine and South End Press. Started in 1990, Speak Out! now offers more than 100 professional speakers and performers who cover a wide range of topics and make personal appearances at campuses, community and labor events in the US and Canada. Among them are Noam Chomsky, Holly Sklar, Peter Dale Scott, Barbara Ehrenreich, Dennis Brutus, Philip Agee, Sara Diamond, Norman Solomon, Martin Lee, and Propaganda Review editors Johan Carlisle and Sheila O'Donnell. All these speakers are listed in a 40-page promotional booklet which describes them and contains a directory of organizations and alternative publications. Speak Out! can help plan events with individual speakers or a lecture series in addition to providing assistance in fundraising to pay for the speakers' expenses and fees. They also will provide a book fair for events with alternative books and periodicals on a variety of subjects. Contact Jean Caiani, 2215-R Market St. #520, San Francisco, CA 94114 (415) 864-4561 War Crimes Tribunals The Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal is currently holding hearings around the world. Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark has been a featured speaker at the hearings, where first-hand testimony of allied war crimes against the Iraqi and Kurdish people is given. Among other places, the hearings have been held in Turkey in defiance of hostilities from government forces. The Commission is currently touring the US, and needs contributions to help pay for travel expenses. Contact the Emergency Commitee to Stop the US War in the Middle East, 2489 Mission St., #28, San Francisco, CA 94110, 415/821-6545 -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Resources Next, Response 26, Masthead PR8 ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 19.27 **/ ** Written 8:51 pm Dec 2, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Masthead PR 8 Managing Editor -- Issue #8 1991, Johan Carlisle Senior Editors: Johan Carlisle, Gloria Channon, Rory Cox, Stephen Leiper, Daniel del Solar, Claude Steiner Associate Editors: Eduardo Cohen, Loretta Graziano, Sheila OUDonnell, Jeanine Olson, Frederic Stout Assistant Managing Editor --Rory Cox Copy Editors: Rory Cox, Stephen Leiper Proofreaders: Gloria Channon, Rory Cox, Stephen Leiper, Jeanine Olson Design, Layout & Desktop Publishing--Johan Carlisle Special Thanks PROPAGANDA REVIEW wishes to thank the following individuals and organizations for their generous financial support: Nu Lambda Trust, W.H. and Carol Bernstein Ferry. We also thank all those who have become sustaining subscribers. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Propaganda Review 8 Forthcoming, PR 9, focusing on Health Issues and Propaganda. ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev **