WATCHMAN ON THE WALL
... WWIII on the horizon?
Or a Golden Age?
Eternal Vigilance Is the
Price of Freedom
AN ESSAY ON WHY AMERICANS
DON'T SEE WHAT'S HAPPENING
by Brian Eno
NOTE: Here is a cogent
essay from
The Observer (London) August 17,
2003.
It is entitled,
Lessons in how to lie about Iraq.
It is a brilliant expose'. Save for the archives with the last two Media Expose's
on "THE HIVE MIND" and "MEDIA
MONOPOLY". All together, they give you the big picture of the mass mind
control machinations of Machiavellian manipulators
behind the creation and management of terror, disease, war and hell on Earth for
the consolidation of their ownership and control of the physical and human
resources of the planet. -CR
------------------ article
follows:
WHY AMERICANS DON'T SEE
WHAT'S HAPPENING
The problem is not propaganda
but the relentless control of the kind of things we think about.
When I first visited Russia, in 1986, I made friends with a musician whose
father had been Brezhnev's personal doctor. One day we were talking about life
during 'the period of stagnation' - the Brezhnev era. 'It must have been
strange being so completely immersed in propaganda,' I said.
That is the difference. Russian propaganda was so obvious that most Russians were able to ignore it. They took it for granted that the government operated in its own interests and any message coming from it was probably slanted - and they discounted it.
We watch the democratic process
taking place - heated debates in which we feel we could have a voice - and
think that, because we have 'free' media, it would be hard for the Government to
get away with anything very devious without someone calling them on it.
It takes something as dramatic as the invasion of Iraq to make us look a bit
more closely and ask:
'How did we get here?'
How exactly did it come about that, in a world of AIDS, global warming, 30-plus
active wars, several famines, cloning, genetic engineering, and two billion
people in poverty, practically the only thing we all talked about for a year was
Iraq and Saddam Hussein?
Was it really that big a problem?
Or were we somehow manipulated into
believing the Iraq issue was important and had to be fixed right now - even
though a few months before few had mentioned it, and nothing had changed in the
interim.
In the wake of the events of
11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was
exploited in America.
According to Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in their new book Weapons of Mass
Deception, it was used to engineer a state of emergency that would justify an
invasion of Iraq.
Rampton and Stauber expose how news was fabricated and made to seem real. But
they also demonstrate how a coalition of the willing - far-Right officials [from
the view of a leftist], neo-con think-tanks, insanely pugilistic media
commentators and of course well-paid PR companies - worked together to pull off
a sensational piece of intellectual dishonesty. Theirs is a study of modern
propaganda.
What occurs to me in
reading their book is that the new American approach to social control is so
much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It
isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda'. It's not so much the control of
what we think, but the control of what we think about.
When our governments want
to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing
on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing
discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language,
dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'.
With the ground thus
prepared, governments are happy if you then 'use the democratic process' to
agree or disagree - for, after all, their intention is to mobilize enough
headlines and conversation to make the whole thing seem real and urgent.
An example of this process is one
highlighted by Rampton and Stauber which, more than any other, consolidated
public and congressional approval for the 1991 Gulf war. We recall the horrifying stories,
incessantly repeated, of babies in Kuwaiti hospitals ripped out of their
incubators and left to die while the Iraqis shipped the incubators back to
Baghdad - 312 babies, we were told. [When the Big Lie is BIG enough, and
bold enough and told enough, as Hitler said... the sheople will believe
it -CR]
The story was brought to
public attention by Nayirah, a 15-year-old 'nurse' who, it turned out later, was
the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and a member of the Kuwaiti
royal family. Nayirah had been tutored and rehearsed by the Hill & Knowlton
PR agency (which in turn received $14 million from the American government for
their work in promoting the war).
Her story was entirely
discredited within weeks but by then its purpose had been served: it had created
an outraged and emotional mindset within America which overwhelmed rational
discussion.
As we are seeing now, the
most recent Gulf war entailed many similar deceits: false linkages made between
Saddam, al-Qaeda and 9/11, stories of ready-to-launch weapons that didn't exist,
of nuclear programs never embarked upon. As Rampton and Stauber show, many of
these allegations were discredited as they were being made, not least by this
newspaper, but nevertheless
were retold.
Throughout all this, the
hired-gun PR companies were busy, preconditioning the emotional landscape.
Their marketing talents were particularly useful in the large-scale
manipulation of language that the campaign entailed.
The Bushites realized, as all ideologues do, that words create realities, and that
the right words can overwhelm any chance of balanced discussion. Guided by the overtly imperial
vision of the Project for a New American Century (whose members now form the
core of the American administration), the PR companies helped finesse
the language to create an atmosphere of simmering panic where American
imperialism would come to seem not only acceptable but right, obvious,
inevitable and even somehow kind.
Aside from the incessant
'weapons of mass destruction', there were 'regime change' (military invasion),
'pre-emptive defense'
(attacking a country that is not attacking you),
'critical regions'
(countries we want to control),
the 'axis of evil'
(countries we want to attack),
'shock and awe'
(massive obliteration) and
'the war on terror' (a
hold-all excuse for projecting American military force anywhere).
Meanwhile, US federal
employees and military personnel were told to refer to the invasion as 'a war
of liberation' and to the Iraqi paramilitaries as 'death squads',
while the reliably sycophantic American TV networks spoke of 'Operation Iraqi
Freedom' - just as the Pentagon asked them to - thus consolidating the
supposition that Iraqi freedom was the point of the war. Anybody questioning the
invasion was 'soft on terror' (liberal)
or, in the case of the UN, 'in danger of losing its relevance'.
When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he
explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how
it's done so I would recognize when I was being lied to. I hope writers such as
Rampton and Stauber and others may have the same effect and help to
emasculate the culture of spin and dissembling that is overtaking our political
establishments.
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