Wars And Propaganda Machines (Rodrigue Tremblay)

Created by : Francis Goodwin View profile

By Rodrigue Tremblay -- Online Journal

"The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust [our own] government statements -- I had no idea until then that you could not rely on [them]." --James W. Fulbright (1905-1995), former US senator

Third sorrow: "The replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions." --Chalmers Johnson, (Sorrows of Empire)

”If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” --Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda

Oct. 9, 2006 -- Propaganda machines are dangerous, even more so in a democracy than in a totalitarian regime, because their goal is to confuse, disinform, lie, raise fear and manipulate the opinions of the people.

Indeed, those few hands that control the media have the power to turn lies into truth and truth into lies, without being contradicted, because they also have the power to silence any competing voices. This is the worse monopoly one can find, much worse than any economic monopoly. Indeed, when a small elite in power start using propaganda intensively, it makes a mockery of the democratic principle of self-government by the people. In fact, people begin to distrust the government because it has become a source of half-truths, lies and disinformation. Discouragement and apathy follow because people know that their views do not count and that the oligarchy in power will do whatever it wants, no matter what the supposedly 'sovereign' people thinks. It is only when the media are free and independent that people can hope to be honestly informed and be free from government manipulation.

We have a clue about how powerful political propaganda can be when we consider that, more than a year after the Iraq invasion, just before the 2004 presidential elections, a Harris Poll reported that 62 percent of all American voters, and 84 percent of those planning to vote for Bush II, still were of the opinion that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had ''strong links" to al Qaeda, and 41 percent of all voters, and 52 percent of Bush backers, believed that Saddam had "helped plan and support the hijackers" who attacked the USA, on 9/11. What's more, as an amazing tribute to the force of political propaganda and the tactics of big lies, a whopping 85 percent of the American soldiers themselves still believed, in 2006, three years after the invasion, the falsehood that they were fighting in Iraq “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks," while 77 percent thought that a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq."

Today, a solid majority of Americans think that the Iraq war was a mistake and many are lucid enough to know they have been misled. Indeed, nearly two-thirds of Americans, an overwhelming majority, are now opposed to the war. But, it is too late. The damage has been done, and the United States is now solidly bogged down in Iraq. In fact, what is the Bush-Cheney administration's answer to popular rejection? Its response: "Stay the course," "Full speed ahead!" Indeed, notwithstanding the tremendous pro-war propaganda originating from the partisan American media, 61 percent of Americans now oppose the war in Iraq. What is even more damning, a vast majority of Iraqis are turning against the invaders and occupiers. Seventy-one percent of Iraqis see the U.S.-led coalition not as "liberators" but as "occupiers," and 78 percent consider the U.S. military presence in Iraq to have a destabilizing influence. And, not surprisingly, a solid majority of them support an immediate military pullout of foreign troops from their country.

In their grandiose plan, the neocon Bush team intends to have American troops occupy the country of Iraq illegally for as long as one can foresee. They built 14 permanent military bases there and they are constructing a military fortress disguised as an embassy to host the equivalent of a medium-size American town. That way, the United States is sure to be at war in the Middle East for decades to come.