http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1020303,00.html
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The problem is not propaganda but the relentless control of the kind of
things we think about
COMMENT - The Observer (London) Sunday August 17, 2003
Brian Eno
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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.
'Ah, but there is the difference. We knew it was propaganda,' replied
Sacha.
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.
In the West the calculated manipulation of public opinion to serve
political and ideological interests is much more covert and therefore much
more effective. Its greatest triumph is that we generally don't notice it
- or laugh at the notion it even exists. 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, 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'. (What else can the spat between the BBC and Alastair Campbell be
but a prime example of this?)
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 mobilise enough headlines and conversation to make the whole thing
seem real and urgent. The more emotional the debate, the better. Emotion
creates reality, reality demands action.
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.
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 programmes 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 realised, as all ideologues do, that words create realities,
and that the right words can over whelm 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 defence' (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 recognise 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.
A longer version of this article will appear in the new literary magazine,
Zembla.