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A Bewildered Herd Dictionary A NATION OF SALESMEN It was, indeed, the Age of Information, but information was not the precursor to knowledge; it was the tool of the salesmen. - Earl Shorris, A Nation of Salesmen A NATION OF STATESMEN Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception. - Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, 1916, Ch.9 ADVERTISING Advertisement conquers all in our land, including the Stars and Stripes. - Charles MacArthur ADVERTISING AGENCY Advertising agency: eighty-five percent confusion and fifteen percent commission. - Fred Allen AGE OF INFORMATION We believe we live in the "age of information," that there has been an information "explosion," an information "revolution." While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information. - Bill McKibben BUSINESS In the United States, where political "change" means finding new ways to redirect wealth into the pockets of the already wealthy, and where political "dialogue" is an elaborate charade that excludes dangerous and difficult topics from public consideration, one must look to the literature of business to find serious talk about national affairs. - Thomas Frank INSTINCTS If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. -- Bertrand Russell, "Roads to Freedom" GREATEST WEAPON OF A DEMOCRACY: AN INFORMED PUBLIC Although now, perhaps more than ever, it is essential that the government speak honestly to the American people, there are disturbing signs that key federal officials don't realize this. Last week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a news conference in which he quoted Winston Churchill, "In wartime truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." The Pentagon later issue a clarification that Rumsfeld did not mean to imply the government would lie. Yet that seems to be exactly what Rumsfeld was saying. -- Erwin Chemerinsky, Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2001 PROPAGANDA AND PERSONALITY There can be no propaganda without a personality, a political chief. Clemenceau, Daladier, De Gaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt, MacArthur are obvious examples. And even more, Khrushchev, who, after having denounced the cult of personality, slipped into the same role, differently, but with the same ease and obeying the same necessity. The nation's unanimity is necessary. This unanimity is embodied in one personality, in whom everyone finds himself, in whom everyone hopes and projects himself, and for whom everything is possible and permissible. - Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, 1965 PROPAGANDA WAR ...Another sort of war is already under way, one in which journalists are already playing an important role as a conduit or filter, though not just the scribblers and broadcasters from the West. It is the propaganda war. That word has come to have a derogatory meaning, of the dissemination of untruths. In this case, America's task is (in truth) to disseminate truths, about its motives, about its intentions, about its current and past actions in Israel and Iraq, about its views of Islam. For all that, however, this part of the war promises to be no easier to win than the many other elements of the effort. - The Economist, October 4, 2001 REPETITION If a lie is repeated often enough all the dumb jackasses in the world not only get to believe it, they even swear by it. - Billy Boy Franklin THE BIG LIE The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. - Adolf Hitler IF YOU HAD IT TO SAY ALL OVER AGAIN We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war. - Ann Coulter, National Review, September 13, 2001 LYING The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way. - Samuel Butler (Mark Twain) MEME WARFARE A meme (rhymes with "dream") is a unit of information (a catchphrase, a concept, a tune, a notion of fashion, philosophy or politics) that leaps from brain to brain. Memes compete with one another for replication, and are passed down through a population much the same way genes pass through a species. Potent memes can change minds, alter behavior, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures. Which is why meme warfare has become the geopolitical battle of our information age. Whoever has the memes has the power. - Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam NEEDED: A PATRIOTISM OF DISSENT A patriotism of dissent has been one of the most vital ingredients of American political life throughout history. It has always been in the national interest to "speak truth to power," and never more so than in times of crisis. We are now entering an era in which the nurture of an active patriotism of dissent will be a most difficult, but most essential task. Patriotic dissent is required if we hope to achieve anything approaching rational and moral balance in American policy and behavior. It is essential for people of faith and good will, who seek to honor the prophetic traditions of all religions, to explore what we can say to predispose such an outcome. - Lloyd J. Averill, Sightings, October 1, 2001 NEWS News often makes you mad as hell and depressed about your own individual powerlessness. The entertainment-as-news and news-as-entertainment shows emerged and merged years after Marshall McLuhan wrote that the medium is the message. Popular news modified one of this most interesting insights. People who complained that the evening news was all "bad news," he said, did not understand what they were seeing. The "good news" was the commercials. Buy this or try that and you get the job, get the money, and get the girl-all endings are happy, or at least pleasurable. - Richard Reeves, What the People Know PICTURES IN OUR HEADS I We do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. - Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion PICTURES IN OUR HEADS II Why are the pictures of the world painted by the mass media so persuasive? For one thing, we rarely question the picture that is shown. We seldom ask ourselves, for example, "Why are they showing me this story on the evening news rather than some other one? Do the police really operate in this manner? Is the world really this violent and crime-ridden?" The pictures that television beams into our homes are almost always simply taken for granted as representing reality. As the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels once noted: `This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it." Once accepted, the pictures we form in our heads serve as fictions to guide our thoughts and actions. The images serve as primitive social theories-providing us with the "facts" of the matter, determining which issues are most pressing, and decreeing the terms in which we think about our social world. - Anthony Pratkanis, Age of Propaganda POLITICS AS MERCHANDISING The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal is, I think, the ultimate indignity of the democratic process. - Adlai E. Stevenson PENTAGON AND THE PRESS Here's how to connect the dots: Eliminate the word "press" and substitute the word "public." The only reason the press is a factor at all is because Americans read it and watch it. The Pentagon is not afraid of the press but of American public opinion...You say you share the Pentagon's worries? You wonder about your neighbor's resolve? In that case, our democracy is much weaker than we dare admit. To let ourselves be wrapped in a cozy blackout curtain because we don't trust each other to know the truth is no way to run a free country, not in peacetime and surely not in wartime. We should remember the real lesson of Vietnam. It was not the press that lied when the communist troops kept coming and coming and coming. Or the soldiers or the Marines wallowing in the mud. Their blood was no lie; neither was their courage. The lies came from the men with stars on their collars and their bosses in the pressed suits. The lies came from the podium. This is a war for freedom. So let's have some. - John Balzar, Los Angeles Times, October 24, 2001 PROPAGANDA GAP The enormous gap between what the U.S. leaders do in the world and what the Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology. -- Michael Parenti THE PROPAGANDIST When one stops to consider the antiquity in which his origins are shrouded, public ignorance of the propagandist is truly remarkable. Wherever the chains of automatic fealty have been burst asunder, collective action depends upon coercion or persuasion. It is safer for even the tyrant to depend upon persuasion, since he cannot perpetually remain upon the alert. (Even the tyrant must sleep.) For the few who would rule the many under democratic conditions, there is no choice but persuasion. --Harold Lasswell READY, AIM, INFORM: INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC INFORMATION (IPI) According to a draft of the IPI charter obtained by the Washington Times, the core group's mission is to counteract enemy propaganda, "to prevent and mitigate crises and to influence foreign audiences in ways favorable to the achievement of U.S. foreign-policy objectives." According to the charter, the IPI will control all "international military information" to influence "the emotions, motives, objective reasoning and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups and individuals." The aim of all this is "to enhance U.S. security, bolster America's economic prosperity and to promote democracy abroad." Critics fear that this new master spin agency is a government attempt to overtly apply psyop (psychological operations) techniques on both the world and American public using communication strategies refined by the PR industry. IPI's proponents say it is better to fight a war with words than bullets, but that to do so requires some central coordination. The IPI has assumed many of the functions of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), which was disbanded last October, and operates out of a new Public Diplomacy branch of the State Department. - Joel Bleifuss, In These Times, March 2000 SELECTIVITY OF NEWS Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strictest sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable. For while people who have direct access can misconceive what they see, no one else can decide how they shall misconceive it, unless he can decide where they shall look, and at what. - Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, 1922 SPECTRUM DEBATE The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. -- Noam Chomsky, The Common Good TELEVISION Television is uniquely suited to implant and continuously reinforce dominant ideologies. And, while it hones our minds, it also accelerates our nervous systems into a form that matches the technological reality that is upon us. Television effectively produces a new form of human being-less creative, less able to make subtle decisions, speedier, and more interested in things-albeit better able to handle, appreciate, and approve of the technological world. High-speed computers, faxes, lasers, satellites, robotics, high-tech war, space travel, and the further suppression of nature are more palatable and desirable for us because of our involvement with TV. The ultimate result, in high-tech terms, is that television redesigns us to be compatible with the future. -Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred TWO POWERS IN THE WORLD "There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind." --Napoleon Bonaparte <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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