-Caveat Lector-
flw wrote:
>
> -Caveat Lector-
>
> "The committee had not personally interviewed a single witness. The report
> was based on 1,200 depositions mostly from refugees, taken by 22 barristers
> from Britain. None of the witnesses were placed on oath, their names were
> omitted (to prevent reprisals against their relatives), and hearsay
> evidence was accepted at full face value...[Later] a commission of inquiry
> ...failed markedly to corroborate a single major allegation on the report"
>
> . -- Phillip Nightly in "The First Casualty" describing how Britain used
> refugees to manufacture atrocity stories in order to bring the US into World
> War I
> flw
The first World War was the first time there was
highly organized state propaganda. The British had
a Ministry of Information, and they really needed
it because they had to get the U.S. into the war
or else they were in bad trouble. The Ministry of
Information was mainly geared to sending propaganda,
including huge fabrications about "Hun" atrocities,
and so on. They were targeting American intellectuals
on the reasonable assumption that these are the people
who are most gullible and most likely to believe
propaganda. They are also the ones that disseminate
it through their own system. So it was mostly geared
to American intellectuals and it worked very well.
The British Ministry of Information documents (a lot
have been released) show their goal was, as they put
it, to control the thought of the entire world, a
minor goal, but mainly the U.S. They didn’t care
much what people thought in India. This Ministry
of Information was extremely successful in deluding
hot shot American intellectuals into accepting
British propaganda fabrications. They were very
proud of that. Properly so, it saved their lives.
They would have lost the first World War otherwise.
In the U.S., there was a counterpart. Woodrow Wilson
was elected in 1916 on an anti-war platform. The U.S.
was a very pacifist country. It has always been. People
don’t want to go fight foreign wars. The country was
very much opposed to the first World War and Wilson
was, in fact, elected on an anti-war position.
"Peace without victory" was the slogan. But he
was intending to go to war. So the question was,
how do you get the pacifist population to become
raving anti-German lunatics so they want to go
kill all the Germans? That requires propaganda.
So they set up the first and really only major
state propaganda agency in U.S. history. The
Committee on Public Information it was called
(nice Orwellian title), called also the Creel
Commission. The guy who ran it was named Creel.
The task of this commission was to propagandize
the population into a jingoist hysteria. It worked
incredibly well. Within a few months there was
a raving war hysteria and the U.S. was able to
go to war.
A lot of people were impressed by these achievements.
One person impressed, and this had some implications
for the future, was Hitler. If you read Mein Kampf,
he concludes, with some justification, that Germany
lost the first World War because it lost the propaganda
battle. They could not begin to compete with British
and American propaganda which absolutely overwhelmed
them. He pledges that next time around they’ll have
their own propaganda system, which they did during
the second World War. More important for us, the
American business community was also very impressed
with the propaganda effort. They had a problem at
that time. The country was becoming formally more
democratic. A lot more people were able to vote
and that sort of thing. The country was becoming
wealthier and more people could participate and
a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on.
So what do you do? It’s going to be harder to run
things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you
have to control what people think. There had been
public relation specialists but there was never a
public relations industry. There was a guy hired
to make Rockefeller’s image look prettier and that
sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry,
which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry,
came out of the first World War. The leading figures
were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the
main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the
Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right
afterwards called Propaganda. The term "propaganda,"
incidentally, did not have negative connotations in
those days. It was during the second World War that
the term became taboo because it was connected with
Germany, and all those bad things. But in this period,
the term propaganda just meant information or something
like that. So he wrote a book called Propaganda around
1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the
lessons of the first World War. The propaganda system
of the first World War and this commission that he
was part of showed, he says, it is possible to
"regiment the public mind every bit as much as
an army regiments their bodies." These new techniques
of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used
by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure
that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do
it now because we have these new techniques.
>From a talk at Z Media Institute June 1997
What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream, by Noam Chomsky
<http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/z9710-mainstream-media.html>
But the state lieth in all languages of good and evil;
and whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath
it hath stolen.
False is everything in it; with stolen teeth it biteth,
the biting one. False are even its bowels.
THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA; Ch. 11, The New Idol
by Friedrich Nietzche (1891)
<http://www.css.itd.umich.edu/~alexboko/zar/first/first11.html>
---
Some good propaganda links:
<http://www.buildfreedom.com/ft/propaganda.htm>
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