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<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! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
--- Begin Message --- -Caveat Lector-
ZGRAM - Where Truth is Destiny
November 16, 2002
Good Morning from the Zundelsite:
This is the conclusion of a two-part ZGram titled "Propaganda War: One Year Later" or, alternately, "The Selling of America", based on an interview by "Guerrilla News Network" (GNN) with author Dr. Nancy Snow.
Shortly after 9-11, GNN asked Dr. Nancy Snow, author of Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World, to explain how the U.S. propaganda machine really works. Dr. Snow, a former cultural officer with the United States Information Agency, should know. She worked in the belly of the beast.
[START]
(Continuing Dr. Nancy Snow's response to GNN's question:
" GNN: What are some of the new propaganda methods that the Bush Administration has employed?
DR. NANCY SNOW: Charlotte Beers at one time headed J. Walter Thompson, one of the top ten PR firms in the world. One of George Creel's enlisted men in the propaganda effort of WWI was James Webb Young of J. Walter Thompson, who led information efforts to demoralize the German people. Victoria de Grazia describes how U.S. propaganda efforts function in comparison to other forms: "Publicity, with private sector support, was the handmaiden of a government that presented itself as opposed to heavy-handed involvement abroad and sought to circumvent autocratic leaders to get the humane, rational message of the American people directly to peoples with similar aspirations. Other regimes may propagate hard-nosed ideology, but American democracy had lofty ideals." Her point that publicity institutions working with the private sector were the handmaidens of American propaganda is exactly what Propaganda, Inc. describes about the function of the U.S. Information Agency both during and after the Cold War.
She also makes a significant point about the United States. There is no other country in the world that matches ours for developing such close links between commerce (salesmanship) and the business of government (statesmanship). None. Since World War I, advertising has mixed with selling war, foreign aid, and even cultural exchanges.
This creates a real dilemma for the United States government in 2002. How can the numero uno propaganda nation avoid overplaying its hand by mixing the Big Sell with a government effort to inform and educate people elsewhere about American society? It cannot. We will continue to read occasional reports from the Council on Foreign Relations or the U.S. Public Diplomacy Advisory Commission gnashing their teeth over our hyper-advertising approach to reshaping America's image in the world. This is what the U.S. is to the world-the ultimate salesman. And just like a tiger doesn't change its stripes, so doesn't the U.S. become something it's not. We appear to the world like the world's Barnum & Bailey, and remember what P.T. Barnum said, "A sucker is born every minute." We shouldn't be surprised that anti-Americanism is on the rise one year after we had global sympathy in the days following 9/11. The President's go-it-alone rhetoric just fans the flames of this growing enmity.
The Bush Administration's propaganda efforts on Iraq underscore a sense that this administration needs the world more as an audience or convenient backdrop to doing exactly what it's going to do anyway. Until and unless the world sees a picture of American society full of debate and dissent about the direction our country is going in, I don't hold out great hope for any short-term gains in improving our global image, whether or not we cool it on the advertising. What I'm trying to do in my own work is to reach out with friends here and abroad to mount some kind of open dissent and protest against a U.S. administration that is neither acting in the American public interest nor in the interests of a global civil society.
Now I'm not so naïve to believe that the New York Times, the so-called "newspaper of record," is printing all the news that's fit to print about what the Bush Administration is doing outside public eye. There's plenty in this new media/mental mind management era that is out of public reach and public comment, hidden in so-called black budgets that merge intelligence, covert action, with information and psyops programs. There's also plenty that we as citizens allow the U.S. press to get away with by not pressing Bush and other people in power about what they mean by Axis of Evil and the defense of freedom. Whose freedom? My freedom or your freedom? Freedom for McDonnell Douglas or Exxon Mobil? Haven't we graduated from the Dick and Jane reading series to a place where we can aggressively debate foreign policies that put innocent people in harm's way? I remember last fall hearing Representative Henry Hyde ask something like, "How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue engendered so much hatred?" That question seemed to sail around the Internet as an example of a nation of leaders out of step with how others see us. He's the chair of the House International Relations Committee and is now promoting the Freedom Promotion Act of 2002. Naturally. In his statement to the press about this new legislation, he said, "If any nation has been a greater force for good in the long and tormented history of this world, I am unaware of it. We have guarded whole continents from conquest, showered aid on distant lands, sent thousands of youthful idealists to remote and often inhospitable areas to help the world's forgotten. Why, then, when we read or listen to descriptions of America in the foreign press do we so often seem to be entering a fantasyland of hatred?"
I find statements like these counterproductive to improving American relations with the world. I'm less concerned about our image than I am about our true relationships. I want to be able to connect with my international counterparts and meet citizen-to-citizen. Some of our elected officials seem focused on underscoring how good or great we are because we say so. Do you think Rep. Hyde has actually sat down with some members of that foreign press who criticize to get an accurate measure of the source of that criticism? It shouldn't surprise our government that we are held in mixed review. No government, including our own, is immune to engaging in actions that harm, especially since governments are often driven by their own narrow self-interests. But the propaganda message is that no really, we're the greatest nation on earth, perhaps in P.T. Barnum's view, the greatest show on earth. I think the world's people and its press are becoming weary of this refrain.
GNN: How has propaganda changed over time? We bemoan it infiltrating the media today, but during World War II, the newsreels produced by the "press" were pretty much indistinguishable from the military's objective.
DR. NANCY SNOW: Recall the now legendary Eisenhower outgoing speech of 1961 in which he said that our country must "guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex." He's famous for providing the military industrial complex (MID) to our lexicon, but I think he might have wanted to add another M. Today's landscape, or at least the landscape of the last 50 years or more, is a military-media industrial complex (MMID). The military and media absorb the bulk of our research sources in technology. Anything that's invested in information technology in the U.S. is first applied in the media and military sectors and then filters down eventually to the mass consumer society. Consumers are the last to get access to new technology that will make our lives freer and easier to challenge the power establishments.
Having said that, wartime propaganda in the 20th century and beyond has always been impacted by the American motion picture industry and American press. Can you imagine the propaganda potential of film with a captive audience of hundreds of millions in the early part of the last century alone?! In Phil Taylor's book, Munitions of the Mind, he describes the massive film operation set up by the Office of War Information just months after the Pearl Harbor attack. What we used to call the U.S. War Department (now the Department of Defense) spent annually over $50 million on film production during World War II to propagate the message of the war both here and overseas. The famous Hollywood film director Frank Capra (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It's a Wonderful Life), became Major Frank Capra during the war and was asked by General George C. Marshall to make the Why We Fight documentary war series. The free press is comprised of people like you and me who are just as subject to a swell of patriotism and ultra nationalism as is anyone else. I think we like to idealize that the press will truly separate its personal feelings about a story and report objectively, but World War II was the "Good War" and was thought then to end all wars. The American press worked in tandem with the military objectives of the U.S. Government as part of their sense of duty to country in wartime.
Today propaganda infiltration of the media system is more intense than ever. You certainly cannot turn to the Internet as a source of "the absolute truth" since the Internet functions as an open media system and is subject to the same rumormongering and gossip as a National Enquirer. The Internet, as media and democracy scholar Robert McChesney notes, is also being colonized by the corporate landscape. That's not to say that there aren't some good critical sites and I do use the Internet regularly to conduct research, but always with an eye toward the source of the information.
[END]
( SOURCE: http://www.guerrillanews.com/media/cointel/doc744.html )
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DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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