http://musliminsuffer.wordpress.com/
bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
Wars and propaganda machines
By Rodrigue Tremblay
"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
10/09/06 "Online Journal" 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 U.S. 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.
Before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the neocon propaganda machine in
the media, led by Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News (News Corp), assisted by
ABC (Disney), NBC (GE), CBS (Viacom), TBS (Time Warner), CNN (Time
Warner), MTV (Viacom), plus the Weekly Standard (News Corp), the
National Review, the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones),
the New York Post (News Corp), the New York Sun, the Washington Times
(Sun Myung Moon), etc., initiated an all-out propaganda campaign to
persuade the American people that Saddam Hussein was really the villain
behind the 9/11 attacks, not the Taliban of Afghanistan or bin Laden's
alleged al Qaeda terrorist network. They succeeded so well in this
endeavor that many Americans believed the fabricated fable and swallowed
the bait -- hook, line, and sinker.
Then the neocons persuaded born-again George W. Bush that he had a
mission from 'God' to fight the evil of Islamist terrorism. They
whispered in his ear that the 'Devil' was in Iraq, not in Afghanistan.
Thus, Bush II could enthusiastically proclaim that "Across the world,
and across the years, we will fight these evil ones, and we will win."
Canadian neocon David Frum introduced in a Bush speech the idea of
targeting three countries -- Iran, Iraq, and North Korea -- as the
evils he had to fight, without even mentioning Osama bin Laden or al
Qaeda. And, just as with the monkey on the elephant's back, the neocons
led the American elephant into the Iraqi quagmire. Even today, most
Americans ignore what really happened and why they have soldiers in Iraq
to kill and to be killed.
As a rule, professional news media in a democracy should be independent,
objective and, as much as possible, factual and neutral in reporting
news and events. This means that they should not have a systematic bias
and should not be under government control or under the total control of
special interest groups. Indeed, to be informed is a prerequisite for
the citizenry to be able to exercise its democratic rights. If the media
systematically slant the news or remain content to serve as conveyor
belt for state propaganda, this results into a direct attack on
democracy itself.
Unfortunately, over the last decade, American corporate media have
developed the lazy tendency of being "embedded" with the government and
of presenting uncritically the government spin on things and events, as
if this was always the truth. Some have gone so far in that direction
that they seem to be reproducing the relationship that existed in the
former Soviet Union between the government and the media, the latter
being a simple extension of the former. A case in point: they have no
qualms about accepting selective invitations to secret meetings in the
Oval Office to be 'briefed' and cheered up in their public support of
the Bush-Cheney administration.
The results of this government-inspired disinformation is all there to
be seen:
1. Three years after this was officially disproved, half of
Americans still believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) before Bush II decided on his own to launch his war of
aggression;
2. Close to one-quarter of Americans still cling to the idea that
the government of Iraq was behind the attacks of 9/11. Since no
such misinformation exists in other countries, this could only
mean that public government officials, assisted by the neocon
media and government propagandists, have consciously spread and
perpetuated the disinformation and are, therefore, mainly
responsible for the abysmal and dangerous ignorance found in a
large and probably decisive segment of the American electorate.
There is no area where general information is as profoundly at odds with
what is known in the United States compared to what is known in the rest
of the world as with questions dealing with the state of Israel and the
Middle East. Thanks to the powerful pro-Israel Lobby and its propaganda
(Hasbara) machine, Americans seem to live on a different planet than the
rest of the world. -- Americans, for example, are far more likely than
Europeans to side with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A
Pew Global Attitudes survey taken between March and May (2006) found
that 48 percent of Americans said that their sympathies lay with the
Israelis; only 13 percent were sympathetic towards the Palestinians. By
contrast, in Spain for example, 9 percent sympathized with the Israelis
and 32 percent with the Palestinians. The main reason for this cleavage
is the fact that Americans do not receive the same news as the rest of
the world. In the U.S., news directly or indirectly involving Israel is
filtered, slanted and adjusted by spin organizations in order to present
Israel as the innocent victim, even when it does the killing and the
destruction, as its indiscriminate bombings of civilian areas in
Lebanon, during the summer of 2006, amply demonstrated.
For this purpose, for example, the Lobby has its own propaganda
coordinating organization, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East
Reporting in America (CAMERA). Its mission is to see that American media
(TV, radio, newspapers, magazines) toe the line on Israel and on
American policies toward Israel, not hesitating in the process to smear
journalists or authors who dare criticizing the actions of the Israeli
government or who offer more balanced viewpoints. It also takes the
necessary political steps to make sure that the Federal Communications
Commission [FCC] does not impede the move toward concentration of media
ownership in the U.S.
What are the conclusions to be drawn from all this?
First, there is the need for free societies to be aware when they are
subjected to incessant and systematic campaigns of indoctrination and
disinformation, the more so if it is to wage wars of aggression abroad.
Second, the threat of excessive concentration of media ownership should
always be a paramount preoccupation in a democracy, if freedom of
information is to be preserved.
Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University
of Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@ yahoo.com. He is
the author of the book 'The New American Empire'. Visit his blog site at
www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.
source:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15241.htm
===
-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW
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