Propaganda: The Art of War

By James Sandrolini

“Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Doctor Johnson’s famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit it is the first.”—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

Considering that the US is poised to fight global wars against terrorism for possibly “the next 40 years”—according to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—it might be helpful to provide a primer on patriotism and war:

The ultimate method for inspiring apathetic citizens of the necessity for incessant war is through the linguistic fuel of patriotism: propaganda. Propaganda is regularly mainlined into American minds via commercial advertising, political campaigns and powerful public relations firms.

The modern master of the propaganda game was PR genius Edward Bernays, Viennese-born nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays took propaganda seriously for his career work: he combined individual and social psychology, public opinion studies, political persuasion and advertising to construct “necessary illusions” which filtered out to the masses as “reality.”

Bernays proudly referred to this all-important social process as the “engineering of consent.” All of this had little, if anything, to do with real democracy. The objective for Bernays was to provide government and media outlets with powerful tools for social persuasion and control. As a matter of fact, so impressed was he with Bernays’ early works Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) that Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels relied heavily upon them for his own dubious inspiration in the 1930s. Apparently, that Bernays was a Jew mattered little to Goebbels.

Over the years the US Defense Department has fallen well behind in churning out effective, Orwellian doublespeak and now regularly relies on crafty PR firms to perform its dirty work. With no obligation to the public, these PR guns for hire are free to go about their duty, often creating information out of nothing, mixing fact with fiction.

Nonetheless, without the mass media, these mind-bending messages of manipulation would fall from politicians’ lips to the ground with a thud. The mass media are their single most important accomplice.

Bernays and journalistic giant Walter Lippman came to Woodrow Wilson’s aid in 1917 to reverse negative public sentiment about war. These two behind-the-curtain wizards were indispensable in helping the president whip gun-shy America into an anti-German frenzy to go “over there” for WWI. Bernays created the patriotic war slogan “Make the World Safe for Democracy”—an irresistibly patriotic mantra that America embraced.

These days the establishment media routinely rely on bold statements from presidents and congressmen, CEOs and labor leaders, and the public relations world for their most profitable prose—regardless of the veracity of such self-serving sloganeering. Besides the convenience and thrift of relying on corporate or government press releases, media companies can also ensure unfettered access to the experts through this kind of predictable exchange.

Mainstream media eagerly swallow establishment propaganda because to look at alternative or unofficial sources is to tag yourself as an “outsider,” or worse, an independent journalist. To hesitate or be critical of our current administration’s war stance is to risk being ostracized from the rest of the journalistic pack.

Moreover, your access to the decision-makers will suddenly be curtailed. The media have forgotten their true mission somewhere along the way. Yesterday’s Watergate heroes are today’s obedient Stepford-press. Don’t rock the boat and you will be rewarded with both government sources and Wall Street dividends.

Big news dailies and corporate news channels are quick to forego journalistic integrity and simply soak up everything handed to them by their political leaders. After all, why would government sources lie, exaggerate or misinform? Why indeed.

On The Late Show with David Letterman (9/17/01), CBS anchor Dan Rather declared his obsequious servitude to President Bush: “George Bush is the president … wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where.”
Weeks later on Entertainment Tonight (10/2/01), Rather reminded America he is still patriotically on board with his president: “If he needs me in uniform, tell me when and where—I’m there.”

Later appearing on the Letterman Show (10/10/01), ABC’s Cokie Roberts assured us her head is in the right place when it comes to reporting the “War on Terror.” Cokie gushed, “Look, I am, I will just confess to you, a total sucker for the guys who stand up with all the ribbons on and stuff and they say it’s true and I’m ready to believe it.”

With Cokie cheerleading at the front lines of journalism, the White House nee not worry about pushing their propaganda campaigns. And with Dan Rather ready to ship out in camouflage and Fox’s Rambo newsman Geraldo Rivera hunting down Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan—swearing he’ll “kick his head in, then bring it home and bronze it”—we can sleep safely at night. Meanwhile, real journalism is dying a slow death.

Rules of the Game

“Critical thinking is compatible with patriotism … Amnesia is not a requirement for patriotism … We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”—Edward R. Murrow

Looking back upon our phenomenally bloody 20th century, American presidents have steadfastly adhered to the advice of great war strategists and propagandists to unite an ambivalent populace. What is essential to discover here is the often deceitful means by which our leaders manipulate and shepherd sheep-like citizens into supporting wars about which they may understand very little. Meanwhile, the very lives of millions of long-suffering peoples in faraway lands completely depends upon how well-informed the American people are going into the devastating mire of war. But this does not weigh heavily on the minds of warmongers.

With Lippman and Bernays behind the curtain pulling the proper levers and switches, Woodrow Wilson—who ran successfully for his second term on the slogan “He kept us out of war”—convinced a reluctant US that entering the European war was part of a divine mission for God’s chosen nation. We took his pious bait and entered the senseless “war to end all wars” with patriotic aplomb.

During his tenure, FDR tried hard to persuade stubborn Americans of the need to enter WWII to defeat fascism. Perhaps the greatest wartime propaganda campaign ever, his aggressive mission to win over an isolationist America would not be fully realized until Japan attacked a US military outpost in the Pacific. Neglected in all the jingoistic fervor was the fact that the US had imposed a severe oil embargo on the Japanese prior to the attacks as a punitive measure against the fascist Axis power. In that day and age, economic sanctions were (and still are) considered acts of “economic warfare.”

However, it was beyond the pale of reason to suggest the American administration suspected no aggressive forms of retaliation on the part of the Japanese. To promote this notion in the media was to risk condemnation and ridicule. It was journalistic heresy; treason. Now 60 years later, history seems to be repeating itself.

Oddly enough, FDR quietly permitted the continued robust trade with “enemy” Nazi Germany. Industry titans like Nazi sympathizer Henry Ford, whose book The International Jew inspired Hitler’s Mein Kampf, was providing tanks to the Nazis. ITT provided phones, radio systems and bomb parts for Germany. Other companies trading with Nazi Germany included GM, Standard Oil, Dupont, and Chase National Bank. Lucrative corporate transactions with the fascist superpower were too valuable to forsake for the costly principles of democracy.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor, like the 9/11 attacks, fell out of the sky and into the arms of a grateful president in 1941. Historians now reveal that FDR had foreknowledge of the imminent attack and allowed it to happen. This “day of infamy” was abetted his political goal of getting into WWII. He had a strategic reason of getting into the war. He was also terrified of the growing possibility of another depression. The faltering president would now get everything he asked of the American people, Congress and the War Department.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson was facing great difficulty getting Americans to appreciate the urgency of defeating Communist uprisings in the small, impoverished nation of Vietnam. So he had the military invent the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” whereby the North Vietnam purportedly instigated an attack on idle US warships. The Tonkin incident was mere fabricated pre-text, yet it was all LBJ needed to escalate a horrifically destructive war of “liberation.”

No serious historian or major newspaper stands by the military account of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution—although the New York Times has yet to print a retraction. It would be an admission of guilt for helping to propagate a war which violently divided the nation and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives—including Agent Orange victims—on both sides.

Citizens and their national media have a remarkable propensity to rally around flag, president and nation when told of a foreign attack against their troops—regardless of whether the attack actually happened or not. Ronald Reagan claimed he was convinced the Soviets were going to make some kind of “back door” sneak attack through Central America and Mexico. We fell for it in Central America, Grenada, and all over the globe. The “Evil Empire” specter was lurking around every corner, squirming under every rock, recruiting at every university.

The Reagan years represent perhaps the golden age of modern patriotic propaganda in the US Few other US presidents have mastered the fine art of spinning mass fear into patriotism quite like Ronald Reagan. Sustaining this manufactured patriotism over the long haul buys a president virtually unlimited political power. Neo-Cold War rhetoric served the Reagan administration well in garnering astronomical SDI funding and soaring military spending.

By the time the Iran-Contra scandal erupted, a relatively new word had come into common usage within the mainstream press: disinformation, the deliberate spreading of falsehoods and lies in the media to make the nation believe what you want them to believe.

George Bush, Sr. didn’t even bother trying to sell us the story of Panama: we just went in and got out in under a week. In the months leading up to it, Bush had spent a great deal of energy trying to persuade the country about how Manuel Noriega, on the CIA payroll since the mid-1970s, was a dangerous, drug-cartel thug who needed to be taken down. Bush’s micro-war was secretly executed in the waning days before Christmas 1989, when the administration figured most Americans would be too caught up in pre-holiday shopping and merry-making to pay much heed to illegal incursions into a small sovereign nation south of the border.

The press was also caught off guard. No one expected this brief burst of ultra-violence that reportedly caused the violent deaths of as many as 5,000 Panamanians, later discovered in a series of mass graves? The former CIA director Bush successfully employed the “shoot first, ask questions later” method of warfare. By the time we even knew what hit us (or Panama) we would already be primed to support Uncle Sam. The mainstream press colluded with the government in this invasion, eagerly swallowing questionable Pentagon press releases. Where would the US military be without the aid of the media?

But Panama was merely a warm-up exercise for the triumphant war in the Middle East the following year. In the Gulf War we witnessed the most desperate attempts by an administration to convince a skeptical population that this war to “liberate Kuwait” was just and necessary. Bush told us it was a war “to maintain our way of life.” In other words, cheap oil for gasoline. The fate of middle-class American convenience was at stake in this desert kingdom.

Paths of Glory

“The threat of ‘terrorism,’ some of it real, most of it invented, is the new Red Scare. The parallels are striking. In America in the 1950s, the Red Scare was used to justify the growth of war industries, the suspension of democratic rights and the silencing of dissenters. That is happening now.—Journalist John Pilger

Here we are with another Bush selling us on the idea that war is unavoidable and that we must sterilize the world of all terrorist elements. Virtually all nations—with the convenient exception of perhaps Saudi Arabia, Syria and Pakistan—are suspects; no rock would remain unturned. This “war” could go on for decades.

In order to keep the engines of perpetual war going, US presidents must keep churning out propaganda to cow citizens into submission to the big machines of mayhem and madness. The latter-day Bush White House has clearly mastered the art of linguistic chicanery and political rhetoric with a relish that would make George Orwell blanch.

Unleashing all the Old Testament thunder they could muster, Bush and Ashcroft have proclaimed that we are at battle with the virtual antichrist. Bush’s rhetoric describing the “great crusade” before us was rife with fundamentalist cant right up to the name of the military mission to combat terrorism: “Operation Infinite Justice.” Due to dissent in oil-rich Arab nations, the Pentagon later re-titled the mission “Operation Noble Eagle” and finally “Operation Enduring Freedom.” The Bush Administration fired linguistic lightning bolts like Moses from the mountain-top reckoning with non-believers. The enemy became “Evil Doers” or “The Evil Ones.”

And as far as second-guessing the Administration, you were “either with us or with the terrorists.” This gave Americans or any other nation little room for deeper thought on the matter. This kind of intellectual detouring is the linchpin of successful propaganda: don’t think, just do it!

We were told that our righteous new crusade was to “cleanse the world of evil.” Americans bathed themselves in all the feel-good patriotism. We could not walk a city block without seeing or hearing the heartwarming, made-in-America slogan “God Bless America.” American flags (mostly made in communist China) of all different sizes were affixed to nearly every house, on top of every vehicle, in the small hands of every patriotic child in the arms of their protective patriotic parents. There simply was not enough red, white and blue to go around. Newscasters discarded any semblance of objectivity, adorning their lapels with small American flag pins.

The president urged us to go shopping in order to help defeat terrorism. Patriotism is good for business! How much more shopping must we do before actually capturing Osama bin Laden, “dead or alive”?

Soon, after Afghanistan’s rocks and caves started to lose their clammy appeal and Osama became indefinitely MIA, it became time to add more enemies to the list. We were entreated to a new force from the underworld, the “Axis of Evil,” including the usual suspects like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

Add our current crusade to the clandestine drug war going on in Columbia and we’ve got a veritable “war without end.” With a compliant, jingoist and commercially owned media, it will take people power to put a stop to this war.