propaganda

While the records book like to say that public relations as a concept and profession hails from just after the turn of the last century, it wasn't until World War Two that propaganda had become a worthless garbage word, replaced by public relations by Edward Bernays.

Now that I have moved to Berlin, I get to hear VOA and NPR Worldwide and the European version of BBC Worldwide and I am pretty excited. I can finally hear US propaganda "outside the border" which is fascinating. As part of NPR Worldwide's broadcast this AM (104.1 FM), I got to hear a show this morning about the history of Public Diplomacy, which I found amazingly interesting. From 1914, I think they said, the US has had a real desire to educate and engage the world, which ended abruptly once we won the cold war. And then it all went to pot, especially since the responsibility of Public Diplomacy has been rolled into the US Department of State. Well, I am all for Public Diplomacy as a strategy that is much more effective than either PR or a propaganda war. One of the most useful past strategies, which is being gutted because of post 9-11 paranoia, was the global encouragement of students to study in the USA. One lad from Egypt spoke of his experience in Washington State at the University of Washington, saying, "I got to experience that most Americans live the American Dream on two parents working two jobs, which is something I would never have known from my experience of the USA from TV from Cairo." Amazingly interesting. Here's some more info on Public Dimplomacy via Wikipedia via Because the Medium is the Message.

Here is an email I wrote to an enviro-wacko from a real activist (me) that works in the field and not from the comfort of his own little studio. He had claimed that all hunters are, basically, evil:

Pravda: “ 'Al Qaeda' is nothing more than a broad euphemistic umbrella classification used to group any Middle Eastern fighter under the Sun as an enemy. The most diabolical aspect of this public relations stunt is that it enables the current Administration to label any group it feels necessary to attack to appear to be related to an unprovable organized enemy while at the same time actually increasing its approval ratings by exploiting the basic primal fears of the American public."

Taken from Haaretz (By Cnaan Liphshiz, Haaretz Correspondent )

What began six months ago as a brazen attempt to counter a perceived anti-Israel slant in the Dutch media, has evolved into a network monitoring the media in eight countries across the world. The idea is simple: Beat press bias at its own game by advertising only bad news about one place.

Over the past months, seven activists from Israel and elsewhere have been exposing online readers to scandalous yet accurate reports from media in Britain (violent drunk teens), France (high homeless mortality), Norway (serial child molesters), Finland (sexual harassment in parliament), Sweden (soaring suicide rates), The Netherlands (menacing Muslim unrest), Mexico (rampaging flood victims) and Los Angeles (drive-by killings).

It was the opening salvo of a campaign to press forward a post-Cold War foreign policy of 'Pax Americana,' a world that the neo-conservatives who made up the bulk of the 25 people who signed PNAC’s statement of principles the previous June saw as a US dominion.

Lakota Oyate: "We ask individuals to cease with false personal attacks, slander and attempts to erode the advances of the Lakota Freedom movement."

Hyperlinks embedded in this post were added by yours truly and don't necessarily indicate an endorsement of respective content by Lakota Oyate.

"Culture is an atidote to propaganda." -- Fashion designer Vivienne Westwood via the Guardian Unlimited

How does entire population become, itself, a weapon of war?

Snip: RAND maintains that “homegrown terrorism” will not be the result of jihadist sleeper cells. Rather, it will result from anti-globalists and radical environmentalists who “challenge the intrinsic qualities of capitalism, charging that in the insatiable quest for growth and profit, the philosophy is serving to destroy the world’s ecology, indigenous cultures, and individual welfare.”

Psychological operations specialist Sgt. Joe Colabuno spent a year-and-a-half helping convince the Sunni residents of Fallujah to turn against local extremists by appealing to citizens' sense of civic pride, pumping up their love of the national soccer team, citing the Koran, and provoking jihadists to overreact. Colabuno also appealed to the Sunnis hatred and fear of Shi'ites, and of Shi'ite Iran. ...

Pyrrhic victory: n. A victory that is offset by staggering losses.

Aldous Huxley, 1959: "And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing … a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it..."

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear: Part 1: "Baby It's Cold Outside": The first part of the series explains the origins of Islamism and Neo-Conservatism. It shows Egyptian civil servant Sayyid Qutb, depicted as the founder of modern Islamist thought, visiting America to learn about the education system, but becoming disgusted with what he saw as a corruption of morals and virtues in western society through individualism. When he returns to Egypt, he is disturbed by westernization under President Nasser and becomes convinced that in order to save society it must be completely restructured along the lines of Islamic law while still using western technology. He also becomes convinced that this can only be accomplished through the use of an elite "vanguard" to lead a revolution against the established order. Qutb becomes a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and, after being tortured in one of Nasser's jails, comes to believe that western-influenced leaders can justly be killed for the sake of removing their corruption. Qutb is executed in 1966, but he inspires the future mentor of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to start his own secret Islamist group. Inspired by the 1979 Iranian revolution, Zawahiri and his allies assassinate Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat, in 1981, in hopes of starting their own revolution. The revolution does not materialise, and Zawahiri comes to believe that the majority of Muslims have been corrupted by their western-inspired leaders and thus may be legitimate targets of violence if they do not join him.

At the same time in the United States, a group of disillusioned liberals, including Irving Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz, look to the political thinking of Leo Strauss after the general failure of President Johnson's "Great Society". They come to the conclusion that the emphasis on individual liberty was the undoing of the plan. They envisioned restructuring America by uniting the American people against a common evil, and set about creating a mythical enemy. These factions, the Neo-Conservatives, come to power under the Reagan administration, with their allies Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and work to unite the United States in fear of the Soviet Union. The Neo-Conservatives allege the Soviet Union is not following the terms of disarmament between the two countries, and, with the investigation of "Team B", they accumulate a case to prove this with dubious evidence and methods. President Reagan is convinced nonetheless.