The Propagandists of Empire
Weekend Edition February 20-22, 2015
Stripping Away the Blankets of Untruth
The Propagandists of Empire
by MICHAEL WELDON
The international community of left intellectuals and educators faces several urgent challenges in its struggle against the depredations of empire. As educators, our first task is to find the critical tools to understand the relationship between propaganda and empire. John MacKenzies marvellous study Propaganda and Empire: the Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (1984) reveals how the rulers of the British Empire used every representational medium at their disposal (postcards, theatre, dance halls, music, posters, childrens literature and penny journalism, films, scholarly treatises and school textbooks) to legitimize their nefarious actions in the world. Adam Hochschilds King Leopolds Ghost: a story of greed, terror and heroism in colonial Africa (1999) chillingly tells the story of how the colonial horrors in the Congo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were intentionally hidden from the public. Public opinion was consciously manipulated and intense pressure placed upon those early voices of human rights, like E.D. Morel, who dared to speak out. Even today, Hochschild observes, Belgium museums provide no trace of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Congolese who were forced into the service of King Leopolds lust for wealth and personal aggrandizement.
In Covering Islam (1981), Edward Said demonstrated convincingly that many educative forms (schools, cartoons, books, comic strips and films) constructed a uniform iconography of Islam and the Arab. This unquestionably derogatory iconography provides the perceptual frame that profoundly inhibits an open, learning relationship to the other. Perhaps it is this orientalist frame that makes it easy for the North American masses to be deceived into thinking that Arabs and Muslims dont count for much in the global clash of civilizations. To bomb an enemy one must first dehumanize the hated other (Said) by incessantly repeating simple phrases, images and concepts. An abstract category must replace real, living breathing men and women who get up in the morning to give their kids breakfast, scold them to hurry up and get off to school. They have to dress, bid their partners a good day as they go about the days business. Propaganda creates abstractions that prevent us from seeing the other as fully human.
Like those empires of old, contemporary empires educate their peoples through using propaganda (particularly television, films, print media and photography) and brutal political manoeuvering. Critical intellectuals (and an alert citizenry) have the task of cutting through the lies and deceptions to tell the truth, wherever we are situated, talking, teaching, arguing. Edward Said reminds us that one of our specific jobs is to break down stereotypes and reductive categories that are so limiting to human thought and communication. But to accomplish this, we need to be aware of how utterly resistant the propaganda machine of empire is to enlightened criticism. The coverage of the crisis in the Ukraine well illustrates how reality is inverted and the Orwellian universe closes out any form of dissent. The cry of Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, The earth is squeezing us. I wish we were wheat so we/could die and live again, expresses our terror that we are intellectually suffocating and wont rise again.
Those of us who work within the Academy still have some respect (I hope!) for facts, evidence and rational argument (Habermass best argument that validates truth claims). That is, we believe that, while external and internal states of affairs are mediated through weltonjustlanguage, nonetheless a world external to the senses of the individual (or propagandist hack) exists. The sun does not rise and fall, medieval theologians. The earth is not flat, ancient geographers. Or Russia is not the aggressor in the Ukraine, think-tank scribblers. Ideally, enlightened intellectuals and educators provide counter-evidence that requires a particular interpretation that rules out other less convincing ones. Yet facts do not seem to matter very much to the US (or British or Belgian) propagandists of empire. Those of us who still cling, however desperately, to the vestiges of the enlightenment belief that truth and falsity exist, are aghast at the extent and depth of the US government and medias willingness to lie, deceive, distort, falsify and exaggerate evidence to serve their geo-political goal of ruling the world. This is also true of Canadas right-wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who rules in the fog.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/20/the-propagandists-of-empire/
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)Last edited Fri Feb 20, 2015, 11:55 AM - Edit history (1)
When "your side" is losing, suppress information, when your side is winning, play it up.
Note to media. ISIS is the enemy, got it? Start acting like it and stop spreading their propaganda and not spreading the message of the Iraqi and Kurd ground troops killing them and being killed by the thousands. Report on the fact ten times more non-Muslims have been killed by ISIS than on-Muslims.
Report on the fact ISIS will be destroyed by.....other Muslims.
Not fitting the agenda, is it?
Equally shocking is the wall to wall coversge of ISIS while ignoring all the serious domestic issues -other than snowstorms and road rage.
Hello? Homeland security defunding by Republicans! Do you really not see the connection to thenTerrorVision reporting on ISIS and all things fearful?
The American media is more than unreliable, they are untrustworthy, they are embracing fully a war and xenophobic agenda.
You lose trust, you lose it all and I guess you have to turn to a Fear Agenda.
"If it bleeds, it leads" mantra is not just for local news anymore.
For example CNN in any given one hour:
ISIS in Iraq
Snowstorm
ISIS in Libya
Road rage
ISIS in Europe
Murder trial
ISIS in America?
It is not media or news anymore, it is a highly privileged, obscenely wealthy, handful of owners with religious and personal axes to grind and a megaphone shoved in our ears.
I wish someone would give Obama his own news channel, who else around do you see as more trustworthy?
Dont call me Shirley
(10,998 posts)It has always been the little cadre of self-appointed elite who have created lie upon lie to fool and steal from the vast majority. They have twisted peoples thinking into committing acts of mass violence for them. The "elite" have etched into the mind of the general public to work against their own human rights. The "elite" have connived otherwise normal people to believe the insane beliefs of the "elite". The self-appointed elite are the ones who have created and disseminated this concept of the "otherization" of large groups of people (and other beings of this earth). They understand that once humanity sees this clearly, humanity will otherize the elite.
swilton
(5,069 posts)Mass culture colonizes the life world to teach us that the world is socially just, unchangeable and rational.
Dont call me Shirley
(10,998 posts)"We need to ponder the mounting evidence, despite our best intentions, that our attempts in the Academy and in public spaces to foster a culture of critical discourse have not penetrated very deeply. How could it haveif our world leaders can so easily drape a blanket of untruth over their statements and get away with it?"
How can the general mind of the masses be reached to perceive the truth? This is the next step to take. Yet, the mind is so resistant to change, to giving up it's erroneous constructs. It is a difficult task indeed to change ones own perception to see things through a clear lens, let alone the millions needed to create healthy change. So how can we move people to begin the arduous path of replacing incorrect unhealthy root thoughts to healthy thoughts?
"Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your words positive because your words become your behaviors. Keep your behaviors positive because your behaviors become your habits. Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your habits become your destiny. Ghandi"