How To Sell a War: The Rendon Group...

[Dirk39]

...deploys ‘perception management’ in the war on Iraq:

"As U.S. tanks stormed into Baghdad on April 9, television viewers in the United States got their first feel-good moment of the war—a chance to witness the toppling of a giant statue of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Americans channel-flipping over breakfast between Fox, CNN and CBS all saw the same images, broadcast live from Baghdad’s Firdos Square. For those who missed it in the morning, the images were continually replayed on cable news throughout the day, and newspapers carried front-page color photos.

A crowd of jubilant Iraqis had climbed onto the statue, thrown a noose around its neck and tried to pull it down. A man with a sledgehammer began pounding at its concrete base. Others took turns, but the statue was too big and the base too massive, so the U.S. marines moved in with an armored vehicle and a chain. Saddam’s statue first bent from its pedestal and then snapped completely, to roars of approval from the crowd, which surged forward to stomp on its remains, kicking and spitting on the rubble. Whooping, they dragged its head through the street.

Media commentators were quick to assign iconic significance to the statue’s tumble, ranking it alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall, the protesters facing down tanks at Tiananmen Square, and other great events caught on TV.

NBC’s Tom Brokaw compared the event to “all the statues of Lenin came down all across the Soviet Union.”

“Iraqis Celebrate in Baghdad,” reported the Washington Post.

“Jubilant Iraqis Swarm the Streets of Capital,” said the headline in the New York Times.

“It was liberation day in Baghdad,” proclaimed the Boston Globe.

“If you don’t have goose bumps now,” gushed Fox News anchor David Asman, “you will never have them in your life.”

The problem is that the images of toppling statues and exulting Iraqis, to which American audiences were repeatedly exposed, obscured a larger reality. A Reuters long-shot photo of Firdos Square showed that it was nearly empty, ringed by U.S. tanks and marines who had moved in to seal off the square before admitting the Iraqis. A BBC photo sequence of the statue’s toppling also showed a sparse crowd of approximately 200 people—much smaller than the demonstrations only nine days later, when thousands of Iraqis took to the streets of Baghdad calling for U.S.-led forces to leave the city. Los Angeles Times reporter John Daniszewski, who was on the scene to witness the statue’s fall, caught an aspect of the day’s events that the other reporters missed. Most Iraqis were indeed glad to see Saddam go, he wrote, but he spoke near the scene with Iraqi businessman Jarrir Abdel-Kerim, who warned that Americans should not be deceived by the images they were seeing.

“A lot of people are angry at America,” Abdel-Kerim said. “Look how many people they killed. Today I saw some people breaking this monument, but there were people—men and women—who stood there and said in Arabic: ‘Screw America, screw Bush.’ So all this is not a simple situation.”

Perception Management

The visual images, of course, are what most people will remember. But it is worth asking whether the toppling of Saddam was as spontaneous as it was made to appear. If this scene seemed a bit too picture-perfect, perhaps there is a reason. Consider, for example, the remarks that public relations consultant John Rendon—who, during the past decade, has worked extensively on Iraq for the Pentagon and the CIA—made on February 29, 1996, before an audience of cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy."
More: http://www.inthesetimes.com/print.php?id=299_0_1_0

If people might be interested, research the role of Rendon during the second gulf war, Clinton's and Clark's war against Yuguslavia etc. ppp.

Goebbels in red, white and blue, restructured, reorganized and downsized?

Hello from Germany,
Dirk

[cosmicdot]

1. what can be done to end this?

I think many have become familiar with Rendon and Hill & Knowlton in Poppy's Gulf War

[Dirk39]

2. Make it public....

At first I have to admit that one more time, I was confronted with how stupid I am.
I never asked myself, where the hell the Kuwaitis did get these flags.

When I did first do a research on Rendon, and there is a lot more about them to say, one question came to my mind:
Isn't that strictly illegal? If you want to sell a chocolate bar and hire people, who praise it, as if it would be the way to paradise, we call that advertising. And it is not allowed to present this as a documentary.
But this is exactly, what this company and companies alike have done over and over again. I'm not an expert in "Jura", but they do nothing but reveiving money from a "company": the US government, the CIA, the Pentagon, and use it to hire people as actors for their scripts.

Heil Rendon,
Dirk

[Dirk39]

3. "We are not paid to moralize ..."

Many Duers have offended me, because of daring to express doubts about the war in Yuguslavia:
Here's just another P.R. agency: RUDER-FINN

"James Harff, director of Ruder & Finn Global Public Affairs, in an interview with French journalist Jacques Merlino which was published in his book, Les Verites Yougoslaves ne sont pas toutes bonnes en dire (Albin Michel, Paris, 1994), talked about his new clients and his (i.e., Harff's) strategy for success. According to Harff: 'Between August 2nd and 5th, 1992, the New York Newsday came out with a lead story on (Serbian death) camps. We jumped at the opportunity and immediately distributed it to three major Jewish organizations - the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress ... The engagement of Jewish organizations on the side of the Bosnians was a superb poker play. Immediately thereafter, we were able to associate the Serbs and the Nazis in the public's mind ... It is not our job to verify information ... Our job is to accelerate the circulation of news items which are favourable to us ... We are not paid to moralize ...'"

"This (i.e., getting the three Jewish groups on board insofar as the elite message concerning the Bosnian conflict was concerned) was a 'sensitive matter', as "the Croatian and Bosnian (Muslim) past was marked by real and cruel anti-Semitism. Tens of thousands of Jews perished in Croatian camps ... Our challenge was to reverse this attitude (i.e., this history) and we succeeded masterfully.

"At the beginning of July 1992, New York Newsday came out with the article on Serb camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations.... That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the Bosnians we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia ... By a single move, we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. We won by targeting the Jewish audience. Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with the use of words with high emotional content such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc, which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz."

Repo continues with regard to Ruder & Finn Global Public Affairs:

"The PR firm was piling hoax upon hoax. The famous story of Serb concentration camps was built on a photo of a gaunt man surrounded by others, staring at the viewer from behind barbed wire; surely an image to chill one to the bones. It took years before a German journalist Thomas Deichman, in an article titled 'The picture that fooled the world', described how the famous photo was staged by its takers, British journalists, who were photographing the inhabitants from inside barbed wire which was protecting agricultural products and machinery from theft in a refugee and transit camp; the men stood outside of it; and at no time was there a barbed-wire fence surrounding the camp. But by that time the image had done its deed, terminally slamming the Serbs as genocidal mass murderers.

"There are countless other stories, all deliberately maligning the Serbs to further the ends of military intervention. These stories and photos of 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' (a la Hitler) in a civil war, in which Serbs are guilty as sin and others are their innocent victims, are repeated ad nauseam by western reporters without the slightest evidence, and have provided the ground for the public's (hopefully only temporary) acceptance of the illegal and brutal war against the sovereign nation of Yugoslavia. They continue after NATO's bombing began, unabated, with new absurdities such as the suggestion that the Serbs are really bombing themselves! Perhaps in the war crimes court there will soon be a place for journalists and PR firms who with their inflammatory reporting and fraudulent actions cause wars to begin." <7>







http://www.endtimesnetwork.com/oldnews/vol8no6.html

The amount of lies, we're told - and this is not about conspiracy theories, these cynical fashists even don't mind to talk about their lies, even surpasses my worst suspicions.

I did a lot of research about this, 'cause I had doubts about my own attitude,


Judge by yourself,
Dirk