{"id":6315,"date":"2010-07-19T00:00:16","date_gmt":"2010-07-18T22:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=6315"},"modified":"2010-07-18T22:25:43","modified_gmt":"2010-07-18T20:25:43","slug":"the-charge-of-the-media-brigade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2010\/07\/the-charge-of-the-media-brigade\/","title":{"rendered":"The Charge of the Media Brigade"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how an all-pervasive corporate media culture in the United States prepares the way for a permanent state of war. And yet for all the column inches and broadcast hours filled, the brainwashing is not succeeding. And this, he suggests, is ‘America’s greatest virtue’.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

The TV anchorwoman was conducting a split-screen interview with a journalist who had volunteered to be a witness at the execution of a man on death row in Utah for 25 years. \u201cHe had a choice,\u201d said the journalist, \u201clethal injection or firing squad.\u201d \u201cWow!\u201d said the anchorwoman. Cue a blizzard of commercials for fast food, teeth whitener, stomach stapling, the new Cadillac. This was followed by the war in Afghanistan presented by a correspondent sweating in a flak jacket. \u201cHey, it\u2019s hot,\u201d he said on the split screen. \u201cTake care,\u201d said the anchorwoman. \u201cComing up\u201d was a reality show in which the camera watched a man serving solitary confinement in a prison\u2019s \u201chell hole.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next morning I arrived at the Pentagon for an interview with one of President Obama\u2019s senior war-making officials. There was a long walk along shiny corridors hung with pictures of generals and admirals festooned in ribbons. The interview room was purpose-built. It was blue and arctic cold, and windowless and featureless except for a flag and two chairs: props to create the illusion of a place of authority. The last time I was in a room like this in the Pentagon a colonel called Hum stopped my interview with another war-making official when I asked why so many innocent civilians were being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then it was in the thousands; now it is more than a million. \u201cStop tape!\u201d he ordered.<\/p>\n

This time there was no Col. Hum, merely a polite dismissal of soldiers\u2019 testimony that it was a \u201ccommon occurrence\u201d that troops were ordered to \u201ckill every motherf*cker.\u201d The Associated Press, says the Pentagon, spends $4.7 billion on public relations: that is, winning the hearts and minds not of recalcitrant Afghan tribesmen but of Americans. This is known as \u201cinformation dominance,\u201d and PR people are \u201cinformation warriors.\u201d<\/p>\n

American imperial power flows through a media culture to which the word imperial is anathema. To broach it is heresy. Colonial campaigns are really \u201cwars of perception,\u201d wrote the present commander, Gen. David Petraeus, in which the media popularizes the terms and conditions. \u201cNarrative\u201d is the accredited word because it is post-modern and bereft of context and truth. The narrative of Iraq is that the war is won, and the narrative of Afghanistan is that it is a \u201cgood war.\u201d That neither is true is beside the point. They promote a \u201cgrand narrative\u201d of a constant threat and the need for permanent war. \u201cWe are living in a world of cascading and intertwined threats,\u201d wrote the celebrated New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, \u201cthat have the potential to turn our country upside down at any moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Friedman supports an attack on Iran, whose independence is intolerable. This is the psychopathic vanity of great power which Martin Luther King described as \u201cthe greatest purveyor of violence in the world.\u201d He was then shot dead.<\/p>\n

The psychopathic is applauded across popular, corporate culture, from the TV death watch of a man choosing a firing squad over lethal injection to the Oscar winning Hurt Locker and a new acclaimed war documentary Restrepo. Directors of both films deny and dignify the violence of invasion as \u201capolitical.\u201d And yet behind the cartoon facade is serious purpose. The U.S. is engaged militarily in 75 countries. There are some 900 U.S. military bases across the world, many at the gateways to the sources of fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

But there is a problem. Most Americans are opposed to these wars and to the billions of dollars spent on them. That their brainwashing so often fails is America\u2019s greatest virtue. This is frequently due to courageous mavericks, especially those who emerge from the centrifuge of power. In 1971, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked documents known as the Pentagon Papers which put the lie to almost everything two presidents had claimed about Vietnam. Many of these insiders are not even renegades. I have a section in my address book filled with the names of former officers of the CIA who have spoken out. They have no equivalent in Britain.<\/p>\n

In 1993, C. Philip Liechty, the CIA operations officer in Jakarta at the time of Indonesia\u2019s murderous invasion of East Timor, described to me how President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had given the dictator Suharto \u201c a green light\u201d and secretly supplied the arms and logistics he needed. As the first reports of massacres arrived at his desk, he began to turn. \u201cIt was wrong,\u201d he said. \u201cI felt badly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Melvin Goodman is now a scholar at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. He was in the CIA more than 40 years and rose to be a senior Soviet analyst. When we met the other day, he described the conduct of the Cold War as a series of gross exaggerations of Soviet \u201caggressiveness\u201d that willfully ignored the intelligence that the Soviets were committed to avoid nuclear war at all costs. Declassified official files on both sides of the Atlantic support this view. \u201cWhat mattered to the hardliners in Washington,\u201d he said, \u201cwas how a perceived threat could be exploited.\u201d The present secretary of defense, Robert Gates, as deputy director of the CIA in the 1980s, had constantly hyped the \u201cSoviet menace\u201d and is, says Goodman, doing the same today \u201con Afghanistan, North Korea, and Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n

Little has changed. In America, in 1939, W.H. Auden wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cAs the clever hopes expire
\nOf a low dishonest decade:
\nWaves of anger and fear
\nCirculate over the bright
\nAnd darkened lands of the earth,
\nObsessing our private lives [\u2026]
\nOut of the mirror they stare,
\nImperialism\u2019s face
\nAnd the international wrong.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

GO TO ORIGINAL \u2013 JOHNPILGER.COM<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how an all-pervasive corporate media culture in the United States prepares the way for a permanent state of war. And yet for all the column inches and broadcast hours filled, the brainwashing is not succeeding. And this, he suggests, is ‘America’s greatest virtue’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}