Propaganda
Leonardo da Vinci once said: “There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, and those who do not see.” In our current world we tend to rely on the news media to give us all the necessary information to help us ‘see’, and we rarely question whether their ‘seeing’ is accurate. This questioning is essential for accountability; what is the point of trusting someone’s information if we just rely on it blindly? Despite all our progress and technology in communication, our ‘seeing’ hasn’t improved much and our lack of questioning has led us to become like the blind leading the blind.
An inquisitive mind like the one of Leonardo da Vinci could see things that most people can’t see; he was a good guide for helping other people see. If the current media were a type of person, it would be the kind who never sees. Most people believe that the media is there to inform the public, their supposed ‘client’. Fewer people understand that the media in the US is not only owned by just 6 corporations, but the media’s ‘true’ client is the powerful and wealthy establishment that needs widespread consensus for wars, and economic and social agendas.
If the media’s ‘seeing’ is colored by the interests of a small elite, it means that its main objective is to further their agenda, and it becomes by definition, propaganda. Propaganda is defined as “a communication that is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda which may not be objective and instead present facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis”.
The practice of propaganda has always existed but its first conscious use happened during WWI. The Allied establishment embarked on the clear demonization of the Germanic enemy by saturating the media with articles about the sharp contrast between the ‘civilized Atlantic’ countries and the ‘savage’ warring Prussians. The propaganda worked so well, that it left a sour connotation in the word. For most people, the word propaganda still has a negative connotation, used only for countries with repressive regimes that lack press freedom. Unfortunately, propaganda works well and is widely used in both free and repressive countries; the difference is just in perception; people in free countries believe in the integrity and truth-value of their press, while people in repressive regimes don’t.
In the US, the confluence of WWI and the Russian Revolution created the perfect time for the development of propaganda. WWI made American industrialists richer than ever, while the Russian revolution made them increasingly afraid of sharing their profits with the workers. With so much spare money and with the technological advances in communications, the rich were able to buy newspapers, magazines, and journalists to report what was clearly propaganda. Their industries could pollute and mistreat their workers, but if you owned the media, you could always control your image.
In this scene enters the nephew of Freud, Edward Bernays, who is considered the Father of Propaganda and Public Relations. Bernays published his book “Propaganda” in 1928 where he rehabilitated the word, defined it clearly, and tailored it to the intricacies of the technologically modern world.
Bernays ideas in advertising and public relations had a very clever approach; he didn’t believe in a direct pitch for the product, instead, his technique focused on creating a wider consensus using a “special committee of experts’, who would advocate for the need of the product in general. For example, if his client was a bacon producer, he would not pitch the bacon directly, but use a panel of doctors who would extol the health benefits of a hearty breakfast. In this way, the audience was persuaded that buying bacon was their idea, not a dictate from an ad in the media.
This innovation was key to the new world of advertising and media. Whether the product is a political person, a war, or a cigarette, the technique is the same; we are constantly being sold something, not just material products but also information that we think is unbiased; the creation of consensus for a given agenda is so subtle, we stay persuaded that we thought it ourselves. We think there is a difference between the commercials and the news media show, but it is all a public relations game in which implanting the right ideas unto a wide audience is as important as convincing them of buying material goods.
Bernays was famous for his campaign to persuade women to smoke. He understood that it was essential to change the prevailing perception correlating women of loose morals with smoking, to one of freedom and smoking. He hired good-looking young women to participate in the Easter Parade along 5th Avenue and smoke while standing around landmarks like St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The young women would chat with people and praise smoking by admitting it made them feel liberated. While Bernays was prompting other women to smoke for their freedom, he hated that his wife smoked. As evidence about the dangers of smoking crept up, Bernays was gradually convinced about its toxicity, and though he came out against smoking, the tobacco companies fought to keep the knowledge away from their audience, and it took decades for smoking to be considered as dangerous as it is.
Bernays’ main thesis in “Propaganda” is based on a need for an intelligentsia that rules above the masses, but remains invisible to them. Their weapon is propaganda which creates a particular knowledge and shapes the thoughts, values, and responses to suit the needs of this intelligentsia. Bernays called this “Engineering consent” of the masses; he thought this was vital for the survival of democracy. In Bernays’ own words:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
The invisible group of people that Bernays is describing above corresponds to the status quo or establishment composed of top corporations, and extremely wealthy and powerful people that have used his techniques to sell wars, economic and social ideas to the masses. The role of the media is to be the conveyor of this everlasting propaganda, manipulating the masses into conformity, convincing us of its fake truth value. This doesn’t mean that all is propaganda in the media, but most of their reporting is certainly dedicated to molding their audience’s opinions to the needs of their masters, the powerful. Any media can have truthful articles that are even critical of the status quo, but those aren’t usually repeated ad nauseam. Once there is an agenda that the powerful want, like a war, a health issue, or a set of economic reforms, the media repeats the message until they reach consensus. This was well understood by propaganda master and avid student of Bernays’ books, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who said: “A lie repeated many times becomes the truth.”
When Bernays wrote about Propaganda, he considered the masses as the working class, the targets of populism. But the power of the media and the sophistication of communication technology have turned almost everyone into Bernays’ “masses”. Most of us are prey, even the very well educated people with money, who don’t have enough power to be part of that intelligentsia. We have all become the masses because even educated people dedicate most of their time to their work in very specialized areas that make it difficult to keep up to date with research that would question what the media says. A neurosurgeon knows a lot about the brain and surgery, but very little about teeth or the behavior of a virus, and much less about the lies the media tells to create consensus for wars and other policies.
We are all considered masses but we aren’t even aware of that, we think we are individuals with opinions, as Bernays would have said: the subtle but constant media indoctrination has persuaded us that we have personally developed opinions that are in fact what the status quo wants us to think. Politicians and the media have cleverly divided us into allegiances, liberal and conservative, right-wing, center, or left-wing so that people feel no need to question any information as long as the label of their news media conforms to their persuasion.
The rhetoric of both sides is a bit different, but when it comes to actions regarding the defense of freedom of speech and the promotion of peace and economic equality, most mainstream media and politicians remain in the camp of the status quo, making the difference between liberal or conservative obsolete. The intelligentsia behind the strategies pushes relentless war, the financialization of the economy that greatly increases inequality, strange theories like Russia-gate to defend the image of the politicians loyal to them, and the severe punishment of journalists or whistle-blowers who dare to expose the dirty secrets of what goes on behind the corridors of power.
This intelligentsia truly believes that their financial accumulation is directly proportional to their wisdom and superior knowledge. Most of us have trouble understanding how excessive wealth and the power it brings, transforms human egos into the egos of gods. Money and power preclude accountability, their decisions can be wrong and cause suffering to millions of people, but they never notice; with enough money you can turn your losses into future gains, your ecological disasters into good-for-the-market schemes, your failed wars into quagmires caused by the ignorance of the natives, your greed for more profits into philanthropy.
According to Bernays, the key to a good democracy was the existence of this arrogant intelligentsia, who controls what people think for their benefit. Not only do they consider us childlike by wanting peace and equality, but we are also naïve enough to believe that we live in a democracy, or at least that the definition of the masses and the intelligentsia coincide. Unfortunately, they differ greatly; we define it as the rule of the people by the people, but for the intelligentsia, democracy is the rule by the agenda of their chosen invisible government. The media’s role is to keep alive the fairy tale of democracy and to convince us that we have freely chosen our opinions and candidates.
One person who exemplifies this intelligentsia in the foreign policy area is Henry Kissinger, the Peace Nobel Prize winner and darling of the elites. Some of his quotes reveal the reality of what the powerful consider normal:
“Democracy is too important to leave up to the votes of the people.”
“It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.”
The propaganda from the media tells us that Kissinger is a real-politics guru, a proud mentor of politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama. In reality, Kissinger is responsible for innumerable foreign policy disasters that not only have caused infinite suffering around the world but have not benefited the people in the US either. Just to name a few:
1. The covert support for Apartheid in South Africa and subsequent support for a South African-led destabilization of nearby African countries like Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, creating unnecessary wars.
2. The covert bombing of Cambodia and the subsequent invasion of both Cambodia and Laos. The bombing destroyed Cambodia and left it vulnerable to the rise of Pol Pot. The late Chef and travel documentarian Anthony Bourdain said it quite clearly:
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”
3. Manipulations during the Vietnam War so that it would last longer, more Americans and Vietnamese would die and the US would end up deeper in debt.
4. Support for the coup in Chile that ousted Salvador Allende, caused his death, and replaced him with General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet embarked on the violent repression of dissenters which resulted in many deaths and brutal torture.
5. Support to Indonesia’s dictator Suharto and in particular of his violent repression in East Timor.
6. Support for Pakistani general Yahya Khan in his brutal repression of Bengali protesters who wanted to secede from Pakistan and create Bangladesh in 1971.
These disasters aren’t the work of just one man, Kissinger. He is just a cog in the wheel of the intelligentsia; he has served his warring rich masters well and has been rewarded with money, influence, and a good name, enough to secure him a Nobel Peace Prize. His books talk about the need for a world order that supposedly increases freedom and democracy, when in reality, it does the opposite. The media pays homage to Kissinger from the New York Times to the Wall St journal, they laud his vision. As James Traub from the Wall St Journal said regarding Kissinger’s book “World Order“:
“the book undermines the romantic pieties that have shaped America’s foreign policy for decades.”
Only a media so subservient to the war-mongering elites would consider that American foreign policy in the 20th century was full of ‘romantic pieties’. These romantic pieties are exactly what the intelligentsia calls childlike behavior of the masses by believing in peace, democracy, and equality.
This lack of accountability for gross errors that don’t help anyone, except the coffers of this intelligentsia, continues unabated because the mainstream media does not provide the public with the information required for accountability from below, meaning the people. It is quite evident that the media’s role as propaganda is a success, while the media’s role as a provider of information is a complete disaster. As Kissinger says, the truth doesn’t matter, it is the perceived truth that matters, which corresponds to the mainstay of the media.
Bernays would be proud of the way the world has evolved, the fast evolution of technology was supposed to make it easier for people to get a variety of information, but instead, it has proven to make easier the spread of propaganda. His belief that only an invisible group of elites could secure a real democracy has been copied to the letter. The Internet was supposed to bring alternative views to the masses, yet, the number of people who have the time and are willing to make an effort to find alternative information remains the same as when we had barely a rudimentary printing press.
In this propaganda world, dissent is quelled quite rapidly; it is either called a conspiracy theory, a source of discrimination, and lately, ‘fake news’. These attacks are based not necessarily on the truth value of the dissent, but mostly on their divergence from the elite’s agenda. The media dictates to us the experts that we should believe without questioning and which experts we shouldn’t believe defining them as conspiracy theorists. Often, the assertions of the media’s correct ‘experts’ turn out to be false, as it happened with the widespread fallacious reporting about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; the supposed conspiracy theorists who dared to go against the elite’s agenda by claiming it was all a farce, ended up as the upholders of truth.
The belief in the need for an elite of thinkers is a recurrent theme in the history of the world. Even the source of our current liberal cultural views, the Enlightenment, had many adherents who believed that public opinion must be molded by the ideas of the thinking enlightened elites, who like themselves, always know better. When their ideas and actions were questioned, there was no acceptance of their mistakes; the blame was transferred to their most vilified group at the time, the priests, or the ‘stupid’ ignorant masses at home or in their colonized countries. Bernays’ ideas continued this tradition of considering the elites as the rightful rulers of our opinions. The advent of industrialization allowed for a new class of people to attain an extreme concentration of wealth that gives them the power to rule over public opinion; the problem is that their interest seems to be more centered on their own profit and power, than in the good of the majority. Propaganda is alive and well, it is disseminated via TV, internet, phones, printed press, books, movies, magazines, and social media. The uniformity of thought insisted upon in our current culture betrays its intolerance for dissent and the propaganda quality of most of its information. This state of affairs precludes accountability from the people and without accountability, the rise of misinformation is assured, as is the lack of truth value in most of our information.
