- Every week or so, the New York Times carries an item
on how the US has bombed a military installation in Iraq. This is strange
on the face of it. When you bomb someone's country, doesn't that imply
that the war has already begun? Not according to the US. The US government
says that it is merely "patrolling" the no-fly zone and retaliating
for Iraqi fire.
-
- I mentioned the US bombs to someone the other day, who
didn't quite believe it. If the US were currently using weapons of mass
destruction against Iraq, wouldn't we know more about it? And truly, it
is hardly ever talked about. (Neither, for that matter, are the decade
old trade sanctions, which are also warlike.)
-
- True to form, Donald Rumsfeld decided to take preemptive
action against misperceptions concerning US bombing. Standing in front
of a color graphic labeled: "No-Fly Zones: Iraqi Violations"
he detailed with scientific precision all the times that that Iraq has
fired on US and British planes.
-
- And don't you dare point out that, after all, this all
takes place inside Iraq. Imagine if Iraq declared, say, Michigan to be
a no-fly zone, insisted on the right of patrolling it, and dropping bombs
if the US fired on the foreign planes. Imagine if Iraq did this while calling
for a regime change in the US. The US could easily mistake such actions
for acts of war.
-
- Given that he would probably rather keep quiet about
US activities, the very fact of the Rumsfeld press conference is revealing.
It seems that the Bush administration's timing is off. It's been using
the last several months dispensing war propaganda in order to rally the
public for an attack.
-
- But opponents of war <http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=against+war>have
also been organizing and there is a rising sense that the public is just
not as supportive of the idea at it might be. World opinion is solidly
against a US attack on Iraq, while American opinion is softly pro-war at
best, and generally less enthusiastic than Bush might have hoped.
-
- What does it mean? Having just read David Welch's <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0415119103/lewrockwell/>The
Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda ( New York: Routledge, 1993, 2002),
one can speculate that it means the following: the opinions of the intellectuals
are making advances over the opinions of the masses, the intended target
of the war propaganda.
-
- Now, before you send me a hysterical email, know that
I am not saying that Bush is like Hitler. Neither, for that matter, did
Germany's justice minister, Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, who caused fits of frenzy
in the US by observing that distracting people with foreign menaces in
the face of domestic trouble is a common tactic of statecraft. "Even
Hitler did that," she observed.
-
- Just so. Indeed, we find in the experience of the Third
Reich a model of war propaganda that is easy to recognized in any state
that seeks war ñ and to that extent, the Bush administration's method
can be seen to have something in common with that of the National Socialists
in the 1930s.
-
- Hitler came to understand the importance of propaganda
as a result of watching the workings of the Allied Powers in World War
I. He came to believe that their main victory was not military but in the
conquest of public opinion. It was the anti-German feeling that made possible
the imposition of a war treaty that was brutal as regards German territories.
It was this model of propaganda that he sought to replicate once in power.
-
- According to the Hitlerian model, good political/war
propaganda:
-
- Must forget about appealing to the intellectuals and
go directly to the masses, not with careful argument but with dire assertions
and clear agendas.
- Must not have a long litany of points or a case that
requires careful thought but rather one must have one, two, or three points
that sum up the case so that it can be immediately grasped by the man on
the street.
- Must not be radically implausible but must tap into and
reinforce a preexisting socio-cultural sensibility and stretched to accord
with one's political ambition.
- As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf,
-
- "To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the
scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses? It
must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses."
- "The receptivity of the great masses is very limited,
their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous.
In consequences, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few
points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public
understands what you want him to understand by your slogan."
- "the art of propaganda lies in understanding the
emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically
correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad
masses."
- In the Third Reich, the plausible assertion involved
pointing to the unjustness of the Versailles Treaty, together with playing
up an existing socio-political bias by affixing blame for Germany's current
plight to the Jews, and calling for justice based on reclaiming lost territory
and purging Germany of "alien" political and cultural forces
that would stand in the way ñ all to be done through the strength
and leadership of one man.
-
- And so the masses were hammered again and again with
slogans: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer. Neither did the propaganda have
to make much sense. One common poster read: "Marxism is the Guardian
Angel of Capitalism. Vote National Socialist." If you were inclined
to point out that Marxism and capitalism are opposite systems and that
socialism and Marxism are indistinguishable in practice ñ as brave
men like Wilhelm Roepke and Ludwig von Mises did ñ well, you must
be an dissident intellectual and therefore you should probably be silenced.
-
- The means for accomplishing the goals of political/war
propaganda were different in those days. There were newspapers and radio
and mass political rallies, and the National Socialists were very good
at using all the newest technology.
-
- The same means cannot be employed today, at least not
directly. The regime must use existing channels of communication, which
means it must depend on middle men: reporters and editors and talk show
hosts.
-
- Fortunately for the current regime, these are all very
stupid people, stupid and gullible. They know they are hacks and worry,
above all else, that this will be discovered. They specialize in seeming
to know what they do not know, which means that they have a tendency to
defer to anyone with more specialized knowledge, particularly knowledge
that seems to come from an inside source.
-
- In our time, the message must be relayed calmly, almost
coolly, so that it comes across well on television. There must be supporting
documentation (it doesn't need to be true) so that reporters can fill up
their column inches. And it must depend on argument from authority because
everyone knows that reporters, editors, and producers defer to authority
for favors and access.
-
- The message we hear today abides by all the usual rules
concerning political propaganda. It taps into a certain truth ("Terrorists
want to harm us"), draws on already established biases ("Saddam
is a very bad man"), and has in mind a certain political solution
("regime change"). The only difference is that it is packaged
in a way to make it compelling to those with access to the public mind
so they can be persuaded to pass on the information without critical commentary.
-
- Of course the intellectuals don't buy it, but then they
do not have to. During September 11 anniversary events at our local university,
hardly any faculty displayed interest in the flags, the pomp, the songs,
the whipping up of war fever. Regardless of their politics otherwise, probably
95 percent of the faculty looked down their noses at the display of bellicosity
and chauvinism. This is very striking, and for all the problems in academia
today, it should be congratulated for this at least.
-
- Of course, the regime has its kept intellectuals, those
who will echo the line of the moment. They write for National Review and
the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal and they are very valuable
to the regime for putting an intelligent spin on propaganda that is otherwise
pathetically low brow. But they are in the minority now. For the most part,
the intellectual classes are not buying into the war line.
-
- Regardless of the handful of intellectuals willing to
do the state's bidding in this case, the success of war propaganda depends
on convincing the masses in such a way that public opinion swamps the opinions
of the intellectuals ñ making the intelligentsia feel outnumbered,
isolated, and passive. A few months back, this is certainly how matters
stood. Most intellectuals were only willing to grouse about public opinion
in private moments. Some of those who raised their voices were drummed
out of a job.
-
- But that does seem to be changing now, for three reasons:
the Bush administration has been ineffective in rallying the masses, possibly
because its case is just not that compelling; second, because Americans
don't like to think of themselves as starting wars; and third, intellectuals
are beginning to speak out in classrooms, in opeds, in articles, on the
web, and on television.
-
- Too many questions are being raised, and the masses are
starting to hear another side. The people are not being converted, at least
not yet. It is also possible ñ we can't rule this out ñ that
the masses are not as stupid as the opinion-molding middle men the current
regime has so thoroughly cowed.
-
- This could stop the war. The failure of propaganda is
the failure of the state.
- _____
-
- Jeffrey Tucker is vice president of the <http://www.mises.org/>Mises
Institute
- Copyright © 2002 by LewRockwell.com
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