[Reader-list] War, Propaganda, Empire - IRAQ ETC.

[Faizan Ahmed]

Hi,

Here is another Great Presentation from Mr. P. Sainath, presented at a Public 
Forum, "Media and the War on Iraq" , organsied by Asian Regional Exchange for 
New Alternatives, Hong Kong - and Indians will find many shocking truths 
which Mr. Sainath has well researched and presented - covering a span of 
atleast half a century:

Best 

Faizan

=========================================================

War, Propaganda, Empire



P. SAINATH

Presented at a public forum, ‘Media and the War on Iraq’ orgainsed by Asian
 Regional Exchange for New Alternatives, Hong Kong


My topic really is war propaganda and empire. Before I get into the history
 of it, I would like to say something. Embedded journalism is a state of the
 mind. You don’t have to be traveling with an army to be an embedded
 journalist. Between 1965 and 1975, there were 5,000 American journalists in
 Saigon, and they still didn’t get the story right. Not one of these
 unembedded guys managed to tell the true story of the Gulf of Tonkin
 Incident for about a decade. So ‘embeddedness’ is a state of mind, you can
 sit right next to your PC in your office in Oklahoma or wherever and be an
 embedded journalist.  I don’t know if the existing media networks or
 conglomerates would ever allow for instance Al Jazeera to be shown in their
 countries in the name of free flow. I’d like to see it happen, I‘d like Al
 Jazeera to be available to all viewers on that continent. When the heck is
 it going to happen?

The word "embedded" in terms of embedded journalism, it’s a fascinating term,
 we’ll come back to it. But you have in this very country, in Hong Kong in
 1975, a lecture made by Barry Zorthian who was the head of JUSPAO, the Joint
 US Public Affairs Office that ran the Vietnam war propaganda, and he
 complained that some of the "embedded" journalists of that time were so dumb
 that they could not take signals when something was going wrong. And Barry
 Zorthian was pretty disgusted, so he gave up his job at JUSPAO -- where he
 had an equal ranking with the CIA Station Chief and General Westmoreland in
 terms of hierarchy in propaganda -- and went back to his old job as
 Vice-President of Time Magazine.

Now my own presentation. 88 years ago, 8,500 Indian troops died in a single
 battle. In one single battle. That too was in Iraq, and that too took place
 in the name of regime change. Then too they had to be sacrificed because of
 the various problems the regime that wanted to do the changing was facing.
 The battle was the Battle of Kut, it was fought between the end of 1915 and
 the early part of 1916. The British Empire had taken a pasting in Gallipoli,
 and the War Office desperately needed some propaganda for back home to
 explain to mothers why their children had to die in so many millions.

Chemical weapons and poison gas were being freely used by the civilized
 nations on the green fields of France. So the War Office sent an order to
 the 6th British Indian Army Division to take Baghdad. They were in no
 position to take Baghdad, they didn’t have a chance in hell of taking
 Baghdad, but they had to take Baghdad to reduce the propaganda pressure on
 the War Office at home because they had been defeated at Gallipoli, there
 was growing demoralization at home, a victory had to be produced. And it was
 thought that by changing the regime in Baghdad, at that time Mesopotamia…
 the British were actually fighting the Turks at the time, not the regime in
 Baghdad, but there was a small hackneyed gang holed up in Baghdad. The
 Indian army division tried doing what it could not do, it lost 8,000 people
 in a single battle at Kut. 88 years later, India and Pakistan are both being
 asked to send troops to support the regime change in Iraq that has taken
 place already so that we can lose a few thousand more soldiers there. This
 is the mindset of empire. As long as somebody else’s soldiers are dying, it
 doesn’t really matter



You know, if you listen even to the presentations of the embeds… I don’t
 think the problem with the war was the logistics, or the costs, or that
 things were going wrong, or that things were not going the way the military
 said. The problem with the war was the war! That was the problem, the war
 itself was immoral, unjustified, had no basis in international law. So the
 sympathy that builds up looking at the problems of "ordinary folks",
 "ordinary GI Joes" because he or she was battered at home or whatever, is
 not looking at the miseries and sufferings inflicted on the Iraqi people.
 Which was what the war was about. And that’s really one of the problems of
 embedded journalism, Iraqis are blacked out- even the sorrows and emotions
 and sadness that we experience are those of good old GI Joe and Jane. It’s
 too much of a problem for me.

But let’s get back to Gallipoli. The defeat in Gallipoli was later painted as
 a propaganda victory, like Dunkirk. The Indian army and other conscripts
 from colonies were sacrificed not in their hundreds but in their tens of
 thousands on the battlefields of Iraq for the next two years, The mind of
 empire does not end with one war, it does not end with war, it does not end
 with Iraq. Immediately after the war in 1919, and this is of interest to you
 considering the propaganda you have been exposed to in this war, Britain
 systematically, deliberately, explicitly used chemical weapons against the
 people of Iraq. And now they are looking for WMDs and chemical weapons in
 Iraq. They probably will find traces of their own stuff! They certainly will
 find the graves of tens of thousands of people who died from the poison gas
 they used in Iraq, with the following words from Winston Churchill: "I do
 not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in
 favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effects
 should be good, and it would spread a lively terror."

The difference then as with now is that they were a little more honest about
 it, they were more open about it, and since the natives were anyway
 sub-humans, and we all know they are sub-humans, so how the hell does it
 matter if you use poison gas? Today you take an individual and demonize him
 so you can take over the rest of the people and show nothing, because your
 embedded journalists are not in interaction with those people. So nothing
 very different happens, according to me, in war propaganda, it just happens
 in different places.  But it happens in different eras.

When it happens in our era, it happens in an era when the media is more
 concentrated than ever before, in the hands of half a dozen conglomerates
 essentially. Therefore the capacity to deceive is far greater than your
 intent to deceive. I might have the intent to deceive, I might print in a
 newspaper ‘Little Green Men From Mars Landed Outside My Window Yesterday’,
 but it doesn’t matter if my newspaper has a circulation of 5 and a print
 order of 100. But if it happens to be Rupert Murdoch’s son you can cause
 panic in the streets with that kind of story, because your capacity to
 deceive is far greater when you’re presiding over an empire, in print alone,
 of 6 billion words daily, as he does. So what’s changed is that things are
 unfolding in a very different media environment, at a time of a collapse on
 restraint of global corporations, at a time of really, really ferocious
 neoliberal market fundamentalism where everything can be justified on a
 particular kind of terms.



Let’s get back to Iraq. I don’t know how many of you saw one of the first
 Rumsfeld press conferences, where all journalists sat there and… oh, by the
 way, I remember Tommy Franks’ press conference, I don’t know if any of you
 saw this, where the props were a US$250,000 set designed in Hollywood. So
 even the damn press conference props, from where these guys address the
 world, are designed in Hollywood, you can get the intent -- you design a
 Hollywood set to have a press conference on the war, you can tell what the
 content is going to be. Anyway, here’s what Rumsfeld said at the other press
 conference, I have this verbatim: "It looks like the bombing of a city, but
 it isn’t." The bombing has been so precise, he told the embeds and the
 empty-heads and everybody else, the altitude and angles of bombing, he
 suggested had been so well calculated as to minimize human damage, loss of
 human life. This at a time when 2,000 pound and 5,000 pound bombs were
 falling on people in Baghdad.

Now this, as I said, is in itself not a new thing. In 1945, Brigadier General
 Thomas Farrell -- Deputy Director of the Manhattan Project that had made
 those two bombs called Fat Man and Little Boy that were dropped on Hiroshima
 and Nagasaki -- addressing the first international media circus in Tokyo
 after the bombing of Hiroshima, this General Thomas Farrell said, and I
 quote verbatim: "The atomic bombs were exploded at a specifically calculated
 altitude to exclude any possibility of residual radioactivity." They managed
 to control the altitude, you know, they just shoved a damn bomb out of a
 plane, but they managed to control the altitude at which it would burst.
 This was followed up with the great embedded loyalty of that wonderful
 newspaper the New York Times that reported a few days later in a banner
 headline: "No radioactivity in the ruins of Hiroshima." A few days later,
 the United States government felt so emboldened by such embedded loyalty it
 declared the most fantastic thing of all which has now been hushed up and
 buried. They actually came out with a statement saying "radioactivity not
 harmful". Official statement, radioactivity is not harmful.

You don’t even have to go so far back, in 1965 in the war against Vietnam
 that 5,000 journalists couldn’t get it right, Time Magazine August 5 1965
 reports the use of gas against Vietnamese civilians and soldiers, poison
 gas, as "non-lethal gas warfare." Now "warfare" and "non-lethal" are
 contradictory terms! By the way, it was the great Peter Arnett who first
 used those words, "non-lethal gas warfare." He was then with the Associated
 Press. And Time Magazine gave its own take on the use of gas against
 "uncivilized tribes", as Winston Churchill so honestly put it. Time Magazine
 said that compared to bombs like napalm-- it didn’t mention that napalm was
 also a US weapon, it wasn’t being used by the Vietnamese — compared to
 napalm, these "temporarily disabling gases are positively more humane than
 horrible." That was Time reporting in 1965 on the use of gas on the
 "uncivilized tribes" of Vietnam.

From Churchill to George Bush, the attitude of empire towards the
 "uncivilized tribes" has remained essentially unchanged, but a lot of other
 things have changed. The politics in the world have changed, the structure
 of propaganda has changed, the ways in which things are done have changed.
 The language, the debasement of language right through by military
 structures and empire is fantastic. How easily all of us have accepted into
 our lexicons the use of words like WMDs, you know, Weapons of Mass
 Destruction. Little acronyms for various things. ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’,
 ‘War on Terror’, every one of these is a totally questionable term…

Right through the 70s and the 80s, two of the fastest growing sectors of the
 global economy were information and armaments. And the growing integration
 between these two sectors, the rapid integration between the sectors of
 information and armaments, had and has very obvious implications for the
 content of information that we get, for the kind of media environment that
 we live in. These huge conglomerates, these little oligarchies, about 6 of
 them, whether you are taking Time-Warner or Disney… just take Time Warner.
 Its market value is equal to the combined GDP of say Mali, Mauritania,
 Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and half a dozen other countries. The kind of clout
 it gives these guys is something enormous and astonishing. And this whole
 business about "giving the public what it wants" is essentially an attitude
 of enormous disrespect for the public. It’s not what the public wants, the
 idea that the public wants something and they are being given it is very
 misleading. It’s what I want to give the public, which my advertisers want
 to give the public, which my sponsors want to give the public, and the
 public, if it has very few choices, will take.

That’s why you have a situation, and one thing that the United States media
 proves comprehensively, is that it is possible to have the world’s largest
 media and the world’s least informed public. Where else in the world did 55%
 of the people believe that Saddam was tied to al Qaida, and 42% believe that
 he was behind the WTC attacks? Because they have no media alternatives. They
 have the same bunch of gangsters raining propaganda at them in a very, very,
 blanketing, saturating level, and not much can be done about it. So just as
 patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, blaming the public for what
 it wants is a bit of an escape, there are very real forces controlling the
 media that may not be able to do all that the public does not want, but will
 do a hell of a lot that the public never asked for. Sure, public attitudes
 and culture can also be shaped over a period of time, but a lot of public
 would like a lot of plain information which was not coloured the way it was.

In conclusion I think that what you have today is, one, empire plus
 neoliberalism plus concentration and more concentration of media equals
 disaster. That’s the first point I’d like to make.

Second, there’s something sad and yet worth learning. In war, the hypocrisy
 of media sometimes stands naked, so we are all ready to condemn and
 criticize. However, the same media does that and much worse during peace as
 well. It does so when it covers the WTO, when it covers the disputes over
 economics, when it covers markets and market fundamentalism and neoliberal
 ideologies, when it covers so-called "success stories". You know, Mexico is
 a "success-story" then Mexico is down the drain, then Argentina is a
 "success story" then you have to look for it with a telescope down the tube.
 They cover all these the same way, but it doesn’t provoke our indignation in
 the same way. It’s the same package, it’s the same mindset, the same
 ideological package. And you’d better get accustomed to the idea, it’s not
 just that the stumbled on the issue of war. It’s an integrated package…

On the issue of alternative media, I was fascinated to hear the example [of
 Korea], there are two or three others that I am personally aware of

I think, by the way, nobody here or anywhere has a right to complain about
 the mainstream media if you are not subscribing to at least two alternative
 media experiments. If you don’t subscribe to those and you don’t put your
 money where your mouth is, don’t whine. I don’t want to hear it. So that’s
 one thing. The second thing is, however much I might support, and I hope all
 of you support, alternative media experiments, I am not willing to give up
 my space in the mainstream media. I think that has got to be liberated from
 the embedded hierarchies of neocolonialism. And to liberate the media from
 the embedded structures of the global conglomerates, we need public action.
 We need to assert that public space has to be respected in the private fora,
 we need to assert that public interest must prevail over private profit, I
 think we have to recover the public space that the conglomerates have taken
 over in the media. If you cannot stop the march of monopoly, you will find
 it very difficult to liberate yourself from embedded propaganda.

There’s one final thing which gives us a lot of hope. The fantastic thing is
 that the limit of this propaganda was also reached in the Iraq war. The most
 fantastic thing is that the media have never been more concentrated that
 they were in this war, they have never been more powerful than they were at
 this time. And yet, there was a divergence between what they said and what
 85% of the world’s public believed and marched for. Governments and media
 were on one side, the public were on the other.

The Indian government did its best to bootlick the Americans on sending
 troops to Iraq, but couldn’t do it because of the opposition of the Indian
 public, despite major newspapers like the Times of India writing editorials
 saying "get ready to go and take care of Baghdad." They couldn’t do it
 because of public opposition despite the media’s position. In Spain, New
 Europe, the government supported the American war on Iraq, 85% of the
 Spanish people opposed it. So this divergence: I think it opens up a window,
 it allows us to explore what are the possibilities for breaking this
 monopoly over the mind. And I think that has come not from mindless herds
 that want something so Murdoch gives it to them. Have respect for the
 ordinary people of the world, they showed you that they are not willing to
 buy into this propaganda. That opens up a space, that opens up hope. You do
 not adjust to empire, you end it



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