When I was at school, aged 13, I wrote on my desk, in six inch high letters, possibly the shortest sentence in the English Language. “I’m Me”. Years later, I remembered writing it but couldn’t quite understand what I had meant by it. And then I did. I am not a Doctor, or a Lawyer, or a Subject, or a Junior. I am just myself.
I rejected all the labels and eventually concluded that there should be only two. The first is my name and it makes me unique. The second label is “human” and it makes me just the same as everyone else in my species. While this notation identifies uniqueness, it also suppresses ego… “I am unique… just like everyone else”.
Labels should be used sparingly as they are far too often used in one of the most insidious inventions of Power – Divide and Rule. One of the few exceptions to the use of labels might be that I would wish to know that the person who is offering me medical treatment has had some training and some experience.
Labels have been around as long as people have used name-calling as a way to mistreat other people. It is the central technique of the altogether more recent formalization of this process by Edward Bernays in the 1920s into a subject that we now politely call Public Relations.
There is a growing consciousness regarding the use of labels. When a person’s proposed salary is discussed, it is immediately obvious if their race or gender figure in that conversation then racism and sexism are at play.
When a country looks for a pretext for war, soldiers only need to be told that those people are “the enemy”, with further justification being apparently unnecessary. The Public however need a little more convincing and so the enemy used to be labelled “un-Christian”. If a fundamentalist religious war is being waged, then even in this supposedly advanced and modern era, the term “infidel” suffices for ISIS.
The label “Communist” used to be a sufficient pretext for outright killing but now it’s more the case that we are urged very strongly not to elect them rather than actually murder them for their beliefs.
So then we arrive at “terrorists”. Surely we can justify murdering them?
Military Dictatorships routinely suppress dissent with outright murder of “terrorists” on the streets. So they must be terrorists, right? But they are unarmed. No problem. Once we have murdered them, we can always place rifles in their hands and pretend they were terrorists. Bringing us back to our friend Bernays and his Phoney Arms Ploy.
Eventually we will arrive in the future where it is not enough to call someone any name as a reason to kill them. A more enlightened Public will demand to see verifiable evidence of an evil enemy at work before giving their consent to the use of force.
In the future, as consciousness of manipulation develops, we will become fully immune to the twisted language of Public Relations. This is already happening. And because everyone will be seen as human, there remains no justification for their murder.
The deception by which the media shape our reaction to events is based on its selection of words and terms. George Orwell is fast becoming the prophet of our time. He must have been aware of the likes of Edward Bernays when in 1949 he wrote probably his most famous book, 1984, and came up with the concept of double-speak, effectively another name for Public Relations, or Spin, and which today has become a regular feature of government briefings and news management. God forbid that they should jst tell us what happened – instead, our reactions to what we are told must be managed. By careful selection of “relevant” facts and judicious use of labels we must be led to the correct opinion.
Below are listed only some of the most common concepts which possess alternative means to describe them – a favourable version when the establishment does it and an unfavourable version when the official enemy does it.
Bear in mind that either word describes exactly the same activity…
ESTABLISHMENT | OFFICIAL ENEMY |
Armed Forces | Armed fanatics Terrorists |
Peace Keeping Mission Intervention Adventure | Invasion Annexation |
Restore Order Protect National Security | Remove Opposition |
Accident | Atrocity |
Firm | Ruthless |
Free and Fair Elections | Rigged Elections |
Legislate | Dictate |
Law Enforcement | Repression |
One-off scandal | Systemic Corruption |
Intelligence Activity | Spies |
Enquiry | Cover Up |
War on Drugs | Attack the Poor |
Cut Public Spending | Undermine Living Standards |
Culture | Propaganda |
Beyond the P.R. and the constant resort to Government Press Briefings and News management, it might be easy to lose sight of the fact that the Mainstream Media could instead simply present us with the Facts.
Before the media rush to report another foreign conflict, they could always attempt to establish the context, the facts, through a little investigative questioning and arrive at a few substantive descriptions rather than double speak.
Here are a few honest questions that a decent-minded journalist, who has a few suspicions about their Government’s Press Briefing, might ask themselves before reporting the story about a conflict in another land.
Who are the Government? Were they elected by the people or imposed in a coup? This vital context is often omitted.
Which side are the vast majority of people on? Often, we see foreign mercenaries, boy slave soldiers and massive military aid on one side, and the vast majority of the population on the other. This is not a “Civil War”. Either the people are rising up against their Government, in which case it’s a Revolution, or the people are rising up to protect their Government in which case it’s to repel a sponsored Foreign Intervention.
What specific events have occurred in the last few years before the conflict? Have the Government tried to act in the interests of their people and divest foreign powers of access to land or resources? Or have the Government acted against the people with brutal repression and attacks on living standards. Easy to check with a quick look at the Indices as we have done previously.
Which foreign Power have invested heavily in the Country and therefore have interests to protect. Is there evidence that implicates them in funding an uprising, an attack on the sovereignty of another Nation?
On this basis, objective reporting is easy.
The fact is that the media do not rush to answer any of these crucial questions that will explain what is going on. They may claim that they don’t really know what’s going on even though thousands of East Timorese tried to tell them for twenty years that an atrocity is being committed by the Indonesian Generals in their country. There are vast swathes of legitimate factual reporting that the media dismiss, ignore, deny, repel, discredit or debate until everybody’s bored of the debate and the evidence can be quietly dropped.
A good example was economist Franklyn Holzman’s “Are the Soviets really outspending the U.S. on defence?” (International Security, Spring 1980) which demonstrated that the calls for greater U.S. weaponry on the basis of the “Soviet threat” were entirely spurious. This report was never refuted, but neither was it promoted. It was simply ignored and forgotten and so the propaganda won the argument, the truth was left behind and the U.S. continued with arms proliferation for their own reasons which had nothing to do with Soviet threats but of course everything to do with keeping their Third World despots armed to the teeth against any popular uprisings – the Rio Sumpul and Lempa River massacres in El Salvador (’80/’81), the Contra War against the Nicaraguan people (from 1979), and the slaughter of 50,000 Mayan Indians in Guatemala over the next 6 years through to 1986.
The Soviet Threat had to be invoked (and the media had to buy it) because bullying small states in Central America just doesn’t look good in print.
Where this isn’t evidence for the claim, in this case a Soviet threat, then it’s an exercise in Public Relations. Or instead you can more accurately call it lies, deception, distortion, omission, concealment or misinformation which all seem to be OK by Western standards. We all remember the Weapons of Mass Destruction that we were told existed in Iraq, and the strenuous efforts of weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Dr David Kelly to assure the West before the War in 2003 that there were none. Dr Kelly’s apparent suicide at this time is still, nearly 20 years later the subject of great suspicion and many unanswered questions.
Only when there is substance, i.e. evidence, reason, logic, witnesses or other multiple forms of corroboration, then there is truth. If our Media were required to present evidence before going to print, and this was enforced by the threat of prison sentences, our Media would look different indeed.
As it stands there are sources to which the media will lend credibility. Top of the list. Government departments. Even though they have often been exposed as partial at best and liars at worst. This doesn’t stop the media from rushing to these continually indicted sources for further misinformation.
Media should not consider it a requirement of “balance” or “objectivity” that they report an indicted source whose latest release again bears all the marks of concealment and distortion. But they could at the very least run a few checks to see whether the official version has any substance. But misinformation is regularly reported. Mass Media mislead ya.
Beyond this, the media’s refusal to investigate implicates them in the conspiracy to keep silent. The extent to which the media inform us defines how independent they are on the one hand, or how servile and compliant they are on the other. Terms such as “civil war” and “communists” are, far more often than not, a guarantee of a compliant media servility. Negligent, career-seeking journalists need to be replaced with journalists with at least some interest in arming the public with the truth, not the “line”.
As I review these lines in 2019, Donald Trump helpfully lends assistance to my position. He has his uses. Too stupid to understand the requirement to disguise true Imperial motives behind “earnest attempts to spread freedom and democracy”, Donald opens his big mouth. On the 13th November, the Guardian reports as follows…
“Donald Trump has insisted that the US military presence in Syria is “only for the oil”, contradicting his own officials who have insisted that the remaining forces were there to fight Isis… Following Trump’s earlier insistence that his administration was solely interested in “keeping” Syrian oil, the US military deployed mechanised military units to oil fields in the east of the country.
However, seizing or benefiting from oil on a foreign territory, without permission from the sovereign authority, would be a violation of international law. Several US officials had sought to interpret the president’s remarks as the US meant to meaning that the denying Isis access to the oil ” (sic)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/13/donald-trump-syria-oil-us-troops-isis-turkey
Although the journalist’s grammar seems to derail a little in that last sentence – maybe due to apoplexy that a US President has in a second undone 100 years of carefully constructed propaganda – we finally hear straight from the Horse’s mouth… the US is not interested in fighting for democracy or against communism or terror.
Contrary to the official line that the US has been shamefully peddling for the last century, Trump comes right out and tells it exactly how it is… the US is a rogue state that has no interest in the sovereignty of other nations, or International Law, or in fighting for democracy. It’s all about grabbing resources. The western propaganda machine falls apart in front of our very eyes.
Citizens who have done exactly the same as Trump, asserting the true priorities of Western Governments many times in Public over the years have been met with sneering and contemptuous disdain by Politicians who condescend that we idiots have no proper grasp of the complexities of Politics.
In the meantime the State and the Media will do what they can to repair the damage. State Officials will scramble around trying to re-interpret what the President said. The Guardian disappeared the story once it had been online on their front page for only a matter of minutes.
The corrupt career journalist is actually not a journalist, they are propagandists. When they continually quote an indicted source, refuse to lend credibility to the other side and refuse to investigate beyond what their government source has told them, what would you call them? I would call them cynical cowards and prostitutes, protecting their own careers by repeating the lies of the powerful. Or are they just doing their job and trying to pay the mortgage? Both.
The objective and method of Public Relations is to ignore, dismiss, ridicule the negative, and to exaggerate and publicise the positive. The PR therefore only reveals the hyped positive. In contrast, the actual reality may be a negative that far outweighs a hyped positive. In this way, regression can be presented as progress.
Take the example of Indonesia. Ignore death squads, widespread torture, and mass repression. Emphasise things like the release of three political prisoners (to co-incide with the visit of an American diplomat). Add a few abstract claims with no substantive basis like “moving towards democracy” (a slightly less rigged election?). Abstract claims are preferable because they don’t actually involve a requirement to then go and do anything.
The evidence is building a damning picture of our earnest reporter… the corrupt, cowardly, partially-sighted, career-minded propagandist will deliberately fall for the cheap conjuring trick of the Government spokesperson. The propagandist will report what he sees in the left hand which bears the public relations package, the false positive, the gesture – i.e. relief aid, earnest attempts at negotiation, improvements just around the corner.
The propagandist will not report what he sees (or refuses to see) in the right hand, i.e. the main part of the story – arms for the dictator, ignore the torture and other human rights abuses, keep stealing the crops and the minerals. In the left hand is the relief work to save a few locals, but in the right hand is the military aid that helped your dictator slaughter the locals in the first place. The military aid dwarfs the relief aid. The numbers killed dwarfs the numbers saved. The reporter sees the dwarf in the left hand, but fails to spot the giant in the right hand. Some oversight.
To invert an observation by Edward S. Herman … the test of a state propagandist, as opposed to an independent journalist, is that serial lying by his sources will not cause him to doubt their next statement. The opposite of investigative journalism is propaganda. The absence of the one indicates the presence of the other.
How is it possible to spend one hour every day devoted to a newspaper (any newspaper) that after 10, 20, 50 years gives no realistic (fact-based) understanding of any one single country throughout the entire world? US interventions to acquire foreign land and resources are written out of media history. The secret war against Cambodia. Half a story (i.e. US and other Imperialist crimes omitted) will never enable understanding, hence the confusion that calls itself a news item. If this appears as confusion, the excuse is given that these things are too complex to put in a few simple words, and of course then there is the risk of over-simplification. e.g. someone’s building an empire.
Over-simplification is allowed only if it puts forward a pro-government point of view. The US Government wished to crush the anti-fascist resistance in Greece after the second World War. All that was needed was a simplified analogy to Congress by Dean Acheson to justify the slaughter. He offered the idea that Greece was like a rotten apple that would infect the rest of the barrel (Western Europe, Africa, Asia Minor, Iran and all to the east) if the US did not intervene. This moronically simple analogy was deemed sufficient to re-install the Monarchy who were fascist sympathisers during World War 2.
A news media that constantly defaults to military and government Press Conferences and Wire Services does not permit journalists to equip their readers with the truth, only the “line”. The line is “applaud what is ours, attack what isn’t”. Information from international Aid agencies, local voluntary groups on the ground and even witnesses do not establish the “line”, they only provide ironic contradiction or “isolated incidents”, if reported at all.
The Military/Political Wire Service comes in to the media HQs. The filter operates and the News Report goes out, excluding US implication; hyping and applauding legal US actions; demonising the enemy no matter what the facts, or the evidence.