A Short Note on the Effects of Propaganda

During routine perusing of the internet, I happened across a very interesting and informative video documentary titled, War Made Easy¹.  This video examines the devastating nature of propaganda and its perverse and insidious capability to alter the human experience.  Nevertheless, it seems rather apt, that on the five-year anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, we might do well to remember what truly matters most; the continually increasing body count: 4,000² Americans, 175 British and an estimated – believe it or not – 1,033,000 Iraqis³; this is a statistic that we rarely, if ever, hear from our supposedly unbiased western news media.  All the same, I highly recommend taking time to watch this revealing and poignant documentary.

 

With depressing regularity, political pundits and the news media, who publicly espouse the virtues of democracy and of a free press, obfuscate reality and shirk their sacrosanct duty to inform the citizenry.  Democratic societies can hardly function when the civil body is misinformed and poorly educated; perhaps the goal?  This documentary builds on what the great George Orwell, attempted to warn us about well over 60-years prior, but we didn’t listen then and few are listening now.  The simple fact is that most of the American news media – even the so-called “liberal” ones – jumped on the pro-war bandwagon because to do otherwise, would be akin to doing violence to their profitability.  If any do decide to watch this video; in the very last minutes, the narrator speaks of a Senator emeritus, Wayne Morse of Oregon.  This man was absolutely correct in what he said, and it makes me wonder whatever happened to such courageous leadership?  Why is that most Americans have never heard of this man?

 

For those of us living in the so-called “free world,” propaganda and its effects are something that each and every one of us must constantly be on-guard against, for, as it stands, our collective somnambulism is undermining the very freedoms we claim to champion.  As Professor Noam Chomsky pointed out, “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”⁴  What will be required in order to rouse us from our great slumber?  Now is the time to hold accountable our media, our politicians and, most importantly, ourselves for the atrocities of our inaction.  The propagandists are hard at work revising reality, yet we sleep… As some may recall, the protagonist of “1984,” Winston Smith, employed by the Ministry of Truth in the important yet ironic capacity of “editing” history, stole a moment to write to a future generation these prohibited and haunting words:

 

            To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:

            From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings!⁵ 

 

 

End Notes:

 

1. http://throwawayyourtelescreen.wordpress.com/
2. http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/03/23/iraq.main/index.html
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORB_survey_of_Iraq_War_casualties
4. Chomsky, Noam. (1999), Profit Over People.  Seven Stories, New York.
5.  Orwell, George. (1948), 1984.  Borzoi Books, London, 1992.