June 21, 2013
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In his book,
Propaganda, published in 1928, Edward Bernays
wrote: "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."
The American nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays invented
the term "public relations" as a euphemism for state propaganda. He
warned that an enduring threat to the invisible government was the
truth-teller and an enlightened public.
In 1971, whistleblower
Daniel Ellsberg leaked US government files known as The Pentagon Papers,
revealing that the invasion of Vietnam was based on systematic lying.
Four years later, Frank Church conducted sensational hearings in the US
Senate: one of the last flickers of American democracy. These laid bare
the full extent of the invisible government: the domestic spying and
subversion and warmongering by intelligence and "security" agencies and
the backing they received from big business and the media, both
conservative and liberal.
Speaking about the National Security
Agency (NSA), Senator Church said: "I know that the capacity that there
is to make tyranny in America, and we must see to it that this agency
and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law …
so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which
there is no return."
On 11 June, following the revelations in the
Guardian by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg wrote that
the US had now "that abyss".
Snowden’s revelation that Washington
has used Google, Facebook, Apple and other giants of consumer technology
to spy on almost everyone, is further evidence of modern form of
fascism – that is the "abyss". Having nurtured old-fashioned fascists
around the world – from Latin America to Africa and Indonesia – the
genie has risen at home. Understanding this is as important as
understanding the criminal abuse of technology.
Fred Branfman, who
exposed the "secret" destruction of tiny Laos by the US Air Force in
the 1960s and 70s, provides an answer to those who still wonder how a
liberal African-American president, a professor of constitutional law,
can command such lawlessness. "Under Mr. Obama," he wrote for AlterNet,
"no president has done more to create the infrastructure for a possible
future police state." Why? Because Obama, like George W Bush,
understands that his role is not to indulge those who voted for him but
to expand "the most powerful institution in the history of the world,
one that has killed, wounded or made homeless well over 20 million human
beings, mostly civilians, since 1962."
In the new American
cyber-power, only the revolving doors have changed. The director of
Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, was adviser to Condoleezza Rice, the former
secretary of state in the Bush administration who lied that Saddam
Hussein could attack the US with nuclear weapons. Cohen and Google’s
executive chairman, Eric Schmidt – they met in the ruins of Iraq – have
co-authored a book, The New Digital Age, endorsed as visionary by the
former CIA director Michael Hayden and the war criminals Henry Kissinger
and Tony Blair. The authors make no mention of the Prism spying
program, revealed by Edward Snowden, that provides the NSA access to all
of us who use Google.
Control and dominance are the two words
that make sense of this. These are exercised by political, economic and
military designs, of which mass surveillance is an essential part, but
also by insinuating propaganda in the public consciousness. This was
Edward Bernays’s point. His two most successful PR campaigns were
convincing Americans they should go to war in 1917 and persuading women
to smoke in public; cigarettes were "torches of freedom" that would
hasten women’s liberation.
It is in popular culture that the
fraudulent "ideal" of America as morally superior, a "leader of the free
world", has been most effective. Yet, even during Hollywood’s most
jingoistic periods there were exceptional films, like those of the exile
Stanley Kubrick, and adventurous European films would have US
distributors. These days, there is no Kubrick, no Strangelove, and the
US market is almost closed to foreign films.
When I showed my own film,
The War on Democracy,
to a major, liberally-minded US distributor, I was handed a laundry
list of changes required, to "ensure the movie is acceptable". His
memorable sop to me was: "OK, maybe we could drop in Sean Penn as
narrator. Would that satisfy you?" Lately, Katherine Bigelow’s
torture-apologizing
Zero Dark Thirtyand Alex Gibney’s
We Steal Secrets,
a cinematic hatchet job on Julian Assange, were made with generous
backing by Universal Studios, whose parent company until recently was
General Electric. GE manufactures weapons, components for fighter
aircraft and advance surveillance technology. The company also has
lucrative interests in "liberated" Iraq.
The power of
truth-tellers like Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden
is that they dispel a whole mythology carefully constructed by the
corporate cinema, the corporate academy and the corporate media.
WikiLeaks is especially dangerous because it provides truth-tellers with
a means to get the truth out. This was achieved by
Collateral Damage,
the cockpit video of an US Apache helicopter allegedly leaked by
Bradley Manning. The impact of this one video marked Manning and Assange
for state vengeance. Here were US airmen murdering journalists and
maiming children in a Baghdad street, clearly enjoying it, and
describing their atrocity as "nice". Yet, in one vital sense, they did
not get away with it; we are witnesses now, and the rest is up to us.
John
Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker,
is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his
documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US.
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