An Essay On .................

......Why American's Can't See What's Happening........
Here is a cogent essay by Brian Eno of the Observer (London) August 17 2003.It is entitled,Lessons in how to lie about Iraq. It is a brilliant expose.

"The problem is not propaganda but the relentless control of the kinds of things that we think about.
When I first visited Russia, in 1986, I made friends with a musician whose father had been Brezhnev's personal doctor. One day we were talking about life during 'the period of great stagnation'-the Brezhnev era. 'It must havebeen strange being so completely immersed in propaganda,' I said 'Ah,but there is a difference. We knew it was propaganda,' replied Sacha.

" That is the difference. Russian propaganda was so obvious that most Russians were able to ignore it. They took it for granted that the government operated in it's own interests and any message coming from it was probably slanted - and they discounted it.

"In the west the calculated manipulation of public opinion to serve political and ideological interests is much more covert and therefore much more effective. It's greatest triumph is that we generally don't notice it - or laugh at the notion it even exists. We watch democratic process taking place - heated debated in which we feel we could have a choice - and think that , because we have a 'free' media, it would be hard for the government to get away with anything very devious without someone calling them on it.

" It takes something as dramatic as the invasion of Iraq to make us look a bit more closely and ask: 'How did we get here?' How exexactly did it come about that, in a world of AIDS, global warming, 30-plus active wars, several famines, cloning, genetic engineering, and two billion people in poverty, practically the only thing we talked about for a year was Iraq and Saddam Hussein? Was it really the big problem? Or were we somehow manipulated into believing the Iraq issue was important and had to be fixed right now - even though a few mopnths before few had mentioned it, and nothing had changed in the interim.

"In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America. According to Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in their new book Weapons of mass Deception, it was used to engineer a state of emergency that would justify an invasion of Iraq. Rampton and Stauber expose how news was fabricated and made to seem real. But they also demonstrate how a coalition of the willing - far-Right officials [from the view of a leftist], neo-con think tanks, insanely pugilistic media commentators and of course well-paid PR companies - worked together to pull off a sensational masterpiece of intellectual dishonesty. Theirs is a study of modern propaganda.

What occurs to me in reading their book is that the new Americn approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda' . It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about.
And they preload the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'.

"With the groung thus prepared, governments are happy if you then 'use democratic process' to agree or disagree - for,after all, their intention is to mobilise enough headlines and conversation to make the whole
thing seem real and urgent. The more emotional the debate, the better. Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.

"An example of thid process is one highlighted by Rampton and Stauber which, more than any other, consolidated public and congressional approval of the 1991 gulf war. We recall the horrifying stories, incessantly repeatd, of babies being ripped from their incubators and left to die on the floor while Iraqis shipped the incubators back to Baghdad - 312 babies we were told....


"The story was brought to public attention by Nayirah, a 15-year old 'nurse' who, it turned out later, was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and a memeber of the Kuwaiti royal family. Nayirah hed been tutored and rehearsed by the Hill & Knowlton PR agency (which in turn recieved $14 million from the american governement for their work i9n promoting the war). Her story was entorely discredited within weeks but by then it's purpose had been served: it had created an outraged and emotional mindset within America which overwhelmed rational discussion.

"As we are seeing now, the most recent Gulf war entailed many similiar deceits: false linkages made between Saddam, al -Qaeda and 9/11, stories of ready to launch weapons that didn't exist, of nuclear programs never embarked upon. As Rampton and Stauber show, many of these allegations were discredited as they were being made, not least by this newspaper, but nevertheless retold.

"Throughout all this, the hired gun PR companies were busy, preconditioning the emotional landscape. Their marketing talents were particularly useful in the large-scale manipulation of language that the campaign entailed. The Bu#es realised, as all ideologues do, that words creat realities, and the right words can overwhelm any chance of balanced discussion.
Guided by the overtly imperial vision of the Project for a New American Century (Whose members now form the core of the American administration), PR companies helped finesse the language to creat an atmosphere of simmering panic where American imperialism would come to seem not only acceptable, but right, obvious, inevitable and even somehow kind.

"Aside from the incessant'weapons of mass destruction', there were 'regime change' (military invasion), 'pre-emptive defense' (attacking a country that is not attacking you), 'critical regions' (countries we want to control), The 'axis of evil' (countries we want to attack), 'shock and awe' ( massive obliteration) and ' the war on terror"(a hold-all excuse for projecting American force anywhere).

"Meanwhile, US federal employees and military personnel were told to refer to the invasion a 'a war of liberation' and to the Iraqi paramilitaries as 'death squads', while the reliably sycophantic American TV networks spoke of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' - just as the pentagon asked them to - thus conditioning the supposition that Iraqi freedom was the point of the war.
Anybody questioning the invasion was 'soft on terror' (liberal) or, in the case of the UN, 'in danger of losing relevance'.

"When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it's done so I would recognise when I was being lied to. I hope the writers such as Rampton and Stauber and other may have the same effect and help to emasculate the culture of spin and dissembling that is overtaking our political establishments."[End of Eno article]

What do you really see?.




[Edited on 23-9-2003 by uNBaLaNCeD]

i can see where he is coming from... i certainly belive that there would not of been a war in afghanistan and iraq... if september the 11th haddent happened...

Brian Eno as in musician and producer? If so that guy is a master, he shaped the way in which music went more than people will know.

BRIAN ENO, the godfather of 'ambience', enters the political commentary arena?!

At least he's one who is qualified to judge, rather than any out-of-the-box manufactured pop tart who suddenly develops an intellect after being on the cover of Teen Hits and knowing every trend in every geopolitical dimension thereafter...