Background: If you have seen a clip of Goebbels speaking, it is likely the conclusion to this speech, taken from Riefenstahl's film of the 1934 rally, Triumph des Willens. Goebbels gave a speech each year at the Nuremberg Rally, often focusing on propaganda. Here he presents Nazi propaganda as the model for the rest of the world, calling it the "backgroud music" to government policy.

The source: Der Kongress zur Nürnberg 1934 (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., Frz. Eher Nachf., 1934), pp. 130-141.

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Goebbels at Nuremberg — 1934

by Joseph Goebbels
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It is difficult to define the concept of propaganda thoroughly and precisely. This is especially true since, in past decades, it was subject to unfavorable, and in part extraordinarily hostile, definitions, on the part of us Germans. First, then, we must defend it. Those abroad sometimes claim that in the past we Germans were particularly knowledgeable in this area, and knew how to apply it, but that unfortunately is not consistent with the facts. We learned the consequences of our neglect all too clearly during the World War. While the enemy states produced unprecedented atrocity propaganda aimed at Germany throughout the whole world, we did nothing and were completely defenseless against it. Only when enemy foreign propaganda had nearly won over the greater part even of the neutral states did the German government begin to sense the enormous power of propaganda. It was too late. Just as we were militarily and economically unprepared for the war, so too with propaganda. We lost the war in this area more than in any other.

The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the war was to accuse Germany of what our enemies themselves were doing. Even today, large parts of world opinion are convinced that the typical characteristics of German propaganda are lying, crudeness, reversing the facts, and the like. One needs only to remember the stories that were spread throughout the world at the beginning of the war about German soldiers chopping off children's hands and crucifying women to realize that Germany then was a defenseless victim of this campaign of calumny. It neither had nor used any means of defense.

The concept of propaganda has undergone a fundamental transformation, particularly as the result of political practice in Germany. Throughout the world today, people are beginning to see that a modern state, whether democratic or authoritarian, cannot withstand the subterranean forces of anarchy and chaos without propaganda. It is not only a matter of doing the right thing; the people must understand that the right thing is the right thing. Propaganda includes everything that helps the people to realize this.

Political propaganda in principle is active and revolutionary. It is aimed at the broad masses. It speaks the language of the people because it wants to be understood by the people. Its task is the highest creative art of putting sometimes complicated events and facts in a way simple enough to be understood by the man on the street. Its foundation is that there is nothing the people cannot understand, but rather things must be put in a way that they can understand. It is a question of making it clear to him by using the proper approach, evidence, and language.

Propaganda is a means to an end. Its purpose is to lead the people to an understanding that will allow it to willingly and without internal resistance devote itself to the tasks and goals of a superior leadership. If propaganda is to succeed, it must know what it wants. It must keep a clear and firm goal in mind, and seek the appropriate means and methods to reach that goal. Propaganda as such is neither good nor evil. Its moral value is determined by the goals it seeks.

Propaganda must be creative. It is by no means a matter for the bureaucracy or official administration, but rather it is a matter of productive fantasy. The genuine propagandist must be a true artist. He must be a master of the popular soul, using it as an instrument to express the majesty of a genuine and unified political will. Propaganda can be pro or con. In neither case does it have to be negative. The only thing that is important is whether or not its words are true and genuine expressions of a people’s values. During its period of opposition, the National Socialist movement proved that criticism can be constructive, indeed, that in a time which the government is in the hands of destructive powers it may be the only constructive element.

The concept of public enlightenment is fundamentally different. It is fundamentally defensive and evolutionary. It does not hammer or drum. It is moderate in tone, seeking to teach. It explains, clarifies, and informs. It is, therefore, used more often by a government than by the opposition. The National Socialist state, growing out of a revolution, had the task of centrally leading both propaganda and education, uniting two concepts that are related but not identical, molding them into a unity that in the long term can serve the government and people.

Even during the time when we were in the opposition, we succeeded in rescuing the concept of propaganda from disfavor or contempt. Since then, we have transformed it into a truly creative art. It was our sharpest weapon in conquering the state. It remains our sharpest weapon in defending and building the state. Although this is perhaps still not clear to the rest of the world, it was obvious to us that we had to use the weapon with which we had conquered the state to defend the state. Otherwise we faced the danger that we could lose the people even though we had power, and that, without the people, we would lose power. We put what we had learned during our attack on the November pseudo-state in the service of our state. The great wealth of ideas and never failing creativity of our propaganda, proven during our struggle for power, was perfected to the last detail. Now we turned it to serve the state itself, to find meaningful ways and flexible forms to influence the people's thinking. The people should share the concerns and successes of its government. Its concerns and successes must therefore be constantly presented and hammered into the people so that it will consider the concerns and successes of its government to be its concerns and successes. Only an authoritarian government, firmly tied to the people, can do this over the long term. Political propaganda, the art of anchoring the things of the state in the broad masses so that the whole nation will feel a part of them, cannot therefore remain merely a means to the goal of winning power. It must become a means of building and keeping power.

This requires alert attention to the events of the day, and a trained and lively creativity that must include a complete knowledge of the soul of the people. The people must be understood in its deepest depths, or intuitively understood, for only then can one speak in a way that the people will understand. Propaganda must be the science of the soul of the people. It requires an organized and purposeful system if it is to be successful in the long run.

That is what we lacked during the war. That is where our enemy was superior to us. We must make up for that. We must take the techniques and dominance of the other side's opinion apparatus. Which is all they really had, and fill it with the fire of the soul and the glow of new ideas.

Propaganda, too, has a system. It cannot be stopped and started whenever one wishes. In the long run, it can only be effective in the service of great ideals and far-seeing principles. And propaganda must be learned. It must be led only by people with a fine and sure instinct for the often changeable feelings of the people. They must be able to reach into the world of the broad masses and draw out their wishes and hopes. The effective propagandist must be a master of the art of speech, of writing, of journalism, of the poster, and of the leaflet. He must have the gift to use the major methods of influencing public opinion such as the press, film, and radio to serve his ideas and goals.

This is particularly necessary in a day when technology is advancing. Radio is already an invention of the past, since television will probably soon arrive. On the one hand successful propaganda must be a master of these methods of political opinion, but on the other it may not become stale in using them. It must find new ways and methods every day to reach success. The nature of propaganda remains the same, but the means provided by advancing technology are becoming ever broader and far-reaching. One need only consider the revolutionary impact of the invention of radio, which gave the spoken word true mass effectiveness. The technology of propaganda has changed greatly in recent years, but the art of propaganda has remained the same.

Understood in this sense, propaganda has long since lost its odium of inferiority inherited from the past. It holds first rank among the arts with which one leads a nation, It is indispensable in building a modern state. It is something of a connecting link between government and people.

All propaganda has a direction. The quality of this direction determines whether propaganda has a positive or negative effect. Good propaganda does not need to lie, indeed it may not lie. It has no reason to fear the truth. It is a mistake to believe that the people cannot take the truth. They can. It is only a matter of presenting the truth to people in a way that they will be able to understand. A propaganda that lies proves that it has a bad cause. It cannot be successful in the long run. A good propaganda will always come along that serves a good cause. But propaganda is still necessary if a good cause is to succeed. A good idea does not win simply because it is good. It must be presented properly if it is to win. The combination makes for the best propaganda. Such propaganda is successful without being obnoxious. It depends on its nature, not its methods. It works without being noticed. Its goals are inherent in its nature. Since it is almost invisible, it is effective and powerful. A good cause will lose to a bad one if it depends only on its rightness, while the other side uses the methods of influencing the masses. We are, for example, firmly convinced that we fought the war for a good cause, but that was not enough. The world should also have known and seen that our cause was good. However, we lacked the effective means of mass propaganda to make that clear to the world. Marxism certainly did not fight for great ideals. Despite that, in November 1918 it overcame Kaiser, Reich, and the army because it was superior in the art of mass propaganda.

National Socialism learned from these two examples. It drew the correct practical conclusions from that knowledge. The ideal of a socialist national community did not remain mere theory with us, but became living reality in the thoughts and feelings of 67 million Germans. Our propaganda of word and deed created the conditions for that. Mastering them kept National Socialism from the danger of remaining the dream and longing of a few thousand. Through propaganda, it became hard, steely everyday reality.

That which we only imperfectly and inadequately understood during the war became a virtuously mastered art during the rise of the National Socialist movement. Today one can say without exaggeration that Germany is a model of propaganda for the entire world. We have made up for past failures and developed the art of mass influence to a degree that puts the efforts of other nations into the shadows. The importance the National Socialist leadership placed on propaganda became clear when it established a Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda shortly after it took power. This ministry is entirely within the spirit of National Socialism, and comes from it. It unites what we learned as an opposition movement confronting the enemy and under persecution from an enemy system, sometimes more from necessity than desire. Recently some have tried to imitate this ministry and its concentration of all means of influencing opinion, but here, too, the slogan applies: "Often imitated, never equaled."

The organizational union of mass demonstrations, the press, film, radio, literature, theater, etc., is only the mechanical side to the matter. It is not so much that all these means are in one hand. The important thing is that this hand knows how to master and control them. Establishing a central office is not difficult. What is difficult is finding people who are experts in an area previously not a concern of the state.

We could not have done that ourselves if we had not been through the great school of our party. She was our teacher. During 14 years of opposition we gathered an enormous amount of knowledge, experience, wisdom, and ability. This made us able to use the wide-reaching methods of government propaganda without running the risk of losing the spirit behind them. Effective propaganda avoids any form of bureaucracy. It requires lightning-fast decisions, alert creativity and inexhaustible inventiveness. The machinery of the organization would remain lifeless and rigid if it were not constantly driven by the motor of the spirit and the idea.

It is, therefore, also wrong to think that a ministry could replace what the movement alone is able to do. Cooperation between the party and the government was necessary for the major successes that we are proud of. Only when all means of propaganda are concentrated and their unified application assured is it be possible to carry out major educational and propaganda battles, as we did before 12 November 1933 [the referendum Hitler called to approve Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations] or 19 August 1934 [the referendum called to approve Hitler's absolute power after the death of Hindenburg], which were of true historical significance.

If such an art of active mass influence through propaganda is joined with the long-term systematic education of a nation, and if both are conducted in a unified and precise way, the relationship between the leadership and the nation will always remain close. From authority and following will develop that type of modern democracy for which Germany is the model for the entire world in the twentieth century.

That is also the basic requirement for any practical political activity. A government that wishes to be successful over the long term cannot ignore it. Its projects and plans would fail were they not supported by the people. But the people must understand them in order to accomplish them.

One can but smile when one looks over our borders at the efforts of parliamentary-democratic parties that are all concerned with this: "How can I tell my child?" A fear of the people is the characteristic of liberal government theory. It has set the people free, and now does not know what to do with them. The hunt for popularity usually leads to nothing other than concealing the truth and speaking nonsense. One dares not say what is right, and what one does say leads to disaster. But that is presumably what the people want. One no longer has the courage to say unpopular things, much less do them. The result is that major European problems are lost in useless debates while political, economic, and social crises of unprecedented magnitude face the nations.

There are times when statesmen must have the courage to do something unpopular. But their unpopular actions must be properly prepared, and must be put in the proper form, so that their peoples will understand. The man on the street is usually not as unreasonable as some think. Since it is he who usually has to bear the heaviest burdens that result from unpopular policies, he at least has a right to know why things are being done this way and not that way. All practical politics depends on its persuasiveness. It is no sign of wise leadership to acquaint the nation with hard facts over night. Crises must be prepared for not only politically and economically, but also psychologically. Here propaganda has its place. It must prepare the way actively and educationally. Its task is to prepare the way for practical actions. It must follow these actions step by step, never losing sight of them. In a manner of speaking, it provides the background music. Such propaganda in the end miraculously makes the unpopular popular, enabling even a government's most difficult decisions to secure the resolute support of the people. A government that uses it properly can do what is necessary without running the risk of losing the masses.

Propaganda is therefore a necessary life function of the modern state. Without it, seeking great goals is simply impossible in this century of the masses. It stands at the beginning of practical political activity in every area of public life. It is its important and necessary prerequisite.

Let me give several recent examples. I need only sketch the details. They are too fresh in our memories to require elaboration.

There are no parliamentary parties in Germany any longer. How could we have overcome them had we not waged an educational campaign for years that persuaded people of their weaknesses, harms, and disadvantages? Their final elimination was only the result of what the people had already realized. Our propaganda weakened these parties. Based on that, they could be eliminated by a legal act.

Marxism could not be eliminated by a government decision. Its elimination was the end result of a process that began with the people. But that was only possible because our propaganda had shown people that Marxism was a danger to both the state and society. The positive national discipline of the German press would never have been possible without the compete elimination of the influence of the liberal-Jewish press. That happened only because of the years-long work of our propaganda. Today, particularism in Germany is something of the past. The fact that it was eliminated by a strong central idea of the Reich is no accident, but rather it depended on psychological foundations that were established by our propaganda.

Or consider economic policy. Does anyone believe that the idea of class struggle could have been eliminated only by a law? Is it not rather the fact that the seeds we sowed in a hundred thousand meetings resulted in a new socialist structure of labor? Today employers and workers stand together in the Labor Front. The Law on National Labor is the foundation of our economic thinking, realizing itself more and more. Are not these social achievements the result of the long and tireless labor of thousands of speakers?

What about the shortage of foreign currency? This affects the people in serious ways. Propaganda once again is the key to dealing with the problem.

The Hereditary Farming Law, the idea of the Reich Agricultural System, market regulations in agriculture, all these need propaganda to show the people their importance, which is necessary if they are to succeed.
We could eliminate the Jewish danger in our culture because the people had recognized it as the result of our propaganda. Major cultural achievements such as the unique "Kraft durch Freude"* are possible only with the powerful support of the people. The prerequisite was and is propaganda, which here too creates and maintains the connection to the people.

The Winter Relief last year raised about 350 million marks. This was not the result of taxation, but rather many gifts of every amount. Everyone gave freely and gladly, many of whom in the past had done nothing in the face of similar need. Why? Because a broad propaganda, using every modern means, presented the whole nation with the need for this program of social assistance.

45 million Reich marks of goods and services were provided. 85 million Reich marks worth of fuel were distributed. 130 million Reich marks worth of food were given out. Ten million Reich marks worth of meals were provided, and 70 million Reich marks worth of clothing.

Some of these achievements were the result of donations in kind, others the result of cash donations. Street collections, donations of a part of paychecks, contributions from companies, and gifts subtracted from bank accounts resulted in cash totaling 184 million Reich marks. 24 million marks alone were the result of “One Pot Sundays.” [On some Sundays, people were encouraged to have a simple meal at home, donating the money saved to the Nazi charity.] The Reich itself added 15 million marks to the contributions of the people. The railway system provided reduced or free shipping with a value of 14 million marks.

Of our population of 65,595,000, 16,511,00 were assisted by the Winter Relief. There were 150,000 volunteers. There were only 4,474 paid workers, of whom 4,144 were in the 34 regional party offices, and 330 at the national headquarters.

Propaganda and education prepared the way for the largest social assistance program in history. They were the foundation. Their success was that, over a long winter, no one in Germany went hungry or was cold.
Over 40 million people approved of the Führer's decision to leave the League of Nations on 12 November 1933. That gave him the ability to speak to the world in the name of the nation, defending honor, peace, and equality as the national ideals of the whole German people. The issues of disarmament were put on firm and clear foundations. Once again, propaganda was the foundation for the nation's unity on 12 November, and therefore of the freedom of action that the Führer had in foreign affairs.

Each situation brings new challenges. And each task requires the support of the people, which can only be gained by untiring propaganda that brings the broad masses knowledge and clarity. No area of public life can do without it. It is the never resting force behind public opinion. It must maintain an unbroken relationship between leadership and people. Every means of technology must be put in its service; the goal is to form the mass will and to give it meaning, purpose, and goals that will enable us to learn from past failures and mistakes and ensure that the lead National Socialist strength has given us over other nations will never again be lost.

May the bright flame of our enthusiasm never fade. It alone gives light and warmth to the creative art of modern political propaganda. Its roots are in the people. The movement gives it direction and drive. The state can only provide it with the new, wide-ranging technical means. Only a living relationship between people, movement, and state can guarantee that the creative art of propaganda, of which we have made ourselves the world's master, will never sink into bureaucracy and bureaucratic narrow-mindedness.
Creative people made propaganda and put it in the service of our movement. We must have creative people who can use the means of the state in its service.

It is also a function of the modern state. Its reach is the firm ground on which the state must stand. It rises from the depths of the people, and must always return to the people to find its roots and strength. It may be good to have power based on weapons. It is better and longer lasting, however, to win and hold the heart of a nation.

Hitler on Propaganda
In chapter six of Mein Kampf, Hitler reviewed the use of propaganda during World War I. In the course of his criticism of the German effort, he included comments on the function of propaganda in general. His statements offer insight into the methods used by the Nazi Party.
Source: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943.
http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/resour...nt/DocPropa.htm

The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses' attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be extended in this direction.
The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be. And this is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness of a propaganda campaign, and not success pleasing a few scholars or young aesthetes.

The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. The fact that our bright boys do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are.

Once understood how necessary it is for propaganda in be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule results:
It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance.

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out.

Thus we see that propaganda must follow a simple line and correspondingly the basic tactics must be psychologically sound.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What, for example, would we say about a poster that was supposed to advertise a new soap and that described other soaps as 'good'?
We would only shake our heads.

Exactly the same applies to political advertising.

The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.

“The reason I tell you the truth is so that when I lie, you will believe me.”

New intel report reignites Iraq arms fight
By KATHERINE SHRADER,
Associated Press Writer
Yahoo News

WASHINGTON - Hundreds of chemical weapons found in Iraq were produced before the 1991 Gulf War and probably are so old they couldn't be used as designed, intelligence officials said Thursday.

Two lawmakers — Sen. Rick Santorum (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa., and House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich. — on Wednesday circulated a one-page summary of a military intelligence report that says coalition forces have recovered about 500 munitions with mustard or sarin agents, and more could be discovered around Iraq. "We now have found stockpiles," Santorum asserted.

But intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitive nature, said the weapons were produced before the 1991 Gulf War and there is no evidence to date of chemical munitions manufactured since then. They said an assessment of the weapons concluded they are so degraded that they couldn't now be used as designed.

They probably would have been intended for chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq War, said David Kay, who headed the U.S. weapons-hunting team in Iraq from 2003 until early 2004.

He said experts on Iraq's chemical weapons are in "almost 100 percent agreement" that sarin nerve agent produced from the 1980s would no longer be dangerous.

"It is less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point," Kay said.

And any of Iraq's 1980s-era mustard would produce burns, but it is unlikely to be lethal, Kay said.

Asked about the potential danger to U.S. troops, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said: "They are weapons of mass destruction. They are harmful to human beings. And they have been found."

The newly declassified military intelligence report was released Wednesday by National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Santorum and Hoekstra had urged him to release report this week during congressional debates on Iraq.

The senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee questioned the timing of the report's release. "What worries me is that the intelligence community — Ambassador Negroponte in particular — may be playing a partisan role in the 2006 election," California Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record) said.

Hoekstra said the document is not a "smoking gun." But he hinted that the chemical agents could be significant because they may have been added to the discovered artillery shells after the first Gulf War. He noted that one of the declassified findings says the munitions could be lethal.

"David Kay says anything produced prior to 1991 is not lethal anymore, so what is the discrepancy here?" Hoekstra said. "I am 100 percent sure if David Kay had the opportunity to look at the reports that describe these things, he would agree with the finding that ... these things are lethal and deadly," Hoekstra said.

Intelligence officials said the munitions were found in ones, twos and maybe slightly larger collections over the past couple of years. One official conceded that these pre-Gulf War weapons did not pose a threat to the U.S. military before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. They were not maintained or part of any organized program run by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

There is no evidence that insurgents have found the chemical munitions. But one official said that insurgents have improvised conventional weapons, so they could apply similar creativity with the vintage weapons.

Former Bush Spokesman Urges Newspapers to Run Pro-War Stories by Former Vets With GOP Ties
democracynow.org

The Buffalo News has revealed that a former spokesman for President Bush has been encouraging U.S. newspapers to run news stories from Iraq written by two combat veterans who are now embedded reporters in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: John Stauber joins us now from Madison, Wisconsin. John is Director of the Center for Media and Democracy and co-editor of the publication PR Watch. He’s co-authored several books, including Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

JOHN STAUBER: Thanks, Amy, it's great to be on.

AMY GOODMAN: John, can you talk about this group, Vets for Freedom, and what it means, what their connection to the press is?

JOHN STAUBER: Well, Vets for Freedom is a very interesting organization. I call it a Republican front group. It might be more accurate to call it a Republican-financed, pro-war group geared toward helping the Republicans keep control of Congress and the Senate this November. It portrays itself as a nonpartisan organization of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are very concerned about the way the media has distorted the image of the war here in the United States and who want to set that record straight. Its founders have been vigorously attacking Democrat John Murtha for his position advocating withdrawal from Iraq. And as the Buffalo News reported just this Sunday, Terry Gross [sic], who was a spokesman for President Bush until last year and is now a P.R. operative and who managed the 2000 Florida debacle for the Republicans, managed their media in the Florida recount --

AMY GOODMAN: Taylor Gross?

JOHN STAUBER: Did I say -- Taylor Gross, correct. He approached the Buffalo News way back in April, trying to place a couple of the founders of this Vets for Freedom organization as embedded reporters for the Buffalo News. Those two Vets for Freedom members were, and are, Wade Zirkle and David Bellavia. They're now in Iraq, reporting on the Vets for Freedom blog. Apparently at least one of them will soon be back in the United States. So I think what we've got here is a pro-war organization.

Its financing is very mysterious. I suspect that, like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, with which it shares a consulting firm, the Donatelli Group, if we knew who was really funding this organization, it would probably be well-heeled people within the Republican Party. I think it's also very possible that this is part of the bigger propaganda campaign that has received hundreds of millions of dollars of public money over the last few years, money that's gone to organizations like the Lincoln Group and other P.R. firms to sell the war.

AMY GOODMAN: We invited on Vets for Freedom to the program, but the group's vice chairman, Owen West, said that no one could join us today. I want to play a clip of the group's founder, Wade Zirkle, speaking on the Hugh Hewitt Show, explaining why he formed the group. Zirkle is a former Marine lieutenant, who served two deployments in Iraq.

WADE ZIRKLE: You know, when I came home, I was injured. And I came home, and, you know, I was watching on TV and on the radio, listening to politicians do their grandstanding spiel, and I realized that, you know, what is being reported to the American people is not what I know from firsthand experience what's going on in Iraq. And I felt like no one was speaking for us.

AMY GOODMAN: John Stauber, your response?

JOHN STAUBER: Well, this is part of the line that this organization has, that we have to stay the course, we have to support the Bush administration's global war on terror, we have to push forward, that we owe it to the veterans who’ve died and who’ve suffered so much, and that the only patriotic course is one of total support for the Bush administration's global war on terror.

I think there was a really important part of the puzzle regarding Veterans for Freedom and what their role is in this election year provided by the New York Times last week, when last Wednesday, in a front-page article, the New York Times reported that the Republican strategy for winning in November is going to be to strongly embrace exactly this pro-war position of Vets for Freedom. And Vets for Freedom is represented by a very sophisticated Republican public relations firm that Taylor Gross founded, called the Herald Group. I think what they understand is that getting vets out as advocates for staying the course, as critics and attackers of anyone who says we should withdraw troops from Iraq, is going to be a very powerful card to play.

AMY GOODMAN: The Vets for Freedom website now features dispatches from Iraq written by these former soldiers who were in Iraq as embedded reporters. The top story on their blog is headlined "Positive Development from Down South." It was written by Vets for Freedom's executive director, Wade Zirkle. Last week the group's vice chair, David Bellavia, wrote about being embedded with the Iraqi military in Ramadi. He describes the experience like this: “Seeing these men in action is amazing. The people of Ramadi trust them. They give them bread and tea. Kids are playing soccer and riding donkeys in the street.” This description of Ramadi stands in stark contrast to the other reports coming out of Ramadi, which Iraqis fear will be the site of the next Fallujah. The Los Angeles Times reported last week that thousands of families are reportedly trapped in the city and facing a mounting humanitarian crisis. Food and medical supplies are running low.” John, your response to these reports?

JOHN STAUBER: I think these so-called "news reports" coming from David Bellavia, one of the Vets for Freedom founders, is exactly what this organization is all about. When Bush's former spokesperson, Taylor Gross, pitched the Buffalo News and the New York Post and other papers to have Zirkle and Bellavia of Vets for Freedom reporting for them as embedded journalists, I believe this was an effort to be able to portray these pro-war Republican advocates as journalists. And again, they state clearly on their website, which is maintained by the Donatelli Group, the same organization that provided similar services to the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, they maintain on their website that they are all about changing the media coverage of the war in Iraq to make it pro-war, pro-mission coverage, now, we see, even to the point of trying to portray themselves as embedded journalists.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you know of any news organization who has taken their reports?

JOHN STAUBER: Well, I think it's interesting that there was no real reporting about Veterans for Freedom until we at Center for Media and Democracy began looking at them this month. And then the Buffalo News came forward and broke this big story on Sunday, about how the former Bush spokesperson, Taylor Gross, was pitching them back in April to make these guys embedded reporters for the Buffalo News. As far as we know, according to Taylor Gross in the Buffalo News article, no paper used them as embedded journalists. That's a good sign.

But it's interesting to note that when Taylor Gross was pitching these guys, he didn't say to these papers, “Hey, I'm Taylor Gross. I was a spokesperson for President Bush until last year.” He simply said, “I've got some brave vets, and they can provide nonpartisan, unbiased coverage for you on the cheap from Iraq. Would you like them as embedded reporters?” So I think that was really an effort -- remember, this was back in April -- again to be able to have these Vets for Freedom, pro-war advocates say, “Not only are we combat veterans.” And these are guys, many of whom were very wounded in combat. There's no questioning their valor or personal passion or commitment, but I think this effort to embed them and get them reporting for papers like the New York Post and the Buffalo News was actually an effort to provide them a veneer of journalism. And it's all fallen apart, because the Buffalo News has revealed it.

What I think is extremely disturbing is that except for this report right now on Democracy Now!, no other national news media has picked this up. There's been no legs to the Buffalo News story, no wire services have picked it up. And yet, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the New York Times, have all run op-eds from these guys, without any reporting on who they actually are.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it's interesting. This is what we call engaging in trickle-up journalism. Maybe viewers, listeners now, people who are reading the transcripts, will call their news organizations to ask for more coverage of this. John, I also wanted to ask you about video news releases, a follow-up. Your organization, Center for Media and Democracy, revealed in April that at least 77 TV stations around the country have been caught airing corporate-sponsored propaganda disguised as news. The report accuses of TV stations of actively disguising the content to make it appear to be their own reporting, even though the spots were actually paid for by companies like General Motors, Panasonic and Pfizer. What's been the response to the study since you put it out and we broadcast it?

JOHN STAUBER: The response has been extremely heartening, because the Federal Communications Commission, based on our fake TV news report, has launched a formal investigation of these 36 stations that we caught red-handed airing corporate propaganda disguised as news stories. What the result of that investigation will be, of course, we don't know. But that was a tremendous development. And now, we're urging people to contact the FCC and to demand that the FCC enforce regulations on the books that require the -- [inaudible]

AMY GOODMAN: John Stauber, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy. Looks like we just lost that satellite feed, but we do want to thank Public Television in Madison, Wisconsin, WHA-TV, Channel 21, for hosting John today. John is co-editor of the publication, PR Watch, and has written a number of books, including Weapons of Mass Deception.

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877.

In all cases, propaganda of agitation tries to stretch energies to the utmost, obtain substantial sacrifices, and induce the individual to bear heavy ordeals. ...it unleashes an explosive movement; it operates inside a crisis or actually provokes the crisis itself....such propaganda can obtain only effects of relatively short duration. If the proposed objective is not achieved fast enough, enthusiasm will give way to discouragement and despair. Therefore, specialists in agitation propaganda break up the desired goals into a series of stages to be reached one by one. There is a period of pressure to obatain some result, then a period of relaxation and rest....
Propaganda by Jacques Ellul, page 72.

Wash Times' Fails to Correct Fabricated Abraham Lincoln Quote -- Now a Congressman is Using It
By E&P Staff
February 15, 2007 10:00 PM ET

NEW YORK More than two days after an inflammatory quote used by a regular Washington Times columnist was shown to be fabricated -- it was attributed to Abraham Lincoln, no less -- the newspaper still has not removed it from the article, nor carried a correction.

Perhaps that's one reason Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) cited the quote on the floor of the House today in the debate over the Iraq war "surge." He took it to be true, apparently. Rep. Young added, referring to Lincoln: "He had the same problem this President has, with an unpopular war. The same problem with people trying to redirect the commander in chief."

On Wednesday, E&P and some political blogs pointed out that conservative Frank Gaffney, Jr. opened his latest column on Tuesday morning with this: "Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged." — President Abraham Lincoln.

He continued: "It is, of course, unimaginable that the penalties proposed by one of our most admired presidents for the crime of dividing America in the face of the enemy would be contemplated — let alone applied — today. Still, as the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate engage in interminable debate about resolutions whose effects can only be to 'damage morale and undermine the military' while emboldening our enemies, it is time to reflect on what constitutes inappropriate behavior in time of war."

One problem: Lincoln never said it. But that hasn't stopped the newspaper, and Gaffney, from refusing to correct the record.

Brooks Jackson at FactCheck.org, the Annenberg Public Policy Center group, had studied the sudden appearance of the quote last August. Why? He had found that his Web search "brought up more than 18,000 references to it."

He reported: "Supporters of President Bush and the war in Iraq often quote Abraham Lincoln as saying members of Congress who act to damage military morale in wartime 'are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.'

"Republican candidate Diana Irey used the 'quote' recently in her campaign against Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, and it has appeared thousands of times on the Internet, in newspaper articles and letters to the editor, and in Republican speeches.

"But Lincoln never said that. The conservative author who touched off the misquotation frenzy, J. Michael Waller, concedes that the words are his, not Lincoln's. Waller says he never meant to put quote marks around them, and blames an editor [at the magazine Insight] for the mistake and the failure to correct it. We also note other serious historical errors in the Waller article containing the bogus quote."

Jackson later provided this update: "Candidate Irey retracted the quote and apologized hours after this article appeared."

Waller wrote to Jackson concerning the 2003 article: "Oddly, you are the first to question me about this. I'm surprised it has been repeated as often as you say. My editors at the time didn't think it was necessary to run a correction in the following issue of the magazine, and to my knowledge we received no public comment."

Jacques Ellul on Sociological Propaganda.

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. Trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner. New York: Knopf, 1966. 62-68.

Political Propaganda and Sociological Propaganda

First we must distinguish between political propaganda and sociological propaganda. We shall not dwell long on the former because it is the type called immediately to mind by the word propaganda itself. It involves techniques of influence employed by a government, a party, an administration, a pressure group, with a view to changing the behavior of the public. The choice of methods used is deliberate and calculated; the desired goals are clearly distinguished and quite precise, though generally limited. Most often the themes and the objectives are political, as for example with Hitler's or Stalin's propaganda. This is the type of propaganda that can be most clearly distinguished from advertising: the latter has economic ends, the former political ends. Political propaganda can be either strategic or tactical. The former establishes the general line, the array of arguments, the staggering of the campaigns; the latter seeks to obtain immediate results within that framework (such as wartime pamphlets and loudspeakers to obtain the immediate surrender of the enemy).

But this does not cover all propaganda, which also encompasses phenomena much more vast and less certain: the group of manifestations by which any society seeks to integrate the maximum number of individuals into itself, to unify its members' behavior according to a pattern, to spread its style of life abroad, and thus to impose itself on other groups. We call this phenomenon "sociological" propaganda, to show, first of all, that the entire group, consciously or not, expresses itself in this fashion; and to indicate, secondly, that its influence aims much more at an entire [62/63] style of life than at opinions or even one particular course of behavior.1

Of course, within the compass of sociological propaganda itself one or more political propagandas can be expressed. The propaganda of Christianity in the middle ages is an example of this type of sociological propaganda; Benjamin Constant meant just this when he said of France, in 1793: "The entire nation was a vast propaganda operation." And in present times certainly the most accomplished models of this type are American and Chinese propaganda. Although we do not include here the more or less effective campaigns and methods employed by governments, but rather the over-all phenomenon, we find that sociological propaganda combines extremely diverse forms within itself. At this level, advertising as the spreading of a certain style of life can be said to be included in such propaganda, and in the United States this is also true of public relations, human relations, human engineering, the motion pictures, and so on. It is characteristic of a nation living by sociological propaganda that all these influences converge toward the same point, whereas in a society such as France in 1960, they are divergent in their objectives and their intentions.

Sociological propaganda is a phenomenon much more difficult to grasp than political propaganda, and is rarely discussed. Basically it is the penetration of an ideology by means of its sociological context. This phenomenon is the reverse of what we have been studying up to now. Propaganda as it is traditionally known implies an attempt to spread an ideology through the mass media of communication in order to lead the public to accept some political or economic structure or to participate in some action. That is the one element common to all the propaganda we have studied. Ideology is disseminated for the purpose of making various political acts acceptable to the people.

But in sociological propaganda the movement is reversed. The existing economic, political, and sociological factors progressively allow an ideology to penetrate individuals or masses. Through the [63/64] medium of economic and political structures a certain ideology is established, which leads to the active participation of the masses and the adaptation of individuals. The important thing is to make the individual participate actively and to adapt him as much as possible to a specific sociological context.


Such propaganda is essentially diffuse. It is rarely conveyed by catchwords or expressed intentions. Instead it is based on a general climate, an atmosphere that influences people imperceptibly without having the appearance of propaganda; it gets to man through his customs, through his most unconscious habits. It creates new habits in him; it is a sort of persuasion from within. As a result, man adopts new criteria of judgment and choice, adopts them spontaneously, as if he had chosen them himself. But all these criteria are in conformity with the environment and are essentially of a collective nature. Sociological propaganda produces a progressive adaptation to a certain order of things, a certain concept of human relations, which unconsciously molds individuals and makes them conform to society.

Sociological propaganda springs up spontaneously; it is not the result of deliberate propaganda action. No propagandists deliberately use this method, though many practice it unwittingly, and tend in this direction without realizing it. For example, when an American producer makes a film, he has certain definite ideas he wants to express, which are not intended to be propaganda. Rather, the propaganda element is in the American way of life with which he is permeated and which he expresses in his film without realizing it. We see here the force of expansion of a vigorous society, which is totalitarian in the sense of the integration of the individual, and which leads to involuntary behavior.

Sociological propaganda expresses itself in many different ways--in advertising, in the movies (commercial and non-political films), in technology in general, in education, in the Reader's Digest; and in social service, case work, and settlement houses. All these influences are in basic accord with each other and lead spontaneously in the same direction; one hesitates to call all this propaganda. Such influences, which mold behavior, seem a far cry from Hitler's great propaganda setup. Unintentional (at least in the first stage), non-political, organized along spontaneous patterns and rhythms, the activities we have lumped together (from a concept that might be judged arbitrary or artificial) are not [64/65] considered propaganda by either sociologists or the average public.

And yet with deeper and more objective analysis, what does one find? These influences are expressed through the same media as propaganda. They are really directed by those who make propaganda. To me this fact seems essential. A government, for example, will have its own public relations, and will also make propaganda. Most of the activities described in this chapter have identical purposes. Besides, these influences follow the same stereotypes and prejudices as propaganda; they stir the same feelings and act on the individual in the same fashion. These are the similarities, which bring these two aspects of propaganda closer together, more than the differences, noted earlier, separate them.

But there is more. Such activities are propaganda to the extent that the combination of advertising, public relations, social welfare, and so on produces a certain general conception of society, a particular way of life. We have not grouped these activities together arbitrarily--they express the same basic notions and interact to make man adopt this particular way of life. From then on, the individual in the clutches of such sociological propaganda believes that those who live this way are on the side of the angels, and those who don't are bad; those who have this conception of society are right, and those who have another conception are in error. Consequently, just as with ordinary propaganda, it is a matter of propagating behavior and myths both good and bad. Furthermore, such propaganda becomes increasingly effective when those subjected to it accept its doctrines on what is good or bad (for example, the American Way of Life). There, a whole society actually expresses itself through this propaganda by advertising its kind of life.

By doing that, a society engages in propaganda on the deepest level. Sociologists have recognized that, above all, propaganda must change a person's environment. Krech and Crutchfield insist on this fact, and show that a simple modification of the psychological context can bring about changes of attitude without ever directly attacking particular attitudes or opinions. Similarly, MacDougall says: "One must avoid attacking any trend frontally. It is better to concentrate one's efforts on the creation of psychological conditions so that the desired result seems to come from them naturally." The modification of the psychological climate [65/66] brings about still other consequences that one cannot obtain directly. This is what Ogle calls "suggestibility"; the degree of suggestibility depends on a man's environment and psychological climate. And that is precisely what modifies the activities mentioned above. It is what makes them propaganda, for their aim is simply to instill in the public an attitude that will prepare the ground for the main propaganda to follow.

Sociological propaganda must act gently. It conditions; it introduces a truth, an ethic in various benign forms, which, although sporadic, end by creating a fully established personality structure. It acts slowly, by penetration, and is most effective in a relatively stable and active society, or in the tensions between an expanding society and one that is disintegrating (or in an expanding group within a disintegrating society). Under these conditions it is sufficient in itself; it is not merely a preliminary sub-propaganda. But sociological propaganda is inadequate in a moment of crisis. Nor is it able to move the masses to action in exceptional circumstances. Therefore, it must sometimes be strengthened by the classic kind of propaganda, which leads to action.

At such times sociological propaganda will appear to be the medium that has prepared the ground for direct propaganda; it becomes identified with sub-propaganda. Nothing is easier than to graft a direct propaganda onto a setting prepared by sociological propaganda; besides, sociological propaganda may itself be transformed into direct propaganda. Then, by a series of intermediate stages, we not only see one turn into the other, but also a smooth transition from what was merely a spontaneous affirmation of a way of life to the deliberate affirmation of a truth. This process has been described in an article by Edward L. Bernays: this so-called "engineering approach" is tied to a combination of professional research methods through which one gets people to adopt and actively support certain ideas or programs as soon as they become aware of them. This applies also to political matters; and since 1936 the National Association of Manufacturers has attempted to fight the development of leftist trends with such methods. In 1938 the N.A.M. spent a half-million dollars to support the type of capitalism it represents. This sum was increased to three million in 1945 and to five million in 1946; this propaganda paved the way for the Taft-Hartley Law. It was a matter of "selling" the American economic system. Here [66/67] we are truly in the domain of propaganda; and we see the multiple methods employed to influence opinion, as well as the strong tie between sociological and direct propaganda.

Sociological propaganda, involuntary at first, becomes more and more deliberate, and ends up by exercising influence. One example is the code drawn up by the Motion Picture Association, which requires films to promote "the highest types of social life," "the proper conception of society," "the proper standards of life," and to avoid "any ridicule of the law (natural or human) or sympathy for those who violate the law." Another is J. Arthur Rank's explanation of the purpose of his films: "When does an export article become more than an export article? When it is a British film. When the magnificent productions of Ealing Studios appear in the world, they represent something better than just a step forward toward a higher level of export...." Such films are then propaganda for the British way of life.

The first element of awareness in the context of sociological propaganda is extremely simple, and from it everything else derives. What starts out as a simple situation gradually turns into a definite ideology, because the way of life in which man thinks he is so indisputably well off becomes a criterion of value for him. This does not mean that objectively he is well off, but that, regardless of the merits of his actual condition, he thinks he is. He is perfectly adapted to his environment, like "a fish in water." From that moment on, everything that expresses this particular way of life, that reinforces and improves it, is good; everything that tends to disturb, criticize, or destroy it is bad.

This leads people to believe that the civilization representing their way of life is best. This belief then commits the French to the same course as the Americans, who are by far the most advanced in this direction. Obviously, one tries to imitate and catch up to those who are furthest advanced; the first one becomes the model. And such imitation makes the French adopt the same criteria of judgment, the same sociological structures, the same spontaneous ideologies, and, in the end, the same type of man. Sociological propaganda is then a precise form of propaganda; it is comparatively simple because it uses all social currents, but is slower than other types of propaganda because it aims at long-term penetration and progressive adaptation.

But from the instant a man uses that way of life as his criterion of good and evil, he is led to make judgments: for example, any[67/68]thing un-American is evil. From then on, genuine propaganda limits itself to the use of this tendency and to leading man into actions of either compliance with or defense of the established order.

This sociological propaganda in the United States is a natural result of the fundamental elements of American life. In the beginning, the United States had to unify a disparate population that came from all the countries of Europe and had diverse traditions and tendencies. A way of rapid assimilation had to be found; that was the great political problem of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. The solution was psychological standardization--that is, simply to use a way of life as the basis of unification and as an instrument of propaganda. In addition, this uniformity plays another decisive role--an economic role--in the life of the United States; it determines the extent of the American market. Mass production requires mass consumption, but there cannot be mass consumption without widespread identical views as to what the necessities of life are. One must be sure that the market will react rapidly and massively to a given proposal or suggestion. One therefore needs fundamental psychological unity on which advertising can play with certainty when manipulating public opinion. And in order for public opinion to respond, it must be convinced of the excellence of all that is "American." Thus conformity of life and conformity of thought are indissolubly linked.

But such conformity can lead to unexpected extremes. Given American liberalism and the confidence of Americans in their economic strength and their political system, it is difficult to understand the "wave of collective hysteria" which occurred after 1948 and culminated in McCarthyism. That hysteria probably sprang from a vague feeling of ideological weakness, a certain inability to define the foundations of American society. That is why Americans seek to define the American way of life, to make it conscious, explicit, theoretical, worthy. Therefore the soul-searching and inflexibility, with excessive affirmations designed to mask the weakness of the ideological position. All this obviously constitutes an ideal framework for organized propaganda.

1 This notion is a little broader than that of Doob on unintentional propaganda. Doob includes in the term the involuntary effects obtained by the propagandist. He is the first to have stressed the possibility of this unintentional character of propaganda, contrary to all American thought on the subject, except for David Krech and Richard S. Crutchfield, who go even further in gauging the range of unintentional propaganda, which they even find in books on mathematics.

Excerpted from Jacques Ellul.Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Vintage Books, 1973

In addition to a certain living standard, another condition must be met: if man is to be successfully propagandized, he needs at least a minimum of culture. Propaganda cannot succeed where people have no trace of Western culture. We are not speaking here of intelligence; some primitive tribes are surely intelligent, but have an intelligence foreign to our concepts and customs. A base is needed — for example, education; a man who cannot read will escape most propaganda, as will a man who is not interested in reading. People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progress; they still celebrate the decline of illiteracy as a great victory; they condemn countries with a large proportion of illiterates; they think that reading is a road to freedom. All this is debatable, for the important thing is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads, to reflect on and judge what one reads. Outside of that, reading has no meaning (and even destroys certain automatic qualities of memory and observation). But to talk about critical faculties and discernment is to talk about something far above primary education and to consider a very small minority. The vast majority of people, perhaps 90% percent, know how to read, but do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word, or, conversely, reject it altogether. As these people do not possess enough knowledge to reflect and discern, they believe — or disbelieve — in toto what they read. And as such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardest, reading matter, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda.

Let us not say: "If one gave them good things to read... If these people received a better education…" Such an argument has no validity because things just are not that way. Let us not say, either: "This is only the first stage; soon their education will be better; one must begin somewhere." First of all, it takes a very long time to pass from the first to the second stage; in France, the first stage was reached half a century ago, and we still are very far from attaining the second. There is more, unfortunately. This first stage has placed man at the disposal of propaganda. Before he can pass to the second stage, he will find himself in a universe of propaganda. He will be already formed, adapted, integrated. This is why the development of culture in the U.S.S.R. can take place without danger. One can reach a higher level of culture without ceasing to be a propagandee as long as one was a propagandee before acquiring critical faculties, and as long as that culture itself is integrated into a universe of propaganda. Actually, the most obvious result of primary education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to make the individual susceptible to superpropaganda.1 There is no chance of raising the intellectual level of Western populations sufficiently and rapidly enough to compensate for the progress of propaganda. Propaganda techniques have advanced so much faster than the reasoning capacity of the average man that to close this gap and shape this man intellectually outside the framework of propaganda is almost impossible. In fact, what happens and what we see all around us is the claim that propaganda itself is our culture and what the masses ought to learn. Only in and through propaganda have the masses access to political economy, politics, art, or literature. Primary education makes it possible to enter the realm of propaganda, in which people then receive their intellectual and cultural environment.

The uncultured man cannot be reached by propaganda. Experience and research done by the Germans between 1933 and 1938 showed that in remote areas, where people hardly knew how to read, propaganda had no effect The same holds true for the enormous effort in the Communist world to teach people how to read. In Korea, the local script was terribly difficult and complicated; so, in North Korea, the Communists created an entirely new alphabet and a simple script in order to teach all the people how to read. In China, Mao simplified the script in his battle with illiteracy, and in some places in China new alphabets are being created. This would have no particular significance except that the texts used to teach the adult students how to read — and which are the only texts to which they have access — are exclusively propaganda texts; they are political tracts, poems to the glory of the Communist regime, extracts of classical Marxism. Among the Tibetans, the Mongols, the Ouighbours, the Manchus, the only texts in the new script are Mao’s works. Thus, we see here a wonderful shaping tool: The illiterates are taught to read only the new script; nothing is published in that script except propaganda texts; therefore, the illiterates cannot possibly read — or know — anything else.

Also, one of the most effective propaganda methods in Asia was to establish "teachers" to teach reading and indoctrinate people at the same time. The prestige of the intellectual — "marked with God’s finger" — allowed political assertions to appear as Truth, while the prestige of the printed word one learned to decipher confirmed the validity of what the teachers said. These facts leave no doubt that the development of primary education is a fundamental condition for the organization of propaganda, even though such a conclusion may run counter to many prejudices, best expressed by Paul Rivet’s pointed but completely unrealistic words: "A person who cannot read a newspaper is not free."

This need of a certain cultural level to make people susceptible to propaganda2 is best understood if one looks at one of propaganda’s most important devices, the manipulation of symbols. The more an individual participates in the society in which he lives, the more he will cling to stereotyped symbols expressing collective notions about the past and the future of his group. The more stereotypes in a culture, the easier it is to form public opinion, and the more an individual participates in that culture, the more susceptible he becomes to the manipulation of these symbols. The number of propaganda campaigns in the West which have first taken hold in cultured settings is remarkable. This is not only true for doctrinaire propaganda, which is based on exact facts and acts on the level of the most highly developed people who have a sense of values and know a good deal about political realities, such as, for example, the propaganda on the injustice of capitalism, on economic crises, or on colonialism; it is only normal that the most educated people (intellectuals) are the first to be reached by such propaganda… All this runs counter to pat notions that only the public swallows propaganda. Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propaganda; he shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is, in fact, one of his great weaknesses, and propagandists are well aware that in order to reach someone, one must first convince him that propaganda is ineffectual and not very clever. Because he is convinced of his own superiority, the intellectual is much more vulnerable than anybody else to this maneuver…

1 Because he considered the newspaper the principal instrument of propaganda, Lenin insisted on the necessity of teaching reading. It was even more the catchword of the New Economic Policy: the school became the place to prepare students to receive propaganda.

2 We also must consider the fact that in a society in which propaganda — whether direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious — absorbs all the means of communication or education (as in practically all societies in 1960), propaganda forms culture and in a certain sense is culture. When film and novel, newspaper and television are instruments either of political propaganda in the restricted sense or in that of human relations (social propaganda), culture is perfectly integrated into propaganda; as a consequence, the more cultivated a man is, the more he is propagandized. Here one can also see the idealist illusion of those who hope that the mass media of communication will create a mass culture. This "culture" is merely a way of destroying a personality.

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Mens Attitudes. Knopf. New York. 1965
NOTES FROM PROPAGANDA

I. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF PROPAGANDA

1. Any modern propaganda, will, first of all, address itself at one and the same time to the individual and to the masses. It cannot separate the two elements. What does this mean? That the individual is never considered as an individual, but always in terms of what he has in common with others, such as his motivations, his feelings, or his myths. Conversely, when propaganda is addressed to a crowd, it must touch each individual in that crowd, in that whole group To be effective, it must give the impression of being personal, for we must never forget that the mass is composed of individuals, and is in fact nothing more than assembled individuals. Thus all modern propaganda profits from the structure of the mass, but exploits the individual's need for self-affirmation; and the two actions must be conducted jointly, simultaneously.

2. The structure of present day societies place the individual where he is most easily reached by propaganda.

3. Propaganda must be total (movies, books, newspapers, ads, etc.). Thus one leaves no part of the intellectual or emotional life alone. It is a matter of reaching and circling the whole man and all men. Propaganda cannot be satisfied with partial success, for it does not tolerate discussion; by its very nature, it excludes contradiction and discussion. As long as a noticeable or expressed tension or a conflict of action remains, propaganda cannot be said to have accomplished its aim.

4. Everything can serve as a means of propaganda and everything must be utilized.

5. No contrast can be tolerated between propaganda and teaching, between the critical spirit formed by higher education and the exclusion of independent thought. One must utilize the education of the young to condition them to what comes later.

6. Direct propaganda, aimed at modifying opinions and attitudes, must be preceded by propaganda that is sociological in nature, slow, general, seeking to create a climate, an atmosphere of favorable preliminary attitudes. No direct propaganda can be effective without pre-propaganda, which, without direct or noticeable aggression, is limited to creating ambiguities, reducing prejudices, and spreading images, apparently without purpose.

7. Finally, we well know that the combination of covert propaganda and overt propaganda is increasingly conducted so that "white" propaganda actually becomes a mask for "black" propaganda--that is, one openly admits the existence of one kind of propaganda and of its organization, means, and objectives, but all this is only a facade to capture the attention of individuals and neutralize their instinct to resist, while other individuals, behind the scenes, work on public opinion in a totally different direction, seeking to arouse very different reactions, utilizing even existing resistance to overt propaganda.

8. Propaganda must be continuous and lasting. Propaganda tends to make the individual live in a separate world; he must not have outside points of reference. He must not be allowed a moment of meditation or reflection in which to see himself vis--vis the propagandist, as happens when the propaganda is not continuous. The individual must not be allowed to recover, to collect himself, to remain untouched by propaganda during any relatively long period of time, for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow constant impregnation. Hitler was undoubtedly right when he said that the masses take a long time to understand and remember, thus it is necessary to repeat. In any case, repetition must be discontinued when the public has been conditioned, for at that point repetition will begin to irritate and provoke fresh doubts with respect to former certainties.

9. Propaganda must create a complete environment for the individual, one from which he never emerges. And to prevent him from finding external points of reference, it protects him by censoring everything that might come in from the outside.

10. Continuous propaganda exceeds the individual's capacities for attention or adaptation and thus his capabilities of persistence. This trait of propaganda, its continuity, explains why it can indulge in sudden twists and turns. It is always surprising that the content of propaganda can be so inconsistent that it can approve today what it condemned yesterday. Antonio Miotto considers this changeability of propaganda an indication of its nature. Of course, the subject notices the change that has taken place, and he is surprised. He may even be tempted to resist--as the communists were at the time of the German-Soviet pact. But will the subject, then, engage in a sustained effort to resist propaganda? Such breaks are too painful; faced with them, the individual, feeling that the attack in line is not an attack on his real self, prefers to retain his habits. The propagandist does not necessarily have to worry about coherence and unity in his claims. Claims can be varied and even contradictory, depending on the setting. For example, Goebbels promised an increase in the price of grain in the country, and, at the same time, a decrease in the price of bread in the city. Another example is Hitler's propaganda against democracy in 1936 and for democracy in 1943.

ORGANIZATION OF PROPAGANDA


1. Propaganda must be organized in several ways. To give it the above-mentioned characteristics (continuity, duration, combination of different media), an organization is required that controls the mass media, is capable of using them correctly, of calculating the effect of one or another slogan or of replacing one campaign with another. Just as technicians are needed to make films and radio broadcasts, so one needs "technicians of influence"--sociologists and psychologists. But this indispensable administrative organization is not what we are thinking of here. What we do mean is that the propaganda is always institutionalized to the extent of an "apparat" in the German sense of the term--a machine. It is tied to realities. A great error, which interferes with propaganda analysis, is to believe that propaganda is solely a psychological affair, a manipulation of symbols, an abstract influence of opinions. A large number of American studies on propaganda are not valid for that reason. All great practitioners have rigorously tied together psychological and physical action as inseparable events. No propaganda is possible unless psychological influence rests on reality. Separation of the psychological and physical events is an arbitrary simplification that prevents an understanding of what propaganda is. Propaganda cannot operate in a vacuum. It must be rooted in action, in a reality it is a part of.

2. The manipulation of symbols is necessary for three reasons:
it persuades the individual to enter the framework of an organization;
it furnishes him reasons, justifications, motivations for action;
it obtains his total allegiance.

The last is vital, for more and more we are learning that genuine compliance is essential if action is to be effective. The worker, the teacher, the soldier, the administrator, the judge, the lawyer--all must believe in what they are doing, must put all their heart and good will into it; they must also find their equilibrium and their satisfactions in their actions.

ORTHOPRAXY

1. The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to transform an opinion, but to arouse an active and mythical belief. Only action is of concern to modern propaganda, for its aim is to precipitate an individual's action, with maximum effectiveness and economy. Goebbels states this expressly when he distinguishes between Haltung (behavior) and Stimmung (morale) in the following passage: "The Stimmung is quite low but that means little; the Haltung holds well." The Stimmung is volatile and varies readily; therefore, above all, the right action must be obtained, the right behavior maintained.

2. The propagandist therefore does not normally address himself to the individual's intelligence, for the process of intellectual persuasion is long and uncertain, and the road from such intellectual conviction to action even more so. The individual rarely acts purely on the basis of an idea. Moreover, to place propaganda efforts on the intellectual level would require that the propagandist engage in individual debate with each person--an unthinkable method.

3. To be effective propaganda must constantly short-circuit thought and decision. It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious. He must not know that he is being shaped by outside forces (this is one of the conditions for the success of propaganda), but some central core in him must be reached in order to release the mechanism in the unconscious which will provide the appropriate--and expected--action. If the classic but outmoded view of propaganda consists in defining it as an adherence of man to an orthodoxy, true modern propaganda seeks, on the contrary, to obtain an orthopraxy--an action that in itself, and not because of the value judgments of the person who is acting, leads directly to a goal, which for the individual is not a conscious and intentional objective to be obtained, but which is considered such by the propagandist. The propagandist knows what objective should be sought and what action should be accomplished, and he maneuvers the instrument that will secure precisely this action.

4. This is a particular example of a more general problem: the separation of thought and action in our society. We are living in a time when systematically--though without our wanting it so--action and thought are being separated. In our society, he who thinks can no longer act for himself; he must act through the agency of others, and in many cases he cannot act at all. He who acts cannot first think out his action, either because of lack of time and the burden of his personal problems, or because society's plan demands that he translate others' thoughts into action.

5. And we see the same division within the individual himself. For he can use his mind only outside the area of his job--in order to find himself, to use his leisure to better himself, to discover what best suits him, and thus to individualize himself; whereas in the context of his work he yields to the common necessity, the common method, the need to incorporate his own work into the overall plan. Escape into dreams is suggested to him while he performs wholly mechanized actions

6. The propagandist can mobilize man for action that is not in accord with his previous convictions. Modern psychologists are well aware that there is not necessarily any continuity between conviction and action and no intrinsic rationality in opinions or acts. Man does not obey his clear opinions or what he believes to be his deliberate will. To control opinion one must be aware that there is an abyss between what a man says and what he does. His actions often do not correspond to any clear motive, or to what one would have expected from a previous impression he made. Into these gaps in continuity propaganda inserts its lever. It does not seek to create wise or reasonable men, but proselytes and militants.

PROPAGANDA AND THE EDUCATED

1. It is almost certainly the case that the ultimate achievement of higher education for the great majority of people, is to open them up and prepare them for bigger and bigger lies and to make them receptive to being part of a group that simultaneously sees itself as above propaganda, and also as a member of a semi-elitist class. As Ellul suggests, however, education, at least as its referred to in the modern sense of the word, is an "absolute prerequisite" for propaganda.

2. In fact, education is largely identical with what Ellul calls "pre-propaganda"--the conditioning of minds with vast amounts of information, already dispensed for ulterior purposes and posing as "facts" and as "education." Ellul follows through by designating intellectuals as virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda for three reasons:

a). they absorb the largest amount of second-hand, unverifiable information;

. they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all such indigestible pieces of information;

c). they consider themselves capable of "judging for themselves."

For these reasons, they literally need propaganda.

SUB-PROPAGANDA AND ACTIVE PROPAGANDA

1. Propaganda must properly be divided into two phases. There is pre-propaganda or sub-propaganda and there is active propaganda. This follows from what was stated earlier about the continuos and permanent nature of propaganda. The essential objective of pre-propaganda is to prepare man for a particular action, to make him sensitive to some influence, to get him into condition for the time when he will effectively, and without delay or hesitation, participate in an action. Seen from this angle, pre-propaganda does not have a precise ideological objective; it has nothing to do with an opinion, an idea, a doctrine. It proceeds by psychological manipulations, by character modifications, by the creation of feelings or stereotypes useful when the time comes. It must be continuous, slow and imperceptible. Man must be penetrated in order to shape such tendencies. He must be made to live in a certain psychological climate.

2. The two great routes that this sub-propaganda takes are the conditioned reflex and the myth. Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual by training him so that certain words, signs, symbols or even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions. But preparatory work is not yet propaganda, for it is not yet immediately applicable to a concrete case. What is visible in propaganda, what is spectacular and seems to us often incomprehensible or unbelievable (such as the Nazi propaganda against the Jews), is possible only because of such slow and not very explicit preparation; without it nothing would be possible.

3. On the other hand, the propagandist tries to create myths by which men will live, which respond to his sense of the sacred. By "myth" we mean an all-encompassing, activating image: a sort of vision of desirable objectives that have lost their material, practical character and have become strongly colored, overwhelming, all-encompassing, and which displace from the conscious all that is not related to it. Such an image pushes man to action precisely because it includes all that he feels is good, just and true. Without giving a metaphysical analysis of the myth, we will mention the great myths that have been created by various propagandas: the myth of race, of the proletariat, of the Fuhrer, of Communist society, of productivity, the "inner child." Eventually the myth takes possession of a man's mind so completely that his life is consecrated to it. But that effect can be created only by slow patient work by all the methods of propaganda, not by any immediate propaganda operation. Only when conditioned reflexes have been created in a man and he lives in a collective myth can he be readily mobilized.

4. The United States prefers to utilize the myth; the [former] Soviet Union has for a long time preferred the reflex. The important thing is that when the time is ripe, the individual can be thrown into action by active propaganda, by the utilization of the psychological levers that have been set up, and by the evocation of the myth. No connection necessarily exists between his action and the reflex or the content of the myth. The action is not necessarily psychologically conditioned by one aspect of the myth. For the most surprising thing is that is that the preparatory work leads only to man's readiness. Once he is ready, he can be mobilized in very different directions--but of course the myth and the reflex must be constantly rejuvenated and revived or they will atrophy. That is why pre-propaganda must be constant, whereas active propaganda can be sporadic when the goal is a particular action or involvement.

INTERNAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PROPAGANDA

I. Knowledge of the Psychological Terrain.

1. The propagandist must first of all know as precisely as possible the terrain on which he is operating. He must know the sentiments and opinions, the current tendencies and the stereotypes among the public he is trying to reach. The propagandist must know the principal symbols of the culture he wishes to attack and the symbols which express each attitude if he is to be effective. A person is not sufficient unto himself; he belongs to that whole called culture by the Americans. Each person's psychology is shaped by that culture. He is conditioned by the symbols of that culture, and is also a transmitter of that culture [see Althusser's "Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus," particularly his notion of "interpolation" for further light on how this transmission works]. Each time the culture's symbols are changed, he is deeply affected. Thus, one can change him by changing these symbols. The propagndist will act on this, keeping in mind that the most important man to be reached is the so-called marginal man; that is, the man who does not believe what the propagandist says, but who is interested because he does not believe the opposition either.

2. Thus the technique of propaganda consists in precisely calculating the desired action in terms of the individual who is to be made to act. From this we may derive a fundamental rule of propaganda utilization: never make a direct attack on an established, reasoned, durable opinion or accepted clich, a fixed pattern. This does not mean that the propagandist must then leave things as they are and conclude that nothing can be done. He need only understand two subtle aspects of this problem:

a). In that there is not necessarily any continuity between opinion or fixed patterns of action, the propagandist avoid making this inconsistency clear by avoiding a head-on attack against the prejudices and opinions he seeks to alter. The skillful propagandist is aware of this and will seek to obtain action without demanding consistency.

. The propagandist can alter opinions by diverting them from their accepted course, by changing them, or by placing them in an ambiguous context. Other methods here include offering forms of action, provoking rifts in a group, or to turn a feeling of aggression toward some specified object.

3. Thus, existing opinion is not to be contradicted, but rather utilized. Each individual harbors a large number of stereotypes and established tendencies; from this arsenal the propagandist must select those easiest to mobilize, those which will give the greatest strength to the action he wants to precipitate. Propaganda need only determine which opinions must not be attacked head on, and be content to undermine them gradually and to weaken them by cloaking them in ambiguity. It goes without saying that propaganda must also change its character according to the results it wishes to attain in given circumstances. For example, propaganda must be strongly personalized when it seeks to create a feeling of guilt in the adversary ("Americans are capitalist pigs"). On the other hand it must be impersonal when it seeks to create confidence and exultation ("America is great.")

4. Another important conclusion to bear in mind is that propaganda cannot create something out of nothing. It must attach itself to a feeling, an idea; it must build on a foundation already present in the individual. Propaganda is confined to utilizing existing material; it does not create it.

5. This "existing material" can be divided into four categories:

a). psychological mechanisms: these are derived from a general knowledge of stimulus-response actions more or less common to all individuals. Diverse schools of psychology provide different insights into the nature of these mechanisms, and here, the propagandist is at the mercy of these differing interpretations.

. conventional patterns and stereotypes: these exist concretely in a particular milieu or individual and can be known more objectively than psychological mechanisms.

c). ideologies: these are more or less consciously shared, accepted and disseminated, and which form the only intellectual, or rather para-intellectual, element that must be reckoned with in propaganda.

d). specific needs: The propagandist must concern himself above all with the needs of those whom he wishes to reach. All propaganda must respond to a need, whether it be a concrete need (bread, security, peace, work) or a psychological need. Propaganda cannot be gratuitous The propagandist cannot simply decide to make propaganda in such and such a direction or on this or that group.

6. The propagandist's need to base himself on what already exists does not prevent him from going further. What exists is only the raw material from which the propagandist can create something strictly new, which in all probability would not have sprung up spontaneously. Take, for example, unhappy workers, threatened by unemployment, exploited, poorly paid, and without hope of improving their situation: Karl Marx has clearly demonstrated that they might have a certain spontaneous reaction of revolt, and that some sporadic outbursts might occur, but that this will not develop into anything else and will lead nowhere. With propaganda, however, this same situation and the existing sentiments might be used to create a class-consciousness and a lasting and organized revolutionary trend.

7. Finally, it is obvious that propaganda must not concern itself with what is best in man--the highest goals humanity sets for itself, its noblest and most precious feelings. Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve. It must therefore utilize the most common feelings, the most widespread ideas, the crudest patterns, and in doing so place itself on a very low level with regard to what it wants man to do and to what end. Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality. To this end, propaganda must stay at the human level. Propaganda must confine itself to simple, elementary messages (Have confidence in our leader, our party...Hate our enemies, etc.) without fear of being ridiculous. It must speak the most simple, everyday language, familiar, individualized (The Bank of America family cares...You'll like our family)--the language of the group that is being addressed, and the language with which a person is familiar.

FUNDAMENTAL CURRENTS IN SOCIETY

1. Propaganda must be familiar with collective sociological presuppositions, spontaneous myths, and broad ideologies. by this we do not mean political currents or temporary opinions that will change in a few months, but the fundamental psycho-sociological bases on which a whole society rests, the presuppositions and myths not just of individuals or of particular groups but those shared by all individuals in a society, including men of opposite political inclinations and class royalties. No propaganda can succeed by going against these structural elements of society. But propaganda's main task is clearly the psychological reflection of these structures.

2. Whatever the differences of opinion are among people, one can discover beneath the differences the same beliefs--in Americans and in Russians, in Communists and in Christians. It seems to us that there are four great collective sociological presuppositions in the modern world. By this we mean not only the Western world, but all the world that shares a modern technology and is structured into nations, including the Communist world, though not yet the African or Asian worlds. These common presuppositions of bourgeois and proletarian are:

a). that man's aim in life is happiness

. that man is naturally good

c). that history develops in endless progress

d). that everything is matter

Formulated in this way, they seem to be philosophical notions but are not. We certainly do not see here any of the philosophical schools, hedonism or materialism, but only the instinctive popular belief marking our epoch and shared by all, expressing itself in very concrete forms.

3. The other great psychological reflection of social reality is the myth. In our society the two great fundamental myths on which all other myths rest are Science and History. And based on them are the collective myths that are man's principal orientations: the myth of Work, the myth of Happiness (which is not the same thing as the presupposition of happiness), the myth of the Nation, the myth of Youth, the myth of the Hero.

4. Propaganda is forced to build on these presuppositions and to express these myths, for without them, nobody would listen to it. For example, a propaganda that questions progress or work would arouse disdain and reach nobody; it would immediately be branded as an ideology of the intellectuals, since most people feel that the serious things are material things because they are related to labor, and so on.

5. No propaganda can succeed if it defends outdated production methods or obsolete social or administrative institutions. Though occasionally advertising may profitably evoke the good old days, political propaganda may not. Rather, it must evoke the future, the tomorrows that beckon, precisely because such visions impel the individual to act. Propaganda not only reflects myths and presuppositions, it hardens them, sharpens them, invests them with the power of shock and action.

6. It is virtually impossible to reverse this trend. In a country in which administrative centralization does not yet exist, one can propagandize for administrative centralization because modern man firmly believes in the strength of a centrally administered State. But where centralization does exist, no propaganda can be made against it.

7. When we analyze this necessary subordination of propaganda to presuppositions and myths, we do not mean that propaganda must express them clearly all the time; it need not speak constantly of progress and happiness (although these are always profitable themes), but in its general line and in its infrastructure it must allow for the same presuppositions and follow the same myths as those prevalent in its audience. There is some tacit agreement: for example, a speaker does not have to say that he believes "man is good": this is clear from his language, behavior, and attitudes, and each man unconsciously feels that the others share the same presuppositions and myths. A person listens to a particular propaganda because it reflects his deepest unconscious convictions without expressing them directly. By the same token, a man's real attitude, his deeply-held convictions and beliefs can ultimately be surmised through his behavior, language and attitude; there is no hiding save through an extraordinary act of diligence and dissemblance.

TIMELINESS

1. A man will become excited over a new automobile because it is immediate evidence of his deep belief in progress and technology. Between news that can be utilized by propaganda and fundamental currents of society the same relationship exists as between waves and the sea. The waves exist only because the underlying mass supports them; without it there would be nothing. But man sees only the waves; they are what attracts, entices and fascinates him. Similarly, propaganda can have solid reality and power over man only because of its rapport with fundamental currents, but it has seductive excitement and a capacity to move him only by its ties to the most volatile immediacy. Goebbels said that the face of politics changes each day, but the lines of propaganda must change only imperceptibly.

2. The public is sensitive only to contemporary events. They alone concern and challenge it. Neither past events nor great metaphysical problems interest or challenge the average individual, the ordinary man of our times. He is not sensitive to what is tragic in life; he is not anguished by a question that God might put to him; he does not feel challenged except by current events. Therefore, propaganda must start with current events; it would not reach anybody if it tried to base itself on historical facts. Vichy propaganda failed when it tried to evoke the images of Napoleon and Joan of Arc in hopes of arousing the French to turn against England.

3. The average individual is at the mercy of events. Hardly has an event taken place before it is outdated; even if its significance is still considerable, it is no longer of interest, and if man experiences the feeling of having escaped it, he is no longer concerned. In addition, he obviously has a very limited capacity for attention and awareness; one event pushes the preceding one into oblivion. And as man's memory is short, the event the event that has been supplanted by another is forgotten; it no longer exists; nobody is interested in it anymore.

4. Man remembers no specific news. He retains only a general impression (which propaganda furnishes him) inserted in the collective current of society. This obviously helps the work of the propagandist and permits extraordinary contradictions. What the listener retains, in the long run determines his loyalties. A remarkable study by Carl I Hovland and Walter Weiss has shown that the individual who questions an item of information because he distrusts the informant, ultimately forgets the suspicious nature of the source and retains only the impression of the information. The implications of this study are disturbing: in the long run, belief in a reliable source of information decreases and belief in information from the suspicious source increases.

5. The public is prodigiously sensitive to current news. Its attention is focused immediately on any spectacular event that fits in with its myths. At the same time, the public will fix its interest and its passion on one point, the exclusion of all the rest. Besides, people have already become accustomed to, and have accommodated themselves to "the rest" (yesterday's news or that the day before yesterday). We are dealing here not just with forgetfulness, but also with plain loss of interest.

6. To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness--of himself, of his condition, of his society--for the man who lives by current events. Such a man never stops to investigate any one point, any more than he will tie together a series of news events.

7. We have already mentioned man's inability to consider several facts or events simultaneously and to make a synthesis of them in order to face or oppose them. One thought drives away another; old facts are chased away by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man's capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandist, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks.

8. Moreover, there is a spontaneous defensive reaction in the individual against an excess of information and--to the extent he clings (unconsciously) to the unity of his own person--against inconsistencies. The best defense is to forget the preceding event. In doing so, man denies his own continuity; to the same extent he lives on the surface of events and makes today's events his life by obliterating yesterday's news, he refuses to see the contradictions in his own life and condemns himself to a life of successive moments, discontinuous and fragmented. All of this is doubly true for those who claim to be "informed" (educated or self-educated) because they read some weekly periodical filled with political revelations.

9. Because he is immersed in current events, the average man has a psychological weakness that puts him at the mercy of the propagandist. No confrontation ever occurs between the event and the truth; no relationship ever exists between the event and the person. Real information never concerns such a person. What could be more distressing, more striking, more decisive than the splitting of the atom, apart from the bomb itself? And yet this great development is kept in the background, behind the fleeting and spectacular result of some catastrophe or sports event because that is the superficial news the average man wants.

10. But here we must make an important qualification. The news event may be a real fact, existing objectively, or it may be only an item of information, the dissemination of a supposed fact. What makes it news is its dissemination, not its objective reality. Here we must emphasize that the current news to which a man is sensitive, in which he places himself, need have no objective or effective origins; in one way this greatly facilitates the work of propaganda. For propaganda can suggest, in the context of news, a group of "facts" which becomes actuality for a man who feels personally concerned. Propaganda can then exploit his concern for its own purposes.

PROPAGANDA AND THE UNDECIDED

1. All of the foregoing can be clarified by a brief examination of a question familiar to political scientists, that of the Undecided--those people whose opinions are vague, who form the great mass of citizens, and who constitute the most fertile public for the propagandist.

2. The Undecided are not the indifferent--those who say they are apolitical, or without opinion and who constitute no more than 10 percent of the population. The Undecided, far from being outside the group, are participants in the life of the group, but do not know what decision to make on problems that seem urgent to them. They are susceptible to the control of public opinion or attitudes, and the role of propaganda is to bring them under this control, transforming their potential into real effect.

3. One strong factor here is the individual's degree of integration in the collective life. Propaganda can only play on individuals more or less intensely involved in social currents. The isolated mountaineer or forester, having only occasional contact with the society is hardly sensitive to propaganda. For him it does not exist. Propaganda acts upon the person embroiled in the conflicts of his time, who shares the "foci of interest" of his society. A prior interest must exist for propaganda to be effective. Propaganda is not effective when based on an individual prejudice, but when based on a collective center of interest, shared by the crowds.

4. That is why religious propaganda, for example, is not very successful; society as a whole is no longer interested in religious problems. At Byzantium, crowds fought in the streets over theological questions, so that in those days religious propaganda made sense. At present, only isolated individuals are interested in religion. It is part of their private opinions, and no real public opinion exists on the subject. On the other hand, propaganda related to technology is sure to arouse response, for everybody is as passionately interested in technology as in politics.

5. As for propaganda and the Undecided, we can present the following three principles:

a). The propagandist must place his propaganda inside the limits of the foci of interest.

. The propagandist must understand that his propaganda has the greatest chance for success where the collective life of the individuals he seeks to influence is most intense.

c). The propagandist must remember that collective life is most intense where it revolves around a focus of interest.

On the basis of these principles the propagandist can reach the Undecided and act on the majority of 93%; and only in connection with this mass of Undecided can one truly speak of ambiguity, majority effect, tension, frustration, and so on. On the subject of this 93%, it is often stated--and opinion surveys tend to confirm this--that between 7 and 10% of all individuals consciously and voluntarily adhere to a trend, to a grouping, whereas about 90% fluctuate according to the circumstances. The first correct estimate of this apparently was made by Napoleon. It was revived by Hitler.

PROPAGANDA AND TRUTH

1. We have not yet considered a problem, familiar but too often ignored: the relationship between propaganda and truth or, rather, between propaganda and accuracy of facts. We shall speak henceforth of accuracy or reality, and not of "truth," which is an inappropriate term here.

2. The most generally held concept of propaganda is that it is a series of lies. This concept leads to two attitudes among the public. The first is: "Of course we shall not be victims of propaganda, because we are capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood." Anyone holding that conviction is extremely susceptible to propaganda, because when propaganda does tell the "truth," he is then convinced that it is no longer propaganda; moreover, his self-confidence makes him all the more vulnerable to attacks of which he is unaware.

3. It seems that in propaganda we must make a radical distinction between a fact on the one hand and intentions or interpretations on the other; in brief, between the material and the moral elements. The truth that pays off is in the realm of facts. The necessary falsehoods, which also pay off, are in the realm of intentions and interpretations. This is a fundamental rule for propaganda analysis.

THE PROBLEM OF FACTUALITY

1. In political matters, personal experience with facts is very rare, difficult to come by and inconclusive. One must carefully distinguish between local facts, which can be checked, and others. Obviously, propaganda must respect local facts, otherwise it would destroy itself. It cannot hold out for long against local evidence unless the population is so securely in the propagandist's hand that he could say absolutely anything and still be believed; but that is a rare condition.

2. There are three principles concerning factuality:

a). Propaganda can effectively rest on a claim that some fact is untrue which may actually be true but is difficult to prove.

. Propaganda may be presented in such a fashion that the reader or listener cannot really understand it or or draw any conclusions from it. Sauvy states that this type of propaganda consists in "respecting detail in order to compose a static whole which gives misleading information on the movement. Thus truth becomes the principal form of falsehood." The publication of a true fact in its raw state is not dangerous. When it would be dangerous to let a fact be known, the modern propagandist prefers to hide it, to say nothing rather than to lie. bout one-fifth of all press directives given by Goebbels between 1939 and 1944 were orders to keep silent on one subject or another.

c). Propaganda can use accurate facts, but based on them, the mechanism of suggestion works best. Americans call this technique innuendo. The public
is left to draw obvious conclusions from cleverly presented truth, and the great majority comes to the same conclusions. The only element in the publication of a fact which one must scrupulously take into account is its probability or credibility. Much news was suppressed during W.W.II because it would not have been believed by the public; it would have been branded pure propaganda.

INTENTIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS

1. This is the realm of the lie; but it is exactly here that it cannot be detected. A fact has different significance, depending on whether it is analyzed by a bourgeois economist or a Communist economist, a liberal historian, a Christian historian, or a Marxist historian. The confusion between judgment of fact and judgment of value occurs at the level of these qualifications of fact and interpretation. For example: All bombings by the enemy are acts of savagery aimed only at civilian objectives, whereas all bombings by one's own planes are proof of one's superiority, and they never destroy anything but military objectives.

2. Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions. The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has had and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit. The accusation aimed at the other's intention clearly reveals the intention of the accuser.

3. Spier says that the role of the propagandist is to hide political reality by talking about it. Sauvy says that the propagandist administers the anesthetic so the surgeon can operate without public interference. This is why, in many cases, according to Megret, complete secrecy is a handicap to the propagandist; he must be free to speak, for only then can hesufficiently confuse things, reveal elements too disconnected to beput together, and so on.

4. Propaganda is necessarily false when it speaks of values, of truth, of good, of justice, of happiness--and when it interprets and colors facts and imputes meaning to them.

5. Propaganda feeds, develops and spreads the system of false claims--lies aimed at the complete transformation of minds, judgments, values, and actions (and constituting a frame of reference for systematic falsification). When the eyeglasses are out of focus, everything one sees through them is distorted. This was not always so in the past. The difference today lies in the voluntary and deliberate character of inaccurate representation circulated by propaganda.

6. One cannot make propaganda in pretended good faith. Propaganda reveals our hoaxes even as it encloses and hardens us into this system of hoaxes from which we can no longer escape.

7. Having analyzed these traits, we can now advance a definition of propaganda--not an exclusive definition, but at least a partial one: Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization.

Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and insinuating false intentions. There are two salient aspects of this fact. First of all, the propagandist must insist on the purity of his own intentions and, at the same time, hurl accusations at his enemy. But the accusation is never made haphazardly or groundlessly. The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit. He who wants to provoke a war not only proclaims his own peaceful intentions but also accuses the other party of provocation. He who uses concentration camps accuses his neighbor of doing so. He who intends to establish a dictatorship always insists that his adversaries are bent on dictatorship. The accusation aimed at the other’s intention clearly reveals the intention of the accuser. But the public cannot see this because the revelation is interwoven with facts.
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda,(Vintage, 1965), pages 58.

The second element of falsehood is that the propagandist naturally cannot reveal the true intentions of the principal for whom he acts: government, party chief, general, company director. Propaganda never can reveal its true projects and plans or divulge government secrets. That would be to submit the projects to public discussion, to the scrutiny of public opinion, and thus to prevent their success. More serious, its make the projects vulnerable to enemy action by forewarning him so the he could take all the proper precautions to make them fail. Propaganda must serve instead as a veil for such projects, masking true intentions.1

1 Many authors have stressed this role of covert propaganda. Speier says that the role of the propagandist is to hide political reality by talking about it. Sauvy says that the propagandist administers the anesthetic so the surgeon can operate without public interference. This is why, in many case, according to Megret, complete secrecy is a handicap to the propagandist; he must be free to speak, for only then can he sufficiently confuse things, reveal elements too disconnected to be put together, and so on. He must keep the public from understanding reality, while giving the public the opposite impression, that it understands everything clearly. Riess says he must give the public distorted news and intentions, knowing clearly beforehand what conclusions the public will draw from them.
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda,(Vintage, 1965), pages 59.

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Mens Attitudes. Knopf. New York. 1965
NOTES FROM PROPAGANDA
CATEGORIES OF PROPAGANDA
1. First we must distinguish between sociological propaganda and political propaganda. We shall not dwell long on the latter because it is the type called immediately to mind by the word propaganda itself.

2. Sociological propaganda is the group of manifestations by which any society seeks to integrate the maximum number of individuals into itself, to unify its members' behavior according to a pattern, to spread its style of life abroad, and thus to impose itself on other groups. At this level, advertising as the spreading of a certain style of life can be said to be included in such propaganda, and in the United States this is also true of public relations, human engineering, the motion pictures, and so on.


3. Sociological propaganda is a phenomenon much more difficult to grasp than political propaganda, and is rarely discussed. Basically it is the penetration of an ideology by means of sociological context. This phenomenon is the reverse of what we have been studying up to now. Propaganda as it is traditionally known implies an attempt to spread an ideology through the mass media of communication in order to lead the public to accept some political or economic structure or to participate in some action. That is the one element common to all the propaganda we have studied. Ideology is disseminated for the purpose of making various political acts acceptable to the people.

4. But in sociological propaganda the movement is reversed. The existing economic, political, and sociological factors progressively allow an ideology to penetrate individuals or masses. Through the medium of economic and political structures a certain ideology is established, which leads to the active participation of the masses and the adaptation of individuals. The important thing is to make the individual participate actively and to adapt him as much as possible to a specific sociological context.

5. Sociological propaganda springs up spontaneously; it is not the result of deliberate propaganda action. No propagandists deliberately use this method, though many may practice it unwittingly, and tend in this direction without realizing it. For example, when an American producer makes a film, he has certain definite ideas he wants to express, which are not intended to be propaganda. Rather, the propaganda element is in the American way of life with which he is permeated and which he expresses in his film without realizing it [think of Frank Capra, or, more subtly and to the point, John Ford or Orson Welles]. We see here the force of expansion of a vigorous society, which is totalitarian in the sense of the integration of the individual, and which leads to involuntary behavior.

6. Sociological propaganda expresses itself in many ways--in advertising, in the movies (commercial and non-political films), in technology in general, in education, in Reader's Digest; and in social service, case work and settlement houses. Unintentional (at least in the first stage), non-political, organized along spontaneous patterns and rhythms, the activities we have lumped together (from a concept that might be judged arbitrary or artificial) are not considered propaganda by either sociologists or the average public.

7. And yet with deeper and more objective analysis, what does one find? These influences are expressed through the same media as propaganda. This fact seems essential. They are really directed by those who make propaganda. These influences follow the same stereotypes and prejudices as propaganda; they stir the same feelings an act on the individual in the same fashion. But there is more. Such activities are propaganda to the extent that the combination of advertising, public relations, social welfare, and so on produces a general conception of society, a particular way of life. From then on, the individual in the clutches of such sociological propaganda believes that those who live this way are on the side of the angels, and those who don't are bad; those who have this conception of society are right, and those who have another conception are bad. By doing this, a society engages in propaganda on the deepest level.

8. But sociological propaganda must act gently. It conditions; it introduces a truth, an ethic in various benign forms, which, although sporadic, end by creating a fully established personality structure. It acts slowly, by penetration, and is most effective in a relatively stable and active society and one that is disintegrating (or in an expanding group within a disintegrating society). But sociological propaganda is inadequate in a moment of crisis. Nor is it able to move the masses to action in exceptional circumstances. Therefore, it must sometimes be strengthened by the classic kind of propaganda, which leads to action.

9. At such times, sociological propaganda will appear to be the medium that has prepared the ground for direct propaganda; it becomes identified with sub-propaganda. Nothing is easier than to graft a direct propaganda onto a setting prepared by sociological propaganda ; besides, sociological propaganda may itself be transformed into direct propaganda. Then, by a series of intermediate stages, we not only see one turn into the other, but also a smooth transition from what was merely a spontaneous affirmation of a way of life to the deliberate affirmation of a truth.

10. Sociological propaganda, involuntary at first, becomes more and more deliberate, and ends up exercising influence. One example is the code drawn up by the Motion Picture Association, which requires films to promote "the highest types of social life," and to avoid "any ridicule of the law (natural or human) or sympathy for those who violate the law."

11. What starts out as a simple situation gradually turns into a definite ideology, because the way of life in which man thinks he is so indisputably well off becomes a criterion of value for him. This does not mean that objectively he is well off, but that, regardless of the merits of his actual condition, he thinks he is. He is perfectly adapted to his environment, like a "fish in water." From that moment on, everything that expresses this particular way of life, that reinforces it and improves it, is good; everything that tends to disturb, criticize, or destroy it is bad.

12. But from the instant a man uses [his] way of life as a criterion of good and evil, he is lead to make judgments: for example, anything un-American is evil. From then on, genuine propaganda limits itself to the use of this tendency and to leading man into actions of either compliance with or defense of the established order.

13. Sociological propaganda in the United States is a natural result of the fundamental elements of American life. In the beginning, the United States had to unify a disparate population that came from all the countries of Europe and had diverse traditions and tendencies. A way of rapid assimilation had to be found; that was the great political problem of the United States at the end of the 19th century. The solution was psychological standardization--that is, simply to use a way of life as the basis of unification and as an instrument of propaganda. In addition, this uniformity plays another decisive role--an economic role--in the life of the United States; it determines the extent of the American market. Mass production requires mass consumption, but there cannot be mass consumption without widespread identical views as to what the necessities of life are. One therefore needs psychological unity on which advertising can play with certainty when manipulating public opinion. And in order for public opinion to respond, it must be convinced of the excellence of all that is "American." Thus conformity of life and conformity of thought are indissolubly linked.

14. All forms of sociological propaganda are obviously very diffuse, and aimed much more at the promulgation of ideas and prejudices, of a style of life, than of a doctrine, at inciting action or calling for formal adherence. They represent a penetration in depth until a precise point is struck at which action will occur.

PROPAGANDA OF AGITATION AND PROPAGANDA OF INTEGRATION
1. The second great distinction within the general phenomenon of propaganda is the distinction between propaganda of agitation and propaganda of integration. Here we find such a summa divisio that we may ask ourselves: if the methods, themes, characteristics, publics and objectives are so different, are we not really dealing with two separate entities rather than two aspects of the same phenomenon?

2. Propaganda of agitation, being the most visible and widespread, generally attracts all the attention. It is most often subversive propaganda and has the stamp of opposition. It is led a party seeking to destroy the government or the established order. Governments also employ this propaganda of agitation, when after having been installed in power, they want to pursue a revolutionary course of action. Most of Lenin and Hitler's propaganda was propaganda of agitation. Hitler could work his sweeping social and economic transformations only by constant agitation, by overexcitement, by straining energies to the utmost.

3. In all cases, propaganda of agitation tries to stretch energies to the utmost, obtain substantial sacrifices, and induce the individual to bear heavy ordeals. It takes him out of his everyday life, his normal framework, and plunges him into enthusiasm and adventure; it opens to him hitherto unsuspected possibilities, and suggests extraordinary goals that nevertheless seem to him completely within reach. Propaganda of agitation thus unleashes an explosive moment; it operates inside of a crisis or actually provokes the crisis itself. On the other hand, such propaganda can obtain effects of relatively short duration. If the proposed objective is not achieved fast enough, enthusiasm will give way to discouragement and despair. Therefore. specialists in "agitprop" break up the desired goals into a series of stages to be reached one by one. There is a period of pressure to obtain some result, then a period of relaxation and rest; this is how Lenin, Hitler and Mao operated.

4. This propaganda of agitation is obviously the flashiest; it attracts attention because of its explosive and revolutionary character. It is also the easiest to make; in order to succeed, it need only be addressed to the most simple and violent sentiments through the most elementary means. Hate is generally its most profitable resource. It is extremely easy to launch a revolutionary movement based on hatred of a particular enemy. Hatred is probably the most spontaneous and common sentiment; it consists of attributing one's misfortune and sins to "another," who must be killed in order to assure the disappearance of those misfortunes and sins.

5. Along with this universal sentiment, found in all propaganda of agitation (even when provoked by the government), are secondary motives more or less adapted to the circumstances. A sure expedient is the call to liberty among an oppressed, conquered invaded, or colonized people: calls summoning the Cuban or Algerian people to liberty, for example, are assured of sympathy and support. The same is true for the promise of bread to the hungry, the promise of land to the plundered, and the call to truth among the religious.

6. As a whole these are appeals to simple, elementary sentiments requiring no refinement, and thanks to which the propagandist can gain acceptance for the biggest lies, the worst delusions--sentiments that act immediately, provoke violent reactions, and awaken such passions that they justify all sacrifices. Such sentiments correspond to the primary needs of all men: the need to eat, to be one's own master, to hate.

7. Given the ease of releasing such sentiments, the material and psychological means employed can be simple: the pamphlet, the speech, the poster, the rumor. in order to make propaganda of agitation, it is not necessary to have the mass media at one's disposal, for such propaganda feeds on itself, and each person seized by it becomes in turn a propagandist. Nor is it necessary to be concerned with probability or veracity. Any statement whatever, no matter how stupid, any lie will be believed once it enters into the passionate current of hatred.

8. Finally, the less educated and informed the people to whom propaganda of agitation is addressed, the easier it is to make such propaganda. That is why it is particularly suited for use among the so-called lower classes (the proletariat) and among African peoples. There it can rely on some key words of magical import, which are believed without question even though the hearers cannot attribute any real content to them. Among colonized peoples, one of these words is "independence," an extremely profitable word from the point of view of effective subversion. It is useless to try to explain to people that national independence is not at all the same as individual liberty; the African countries generally have not developed to the point at which they can live in political independence in the Western manner; that the economy of their countries permits them merely to change masters. But no reason can prevail against the magic of the word. And it is the least intelligent people who are most likely to be thrown into a revolutionary movement by such summary appeals.

9. In contrast to propaganda of agitation is the propaganda of integration--the propaganda of developed nations and characteristic of our civilization; in fact, it did not exist before the twentieth century. It is a propaganda of conformity. It is related to the fact, analyzed earlier, that in Western society it is no longer sufficient to obtain a transitory political act (such as a vote): one needs total adherence to a society's truths and behavioral patterns. As the more perfectly uniform the society, the stronger its power and effectiveness, each member should be only an organic and functional fragment of it, perfectly adapted and integrated. He must share the stereotypes, beliefs and reactions of the group; he must be an active participant in its economic, ethical, aesthetic and political doings. All his activities, all his sentiments are dependent on this collectivity. And, as he is often reminded, he can fulfill himself only through this collectivity, as a member of this group (this is one of the points common to all American micro-sociology). Propaganda of integration thus aims at making the individual participate in his society in every way. It is a long-term propaganda, a self-reproducing propaganda that seeks to obtain a stable behavior, to adapt the individual to his everyday life, to reshape his thoughts and behavior in terms of the permanent social setting. It must be permanent, for the individual must no longer be left to himself.

10. Integration propaganda aims at stabilizing the social body, at unifying and reinforcing it. It is thus the preferred instrument of government, though properly speaking, it is not exclusively political propaganda. Integration propaganda is much more subtle and complex than agitation propaganda. It seeks not a temporary excitement but a total molding of the person in depth. It is primarily this integration propaganda that the present study is concerned with, for it is the most important of our time despite the success and the spectacular character of subversive propaganda.

11. Let us note right away a final aspect of integration propaganda: the more comfortable, cultivated and informed the milieu to which it is addressed, the better it works. Intellectuals are more sensitive than peasants to integration propaganda. In fact, they share the stereotypes of a society even when they are political opponents of the society.

12. One essential problem remains. When a revolutionary movement is launched, it operates, as we have said, with agitation propaganda; but once the revolutionary party has taken power, it must begin to operate immediately with integration propaganda (save for the exceptions mentioned). But the transition from one type of propaganda to the other is extremely delicate and difficult. After one has, over the years, excited the masses, flung them into adventures, fed their hopes and their hatreds, opened the gates of action to them, and assured them all their actions were justified, it is difficult to make them re-enter the ranks, to integrate them into the normal framework of politics and economics.

13. The integration of the revolutionary rebel into a prodigiously disciplined, organized, and regimented army, which goes hand in hand with his intellectual and moral indoctrination, prepares him to be taken into custody by integration propaganda after victory, and to be inserted into the new society without resistance or anarchical excursions. This patient and meticulous shaping of the whole man, this "putting into the mold," as Mao calls it, is certainly his principal success. Of course, he began with a situation in which man was already well-integrated into the group, and he substituted one complete framework for another. Also he [Mao] needed only to shape the minds of people who had very little education (in the Western sense), so that they learned to understand everything through images, stereotypes, slogans, and interpretations that he knew how to inculcate. Under such conditions, integration is easy and practically irreversible. Again, integration propaganda is by far the most important new fact of our day.

VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL PROPAGANDA
1. Classic propaganda, as one usually thinks of it, is a vertical propaganda--in the sense that it is made by a leader, a technician, a political or religious head who acts from the superior position of his authority and seeks to influence the crowd below. Such propaganda comes from above. It is conceived in the secret recesses of political enclaves; it uses all technical methods of centralized mass communication; it envelops a mass of individuals; but those who practice it are on the outside. Let us recall here the distinction, cited above, made by Laswell between direct propaganda and effect propaganda, though both are forms of vertical propaganda.

2. One trait of vertical propaganda is that the propagandee remains alone even though he is part of a crowd. His shouts of enthusiasm or hatred, though part of the shouts of the crowd, do not put him in communication with others; his shouts are only a response to the leader.

3. Finally, this kind of propaganda requires a passive attitude from those subjected to it. They are seized, they are manipulated, they are committed; they experience what they are asked to experience; they are really transformed into objects.

4. When we say that this is a passive attitude, we do not mean that the propagandee does not act; on the contrary, he acts with vigor and passion. But, as we shall see, his action is not his own, though he believes it is. Throughout, it is willed and conceived outside of him; the propagandist is acting through him, reducing him to the condition of a passive instrument. He is mechanized, dominated, hence passive. This is all the more so because he is often plunged into a mass of propagandees in which he loses his individuality and becomes one element among others, inseparable from the crowd and inconceivable without it.

5. In any case, vertical propaganda is by far the most widespread, but its direct effects are extremely perishable, and it must be renewed constantly. It is primarily used for agitation propaganda.

6. Horizontal propaganda is a much more recent development. We know it two forms: Chinese propaganda and group dynamics in human relations. The first is political propaganda; the second is sociological propaganda; both are integration propaganda.

7. This propaganda can be called horizontal because it is made inside the group (not from the top), where, in principle, all individuals are equal and there is no leader. The individual's adherence to his group is "conscious" because he is aware of it and recognizes it, but he is ultimately involuntary because he is trapped in a dialectic and in a group that leads him unfailingly to this adherence. His adherence is also "intellectual" because he can express his conviction clearly and logically, but it is not genuine because the information, the data, the reasoning that have lead him to adhere to the group were themselves deliberately falsified in order to lead him there.

8. But the most remarkable characteristic of horizontal propaganda is the small group. The individual participates actively in the life of this group, in a genuine and lively dialogue. In China the group is watched carefully to see that each member speaks, expresses himself, gives his opinions. Only in speaking will the individual gradually discover his own convictions (which also will be those of the group), become irrevocably involved, and help others to form their opinions (which are identical). Each individual helps to form the opinion of the group, but the group helps each individual to discover the correct line. For, miraculously, it is always the correct line, the anticipated solution, the "proper" convictions, which are eventually discovered. All the participants are placed on an equal footing, meetings are intimate, discussion is informal, and no leader presides. Progress is slow; there must be many meetings, each recalling events of the preceding one, so that a common experience can be shared. To produce "voluntary" rather than mechanical adherence, and to create a solution that is "found" by the individual rather than imposed from above is indeed a rather advanced method, much more effective and binding than the mechanical action of vertical propaganda. When the individual is mechanized, he can be manipulated easily. But to put the individual in a position where he apparently has a freedom of choice and still obtain from him what one wants and expects, is much more subtle, risky, but ultimately more effective. This will undoubtedly remind many people of the structure of the now-famous twelve-step programs.

9. Vertical propaganda needs the huge apparatus of the mass media of communication; horizontal propaganda needs a huge organization of people. Each individual must be inserted into a group, if possible into several groups with convergent actions. The groups must be homogenous, specialized, and small: fifteen to twenty is the optimum figure to permit active participation by each person. Most friction between individuals can then be ironed out and all factors eliminated which might distract attention, splinter motivations, and prevent the establishment of the proper line

10. This form of propaganda needs two conditions: first of all, a lack of contact between groups. A member of a small group must not belong to other groups in which he would be subjected to other influences; that would give him a chance to find himself again and, with it, the strength to resist. This is why the Chinese Communists insisted on breaking up traditional groups, such as the family. A private and heterogeneous group (with different ages, sexes, and occupations), the family is a tremendous obstacle to such propaganda.

11. The problem is very different in the United States and in the Western societies; there the social structures are sufficiently flexible and disintegrated to be no obstacle. It is not necessary to break up the family in order to make the group dynamic and fully effective: the family already is broken up. It no longer has the power to envelop the individual; it is no longer the place where the individual is formed and has his roots. The field is clear for the influence of small groups.

12. The other condition for horizontal propaganda is identity between propaganda and education. The small group has as its goal to put its members in touch with reality through group experience. In this sense the education is very complete, with complete coordination between what is learned "intellectually" and what is "lived" in practice.

13. We have already seen that the importance of these small groups requires the breaking up of other groups, such as the family. Now we must understand that the education given in the political small groups requires either the disappearance of academic education, or its integration into the system. In The Organization Man, William H. Whyte clearly shows the way in which the American school is becoming more and more a simple mechanism to adapt youngsters to American society.

14. Horizontal propaganda thus is very hard to make (particularly because it needs so many instructors), but it is exceptionally efficient through its meticulous encirclement, through the effective participation of all present, and through their public declarations of adherence. It is peculiarly a system that seems to coincide perfectly with egalitarian societies claiming to based on the will of the people and calling themselves democratic. But all this is ultimately much more stringent and totalitarian than explosive propaganda.

RATIONAL AND IRRATIONAL PROPAGANDA
1. That propaganda has an irrational character is still a well-established and well-recognized truth. The distinction between propaganda and information is often made: information is addressed to reason and experience--it furnishes facts; propaganda is addressed to feelings and passions--it is irrational. On the other hand, there is a propaganda based exclusively on facts, statistics, economic ideas. We can say that the more progress we make, the more propaganda becomes rational and the more it is based on serious arguments, on dissemination of knowledge, on factual information, figures and statistics.

2. Purely impassioned and emotional propaganda is disappearing. It is unusual nowadays to find a frenzied propaganda composed solely of claims without relation to reality. Such propaganda is now discredited, but it still convinces and always excites.

3. Modern man needs a relation to facts, a self-justification to convince himself that by acting in a certain way he is obeying reason and proved experience. We must therefore study the close relationship between information and propaganda. Propaganda's content increasingly resembles information. It has even clearly been proved that a violent, excessive, shock-provoking propaganda text leads ultimately to less conviction and participation than does a more "informative" and reasonable text on the same subject. A large dose of fear precipitates immediate action; a reasonably small dose produces lasting support.

4. After having read an article on wheat in the United States or on steel in the Soviet Union, does the reader remember the figures and statistics, has he understood the economic mechanisms, has he absorbed the line of reasoning? If he is not an economist by profession, he will retain an over-all impression, a general conviction that "these Americans (or Russians) are amazing...They have methods...Progress is important after all," and so on.

5. Thereafter, what remains with the individual affected by this propaganda is a perfectly irrational picture, a purely emotional feeling, a myth. The facts, the data, the reasoning--all are forgotten and only the impression remains. And this is indeed what the propagandist seeks, for the individual will never begin to act on the basis of facts, or engage in purely rational behavior.

6. The problem is to create an irrational response on the basis of rational and factual elements. That response must be fed with facts, those frenzies must be provoked by rigorously logical proofs. Thus propaganda in itself becomes honest, strict, exact, but its effect remains irrational because of the spontaneous transformation of all its contents by the individual.

7. We emphasize that this is true not just for propaganda but also for information [see "How to Lie with Statistics"]. Except for the specialist, information, even when it is very well presented, gives people only a broad image of the world. And much of the information disseminated nowadays--research findings, facts, statistics, explanations, analysis--eliminate personal judgment and the capacity to form one's own opinion even more surely than the most extravagant propaganda. This claim may seem shocking; but it is a fact that excessive data do not enlighten the reader or listener; they drown him.

8. And the more facts supplied, the more simplistic the image. If a man is given one item of information, he will retain it; if he is given a hundred data in one field, on one question, he will have only a general idea of that question But if he is given a hundred items of information on all the political and economic aspects of a nation, he will arrive at a summary judgment--"The Russians are great!"--and so on. A surfeit of data, far from permitting people to make judgments and form opinions, prevents them from doing so and actually paralyzes them.

9. Thus the mechanisms of modern information induce a sort of hypnosis in the individual, who cannot get out of the field that has been laid for him by the information. His opinion ultimately will be formed solely on the basis of the facts transmitted to him, and not on the basis of his choice and his personal experience. The more the techniques of distributing information develop, the more the individual is shaped by such information. It is not true that he can choose freely with regard to what is presented to him as the truth. And because rational propaganda thus creates an irrational situation, it remains, above all, propaganda--that is, an inner control over the individual by a social force, which means that it deprives him of himself.

II. THE CONDITIONS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF PROPAGANDA
1. Modern propaganda could not exist without the mass media--the inventions that produced press, radio, television, and motion pictures, or those that produced the means of modern transportation and which permit crowds of diverse individuals from all over to assemble easily and frequently. Also, without the discoveries made in the past half-century by scientists "who never wanted this" there would be no propaganda. The findings of social psychology, depth psychology, behaviorism, group sociology, and sociology of public opinion are the very foundations of the propagandist's work.

A. THE SOCIOLOGICAL CONDITIONS
Individualist Society and Mass Society.
1. For propaganda to succeed, a society must first have two complementary qualities: it must be both an individualist and a mass society. In actual fact, an individualist society must be a mass society, because the first move toward liberation of the individual is to break up the small groups that are an organic fact of the entire society. In this process, the individual frees himself from family, parish, or brotherhood bonds--only to find himself face to face directly with society. When individuals are not held together by local structures, the only form in which they can live together is in an unstructured mass society. Similarly, a mass society can only be based on individuals--that is, on men in their isolation, whose identities are determined by their relationships with one another.

1a. Precisely because the individual claims to be equal to all other individuals, he becomes an abstraction and is in effect reduced to a cipher.

2. Propaganda can only be effective in an individualist society, by which we do not mean theoretical individualism, but the genuine individualism one witnesses in praxis, that is the individualism one actually experiences. In individualist theory the individual has eminent value, man himself is the master of his life; in individualist reality, each human being is subject to innumerable forces and influences, and is not at all master of his own life.

2a. An individual can be influenced by propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups [that is, groups that retain their own non-propagandist agendas]. Because such groups are organic and have a well-structured material, spiritual, and emotional life, they are not easily penetrated by propaganda.

2b. One can say, generally, that 19th century individualist society came about through the disintegration of such small groups as the family or the church. Once these groups lost their importance, the individual was left substantially isolated. He no longer had a traditional place in which to live, he was no longer geographically attached to a fixed place, or historically to his ancestors. An individual thus uprooted can only be part of a mass. He is on his own, and individualist thinking asks of him something he has never been required to do before: that he, the individual, become the measure of all things.

2c. Thus he begins to judge everything for himself. In fact he must make his own judgments. He is thrown entirely on his own resources; he can find criteria only in himself. He is clearly responsible for his own decisions, both personal and social. He becomes the beginning and the end of everything. Before him there was nothing; after him there will be nothing. His own life becomes the only criterion of justice and injustice, of Good and Evil.

2d. In theory, this is admirable. But in practice what actually happens? The individual is placed in a minority position and burdened at the same time with a total, crushing responsibility. Such conditions make an individualist society fertile ground for propaganda.

3. Thus here is one of the first conditions for the growth and development of modern propaganda: It emerged in western Europe in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th precisely because that was when society was becoming increasingly individualistic and its organic structures were breaking down.

4. But for propaganda to develop, society must also be a mass society. It cannot be a society that is simply breaking up or dissolving. The society that favors the development of propaganda must be a society maintaining itself, but at the same time taking on a new structure, that of the mass society.

4a. A mass society is a society with considerable population density in which local structures are weak, currents of opinion are strongly felt, men are grouped into large and influential collectives, the individual is part of these collectives, and a certain psychological unity exists. Mass society, moreover, is characterized by a certain uniformity of material life. Despite differences of environment, training, or situation, the men of a mass society have the same preoccupations, the same interest in technical matters, the same mythical beliefs, the same prejudices. The individuals making up the mass in the grip of propaganda may seem quite diversified, but they have enough in common for propaganda to act on them directly.

5. From mass society emerge the psychological elements most favorable to propaganda: symbols and stereotypes. Of course these also exist in small groups and limited societies, but there they are not of the same kind, number, or degree of abstraction. In a mass society they are more detached from reality, more manipulable, more numerous, more likely to provoke intense but fleeting emotions, and at the same less significant, less inherent in the personal life.

6. For propaganda to be effective, a combination of demographic phenomena is required as well. The first is population density, with a high frequency of diversified human contacts, exchanges of opinions and experiences, and with primary importance placed on a feeling of togetherness. The second is urban concentration, which, resulting from the fusion between mass and crowd, gives the mass its psychological and sociological character. Only then can propaganda utilize crowd effects

OPINION
1. We must add to all this the problem of public opinion. Public opinion has three characteristics. It can shape itself only in a society in which institutionalized channels of information give the people the facts on which they will take a position. Thus, some steps intervene between fact and opinion.

1a. A second characteristic of public opinion is that it cannot express itself directly, but only through channels. A constituted public opinion is as yet nothing, and does not express itself spontaneously. It will express itself in elections, through political parties, associations in the newspapers, referenda, and so on. But all that is not enough.

1b. The third characteristic of public opinion is that this opinion is formed by a very large number of people who cannot possibly experience the same fact in the same fashion, who judge it by different standards, speak a different language, and share neither the same culture nor the same social position. Normally, everything separates the. They really should not be able to form a public opinion, and yet they do. This is possible only when all these people are really not apprised of the facts, but only of abstract symbols that give the facts a shape in which they can serve as a base for public opinion. Public opinion forms itself around attitudes and theoretical problems not clearly related to the actual situation. And the symbols most effective in the formation of public opinion are those most remote from reality.

1c. Therefore, public opinion always rests on problems that do not correspond to reality.

1d. Only in "second-hand" opinion can propaganda play its role; in fact, it cannot fail to play it there. In order for public opinion to form itself into large groups, channels of information and manipulation of symbols must be available. Where public opinion exists, propaganda crystallizes that opinion from the pre-conscious individual state to the conscious public state.

2. Propaganda can only exist in societies in which second-hand opinion definitely dominates primary opinion and the latter is reduced and driven into a minority position; then, when the individual finds himself between the two conflicting types of opinion, he will normally grasp the general, public opinion. This corresponds to what we have said about the mass society.

THE MASS MEDIA OF COMMUNICATION
1. Finally, one more condition is basic for propaganda. Without the mass media there can be no modern propaganda. Here, they must be subject to centralized control on the one hand, and well diversified with regard to their products on the other. Where film production, press, an radio transmission are not centrally controlled, no propaganda is possible. As long as a large number of independent news agencies, newsreel producers, and diverse local papers function, no conscious and direct propaganda is possible.

1a. To make the organization of propaganda possible, the media must be concentrated, the number of news agencies reduced, the press brought under single control, and radio and film monopolies established [think of Time-Warner or Coca-Cola's film studios]. The effect will be still greater if the various media are concentrated in the same hands.

1b. Only through concentration in a few hands of a large number of media can one attain a true orchestration, a continuity, and an application of scientific methods of influencing individuals. A state monopoly, or a private monopoly, is equally effective. Such a situation is in the making in the United States, France, and Germany--the fact is well known.

1c. The number of newspapers decreases while the number of readers increases. Production costs constantly increase and necessitate greater concentration; all statistics converge on that.

2. The act of buying a newspaper or acquiring a TV set brings up a point that we will discuss at considerable length: the complicity of the propagandee. If he is a propagandee, it is because he wants to be, for he is ready to buy a paper, go to the movies, pay for a radio or TV set. Of course, he does not buy these in order to be propagandized--his motivations are more complex. But in doing these things he must know that he opens the door to propaganda, that he subjects himself to it.

2a. Let no one say: "The reader does not submit to propaganda; first he has such and such ideas and opinions, and then he buys the paper that corresponds to them." Such an argument is simplistic, removed from reality, and based on liberal idealism. In reality, propaganda is at work here, for what is involved is a progression from vague, diffuse opinion on the part of the reader to rigorous, exciting, active expression of that opinion. A feeling or impression is transformed into a motive for action. Confused thoughts are crystallized. Myths and the reader's conditioned reflexes are reinforced if he reads that paper. All this is characteristic of propaganda. The reader is really subject to propaganda, even though it be propaganda of his choice. Why always fall into the error of seeing in propaganda nothing but a device to change opinions? Propaganda is also a means of reinforcing opinions, of transforming them into action. The reader himself offers his throat to the knife of the propaganda he chooses.

B. OBJECTIVE CONDITIONS OF TOTAL PROPAGANDA
The Need for An Average Standard of Living
1. Just as there are societies not susceptible to propaganda, there are individuals not susceptible to it. We have just seen, for example, that it takes an individual to read the newspapers and buy a radio or TV set--an individual with a certain standard of living.

2. More advanced propaganda can influence only a man who is not completely haunted by poverty, a man who can view things from a certain distance and be reasonably unconcerned about his daily bread, and who therefore can take an interest in more general matters and mobilize his actions for purposes other than merely earning a living. It is well known that propaganda is particularly effective in the upper segment of the working class and in the middle classes. It faces much greater problems with the proletariat or the peasantry.

3. The poor react only very little and very slowly to any propaganda that is not pure agitation propaganda. This explains the weakness of propaganda in Egypt and India. For propaganda to be effective, the propagandee must have a certain store of ideas and a number of conditioned reflexes. These are acquired only with a little affluence, some education, and peace of mind springing from relative security.

4. Conversely, all propagandists come from the upper middle class, whether, Soviet, Nazi, Japanese or American propagandists. The wealthy and very cultured class provides no propagandists because it is remote from the people and does not understand them well enough to influence them.

5. Adjustment has become one of the key words of all psychological influence. Whether it is a question of adaptation to working conditions, to consumption, or to milieu, a clear and conscious intent to integrate people into the "normal" pattern prevails everywhere. This is the summit of propaganda action. For example, there is not much difference between Mao's theory of the "mold" and McCarthyism. In both cases the aim is normalcy, in conformance with a certain way of life. For Mao, normalcy is sort of ideal man, the prototype of the Communist, who must be shaped, and this can be done only by pressing the individual into a mold in which he will assume the desired shape. As this cannot be done overnight, the individual must pressed again and again into the mold; and Mao says that the individual himself is fully aware that he must submit to the operation. Mao adds that this normalcy does not take shape "except at a certain level of consciousness--that is, at a certain standard of living" We are face to face here with the most total concept of propaganda.

6. On the other side, and with other formulas, there is McCarthyism. McCarthyism is no accident. It expresses, and at the same time exploits, a deep current in American opinion against all that is "un-American." It deals less with opinions than with a way of life. To find that belonging in a milieu, a group, or a family in which there are Communists is regarded as reprehensible in the United States is surprising, because what matters here is not ideas but a different way of life.

7. To sum up: The creation of normalcy in our society can take one of two shapes. It can be the result of scientific, psycho-sociological analysis based on statistics--that is, the American type of normalcy. It can also be ideological and doctrinaire--that is, the Communist type. But the results are identical: such normalcy necessarily gives rise to propaganda that can reduce the individual to the pattern most useful to society.

AN AVERAGE CULTURE
1. In addition to a certain standard of living, another condition must be met: if man is to be successfully propagandized, he needs at least a minimum of culture. Propaganda cannot succeed where people have no trace of Western culture.

1a. A base is needed--for example, education; a man who cannot read will escape most propaganda, as will a man who is not interested in reading. People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progress; they still celebrate the decline of literacy as a great victory; they condemn countries with a large proportion of illiterates; they think that reading is a road to freedom. All this is debatable, for the important thing is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads, to reflect on and judge what one reads. Outside of that, reading has no meaning (and even destroys certain automatic qualities of memory and observation [see Ong, McCluhan, Stock, et al]. But to talk about critical faculties and discernment is to talk about something far above primary education and to consider a very small minority.

1b. The vast majority of people, perhaps 90%, know how to read, but do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word, or, conversely, reject it altogether.

1c. As these people do not possess enough knowledge to reflect and discern, they believe--or disbelieve--in toto what they read. And as such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardest, reading material, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda.

2. One can reach a higher level of culture without ceasing to be a propagandee as long as one was a propagandee before acquiring critical faculties, and as long as that culture itself is integrated into a universe of propaganda. Actually, the most obvious result of primary education in the 19th and 20th centuries as to make the individual susceptible to super-propaganda.

3. There is no chance of raising the intellectual level of Western populations sufficiently and rapidly enough to compensate for the progress of propaganda. Propaganda techniques have advanced so much faster than the reasoning capacity of the average man that to close this gap and shape this man intellectually outside the framework of propaganda is almost impossible.

3a. In fact, what happens and what we see all around us is the claim that propaganda itself is our culture and what the masses ought to learn. Only in and through propaganda have the masses access to political economy, politics, art or literature. Primary education makes it possible to enter the realm of propaganda, in which people then receive their intellectual and cultural environment.

3b. We must also consider the fact that in a society in which propaganda--whether direct or indirect--absorbs all the means of communication or education (as in practically all societies in 1960), propaganda forms culture and in a certain sense is culture. When film and novel, newspaper and television are instruments either of political propaganda in the restricted sense or in that of human relations (social propaganda), culture is perfectly integrated into propaganda; as a consequence, the more cultivated a man is, the more he is propagandized. Here one can also see the idealist illusion of those who hope that the mass media of communication will create a mass culture. This "culture" is merely a way of destroying personality.

4. The number of propaganda campaigns in the West which have first taken hold in cultured settings is remarkable. this is not only true for doctrinaire propaganda, which is based on exact facts and acts on the level of the most highly developed people who have a sense of values and know a good deal about political realities, such as, for example, the propaganda on the injustice of capitalism, on economic crises, on "patriarchal" society, or on colonialism; it is only normal that the most educated people (intellectuals) are the first to be reached by propaganda.

4a. All this runs counter to notions that only the uneducated mass swallows propaganda. Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propaganda; he shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is, in fact, one of his greatest weaknesses, and

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Mens Attitudes. Knopf. New York. 1965
NOTES FROM PROPAGANDA

INFORMATION

1. In reality, to distinguish exactly between propaganda and information is impossible. Besides, information is an essential element of propaganda; for propaganda to succeed, it must have reference to political or economic reality.

2. Propaganda does not base itself on errors, but on exact facts. It even seems that the more informed public or private opinion is (notice we say "more" not "better"), the more susceptible it is to propaganda.

2a. Again, intellectuals are most easily reached by propaganda, particularly if it employs ambiguity. The reader of a number of newspapers expressing diverse attitudes--just because he is better informed--is more subjected than anyone else to a propaganda that he cannot perceive, even though he claims to retain free choice in the mastery of all this information, Actually, he is being conditioned to absorb all the propaganda that coordinates and explains the facts he believes himself to be mastering.

THE IDEOLOGIES

1. Finally, the last condition for the development of propaganda is the prevalence of strong myths and ideologies in a society. We subscribe to Raymond Aron's statement that an ideology is any set of ideas accepted by individuals or peoples. Without attention to their origin or value.

1a. Ideology differs from myth in three important ways:

i). the myth is embedded much more deeply in the soul

ii). the myth is much less "doctrinaire"; an ideology (which is not a doctrine because it is believed and not proved) is first of all a set of ideas, which, even when they are irrational, are still ideas. The myth is more intellectually diffuse; it is part emotionalism, part affective response, part a sacred feeling.

iii). the myth has stronger powers of activation, whereas ideology is more passive (one can believe in ideology and remain on the sidelines). The myth does not leave man passive; it drives him to action.

What myth and ideology have in common, however, is that they are collective phenomena and their persuasive force springs from the power of collective participation.

2. Thus, one can distinguish the fundamental myths of our society,

i). Work

ii). Progress

iii). Happiness

from the fundamental ideologies,

i). Nationalism

ii). Democracy

iii). Socialism

Communism shares in both elements. It is an ideology in that it is a basic doctrine, and a myth in that it has an explanation for all questions and an image of a future world in which all contradictions will be resolved.

3. Myths have existed in all societies, but there have not always been ideologies. The 19th century was a great breeding ground of ideology, and propaganda needed an ideological setting to develop.

4. Ideology in the service of propaganda is very flexible and fluid. Propaganda in support of the French Revolution, or United States life in the twenties, or of Soviet life in the forties, can all be traced back to the ideology of democracy.

5. Ideology serves propaganda as a peg, a pretext. Propaganda seizes what springs up spontaneously and gives it a new form, a structure, an effective channel, and can eventually transform ideology into myth.

III. THE NECESSITY FOR PROPAGANDA

1. A common view of propaganda is that it is the work of a few evil men, seducers of the people, cheats and authoritarian rulers who want to dominate a population; that it is the handmaiden of more or less illegitimate powers. This view always thinks of propaganda as being made voluntarily; it assumes that a man decides "to make propaganda," that a government establishes a Propaganda Ministry, and that it just develops from there on. This notion is held not only by those who think one can manipulate the crowds but also by those who think propaganda is not very effective and can be resisted easily.

1a. In other words, this view distinguishes between an active factor--the propagandist--and a passive factor--the crowd, the mass, man. Seen from that angle, it is easy to understand the moralist's hostility to propaganda: man is the innocent victim pushed into evil ways by the propagandist; the propagandee is entirely without blame because he has been fooled and has fallen into a trap. The militant Nazi and Communist are just poor victims who must not be fought but must be psychologically liberated from that trap, readapted to freedom, and shown the truth.

1b. In any event, the propagandee is seen in the role of the poor devil who cannot help himself, who has no means of defense against the bird of prey who swoops down on him from the skies. A similar point of view can be found in studies on advertising which regards the buyer as victim and prey.

1c. In all this, the propagandee is never charged with the slightest responsibility for a phenomenon regarded as originating entirely outside of himself.

2. This view is completely wrong, and a simple fact should lead us to at least question it: nowadays propaganda pervades all aspects of public life. We know that the psychological factor, which includes encirclement, integration into a group, and participation in action, in addition to personal conviction, is decisive.

2a. To draw up plans for an organization, a system of work. political methods, and institutions is not enough; the individual must participate in all this from the bottom of his heart, with pleasure and deep satisfaction.

3. For propaganda to succeed, it must correspond to a need for propaganda on the individual's part. The propagandee is by no means just an innocent victim. He provokes the psychological action of propaganda, and not merely lends himself to it, but even derives satisfaction from it. Without this previous, implicit consent, without this need for propaganda experienced by practically every citizen of the technological age, propaganda could not spread.

4. We are face to face with a dual need: the need on the part of organizations to make propaganda, and the need of the propagandee. These two conditions correspond to and complement each other in the development of propaganda.

A. THE STATE'S NEED FOR PROPAGANDA

1. Propaganda is needed in the exercise of power for the simple reason that the masses have come to participate in political affairs.

1a. Let us not call this democracy; this is only one aspect of it. To begin with, there is the concrete reality of masses. In a sparsely populated country, politics can be made by small groups, separated from each other and from the masses, which will not form a public opinion and are remote from the centers of power.

2. The nearness of the masses to the seats of power is very important. Pericles and Tiberius were well aware of it, as were Louis XIV and Napoleon; they installed themselves in the countryside, far from the crowds, in order to govern in peace outside the reach of the masses, which, without even clearly wanting to, affect the conditions of power by their mere proximity.

2a. Nowadays the ruler can no longer detach himself from the masses and conduct a more or less secret policy. He cannot escape the mass simply because of the present population density--the mass is everywhere.

2b. If the ruler wants to play the game by himself and follow secret policies, he must present a decoy to the masses. He cannot escape the mass; but he can draw between himself and that mass an invisible curtain, a screen, on which the mass will see the projected image of some politics, while the real politics are being made behind it.

3. For, after all, the masses are interested in politics. This, too, is new. Even those who do not read the papers carefully are appalled at the thought of censorship, particularly when they feel that the government wants to hide something or leave them in the dark.

4. Democracy rests on the conviction that the citizen can choose the right man and the right policy. Because this is not exactly the case, the crowd is propagandized in order to make it participate. Under such conditions, how could the mass not be convinced that it is deeply concerned?

5. The rule of public opinion is regarded as a simple and natural fact. Theoretically, democracy is political expression of mass opinion. Most people consider it simple to translate this opinion into action, and consider it legitimate that the government should bend to the popular will.

5a. Democracy is based on the concept that man is rational and capable of seeing clearly what is in his own interest, but the study of public opinion suggests this is a highly doubtful proposition.

6. The fundamental question, then, is: Does the State obey and express and follow public opinion? Our unequivocal answer is that even in a democratic State it does not.

6a. Public opinion is so variable and fluctuating that the government could never base a course of action on it; no sooner would government begin to pursue certain aims favored in an opinion poll, than opinion would turn against it.

6b. To degree that opinion changes are rapid, policy changes would have to be equally rapid; to the extent that opinion is irrational, political action would have to be equally irrational.

6c. Nor can public opinion crystallize overnight--and the government cannot postpone actions and decisions until vague images and myths eventually coalesce into opinion. In the present world of politics, action must at all times be the forerunner of opinion.

6d. Take foreign policy, for example: Recent studies have shown the catastrophic role of public opinion in matters of foreign policy. The greatest danger in connection with foreign policy is that of public opinion manifesting itself in the shape of a crisis, in an explosion. Obviously, public opinion knows little about foreign affairs and cares less; torn by contradictory desires, divided on principal questions, it permits the government to conduct whatever foreign policy it deems best.

6e. But all at once, for a variety of reasons, opinion converges on one point, temperatures rise, men become excited and assert themselves. And should this opinion be followed? To the same extent that opinion expresses itself sporadically, that it wells up in fits and starts, it runs counter to the necessary continuity of foreign policy and tends to overturn previous agreements and existing alliances. Because public opinion is intermittent and fragmentary, the government could not follow it even if it wanted to.

7. Ergo: even in a democracy, a government that is honest, serious, benevolent and respects the voter cannot follow public opinion. But it cannot escape it either. The masses are there; they are interested in politics. The government cannot act without them. So, what can it do?

8. Only one solution is possible: as the government cannot follow opinion, opinion must follow government. The democratic State, precisely because it believes in the expression of public opinion and does not gag it, must channel and shape that opinion if it wants to be realistic and not follow an ideological dream. The Gordian knot cannot be cut any other way.

9. In a democracy, the citizens must be tied to the decisions of the government. This is the great role propaganda must perform. It must give the people the feeling--which they crave and which satisfies them--"to have wanted what the government is doing, to be responsible for its actions, to be involved in defending them and making them succeed."

9a. Since the 18th century, the democratic movement has pronounced, and eventually impregnated the masses with, the idea of the legitimacy of power; and after a series of theories on that legitimacy we have now reached the famous theory of the sovereignty of the people. Power is regarded as legitimate when it derives from the sovereignty of the people, rests on the popular will.

9b. In any event, this rather abstract philosophical theory has become a well-developed and irrefutable idea in the mind of the average man. For the average Westerner, the will of the people is sacred, and a government that fails to represent that will is an abominable dictatorship. Each time the people speak their minds the government must go along; no other source of legitimacy exists. This is the fundamental image, the collective prejudice which has become a self-evident belief and is no longer merely a doctrine or a rational theory. This belief has spread very rapidly in the last thirty years.

10. Because of this mystical belief in the people's sovereignty, all dictators try to demonstrate that they are the expression of that sovereignty. Hitler, Stalin, Tito and Mussolini were all able to claim that they obtained their power from the people. Every plebiscite shows the famous result, which fluctuates between 99.1 and 99.9% of the votes. It is obvious to everybody, including those elected, that the election is just for the sake of appearance, a "consultation" of the people without any significance--but it is equally obvious that one cannot do without it. The people lend themselves to this; after all, it cannot be denied that the voters really vote, and that they vote in the desired way--the results are not faked. There is compliance.

11. Could it be that the people's sovereignty is actually something other than compliance? Might it be hoped that without any prior attempts at influencing the people, a true constitutional form could emerge from the people? Such a supposition is absurd. The only reality is to propose to the people something with which they agree.

11a. Up to now there is not a single recorded example of people not eventually complying with what was proposed to them.

11b. Example: In 1957, when the Soviet people were called upon to study and discuss Khrushchev's Theses on Economic Reorganization, we witness a truly remarkable operation. The underlying suggestion of it all was, of course, that everything is being decided by the people. How can the people not be in agreement afterwards? How can they fail to comply completely with what they have decided in the first place? The Theses were submitted to the people first. Naturally, they were then explained in all the Party organizations, in the Komsomols, in the unions, in the local soviets, in the factories, and so on, by agitprop specialists. Then the discussions took place. Next Pravda opened its columns to the public, and numerous citizens sent in comments, expressed their views, suggested amendments.

11c. After that, what happened? The entire government program, without the slightest modification, was passed by the Supreme Soviet. Even amendments presented and supported by individual deputies were rejected, and all the more those presented by individual citizens; for they were only individual (minority) opinion, and from the democratic (majority) point of view insignificant. But the people were given the immense satisfaction of having been consulted; of having been given a chance to debate, of having--so it seemed to them--their opinions solicited and weighed.

11d. A subtler process is when government propaganda suggests that public opinion demand this or that decision; it provokes the will of the people, who spontaneously would say nothing. But, once evoked, formed, and crystallized on a point, that will becomes the people's will; and whereas the government really acts on its own, it gives the impression of obeying public opinion--after first having built that public opinion. The point is to make the masses demand of the government what the government has already decided to do.

12. The emergence of this particular phenomena was predictable from the day when the principle of popular sovereignty began to take hold. From that point on, the development of propaganda cannot be regarded as a deviation or an accident.

"We're All In This Together"
A talk by Commonweal Institute Fellow David C. Johnson to supporters of public education, presented March 7, 2007.

A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about how to start this talk, when I came across this video clip from the Sean Hannity show on Fox News:
Click to play video clip

[Clip of Fox News, Hannity & Colmes, with Neal Boortz saying that teachers unions are more dangerous to America than terrorists armed with nuclear weapons because a nuke could only wipe out 100,000 people but public schools are "destroying a generation."]


I’m showing you this because it illustrates something that we increasingly have to deal with. I’ll talk about how this uncivil hyperbole fits into the overall pattern of what we as supporters of public education are dealing with. Then I’ll talk about what we can do about it.

What you just saw was on the most-watched cable TV news network just two weeks ago.

The host, Sean Hannity, is one of the most popular radio hosts as well. The guest who said those things – it doesn’t really matter who in particular HE is – and I’m not using his name because he is JUST an example. He’s just one more voice from opponents of public education who call themselves the “conservative movement”— trained, funded and widely promoted to say things like this. One more of hundreds. Yes, hundreds.

The Commonweal Institute report that I co-authored, Responding to the Attack on Public Education and Teacher Unions, was partly based on National Education Association (NEA) research. In it, I provided 9 ½ pages of examples of this kind of hyperbolic language, including its use in comic strips from my own local newspaper. Allow me to summarize those pages in one sentence:

“Collectivist government schools, run by greedy big labor bosses, betray and brainwash our children, promoting a hidden homosexual and socialist agenda.”

And that is the polite stuff.

In Appendix 3 I compiled 9 more pages, all demonstrating how a coordinated, framed message is repeated – word-for-word – by people at every level of the conservative movement, from the ground up to the very top leadership – the President – going out to the public through multiple channels. Hold up your hand if you have heard the framed message: “Children trapped in failing public schools.”

Let me read you a bit more from the guy you saw on the video clip. In a widely-distributed column titled “Child abuse in government schools” he wrote,

“These institutions are no longer schools. They are government indoctrination centers, owned and operated by government and staffed by government employees who have every reason to teach dependency on government and no reason to produce a generation of children who have learned how to depend on themselves. The single most prevalent form of child abuse in this country is the act of sending a child to a government school.”

This guy is not some fringe character. In 2001 he co-wrote a book with a Member of Congress – on the subject of getting rid of taxes. That book – like another of his books, titled, The Terrible Truth About Liberals – doesn’t talk about schools.

Instead it follows another script you hear every day: “Liberals are bad and conservatives are good.”

How many of you have heard variations of that script?

Let me play that clip again.

Click to play video clip

It’s not just fringe ideologues who talk like this. Do you remember two years ago when Secretary of Education Rod Paige called the NEA a “terrorist organization?”

They may sound like the fringe to you and me, but by definition the Secretary of Education isn’t the fringe.

No, this is pervasive. If you turn on the radio you hear it all day, every day on shows like Rush Limbaugh’s. Don’t dismiss that – Rush Limbaugh’s is by far the most listened-to radio show in the country. And as I said, Sean Hannity, the host in the video, also has a widely-heard radio show.

Radio is one of the media through which most regular people get their information. Cable news is another. And comic strips are another. So there are these messages – placed in all the places where most people get their information.

It is a political tactic. By putting these radicals in front of the public, the conservative movement moves the national discussion WAAYYY over in their direction.

The guy in the video clip I showed talked about “government schools.” But think about this – that isn’t an anti-school message until people have been turned anti-government. His “government schools” message can’t resonate otherwise. And he understands that. So like the others in the “conservative movement” he also writes anti-government, anti-tax and anti-“liberal” books and columns as well.

Similarly “Labor Bosses” isn’t a negative message until the public’s appreciation of labor is eroded. So before they can attack schools and unions using those terms, they have to “prepare the ground” – they have to do the messaging work to erode the public’s appreciation of government and labor.

And this brings up a key point that I want to make tonite -- There are things people have to care about before they can care about public education. There are things people have to care about before they will care about the right to have a union.

Those in the conservative movement understand that public appreciation of community and government are the underpinnings of support for these and other target issues. So by first working to erode public support for government and community they can effectively leverage their efforts and erode support for all of their targets at the same time.

The guy in the video clip attacks public education – but he does it as part of a larger attack on what he calls “liberals.” “Liberals” is the shorthand name for their enemy but it is really an attack on community and government. Some of you here may not think of yourselves as “liberals,” but because you value public education this puts you in that enemy category as far as THEY are concerned.

WHO is doing this?

Earlier I mentioned my Commonweal Institute report on the attack on public education. I want to mention another report I helped prepare for the Commonweal Institute. That report, called “The Attack on Trial Lawyers and Tort Law” was about a similar attack – but on the civil justice system, The report detailed a well-funded, widespread, coordinated strategy attacking trial lawyers and tort law.

Here’s the thing: that attack involves many of the same think tanks and organizations and pundits and others – like the guy in the video clip – as the attack on teacher unions and public education. Many of the financial backers are the same. The tactics are the same. Their messaging goes out through the same channels. It even utilizes the same comic strips.

And if you talk with the trial lawyers, or the environmentalists, the leaders of the mainstream religions, unions, etc, you will find out that they are all facing vicious attacks from similar organizations using similar techniques to those used against public education.

There are many others saying similar things to what this video clip and the Secretary of Education said. They are not just attacking public education – and the NEA – they are also attacking other groups, and they all have in common these attacks on what they call liberals.

Most of the public constantly hears this drumbeat of anti-government, anti-community, anti-tax, you’re-on-your-own, free market, and personal responsibility mantra from the right. Many people now under the age of 35 have never heard the other side of the story.

After a few decades of this attack the public’s appreciation of social responsibility has eroded. Civic participation has eroded. They have been replaced by consumerism, greed, and instant gratification.

Quoting something else written by the guy in the video clip, praising greed:

Greed: A word commonly used by liberals, low achievers, anti-capitalists and society's losers to denigrate, shame and discredit those who have acquired superior job skills and decision-making capabilities and who, through the application of those job skills, achieve success.

You and I see this for what it is. But does the general public see this for what it is?


And now, after decades of this kind of attack – mostly unanswered, often because we think it isn’t worth answering – labor unions are seen as special interests rather than as representatives of working people, fighting for the well-being of those who work for a living—the majority of the adult population. Public schools are portrayed as just another special interest group – they’re just the front for power-hungry, greedy teacher unions.

Many of us do not understand how widespread this attack really is – each of us only sees our own piece of the equation, each of us is busy fighting back against the attack on OUR issue or group – so it is hard to see the bigger picture and take steps to counter it AS a bigger picture.

The ongoing assault on public education is paralleled by similar ongoing attacks on so many other traditionally valued institutions in our society.

Did you know that there are related organizations working to split the Episcopal Church and other mainstream religious denominations?

…Organizations funded to attack community-oriented philanthropy?

…Organizations funded to attack environmental groups and prominent environmental spokespersons like Al Gore?

There are even fully-funded sister-organizations with the mission statement of discrediting science itself!

The organizations may have different identities but they share leadership and resources and people and communication channels. And they attack the common enemy – government and community – in a common way, until the public’s understanding of, and respect for, that enemy is undermined, and then they tie targeted issues like public education and organizations like the NEA to the common enemy.

If you haven’t heard these sorts of thing before, you may think that I’m one of those dreaded “conspiracy theorists.” Consider, though, that one source of data for my research was the 1998 NEA Report titled, The Real Story Behind Paycheck Protection, The Hidden Link Between Anti-Worker and Anti-Public Education Initiatives: An Anatomy of the Far Right, which discussed several of these same well-funded organizations that are working to bring about privatization of schools. Our Commonweal Public Education report expanded into a look at their strategies and methods, and based on that made recommendations for how to counter them.

And many other studies as well have examined the interlocking structure of the “conservative movement” showing how the leaders and so-called scholars move from organization to organization. Their books are published by the same publishers. Their articles are promoted through the same network of magazines, online sites, and radio and TV outlets. They have interlocking leadership and common funding sources.

Each of the organizations, along with their books, and their reports are promoted by all of the other organizations until it seems like there is widespread public acceptance of their ideas and values.

Different identities. The same people. The same message.

Using the SAME tactics against the targeted groups and their issues.

This is not an ISSUE fight – it is a VALUES fight. This is why it works.

* Different identities, giving the impression of a variety of voices in support
* A common attack using a deeper, underlying message, then tying it to the target,
* Multiple channels to reach targeted demographics.


To give you a picture of the conservative movement’s use of long-term strategy I will describe one of their methods, called The Overton Window. The Overton Window is named for Joseph P. Overton, who was a senior vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank that is one of the leading proponents of what they call “school choice”.

The Overton Window is a sophisticated tactic to help move the Right’s self-described “unthinkable” ideas all the way to becoming policy.

The strategy is to make radical ideas seem acceptable and comfortable.

They describe a “ladder” of steps – degrees of public acceptance. They say they work to walk the public up this ladder step by step.

According to the Overton Window concept, when the public FIRST hears ideas like getting rid of public schools, they consider them unthinkable, but with time and repetition, these ideas begin to be considered only radical, then with familiarity they become acceptable, and eventually sensible and worth putting into policy.
This is the Mackinac Center’s description of the Overton Window “Education Continuum.”

Let me read from the Mackinac Center’s own description of the education ladder continuum:

Let's start by developing a continuum of educational states, from the desired extreme of total freedom, to the undesirable extreme of total statism. It might look something like this:

THIS is how the Right depicts the continuum of public school privatization. You can see how they feel about public schools, and you can see where they want to take things.
This (above) is where they felt they were when they began their efforts.
THIS (above) is where they feel they are today. Look how much they feel they have accomplished – and look where they are heading next.
NOW we can understand the role of people like the guy from the video clip. He is out at the extreme – on the right side of the see-saw. Anything LESS extreme sounds almost moderate by comparison – in the window of “thinkable.” THIS is why they say those outrageous things. They’re walking people up the ladder. It’s part of the long-term strategy.

This long-term, systematic effort to undermine the public’s understanding and appreciation of public education has already made it difficult for many members of the general public to appreciate the value of public schools. They hear every day that parents need to rescue their children from FAILING PUBLIC SCHOOLS, are entitled to tuition tax credits, and must have SCHOOL CHOICE in the form of home schooling and vouchers.

In this context, it will be an uphill battle to get the public to embrace the NEA’s message that “great schools are a basic right of every child.”

WHY are they a basic right? Why do we need public schools at all? The foundation of understanding of the basis for that right – COMMUNITY – has eroded. Without that understanding people won’t understand why public schools are a “basic right.”

Here are some examples of the Overton Window in action: Beyond privatizing schools and Social Security the Right is also talking not only about making abortion illegal, but even about going back to making birth control illegal. (Some of you might remember that it used to be illegal in several states.)

They are talking about eliminating all environmental regulations. They are talking about eliminating zoning laws. California and a few other states had a ballot initiative last year that did both of those – it almost passed – and Oregon actually passed it a few years back.

And they are talking about eliminating national parks. Public libraries. Taxes. Even public involvement in government.

The Right has Overton Window strategies in operation for all of these efforts and more.

So you see, it isn’t JUST YOU. It isn’t JUST about SCHOOLS. Numerous other groups and their issues are also under attack.

We’re all in this together.
The bad part of this larger values-based attack is that you can’t respond just by promoting public education. It will be seen as little more than another interest group promoting your own interest, not the public’s.

But it also means you are not in this on your own. You are not alone against this attack.

We’re all in this together.

This means there is a natural alliance to join with others who are under similar attack to work to reinforce the common underpinnings that support public schools AND support the right to sue AND the right to organize AND the right to health care AND the right to live in a clean environment AND with every other group that has been strategically attacked, split off and marginalized.

And what is the foundation for of all of these rights?

COMMUNITY: WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

What can we, as supporters of public education, do about this?

The supporters of public education must join with their natural allies -- the trial lawyers and the environmentalists and reproductive rights organizations and others and begin to talk to the public with a COMMON message that says WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER because we are a COMMUNITY. Only after people come to understand and appreciate this philosophy of community again, will they begin to understand and appreciate the value of public schools.

The Right pushes an ugly message that we are each on our own, out for ourselves to get what we can, in a dog-eat-dog world. But in truth, we are really ARE all in this together, not only as being on the receiving end of similar attacks, but also because we can work together to help each other. We can work to counter the Right’s message by restoring the public’s understanding and appreciation of COMMUNITY and the value of responsible government.

How can we do this?

As I’m sure you know, frame and message development and testing are complex and require skilled professionals. Messaging efforts on behalf of public education will have the greatest effect if linked to broad frames that are developed across sectors, frames that support the value of community and government. And the messaging that supports these values will be most effective if it is delivered by multiple voices, third-party voices that are not strongly identified with public education and other interest groups. It must be coordinated with a long-term strategy.

The NEA’s work on messaging about public schools can be a starting point for the Foundation's own message development work.

I am a Fellow of the Commonweal Institute, a multi-issue think tank that is set up to help create issue-bridging alliances and messaging efforts that are needed.
We conduct research, provide resources, bring together groups to work together, and do training.

Public education is one of several areas in which we have worked.
Based on our experience and understanding of the situation in which public education finds itself, I suggest that the NEA Foundation consider how it can begin to develop cross-issue alliances, and address the need for framing and language research that can identify and promote those underlying values on which public education rests.

WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER!

Talking Points Memo

You probably remember a few weeks ago when NBC's Andrea Mitchell went on the air and announced that the American people supported pardoning Scooter Libby when they actually overwhelmingly opposed it, according to all available polling.

Well, this morning TPM Reader CG caught her at it again, this time with Nancy Pelosi. And we grabbed the clip for a TPMtv Extra.
Take a look ...

The declared rebuilding successes in Iraq are failures, too
by Joe Sudbay (DC) · 4/29/2007

Is there anything the Bush administration hasn't lied about when it comes to Iraq? Claims of success on rebuilding projects were lies:

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections were no longer working properly.

The crazy thing is that they are lying about things that can be easily documented.

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
By John Borland Email 08.14.07

CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith built a search tool that traces IP addresses of those who make Wikipedia changes.
Photo: Photo: Jake Appelbaum

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.

This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.

The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia, including records of all these changes.

Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.

Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.

Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush.

The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."

A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time.

Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while citing a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a community.

Propaganda as it is traditionally known implies an attempt to spread an ideology through the mass media of communication in order to lead the public to accept some political or economic structure or to participate in some action. That is the one element common to all the propaganda we have studied. Ideology is disseminated for the purpose of making various political acts acceptable to the people.

ORTHOPRAXY

1. The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to transform an opinion, but to arouse an active and mythical belief. Only action is of concern to modern propaganda, for its aim is to precipitate an individual's action, with maximum effectiveness and economy. Goebbels states this expressly when he distinguishes between Haltung (behavior) and Stimmung (morale) in the following passage: "The Stimmung is quite low but that means little; the Haltung holds well." The Stimmung is volatile and varies readily; therefore, above all, the right action must be obtained, the right behavior maintained.

3. To be effective propaganda must constantly short-circuit thought and decision. It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious. He must not know that he is being shaped by outside forces (this is one of the conditions for the success of propaganda), but some central core in him must be reached in order to release the mechanism in the unconscious which will provide the appropriate--and expected-- action. If the classic but outmoded view of propaganda consists in defining it as an adherence of man to an orthodoxy, true modern propaganda seeks, on the contrary, to obtain an orthopraxy--an action that in itself, and not because of the value judgments of the person who is acting, leads directly to a goal, which for the individual is not a conscious and intentional objective to be obtained, but which is considered such by the propagandist. The propagandist knows what objective should be sought and what action should be accomplished, and he maneuvers the instrument that will secure precisely this action.

6. The propagandist can mobilize man for action that is not in accord with his previous convictions. Modern psychologists are well aware that there is not necessarily any continuity between conviction and action and no intrinsic rationality in opinions or acts. Man does not obey his clear opinions or what he believes to be his deliberate will. To control opinion one must be aware that there is an abyss between what a man says and what he does. His actions often do not correspond to any clear motive, or to what one would have expected from a previous impression he made. Into these gaps in continuity propaganda inserts its lever. It does not seek to create wise or reasonable men, but proselytes and militants.

SUB-PROPAGANDA AND ACTIVE PROPAGANDA

1. Propaganda must properly be divided into two phases. There is pre-propaganda or sub-propaganda and there is active propaganda. This follows from what was stated earlier about the continuous and permanent nature of propaganda. The essential objective of pre-propaganda is to prepare man for a particular action, to make him sensitive to some influence, to get him into condition for the time when he will effectively, and without delay or hesitation, participate in an action. Seen from this angle, pre-propaganda does not have a precise ideological objective; it has nothing to do with an opinion, an idea, a doctrine. It proceeds by psychological manipulations, by character modifications, by the creation of feelings or stereotypes useful when the time comes. It must be continuous, slow and imperceptible. Man must be penetrated in order to shape such tendencies. He must be made to live in a certain psychological climate.

Gunning for Mexicans
Monday, August 13, 2007
-- by Dave
Video of Para-Military Shooter using nighscope targeting unidentified persons.

You hear a lot of talk among border-watch types about shooting Mexicans. They talk about it around campfires, tell filmmakers that the way to stop the flow over the border is that "we ought to be able to shoot the Mexicans on sight", and even make crude video games about it. Recently we read about the Gaede twins' grandfather claiming he had himself shot six Mexican border crossers.

So far, it's all sounded like so much bellicose fantasy, the kind right-wing yahoos specialize in. But as is inevitable with this kind of talk, it's becoming evident that some of them are taking shots in reality as well. Enough talk, they wanna shoot somethin'.

Casey Sanchez at the SPLC's Hatewatch blog has a report on a video showing some anonymous vigilante on night patrol somewhere on the border, taking potshots at Lord knows what (he only fires off one round from his shotgun, and it sounds like it hit nothing), but it's chilling in the sheer inhuman ugliness on display:

“This video shows how to keep a ‘Home Depot’ parking lot empty,” Crooks (right) wrote in his sneering July 26 E-mail, titled “Homeland Defence.” Gilchrist, whose organization had earlier provided Crooks’ group with supplies, responded by banning Crooks from contact with his own group.

Filmed through a night-vision scope, the four-minute video shows two or three men standing on a hill that appears to be on the Mexican side of the border, beyond a barbed-wire fence. “All right, come on across, mother****ers,” a man says off camera in a quiet voice. “Yeah, go that way. I dare you to go that way. That’s my ****ing trail, bitch!”

Then, after muttering about the distant figures being “cockroaches,” the man shouts out loud, “Hey putos [“faggots”], one, two, three!” Next comes the distinct sound of a shotgun shell being chambered, followed by a sudden flash of light and the sound of a shotgun blast. The direction of the gunfire is unclear.


Note that the creators of the video are Minuteman spinoffs. This is how far-right "Patriot" groups organize: one or two organizations introduce and mainstream the concept by playing the straight man, while dozens of independent offspring go about wreaking havoc on their own agendas. We've seen this with groups like Laine Lawless' Minuteman spinoff, which strategized with neo-Nazis on the kinds of brownshirt tactics they could apply against Latinos; and with Minuteman support groups like California's Save Our State, which coddled neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates at their rallies and within their ranks. More to the point, the Minutemen themselves have been infiltrated since their inception by white supremacists, though they have announced their efforts to drive out such elements with much fanfare (without, exactly, being very convincing on the matter).

More recently, another report by Sanchez in the most recent Intelligence Report details some of the thuggish tactics of intimidation being employed by another Minutemen spinoff, the San Diego Minutemen:

Halloween or not, the San Diego Minutemen take year-round pleasure in scaring immigrants. On Saturday mornings, when they travel to the sleepy suburban gas stations where immigrant day laborers go to find work, they create scenes that would play well in a show called "Nativists Gone Wild." They call immigrants "wetbacks" and "Julios." They pull out Mace and threaten passing motorists who disagree with them. Calling those who hire day laborers "slavemasters," they've been known to slap flashing amber police lights on their SUVs and chase the would-be employers down. When they're not busy physically intimidating migrants, they take to the airwaves and the Internet to accuse them, without a shred of evidence, of running child prostitution rings and practicing "voodoo Santeria rituals."


Wonder if Lou Dobbs and Michelle Malkin still want to claim that the Minutemen are just a big neighborhood watch. And I wonder if anyone will remember them when someone gets hurt.

In all cases, propaganda of agitation tries to stretch energies to the utmost, obtain substantial sacrifices, and induce the individual to bear heavy ordeals. ...it unleashes an explosive movement; it operates inside a crisis or actually provokes the crisis itself....such propaganda can obtain only effects of relatively short duration. If the proposed objective is not achieved fast enough, enthusiasm will give way to discouragement and despair. Therefore, specialists in agitation propaganda break up the desired goals into a series of stages to be reached one by one. There is a period of pressure to obatain some result, then a period of relaxation and rest....
Propaganda by Jacques Ellul, page 72.

Test Marketing
by George Packer
August 31, 2007

If there were a threat level on the possibility of war with Iran, it might have just gone up to orange. Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, has written an account of a conversation with a friend who has connections to someone at a neoconservative institution in Washington. Rubin can’t confirm his friend’s story; neither can I. But it’s worth a heads-up:

They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”

True? I don’t know. Plausible? Absolutely. It follows the pattern of the P.R. campaign that started around this time in 2002 and led to the Iraq war. The President’s rhetoric on Iran has been nothing short of bellicose lately, warning of “the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.” And the Iranian government’s behavior—detaining British servicemen and arresting American passport holders, pushing ahead with uranium enrichment, and, by many reliable accounts, increasing its funding and training for anti-American militias in Iraq—seems intentionally provocative. Perhaps President Ahmedinejad and the mullahs feel that they win either way: they humiliate the superpower if it doesn’t take the bait, and they shore up their deeply unpopular regime at home if it does. Preëmptive war requires calculations (and, often, miscalculations) on two sides, not just one, as Saddam learned in 2003. When tensions are this high between two countries and powerful factions in both act as if hostilities are in their interest, war is likely to follow.

It’s one thing for the American Enterprise Institute, the Weekly Standard, et al to champion a war they support. It’s another to jump like circus animals at the crack of the White House whip. If the propaganda campaign predicted by Rubin’s friend is launched, less subservient news organizations should ask certain questions, and keep asking them: Does the Administration expect the Iranian regime to fall in the event of an attack? If yes, what will replace it? If no (and it will not), why would the Administration deliberately set about to strengthen the regime’s hold on power? What will the Administration do to protect highly vulnerable American lives and interests in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world against the Iranian reprisals that will follow? What if Iran strikes against Israel? What will be the strategy when the Iranian nuclear program, damaged but not destroyed, resumes? How will the Administration handle the international alarm and opprobrium that would be an attack’s inevitable fallout?

If this really is a return to the early fall of 2002 all over again, then I’m fairly sure that no one at the top of the Administration is worrying about the answers.

Postscript: Barnett Rubin just called me. His source spoke with a neocon think-tanker who corroborated the story of the propaganda campaign and had this to say about it: “I am a Republican. I am a conservative. But I’m not a raging lunatic. This is lunatic.”

FEMA Stages Press Conference: Staff Pose As Journalists And Ask ‘Softball’ Questions
October 26, 2007

On Tuesday, while “wildfires raged” in California, Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), held a press conference at FEMA’s Southwest D.C. offices that was “carried live on Fox News, MSNBC and other outlets.” In the presser, Johnson said he was “very happy with FEMA’s response” while praising “the good messaging” of federal and local government responders.

But if the questions lobbed at Johnson seemed a bit like softballs, that’s because they were asked by FEMA employees posing as journalists. The Washington Post’s Al Kamen reports:

We’re told the questions were asked by Cindy Taylor, FEMA’s deputy director of external affairs, and by “Mike” Widomski, the deputy director of public affairs. Director of External Affairs John “Pat” Philbin asked a question, and another came, we understand, from someone who sounds like press aide Ali Kirin.

Watch a segment of Fox News’ coverage of the presser, which never mentions the FEMA stage handling:
Video of fake FEMA Press Conference
Though FEMA told Kamen that “the staff did not make up the questions,” the press briefing was filled with softball questions and opportunities for Johnson to praise the FEMA’s response to the disaster, contrasting it with the agency’s performance during Hurricane Katrina. Kamen writes:

[S]omething didn’t seem right. The reporters were lobbing too many softballs. No one asked about trailers with formaldehyde for those made homeless by the fires. And the media seemed to be giving Johnson all day to wax on and on about FEMA’s greatness.

Considering FEMA gave reporters “only 15 minutes’ notice of the briefing,” it gives off the perception that they didn’t want reporters to show up and ask questions that would disrupt the agency’s propaganda performance.

As we take the steps necessary to achieve these goals, we will make our future one of peace and prosperity.

Today we have good reason to be optimistic about our economy. More Americans are working today than at any time in our history. More Americans own their homes than at any time in our history. More Americans are going to college and own their own businesses than at any time in our history -- and a new economic report shows that inflation is in check.

As we work to deliver opportunity at home, we're also keeping you safe from threats from abroad. We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens.

"By making their stand in Iraq, the terrorists have made Iraq a vital test for the future security of our country and the free world. We will settle for nothing less than victory."

We're fighting a ruthless enemy that relishes the killing of innocent men, women, and children.

We mourn every one of these brave men and women who have given his or her life for our liberty.

Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror. These foreign terrorists violently oppose the rise of a free and democratic Iraq, because they know that when we replace despair and hatred with liberty and hope, they lose their recruiting grounds for terror. ...They know there is no room for them in a free and democratic Middle East, so the terrorists and insurgents are trying to get us to retreat.

Our troops are fighting these terrorists in Iraq so you will not have to face them here at home...

Together we will do what Americans have always done: build a better and more peaceful world for our children and grandchildren.

1984, Chapter 5, George Orwell.

'Comrades!' cried an eager youthful voice. 'Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us. Here are some of the completed figures. Foodstuffs-'

The phrase 'our new, happy life' recurred several times. It had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom. He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that they were in some way a cause for satisfaction. He had lugged out a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week it was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too-in some more complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory?

Bush in Germany: Like a Staged Communist Rally
by Buckeye Hamburger
Dailykos.com
Sun Jul 16, 2006

Dubya's visit to Germany is over, and with it a week of protests throughout the country. The event was much like we're used to seeing in the Rovian era of media: a speech with a TV-friendly background, and as always, a Bush-friendly crowd to greet him enthusiastically. About 1000 hand-picked guests were invited, and the national news dutifully reported their friendly applause. Protestors were required to stay far away (although Greenpeace did get some messages up in plain view).

These staged appearances, shielded from any opposition, has become a familiar if annoying constant of the Bush presidency, hardly worth commenting any more. But for citizens of former East Germany, where the visit took place, the spectacle was unnerving, since it was similar to the way rallies of the Communist era were staged and reported by state propaganda. As a colleague from Leipzig wrote to me: "In those times they would have said, 'About 1000 deserving workers gave an enthusiastic reception to the Chairman of the CPSU.' I have to puke."

Buckeye Hamburger's diary :: ::
(See my earlier diary about the planned protests and over-the-top security for Bush's visit, and a photo album about the protest in Hamburg)

Public parades were a regular ritual in a place like East Germany, carried out every year on the May Day holiday and on October 7th, the day the country was founded, and also at various other times, for example when a foreign dignitary such as the Soviet Chairman was visiting. The "crowds" consisted of selected faithful party members, teenagers in the Free German Youth with their bright blue shirts, "deserving" workers and farmers who had won some sort of medal ("Hero of Labor", for example), anyone who could be counted on to look loyal and enthusiastic on television and in the newspaper. These people got items like flags and torches to carry to the parade, and sternly worded signs extolling something wonderful about the country or its leaders; and they marched past a grandstand where the party functionaries stood, grim old men with a smile frozen into their faces, waving back to the crowd. These events were prominently reported in state television and newspapers, the "reporters" droning on and on about the glorious achievements of the socialist state. Nothing was left to chance at these events; any attempts at protest were put down ruthlessly, usually by plainclothes policemen and state security officers mixed in the crowd, always on the lookout for any trouble.

East German dictator Erich Honecker greeting a child at the 1988 May Day parade in East Berlin.

"Dear Erich, carry on!" at the 1986 May Day parade in East Berlin

"In honor of the 21st Party Congress: HOUSEHOLD REFRIGERATOR with 3 temperature zones" at the 1985 May Day parade in East Berlin.

"Two loving sisters, Moscow and Berlin", at the 1985 May Day parade in East Berlin.

George Bush and Angela Merkel greeting hand-picked guests in Stralsund, formerly in East Germany.

The most famous staged rally in East Germany was on October 7th, 1989, to celebrate the nation's 40th anniversary. Eastern Europe was in an uproar at the time; the first non-Communist governments had been elected in Poland and Hungary, and Hungary had opened its border with Austria earlier that summer. Before long, East Germans were running over the border, and they began barricading themselves in West German embassies in Budapest, Prague, Warsaw and East Berlin, in the hopes of gaining passage to the West. Demonstrations had broken out all over the country, something almost unheard of in East Germany since a short-lived uprising in 1953. The leadership under Erich Honecker consisted entirely of old-guard Communists who formed one of the most ruthless regimes in the Eastern bloc, and they were determined beat back the rebellion. Surrounded by yes-men who fed them all the news and information they wanted to hear, they were convinced that the broad public still supported and loved them, and that the demonstrators were just "youthful rowdys" and provocateurs working for the West. So for the 40th anniversary, they invited leaders from all over the world, above all from the Communist bloc, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, to a celebration that would show the world that they were still in charge and all was well.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev greeting East German dictator Erich Honecker with the "socialist brother kiss"

Bush greeting Merkel with a smooch in Stralsund.

That day, Gorbachev stood next to Honecker in the grandstand in front of the visiting dignitaries, waving as the carefully chosen crowds marched past in a torchlight parade. I was visiting friends in a town close to the border that day, where East German state television could be received, and I'll never forget the clash of images that I saw. Gorbachev felt that the East Germans should join the reforms and was watching the parade with a skeptical look, but Honecker, convinced that his people loved him and that this was his moment of triumph, looked out into the crowd with a goofy grin. Meanwhile, syncophantic television commenters droned on and on with obituaries to the greatness of the German socialist state. When I switched over to West German TV, I saw pictures of demonstrators and police clashing all over East Germany, prepared to reject the state altogether by leaving.

Honecker resigned in a coup less than two weeks later. The Berlin Wall was opened on November 9th, 1989, and the two German states were re-unified on October 3rd, 1990. After its 40th birthday, East Germany did not survive another year.

Gorbachev and Honecker observing the parade of hand-picked marchers on the 40th anniversary of East Germany, October 1989

Bush and Merkel wave at the hand-picked crowd in Stralsund, July 2006

East German police attempting to contain protests on the 40th anniversary of East Germany, October 1989

Protestors in Stralsund, held by police far away from Bush and Merkel, July 2006. The sign says "Starting war remains a crime, we'll remember", with a play on Merkel's name

The final leg of Bush's visit was in Trinwillershagen, where Bush and Merkel had a roast pig that Bush couldn't stop ranting about at a press conference (even after serious questions about the Middle East). Trinwillershagen had served as a model village in East Germany, and was one of Honecker's favored destinations. Honecker was a passionate hunter, and liked to shoot boar -- the "pig" that Bush was so excited about.

The pig that Bush couldn't shut up about; a favored hunting prey for former East German dictator Erich Honecker

Bush's controlled appearances with friendly audiences has long been criticized as being unworthy of a democratic leader, who is too cowardly to risk a confrontation with dissenters. But it's become so commonplace that we hardly pay attention any more. Let us never forget what these staged events are: propaganda spectacles with tried-and-true techniques that have been regularly employed by the most authoritarian regimes in history.

George Bush's War Speech

...If I call the Congress, if I now demand the American people to sacrifice, and if necessary, I demand to sacrifice everything, I have the right to do so. Because I am ready today, as I did in the past, to bring any personal sacrifice, I do not demand of any American to do anything I was not prepared to do myself for four years. There should be no deprivation in America that I will not share. My entire life belongs from this moment on to my people. I want nothing else now than to be the first soldier of the war against terror.

I have now put on the same uniform that was once my dearest and holiest. I will only take it off after the victory, or else I will not live to see that end. Should something happen to me in this battle, my first successor will be party member Cheney. Should something happen to party member Cheney, the next in line will be party member the Speaker of the House. You would then be bound by blind loyalty to them as Leaders , as you were to me. Should something happen to party member Cheney, I will enact a law that the senate will then elect the worthiest, i.e. the bravest from their midst.

As an American I am going into this battle with a brave heart. My whole life was nothing but one continuous battle for my people, for its renewal, for America. This battle was always backed by the faith in this people. There is one word I have never known. It is surrender. If anybody thinks we may be heading towards difficult times, I want to ask him to remember that once a President with a minuscule state faced a big coalition and won after three battles, because he had a strong heart and faith. This is what we need today. And I want to tell the whole world: never again will there be a September 11th in American history! Just as I am ready to sacrifice my life at any moment for my people and America, I demand the same from everyone. Anyone who believes he can evade this national command ¯ whether directly or indirectly ¯ will fall. Terrorist can only expect death.

In this we all follow an old principle: It is of no consequence if we live, but it is essential that our nation will live, that America lives....

FCC official wants probe of "60 Minutes" black-out
Mon Mar 3, 2008 6:17pm EST
by Peter Kaplan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Federal Communications Commission official is seeking an inquiry into the blacking out of a politically charged segment of the CBS News magazine "60 Minutes" by a local television station in Alabama.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said he had asked the chairman of the FCC to open an inquiry into the February 24 incident at WHNT, a CBS affiliate in Huntsville, Alabama, in which civil rights footage from the 1960s was blacked out.

"The FCC now needs to find out if something analogous is going on here," Copps said at a luncheon with media watchdog groups. "Was this an attempt to suppress information on the public airwaves, or was it really just a technical problem?"

Copps is one of two Democratic appointees on the five-member FCC. The chairman of the agency, Kevin Martin, is a Republican.

Martin responded by saying he would look into the matter but has not indicated yet whether he would issue a letter of inquiry to the station, a source close to the commission said.

The "60 Minutes" segment centered on the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, who was convicted in 2006 on charges of corruption.

The program made the case that Siegelman had been wrongly convicted on the basis of a politically motivated case built by Republican prosecutors and White House political advisor Karl Rove.

The blackout of the segment in Huntsville prompted an editorial in The New York Times the following week that raised comparisons between the WHNT incident and systematic efforts by a Mississippi TV station to suppress information about the civil rights movement during the 1960s.

WHNT denied that the blackout was politically motivated. It said it had failed to get the segment on the air because of an equipment failure at the station that cut off the feed from CBS. WHNT said the problem was corrected a few minutes before the end of the Siegelman segment.

In a posting on WHNT's Web site, the station's news director, Denise Vickers, said the station had been "bombarded" with complaints and accusations that the station had sabotaged the broadcast for political reasons.

"But I assure everyone that the notion is patently false," Vickers wrote in her Web site posting. "Who would invite such a public relations nightmare on themselves??"

WHNT was sold along with eight other stations by The New York Times Co last year to the private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners.

Station managers requested and received permission from CBS to re-air the segment twice in the following days, Vickers said.

Copps said on Monday the FCC should move quickly to "determine the facts" surrounding the incident.

"If the decision was intentional, who made the decision and why? The FCC needs to get to the bottom of this," Copps said. (Reporting by Peter Kaplan; editing by Stuart Grudgings)

"How completely isolated a world the German people live in," I noted in my diary on August 10, 1939. "A glance at the newspapers yesterday and today reminds you of it." I had returned to Germany from a brief leave in Washington, New York and Paris, and coming up in the train from my home in Switzerland two days before I had bought a batch of Berlin and Rhineland newspapers. They quickly propelled one back to the cockeyed world of Nazism, which was as unlike the world I had just left as if it had been on another planet. I noted further on August 10, after I had arrived in Berlin:

Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland...here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is maintained... What the Nazi papers are proclaiming is this: that it is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threatening Germany with armed invasion...

"POLAND, LOOK OUT!" warns the B.Z. headline, adding: "ANSWER TO POLAND, THE RUNNER-AMOK [AMOKLAUFFER]

AGAINST PEACE AND RIGHT IN EUROPE!"

Or the headline in Der Fuehrer, daily paper of Karlsruhe, which I bought on the train:

"WARSAW THREATENS BOMBARDMENT OF DANZIG-UNBELIEVABLE AGITATION OF THE POLISH ARCHMADNESS [POLNISCHEN GROESSENWAHSN]!"

You ask: But the German people can't possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do.

By Saturday, August 26, the date originally set by Hitler for the attack on Poland, Goebbels' press campaign had reached its climax. I noted in my diary some of the headlines.

The B.Z.: "COMPLETE CHAOS IN POLAND-GERMAN FAMILIES FLEEPOLISH SOLDIERS PUSH TO EDGE OF GERMAN BORDER!" The 12-Uhr Blatt: "THIS PLAYING WITH FIRE GOING Too FAR-THREE GERMAN PASSENGER PLANES SHOT AT BY POLES-IN CORRIDOR MANY GERMAN FARMHOUSES IN FLAMES!"

On my way to Broadcast House at midnight I picked up the Sunday edition (August 27) of the Voelkischer Beobachter. Across the whole top of the front page were inch-high headlines:

WHOLE OF POLAND IN WAR FEVER! 1,500,000 MEN MOBILIZED! UNINTERRUPTED TROOP TRANSPORT TOWARD THE FRONTIER! CHAOS IN UPPER SILESIA!

There was no mention, of course, of any German mobilization, though, as we have seen, Germany had been mobilized for a fortnight. (Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, Simon and Schuster 1960, William L. Shirer, pp. 563-564)”

Excellent stuff. My head is reeling....

That was fascinating about Wikipedia. I've often seen stuff disappear or spin, and have started to treat it as a source with a pinch of salt, although I still rate it as an excellent key source.

It's amazing the number of drones that regurgitate the same tired propaganda nonsense on other sites and open forums, even in papers and editorials.
I rant a bit on Topix, (don't even ASK how I ended up there...) and am staggered at the level of idiocy and ignorance, to the point where I'm sure it's contrived. Nobody could be so stupid naturally.

"I was standing in the Wilhelmstrasse before the Chancellery about noon when the loudspeakers suddenly announced that Great Britain had declared herself at war with Germany. Some 250 people-no more-were standing there in the sun. They listened attentively to the announcement. When it was finished, there was not a murmur. They just stood there. Stunned. It was difficult for them to comprehend that Hitler had led them into a world war." (Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, Simon and Schuster 1960, William L. Shirer, pp. 614)”

"The scales," as Churchill later wrote, "had tilted against Fighter Command... There was much anxiety." A few more weeks of this and Britain would have had no organized defense of its skies. The invasion would almost certainly succeed.

And then suddenly Goering made his second tactical error, this one comparable in its consequences to Hitler's calling off the armored attack on Dunkirk on May 24. It saved the battered, reeling R.A.F. and marked one of the major turning points of history's first great battle in the air.

With the British fighter defense suffering losses in the air and on the ground which it could not for long sustain, the Luftwaffe switched its attack on September 7 to massive night bombings of London. The R.A.F. fighters were reprieved.

What had happened in the German camp to cause this change in tactics which was destined to prove so fatal to the ambitions of Hitler and Goering? The answer is full of irony.

To begin with, there was a minor navigational error by the pilots of a dozen German bombers on the night of August 23. Directed to drop their loads on aircraft factories and oil tanks on the outskirts of London, they missed their mark and dropped bombs on the center of the capital, blowing up some homes and killing some civilians. The British thought it was deliberate and as retaliation bombed Berlin the next evening.

It didn't amount to much. There was a dense cloud cover over Berlin that night and only about half of the eighty-one R.A.F. bombers dispatched found the target. Material damage was negligible. But the effect on German morale was tremendous. For this was the first time that bombs had ever fallen on Berlin.

The Berliners are stunned [I wrote in my diary the next day, August 26]. They did not think it could ever happen. When this war began, Goering assured them it couldn't... They believed him. Their disillusionment today therefore is all the greater. You have to see their faces to measure it.

Berlin was well defended by two great rings of antiaircraft and for three hours while the visiting bombers droned above the clouds, which prevented the hundreds of searchlight batteries from picking them up, the flak fire was the most intense I had ever seen. But not a single plane was brought down. The British also dropped a few leaflets saying that "the war which Hitler started will go on, and it will last as long as Hitler does." This was good propaganda, but the thud of exploding bombs was better.

The R.A.F. came over in greater force on the night of August 28-29 and, as I noted in my diary, "for the first time killed Germans in the capital of the Reich." The official count was ten killed and twenty-nine wounded. The Nazi bigwigs were outraged….(Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, Simon and Schuster 1960, William L. Shirer, pp. 777-778)”

Five Things You Need to Know to Understand the Latest Violence in Iraq
By Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar, AlterNet. Posted March 27, 2008.

Heavy fighting has spread across Shia-dominated enclaves in Iraq over the past two days. The U.S.-backed regime of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has ordered 50,000 Iraqi troops to "crack down" -- with coalition air support -- on Shiite militias in the oil-rich and strategically important city of Basra, U.S. forces have surrounded Baghdad's Sadr City and fighting has been reported in the southern cities of Kut, Diwaniya, Karbala and Hilla. Basra's main bridge and an oil pipeline connecting it to Amara were destroyed Wednesday. Six cities are under curfew, and acts of civil disobedience have shut down dozens of neighborhoods across the country. Civilian casualties have reportedly overwhelmed poorly equipped medical centers in Baghdad and Basra.

There are indications that the unilateral ceasefire declared last year by the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is collapsing. "The cease-fire is over; we have been told to fight the Americans," one militiaman loyal to al-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor's Sam Dagher by telephone from Sadr City. Dagher added that the "same man, when interviewed in January, had stated that he was abiding by the cease-fire and that he was keeping busy running his cellular phone store."

A political track is also in play: Sadr has called on his followers to take to the streets to demand Maliki's resignation, and nationalist lawmakers in the Iraqi Parliament, led by al-Sadr's block, are trying to push a no-confidence vote challenging the prime minister's regime.

The conflict is one that the U.S. media appears incapable of describing in a coherent way. The prevailing narrative is that Basra has been ruled by mafialike militias -- which is true -- and that Iraqi government forces are now cracking down on the lawlessness in preparation for regional elections, which is not. As independent analyst Reider Visser noted:

On closer inspection, there are problems in these accounts. Perhaps most importantly, there is a discrepancy between the description of Basra as a city ruled by militias (in the plural) ... [and the] facts of the ongoing operations, which seem to target only one of these militia groups, the Mahdi Army loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. Surely, if the aim was to make Basra a safer place, it would have been logical to do something to also stem the influence of the other militias loyal to the local competitors of the Sadrists, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq [SIIC], as well as the armed groups allied to the Fadila party (sic) (which have dominated the oil protection services for a long time). But so far, only Sadrists have complained about attacks by government forces.

The conflict doesn't conform to the analysis of the roots of Iraqi instability as briefed by U.S. officials in the heavily-fortified Green Zone. It also doesn't fit into the simplistic but popular narrative of a country wrought by sectarian violence, and its nature is obscured by the labels that the commercial media uncritically apply to the disparate centers of Iraqi resistance to the occupation.

The "crackdown" comes on the heels of the approval of a new "provincial law," which will ultimately determine whether Iraq remains a unified state with a strong central government or is divided into sectarian-based regional governates. The measure calls for provincial elections in October, and the winners of those elections will determine the future of the Iraqi state. Control of the country's oil wealth, and how its treasure will be developed, will also be significantly influenced by the outcome of the elections.

It's a relatively straightforward story: Iraq is ablaze today as a result of an attempt to impose Colombian-style democracy on the unstable country: Maliki's goal, shared by the like-minded allies among the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities that dominate his administration, and with at least tacit U.S. approval, is to kill off the opposition and then hold a vote.

To better understand the nature of this latest round of conflict, here are five things one needs to know about what's taking place across Iraq.

1. A visible manifestation of Iraq's central-but-under-teported political conflict (not "sectarian violence")

Iraq, which had experienced little or no sectarian-based violence prior to the U.S. invasion, has been plagued with sectarian militias fighting for the streets of Iraq's formerly heterogeneous neighborhoods, and "sectarian violence" has become Americans' primary explanation for the instability that has plagued the country.

But the sectarian-based street-fighting is a symptom of a larger political conflict, one that has been poorly analyzed in the mainstream press. The real source of conflict in Iraq -- and the reason political reconciliation has been so difficult -- is a fundamental disagreement over what the future of Iraq will look like. Loosely defined, it is a clash of Iraqi nationalists -- with Muqtada al-Sadr as their most influential voice -- who desire a unified Iraqi state and public-sector management of the country's vast oil reserves and who forcefully reject foreign influence on Iraq's political process, be it from the United States, Iran or other outside forces.

The nationalists now represent a majority in Iraq's parliament but are opposed by what might be called Iraqi separatists, who envision a "soft partition" of Iraq into at least four semiautonomous and sectarian-based regional entities, welcome the privatization of the Iraqi energy sector (and the rest of the Iraqi economy) and rely on foreign support to maintain their power.

We've written about this long-standing conflict extensively in the past, and now we're seeing it come to a head, as we believed it would at some point.

2. U.S. is propping up unpopular regime; Sadr has support because of his platform

One of the ironies of the reporting out of Iraq is the ubiquitous characterization of Muqtada al-Sadr as a "renegade," "radical" or "militant" cleric, despite the fact that he is the only leader of significance in the country who has ordered his followers to stand down. His ostensible militancy appears to arise primarily from his opposition to the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.

He has certainly been willing to use violence in the past, but the "firebrand" label belies the fact that Sadr is arguably the most popular leader among a large section of the Iraqi population and that he has forcefully rejected sectarian conflict and sought to bring together representatives of Iraq's various ethnic and sectarian groups in an effort to create real national reconciliation -- a process that the highly sectarian Maliki regime has failed to accomplish.

It's vitally important to understand that Sadr's popularity and legitimacy is a result of his having a platform that's favored by an overwhelming majority of Iraqis.

Most Iraqis:

* Favor a strong central government free of the influence of militias.
* Oppose, by a 2-1 margin, the privatization of Iraq's energy sector -- a "benchmark towards progress according to the Bush administration.
* Favor a U.S. withdrawal on a short timeline (PDF) (most believe the United States plans to build permanent bases -- both are issues about which the Sadrists have been vocal.
* Oppose al Qaeda and the ideology of Osama Bin Laden and, to a lesser degree, Iranian influence on Iraq's internal affairs.

With the exception of their opposition to Al Qaeda, the five major separatist parties -- Sunni, Shia and Kurdish -- that make up Maliki's governing coalition are on the deeply unpopular side of these issues. A poll conducted last year found that 65 percent of Iraqis think the Iraqi government is doing a poor job, and Maliki himself has a Bush-like 66 percent disapproval rate.

As in Vietnam, the United States is backing an unpopular and decidedly undemocratic government in Iraq, and that simple fact explains much of the violent resistance that's going on in Iraq today.

3. "Iraqi forces" are, in fact, "Iranian- (and U.S.-) backed Shiite militias"

Every headline this week has featured some variation of the storyline of "Iraqi security forces" battling "Shiite militias." But the reality is that it is a battle between sh*te militias -- separatists and nationalists -- with one militia garbed in Iraqi army uniforms and supported by U.S. airpower, and the other in civilian clothes.

It has always been the great irony of the occupation of Iraq that "our" man in Baghdad is also Tehran's. Maliki heads the Dawa Party, which has long enjoyed close ties to Iran, and relies on support from SIIC, a staunchly pro-Iranian party, and its powerful Badr militia. The "government crackdown" is an escalation of a long-simmering conflict in the south between the Badr Brigade, the Sadrists and members of the Fadhila Party, which favors greater autonomy for Basra but rejects SIIC's vision of a larger Shiite-dominated regional entity in Southern Iraq.

4. Colombia-style democracy

Basra has been engulfed in a simmering conflict since before the British pulled their troops back to a remote base near the airport and turned over the city to Iraqi authorities. But the timing of this crackdown is not coincidental; Iraqi separatists -- Dawa, SIIC and others -- are expected to do poorly in the regional elections, while the Sadrists are widely anticipated to make significant gains. It is widely perceived by those loyal to Sadr that this is an attempt to wipe out the movement he leads prior to the elections and minimize the influence that Iraqi nationalists are poised to gain.

The United States, for its part, continues to take sides in this conflict -- in addition to providing airpower, U.S. forces are enforcing the curfew in Sadr City -- rather than playing the role of neutral mediator. That's because the interests of the Bush administration and its allies are aligned with Maliki and his coalition. That they are not aligned with the interests of most Iraqis is never mentioned in the Western press, but is a key reason why Bush's definition of "victory" -- the emergence of a legitimate and Democratic state that supports U.S. policy in the region -- has always been an impossible pipedream.

5. Chip off the old block: Maliki's attempt to criminalize dissent

It's unclear whether Sadr has lifted the cease-fire entirely, or simply freed his fighters to defend themselves. He continues to call for peaceful resistance.

Whatever the case may be, it's not entirely accurate to say that he "chose" this conflict. The reality is that while his army was holding the cease-fire, attacks on and detentions of Sadrists have continued unabated. Sadr renewed the cease-fire last month, but he did so over the urging of his top aides, who argued that their movement was threatened with annihilation. He later authorized his followers to carry weapons "for self-defense" to head off a mutiny within his ranks.

Ahmed al-Massoudi, a Sadrist member of Parliament, last week "accused the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, his Dawa Party and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) of planning a military campaign to liquidate the Sadrists."

The lawmaker told Voices of Iraq that Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim's "SIIC and the Dawa Party have held meetings with officers of the militias merged recently into security agencies to launch a military campaign outwardly to impose order and law, but the real objective is to liquidate the Sadrist bloc." "Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is directly supervising this scheme with officers from the Dawa Party and the SIIC," he added. Despite his close ties with Tehran and deep involvement in Shiite militia activity, Hakim has been invited to the White House, where he was feted by Bush himself.

Sadr called for nationwide civil disobedience that would have allowed his followers to flex some political muscle in a nonviolent way. His orders, according to Iraqi reports were to distribute olive branches and copies of the Koran to soldiers at checkpoints.

The Maliki regime responded by saying that individuals joining the nationwide strike would be punished and that those organizing it are in violation of the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Act issued in 2005. A spokesman for the prime minister promised to punish any government employees who failed to show up for work.

This is consistent with a long-term trend: the U.S.-backed government's obstruction of Iraqi efforts to foster political reconciliation among diverse groups of Iraq nationalists. (Read more about this here.)

Propaganda and the surge

The Maliki regime has set an ultimatum demanding that the militias -- the nationalist militias -- lay down their arms within the next two days or face "more serious consequences." Al-Sadr has also issued an ultimatum: The government must cease its attacks on his followers, or his followers will escalate. It is an extremely dangerous situation, especially given the fact that the main U.S. resupply routes stretch from Baghdad through the Shia-dominated southern provinces.

But the precariousness of the situation appears to be of little concern to the military command, which issued a statement saying that the violence was a result of the success of the U.S. troop "surge" (Bush called the "crackdown" a "bold decision'' that shows the country's security forces are capable of combating terrorists). It's yet another example of the administration putting U.S. geostrategic (and economic) interests ahead of Iraqi reconciliation and democratic governance.

The much-touted troop "surge" had little to do with the drop in violence in recent months -- it didn't even correlate with the lull chronologically and was certainly a minor causal factor at best. A number of factors led to the reduced violence, but Sadr's cease-fire had the greatest impact. Nonetheless, the Maliki regime, backed by the United States, continued a campaign of harassment and intimidation against Sadr's followers, denied them space to peacefully resist the occupation and forced his hand.

Given the degree to which the coalition has continued to stir a hornets' nest, we may be seeing a perfect illustration of the dangers of believing one's own propaganda play out as Iraq is once again set aflame.

Military Report: Secretly 'Recruit or Hire Bloggers'
By Noah Shachtman EmailMarch 31, 2008

A study, written for U.S. Special Operations Command, suggested "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers."

Since the start of the Iraq war, there's been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs -- and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops' time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad.

This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, "Blogs and Military Information Strategy," offers a third approach -- co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll. "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering," write the report's co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.

Lt. Commander Marc Boyd, a U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman, says the report was merely an academic exercise. "The comments are not 'actionable', merely thought provoking," he tells Danger Room. "The views expressed in the article publication are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy or position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, USSOCOM [Special Operations Command], or the Joint Special Operations University."

Denning, a professor at Naval Postgraduate School, adds in an e-mail, "I got some positive feedback from people who read the article, but I don't know if it led to anything."

The report introduces the military audience to the "blogging phenomenon," and lays out a number of ways in which the armed forces -- specifically, the military's public affairs, information operations, and psychological operations units -- might use the sites to their advantage.

Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence... to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital. Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

An alternative strategy is to “make” a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog. In some cases, their talents might be redirected toward operating blogs as part of an information campaign. If a military blog offers valuable information that is not available from other sources, it could rise in rank fairly rapidly.

Denning, the report's author, has promoted controversial opinions before. In the early 1990s, when she was chair of the Georgetown University's computer science department, Denning emerged as the leading advocate for the so-called "Clipper Chip," a cryptographic device for protecting communications -- until the government wanted to listen in. The project was cancelled by 1996.

In her 2006 paper, Denning warns that blogs can and will be used by America's enemies. These sites, she argues, can also be used to serve U.S. government interests.

There are certain to be cases where some blog, outside the control of the U.S. government, promotes a message that is antithetical to U.S. interests, or actively supports the informational, recruiting and logistical activities of our enemies. The initial reaction may be to take down the site, but this is problematic in that doing so does not guarantee that the site will remain down. As has been the case with many such sites, the offending site will likely move to a different host server, often in a third country. Moreover, such action will likely produce even more interest in the site and its contents. Also, taking down a site that is known to pass enemy EEIs (essential elements of information) and that gives us their key messages denies us a valuable information source. This is not to say that once the information passed becomes redundant or is superseded by a better source that the site should be taken down. At that point the enemy blog might be used covertly as a vehicle for friendly information operations. Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience. Better yet, if the blogger happens to be passing enemy communications and logistics data, the information content could be corrupted. If the messages are subtly tweaked and the data corrupted in the right way, the enemy may reason that the blogger in question has betrayed them and either take down the site (and the blogger) themselves, or by threatening such action, give the U.S. an opportunity to offer the individual amnesty in exchange for information. (emphasis mine)

SYRIA: More questions about alleged nuclear site

Professor William Beeman at the University of Minnesota passed along a note today from "a colleague with a U.S. security clearance" about the mysterious Syrian site targeted in a Sept. 6 Israeli airstrike.

The note raises more questions about the evidence shown last week by U.S. intelligence officials to lawmakers in the House and Senate.

The author of the note pinpoints irregularities about the photographs. Beeman's source alleges that the CIA "enhanced" some of the images. For example he cites this image:



The lower part of the building, the annex, and the windows pointing south appear much sharper than the rest of the photo, suggesting that they were digitally improved.

The author points to more questions about the photographs of the Syrian site.

1. Satellite photos of the alleged reactor building show no air defenses or anti-aircraft batteries such as the ones found around the Natanz nuclear site in central Iran.
2. The satellite images do not show any military checkpoints on roads near the building.
3. Where are the power lines? The photos show neither electricity lines or substations.
4. Here is a link to a photo of the North Korean facility that the Syrian site was based on. Look at all the buildings surrounding it. The Syrian site was just one building.

Now compare this photograph of the site:

To this one:

The site looks like a rectangle in the first shot, but more like a square in the second shot. Huh?

Thanks to Beeman, a professor of anthropology and Middle East studies as well as a member of the blogosphere, for allowing us to share his colleague's comments.

— Borzou Daragahi in Amman, Jordan

Scott Ritter: By Releasing Intel, US Endorses Israel’s Illegal Bombing of Alleged Syrian Nuke Site

Scott Ritter, Ritter served from 1991 to 1998 as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq in the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM). He is author of Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change.

AMY GOODMAN: The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog group, Mohamed ElBaradei, has criticized the United States for withholding intelligence that it says showed the construction of a nuclear reactor in Syria that Israel bombed in September. The International Atomic Energy Agency chief was critical of both the US delay in releasing the information and of Israel’s bombing of the site before the IAEA could inspect it. Syrian officials say the site was an unused military facility under construction.

On Thursday, top US intelligence officials presented lawmakers evidence they said proved Syria was building a nuclear reactor with North Korean assistance. Among the evidence they displayed were pictures, said to have been obtained by Israel, allegedly taken inside the facility, showing the reactor core being built. Officials said the US believed the site was nearing operational capability, but they declared “low confidence” the site played a role in a Syrian nuclear weapons program.

This is the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, briefing reporters in Washington.

ADMIRAL MICHAEL MULLEN: That this facility was being built secretly and against international convention and that it was destroyed before it became operational are the key points to remember. It should serve as a reminder to us all of the very real dangers of proliferation and need to rededicate ourselves to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, particularly into the hands of a state or a group with terrorist connections.


AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, the Syrian ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha, dismissed the allegations.

IMAD MOUSTAPHA: Can you believe—can anyone be as gullible as this? An allegedly strategic site in Syria without a single military checkpoint around it, without barbed wire around it, without anti-aircraft missiles around it, without any sort of security surrounding it, thrown in the middle of the desert without electricity, plans to generate electricity for it, with out major supply plans around it? And yet, it is supposed to be a strategic installation? And people don’t even think of it. Yesterday, in the White House presidential statement, it was stated to the letter that that was a secret location. And yet, every commercial satellite service available on earth was able to provide photos and images of this so-called secret Syrian site for the past five, six years. I think something is very absurd and preposterous in the whole story.


AMY GOODMAN: For more, I am joined on the telephone by Scott Ritter. He’s the former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, author of Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change. Scott Ritter, welcome to Democracy Now!

SCOTT RITTER: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: Your evaluation of this whole situation, the information that has been presented to Congress on Friday?

SCOTT RITTER: Well, first of all, we have to be concerned about the evidence. We have interior photographs and exterior shots and nothing that links the two. And so, on the surface, I would say that if you’re bringing this evidence to a court of law—it’s a strange dimension, the rule of law, when we speak of American foreign policy lately—you would have trouble having anybody say yes, this is definitive evidence that links the allegations to this specific site in question.

But let’s just assume for a second that the data is in fact accurate. I have to take exception with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he says that the alleged activities are against international conventions. Actually, they’re not. If Syria had in fact been constructing the reactor they’ve been accused of, they were in total conformity with international law. The nonproliferation treaty, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which Syria is a signatory, requires that facilities be declared to the IAEA only when nuclear materials are to be introduced to these facilities, that a facility under construction is not a declarable item. And so, it’s absurd to sit there and say that just because Syria and North Korea were pouring concrete that they are somehow breaking the law.

And this notion that the reactor was on the verge of becoming operational, again, is absurd. You know, there would have to be literally thousands of pounds of pure graphite that would have to be introduced to this facility, and there’s no evidence in the destruction. You know, there were a number of reporters who went to the site after it was blown up. If it had been bombed and there was graphite introduced, you would have a signature all over the area of destroyed graphite blocks. There would be graphite lying around, etc. This was not the case.

I don’t know what was going on at this site. If the images are accurate, it appears that Syria was producing a very, very small research reactor. But it is not a reactor usable in a nuclear weapons program. Syria was not violating the law.

And if there were concerns over this reactor, a simple referring of the material, these photographs, to the International Atomic Energy Agency would have produced an insistence on special inspections that would have had the inspectors on the site actually determining what was going on and a peaceful resolution of the problem. This shows that the United States and Israel have a wanton disregard for the rule of law. And this is especially critical when the United States is holding up the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a standard in which we hold Iran and North Korea accountable to.

AMY GOODMAN: Scott Ritter, the Washington Post reporting another senior official said US intelligence had formerly declared only “low confidence” that the site played in a Syrian nuclear program?

SCOTT RITTER: Well, I understand there’s people saying that. You know, we have John Bolton, who recently left the Bush administration, putting his marker on the table, saying that Syria was pursuing nuclear weapons. You have the Office of the Vice President carrying out a whispering campaign. But the bottom line is that it really doesn’t matter what the US government says was going on there or wasn’t going on there; the site was bombed. And the United States government has not condemned this bombing.

We are signatories to the Charter of the United Nations. We are a permanent member of the Security Council. And it is our responsibility to ensure that the sovereignty of member nations is protected. And what occurred in September of last year was that the sovereignty of Syria was violated by Israel in a preemptive, unprovoked attack against a site that was not in any way representative of a threat to Israel or a violation of international law. This is where people should be focused on, not, you know, the to-ing and fro-ing about what was or what wasn’t going on in Syria. What we’re talking about here is the violation of a nation’s sovereignty, an act of war, unprovoked, preemptive, by one nation against another. And the United States is remaining not only silent, but we’re actually siding with the aggressor.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the photo that was released of a Syrian official with a North Korean official that did not actually appear at the Al Kibar site?

SCOTT RITTER: Again, it’s a photo that can’t be linked to any of these activities. It’s a photo that ostensibly shows one Korean with, you know, one Syrian, and it’s not evidence of a crime. It’s not evidence of a nuclear weapons program. It’s not evidence of anything. It’s circumstantial in the extreme. And to be talking about a photograph of this nature in a manner which somehow justifies this preemptive act of aggression is absurd and insulting, to be honest.

AMY GOODMAN: And the timing of the release of this photo and this information?

SCOTT RITTER: I think it’s quite clear the United States is in the middle of some very sensitive negotiations with North Korea to resolve the North Korean nuclear dismantlement. The Bush administration is desperate to be seen as saving face, and they are trying to get the North Koreans to admit to having a secret uranium enrichment program and for working with Syria on an undeclared nuclear program. The North Koreans so far have refused to acknowledge either. And I believe that the Bush administration’s sanctioning of the release of this information at this time is designed to embarrass North Korea to prompt a face-saving move for the Bush administration and maybe even get the North Koreans to admit to something that they continue to say just wasn’t happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Isn’t Syria also saying that there are negotiations going on with Israel right now about giving back the Golan Heights?

SCOTT RITTER: There is this discussion. I don’t believe the Syrians have come right out and said that there’s a deal. There’s some talk in Israel that they have received a diplomatic outreach from Syria about this issue, about trading peace for the Golan Heights. And there has been some speculation that the release of this information is designed to torpedo any talk of a peace settlement between Israel and Syria.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the US does plan to attack Iran?

SCOTT RITTER: There’s no doubt in my mind that the United States is planning right now, as we speak, a military strike against Iran. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and almost every senior US military official has pretty much acknowledged the same. They speak of the need to punish Iran and deter Iran from continuing to provide material assistance to Iraqi groups, these so-called “special groups” that operate, according to the United States, outside of the umbrella of the Mahdi Army. And they speak of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command as being a rogue organization within the Iranian government that provides this support. The United States Senate, through the Kyl-Lieberman resolution, has pretty much given a target list blessing to the US military by passing a resolution that labels the Revolutionary Guard Command as a terrorist organization. And the Bush administration, of course, is engaged in a global war on terror backed by two congressional war powers resolutions.

We take a look at the military buildup, we take a look at the rhetoric, we take a look at the diplomatic posturing, and I would say that it’s a virtual guarantee that there will be a limited aerial strike against Iran in the not-so-near future—or not-so-distant future, that focuses on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command. And if this situation spins further out of control, you would see these aerial strikes expanding to include Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and some significant command and control targets.

AMY GOODMAN: Scott Ritter, I want to thank you for being with us. Scott Ritter is a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq. He has written the book, Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change.

1+1=1
April 30, 2008

New math from the Secretary of Defense:

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) — The U.S. Navy has temporarily added a second aircraft carrier in the Gulf as a “reminder” to Iran, but this was not an escalation of American forces in the region, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday …

“This deployment has been planned for a long time,” Gates said. “I don’t think we’ll have two carriers there for a protracted period of time. So I don’t see it as an escalation. I think it could be seen, though, as a reminder.”

Are these Syrian nuclear pictures faked?

The CIA published three aerial photographs last week purporting to show a Syrian nuclear reactor, bombed by Israel last September. But are the pictures all that they seem? Doubts about their authenticity have been raised by Professor William Beeman, head of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, who has had a long involvement with the Middle East.

He posted on a Los Angeles Times website a note received from a "colleague with US security clearance" pointing out "irregularities". The unnamed colleague said a picture taken before the bombing looked as if it had been digitally enhanced, noting that the lower part of the building, the annexe and the windows pointing south appeared much sharper than the rest.

He also questioned why the alleged reactor had no air defences, no military checkpoints and no powerlines. Turning to two shots of the bombed building, he noted that the first showed a rectangular building and the second a square one. Were they the same building?

His note has produced lively and detailed exchanges, involving photo technicians, graphic artists and military analysts past and present, including a specialist in aerial reconnaissance. The basic divide is between those who think it is unpatriotic to question the Bush administration and those suspicious that it is a rerun of 2003, when the administration put out misleading intelligence before the Iraq invasion.

Bloggers supportive of the CIA acknowledge that the first picture was digitally enhanced but say that the CIA never claimed last week that it was untouched. As for the discrepancies between pictures two and three, they suggest that the differences between the rectangular shape and the square can be explained by having been taken at different angles.

Beeman told the Guardian he did not know one way or another whether there had been a nuclear reactor in the desert, but he had been concerned last week when the administration put out the pictures. "It was so sloppy and obviously doctored," he said.

"My friend who watches this material carefully in his capacity as an analyst said, 'This does not add up.'"

Jung: Resisting the 'New World Order '
The Existentialist Cowboy
Monday, June 16, 2008

"Take away the right to say "f*ck" and you take away the right to say "f*ck the government." —Lenny Bruce, 1923 - 1966)

It is said of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung [1875 - 1961] that he was 'prophetic of today’s ongoing debate about religion and science' as well as a much older debate about the 'individual' and the 'state'. Today --the GOP has demagogued religion while Bush, the party's flag bearer, has thrown in with 'state absolutists' --Friedrich Hegel, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler and Pol Pot.

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

--Carl Jung

Those words put Carl Jung in opposition to a cult of cruelty and torture that has apparently assumed political control in the United States. It is ironic that a nation said to have been founded upon the principles of the enlightenment should find itself, under Bush's rule, categorized with regimes historically associated with 'collectivism' and 'totalitarianism.

Growing up in West Texas, among both radical 'John Birchers' and fundamentalist Christians, it is less surprising to me that the GOP, a party that often says of itself that it opposes 'big government' should, during the regime of George W. Bush, align itself with the forces of state oppression and incipient totalitarianism and that it should do so while brandishing the flag.

In this broad belt of unconsciousness, which is immune to conscious criticism and control, we stand defenseless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections. As with all dangers, we can guard against the risk of psychic infection only when we know that is attacking, and how, where and when the attack will come.

Since self-knowledge is a matter of getting to know the individual, facts and theories are of very little help in this respect. For the more a theory lays claims to universal validity, the less capable it is of doing justice to the individual facts.

Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean. This mean is quite valid, though it need not necessarily occur in reality.
--Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

In "The Undiscovered Self", Jung foresaw a great crisis arising from the forces of 'collectivism' on the one hand and those that celebrate the inherent value of the individual on the other. It is a dialectic that few could have imagined might reach a zenith in a Bush regime, from which nothing special was expected, a regime that held out only the promise of oppressive dullness --not oppresssion itself, a regime characterized by standard GOP conventionality and mediocrity.

Little was expected of Bush who delivered even less in every area but one. Bush marshaled the powerful forces of state propaganda, fear, and 'group think' to forge a totalitarian collective from among his aggressive, authoritarian, intolerant and elitist base! In the wake of 911, even strong 'individualists' found it easier to just go along with the 'mass think' that blamed Islam, Europe [France, in particular] for crimes that we now know were perpetrated by the Bush regime itself. Hitler had been similarly successful in the wake of the Reichstag Fire.

Jung argued the future of civilization was literally dependent upon the ability of the individual to resist the collective forces that are found in every society. Jung's prescription consisted of individuals 'gaining an awareness and understanding' of one's own sub-conscious, in other words, “the undiscovered self'.

Resistance to the organized mass can be affected only by the man who is well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.'

--Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, [p. 60]

One should not be surprised that Bush benefited most from the 'collectivist instinct' found in the 'religious right', a movement which typifies 'group think' and the suppression of individual reason, creativity, originality, or non-conformity of any type.

He [Jung] distinguishes between religion which expresses a subjective relationship to certain metaphysical factors and a creed which merely gives expression to a collective belief. Religion is understood in the broad sense, including the relationship of the individual to the metaphysical and the world of dreams, feelings and intuitions.

Science, on the other hand, is the rationalistic, statistical and theoretical part of understanding. Self-knowledge, according to Jung, cannot be achieved by abandoning either of these facets.

--Review, Carl Jung's The Undiscovered Self

In America, the 'religious' instinct is that of the 'group'. It has very little in common with the individual's quest for enlightenment or spirituality. Thus, the process by which individuals acquire knowledge of Jung's 'undiscovered self' is antithetical to 'ideological fanaticism' observed to be rampant and intolerant throughout Bush's America.

Only when individuals embrace the dual nature of the human psyche --the existence of good as well as its capacity for evil --that individuals may cope with the dangers and threats posed by those in power or by what Jung has called 'the sum total of individuals' i.e, the modern 'mass society'. It is not only totalitarian regimes but society itself, by way of the 'science' of 'demographics' that reduces the individual to the individual only as he/she is a part of the 'mass'.

Modern propaganda reaches individuals enclosed in the mass, yet it also aims at a crowd, but only as a body composed of individuals. What does this mean? First of all, that the individual is never considered as an individual, but always in terms of what he has in common with others, such as his motivations, his feelings, or his myths. He is reduced to an average; and except for a small percentage, action based on averages will be effectual.'

...
'In this broad belt of unconsciousness, which is immune to conscious criticism and control, we stand defenseless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections. As with al dangers, we can guard against the risk of psychic infection only when we know that is attacking, and how, where and when the attack will come. Since self-knowledge is a matter of getting to known the individual facts, theories help very little in this respect. For the more a theory lays claims to universal validity, the less capable it is of doing justice to the individual facts. Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean. This mean is quite valid, though it need not necessarily occur in reality.

--Propaganda: On the Formation of Man’s Attitudes[p.6]

Jung defies summary. It is better that you read him for yourself. However, some general conclusions are possible. Jung writes that 'Separation from his instinctual nature' impels the 'conflict between conscious and unconscious', between 'knowledge and faith' [Jung, op cit., p. 81] It is easy enough to find this 'symptom' in Bush's America bombarded as it is by unprecedented 'mass media' and equally unprecedented pressures to conform.

These 'pressures' to conform have always been identifiable, opposed as they were by Henry David Thoreau who chose --at Walden pond --to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Others known for their creative resistances to 'mass think' include Mark Twain and later Lenny Bruce, the 'beatniks', hippies, and Viet Nam war resisters. 'Howl' by Allen Ginsberg is a latter day movement's very anthem of 'resistance' as was the earlier 'Song of Myself' by Walt Whitman in which it is written:

'I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

--Walt Whitman

“Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?'

--Jung, op cit, p.88

Given the oppressive nature of Bush's evil regime, the 'mass think' inherent in 'mass media', the mind-numbing sameness of American suburbs, it is difficult to find the paths sought so heroically by Whitman, Ginsberg, et al.

We can recognize our prejudices and illusions only when, from a broader psychological knowledge of ourselves and others, we are prepared to doubt the absolute rightness of our assumptions and compare them carefully and conscientiously with the objective facts.

--Jung, op cit,p. 102

The same thing was said much earlier by Oliver Cromwell to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650

I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

The GOP, tragically, will never admit of being wrong. Therefore, as long as the GOP is allowed power of any sort, the state is made dysfunctional and the 'debate' made meaningless. The future of mankind is in doubt. As long as the state presumes to exercise 'absolute power', individuals are robbed of the freedom required to lead meaningful lives.

In this challenging and provocative work, Dr. Carl Jung—one of history’s greatest minds—argues that civilization’s future depends on our ability as individuals to resist the collective forces of society. Only by gaining an awareness and understanding of one’s unconscious mind and true, inner nature—“the undiscovered self”—can we as individuals acquire the self-knowledge that is antithetical to ideological fanaticism. But this requires that we face our fear of the duality of the human psyche—the existence of good and the capacity for evil in every individual. In this seminal book, Jung compellingly argues that only then can we begin to cope with the dangers posed by mass society—“the sum total of individuals”—and resist the potential threats posed by those in power.

--Penquin Review of Jung's 'The Undiscovered Self'

I awoke this morning hearing a voice saying:

"Beware of the warrior Many Tongues whose mind is cluttered with things and he walks the earth in confusion, deep in his fear of the Great Spirit Emptiness, for he knows that without Emptiness there would be no-thing."

Secretary Of Energy Repeats Katrina Oil Spill Lie: ‘Not One Case’ Where Oil ‘Spilled In The Environment’

After meeting with his cabinet today, President Bush renewed his call for “Congress to lift the legislative ban that prevents offshore exploration on the Outer Continental Shelf.” Bush has previously claimed that such offshore drilling can be done in a manner that will “ensure that our environment is protected.”

In order to support Bush’s message, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman went on Fox News today to push the claim that offshore drilling is safe for the environment. But in the midst of his interview, Bodman repeated the right-wing lie that no oil spilled in 2005 during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita:

JARRETT: Has technology improved so dramatically that drilling can now be done in a way that protects the environment?

BODMAN: I believe that it can. When we had Katrina and Rita, the two worst hurricanes in — at least in recent memory, in ‘05, some three years ago, there was not one case where we had a situation with oil or gas being spilled in the environment.

Watch it:

As ThinkProgress has previously noted, the clear satellite evidence of major spills was borne out by final reports. In May 2006, the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) published their offshore damage assessment: “113 platforms totally destroyed, and 457 pipelines damaged, 101 of those major lines with 10 inches or larger diameter.”

In all, the two hurricanes caused 124 offshore spills for a total of 743,700 gallons, including six spills of 42,000 gallons or greater.

It’s one thing for right-wing hacks like the Wall Street Journal editorial page to push these lies, but America’s highest-ranking energy official should know better.

Transcript:

Look, you’re an engineer by background.

BODMAN: That’s right.

JARRETT: Has technology improved so dramatically that drilling can now be done in a way that protects the environment?

BODMAN: I believe that it can. When we had Katrina and Rita, the two worst hurricanes in — at least in recent memory, in ‘05, some three years ago, there was not one case where we had a situation with oil or gas being spilled in the environment.

Conservatives Echo McCain’s False Claim That Katrina Caused No Oil Spill Damage»

In a Tuesday speech delivered before an audience of oil executives, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) pushed to overturn the federal ban on offshore oil drilling. McCain claimed drilling is so “safe” that “not even Hurricane Katrina and Rita could cause significant spillage from battered rigs off the coasts of New Orleans and Houston.” Watch it:

Picking up McCain’s talking points, a growing chorus of conservatives have repeated this claim as justification for expanded drilling:

– George Will: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed or damaged hundreds of drilling rigs without causing a large spill.”

– Wall Street Journal editorial: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita flattened terminals across the Gulf of Mexico but didn’t cause a single oil spill.”

– Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne: “When Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast where we have about 4,000 oil and gas platforms, 3,000 were in the direct line of the storms - the most significant storms we’ve seen ever - and 3,000 of those had to be shut down. We had no significant oil spill. The system worked.”

– Fox News’ Dick Morris: “And by the way, the safety concerns, Hurricane Katrina didn’t cause any leakage or any spill in the Gulf of Mexico oil wells.”

The truth is that Hurricane Katrina caused oil spillage so significant it was clearly visible from space. It also wreaked environmental havoc near the scale of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

The Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson explains the disastrous extent of Katrina’s wreckage of Gulf oil facilities.

– Lee Fang

From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks.

To whom does one appeal?

It seems clear enough that since the election of 1980, there is no court of higher appeal.
See poison

Road Visions: Adventures in the Poison Factory
Written by Chris Floyd
Friday, 01 August 2008
I'm on the road right now, will be back in a few days, with only sporadic contact with the virtual world of the blogosphere-- and the hallucinated world of "higher politics."

However, I do note, in just the briefest dip into the digital waters, that Cheney and the gang have been up to their old Hitlerian "let's fake a casus belli" tricks in regard to a war on Iran, while the American corporate media continues to cover up -- eagerly, slavishly -- what Glenn Greenwald rightly calls one of the most important and astounding stories of our time: how the Bush Administration completely concocted false evidence pointing to Saddam Hussein's involvement in the post-9/11 anthrax terrorism, then fed these lies to the aforementioned eager, slavish corporate media hacks at ABC. As Greenwald notes, the hacks know exactly who feed them these lies -- which were instrumental in fomenting war fever for the act of aggression against Iraq -- but they refuse to give up these conniving, traitorous wretches.

Still think you're living in a free country, with a free press? We've said it before and we'll say it again: at this point, anyone in public office who acknowledges the Bush Faction as being in any way a legitimate government -- instead of a pack of criminals in need of immediate and relentless prosecution -- is in fact complicit in the Faction's crimes.

As I wrote here awhile back:

Tomorrow is here. The game is over. The crisis has passed -- and the patient is dead. Whatever dream you had about what America is, it isn't that anymore. It's gone. And not just in some abstract sense, some metaphorical or mythological sense, but down in the nitty-gritty, in the concrete realities of institutional structures and legal frameworks, of policy and process, even down to the physical nature of the landscape and the way that people live.

The Republic you wanted -- and at one time might have had the power to take back -- is finished. You no longer have the power to keep it; it's not there. It was kidnapped in December 2000, raped by the primed and ready exploiters of 9/11, whored by the war pimps of the 2003 aggression, gut-knifed by the corrupters of the 2004 vote, and raped again by its "rescuers" after the 2006 election. Beaten, abused, diseased and abandoned, it finally died. We are living in its grave....

"How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." – Thoreau

.....The time has passed for ordinary political opposition, "within the system." The system itself has been perverted and converted into something else; it is now impossible to "work within the system" in the old understanding of that term, because that old system is gone. To work within the current system is to collaborate with evil, to give it legitimacy.

Thoreau's answer should be taken up by every person in public life, beginning with the Senators and Representatives in Congress, and radiating outward to all other elected officials in the 50 states, and to civil servants and other government employees, law enforcement agencies, judges, universities, contractors, banks, and on and on, throughout the vast, intricate web that binds the lives of so many people directly to the federal government. There should be non-compliance, non-recognition of this illegitimate authority, disassociation from taking part in its workings.

But we must also recognize that the kind of civil disobedience that Thoreau preached – and practiced – is immensely more difficult today, because the power of the state is so much greater, far more pervasive, more invasive…and much more implacable, more inhuman. No one would have dared put Thoreau in "indefinite detention" without charges, or torture him, or delegate some underling in intelligence apparatus (which didn't exist then) to kill him as a "suspected terrorist." Of course there were many egregious suspensions of Constitutional liberties and draconian measures during the Civil War; but these occasioned fierce fights in Congress, investigations, lawsuits, and outraged protests on the streets – the worst, by far, in American history, dwarfing the urban riots and war protests of the Sixties. But only the most ignorant fool – or devious liar – could compare these short-lived, ad hoc, inconsistently applied, frequently reversed and much-disputed depredations, carried out in the midst of a massive insurrection by fully-fledged armies on American soil, with today's thorough-going, systematic creation of an authoritarian state, on the basis of a zealous ideology of an unrestricted "unitary executive," operating in a nebulous, self-declared "state of war" that we are told will last for generations.

Neither Thoreau – nor any Northern opponent of the Civil War – confronted anything like this. (In fact, neither did the insurrectionists of the South, who were treated as lawful prisoners-of-war when captured – or often simply allowed to return to their homes on parole, in exchange for a simple statement that they would fight no more. No Southerner was ever subjected to indefinite detention, none were tortured, none were liquidated by secret agents.) The technology available to the government today amplifies the scope of repression immeasurably, both in the pinpoint, surreptitious targeting of individuals and in larger-scale operations.

In a land crawling with armed – and armored – SWAT teams, with operatives from innumerable federal agencies packing heat and happy to use it, a land where more than 2 million people languish in prison (many of them captives of an endless "war on drugs" that has done nothing to curb substance abuse but has greatly augmented the power of the state and the criminal gangs whose laundered money enriches Establishment elites), a land where almost every transaction is wired up to some national grid, where national ID cards are now being imposed – a land where you literally cannot exist without placing your liberty, your privacy, your very life at the mercy of a government apparatus besotted with violence, coercion and intrusion, there is no place left for the kind of action that Thoreau advocated. His way – and that of Gandhi and King, who took so much from him – envisions a state opponent which one could hope to shame into honorable action by the superior moral force of principled civil disobedience. But the very hallmark of the present regime is its shamelessness, its utter lack of any sense of honor or principle, its bestial addiction to raw power.

It is pointless – and counterproductive – to simply throw yourself under the wheels of such a monstrous machine in futile spasms of rage and despair. The machine doesn't care. It will gladly chew up your life and move on. For the action of the ordinary individual to have an effect, it must be amplified by a larger social movement. And it is difficult to imagine such a movement arising in America today, in a society atomized by the engines of profiteering, its communities gutted or abandoned by elites seeking greener pastures – and cheaper labor – elsewhere, its citizens isolated from one another, locked in their own bubbles of electronic diversion, and their own struggles to keep their jobs (unprotected by unions, subject to the arbitrary whim of local bosses, or faceless corporate masters, or predatory hedge funds, etc.), hang on to their health insurance (if they've got it), and stay out of the hell created by the bipartisan Bankruptcy Bill for the benefit of the credit card companies.

And despite the deep unpopularity of the regime, there is still a widespread reluctance to recognize its true nature, and what it will require to restore our constitutional republic. And truth to tell, there are a great many people uninterested in doing so. As long as the diversions keep pouring through the latest gadgetry, the monthly paycheck manages to cover the bills, and their own bodies are not subjected to the tyrant's evil, many people are happy to accept the authoritarian system. (This is not unique to Americans, of course; it is a constant in human history.) But even where there is an interest in discerning the reality of our times, and a yearning for change, again there is no broader movement to leverage an individual's dissent into a form large enough to thwart the tyrannical machine. And there is no American Sakharov on the horizon, someone to arise from the very center of the machine to denounce its workings and call for genuine liberty, genuine democracy, genuine economic and social justice.

So whatever we can do, we must do it ourselves. If we have no power or influence, if we cannot take large actions, then we must take small ones. Every word or action raised against the overthrow of the Republic will find an echo somewhere, from one person to another to another to the next -- each isolated, individual voice slowly finding its way into a swelling chorus of dissent.

It might be too late. It might not work. But failure – and much more horror -- is guaranteed if we don't even try.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote – in a context that is growing less dissimilar all the time: -- it is impossible that evil should not come into the world; but take care that it does not enter through you.

"What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret." –Thoreau.

Anyway, we'll be off the road in a few days. But do keep checking in. You never know when something new might turn up.

Anthrax And The Bush 'War On Terror'
August 04, 2008
-- by Dave

It's becoming increasingly apparent that the Bush administration -- including the FBI, Homeland Security, and the Pentagon -- all want the anthrax-killer case to quietly die with the person of Bruce Ivins. Yep, case closed, move along, folks. Right?

Well, excuse us. If you don't mind, we still have a few questions:

-- Was Ivins, as Marcy and Glenn Greenwald have wondered, a conscious part of the disinformation campaign to convince Congress and the public to go to war with Iraq?

-- Did Ivins -- if he really was the anthrax killer -- have any co-conspirators, as the evidence suggests?

-- Why was security at Fort Detrick, home of USAMRIID, probably the nation's most sensitive and secretive weapons laboratory, so lax as to allow this to happen?

-- And finally (and perhaps most significantly), was the mere fact of this kind of weaponized anthrax's existence at Fort Detrick another example of the Bush administration's flagrant violations of international law?

You see, the process used to create this anthrax was in flagrant violation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (more here). The United States is not just a cosigner, it is one of the chief authors of this particular international law, which has been in effect since 1972. Chief among its tenets is the prohibition against developing new biological-weapons processes.

The FBI's self-evident conclusion that the anthrax was produced at Fort Detrick is manifest evidence that we are violating that law -- and have probably been doing so for some time, even preceding the Bush regime.

Indeed, we've known since this spring that the anthrax was almost certainly produced there, when a Fox News report on a possible breakthrough in the case disclosed that "scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues."

So you'll have to excuse us if we are not quite ready to move along. In fact, as Jane says, it's time for a full-blown, front-page congressional investigation.

That same Fox News story, incidentally, reported that there were four suspects in the anthrax case at the time. Now that the deed has been laid at Ivins' feet, does that mean the other three have been cleared? Judging from the FBI's treatment of the matter, it certainly seems so.

And yet for each door that officials want to close with Ivins' convenient suicide, four others seem to open. Moreover, as the New York Times observed this morning, there is still by no means any conclusive evidence that it was in fact Ivins -- nor even that he acted alone.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the anthrax case is the one that emerges from the larger picture that has been taking shape in the years since the attacks: It is now perfectly clear that the attacks were used by the Bush administration to drum up public fearfulness to advance the "War on Terror" as a marketing device for a whole panoply of measures and policies, from the Patriot Act to the invasion of Iraq.

And yet the perpetrator of those attacks, it turns out, was a scientist on the administration's payroll. There is of course no evidence connecting Ivins with the BushCo "terra" marketing team beyond this coincidence, but this simple fact itself is reason enough for a full investigation.

Observe, as Blue Texan has, that the objects of the attacks were Democratic congressional leaders (Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy) and a major "liberal media" figure, Tom Brokaw of NBC. Perhaps it was only a coincidence that congressional Democrats and the media were going to be the Bush administration's chief obstacles in passing its initiatives under the rubric of the "war on terror".

Perhaps Ivins (or whoever the perpetrator was) actually saw this political reality and chose his targets out of an ideological desire to help the administration. Or perhaps he just wanted more funding for his particular line of research. But we won't know until there is a proper investigation.

One thing we do know: Once it became apparent that the phony theory that the anthrax contained bentonite -- which was how the attacks were originally connected to Iraq -- would not hold water, it was also clear that this was a case of pure domestic terrorism, and very likely right-wing terrorism at that. And it was at this point that all interest in solving the case, both on an official level and within the media, evaporated.

It's also now painfully clear that the attacks had their desired effect. Congressional Democrats in fact caved, and have continued to cave, every time the White House has waved the bloody, anthrax-stained "terra" shirt.

Likewise, so have the media -- witness their complicit role, as Greenwald has explored in some detail, in purveying the bentonite hoax. And of course, the right-wing bigotsphere has never given up on it; Michelle Malkin has continued to tout the theory as recently as this year -- though she has been impressively silent about Ivins.

Meanwhile, we dirty f*cking hippies, who have been consistently right about this case, have again gone consistently ignored. (If you want an example of eerie prescience which actually was just very good, thorough, and well-informed analysis, check out Paul deArmond's 2002 paper on the matter.)

At the end of the day, what we're looking at is a Bush clusterf*ck of historic proportions: an intensely important weapons program where security is criminally lax; an administration so intensely politicized that it is willing to seize upon terrorist attacks against their political enemies as a club for obtaining their agenda -- potentially through collusion with the terrorist; an administration similarly willing to flout the fundamental tenets of international law; while the actual perpetrator remains scot-free and is only finally revealed by his own continuing miscreancy.

If that doesn't bear investigation, nothing does.

Scientists Question FBI Probe On Anthrax. Ivins Could Not Have Been Attacker, Some Say
By Joby Warrick, Marilyn W. Thompson and Aaron C. Davis
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 3, 2008; A01

For nearly seven years, scientist Bruce E. Ivins and a small circle of fellow anthrax specialists at Fort Detrick's Army medical lab lived in a curious limbo: They served as occasional consultants for the FBI in the investigation of the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, yet they were all potential suspects.

Over lunch in the bacteriology division, nervous scientists would share stories about their latest unpleasant encounters with the FBI and ponder whether they should hire criminal defense lawyers, according to one of Ivins's former supervisors. In tactics that the researchers considered heavy-handed and often threatening, they were interviewed and polygraphed as early as 2002, and reinterviewed numerous times. Their labs were searched, and their computers and equipment carted away.

The FBI eventually focused on Ivins, whom federal prosecutors were planning to indict when he committed suicide last week. In interviews yesterday, knowledgeable officials asserted that Ivins had the skills and access to equipment needed to turn anthrax bacteria into an ultra-fine powder that could be used as a lethal weapon. Court documents and tapes also reveal a therapist's deep concern that Ivins, 62, was homicidal and obsessed with the notion of revenge.

Yet, colleagues and friends of the vaccine specialist remained convinced that Ivins was innocent: They contended that he had neither the motive nor the means to create the fine, lethal powder that was sent by mail to news outlets and congressional offices in the late summer and fall of 2001. Mindful of previous FBI mistakes in fingering others in the case, many are deeply skeptical that the bureau has gotten it right this time.

"I really don't think he's the guy. I say to the FBI, 'Show me your evidence,' " said Jeffrey J. Adamovicz, former director of the bacteriology division at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, on the grounds of the sprawling Army fort in Frederick. "A lot of the tactics they used were designed to isolate him from his support. The FBI just continued to push his buttons."

Investigators are so confident of Ivins's involvement that they have been debating since Friday whether and how to close the seven-year-old anthrax investigation. That would involve disbanding a grand jury in the District and unsealing scores of documents that form the basis of the government's case against Ivins.

Negotiations over the legal issues continue, but a government source said that the probe could be shuttered as early as tomorrow. The move would amount to a strong signal that the FBI and Justice Department think they got their man -- and that he is dead, foreclosing the possibility of a prosecution. No charges are likely against others, that source added.

Once the case is closed, the FBI and Justice Department will face questions -- and possibly public hearings -- from congressional oversight committees, which have been largely shut out of the case the past five years. The investigators have cited the ongoing nature of the case, as well as accusations of leaks to the media, for the information blackout to Capitol Hill.

One bioweapons expert familiar with the FBI investigation said Ivins indeed possessed the skills needed to create the dust-fine powder used in the attacks. At the Army lab where he worked, Ivins specialized in making sophisticated preparations of anthrax bacteria spores for use in animal tests, said the expert, who requested anonymity because the investigation remains active.

Ivins's daily routine included the use of processes and equipment the anthrax terrorist likely used in making his weapons. He also is known to have had ready access to the specific strain of Bacillus anthracis used in the attack -- a strain found to match samples found in Ivins's lab, he said.

"You could make it in a week," the expert said. "And you could leave USAMRIID with nothing more than a couple of vials. Bear in mind, they weren't exactly doing body searches of scientists back then."

But others, including former colleagues and scientists with backgrounds in biological weapons defense, disagreed that Ivins could have created the anthrax powder, even if he were motivated to do so.

"USAMRIID doesn't deal with powdered anthrax," said Richard O. Spertzel, a former biodefense scientist who worked with Ivins at the Army lab. "I don't think there's anyone there who would have the foggiest idea how to do it. You would need to have the opportunity, the capability and the motivation, and he didn't possess any of those."

Another scientist who worked with Ivins acknowledged it would have been technically possible to manufacture powdered anthrax at Fort Detrick, but unlikely that anyone could have done so without being detected.

"As well as we knew each other, and the way the labs were run, someone would discover what was going on," said the scientist, "especially since dry spores were not something that we prepared or worked with."

Scientists, co-workers and people who for years have researched the anthrax investigation, only to encounter frustration, misinformation and false leads, say law enforcement authorities should lay out their case as soon as possible. They want authorities to explain how Ivins, who led a seemingly normal life as a family man, churchgoer and volunteer, could have been responsible for one of the nation's most notorious unsolved crimes.

Authorities cast doubt yesterday on reports that Ivins had acted for financial gain based on patents and scientific advances he had made. Experiments by Ivins, working with several other Fort Detrick colleagues, led to two patented inventions considered crucial in the development of a genetically modified anthrax vaccine made by VaxGen, a California company that secured large government contracts after the 2001 anthrax attacks.

But sources familiar with details of the Army's patent process said it was unlikely that Ivins or the other scientists would reap a big financial windfall from VaxGen's vaccine production. They say the government restricts income from inventions produced in its laboratories to no more than $150,000 per year, but the amount is often considerably less.

Jaye Holly, who lived next door to the Ivinses until she and her husband moved to New York a month ago, said she couldn't believe that her former neighbor, who was obsessed with grass recycling and who happily drove a 20-year-old faded red van, would endanger others for financial gain.

"I can't imagine him being involved in a scheme to make money or to make a profit, especially one that would put people at risk or even die," Holly said. "That's not the Bruce we knew. He was sweet, friendly. I mean, he was into grass recycling."

Court records obtained yesterday shed further light on the concerns of a mental health professional who met Ivins during his final months -- a period when, friends say, he fell into depression under the strain of constant FBI scrutiny. The records also suggest that a Frederick social worker, Jean Duley, passed on her concerns to the FBI after receiving death threats from Ivins.

Duley became so worried that she petitioned a local judge for a protective order against Ivins. According to an audio recording of the hearing, she said she had seen Ivins as a therapist for six months, and thought he had tried to kill people in the past.

"As far back as the year 2000, [Ivins] has actually attempted to murder several other people, [including] through poisoning," she said "He is a revenge killer, when he feels that he's been slighted . . . especially towards women. He plots and actually tries to carry out revenge killings," she told a judge.

She described a July 9 group therapy session in which Ivins allegedly talked of mass murder.

"He was extremely agitated, out of control," she said. Ivins told the group he had bought a gun, and proceeded to lay out a "long and detailed homicidal plan," she said.

"Because he was about to be indicted on capital murder charges, he was going to go out in a blaze of glory; that he was going to take everybody out with him," she said.

Staff writers Carrie Johnson and Paul Kane and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

"Here, Broken Laws Be Left ... "
The Anthrax Attacks and the Assault on Civil Liberties
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
August 5, 2008

In last weekend’s edition of CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn updates the ongoing persecution of Sami Al-Arian by federal prosecutors. Al-Arian was a Florida university professor of computer science who was ensnared by the Bush Regime’s need to produce “terrorists” in order to keep Americans fearful and, thereby, amenable to the Bush Regime’s assault on US civil liberties.

The charges against Al-Arian were rejected by a jury, but the Bush Regime could not accept the obvious defeat. If Al-Arian was not a terrorist, then other of the Bush Regime’s fabricated cases might fall apart, too.

In open view, the US Department of Justice (sic) proceeded to trash every known ethical rule of prosecution. I don’t need to repeat the facts, as they are covered by Cockburn’s articles and in The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Instead, I want to point out another meaning of the Al-Arian case. The Justice (sic) Department itself knows that it is persecuting a totally innocent person for reasons of a political agenda--the need to convince gullible Americans of an ongoing terrorist threat. The existence of this threat is used to justify the Bush Regime’s adoption of police state measures, such as spying on Americans without warrants, arresting them without charges, and refusing to let go of them when they are cleared by juries.

Sami Al-Arian is a fabricated terrorist created by federal prosecutors and judges in behalf of an undeclared agenda. The Al-Arian case proves that terrorists are in short supply and that the Bush Regime has had to create them out of total innocents. The “war on terror” is a hoax used to justify war crimes and the overthrow of America’s civil liberties.

The anthrax scare is one more example of the Bush Regime’s use of disinformation to advance an undeclared political agenda. As Glenn Greenwald reminded us last week in Salon, the Bush Regime used Brian Ross at ABC News to spread the lie far and wide that US government tests proved that the anthrax mailed to various Americans, including prominent US Senators, was made in Iraq by Saddam Hussein. This lie was essential for scaring Congress into passing the Bush Regime’s Gestapo laws, such as the PATRIOT Act, and for overcoming opposition to invading Iraq.

When it leaked out that the anthrax actually came from a US government lab, the Bush Regime tried to frame a US scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, but failed. On June 28th, the Los Angeles Times reported that Hatfill, “The former Army scientist who was the prime suspect in the deadly 2001 anthrax mailings agreed Friday to take $5.82 million from the government to settle his claim that the Justice Department and the FBI invaded his privacy and ruined his career.” Indeed, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton allowed Hatfill’s attorneys two years to review all news reports and FBI evidence. Judge Walton stated: “there is not a scintilla of evidence that would indicate that Dr. Hatfill had anything to do with this.”

The anthrax matter was again news last week when another US government scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, “committed suicide.” Instantly, the deceased Ivins was fingered as the culprit. Overnight a man, liked and respected by his colleagues, who had worked on American biological warfare weapons for years, became a deranged homicidal maniac who decided to murder Americans at random in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 by sending them letters containing anthrax.

I don’t believe a word of it. But assume that it is true. Blaming the anthrax letters on Ivins does not resolve the issue of why the Bush Regime lied to Brian Ross and used ABC to put the blame on Saddam Hussein in order to invade an innocent country. Wouldn’t a government that would lie about something this serious lie about other serious matters?

The Bush Regime stands against against the truth. That is why it pretends to have the power to prevent executive branch officials wanted for questioning by Congress from appearing before the people’s representatives. Nothing could make clearer the contempt that the Bush Regime has for the American people and their elected representatives than its arrogant claim that it is unanswerable to them.

Obviously, neither the President nor the Vice President respect their oaths of office. If they will betray such a serious oath, won’t they lie about everything?

According to the discredited 9/11 Commission Report, a few Muslims hatched a multi-year plot that went undetected by the vast security agencies of the United States and its allies, and within one hour on one morning at four different locations defeated airport security, NORAD, the US Air Force, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, the Pentagon’s defenses and crashed three hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center towers and the heart of the US military. Muslims were able to achieve this fantastic feat operating out of caves in Afghanistan.

We now know for a fact that the “terrorist anthrax attack” had nothing whatsoever to do with Muslim terrorists. Even the US Government now blames white American citizens, employees of the federal government, for the anthrax letters that, at the time, were blamed on the “Osama bin Laden al Qaeda plot against America.”

We now know for a fact that this was intentional disinformation planted by the Bush Regime on a gullible and incompetent ABC News reporter, who is a disgrace to journalism. No one denies this.

We also know for a fact that ABC News will not say who planted on ABC the lies that committed the United States to the dishonor of an illegal invasion, war crimes, and executive branch attack on the US Constitution. How can anyone anywhere in the world rely on ABC News when it serves as a disinformation agency for a criminal regime?

The anthrax letters made the “terrorist attack” seem wider and more general. This increased the sense of peril and Americans’ fear and anger, thereby opening wider the door for the Bush Regime’s attack on Iraq and US civil liberty.

Now that the dead Ivins can be conveniently blamed for the anthrax mailings, the Bush Regime can declare the case closed, thus protecting the false flag operation from further risk of exposure.

Many Americans lack the mental and emotional strength to confront the facts. The facts are too unsettling and many are relieved when the “mainstream media” spins the facts away. Many Americans find it too appalling that any part of “their” government, even a rogue operation, could possibly have been involved in any way in the anthrax attacks. No evidence--not even full confessions--could convince them otherwise. Many Americans have welcomed their brainwashing by the neoconservatives: America is pure; her shining virtue causes evil men to attack her; they hate us because we are good and they are evil.

For the sake of argument, let’s accept this make-believe. It does not explain why, in order to protect us from evil men, the US Constitution needs to be dismantled and civil liberties set aside. Our Founding Fathers said that dismantling the Constitution and setting aside civil liberties are precisely what would make us unsafe in the extreme. The Bush Regime has never explained how the civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution interfere with any legitimate response to terrorism.

The fact still remains that the Bush Regime responded to 9/11 and anthrax letters with a comprehensive assault on US civil liberty. The Bush Regime’s assault on America has been much more successful than its assault on “terrorism.” Who remembers the promise of a “six weeks war”? Americans have been mired for 6 years in two wars without end which the neoconned Bush Regime, in alliance with Israeli zionists, seeks to expand to Iran, Pakistan, Syria, and Lebanon. The Republican candidate for president has given his commitment to a 100-year “war against terrorism.” Many Americans will vote for this candidate who wants to fight against a hoax for 100 years.

In The Twilight of Democracy: The Bush Plan for America, Jennifer Van Bergen explains the constitutional and legal principles on which American liberty is based and the Bush Regime’s intense assault on these principles. Part I of her book sets out the Constitutional principles that are under attack. Part II details the systematic attack on the US Constitution that is the heart and soul of the Republican neoconservative Bush Regime--and a Regime it is as it asserts that it is above the law and unanswerable to law, Congress, the federal courts, and the Constitution that it is sworn to uphold

Jennifer Van Bergan likens Bush and his brownshirt supporters to Julius Caesar in motives, though not in courage. She cites the poet Lucan who in his work Pharsalia described Caesar as he flouted the law of the Roman Republic and crossed the Rubicon with his army: “When Caesar crossed and trod beneath his feet the soil of Italy’s forbidden fields, ‘here,’ spake he, ‘peace, here broken laws be left; Farewell to treaties. Fortune, lead me on; War is our judge.’”

Anyone who believes that the Bush Regime’s “war on terror” is about terrorism, oil, getting even with those who attacked us, bringing freedom and democracy to Muslims--whatever rationale makes the gratuitous war crimes committed by the Bush Regime acceptable to gullible Americans--needs to read Jennifer Van Bergan’s Twilight of Democracy. Nothing less than American liberty is at stake.

The hour is late. Gullible Americans are being marched off into tyranny as the promised land of safety.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

Anthrax Mystery: Questions Raised over Whether Government Is Framing Dead Army Scientist for 2001 Attacks
August 04, 2008

The FBI’s prime suspect in the October 2001 anthrax letters case died last week in an apparent suicide. Bruce Ivins was an elite government scientist at the biodefense research lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. He was among the nation’s top experts on the military use of anthrax. But many of his colleagues have expressed deep skepticism over the FBI’s claims. We speak to anthrax expert Dr. Meryl Nass and blogger Glenn Greenwald. [includes rush transcript]

Guests:

Glenn Greenwald, attorney and blogger at Salon.com. His recent posts include “Vital Unresolved Anthrax Questions and ABC News”, “Additional Key Facts Re: The Anthrax Investigation” and “Journalists, Their Lying Sources, and the Anthrax Investigation”

Dr. Meryl Nass, expert on anthrax and editor of the blog AnthraxVaccine.blogspot.com

AMY GOODMAN: The FBI’s prime suspect in the October 2001 anthrax letters case died last week in an apparent suicide. Bruce Ivins was an elite government scientist at the biodefense research lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland. He was among the nation’s top experts on the military use of anthrax.

Ivins reportedly died soon after learning the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people and sickened seventeen others, crippling the national mail service. He had been part of a team that helped the government investigate the attacks and won the Pentagon’s highest civilian award in 2003.

Many of his colleagues are convinced Ivins was innocent and claim he lacked the motive and the means to develop the fine powder used in the letter scare. They’re also skeptical of the FBI’s investigation, one of the largest in US history, given its false starts over the past seven years. The investigation initially focused on Steven Hatfill, the onetime colleague of Bruce Ivins. But this June, the Justice Department settled with Hatfill for $5.82 million.

Whether Ivins was guilty or not, the case also raises key questions about how the anthrax scare was initially linked to Islamic terrorists and Iraq. In a piece for Salon.com, attorney and author Glenn Greenwald writes repeated claims by the mainstream media linking the attacks to Saddam Hussein helped shape American perceptions about Iraq in the lead-up to the invasion.

Glenn Greenwald joins us now by telephone from Brazil. We’re also joined on the phone by Dr. Meryl Nass. She’s in Maine. She’s an expert on anthrax and knew Bruce Ivins. On her blog, anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com, she writes she believes Ivins was probably innocent.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Glenn Greenwald, let’s begin with you. When you heard about Bruce Ivins being the key suspect, about to be indicted, apparently—we all learned this after his suicide—can you talk about your reaction?

GLENN GREENWALD: It’s hard to have any reaction to anything that the government and the FBI say about the anthrax investigation other than extreme skepticism. In light of the fact that everything that they’ve done and said over the past seven years, by all accounts, has been either completely inept or, worse, deliberately misguided away from the true source of the anthrax. And so, all of these news accounts over the past several days that have suggested that Bruce Ivins is the person behind the anthrax attacks are lacking one critical ingredient, and that’s any evidence whatsoever that those claims are true.

And the one thing that I would underscore is, as you said in your introductory remarks, the L.A. Times, when they reported this story originally, said that Ivins was about to be indicted, trying to suggest that it was literally imminent, like a day or two away. And yet, a New York Times story this morning spoke with various investigators at the FBI who have now backtracked significantly on that claim, and they’re saying that all of the evidence that they have against Ivins is, quote, “entirely circumstantial” and that the grand jury intended to hear evidence for at least several more weeks before deciding whether or not to indict him. So there’s all sorts of really mystifying questions that have plagued this case from the start, and there’s even more now, in light of this recent event, and what we need is a real public hearing of all these facts.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Senator McCain and his comments soon after September 11th. He was on the David Letterman show. It was October 18, 2001. And he brought up Iraq as a possible, quote, “second phase” of the war in Afghanistan. He said the anthrax may have come from Iraq.

DAVID LETTERMAN: How are things going in Afghanistan now?

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: I think we’re doing fine. I think we’ve removed what little anti-aircraft capability they have. These C-130 gunships are pretty awesome weapons of war, and I believe that the Taliban will be removed. I think we’ll do fine. The second phase—if I could just make one very quickly—the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may—and I emphasize “may”—have come in from—come from Iraq.

DAVID LETTERMAN: Oh, is that right?

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: If that may be the case, then that’s when some tough decisions are going to have to be made.


AMY GOODMAN: President Bush would echo what John McCain had to say, linking Iraq to anthrax in his 2002 State of the Union address just a few months later. This is an excerpt.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections, then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.


AMY GOODMAN: That was President Bush in 2002. And now, the New York Daily News is reporting in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by al-Qaeda. So, Glenn Greenwald, take us from the point of the attacks to the direction the investigation took, from the government and this information to Steven Hatfill.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, clearly, the focus in the initial phases was on trying to link the anthrax attacks to Islamic terrorism and as a second stage of the 9/11 attacks. And in fact, the anthrax attacker or attackers clearly had the same goal in mind. I mean, the letters that accompanied the anthrax, a lot of people have forgotten, were dated 9/11/01, and they said things like, “We have anthrax. Prepare to die. Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.” And so, there was a clear attempt on the part of the attackers themselves to link the attack to Islamic radicalism.

And then all sorts of sources inside of the government were claiming that there was evidence found at the Fort Detrick lab, where the government now says the attacks came from, that also linked the attacks to Iraq. There was one particularly influential story from ABC News and Brian Ross, where for days and days, on Peter Jennings and other shows, they claimed that they were told by many sources inside the government that tests had found the presence of something called bentonite, which is the hallmark, they said, of the Iraqi biological weapons program. It turned out that claim was totally false. There never was any bentonite found in the anthrax, everybody now agrees, and yet, as you showed from the clip from John McCain—there was clips from Joe Lieberman several days later on Meet the Press—there was a concerted effort to try and link the anthrax in the public mind to Saddam Hussein and to Iraq, specifically, and Islamic radicalism, more generally.

The FBI ultimately, through their tests, decided that all of the evidence was actually pointing to US government facilities and US government and US Army research labs, of the type where Bruce Ivins and Steven Hatfill worked at Fort Detrick. And so, they were aware from the start that it was almost certainly a domestic source, and yet all kinds of factions, within the government and out, tried continuously to depict it as something that was likely coming from Iraq, and they continued to do that for several years, even when it was clearly established that it was almost certainly a domestic source.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to a break. When we come back, we’ll also be joined by Dr. Meryl Nass, who is an anthrax expert, physician and writer, blogs at anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com and knew Bruce Ivins, the man who committed suicide last week. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We continue our discussion in this aftermath of the apparent suicide of Bruce Ivins, the man who now the government says was moving in on perhaps to indict holding him responsible for the anthrax attacks of 2001. He committed suicide right after being informed that he was the prime suspect in the investigation. Our guests are Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and blogger for Salon.com, his latest book is Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics; and Dr. Meryl Nass joins us now from Maine, who blogs at anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com.

Did you know Bruce Ivins, Dr. Nass? Dr. Nass?

DR. MERYL NASS: Yes. [inaudible]

AMY GOODMAN: Did you know Bruce Ivins?

DR. MERYL NASS: Yes, I knew him.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about who he was.

DR. MERYL NASS: He was a very pleasant, sort of Midwestern scientist, salt of the earth kind of guy, maybe a little bit nervous. He did good work. I was able to rely on the quality of his work in all the many papers that he published on anthrax vaccine. And he was a generous scientist, in that he was always willing to discuss work that I was doing and provide me with papers or information about that work.

AMY GOODMAN: Were you surprised when you heard the government was targeting him?

DR. MERYL NASS: Yes, I was completely shocked. And of course, I found that out after he had committed suicide. He would be the last person I would have suspected, not that I’m any expert, but I have been told that there is no forensic personality for a crime like this that’s been defined. So, I guess it’s possible that he did it, but I absolutely cannot come up with a motive, with access and with the complicated things that would need to be done if he were a loner performing such an act.

And I am struck by the fact that there were at least two earlier people who, in my view, appeared to have been set up as possible patsies for the letter attacks, and Hatfill being one and Ayaad Assaad being another. The week the letters were sent, a letter was sent to Quantico implicating Assaad. And the Quantico letter actually arrived before the anthrax letters, but it seemed that there was a definite intent to link Assaad. So—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain who Assaad was.

DR. MERYL NASS: Assaad was an Egyptian scientist who previously had worked at Fort Detrick. He was not an anthrax scientist; neither was Hatfill. And he had had a difficult time at Fort Detrick. There were a number of other scientists who used to make fun of him. Laura Rozen outlined all this in an article in Salon.com back about five or six years ago. As a result, he left. He filed a—I think an age discrimination suit against Fort Detrick. And he was called in for questioning after this letter appeared. So it looked like somebody was trying to finger Assaad.

And then, later, there were a lot of odd coincidences with respect to Steven Hatfill and his travels and his past history and living in Rhodesia that had correspondence with features of the anthrax attacks. So he had lived in Harari, which had a suburb named Greendale, and there were these letters post-marked Greendale—not post-marked, but Greendale was the return address. So there were—it seemed that somebody who knew a bit about Hatfill’s life also had attempted to implicate him in the letters.

So now we have Ivins. And the Defense Department—sorry, not the Defense, Justice Department has failed to provide to the public any shred of evidence that really would link Ivins in any kind of definitive way to this crime. This morning, we’re being told that there is forensic scientific evidence to show that the strain in the letters was a strain that came from his lab. But, you know, the old saw in bioterrorism is that of course you select your agent from—so that it will make somebody else look guilty. So, somebody else could have gotten a strain from his lab in order to cast aspersions on Ivins. The fact that it was found in his lab really means nothing. I mean, a smart scientist who is going to create an attack like this is clearly not going to choose anthrax that’s going to lead right back to his own lab. So I think that no matter how fancy the forensics gets, you’re not going to get an answer there. And if that is the basis for the charges against Ivins, it is, in my mind, very weak.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to an interview that I did in July of 2003 with Patrick Clawson, the friend and former spokesperson for Steven Hatfill. I asked Clawson about the FBI investigation that named Hatfill as a, quote, "person of interest” in the anthrax case.

PATRICK CLAWSON: The problem that Steve Hatfill has is that his life is a living nightmare right now. Every place he goes, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, he is followed by squads of FBI agents. Just last week, Steve and I went out to have some drinks and dinner, and as soon as I left his house, bam!, I had seven FBI cars following me all over northwest Washington, D.C. Sometimes these agents swear at him, they flip him the finger. There’s nothing surreptitious about this. This is not a surveillance. This is an open, in-your-face harassment campaign. Steve Hatfill is a poster boy for abuses of the PATRIOT Act.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Patrick Clawson, friend of Steven Hatfill, who just a few weeks ago won more than $5.8 million from the US government. Glenn Greenwald, can you talk about that campaign against Steven Hatfill—there was very little attention about the fact he just won $6 million—and then the fingering of Bruce Ivins?

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, it’s really extraordinary. I mean, they basically destroyed his life and destroyed his reputation. And what was so amazing about that was that, for years, what they did was, investigators inside the Justice Department and the FBI continuously and systematically leaked to a whole slew of reporters all kinds of accusatory innuendo about Hatfill, information about his medical records, about things that they had found in his garbage cans about parts of his personal life that they had obtained as a result of a very widespread surveillance. And they absolutely tailed him in a way that was designed to make him in public appear as though he was clearly the guilty party.

And then, when it came—when he sued essentially everybody—the government and all of the journalists who had published all of this information—the journalists acted to protect the government in every way. I mean, they refused to disclose who it was who had fed them this information. And the court ultimately ended up ordering the journalists to disclose their sources, so that Hatfill was on the verge of finding out who inside the Justice Department and the FBI had been disclosing all this information designed to make him look like the anthrax attacker, when as the government, ultimately, through its actions, ended up conceding, by paying him millions of dollars and then by ultimately now charging or accusing Ivins of being the attacker. All of this information was untrue all along. And so, the investigation was directed almost exclusively at someone who the government now says had nothing to do with the attacks, and they used the media along the way to publicly convict him and destroy his life. And the media not only cooperated enthusiastically, but continues to protect the people inside the government who did that.

And, of course, you see the same thing with the media doing that with regard to who inside the government tried to lie to the public by connecting the attacks to Iraq. And now, Ivins is essentially being convicted in public, as well, through selective leaks from the government to the media that then prints it more or less uncritically. So the whole investigation has been a sham from the start. And even if you want to be as generous as possible in your interpretation, you would say that it’s been filled from start to finish with pure ineptitude. And that’s why I think a full-scale congressional investigation or the kind of commission that was charged with investigating the 9/11 attack, with real subpoena power, is absolutely vital here to having the public believe that they’ve gotten even the basic facts about what occurred.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the court documents and tapes that reveal his therapist Jean Duley’s concerns to the FBI after receiving death threats from Ivins?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I find that whole part of the story bizarre in so many ways. I mean, first of all, if you look at Bruce Ivins’ history, he doesn’t actually have a shred of a criminal record. By contrast, Jean Duley, who is not actually a psychiatrist or a psychologist, she’s actually a social worker who just recently graduated from school and is the kind of social worker who does things like, you know, lead group therapy sessions and the like. She’s hardly a credible or authoritative expert on someone’s psychological state, as she’s been depicted, but she actually has a long history of being involved in various court proceedings. She was convicted in 2007 and then again—in 2006, then again in 2007, of driving under the influence of alcohol. She’s been on probation. She’s still on probation, actually. She’s had significant financial difficulties.

And all of a sudden, out of the blue, while working with the FBI, she starts making some very extreme accusations about Bruce Ivins’ history, about his psychological condition, that none of his co-workers or friends or people who know him confirm in any way, shape or form—in fact, they vehemently contradict it. And so, so much of the media’s depiction of Ivins as this kind of unstable, violent, threatening psychotic is based on the claims of someone who, for a lot of different reasons, really isn’t particularly credible. I mean, it may turn out that Ivins is guilty, it may turn out that what she said is true, but before anyone even forms an opinion about those issues, we ought to wait and see what the evidence really is. And so far, what the media has given us is extremely unconvincing.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Dr. Meryl Nass, there has been reports that the investigation will basically be finished by the end of the week, will wrap up, and there will be more information implicating Dr. Ivins.

DR. MERYL NASS: You know, what I’m afraid of, Amy, is that we will hear a lot of fluff and that the investigation will in fact wrap up, and all the important information will be classified. We’ve already gotten a tremendous amount of misinformation from an unidentified government spokesperson, and that is not just this weekend, but going back to the initial release of the letters. There has been a tremendous amount of innuendo and information put forward that has never been backed up and never been attributed to anybody.

And I fear that because a variety of the information that may be used to convict Bruce Ivins after his death is going to be classified, or perhaps we will be given false information, that it will become impossible to defend him and impossible to really make sense of the entire letters case. And I’m very concerned about the whole concept of having significant amount of information in a criminal case that is classified or that only the Justice Department has access to and whether that precludes justice for people who are ensnared in those cases.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for joining us, Dr. Meryl Nass, anthrax expert, physician, writer, writes at anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com, and Glenn Greenwald, speaking to us from Brazil, constitutional law attorney, blogger for Salon.com.

Ivins Told Ethics Officer About Anthrax Clean-up
by Eric Umansky - August 5, 2008 6:03 pm EDT

When the Los Angeles Times first broke the story that the government had been "about to file charges" in the anthrax case, it pointed to a few pieces of apparent evidence against Bruce Ivins. Perhaps most damning was this:

Ivins, employed as a civilian at Ft. Detrick, earlier had attracted the attention of Army officials because of anthrax contaminations that Ivins failed to report for five months. In sworn oral and written statements to an Army investigator, Ivins said that he had erred by keeping the episodes secret -- from December 2001 to late April 2002. He said he had swabbed and bleached more than 20 areas that he suspected were contaminated by a sloppy lab technician.

The detail about Ivins' apparent failure to report anthrax contamination was picked up by too many news outlets to count.

But a tidbit buried in today’s Wall Street Journal offers a slightly different take on the episode. Countering the vast expanses of anonymice-filled coverage, the Journal talks to a named source, Col. Arthur Anderson, who it turns out says Ivins quickly told him about the clean-up:

Col. Anderson says Dr. Ivins told him about the lapse in safety shortly after it occurred, contradicting Army findings in 2002 that Dr. Ivins had told no one. Dr. Ivins's failure to immediately report the incident to his superiors is now seen by law-enforcement authorities as key evidence against him.

"He didn't tell the safety office, he didn't tell the commander, but he told me," said Col. Anderson, director of the office of human use and ethics.

Not telling a safety officer or one’s commander about a spill and subsequent cleanup of deadly pathogens is certainly suspicious. But at the least, the incident doesn’t appear to be as clear as it was made out in the first report . And that report -- of Ivins' "secret clean-up" -- is still being picked up.

Jean C. Duley... tell us again...
August 03, 2008

Okay, well the more research I do into the now infamous Ms. Jean C. Duley - the "therapist" who filed a restraining order against the alleged anthrax attacks suspect Bruce E. Ivins - the more her story sounds like a whole load of crap.

Let's rehash Ms. Duley's role in the whole saga.

According to The Smoking Gun, documents they obtained and posted show that Ms. Duley filed a restraining order request against Bruce Ivins on July 24th. In that complaint, she wrote the following (the errors are hers):

client has a history dating to his graduate days of homicidal threats, actions, plans, threats & actions toward theripist. Dr. David Irwin his psychiatrist called him homicidal, sociopathic with clear intentions will testify with other details FBI involved, currently under investigation & will be charged with 5 capital murders. I have been subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury August 1, 2008 in Washington, D.C.

It is hard to know where to begin with this piece of work, but let us start with the obvious:

1. FBI Investigation into Domestic Bioterrorism Attacks Is Open to Duley?

How does Duley know that Ivins "will be charged with 5 capital murders?" She has yet to testify to the grand jury, which means the grand jury has yet to indict him. And why on earth would the FBI investigators read Duley into the case details?

2. Death Threats, Terra Threats, and "theripist" threats, oh my?

The complaint alleges that on July 9th Duley got threats of a homicidal nature, see here. Now, I don't know about you, but I would not wait roughly three weeks to report homicidal threats from a bio-weapons expert, nor would I wait that long to report threats that were made only against me. I have had some personal experience with stalkers. You don't wait when you are frightened like she claims to be. If you are that frightened, you go straight away to the police. She says that on July 10, Ivins is committed to Shepard Pratt psychiatric facility. I have yet to read any account of anyone validating this. But let us assume that he was, Duley alleges that he signed himself out on July 16th, after Ivins went to have a commitment hearing.

Again, if a bio-weapons expert is making homicidal threats and is committed, he does not get to check himself out and if he actually attended a commitment hearing and was granted release, then clearly someone at Shepard Pratt that that Ivins was stable. But in any case, he is out on July 16th, so why is she still not filing a restraining order against him? Why does she wait until July 24th?

In addition to this series of strange claims by Duley, the most obvious issue here is if Ivins had a history "dating back to his graduate days" - so some 30 years ago - of homicidal threats and plans (whatever the hell that means), how was he able to gain access and security clearences to work with Anthrax?

And just what kind of therapist cannot spell the term of her own profession, spelling it "theripist?" She got subpoena right, which is far more difficult to spell (although the tense is wrong) and yet a term that is used on a daily basis in the field that she actually works in she could not get right?

3. Dr. David S. Irwin, come on down...

According to Duley, Ivins was described by a psychiatrist as "homicidal, socipathic with clear intentions" although she does not specify what the intentions are. Again, I have to ask what kind of psychiatrist a). makes these statements to some twit fresh out of school in violation of HIPAA laws, but . does not file a police report given who the patient is, and c). does nothing to notify Ft. Detrick?

Okay, now with these basics in hand, let's examine Ms. Duley;

1. According to her boyfriend of 7 years, she is in an undisclosed location because she wants privacy. Okay, then why is her boyfriend Mike giving statements to the press?

Mike McFadden, spoke to The Frederick News-Post on Saturday from their home in Williamsport and provided a statement on her behalf.

"Jean is currently at an undisclosed location," McFadden said.

2. Duley's boyfriend says she was "reluctant to become involved in the FBI investigation" and then turns around and says "Jean is the kind of person who believes her life is insignificant in comparison with the kind of damage Dr. Ivins is capable of...She sacrificed all this stuff because she wanted to do the right thing. She'll soon reveal what many wouldn't because they didn't want to be involved with it." Which is it, was she reluctant or willing to sacrifice everything because she felt her life was insignificant?

And what is with this cryptic statement: "she'll soon reveal what many wouldn't because they didn't want to be involved with it."

She will soon reveal? Um, this is a terrorism case, it is not for her to reveal anything, rather, it is for the FBI/DOJ to reveal information. And if she had something to reveal, why does she simply not reveal it? She wants privacy, but dangles this little morsel over the heads of hungry journos?

3. What kind of therapist was Ms. Duley? Well, as of 07/08 she had made the Dean's list of a small and extremely expensive liberal arts college called Hood College, which costs $24k p/y to attend. So I am not entirely clear what degree she was going for or how she was able to pay for it on a social worker's salary. Also interesting is that in 1999 she had gotten a Chapter 7 Discharge, which again makes one wonder how she was able to pay for tuition.
Record 1:
Civil Record Verification: Confirm Case # 9920549 at the Court House
Defendant: DULEY, JEAN Case Number: 9920549
Filing Type: CHAPTER 7 DISCHARGED Entity Type: INDIVIDUAL RECORD
Filing Date: 19990907 Address: 343C FIELDPOINTE BV 103
City: FREDERICK State: MD
Zip: 21701 Schedule 341 Date: 19991008
Attorney: STEVEN COHEN Attorney Phone: 3019899000
Attorney Address: 15316 SPENCERVILLE CT Attorney City: BURTONSVILLE
Attorney State: MD Attorney Zip: 20866
Assets Available: N Court Code: MD002
Court Name: GREENBELT Judge Initials: DWK
Unlawful Detainer: N

4. If you go back to the statement by her boyfriend above and read the full article, he also says of Duley "She had to quit her job and is now unable to work, and we have spent our savings on attorneys."

Okay, I give up. Why did this woman have to spend all her money on attorneys? She clearly filed the restraining order herself. So how is it that she incurred any attorney fees? Unless, of course, her boyfriend means that she incurred attorney fees for her DUI jury trial in 06 and ongoing fees relating to her probation? Why did Ms. Duley lose her job? Is it because as a "therapist" working with drug addiction cases, she was found driving under the influence?

I don't know what to make out of all of this. Is this woman jumping on the bandwagon hoping to pen a book deal or something? Is she simply lying? Is she telling the truth about Ivins? Is she as nutty as she claims him to be? I don't know. What I think, however, is that if this witness was dragged into a court in which I was the defense attorney, her credibility would quickly be shot down. Somehow, I think, we will soon see a Fox Noise exclusive interview with this woman and her boyfriend who will "reveal" what it is that they know. At this point, I am not buying this story and I am not sure why the media has jumped on her claims as though they were gospel.

Thoughts?

The Bush Administration, ABC News and the Scare Tactics That Lead the US to War
The Anthrax Cover-Up
By SHELDON RAMPTON
August 6, 2008

Bruce Edwards Ivins, a top anthrax researcher at the U.S. Government's biological weapons research laboratories, died of an apparent suicide last Tuesday, just as the Justice Department was about to charge him with responsibility for the September 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people in the United States. Glenn Greenwald has written an important piece for Salon.com in which he demonstrates, with copious evidence, that a major government scandal lurks behind the anthrax story.

Ivins may have acted alone in carrying out the anthrax attacks. (I don't want to presume his guilt or anything else about this case until we see further details about the government's evidence against him.) However, Ivins most certainly did not act alone in falsifying information so the attacks could be used as a pretext for war.

"If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks," Greenwald writes, "then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks."

Greenwald continues: "Much more important than the general attempt to link the anthrax to Islamic terrorists, there was a specific intent -- indispensably aided by ABC News -- to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq and Saddam Hussein."

ABC claimed it had been told by "four well-placed and separate sources" that the anthrax used in the September attack contained bentonite, which therefore suggested it was produced in Iraq. As Greenwald points out, "That means that ABC News' 'four well-placed and separate sources' fed them information that was completely false." In all likelihood, "the same Government lab where the anthrax attacks themselves came from was the same place where the false reports originated that blamed those attacks on Iraq. ... Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade."

Greenwald goes on to provide details about the psychological impact that the anthrax fabrications played in influencing journalists and propagandizing the American public to support the invasion of Iraq. He also notes that John McCain and Joe Lieberman were among the first people to claim publicly, during an appearance on the David Letterman Show, that the anthrax came from Iraq. (Interestingly, the Bush White House repeatedly denied this claim, despite its overall tendency to exaggerate and fabricate evidence linking Iraq to weapons of mass destruction.)

Of course, ABC News knows the identity of the "well-placed sources" who fed this false information to them and, through them, to the American public. I'll leave it to Greenwald to explain the implications:

And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this. They're allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.

They're not protecting "sources." The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't "sources." They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood. But by protecting the wrongdoers, ABC News has made itself complicit in this fraud perpetrated on the public, rather than a news organization uncovering such frauds. That is why this is one of the most extreme journalistic scandals that exists, and it deserves a lot more debate and attention than it has received thus far.

If indeed Ivins was the person who carried out the anthrax attack, there is one possible scenario that Greenwald does not seem to have fully considered. Perhaps Ivins himself was the person who fabricated the claim that the anthrax contained bentonite. ABC's sources might have been merely repeating what he told them. If so, however, that is an important story in itself and needs to be reported. Just as the FBI has a responsibility to share publicly its evidence linking Ivins to this crime, ABC has some explaining to do about the disinformation that it helped disseminate to the American people.

The anthrax attack of September 2001 was an act of terrorism that killed five innocent people. At the time, and for years thereafter, many people were led to believe that the perpetrators were Islamic extremists in service to a hostile foreign power. The FBI is now claiming that the perpetrator was a Roman Catholic and an employee of the U.S. army who held a position of trust that gave him access to biological weapons -- even though he was, according to his counselor, "homicidal, sociopathic." This is a major scandal by any measure. The public deserves to know how American institutions -- including the U.S. Department of Defense as well as the news media -- could have failed them this badly.

Sheldon Rampton is a reseracher at the Center for Media and Democracy (where this essay originally appeared) and co-author of two books about the war: Iraq: Weapons of Mass Deception and The Best War Ever.

Countdown: Nothing About The FBI’s Anthrax Story Adds Up
See Video interview:

OLBERMANN: A memorial service was held today for Dr. Ivins at Fort Detrick and Dr. Ivins‘ attorney in a statement reasserted his client‘s innocence.

Let‘s call in once again, investigative author, Gerald Posner, who wrote, “Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11.”

Thanks again for your time, sir.

GERALD POSNER, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: Thanks, Keith. Good to be with you again.

OLBERMANN: The flask of anthrax with identical spores, ostensibly, their strongest piece of evidence. What do you make of this?

POSNER: That‘s what they make it sound like, but it‘s not. Let me tell you, the late public hears this, they think that‘s the evidence. Those are the spores that got people sick, sent out from the envelopes, not true. That was liquid anthrax in that flask.

Even if the FBI can tie to that flask, they can‘t explain how it was then made into this extremely sophisticated type of weapon with small milligram with electric charges to it, with polyglots on top of the coating, all to go deep inside the lungs, to spread to the air. This was weaponized, military anthrax. They cannot explain how from that glass flask in a liquid form into the form that was sent in the envelopes, that they don‘t have the evidence on it.

OLBERMANN: What, if anything that they presented today, is the strongest evidence? What do they got going for them?

POSNER: Well, they threw out this machine what they called the lyopholizer, they say that can make wet anthrax into dry anthrax, but I talked to six different microbiologist today and people involved formerly in weapons programs in the United States and in Russia, who say that the machine that the FBI talks about can‘t do that.

The strongest evidence they have going for them is also their Achilles‘ heel and that he‘s psychological profile. That fact that he‘s very unstable, that he was someone who was an alcoholic, that he might wanted to have the vaccine continue to go along, but that‘s also the fact that he could have been set up as a cutout or puppet (ph) or used by a group of people who wanted the anthrax out there.

They also knew about his weak psychological profile. How was he employed with the most secret biological warfare lab in the United States with this type of background that we now hear about? That they should have known about from day one. The Defense Department should hang its head in shame.

OLBERMANN: Right. Thirty-five years of murderous intent and nobody knew about it, and they let him in to the germ warfare lab. As to motive, they mentioned it but almost as if it were in passing? Is that a weak part of the case? Do they offer anything that made any sense?

POSNER: Well, I‘ll tell you. I thought it was a weak part of the case. I listened to a press conference today and then sort of at the end as though they felt they had to throw something out, they said, “Oh, by the way, let‘s give you the reasons to why we think he sent and went on this homicidal rage.”

And the motive they said was, “Well, he‘d helped developed a vaccine for anthrax, he probably wanted to continue to see that developed by killing people by having come up with an unknown way of this high military grade anthrax. We would keep the vaccine program going.”

That was pretty weak, and, you know, I thought they‘re just literally were fishing. They don‘t have a good motive, unfortunately, for them and their prosecution. But as you said in the lead into this, they don‘t need to because the primary suspect, the only suspect is dead. They‘re going to close this case.

OLBERMANN: But the declaration that he is the only, it‘s not just a question of proving a dead man did this, or was part of this, but the insistence is, he did by himself alone, mad scientist thing. Did they get anywhere near confirming that?

POSNER: No. As a matter of fact, that‘s my major problem with this. You know, if you look at it and you say, “He‘s involved, he‘s got a role in it, he‘s done something.” That‘s the evidence I‘m waiting to see that and they may nail that down. But I spoke to enough experts in the last few days, who have convinced, who know how this process works, that these spores that were sent out, were not the work of one lone scientist and that, I believe, is the case.

OLBERMANN: Investigative journalist and author, Gerald Posner, your help on this has been invaluable. Thank you, sir.

POSNER: Thank you, Keith.