The Invisible
Government
In a speech in Chicago, John Pilger describes how propaganda
has become such a potent force in our lives and, in the
words of one of its founders, represents 'an invisible
government'.
By John Pilger
07/20/07 "ICH"
-- - -The title of this talk is Freedom Next Time, which
is the title of my book, and the book is meant as an
antidote to the propaganda that is so often disguised as
journalism. So I thought I would talk today about
journalism, about war by journalism, propaganda, and
silence, and how that silence might be broken. Edward
Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, wrote
about an invisible government which is the true ruling power
of our country. He was referring to journalism, the media.
That was almost 80 years ago, not long after corporate
journalism was invented. It is a history few journalist talk
about or know about, and it began with the arrival of
corporate advertising. As the new corporations began taking
over the press, something called "professional journalism"
was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate
press had to appear respectable, pillars of the
establishment—objective, impartial, balanced. The first
schools of journalism were set up, and a mythology of
liberal neutrality was spun around the professional
journalist. The right to freedom of expression was
associated with the new media and with the great
corporations, and the whole thing was, as Robert McChesney
put it so well, "entirely bogus".
For what the public did not know was that in order to be
professional, journalists had to ensure that news and
opinion were dominated by official sources, and that has not
changed. Go through the New York Times on any day, and check
the sources of the main political stories—domestic and
foreign—you'll find they're dominated by government and
other established interests. That is the essence of
professional journalism. I am not suggesting that
independent journalism was or is excluded, but it is more
likely to be an honorable exception. Think of the role
Judith Miller played in the New York Times in the run-up to
the invasion of Iraq. Yes, her work became a scandal, but
only after it played a powerful role in promoting an
invasion based on lies. Yet, Miller's parroting of official
sources and vested interests was not all that different from
the work of many famous Times reporters, such as the
celebrated W.H. Lawrence, who helped cover up the true
effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August,
1945. "No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin," was the headline
on his report, and it was false.
Consider how the power of this invisible government has
grown. In 1983 the principle global media was owned by 50
corporations, most of them American. In 2002 this had fallen
to just 9 corporations. Today it is probably about 5. Rupert
Murdoch has predicted that there will be just three global
media giants, and his company will be one of them. This
concentration of power is not exclusive of course to the
United States. The BBC has announced it is expanding its
broadcasts to the United States, because it believes
Americans want principled, objective, neutral journalism for
which the BBC is famous. They have launched BBC America. You
may have seen the advertising.
The BBC began in 1922, just before the corporate press began
in America. Its founder was Lord John Reith, who believed
that impartiality and objectivity were the essence of
professionalism. In the same year the British establishment
was under siege. The unions had called a general strike and
the Tories were terrified that a revolution was on the way.
The new BBC came to their rescue. In high secrecy, Lord
Reith wrote anti-union speeches for the Tory Prime Minister
Stanley Baldwin and broadcast them to the nation, while
refusing to allow the labor leaders to put their side until
the strike was over.
So, a pattern was set. Impartiality was a principle
certainly: a principle to be suspended whenever the
establishment was under threat. And that principle has been
upheld ever since.
Take the invasion of Iraq. There are two studies of the
BBC's reporting. One shows that the BBC gave just 2 percent
of its coverage of Iraq to antiwar dissent—2 percent. That
is less than the antiwar coverage of ABC, NBC, and CBS. A
second study by the University of Wales shows that in the
buildup to the invasion, 90 percent of the BBC's references
to weapons of mass destruction suggested that Saddam Hussein
actually possessed them, and that by clear implication Bush
and Blair were right. We now know that the BBC and other
British media were used by the British secret intelligence
service MI-6. In what they called Operation Mass Appeal,
MI-6 agents planted stories about Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction, such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in
secret underground bunkers. All of these stories were fake.
But that's not the point. The point is that the work of MI-6
was unnecessary, because professional journalism on its own
would have produced the same result.
Listen to the BBC's man in Washington, Matt Frei, shortly
after the invasion. "There is not doubt," he told viewers in
the UK and all over the world, "That the desire to bring
good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and
especially now in the Middle East, is especially tied up
with American military power." In 2005 the same reporter
lauded the architect of the invasion, Paul Wolfowitz, as
someone who "believes passionately in the power of democracy
and grassroots development." That was before the little
incident at the World Bank.
None of this is unusual. BBC news routinely describes the
invasion as a miscalculation. Not Illegal, not unprovoked,
not based on lies, but a miscalculation.
The words "mistake" and "blunder" are common BBC news
currency, along with "failure"—which at least suggests that
if the deliberate, calculated, unprovoked, illegal assault
on defenseless Iraq had succeeded, that would have been just
fine. Whenever I hear these words I remember Edward Herman's
marvelous essay about normalizing the unthinkable. For
that's what media clichéd language does and is designed to
do—it normalizes the unthinkable; of the degradation of war,
of severed limbs, of maimed children, all of which I've
seen. One of my favorite stories about the Cold War concerns
a group of Russian journalists who were touring the United
States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by
the host for their impressions. "I have to tell you," said
the spokesman, "that we were astonished to find after
reading all the newspapers and watching TV day after day
that all the opinions on all the vital issues are the same.
To get that result in our country we send journalists to the
gulag. We even tear out their fingernails. Here you don't
have to do any of that. What is the secret?"
What is the secret? It is a question seldom asked in
newsrooms, in media colleges, in journalism journals, and
yet the answer to that question is critical to the lives of
millions of people. On August 24 last year the New York
Times declared this in an editorial: "If we had known then
what we know now the invasion if Iraq would have been
stopped by a popular outcry." This amazing admission was
saying, in effect, that journalists had betrayed the public
by not doing their job and by accepting and amplifying and
echoing the lies of Bush and his gang, instead of
challenging them and exposing them. What the Times didn't
say was that had that paper and the rest of the media
exposed the lies, up to a million people might be alive
today. That's the belief now of a number of senior
establishment journalists. Few of them—they've spoken to me
about it—few of them will say it in public.
Ironically, I began to understand how censorship worked in
so-called free societies when I reported from totalitarian
societies. During the 1970s I filmed secretly in
Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed
members of the dissident group Charter 77, including the
novelist Zdener Urbanek, and this is what he told me. "In
dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in
one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the
newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television,
because we know its propaganda and lies. I like you in the
West. We've learned to look behind the propaganda and to
read between the lines, and like you, we know that the real
truth is always subversive."
Vandana Shiva has called this subjugated knowledge. The
great Irish muckraker Claud Cockburn got it right when he
wrote, "Never believe anything until it's officially
denied."
One of the oldest clichés of war is that truth is the first
casualty. No it's not. Journalism is the first casualty.
When the Vietnam War was over, the magazine Encounter
published an article by Robert Elegant, a distinguished
correspondent who had covered the war. "For the first time
in modern history," he wrote, the outcome of a war was
determined not on the battlefield, but on the printed page,
and above all on the television screen." He held journalists
responsible for losing the war by opposing it in their
reporting. Robert Elegant's view became the received wisdom
in Washington and it still is. In Iraq the Pentagon invented
the embedded journalist because it believed that critical
reporting had lost Vietnam.
The very opposite was true. On my first day as a young
reporter in Saigon, I called at the bureaus of the main
newspapers and TV companies. I noticed that some of them had
a pinboard on the wall on which were gruesome photographs,
mostly of bodies of Vietnamese and of American soldiers
holding up severed ears and testicles. In one office was a
photograph of a man being tortured; above the torturers head
was a stick-on comic balloon with the words, "that'll teach
you to talk to the press." None of these pictures were ever
published or even put on the wire. I asked why. I was told
that the public would never accept them. Anyway, to publish
them would not be objective or impartial. At first, I
accepted the apparent logic of this. I too had grown up on
stories of the good war against Germany and Japan, that
ethical bath that cleansed the Anglo-American world of all
evil. But the longer I stayed in Vietnam, the more I
realized that our atrocities were not isolated, nor were
they aberrations, but the war itself was an atrocity. That
was the big story, and it was seldom news. Yes, the tactics
and effectiveness of the military were questioned by some
very fine reporters. But the word "invasion" was never used.
The anodyne word used was "involved." America was involved
in Vietnam. The fiction of a well-intentioned, blundering
giant, stuck in an Asian quagmire, was repeated incessantly.
It was left to whistleblowers back home to tell the
subversive truth, those like Daniel Ellsberg and Seymour
Hersh, with his scoop of the My-Lai massacre. There were 649
reporters in Vietnam on March 16, 1968—the day that the
My-Lai massacre happened—and not one of them reported it.
In both Vietnam and Iraq, deliberate policies and strategies
have bordered on genocide. In Vietnam, the forced
dispossession of millions of people and the creation of free
fire zones; In Iraq, an American-enforced embargo that ran
through the 1990s like a medieval siege, and killed,
according to the United Nations Children's fund, half a
million children under the age of five. In both Vietnam and
Iraq, banned weapons were used against civilians as
deliberate experiments. Agent Orange changed the genetic and
environmental order in Vietnam. The military called this
Operation Hades. When Congress found out, it was renamed the
friendlier Operation Ranch Hand, and nothing change. That's
pretty much how Congress has reacted to the war in Iraq. The
Democrats have damned it, rebranded it, and extended it. The
Hollywood movies that followed the Vietnam War were an
extension of the journalism, of normalizing the unthinkable.
Yes, some of the movies were critical of the military's
tactics, but all of them were careful to concentrate on the
angst of the invaders. The first of these movies is now
considered a classic. It's The Deerhunter, whose message was
that America had suffered, America was stricken, American
boys had done their best against oriental barbarians. The
message was all the more pernicious, because the Deerhunter
was brilliantly made and acted. I have to admit it's the
only movie that has made me shout out loud in a Cinema in
protest. Oliver Stone's acclaimed movie Platoon was said to
be antiwar, and it did show glimpses of the Vietnamese as
human beings, but it also promoted above all the American
invader as victim.
I wasn't going to mention The Green Berets when I set down
to write this, until I read the other day that John Wayne
was the most influential movie who ever lived. I a saw the
Green Berets starring John Wayne on a Saturday night in 1968
in Montgomery Alabama. (I was down there to interview the
then-infamous governor George Wallace). I had just come back
from Vietnam, and I couldn't believe how absurd this movie
was. So I laughed out loud, and I laughed and laughed. And
it wasn't long before the atmosphere around me grew very
cold. My companion, who had been a Freedom Rider in the
South, said, "Let's get the hell out of here and run like
hell."
We were chased all the way back to our hotel, but I doubt if
any of our pursuers were aware that John Wayne, their hero,
had lied so he wouldn't have to fight in World War II. And
yet the phony role model of Wayne sent thousands of
Americans to their deaths in Vietnam, with the notable
exceptions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Last year, in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for
Literature, the playwright Harold Pinter made an epoch
speech. He asked why, and I quote him, "The systematic
brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless
suppression of independent thought in Stalinist Russia were
well know in the West, while American state crimes were
merely superficially recorded, left alone, documented." And
yet across the world the extinction and suffering of
countless human beings could be attributed to rampant
American power. "But," said Pinter, "You wouldn't know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was
happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of
no interest." Pinter's words were more than the surreal. The
BBC ignored the speech of Britain's most famous dramatist.
I've made a number of documentaries about Cambodia. The
first was Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia. It
describes the American bombing that provided the catalyst
for the rise of Pol Pot. What Nixon and Kissinger had
started, Pol Pot completed—CIA files alone leave no doubt of
that. I offered Year Zero to PBS and took it to Washington.
The PBS executives who saw it were shocked. They whispered
among themselves. They asked me to wait outside. One of them
finally emerged and said, "John, we admire your film. But we
are disturbed that it says the United States prepared the
way for Pol Pot."
I said, "Do you dispute the evidence?" I had quoted a number
of CIA documents. "Oh, no," he replied. "But we've decided
to call in a journalistic adjudicator."
Now the term "journalist adjudicator" might have been
invented by George Orwell. In fact they managed to find one
of only three journalists who had been invited to Cambodia
by Pol Pot. And of course he turned his thumbs down on the
film, and I never heard from PBS again. Year Zero was
broadcast in some 60 countries and became one of the most
watched documentaries in the world. It was never shown in
the United States. Of the five films I have made on
Cambodia, one of them was shown by WNET, the PBS station in
New York. I believe it was shown at about one in the
morning. On the basis of this single showing, when most
people are asleep, it was awarded an Emmy. What marvelous
irony. It was worthy of a prize but not an audience.
Harold Pinter's subversive truth, I believe, was that he
made the connection between imperialism and fascism, and
described a battle for history that's almost never reported.
This is the great silence of the media age. And this is the
secret heart of propaganda today. A propaganda so vast in
scope that I'm always astonished that so many Americans know
and understand as much as they do. We are talking about a
system, of course, not personalities. And yet, a great many
people today think that the problem is George W. Bush and
his gang. And yes, the Bush gang are extreme. But my
experience is that they are no more than an extreme version
of what has gone on before. In my lifetime, more wars have
been started by liberal Democrats than by Republicans.
Ignoring this truth is a guarantee that the propaganda
system and the war-making system will continue. We've had a
branch of the Democratic party running Britain for the last
10 years. Blair, apparently a liberal, has taken Britain to
war more times than any prime minister in the modern era.
Yes, his current pal is George Bush, but his first love was
Bill Clinton, the most violent president of the late 20th
century. Blair's successor, Gordon Brown is also a devotee
of Clinton and Bush. The other day, Brown said, "The days of
Britain having to apologize for the British Empire are over.
We should celebrate."
Like Blair, like Clinton, like Bush, Brown believes in the
liberal truth that the battle for history has been won; that
the millions who died in British-imposed famines in British
imperial India will be forgotten—like the millions who have
died in the American Empire will be forgotten. And like
Blair, his successor is confident that professional
journalism is on his side. For most journalists, whether
they realize it or not, are groomed to be tribunes of an
ideology that regards itself as non-ideological, that
presents itself as the natural center, the very fulcrum of
modern life. This may very well be the most powerful and
dangerous ideology we have ever known because it is
open-ended. This is liberalism. I'm not denying the virtues
of liberalism—far from it. We are all beneficiaries of them.
But if we deny its dangers, its open-ended project, and the
all-consuming power of its propaganda, then we deny our
right to true democracy, because liberalism and true
democracy are not the same. Liberalism began as a preserve
of the elite in the 19th century, and true democracy is
never handed down by elites. It is always fought for and
struggled for.
A senior member of the antiwar coalition, United For Peace
and Justice, said recently, and I quote her, "The Democrats
are using the politics of reality." Her liberal historical
reference point was Vietnam. She said that President Johnson
began withdrawing troops from Vietnam after a Democratic
Congress began to vote against the war. That's not what
happened. The troops were withdrawn from Vietnam after four
long years. And during that time the United States killed
more people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos with bombs than
were killed in all the preceding years. And that's what's
happening in Iraq. The bombing has doubled since last year,
and this is not being reported. And who began this bombing?
Bill Clinton began it. During the 1990s Clinton rained bombs
on Iraq in what were euphemistically called the "no fly
zones." At the same time he imposed a medieval siege called
economic sanctions, killing as I've mentioned, perhaps a
million people, including a documented 500,000 children.
Almost none of this carnage was reported in the so-called
mainstream media. Last year a study published by the Johns
Hopkins School of Public Health found that since the
invasion of Iraq 655, 000 Iraqis had died as a direct result
of the invasion. Official documents show that the Blair
government knew this figure to be credible. In February, Les
Roberts, the author of the report, said the figure was equal
to the figure for deaths in the Fordham University study of
the Rwandan genocide. The media response to Robert's
shocking revelation was silence. What may well be the
greatest episode of organized killing for a generation, in
Harold Pinter's words, "Did not happen. It didn't matter."
Many people who regard themselves on the left supported
Bush's attack on Afghanistan. That the CIA had supported
Osama Bin Laden was ignored, that the Clinton administration
had secretly backed the Taliban, even giving them high-level
briefings at the CIA, is virtually unknown in the United
States. The Taliban were secret partners with the oil giant
Unocal in building an oil pipeline across Afghanistan. And
when a Clinton official was reminded that the Taliban
persecuted women, he said, "We can live with that." There is
compelling evidence that Bush decided to attack the Taliban
not as a result of 9-11, but two months earlier, in July of
2001. This is virtually unknown in the United
States—publicly. Like the scale of civilian casualties in
Afghanistan. To my knowledge only one mainstream reporter,
Jonathan Steele of the Guardian in London, has investigated
civilian casualties in Afghanistan, and his estimate is
20,000 dead civilians, and that was three years ago.
The enduring tragedy of Palestine is due in great part to
the silence and compliance of the so-called liberal left.
Hamas is described repeatedly as sworn to the destruction of
Israel. The New York Times, the Associated Press, the Boston
Globe—take your pick. They all use this line as a standard
disclaimer, and it is false. That Hamas has called for a
ten-year ceasefire is almost never reported. Even more
important, that Hamas has undergone an historic ideological
shift in the last few years, which amounts to a recognition
of what it calls the reality of Israel, is virtually
unknown; and that Israel is sworn to the destruction of
Palestine is unspeakable.
There is a pioneering study by Glasgow University on the
reporting of Palestine. They interviewed young people who
watch TV news in Britain. More than 90 percent thought the
illegal settlers were Palestinian. The more they watched,
the less they knew—Danny Schecter's famous phrase.
The current most dangerous silence is over nuclear weapons
and the return of the Cold War. The Russians understand
clearly that the so-called American defense shield in
Eastern Europe is designed to subjugate and humiliate them.
Yet the front pages here talk about Putin starting a new
Cold War, and there is silence about the development of an
entirely new American nuclear system called Reliable Weapons
Replacement (RRW), which is designed to blur the distinction
between conventional war and nuclear war—a long-held
ambition.
In the meantime, Iran is being softened up, with the liberal
media playing almost the same role it played before the Iraq
invasion. And as for the Democrats, look at how Barak Obama
has become the voice of the Council on Foreign Relations,
one of the propaganda organs of the old liberal Washington
establishment. Obama writes that while he wants the troops
home, "We must not rule out military force against
long-standing adversaries such as Iran and Syria." Listen to
this from the liberal Obama: "At moment of great peril in
the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed
and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and
fought for the freedom sought by billions of people beyond
their borders."
That is the nub of the propaganda, the brainwashing if you
like, that seeps into the lives of every American, and many
of us who are not Americans. From right to left, secular to
God-fearing, what so few people know is that in the last
half century, United States adminstrations have overthrown
50 governments—many of them democracies. In the process,
thirty countries have been attacked and bombed, with the
loss of countless lives. Bush bashing is all very well—and
is justified—but the moment we begin to accept the siren
call of the Democrat's drivel about standing up and fighting
for freedom sought by billions, the battle for history is
lost, and we ourselves are silenced.
So what should we do? That question often asked in meetings
I have addressed, even meetings as informed as those in this
conference, is itself interesting. It's my experience that
people in the so-called third world rarely ask the question,
because they know what to do. And some have paid with their
freedom and their lives, but they knew what to do. It's a
question that many on the democratic left—small "d"—have yet
to answer.
Real information, subversive information, remains the most
potent power of all—and I believe that we must not fall into
the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public.
That wasn't true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it isn't
true of the United States.
In all the years I've been a journalist, I've never know
public consciousness to have risen as fast as it's rising
today. Yes, its direction and shape is unclear, partly
because people are now deeply suspicious of political
alternatives, and because the Democratic Party has succeeded
in seducing and dividing the electoral left. And yet this
growing critical public awareness is all the more remarkable
when you consider the sheer scale of indoctrination, the
mythology of a superior way of life, and the current
manufactured state of fear.
Why did the New York Times come clean in that editorial last
year? Not because it opposes Bush's wars—look at the
coverage of Iran. That editorial was a rare acknowledgement
that the public was beginning to see the concealed role of
the media, and that people were beginning to read between
the lines.
If Iran is attacked, the reaction and the upheaval cannot be
predicted. The national security and homeland security
presidential directive gives Bush power over all facets of
government in an emergency. It is not unlikely the
constitution will be suspended—the laws to round of hundreds
of thousands of so-called terrorists and enemy combatants
are already on the books. I believe that these dangers are
understood by the public, who have come along way since
9-11, and a long way since the propaganda that linked Saddam
Hussein to al-Qaeda. That's why they voted for the Democrats
last November, only to be betrayed. But they need truth, and
journalists ought to be agents of truth, not the courtiers
of power.
I believe a fifth estate is possible, the product of a
people's movement, that monitors, deconstructs, and counters
the corporate media. In every university, in every media
college, in every news room, teachers of journalism,
journalists themselves need to ask themselves about the part
they now play in the bloodshed in the name of a bogus
objectivity. Such a movement within the media could herald a
perestroika of a kind that we have never known. This is all
possible. Silences can be broken. In Britain the National
Union of Journalists has undergone a radical change, and has
called for a boycott of Israel. The web site Medialens.org
has single-handedly called the BBC to account. In the United
States wonderfully free rebellious spirits populate the
web—I can't mention them all here—from Tom Feeley's
International Clearing House, to Mike Albert's ZNet, to
Counterpunch online, and the splendid work of FAIR. The best
reporting of Iraq appears on the web—Dahr Jamail's
courageous journalism; and citizen reporters like Joe
Wilding, who reported the siege of Fallujah from inside the
city.
In Venezuela, Greg Wilpert's investigations turned back much
of the virulent propaganda now aimed at Hugo Chávez. Make no
mistake, it's the threat of freedom of speech for the
majority in Venezuela that lies behind the campaign in the
west on behalf of the corrupt RCTV. The challenge for the
rest of us is to lift this subjugated knowledge from out of
the underground and take it to ordinary people.
We need to make haste. Liberal Democracy is moving toward a
form of corporate dictatorship. This is an historic shift,
and the media must not be allowed to be its façade, but
itself made into a popular, burning issue, and subjected to
direct action. That great whistleblower Tom Paine warned
that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and
the ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the
Bastille of words. That time is now.
Speech delivered at the Chicago Socialism 2007 Conference on
Saturday June 16 2007
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