[NYTr] Pilger: The Invisible Government

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

sent by Riaz K. Tayob - activ-l

Information Clearing House - Jul 20, 2007


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

[Speech delivered at the Chicago Socialism 2007 Conference on Saturday 
June 16 2007]

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 establishmentobjective, 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 
storiesdomestic and foreignyou'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 dissent2 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 clichid language does and is
designed to doit 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
themthey've spoken to me about itfew 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 clichis 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, 1968the day that the My-Lai massacre
happenedand 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 completedCIA 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
forgottenlike 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
liberalismfar 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 
Statespublicly. 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 Globetake 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 knewDanny 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 wara 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 governmentsmany of them democracies. 
In the process, thirty countries have been attacked and bombed, with
the loss of countless lives. Bush bashing is all very welland is 
justifiedbut 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 leftsmall "d"have
yet to answer.

Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power 
of alland 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 warslook 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 suspendedthe 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 webI can't mention them all herefrom 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 webDahr 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 Chavez. 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 fagade, 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.