The Propagandists of Empire
Weekend Edition February 20-22, 2015
Stripping Away the Blankets of Untruth
The Propagandists of Empire
by MICHAEL WELDON
The international community of left intellectuals and educators faces several urgent challenges in its struggle against the depredations of empire. As educators, our first task is to find the critical tools to understand the relationship between propaganda and empire. John MacKenzie’s marvellous study Propaganda and Empire: the Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (1984) reveals how the rulers of the British Empire used every representational medium at their disposal (postcards, theatre, dance halls, music, posters, children’s literature and penny journalism, films, scholarly treatises and school textbooks) to legitimize their nefarious actions in the world. Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: a story of greed, terror and heroism in colonial Africa (1999) chillingly tells the story of how the colonial horrors in the Congo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were intentionally hidden from the public. Public opinion was consciously manipulated and intense pressure placed upon those early voices of human rights, like E.D. Morel, who dared to speak out. Even today, Hochschild observes, Belgium museums provide no trace of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Congolese who were forced into the service of King Leopold’s lust for wealth and personal aggrandizement.
In Covering Islam (1981), Edward Said demonstrated convincingly that many educative forms (schools, cartoons, books, comic strips and films) constructed a uniform iconography of Islam and the Arab. This unquestionably derogatory iconography provides the perceptual frame that profoundly inhibits an open, learning relationship to the other. Perhaps it is this orientalist frame that makes it easy for the North American masses to be deceived into thinking that Arabs and Muslims don’t count for much in the global “clash of civilizations.” To bomb an enemy one must first dehumanize the “hated other” (Said) by incessantly repeating simple phrases, images and concepts. An abstract category must replace real, living breathing men and women who get up in the morning to give their kids breakfast, scold them to hurry up and get off to school. They have to dress, bid their partners a good day as they go about the day’s business. Propaganda creates abstractions that prevent us from seeing the other as fully human.
Like those empires of old, contemporary empires educate their peoples through using propaganda (particularly television, films, print media and photography) and brutal political manoeuvering. Critical intellectuals (and an alert citizenry) have the task of cutting through the lies and deceptions to tell the truth, wherever we are situated, talking, teaching, arguing. Edward Said reminds us that one of our specific jobs is to “break down stereotypes and reductive categories that are so limiting to human thought and communication.” But to accomplish this, we need to be aware of how utterly resistant the propaganda machine of empire is to enlightened criticism. The coverage of the crisis in the Ukraine well illustrates how reality is inverted and the Orwellian universe closes out any form of dissent. The cry of Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, “The earth is squeezing us. I wish we were wheat so we/could die and live again,” expresses our terror that we are intellectually suffocating and won’t rise again.
Those of us who work within the Academy still have some respect (I hope!) for facts, evidence and rational argument (Habermas’s “best argument” that validates truth claims). That is, we believe that, while external and internal states of affairs are mediated through weltonjustlanguage, nonetheless a world external to the senses of the individual (or propagandist hack) exists. The sun does not rise and fall, medieval theologians. The earth is not flat, ancient geographers. Or Russia is not the aggressor in the Ukraine, think-tank scribblers. Ideally, enlightened intellectuals and educators provide counter-evidence that requires a particular interpretation that rules out other less convincing ones. Yet “facts” do not seem to matter very much to the US (or British or Belgian) propagandists of empire. Those of us who still cling, however desperately, to the vestiges of the enlightenment belief that truth and falsity exist, are aghast at the extent and depth of the US government and media’s willingness to lie, deceive, distort, falsify and exaggerate evidence to serve their geo-political goal of ruling the world. This is also true of Canada’s right-wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who rules in the fog.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/20/the-propagandists-of-empire/
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