Propaganda News

 
When I was a little boy of about four Cary Grant told me the Japanese have no word for Love.
 
Of course I did not know Cary personally, and I was not sitting on his lap when he told me this; he told me this in the wartime submarine movie, Destination Tokyo, and I saw it from close to the screen while sitting in a theater seat far to big for me, my little feet not touching the floor.
 
It was common in movies of the World War Two era to inject patriotic conversations into the scripts, and Cary's character, Captain Cassidy, was explaining why the Japanese were so fanatical in war.  One of the reasons he gave was that there was no word for Love in the Japanese language.
 
This was not true, of course, the Japanese have words for Love, but it was wartime and the Japanese were portrayed to be as subhuman as possible.
 
This wartime propaganda had such an effect on me when I was two, three, four and five years old, all those years spent as a wartime child, that even at the age of ten I once asked someone if the Japanese had a language.  I asked that 1950, the war had been over for five years and I still thought of the Japanese as a kind of monkey-people.
 
The same propaganda could not have worked so well had the movie been Destination Bremerhaven and Cary Grant had said the Germans have no word for Love.  This is because the Germans were very familiar to the Americans, and such nonsensical  propaganda worked only because the Japanese culture was almost unknown to the average American.
 
Propaganda is a natural byproduct of war, and while not always totally false it tends to be a grotesque distortion of the truth.
 
In the United States of America propaganda is far more smooth than the propaganda of, say, a communist nation, because propaganda is a voluntary product of the media and not put out by some government body charged with producing it.
 
When I worked for UPI in Tokyo I found it impossible to write a straight news story about Russia or China or about any American opposed to the war, or even the most basic Vietnam combat stories, because those stories would always be changed with an infusion of propaganda or out and out alteration of facts as they passed through the UPI censoring system, called editing, before they reached UPI's thousands of newspaper clients around the world.
 
You try risking your life in hot combat only to see your stories utterly changed and only your name remaining at the top; your name there, so everyone thought you had written that untrue rubbish.  You try going back to the combat unit you had been with and the Grunts asking you why you had written that crap, that wasn't the way it was at all.  It would make you think about things as they are and as they are represented to be.
 
Truth is impossible in the American news media, unless the subject is sports scores or the numbers dead in airline crashes.
 
When I worked for the Los Angeles Times it was impossible to write a straight story about hippies, and when I wrote something good about them it would be changed to something bad unless I mother-henned  the story through the print shop, because even the typesetters had the right to change copy they did not approve of.
 
The attitude of the Los Angeles Times toward hippies was exactly the same as the Tallahassee Democrat's attitude toward blacks when I worked there in 1959.  As my editor a the LA Times told me, "All we want to know is how many hippies get busted for dope".
 
Truth is impossible in the American news media unless that truth matches what the ownership sees as truth.
 
I mention this because propaganda in America today, under the dictatorship of Republican American Fascism, is highly organized and intense and permeates just about every television news show you see, and is also woven into fictional drama shows such as Law and Order.
 
As a result, there is no more American knowledge about "Terrorism" and the engine driving it than there was before 9/11.  The media-government alliance tells us what beasts these monsters are, but they are not that, they are soldiers fighting for a cause and they often do monstrous things just as the soldiers of all nations and all beliefs often do monstrous things.
 
The resistance fighters in Iraq during the American occupation are the historical equivalent of the resistance fighters in France during the German occupation; the suicide bombers are the historical equivalent of the Japanese Kamikaze pilots.  In both cases, those were the only tactic available and the weapon of last resort.
 
You can call them monsters if you like, the Iraqis you call by the inaccurate term, Insurgents, but they are soldiers, they are soldiers, they are soldiers, fighting a pompous, ignorant nation who has invaded and occupied their country.  Insurgents are people in rebellion against an established government, not an occupying power and its puppet government.
 
Every nation has a certain percentage of warriors, such men and women fight on when their nation is occupied.  This has been a truth throughout history, and this truth does not change just because the propaganda mill changes it, or just because America's Daddy Warbucks Vice President did not anticipate it.
 
The American media is speaking to the American people in the same way Cary Grant spoke to me when I was four years old.
 
That it has a right to do that is arguable, and that the American people might want to be spoken to as ignorant children is certainly within the realm of possibility, but while this propaganda technique worked in the simpler days of World War Two it is, I suggest, a dangerous and self-defeating policy at this time.
 
I refer you to one of the most basic maxims of war:  Know They Enemy.
 
America is at war with an enemy it does not know, Jihad Islam; and that is why America is doomed to get caught flat-footed time after time.  America is faced in Osama Bin Laden with a military mind perhaps equal to Saladin of Crusader times, but is led by a government of war-shirkers and war-duffers who likely do not even know who Saladin was.
 
(If you do not know who Saladin was, Dear Reader, that is no great shortcoming, but you are not a government of men ignorant of history and culture leading the United States of American down a road to defeat the likes of which history as never known.)
 
Were that not enough, had Republican American Fascism not only wagered the fate of the nation on a stupid interpretation of what "Terrorism" is, it is now toying with war with a Communist society it also interprets stupidly, by this I mean the current hoopla over "North" Korea.
 
Here is where the mean-spirited allegedly well-educated female and black Secretary of States comes in, turning up the heat with insult and over-simple Republican American Fascist dogma.
 
My point here, Dear Reader, is that your government and your media are talking to you like Cary Grant talked to me when I was four years old.   Republican American Fascism believes the American people are as stupid as Republican American Fascism.