War,
Propaganda, Empire
By P Sainath
03 September, 2003
Presented at
a public forum, Media and the War on Iraq orgainsed by Asian
Regional Exchange for New Alternatives, Hong Kong.
My
topic really is war propaganda and empire. Before I get into the history
of it, I would like to say something. Embedded journalism is a state
of the mind. You dont have to be travelling with an army to be
an embedded journalist. Between 1965 and 1975, there were 5,000 American
journalists in Saigon, and they still didnt get the story right.
Not one of these unembedded guys managed to tell the true story of the
Gulf of Tonkin Incident for about a decade. So embeddedness
is a state of mind, you can sit right next to your PC in your office
in Oklahoma or wherever and be an embedded journalist. I dont
know if the existing media networks or conglomerates would ever allow
for instance Al Jazeera to be shown in their countries in the name of
free flow. Id like to see it happen, I d like Al Jazeera
to be available to all viewers on that continent. When the heck is it
going to happen?
The word embedded
in terms of embedded journalism, its a fascinating term, well
come back to it. But you have in this very country, in Hong Kong in
1975, a lecture made by Barry Zorthian who was the head of JUSPAO, the
Joint US Public Affairs Office that ran the Vietnam war propaganda,
and he complained that some of the embedded journalists
of that time were so dumb that they could not take signals when something
was going wrong. And Barry Zorthian was pretty disgusted, so he gave
up his job at JUSPAO-- where he had an equal ranking with the CIA Station
Chief and General Westmoreland in terms of hierarchy in propaganda--
and went back to his old job as Vice-President of Time Magazine.
Now my own presentation.
88 years ago, 8,500 Indian troops died in a single battle. In one single
battle. That too was in Iraq, and that too took place in the name of
regime change. Then too they had to be sacrificed because of the various
problems the regime that wanted to do the changing was facing. The battle
was the Battle of Kut, it was fought between the end of 1915 and the
early part of 1916. The British Empire had taken a pasting in Gallipoli,
and the War Office desperately needed some propaganda for back home
to explain to mothers why their children had to die in so many millions.
Chemical weapons and poison gas were being freely used by the civilized
nations on the green fields of France. So the War Office sent an order
to the 6th British Indian Army Division to take Baghdad. They were in
no position to take Baghdad, they didnt have a chance in hell
of taking Baghdad, but they had to take Baghdad to reduce the propaganda
pressure on the War Office at home because they had been defeated at
Gallipoli, there was growing demoratization at home, a victory had to
be produced. And it was thought that by changing the regime in Baghdad,
at that time Mesopotamia
the British were actually fighting the
Turks at the time, not the regime in Baghdad, but there was a small
hackneyed gang holed up in Baghdad. The Indian army division tried doing
what it could not do, it lost 8,000 people in a single battle at Kut.
88 years later, India and Pakistan are both being asked to send troops
to support the regime change in Iraq that has taken place already so
that we can lost a few thousand more soldiers there. This is the mindset
of empire. As long as somebody elses soldiers are dying, it doesnt
really matter.
You know, if you
listen even to the presentations of the embeds
I dont think
the problem with the war was the logistics, or the costs, or that things
were going wrong, or that things were not going the way the military
said. The problem with the war was the war! That was the problem, the
war itself was immoral, unjustified, had no basis in international law.
So the sympathy that builds up looking at the problems of ordinary
folks, ordinary GI Joes because he or she was battered
at home or whatever, is not looking at the miseries and sufferings inflicted
on the Iraqi people. Which was what the war was about. And thats
really one of the problems of embedded journalism, Iraqis are blacked
out- even the sorrows and emotions and sadness that we experience are
those of good old GI Joe and Jane. Its too much of a problem for
me.
But lets get
back to Gallipoli. The defeat in Gallipoli was later painted as a propaganda
victory, like Dunkirk. The Indian army and other conscripts from colonies
were sacrificed not in their hundreds but in their tens of thousands
on the battlefields of Iraq for the next two years, The mind of empire
does not end with one war, it does not end with war, it does not end
with Iraq. Immediately after the war in 1919, and this is of interest
to you considering the propaganda you have been exposed to in this war,
Britain systematically, deliberately, explicitly used chemical weapons
against the people of Iraq. And now they are looking for WMDs and chemical
weapons in Iraq. They probably will find traces of their own stuff!
They certainly will find the graves of tens of thousands of people who
died from the poison gas they used in Iraq, with the following words
from Winston Churchill: I do not understand this squeamishness
about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against
uncivilized tribes. The moral effects should be good, and it would spread
a lively terror.
The difference then
as with now is that they were a little more honest about it, they were
more open about it, and since the natives were anyway sub-humans, and
we all know they are sub-humans, so how the hell does it matter if you
use poison gas? Today you take an individual and demonize him so you
can take over the rest of the people and show nothing, because your
embedded journalists are not in interaction with those people. So nothing
very different happens, according to me, in war propaganda, it just
happens in different places. But it happens in different eras. When
it happens in our era, it happens in an era when the media is more concentrated
than ever before, in the hands of half a dozen conglomerates essentially.
Therefore the capacity to deceive is far greater than your intent to
deceive. I might have the intent to deceive, I might print in a newspaper
Little Green Men From Mars Landed Outside My Window Yesterday,
but it doesnt matter if my newspaper has a circulation of 5 and
a print order of 100. But if it happens to be Rupert Murdochs
son you can cause panic in the streets with that kind of story, because
your capacity to deceive is far greater when youre presiding over
an empire, in print alone, of 6 billion words daily, as he does. So
whats changed is that things are unfolding in a very different
media environment, at a time of a collapse on restraint of global corporations,
at a time of really, really ferocious neoliberal market fundamentalism
where everything can be justified on a particular kind of terms.
Lets get back
to Iraq. I dont know how many of you saw one of the first Rumsfeld
press conferences, where all journalists sat there and
oh, by
the way, I remember Tommy Franks press conference, I dont
know if any of you saw this, where the props were a US$250,000 set designed
in Hollywood. So even the damn press conference props, from where these
guys address the world, are designed in Hollywood, you can get the intent-
you design a Hollywood set to have a press conference on the war, you
can tell what the content is going to be. Anyway, heres what Rumsfeld
said at the other press conference, I have this verbatim: It looks
like the bombing of a city, but it isnt. The bombing has
been so precise, he told the embeds and the empty-heads and everybody
else, the altitude and angles of bombing, he suggested had been so well
calculated as to minimize human damage, loss of human life. This at
a time when 2,000 pound and 5,000 pound bombs were falling on people
in Baghdad.
Now this, as I said,
is in itself not a new thing. In 1945, Brigadier General Thomas Farrell--
Deputy Director of the Manhattan Project that had made those two bombs
called Fat Man and Little Boy that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasakiaddressing
the first international media circus in Tokyo after the bombing of Hiroshima,
this General Thomas Farrell said, and I quote verbatim: The atomic
bombs were exploded at a specifically calculated altitude to exclude
any possibility of residual radioactivity. They managed to control
the altitude, you know, they just shoved a damn bomb out of a plane,
but they managed to control the altitude at which it would burst. This
was followed up with the great embedded loyalty of that wonderful newspaper
the New York Times that reported a few days later in a banner headline:
No radioactivity in the ruins of Hiroshima. A few days later,
the United States government felt so emboldened by such embedded loyalty
it declared the most fantastic thing of all which has now been hushed
up and buried. They actually came out with a statement saying radioactivity
not harmful. Official statement, radioactivity is not harmful.
You dont even
have to go so far back, in 1965 in the war against Vietnam that 5,000
journalists couldnt get it right, Time Magazine August 5 1965
reports the use of gas against Vietnamese civilians and soldiers, poison
gas, as non-lethal gas warfare. Now warfare
and non-lethal are contradictory terms! By the way, it was
the great Peter Arnett who first used those words, non-lethal
gas warfare. He was then with the Associated Press. And Time Magazine
gave its own take on the use of gas against uncivilized tribes,
as Winston Churchill so honestly put it. Time Magazine said that compared
to bombs like napalm-- it didnt mention that napalm was also a
US weapon, it wasnt being used by the Vietnamese compared
to napalm, these temporarily disabling gases are positively more
humane than horrible. That was Time reporting in 1965 on the use
of gas on the uncivilized tribes of Vietnam.
From Churchill to
George Bush, the attitude of empire towards the uncivilized tribes
has remained essentially unchanged, but a lot of other things have changed.
The politics in the world have changed, the structure of propaganda
has changed, the ways in which things are done have changed. The language,
the debasement of language right through by military structures and
empire is fantastic. How easily all of us have accepted into our lexicons
the use of words like WMDs, you know, Weapons of Mass Destruction. Little
acronyms for various things. Operation Iraqi Freedom, War
on Terror, every one of these is a totally questionable term
Right through the
70s and the 80s, two of the fastest growing sectors of the global economy
were information and armaments. And the growing integration between
these two sectors, the rapid integration between the sectors of information
and armaments, had and has very obvious implications for the content
of information that we get, for the kind of media environment that we
live in. These huge conglomerates, these little oligarchies, about 6
of them, whether you are taking Time-Warner or Disney
just take
Time Warner. Its market value is equal to the combined GDP of say Mali,
Mauritania, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and half a dozen other countries.
The kind of clout it gives these guys is something enormous and astonishing.
And this whole business about giving the public what it wants
is essentially an attitude of enormous disrespect for the public. Its
not what the public wants, the idea that the public wants something
and they are being given it is very misleading. Its what I want
to give the public, which my advertisers want to give the public, which
my sponsors want to give the public, and the public, if it has very
few choices, will take.
Thats why
you have a situation, and one thing that the United States media proves
comprehensively, is that it is possible to have the worlds largest
media and the worlds least informed public. Where else in the
world did 55% of the people believe that Saddam was tied to al Qaida,
and 42% believe that he was behind the WTC attacks? Because they have
no media alternatives. They have the same bunch of gangsters raining
propaganda at them in a very, very, blanketing, saturating level, and
not much can be done about it. So just as patriotism is the last refuge
of the scoundrel, blaming the public for what it wants is a bit of an
escape, there are very real forces controlling the media that may not
be able to do all that the public does not want, but will do a hell
of a lot that the public never asked for. Sure, public attitudes and
culture can also be shaped over a period of time, but a lot of public
would like a lot of plain information which was not coloured the way
it was.
In conclusion I
think that what you have today is, one, empire plus neoliberalism plus
concentration and more concentration of media equals disaster. Thats
the first point Id like to make.
Second, theres
something sad and yet worth learning. In war, the hypocrisy of media
sometimes stands naked, so we are all ready to condemn and criticize.
However, the same media does that and much worse during peace as well.
It does so when it covers the WTO, when it covers the disputes over
economics, when it covers markets and market fundamentalism and neoliberal
ideologies, when it covers so-called success stories. You
know, Mexico is a success-story then Mexico is down the
drain, then Argentina is a success story then you have to
look for it with a telescope down the tube. They cover all these the
same way, but it doesnt provoke our indignation in the same way.
Its the same package, its the same mindset, the same ideological
package. And youd better get accustomed to the idea, its
not just that the stumbled on the issue of war. Its an integrated
package
On the issue of
alternative media, I was fascinated to hear the example [of Korea],
there are two or three others that I am personally aware of. I think,
by the way, nobody here or anywhere has a right to complain about the
mainstream media if you are not subscribing to at least two alternative
media experiments. If you dont subscribe to those and you dont
put your money where your mouth is, dont whine. I dont want
to hear it. So thats one thing. The second thing is, however much
I might support, and I hope all of you support, alternative media experiments,
I am not willing to give up my space in the mainstream media. I think
that has got to be liberated from the embedded hierarchies of neocolonialism.
And to liberate the media from the embedded structures of the global
conglomerates, we need public action. We need to assert that public
space has to be respected in the private fora, we need to assert that
public interest must prevail over private profit, I think we have to
recover the public space that the conglomerates have taken over in the
media. If you cannot stop the march of monopoly, you will find it very
difficult to liberate yourself from embedded propaganda.
Theres one
final thing which gives us a lot of hope. The fantastic thing is that
the limit of this propaganda was also reached in the Iraq war. The most
fantastic thing is that the media have never been more concentrated
that they were in this war, they have never been more powerful than
they were at this time. And yet, there was a divergence between what
they said and what 85% of the worlds public believed and marched
for. Governments and media were on one side, the public were on the
other. The Indian government did its best to bootlick the Americans
on sending troops to Iraq, but couldnt do it because of the opposition
of the Indian public, despite major newspapers like the Times of India
writing editorials saying get ready to go and take care of Baghdad.
They couldnt do it because of public opposition despite the medias
position. In Spain, New Europe, the government supported the American
war on Iraq, 85% of the Spanish people opposed it. So this divergence,
I think it opens up a window, it allows us to explore what are the possibilities
for breaking this monopoly over the mind. And I think that has come
not from mindless herds that want something so Murdoch gives it to them.
Have respect for the ordinary people of the world, they showed you that
they are not willing to buy into this propaganda. That opens up a space,
that opens up hope. You do not adjust to empire, you end it.
P
Sainath
is one of Asias leading development journalists, and the author
of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. His writing focuses on
the impact of neoliberal globalisation on the lives of people, poverty
and food security in rural India, and other issues of contemporary concern.
[transcribed by
Pranjal Tiwari]