Managing
Consent: The Art Of War, Democracy And Public Relations
By Ramzy Baroud
19 August, 2007
Countercurrents.org
It
is Edward Bernays who fine-tuned the art of public relations in the
20th century. Using many of the psychoanalytic theories put forward
by his uncle Sigmund Freud, he developed a mastery of public manipulation,
suggesting that such manipulation was essential to democracy itself.
Bernays strongly believed that people are simply "stupid"
and in need of being told how to behave, what to believe, what to eat,
what to wear, and how to vote. The outcomes of such an experiment reverberate
to this day.
Some historians credit Bernays's
efforts in the 1920s and 1930s for turning the modern citizen into a
modern consumer. Not only did he convince Americans that a "hearty
breakfast" must include eggs and bacon, as opposed to the traditional
toast and coffee, he also managed to convince women at the time that
cigarettes were a symbol of man's power and domination; to challenge
the male sense of superiority, women needed to smoke. A few public stunts
later, sales of cigarettes (which Bernays termed "torches of freedom")
soared, eventually doubling the market for tobacco manufacturers, who,
among many other businesses, were Bernays's clients.
It was only natural that
such tactics would soon become politicized. Various presidents and presidential
candidates utilized Bernays's theories and services in the interests
of power and profit, though some did try to outset the increasing influence
of big businesses on American democracy. Roosevelt's New Deal in the
early 1930s - which purported to reengage the citizen as a vital component
in a functioning democracy - was resented by the corporations, and they
ferociously fought to win consumers back and defeat the democratic initiative.
Ultimately, they succeeded.
Freud argues that a person's
subconscious desires would be utterly violent and sadistic if uncontrolled;
his nephew suggested the cure was to curb these desires in a way that
generated immense profits.
It didn't take long for Bernays's
tactics to be applied in US foreign policies. Guatemala is a textbook
example; when the country was ready to embrace serious popular change
in the 1950s, with democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz implementing
equitable land reforms that ran counter to the interests of the US United
Fruit Company (which was naturally unwilling to concede its highly profitable
"Banana Republic"), media manipulators in the US immediately
set about to convince Americans that Arbenz somehow posed a threat to
American democracy. A CIA-engineered coup deposed the elected president
and installed its operative Castillo Armas, who was hailed by visiting
US vice president Richard Nixon as a "liberator."
Freud's Civilization and
Its Discontents argues that a person's subconscious desires would be
utterly violent and sadistic if uncontrolled; his nephew suggested the
cure was to curb these desires in a way that generated immense profits.
Successive US administrations have taken note, and their greatest achievement
has been to exploit the subconscious factors that infuse fear and paranoia
among the masses. Wars have been waged, regimes overthrown, and bombs
dropped in the midst of sleeping populations, all in the name of democracy.
What Bernays brazenly dubbed "managing consent" - and Chomsky
and Herman more honestly referred to as "manufacturing consent"
- remains the defining factor that subverts true democracy in the US,
and it often leads to the most violent consequences in countries that
fall under the US sphere of influence.
Despite serious public efforts
to counter the anti-democratic union between the state and corporations
in the 1960s and 1970s, the latter managed to prevail, using direct
repression at times, but also by underhandedly exploiting the same discontented
popular movements to promote their ideas and products. This tactic has
manifested itself invariably every time a discord between the state
and corporation on one hand and the people on the other took place.
A more recent example is
the way in which President George W. Bush has constantly attempted to
manipulate to his advantage the anti-war movement that opposed his 2003
war and invasion of Iraq. His logic - also used by former British prime
minister Tony Blair - was simple, yet most deceptive: The war in Iraq
is aimed at achieving the same kind of democracy that allows millions
of Americans to disagree peacefully with their government without facing
the persecution they suffer under Saddam.
While one finds laughable
the deduced notion that Iraqis are now reaping the benefits of democracy,
one can hardly deny that Bush's logic took hold among many, even those
opposed to the war. Such dialectics managed to shift the debate in many
circles from the illegitimacy of the war and its true intentions to
altruistic arguments about how "the world is better off without
Saddam." This type of manipulation is anything but new and is hardly
exclusive to the Iraq case.
Since World War II, the US
government and corporate America have carried the democracy banner whenever
they sought war and profits. While doing so, the CIA has managed to
topple many popular, democratic governments around the world, replacing
them with handpicked, puppet regimes. The Palestinian elections in January
2006 were the closest the region had seen of true democratic elections
in many years, and yet the fact that it was Hamas - who violently fought
the Israeli military occupation and who strongly opposed US policies
in the region - was elected to power justified an entire population
being starved, physically confined, and violently oppressed by Israel,
with the full support of the US and the world's banking system. The
Palestinian experiment is unlikely to conclude soon, but the outcomes
have been utterly devastating thus far.
Edward Bernays's direct influence
is long gone, but his ideas continue to define the relationships between
the corporations, the American state, and the consuming citizen, and
even the relationships between the state-corporations' union and the
rest of the world. The carefully managed relationships have undermined
democracy and unleashed sadistic wars and uncontrollable violence, of
which Freud had warned, but which his nephew shamelessly exploited.
Ramzy Baroud
is a Palestinian-American author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com.
His work has been published in numerous newspapers and journals worldwide.
His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a
People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London). Read more about him on his
website: ramzybaroud.net
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