Oct 28 2004
Propaganda
Fahrenheit 9/11 is being broadcasted on AMEA for almost 10 days now. I have requested people to respond and a few positive emails came in, but mostly there was a lot of negative feed back. Hate mails, even. Some of these hate mails aren’t even worth posting because they are obviously written by people who have a hard time making a point, so instead they stoop down to cursing in the Caps Lock mode.
One thing however intrigues me. Almost all Bush followers, confronted with F/9/11, talk about propaganda and I am wondering why that is. Apart from the usual pen pushers in the conservative media around Europe, few people here have considered the documentary to be ‘propaganda’. They have a lot of critique on the film, but propaganda is almost never the keyword in their rants.
By now I must have seen the documentary quite a few times, and suddenly I understand why the same people who thought the whole ‘ weapons of mass destruction’ story that so many people died for had nothing to do with propaganda. For some reason this documentary must be all propaganda in the eyes of those who like Mr. Bush.
Apparently one has to be American to fully understand, but I will give it a try anyhow.
What is the best drill for a propagandist? You give him access to all media and then you supply him with scissors to cut out all that unwanted reality to form a new truth that is easier on minds and souls of those who think they are the righteous half of society. All you need is a good studio and the best editor you can afford and before you know it an utterly charming nitwit has been elected governor of California. I have nothing against bodybuilders with a nice smile but I am really glad he prefers the tax system in the USA better, so we will not see his face show up at EU meetings as president of politically ambivalent Austria, the old cradle of Nazism.
It is easy to blame Moore for propagandist behaviour. The style of editing combined with a father figure type narrative really leans on the techniques used by propagandists. Most Europeans are not so aware of that. If they are, they are most likely to think of it as a pastiche of already existing American propaganda. (Like all these romantic bleeding hearts telling the public they should follow their warlord because he is a family man, loves his dog, never smokes, never cheated on his wife and only used alcohol once to clean his daddy’s whistle before using it again after so many years to go to war.)
Our European politicians do not even bother to plot against anything using such sophisticated and costly techniques. They just lie straight in our faces, while we know the real truth, but we pay our taxes and hope for better times, always glad to see that at least the Germans, the Brits, the Italians and the French are not turning our soil into bloody battle fields for a change. Most of us live in acceptance and if things go out of control, the electorate is demanding hearings and those who rule speak up in long, boring gatherings, until everybody is fed up with it all, needs a drink and wants to go home. With the best of luck a few political sidekicks are fired so that the wheels of Democracy can roll on.
We have become cynics as far as Democracy concerns. We have had Democracy since the Old Greeks and Romans. Ample time to see the shortcomings of any system, but nobody wants the Caesars or the more recent dictators back that this continent has been producing over the ages.
Let us be bold here and state that Moore’s opposition is right in saying that the man is a lying, paranoid, propagandist. Ok. Now that we have established that; are we sure that we erased an important part of propaganda in US media? No way. After 9/11 most anchormen have been singing the National Hymn at every occasion and each citizen interviewed had to at least give a short statement on how patriotic he or she was. Even Moore has to sing that song every two minutes. And for those interviewed who did not have the intelligence to come up with something interesting, it was enough to state that the firemen “who rescued all these people” were such handsome, muscled, good looking American heroes, while they were actually just doing their job and if you ask me not in a very professional manner. (You can not help people if you park all your vehicles right beneath a skyscraper that is obviously going to collapse within the hour. Reminds me of a soldier who disobeyed the “heads down” command of his senior officer, got his left ear shot off, was sent home before the rest of his unit was slaughtered, and received the Purple Heart for that.)
So propaganda is indeed a problem in the US with all those competing news media that are losing their credibility with a great deal of their audiences. What do we know about propaganda? Usually it is either being used by governments who are scared – Russia during and right after Stalin – or by governments who have a direct goal that has to be hidden from the people because they need their votes. And they know nobody is going to vote for a cause that will first bring a minor victory over the bodies of young men and women to finally end in defeat. (Like the Germans in the 1930s.)
The Americans are scared. They can say that out loud, they have good reason to be scared with half the world population sick and tired of their post modern colonialism. That they have goals that their voters don’t like to see has become evident too during the war in Iraq.
My advice to all those who have sent hate mails: dismantle your cable unit; watch National Geographic or public access TV. And to the soldiers out there; always light a cigarette first before you make a decision to kill innocent people, it gives you time to consider whether you want to have nightmares for the rest of your lives.
Last but not least; read a history book for a change. The experience is a lot like scrolling down on hypertext pages filled with terror and sex, but you don’t scroll and there are no nagging popups, you just turn pages instead. It is great for historical perspective.