Understanding the Latest Leaks Is Understanding the Rise of a
New Fascism
By John Pilger
In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Edward Bernays wrote: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
By John Pilger
In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Edward Bernays wrote: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
The
American nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays invented the term
"public relations" as a euphemism for state propaganda. He
warned that an enduring threat to the invisible government was
the truth-teller and an enlightened public.
In 1971,
whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked US government files known
as The Pentagon Papers, revealing that the invasion of Vietnam
was based on systematic lying. Four years later, Frank Church
conducted sensational hearings in the US Senate: one of the last
flickers of American democracy. These laid bare the full extent
of the invisible government: the domestic spying and subversion
and warmongering by intelligence and "security" agencies and the
backing they received from big business and the media, both
conservative and liberal.
Speaking
about the National Security Agency (NSA), Senator Church said:
"I know that the capacity that there is to make tyranny in
America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies
that possess this technology operate within the law … so that we
never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there
is no return."
On 11
June, following the revelations in the Guardian by NSA
contractor Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg wrote that the US had
now "that abyss".
Snowden’s
revelation that Washington has used Google, Facebook, Apple and
other giants of consumer technology to spy on almost everyone,
is further evidence of modern form of fascism – that is the
"abyss". Having nurtured old-fashioned fascists around the world
– from Latin America to Africa and Indonesia – the genie has
risen at home. Understanding this is as important as
understanding the criminal abuse of technology.
Fred Branfman,
who exposed the "secret" destruction of tiny Laos by the US Air
Force in the 1960s and 70s, provides an answer to those who
still wonder how a liberal African-American president, a
professor of constitutional law, can command such lawlessness.
"Under Mr. Obama," he wrote, "no president has done more to
create the infrastructure for a possible future police state."
Why? Because Obama, like George W Bush, understands that his
role is not to indulge those who voted for him but to expand
"the most powerful institution in the history of the world, one
that has killed, wounded or made homeless well over 20 million
human beings, mostly civilians, since 1962."
In the new
American cyber-power, only the revolving doors have changed. The
director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, was adviser to
Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state in the Bush
administration who lied that Saddam Hussein could attack the US
with nuclear weapons. Cohen and Google’s executive chairman,
Eric Schmidt – they met in the ruins of Iraq – have co-authored
a book, The New Digital Age, endorsed as visionary by the
former CIA director Michael Hayden and the war criminals Henry
Kissinger and Tony Blair. The authors make no mention of the
Prism spying program, revealed by Edward Snowden, that provides
the NSA access to all of us who use Google.
Control
and dominance are the two words that make sense of this. These
are exercised by political, economic and military designs, of
which mass surveillance is an essential part, but also by
insinuating propaganda in the public consciousness. This was
Edward Bernays’s point. His two most successful PR campaigns
were convincing Americans they should go to war in 1917 and
persuading women to smoke in public; cigarettes were "torches of
freedom" that would hasten women’s liberation.
It is in
popular culture that the fraudulent "ideal" of America as
morally superior, a "leader of the free world", has been most
effective. Yet, even during Hollywood’s most jingoistic periods
there were exceptional films, like those of the exile Stanley
Kubrick, and adventurous European films would have US
distributors. These days, there is no Kubrick, no Strangelove,
and the US market is almost closed to foreign films.
When I
showed my own film,
The War on Democracy,
to a major, liberally-minded US distributor, I was handed a
laundry list of changes required, to "ensure the movie is
acceptable". His memorable sop to me was: "OK, maybe we could
drop in Sean Penn as narrator. Would that satisfy you?" Lately,
Katherine Bigelow’s torture-apologizing Zero Dark Thirty
and Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets, a cinematic hatchet
job on Julian Assange, were made with generous backing by
Universal Studios, whose parent company until recently was
General Electric. GE manufactures weapons, components for
fighter aircraft and advance surveillance technology. The
company also has lucrative interests in "liberated" Iraq.
The power
of truth-tellers like Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and
Edward Snowden is that they dispel a whole mythology carefully
constructed by the corporate cinema, the corporate academy and
the corporate media. WikiLeaks is especially dangerous because
it provides truth-tellers with a means to get the truth out.
This was achieved by
Collateral Damage,
the cockpit video of an US Apache helicopter allegedly leaked by
Bradley Manning. The impact of this one video marked Manning and
Assange for state vengeance. Here were US airmen murdering
journalists and maiming children in a Baghdad street, clearly
enjoying it, and describing their atrocity as "nice". Yet, in
one vital sense, they did not get away with it; we are witnesses
now, and the rest is up to us.
www.johnpilger.com
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