-Caveat Lector-
> July 30, 1999
>
> WAR PROPAGANDA � AT TAXPAYERS� EXPENSE
>
> It wasn�t enough for the Clintonians that virtually the entire
> news media marched in lockstep to the beat of the war-drums
> during the �liberation� of Kosovo; it wasn�t enough that
> television broadcast nothing but endless loops of fleeing
> Kosovars, with close-ups of their tears-streaked faces; it wasn�t
> enough that the pundits (the approved ones, anyway) only
> dissented to the extent that they wanted more Serb blood, and
> sooner. What the War Party wants is not majority support, but
> unanimity: no dissent is their goal. Toward that end, the Clinton
> gang has come up with � what else but a new government agency!
>
>
>
> 'SPINNING' AS A FUNCTION OF GOVERNMENT
>
> Citing a former administration insider, the Washington Times
> [July 29, 1999] has revealed that "a new multiagency plan to
> closely control the dissemination of public information abroad is
> really aimed at 'spinning the American public.'" What really
> sticks in the Clintonians' craw is that, in spite of an
> unprecedented barrage of war propaganda masquerading as news
> unleashed during the recent war, "the U.S. public has refused to
> back President Clinton's foreign policy." According to this
> unnamed official, the Clintonians are miffed that coverage of
> foreign news is "distorted" and are convinced that "they need to
> fight it at all costs." How? By "using resources that are aimed
> at spinning the news." And due to the extra-constitutional magic
> of Presidential Decision Directives, whereby the President can
> conjure new policies and the agencies to carry them out, the
> Congress is powerless to stop him.
>
> A SOW'S EAR
>
> And please don't tell me about the congressional "power of the
> purse." The recent revelation that the Pentagon has been spending
> money hand-over-fist on programs not authorized by Congress has
> shattered that myth hopefully forever.
>
> TOP SECRET
>
> This new addition to the federal nomenklatura, the International
> Public Information (IPI) system, created by Presidential
> Directive 68, is to be chaired by Morton Halperin, formerly
> "Senior Director for Democracy" at the National Security Council,
> and now head of policy planning at the State Department. The IPI
> working group, which met for the first time on Wednesday, is
> nothing if not ambitious: the IPI charter, still classified Top
> Secret, blends the functions of agencies like the old USIA and
> Radio Free Europe, ostensibly aimed overseas, with the scope and
> spirit of such World War II era organizations as the Office of
> War Information, which blanketed the US with pro-New Deal
> propaganda. The leaked text of the draft charter is written in
> typical bureaucratese, but the meaning is unmistakable: overseas
> propaganda will "be coordinated, integrated, deconflicted and
> synchronized with the [IPI] to achieve a synergistic effect" at
> home. Translation: American taxpayers will be footing the bill
> for the their own indoctrination..
>
> BACK TO WILSONIANISM
>
> While all administrations since FDR's have used the governmental
> apparatus to make propaganda, they have usually done so under the
> rubric of selling the American line abroad. Especially during the
> Cold War, when the American elites saw the US locked in an
> ideological conflict with the Communist bloc, such institutions
> as Radio Free Europe and the USIA were justified as a method of
> selling "the American way" to the wavering Europeans and the
> Third World masses. Such programs had definite domestic political
> uses, but were rationalized as essential to the war against
> Communism. With the Clintonians, however, even this kind of
> pretense has been dropped, and we are going back to the era of
> Woodrow Wilson.
>
> THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC INFORMATION
>
> It was Wilson who first mobilized American intellectuals in a
> whole series of government-created and financed organizations
> whose sole purpose was to hector Americans into supporting his
> holy crusade to make the world safe for capital-'D' Democracy.
> The Committee on Public Information, created by Wilsonian decree,
> flooded the country with pamphlets, leaflets, and posters
> designed to inflame the war spirit and anathematize the Germans.
> Our noble allies, the British and the French, were depicted as
> angelic upholders of the human spirit against the demonic
> depredations of the Huns.
>
> HISTORIANS IN THE SERVICE OF THE STATE
>
> Wilson and the Wilsonians virtually militarized academia in an
> all-out effort to indoctrinate Americans in the justice of the
> Allied cause. Even the professional historians were enlisted: the
> National Board for Historical Service, a government agency,
> recruited American historians to the task of proving German war
> guilt and documenting the Huns' inherent barbarity. In their
> secular evangelism to spread the Word of Progressive Uplift to
> every corner of the earth, America's intellectuals did not have
> to be drafted into the army of war propagandists. They
> volunteered gladly, and their enthusiasm did not wane until the
> scales fell from their eyes and they saw the horrific results of
> their labors: a Europe decimated, and a Versailles Treaty that
> legitimized the old imperialism instead of abolishing it. By
> then, of course, it was far too late to reverse course.
>
> FROM WILSON TO EISENHOWER
>
> In Wilson's day, it was possible to jail the antiwar opposition.
> Vigilante groups worked in tandem with government to smash the
> midwestern populist and left-wing movement against the war. In
> FDR's time, the New Dealers took care to be a bit more subtle,
> lest they make themselves easy targets of their Republican
> opponents � who hated FDR's wartime dictatorship, and looked for
> every opportunity to subvert it. Today, however, the vigilance of
> the Republicans is considerably reduced. After fifty years of the
> Cold War, during which the boundary between foreign and domestic
> operations was often blurred, the Old Right's fierce fight
> against FDR's Soviet-style propaganda machine was largely
> forgotten. The Cold Warriors, many of them ex-Communists (often
> of the Trotskyist or other dissident variety) imitated the
> Comintern in setting up numerous "front" organizations, which
> functioned both internationally and on the home front.
>
> A CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH THE CIA
>
> Who can forget the escapades of the infamous CIA-funded Congress
> of Cultural Freedom and its satellite groups, including the
> prestigious Encounter magazine, which nurtured (and paid out of
> taxpayers' pockets) such neoconservative intellectuals as Irving
> Kristol to combat alleged Communist Party influence at home and
> abroad? But they had to be careful to do it covertly, and when
> the CIA link to the CCF was finally exposed, the group was
> discredited, along with its affiliates.
>
> GOVERNMENT AND THE MEDIA � OR DO I REPEAT MYSELF?
>
> In our own time, however, government officials have no such
> qualms. The old adversarial relationship between the government
> and the media is gone, replaced with a new collegiality. Indeed,
> the ascension of former Time magazine editor Strobe Talbott to
> high office in the State Department dramatizes the startling fact
> that they are increasingly one and the same.
>
> THE NEWS WAR
>
> The Washington Times quotes the unnamed ex-official as saying
> that the IPI charter not only fails to make the traditional
> distinction between propaganda operations at home and abroad, but
> also "talks about a news war." He adds: "This has been in the
> works a long time. The target is the American people." Yes, as we
> have seen, it has been in the works a long time. But more
> importantly this illustrates a point that we have been making at
> Antiwar.com since its founding: the recent assault against
> Yugoslavia was also a war on the American people, who were
> subjected to a heavy bombardment of lies. Given the revelations
> that most of the military ordnance dropped on Serbia failed to
> hit military targets, and instead blasted fake tanks and other
> decoys, perhaps it can be said that the war at home was far more
> successful than the war in the field � and that it did more
> damage.
>
> THE LAPDOG MEDIA
>
> In this war, Clinton's lapdog media lost any sense of its
> responsibility to reflect on what it was reporting. The result
> was that the daily newscasts soon took on an Orwellian tone: one
> particularly grotesque example was the blatant exaggeration and
> manipulation of the numbers of Kosovar casualties. First it was
> reported that the Serbs had slaughtered as many as a million, or
> even more; then the estimate was unobtrusively lowered to half a
> million. A few weeks later, reporters were confidently asserting
> that 100,000 were surely killed in a frenzy of ethnic cleansing.
> That figure was then halved, and finally reduced to . . . 10,000.
> What is astonishing is not so much the successive reductions �
> after all, the "fog of war" is not only generated by government
> spinmeisters, but also by the sheer confusion that is the
> hallmark of any military conflict. What was striking was the
> complete lack of acknowledgment that anything had changed.
>
> A FOOTNOTE: ORWELL, AGAIN
>
> I keep coming back, in this column, to a passage from George
> Orwell's classic book, 1984, a novel that becomes more timely
> with the passage of years, and never more so than in the era of
> Clintonian "spin":
>
> "Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up
> to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be
> shown to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any
> expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the
> moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a
> palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed as often as was
> necessary."
>
> THE SUBJECTIVITY OF EVIL
>
> As the numbers associated with stories of alleged Serb atrocities
> began to change, there was, however, no lessening of the
> hyperbolic rhetoric being used to describe Milosevic as the new
> "Hitler." If anything, as time went on, and the casualty
> estimates dropped, the denunciations reached new heights of
> hyperventilated hysteria: there began to be talk, reflected in
> administration pronouncements, that all Serbs were guilty of war
> crimes, because, as the war-maddened New Republic put it, they
> were "Milosevic's willing executioners." Is there is a lesson in
> this � some larger point about the nature of what Robin Harris,
> an advisor to Margaret Thatcher, calls "New Left Globalism (in
> yesterday's London Times)? Surely this is a case study in the
> unreality of evil, its pure subjectivity, its complete antipathy
> to the world of facts.
>
> SURELY YOU JEST
>
> The response of the administration to accusations that the IPI
> will be used to influence opinion on the home front shows that at
> least they haven't lost their sense of humor: "We are very
> cognizant of the history of the 80s," said one official, whose
> acquaintance with history of any sort seems tenuous at best.
> "There are congressional controls now." Is this the same Congress
> that rejected the rationale for the war � and then voted to give
> the President more money than he requested in order to fight it?
>
> CONSIDER THE SOURCE
>
> The Congress of the United States has not exercised its foreign
> policy prerogatives since Harry Truman sent troops to Korea, and
> notified the representatives of the people after the fact. The
> idea that they will suddenly rise up and assert their
> constitutional authority is so unlikely that the administration
> is probably welcoming this "leak" to the Times as the best way to
> discredit the potential opposition � if they didn't leak it
> themselves. After all, the spinmeisters will say, consider the
> source.
>
> THE LOYAL "OPPOSITION"
>
> Worse than the cruel jests of administration flacks are the
> protests of what passes for the opposition: "This... indicates a
> measure of desperation in President Clinton's foreign policy,"
> said Seth Ackerman of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).
> "When it is not received well abroad, he resorts to propaganda."
> This misses the point completely, in that the real target, as the
> leaker made clear to the Times, is the American people. But the
> lefties over at FAIR, being lefties, have no real objection to
> that, at least in principle: they only regret that they are not
> in charge of the government-funded propaganda apparat.
>
> THE MYTH OF 'NONPARTISAN' GOVERNMENT
>
> Even worse is the "criticism" coming from the Right: The Times
> reports the remarks of one Ariel Cohen, of the Heritage
> Foundation, who worries that "the IPI system could be used by the
> party in power to push its own agenda, rather than the national
> interest." Cohen avers that "it would be a mistake to turn the US
> public information system into a tool of a partisan agenda. It
> cannot be driven by any political-correctness agenda that will
> not be representative of what the American people think or that
> will reflect only a social-change agenda of extremist activist
> groups." Huh? Cohen is hardly that naive. His pious protestations
> to the contrary, he surely realizes that there can hardly be such
> a thing as nonpartisan government. Democracy is always partisan,
> because that is what electoral politics is all about. The folks
> over at Heritage have this much in common with their opposite
> numbers over at FAIR: they, too, pine for an International Public
> Information system they can call their own, albeit one that is
> non-"extremist," ostensibly nonpartisan � and operates by a
> different standard of political correctness.
>
> THE BLOB
>
> Now that the Cold War is over, and the need for a government
> propaganda machine aimed at foreigners and Americans alike can no
> longer be justified in terms of national security (or survival),
> how is it that the bureaucracy not only survives but expands? No
> sooner is the old USIA (United States Information Agency)
> practically abolished and folded into the State Department; no
> sooner is Radio Free Europe and the other "liberation" radio
> stations defunded or cut to the bone; no sooner is the National
> Endowment for Democracy � that welfare program for out-of-work
> Social Democrats and renegade ex-Trotskyists � zeroed out in the
> Senate version of the budget, then it reappears in another form.
> Like one of those science fiction creatures � the Blob � that
> reconstitutes itself even as it is destroyed, it comes back
> bigger and stronger. After decades of abuses, of secret slush
> funds, dubious covert operations, and a continuous stream of
> lies, will no one rid of us this monster?
>
> AN ODD CHOICE OF WORDS
>
> The leaker told the Times that the Clintonians believe that the
> American media's reporting of international news is "distorted."
> The administration, he said, is convinced that "they need to
> fight it at all costs." But why? Why is it such a priority for
> this administration to set in motion a propaganda machine
> designed to manage the news from abroad and hoodwink the American
> people into supporting Clinton's globalist agenda? Could it be
> that there are plans in the works for another intervention,
> sooner rather than later? Perhaps the second phase of the
> Interrupted War, maybe something bigger. Whatever the New Left
> globalists have in mind, you can bet the IPI will play a major
> role.
>From www.antiwar.com/junstin/justincol.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> July 29 1999 OPINION<Picture: Line>
>
>
> Robin Harris
>
> 'There is no Balkan problem: but there is, and is likely to
> remain, a Serb problem. A glance at the ethnic map will suffice
> to show the truth of this'
>
> Listening to Western leaders in the wake of Kosovo, one might
> conclude that the one thing worse than losing a war, with Tony
> Blair and Bill Clinton in charge, is winning it. Far from
> inducing a healthy realism about the dangers of ill-prepared
> foreign ventures, the campaign seems to have sharpened the
> enthusiasm of Western governments for wholesale refashioning of
> the world in the West's own image.
>
> The showcase for New Left globalism, though, is to be the
> Balkans. The Western leaders who meet in Sarajevo today are
> already engaged in hugely ambitious and expensive plans for a
> "stability pact" intended to transform the countries of the
> region. The US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, has
> declared: "Our purpose is to do for the Balkans what the Marshall
> Plan did for Europe's West 50 years ago." More phlegmatically,
> Tony Blair has observed: "When we consider how much the
> international community has spent on resolving conflict in the
> Balkans, it is at least worth thinking about how we can make some
> prudent investment in ensuring that we never have to go and sort
> out further conflicts." Unfortunately, the assumption that in the
> Balkans war flows from poverty is itself misconceived.
>
> The Marshall Plan was a timely, temporary initiative, which in
> the late l94Os helped to sustain confidence in war-shattered
> European economies. But the main impulses towards European
> recovery in the decades that followed were internally, not
> externally, generated as resourceful managers and well-educated,
> motivated workforces satisfied rapidly increasing demand.
> Moreover, the plan did not change - and was not designed to
> change - the value systems of the recipient countries.
>
> That postwar European experience, therefore, offers no
> encouragement for the belief that pouring billions into Balkan
> countries will change Balkan outlooks and ensure Balkan
> stability. Indeed, more recent experience suggests quite the
> opposite. For the past eight years Western politicians and
> bankers have sought with increasing desperation to turn Russia
> into an ordinary country with which the West could do business.
> And the political upshot? Russia is more dangerous, unstable,
> hostile and - as was evident in Pristina - duplicilous than ever.
> Western money in the Balkans will make the inhabitants no more
> Western than it did in Russia.
>
> In any case, the basic assumption of the Balkan stability pact is
> wrong because there is no generic "Balkan" problem that needs
> solving. This is amply demonstrated by listing the quite
> different circumstances of the countries due to receive
> assistance. Romania: afflicted by the fallout from Russian
> collapse, experiencing typical problems of transition to
> capitalism. Bulgaria: likewise, but more so. Albania: so poor,
> corrupt and misgoverned that there is little outsiders (or
> insiders, for that matter) can do about it. Then there are the
> countries which were part of the old Yugoslavia - Slovenia,
> Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia. These do not have much in common
> now either - except a desperate desire to avoid being drawn back
> into some kind of union with the Serbs, where many Western
> politicians would try to force them. As for Montenegro, still
> part of rump Yugoslavia, it simply wants to get out - but in one
> piece.
>
> There is, then, no Balkan problem: but there is, and is likely to
> remain, a Serb problem. A glance at the ethnic map will suffice
> to show the truth of this: wherever there were large numbers of
> Serbs, living in their own republic or in someone else's, they
> fomented violence, and the more Serbs the worse the violence. The
> Serb nation, with a few honourable exceptions, has swallowed an
> ideology that makes living with non-Serbs practically impossible.
> This same Greater Serbian ideology, which has induced a genocidal
> mixture of fear, contempt and hatred, underpins the regime that
> Milosevic still heads, and it will undoubtedly survive him. It is
> deeply entrenched, strongly supported by the Serb intelligentsia
> and clergy, and shows no evidence so far of succumbing to sanity,
> let alone to lectures from Robin Cook and dollars from the
> International Monetary Fund.
>
> Distressing it may be for the State Department, the Foreign
> Office and the Chanceries of Europe to accept, but the diplomats'
> capacity to impose their preferred patterns on the disparate
> countries of southeastern Europe is extremely limited. And still
> more to the point, the likelihood of bringing Serbia at an early
> date into what Blair-speak calls "the family of world nations" is
> remote. There are, thus, better ways to spend the dollars, pounds
> and euros of the Western taxpayer.
>
>
>
> � The author is adviser to Baroness Thatcher
>From www.the-times.uk.co
A<>E<>R
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
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