Censored 2012 (51 page)

Perhaps the most notorious atrocity story was invented and disseminated worldwide by the Northcliffe press (mainly the
Times
and the
Daily Mail
), with the help of Belgian émigré writers and publishers of the London-based
Indépendance belge
(a daily French-language newspaper). This was the story about the Corpse Utilization Plant, which, according to the press, is where the Germans boiled down their own dead soldiers to extract useful chemicals and bone meal for pig food and fertilizer. The desecration of their dead in this way was presented as proof positive that the Germans were subhumans, ghouls, a throwback to barbarism that the world would have to defeat if civilization were to survive. Rumors of the existence of such factories are easy to explain. The Germans did indeed have installations for boiling down horse carcasses, and as horses were widely used for transportation of artillery and other war materials during World War I, many of these animals were brought to these factories upon their death. The Northcliffe press cleverly made use of a report in an official German
newspaper to make it appear that the Germans were admitting to boiling down their own soldiers. They did this with a mistranslation of a report from the French front, where the writer, Karl Rosner, made a passing remark on the smell emanating from a
Kadaverververtunganstalt
(Corpse Utilization Plant) and explained that this is where the chemicals are extracted from carcasses (using the word “Kadaver,” for carcass) observing, “Nothing must go to waste.” The word was mistranslated as “corpse” and the German word
Leim
, “glue,” was mistranslated as “lime,” both mistranslations giving the impression that human bodies were involved, as quicklime was used as a disinfectant. On April 17, 1917, the Northcliffe press juxtaposed this mistranslation with another detailed eyewitness account by an actual observer who supposedly witnessed corpses being processed. Published in the free Belgian press in London it was a gruesome account, stimulating the imagination with vivid descriptions, but short on details to answer obvious problems about its authenticity, including the question of how the observer could have gained access to what was described as a heavily guarded and concealed plant. The impression that the Belgian and German accounts were describing the same factory was bolstered by the fact that both Belgian and German newspapers carried the same date of publication: April 17, 1917.

The British officially repudiated the story in 1925, but the intricate role of the Northcliffe press was effectively concealed in the different versions of how the story came into being. The irony of this story is that it hindered belief in reports, during World War II, that Germans were incinerating Jews, as people recalled the earlier invented corpse factory story.
⁸

For the most pervasive, thorough, and effective propaganda in the twentieth century, we can turn to the machine invented by Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels, beginning in the early 1920s with the founding of the German Nazi Party. Hitler studied propaganda carefully and laid out his observations in his book,
Mein Kampf
(“My Struggle”), in which he wrote that the masses have a short memory, and so messages must be repeated endlessly to convert them. The party would have to consist of a small number of active members who would secure and inspire a much larger number of passive members. With small numbers, they needed to attract attention, which they did through violence. Whereas
the Communists disseminated the doctrine of class struggle, the Nazis chose to focus on a doctrine of racial purity, locating social problems in alleged racial contamination. The Nazis made use of party newspapers, posters, theater, and film. Nazi leaders were assigned areas, or
Gaus
, where they were to organize party membership and activities. They would concentrate their forces in small areas where they could easily win elections and give the impression of victory. When Hitler was banned for speeches inciting violence, he was championed on the basis of free speech principles, with posters showing a gagged Hitler. The burning of the Reichstag (Parliament) in February 1933 helped to bring the Nazis to power the following month. The Nazis instituted extensive censorship, requiring party membership among those holding positions of cultural influence, all while excluding Jews. Cheap radio sets were sold on a large scale, thus providing a medium through which to receive Nazi propaganda. Goebbels knew that propaganda had to be entertaining, and so Wagnerian music and myths were widely utilized to convey the Nazi ideology. Hitler made use of powerful extended metaphors by speaking of filth, rubbish, and disease connected with unsanitary living, by discussing “degenerate art” to invoke the desired emotions among his audience. Through these metaphors he fostered the idea that human beings responsible for the “spiritual death” of Aryans (Hitler’s favored racial group) should be exterminated in the same way as rodents who spread disease causing physical death. From the beginning, propaganda of fear dominated the Nazi route to power, as they made it clear that constitutional niceties would not hamper the elimination of those who would attempt to thwart their aims. The 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin were used to showcase German power and alleged peaceful intentions while downplaying anti-semitism, but with the outbreak of war in 1939, a strategy of terror was used to dissuade the United States from joining the Allies. Hitler offered the threat of war while holding out the prospect of peace, but a peace on (unacceptable) Nazi terms. The image of the Führer as a man of god-like features was carefully cultivated, as in
Triumph of the Will
, Leni Riefenstahl’s film about the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi Party rally, where Hitler arrives by airplane, majestically descending from the clouds with appropriate accompanying music from Wagner’s opera
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
. The film shows Hitler responding to adoring crowds, greeting
mothers and their children with mutual warmth and encouragement. Nazi propagandists were sensitive to the need for credible spokespeople and used fluent and witty French speakers to address the French and a sharp-tongued Anglo-Irish speaker, William Joyce, to communicate with the British.

Allied propaganda against the Axis and Japan followed a similar pattern to that of World War I in the matter of demonizing the enemies. One stereotype showed a monocled German in uniform threatening torture: “Ve haf our vays!” A “Jap” would often be shown in the form of a snake with buckteeth.

The initial British propaganda of victory fell flat when Hitler’s Blitzkrieg sent British and French forces reeling in 1940, but a new propaganda of Dunkirk heroism emerged. In the United States many films showed the heroism of US fighting forces, encouraging recruitment and war bond sales. A widely viewed Hollywood film,
The Fighting Sullivans
, was about a mother who lost five sons when a naval ship sank, making the loss of one son seem more bearable by comparison. Well-known actors such as John Wayne often played roles in war movies where their characters would give the impression that the US could not lose. Canadians would feel similarly about Canadian actor Lorne Greene, who had a deep, booming, and thoroughly confident voice reporting war news on radio.

The arrival of the Cold War and the struggle for ascendancy between the United States and the Soviet Union led to numerous proxy wars and deception on both sides. In the context of the Cold War one needs to talk about propagandas in the plural. Propaganda depicting the Soviet Union as an aggressor seeking world domination served to arouse fear in the United States. This fear helped to sustain a large military capability, which in turn sparked fear among the Soviets. In this way the arms race began and has continued today with the help of lobbyists and public relations experts, and with a largely compliant mass media that is reluctant to question the wisdom of a war backed by powerful government and corporate interests. George Orwell’s depiction of the need for external enemies to justify extensive government powers in
1984
has been largely borne out since the book’s appearance in 1948. US President Dwight Eisenhower warned the world about the dangers of what he called the “Military-Industrial
Complex,” which he feared would dominate US policy if unchecked, running the US in its interests rather than those of the population as a whole. Voices such as those of I. F. Stone in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, and Noam Chomsky today have exposed many of the propaganda ruses used to promote the military-industrial interests. Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the press important documents, known as the Pentagon Papers, compiled by the Pentagon during the Vietnam War that showed the strength of the opposing forces to be much greater than the military was revealing to the public, with General William Westmoreland regularly promising “light at the end of the tunnel.” Senator J. William Fulbright showed in a 1970 book,
The Pentagon Propaganda Machine
, how the Pentagon used PR techniques, such as co-opting citizen group leaders, to overcome resistance to the deployment of missiles in various sites across the country.

Celebrating war heroes is good for recruitment, but the Pentagon’s initial attempts to lionize soldiers Pat Tillman in Afghanistan and Jessica Lynch in Iraq were thwarted when it came to light that the former had been killed by “friendly fire” and the latter, by her own account, had been in no condition to fight back, contrary to stories about her bravely taking on the enemy in an exchange of gunfire. Both Lynch and Tillman’s family resented the deceit and the false honors bestowed on them by the military for its own purposes.

Modern propaganda is largely shaped in democracies by a public relations industry that has grown by leaps and bounds in the last fifty years. Hill & Knowlton, a public affairs and public relations consultancy, helped US President George H. W. Bush get support for the war against Iraq in 1991, following the invented story that Iraqi soldiers took over three hundred babies from incubators in Kuwait, leaving them to die while taking the incubators to Baghdad. A tearful young woman, identified only as Nayirah testified that she saw an instance where this happened, and her moving testimony was widely broadcast. Only later was she revealed to be the daughter of Kuwaiti Ambassador Saud Nasir al-Sabah, who obviously had an interest in helping the US go to war. The official story to justify a second, US-led attack on Iraq in 2003 was that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he was ready and able to deliver and that Iraq would soon have a nuclear capability. Further, it was said that
he had been in collusion with al-Qaeda and bore some responsibility for events of 9/11. Undeniably, Hussein had at one time used gas to poison Kurds and had supported payment to relatives of terrorists, but the other claims did not stand up to later investigation.

Those who doubt official stories used to promote war or shift blame are often branded conspiracy theorists. Yet the document “Operation Northwoods,” mentioned earlier in connection with Pisitratus, should be convincing evidence that Pentagon planners are capable of thinking up outrageous and intricate deceptions for propaganda purposes.

One of the pioneers of public relations early in the twentieth century was Ivy Lee, who wrote about the ethics of this activity. He had one rule for ethical public relations: do not misrepresent the source of your information; if someone has paid you to disseminate a message in his or her interests, you should not conceal that source. The current propaganda scene is awash with misrepresentations breaking this rule, one example being the use of “video news releases.” These appear to be genuine news broadcasts, using bona fide journalists, but they are often scripted and filmed by a corporation or government department to get its message across, knowing that free, well-produced footage will be welcomed by television stations, saving them the cost. When the stations don’t acknowledge the source, the viewer loses an important item of information affecting the credibility of the message.

Similarly, the phenomenon of “Astroturf” creates a deception. For example, industrialist David Koch funds “grassroots” organizations that agitate on his behalf to benefit his interests. If the same messages came from him they would be viewed suspiciously, but by funding a front group, say, against climate change theories, the message becomes more easily accepted in the public consciousness. PR Watch is a public-interest group that has exposed these kinds of deceptions online for many years, and with books by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton.

More recently, on April 20, 2008, the
New York Times
brought attention to high-ranking retired military officers and how they often speak out in support of Pentagon initiatives. The fact of their being retired might seem to enhance their detachment, but revelation of lucrative contracts with military-allied groups belies that detachment. In all of this, the mass media would do the public a service by seeking to expose the source of news items, including relevant funding, rather
than referring to anonymous sources or officials who speak “on condition they not be named.” Sometimes anonymity must be respected, but an editor could insist that short of revealing the identity of an informant, the possible motivations for speaking should be revealed.

The main hope for countering propaganda lies in exposing it. In the past, leaks helped to expose deceptions perpetrated by the tobacco industry, and the pharmaceutical industry has had whistle-blowers calling attention to unpublicized harmful side effects found by researchers. Today, the arrival of WikiLeaks, the organization founded by Julian Assange with the purpose of guaranteeing anonymity to those who would leak important information, brings a whole new dimension to the risks and strategies of propaganda operations. With Twitter, Facebook, and other means of internet connection, messages can reach huge populations in a very short time, providing speedy and timely counter-propaganda. Financial institutions that tried to cut off Assange’s access to their services were bombarded with computergenerated messages sent by a group called “Anonymous,” effectively jamming their operations.