Military PR
Resisting the Manipulation of Public Support
In these articles, written during the Iraq War, I looked at the way in which people adapt their thinking to support their governments in times of war - and how governments help them. Then I look at how one might resist, using the Internet, and some of the psychology involved.
In the first I draw on an example from Germany when, after the defeat at Stalingrad, Hitler's Propoganda Minister, Dr Joseph Goebbels, nevertheless received huge ovations for a call for "Total War".
In the second article, written a few days later, I looked the adaption of public opinion in more depth. People do not, of course, go straight over from opposing war to becoming its enthusiastic supporters. In both the US and the UK many people ended up facing both ways. This was best exemplified by a former British cabinet minister Mo Mowlam who, having opposed the war, who, once the war had started, called for ending the restraint on bombing, in order to win quicker...
The third article looks at how one might resist these processes which attempt to get us to adapt our view of reality to fall in line with the war mongers. Against the war machine we may feel helpless and yet feel filled with outrage. In the age of the Internet we have new tools at our disposal to express our dissent. Above all, as members of the public we are entitled to ask questions and to expect answers from the departments and ministries in which the decisions to kill are made, as well as from those companies and organisations complicit with them, and where the consequences show up later. The idea here is that the individuals who run these organisations are ordinary human beings - who have to carry the responsibility for what they do. Written at at a time of war it is, however, important, I think, to keep the pressure up afterwards so thaty they cannot bury their responsibility by trying to forget. So that they cannot ignore the issues.....Several weeks down the line there is still not sign of weapons of mass destruction - except for the ones used by the British and American military...
The fourth article is very brief and looks at official jargon as a way of covering up the truth. It gives a few examples. Many more could have been given about the ways to be "economical with the truth".
(At the time of revisiting these articles, a few weeks after I wrote them, I am aware of chilling news from Spain, that the proposals sit before Spanish parliament for adjusting the Military Code so that civilians can be imprisoned for "defeatism" if they oppose a war that Spain - or its allies are involved in......Propoganda, of course, is not enough, naked intimidation is also a part of how power structures work....In the Iraq war this intimidation was exemplified by the murder of several journalists who operated independently....)
Article 1 - The PR Machine at Work - Remembering Dr Goebbels
Yesterday at a demonstration outside the BBC in Nottingham someone told me that Geoff Hoon, our War Minister, had boasted that the PR on the war was going well. I was told that Hoon, like Blair and his wife, were barristers, people whose job it is to argue a case in an adversarial setting. And later in the evening I turned on BBC radio, by chance, and heard part of the programme "Any Questions". I was, at first, particularly pleased as someone asked a similar question to the one that I had thought of myself yesterday, about casualties and what level of civilian casualties the government would "call it a day at", in other words admit it had all been futile - given that their argument was that they were against weapons that would kill a lot of people, given that they were claiming to liberate Iraq from the brutality of Saddam. Then my pleasure at a real question turned to horror as David Dimbleby took the question away. "If I may be allowed to rephrase that question..." He said, and then rephrased it in a way that got the government off the hook. Well done David Dimbleby - credit where credit is due. He did a good job of defusing a difficult one.
Working, as I do, in Mental Health, I think it helps to be reminded that people will avoid painful truths. Now that the war has started many people are gravitating to believing the government. It is too uncomfortable to do otherwise. For if you don't believe the government is right then you cannnot go about your daily routine any more in the same way if you have any integrity - you have to make choices like resigning, or devoting a large part of your time to something other than the daily routine of work, shopping, doing the domestic chores....It all becomes at best incovenient, at worse, frightening and painful. So people of course want to look the other way. Now the war is started they want to believe the government. And people like David Dimbleby help them do so.
What do they want to believe - well, that our brave boys are doing the best job under difficult circumstances and that, as the Mirror puts it, over and over again, that for all his faults, Tony Blair is "sincere".
Frankly the matter of Tony Blair's sincerity misses the point. Recently I read an article in the German weekly Der Spiegel about Hitler's Mephistopholes, his PR man, Joseph Goebbels. 60 years ago, on the 18th February 1943, after the German armies had suffered a crushing defeat at Stalingrad , and the tide of the war had turned, the enthusiasm of the German public for war was kept alive by Goebbels. It was widely regarded as a masterpiece of PR by Hitler's propoganda master and barrister for the Nazi war cause. It took place in the Sports Palace in Berlin, in front of film cameras and radio, and with 10,000 who were claimed to have been specially chosen for the occaision. They were said to be a cross section of (Nazi) German society, including war amputees from the Eastern Front. When Goebbels got up to speak he stylised the occaision as a plebicite at which he yelled out questions like "Do you want total war?" "Are you prepared, if necessary, for a war that is yet more total, yet more radical than you can possibly conceive it today?" And at each question the mass rose with stormy enthusiasm and yelled at the top of their voices - "Yes" - their voices, their votes for carnage and destruction, being broadcast to the rest of the world.
Now, of course, it is not like that here. We are British. We understate things. Yet we have no less a capacity as the German people then, as any human being, for self deception, for being led to believe the things that we would prefer to believe, because it is easier and less frightening for us. It's important to remember how ordinary we all are, and how vulnerable. When the people who attended Goebbell's famous speech were asked, 60 years later what they felt at the time, Der Spiegel found it was difficult for them get themselves back into the previous state of mind. Their embarrassment and their struggle to explain themselves was painful. "We wanted to believe", "Perhaps we had gradually become accustomed to thinking that kind of thing". It was too painful and frightening to go against the mass. For example, Dr Goebbel's secretary, Bruenhilde Pomsel, now 92, was motivated by others things - the pay was good in the Propoganda Ministry she said. She joined the Nazi Party of course, because everyone did, and the office was nice although the job was sometimes boring with not a lot to do. As a young secretary her main concern was to do her job well to please her boss. "I had this idealistic notion that if my boss trusted me, I shouldn't let him down".
And that brings me to my main point. When we write to civil servants who work in the Ministry of Defence, or the Foreign Office, we write to ordinary people like this. They want to believe and they want to do a good job for their bosses - someone they know as a perhaps distant and charismatic person in an office which has become their daily world, a part of their security and ordinay lives.
We write too, to people whose job it is to argue cases, to make PR, and they sit down with our words, analysing them, not to see what that they can learn from what we are saying, what truths we may have uttered, but immediately interpreting us from the point of view of how are arguments can be countered, indeed how they can be used. For when people like us write, for example, to the Ministry of Defence, it is all useful information which can be used in the design of their PR strategy - which they then boast about later, utterly unconcerned about the issues themselves, but very happy that they have done a good job in countering our arguments and swinging the opinions polls their way. (Ministry of Defence 1. Peace Movement 0.)
In this regard we should remember that people are not alike. What people devote their time, their attention and their lives to are very different. Some people play a game in life in which they are the professionals at arguing a cause. it is not an accident that the government of Spin is led by former barristers. For people like this satisfaction in life, meaning, self esteem, professional and political advancement is to be found in winning the argument - and this is not the same mind set as open mindedly exploring the alternative viewpoint for its truth content. Barristers like this read our texts from the point of view of "How can we knock this down?", not "What has this got to tell us?".
This comes back to a question of the sincerity of Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon. Of course, there is a sense in which any barrister has to believe in their case to articulate it well. Before they can convince others, they must first convince themselves. But this is hardly the point. A recent article in the Guardian claimed that Tony Blair does not look into things in depth before he makes up his mind. Perhaps as Prime Minster he feels that he is entitled to assume that he is well advised by senior civil servants and colleagues so that, in a technocratic way, he is following the best course. With only a very shallow emotional attachment to the Labour movement cause, because he has never experience what it is like to be on the receiving end of a power structure, he does sincerely believe in his experts and the networked clubs of powerful interests that surround him. He is indeed sincere - but his sincerity is borne in that naivety that all powerful people have about their world view, the aerial view, from the pinnacles of power. It is a world in statistics and policy options. It is seemingly more comprehensive and appears to be more real than the view on the ground, where the heads of children are blown off and people, like you and me, with bodies made of soft tissues made up of 70% water, are shredded by their cluster bombs.
Just over two years after his PR coup Dr Goebbels, Hitler's Mephistopholes, the PR expert was dead. After he and his wife Magda had killed their large family of young children, they killed themselves. Rather than accept the reality of defeat, that was already clear to many, and rather than sueing for peace, the Propoganda machine had succeeded and the German people had been led to support what was to become a yet greater catastrophe for world and for Germany itself......(some text deleted - it was wrong - it predicted a longer war!)
Article 2 - Public Opinion and Politicians who face both ways
When they don't know what is going on, people anxiously hedge their bets in controversial situations, trying to keep everyone happy and not fall out with anyone. As everyone knows we are supposed to support our country in a war, so we do. And yet we actually don't support it so we don't. This is, in large part, the true state of British public opinion.
According to a poll a couple of days ago support for the war in Iraq has dropped below 50 percent for the first time since the conflict started - But the poll for GMTV and the Daily Mirror showed an overwhelming 78 percent do not want British troops brought home until the war is over, however long it takes. This crazy position is best exemplified by Mo Mowlam in the UK who says she opposes the war yet advocates stepping up the bombing campaign.
In the conventional psychiatric way of thinking mental health problems can happen only to individuals, not collectively. Thus if large number of people think that a wafer and wine is the body and blood of Christ, then that is not a mental health problem. However, an individual believing their fish and chip supper, after a few pints, is the body and blood of Christ might end up being investigated for something wrong with the neurology of their brains.
However, imagine someone was involved in a shoot out with their neighbours and shouted out "I'm opposed to this happening, you know - but as it is happening, I've got to totally destroy you - otherwise I'll never get away with it....". I think you might want to bring in a forensic psychiatrist when you call in police to the scene. This is the position of Mo Mowlam, a former British Cabinet Minister.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/030403/80/dwv8t.html
Similar crazy positions are to be found in the US and put by politicians there. This article, also in Counterpunch, on http://www.counterpunch.org/gorman04042003.html discusses the facing both ways position
".....There is, then, a divergence between "supporting the war" and "supporting the troops." Conventional thought, however, would have us believing the opposite..."
Article 3 - Waging Peace Ruthlessly
I am sure that many people in the face of the mounting horror feel that they are helpless. We read how Baghdad is being turned, in every sense literally, into a slaughter house for human beings and watch while the financial markets whoop for joy as they anticipate the profits that will come, as they hope, sooner than they had previously expected. And we start to look away too because we cannot bear to see such things which seem so terrifyingly shocking and so aweful.
And that is exactly the intended effect! We must never question our betters - all resistance is futile - they are too powerful, they can do just whatever they like. That is exactly their intended message.
But it isn't true. There is something very different this time. Despite all the attempts to stop the truth coming out, the stories keep on coming. I can hardly write the name of Robert Fisk without bursting into a flood of tears. What Robert Fisk and others like him, like the journalists of Al Jazeera, whose offices were bombed today - what they do is to confront us with the human reality of what is happening. They describe what is happening to people like us, people who were trying to lead ordinary lives, in the streets, homes, offices, hospitals of that city. And they give us the information that we must use as our part of weaponry for peace - for us to use in order to end this bloody carnage.
Yet people ask themselves - what can I possibly do? Well demonstrate for one thing, Wednesday morning at the Inland Revenue Offices in Nottingham, or this Saturday in London - but not only demonstrate.
Writing to the politicians and the civil servants seems so pathetically inadequate at a time like this - and yet the writings of Fisk and the pictures of Al Jazeera do not seem pathetic, they fill us with powerful emotions, they urge us to act. We ask ourselves what can we possibly say that will add to their power? What is the magic ingredient that will make the politicians, the money men and the lying journalists change heart?
There is no other magic ingredient, there are no more things that we, leading our comfortable lives, can add - these words and these horrific pictures must be sent on direct. They must be sent back to the people who launched this war - direct into their offices, direct to their internet terminals. We must make them accept the human reality of what they are doing and what they have done. It is not for us to judge them - we must send them the material that will condemn them: condemn them to judge themselves.
Most of those who have been caught up, without much thinking about it, in the process that led up this war, are ordinary people. They are civil servants, media people, politicians. They are not unlike the ordinary people of Baghdad caught up in a process they feel that they cannot control
"Saadia Hussein Al-Shomari is pin-cushioned with bloody holes. She is the civil servant from the Iraqi Ministry of Trade and she lies asleep, exhausted by pain, another doctor swiping the flies off her wounds with a piece of cardboard, asking me — as if I knew — whether a human can recover from a severe wound to the liver. A relative tells slowly how Saadia was leaving her home in the Baghdad Jdeidi district when an American plane dropped a cluster bomb on the estate. "There were some neighbors of hers. They were all hit. From one of them, a leg flew off, from another, an arm and a leg went flying into the air." .
This is what happens to ordinary people like us in Baghdad.
The civil servants, media and junior politicians here are faced with a different set of issues. In this country I am sure that many are having to do very hard psychological work trying to hold out of their minds, the full horror of what they are justifying, and the terrible sense of shame that they that know, in a difficult to smother part of themselves, they ought to fully feel. They are having to adopt the psychological mechanisms which people use in these circumstances - those of avoidance. They push their doubts to one edge of their minds. Thereby they avoid addressing the questions and ideas that would fully explore these insistent doubts. To do so would plunge them into an icy sense of guilt, a collapse of self esteem and of self respect, unless they were to take the unthinkable step of acting against the war machine for which they work. They surround themselves with people that think like them, and read the papers that use their language and that tell them what they want to hear as reassurances.
Even so, for many of them, I've no doubt that in their minds, it feels like there is an emotional damn that might break, that they dare not contemplate. Perhaps they feel jittery too - so they insulate themselves from the consequences of what they are justifying. They return home to nice houses with gardens in places like Paddock Wood, or Brighton, or Hampstead or Belsize Park, which they have to pay mortgages for, find as many distractions as they can, in sport, or strenuous exercise or in their ordinary pursuits. They try to switch off, seeking reassurance in the conversations of people like themselves. But this is at a terrible cost to their own humanity - and they do not, dare not, stop to recognise that this is why, despite all their psychological defences, that nevertheless the doubt, and the frightening questions, keep on reappearing into their field of consciousness.
Mo Mowlam writes in the Daily Mirror:
"My awful conclusion is we must win this war quickly, and be seen to be brave, powerful and invincible. We have no option but to....adopt the option with more bombing and taking the war to the enemy, even if that means the dreadful level of casualties that will go with it. We will still be hated, but we will be held in awe. That is now a consequence of any further action we take. Fear and respect is not as good as friendship and understanding but it is better than being despised."
So my conclusion is, so be it - as the cluster bombs rain down on Iraq tearing the children of Iraq to pieces, the images and stoires about these shredded children should rain down on Mo Mowlam, whose e mail address is MoMwlam@aol.com . (She left gave it after a Guardian article a few months ago). Why should she be allowed to escape in her "heart and her mind", from a full knowledge of the consequences of what she has advocated? As we sow, so shall ye reap. (There are a mass of web references that can be used for this in the section in civilian casualties in this digest.)
And we must accompany our e mails and letters with questions. We must make these human robots work. The Ministry of Defence has a performance standard, like the rest of the civil service, that members of the public are replied to in 3 weeks. So let's start asking them some questions about their lies - questions that will force them to question themselves too, as human beings.
If they say they are sincerely sorry about the civilian casualties then we can ask - did they try to estimate the number before hand? If not why not? What kind of sincerity is that? If they are "open minded" about DU weapons as health risks then when are they going to make up their minds? What kind of evidence is going to satisfy them? What are their comments about all the lies that they have made that we have discovered on the Internet?
If thousands of people started doing this then the Ministry of Defence would not be able to operate in the same way any more. You don't have to have a degree to do this. You just cut them out of the newspapers or the Internet and send it with a question. So what's stopping us? We should sent plenty of copies to our friends too, to make them aware how many people are noting what liars they are.
Here's their e mail address Public@ministers.mod.uk
While you are about it, send a copy to Geoff Hoon's constituency, so that "New Labour, the Kill for Oil Party" know what people think of their MP.
CONTACT@geof-hoon-mp.new.labour.org.uk
And how about some the academics, currently muttering over their coffee cups about how terrible the war is, chasing after the civil servants at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with information and questions about growing hostility to Brits around the world. This is the web page with their feedback form:
http://www.fco.gov.uk/servlet/Front?pagename=OpenMarket/Xcelerate/ShowPage&c=Page&cid=1007029390545
Or chasing cuddly Michael Meacher at the Department of the Environment with questions about the environmental devastation in the Gulf. Or laying into them with valid and important questions about prospects for the world oil market and an equitable division of energy for the world's poor. If you don't know where to ask your questions then ask:
Or getting on the tail of the Department of Health with the questions that they are not addressing about the health and mental health implications of the government's crimes. Or sending them a few e mailed pictures of Her Majesty's Government's current health policy for Iraq with a large number of pertinent questions attached
Also, when are we going to start bombarding the Treasury with questions about how much this war is costing that we will pay for out of our taxes. (The Treasury is a more difficult nut to crack. It's the money men ministry. The Treasury web site is all one way - it has a long statement about consultation with taxpayers on it, but no e mail address you can consult through....)
E mails to the Inland Revenue are easier - for example you can ask about the charity schemes that allow you to opt out of paying some taxes by donating part of your income to charities instead. Charities@inlandrevenue.gov.uk
And it doesn't just stop with the government. There's the BBC too that has to be called to account. Send them the news items that you have found, that they are not reporting and ask them why they are not covering these.
today@bbc.co.uk and pm@bbc.co.uk
And the business sector too. We can do this to the leaders of the business sector too - for example, which British firms make Depleted Uranium Weapons? When we find that out, we can ask whether their managers and shareholders at their shareholder meetings, what is the total number of deaths caused by their weapons? If they have not calculated these, why not? Do the children of the managers know how many deaths their parents are implicated in? Do their neighbours? Does their church congregation? Does the Rotary Club? Is it known in their charitable activities? Is it known to their GP? Do they know in the local pub? It's time we started waging peace quite as ruthlessly as they are waging war.
Few of us are going to be anywhere near a Robert Fisk, but let's do what we can do well, let's do what we know how to do. Let's put our time and effort into it - and let's tell our friends we are doing it, in this country and abroad.
It's called "calling them to account". We don't have to invent anything to say ourselves as we can cut and paste what others are saying, as well as seeing through the cameras in the killing fields that appear on the Internet. And then we ask the questions that they have got to be made to think about. To make the government "answerable" you must first ask them the questions.
Then the individuals who run the government have got to live with themselves for the rest of their lives.
In his poem, The Divine Comedy, Dante describes the bottom of pit of Hell, its ninth circle, not as a place were souls were burned in fire but where souls are frozen in the icy lake of lovelessness.
Then we can leave them to judge themselves.
Article 4 - Brief Guide to Official Phrases and Terminology
"We can't afford...." = "What me and my friends think the money should be spent on is more important than what you and
"I don't think we should be posing the arguments in those terms" = "You've just won that argument but I can try to prevent the people who are listening noticing.." (The David Dimbleby variant: "If I may be allowed to rephrase that for you, in this way....")
"No Comment" or "A Spokesman was unavailable for comment" = " You've caught us out and we are hiding until it blows over" (The John Heppell variant "I've had to cancel my MP's surgery this week....")
"We are open minded but....." = "We'll never agree to what you are saying because that would cost us a lot, but we are on weak ground, so we are going to string you along on this question until you get fed up and give up....."
Brian Davey