Movie ”The War You Don’t See” by John Pilger. Edward Bernays war on people and Creel Committee.

“… slaughter known as the first World War. 16 Millions died and 21 million were wounded. At the height of the Carnage the Prime Minister of Great Britain David Lloyd George had a private chat with the editor of the Guardian CP Scott “If people really knew the truth” said the Prime Minister “the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don’t know and can’t know”. The British public were desperate for real news. More than half the nation flocked to see an official propaganda film “The Battle of the Somme”. Cameras were so unusual that young troops would shout “hello mum” as they marched to the front and they were heard crying for their mothers as they died on the battlefield; this was almost never reported… A pioneer of modern propaganda was this man Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the term public relations. He wrote: the intelligent manipulation of the masses is an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country. He was part of a secretive group called the U.S Committee on Public Information (Creel Committee) set up in 1917 to persuade reluctant Americans to join the war in Europe. Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann went to Woodrow Wilson and said: look man if you’re going to enter into this war, we are going to need to sell this war to the American people and so Wilson institutes and creates the first modern propaganda Machinery. It was actually quite brilliant in its conceptualization. So that the best way to persuade people is to grab them by their emotions, by their unconscious and instinctual urges, let’s not bother with pumping out facts, let’s scare the hell out of people. A picture of the Statue of Liberty in tatters crumbled into the New York Harbor with German planes flying around it. A picture of the world being gobbled up by the bloody hands of a gorilla wearing a German Helmet. So you know it’s not about facts anymore, the facts don’t matter. For Edward Bernays Public Relations was like a war on people, on bending their will.” -The War You Don’t See” by John Pilger

Britain also made extensive use of propaganda during World War 1, and Hitler, who once famously stated “Propaganda, propaganda, propaganda. All that matters is propaganda”, was intrigued by the success of the allied war propaganda. Explaining the effect such propaganda had on him, Hitler wrote:

“But it was not until the war that it became evident what immense results can be obtained by a correct application of propaganda. Here again, unfortunately, all our study had to be done on the enemy side, for the activity on our side was modest, to say the least… For what we failed to do, the enemy did, with amazing skill and really brilliant calculation. I, myself, learned enormously from this enemy war propaganda.” – Adolf Hitler.

“The Creel Commission…succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world – Noam Chomsky, Media Control.

I am old enough to remember coverage of the second war in Iraq. I was a teenager during this time. I vaguely remember watching coverage on TV of Saddam Hussein’s statue being destroyed. I remember back then thinking it was legitimate. But it was just propaganda organized by the US. You got a BBC report that covered it describing it as “made for TV moment”. The issue is if you go and ask people on the street over 95% of people will tell you it was a legitimate moment, some of them may say Iraq was wrong but that moment was legitimate, but it was not. Back then I remember watching coverage on TV and on Al-jazizera English on the internet. I saw Al-jazizera had more reliable coverage.

Most people don’t know history so they believe what they are told. I have understood most of what we are told is bullshit some time ago, then another question arrived “How can people believe such lies?”.  I was not the first one to ask that question. This is a great lecture by Aldous Huxley that is a good introduction to this subject.

“INTERVIEWER: Guest Mr. Aldous Huxley, now an essayist, is a novelist who during the spring semester is residing at the University and its capacity as a Ford research professor. Mr. Huxley has recently returned from a conference at the Institute for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, where the discussion focused on the development of new techniques by which to control indirect human behavior. Traditionally it is impossible to suppress individual freedom through the application of physical coercion, through the appeal of ideologies, through the manipulation of man’s physical and social environment and more recently techniques of psychological conditioning. The ultimate revolution about which Mr. Huxley will speak today concerns itself with the development of new behavioral controls which operate directly upon the psycho-physiological organisms of man. That is the capacity to replace external constraint by internal compulsions as those of us who are familiar with Mr. Huxley’s works will know this is a subject with which he has been concerned for quite a period of time. Mr. Huxley will make a presentation of approximately half an hour followed by some brief discussions and questions by the two panelists sitting to my left of Miss Lillian Rivlin and mr. John post and mr. Huxley.

Aldous Huxley: …there seems to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution, this method of control by which people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs which by any decent standard they ought not to enjoy. This I mean the enjoyment of servitude, well this process as I say has gone on for over over the years and if I become more and more interested in what is happening.”

To understand how the tendency of human beings to engage in group-identification renders the masses manipulable, we must turn to one of Freud’s ideas which heavily influenced the manipulation techniques developed by Bernays. In his book Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays explained:

“It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud who have pointed out that many of man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself. A man buying a car may think he wants it for purposes of locomotion…He may really want it because it is a symbol of social position, an evidence of his success in business, or a means of pleasing his wife.” -Propaganda, Edward Bernays

“Now that we know how positive reinforcement works, and why negative doesn’t, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled…nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement—there’s no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.” -B.F. Skinner, Walden Two