We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, April 21, 2014

Towards the End of U.S. Propaganda

Click here to access article by Thierry Meyssan from VoltaireNet.

Meyssan proposes a very interesting, hopeful argument that the world of ruling class propaganda has changed, and changed for the better. He reviews the early, successful history of war propaganda starting in 1915 when the British issued the infamous Bryce Report on German war crimes to enlist their population in a war against Germany, and continues with such efforts during WWII. He argues that the present proliferation of alternative sources of information has radially changed things. I think he is referring to the internet and the access it gives to people all over the world, to TV media networks like RT, and such journalists as Pepe Escobar, that are independent of Empire control and accessible in the US.
Barack Obama and Benjamin Rhodes , John Kerry and Richard Stengel act only in the short term. Their propaganda convinces the masses for only a few weeks and then helps create revulsion when the people understand they are being manipulated. Unwittingly, they undermine the credibility of the state institutions of NATO who consciously relay them. They forget that the propaganda of the twentieth century could only succeed because the world was divided into blocks that did not communicate with one another, and this monolithic principle is incompatible with the new means of communication.