Salon.com > Propaganda

New documents reveal A.A. Milne was a secret wartime propagandist

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:52:00 +0000

New documents reveal that venerated "Winnie-the-Pooh" author A.A. Milne, a steadfast pacifist, secretly served as a wartime propagandist for a top-secret intelligence unit called MI7b during WWI.

According to the Telegraph, MI7b was founded in 1916 and designed "to sustain support for the war":

The secret propaganda unit was established in 1916 to sustain support for the war when the enormous numbers of soldiers killed were rising and increasing anti-war movements were sweeping war-torn Europe.

It was made up of 20 other authors taken from the best of British talent at the time, who had to write thousands of positive newspaper articles about Victoria Cross winners, heroism and sanitised accounts of life in the trenches - as well as reports of atrocities by German troops.

Although most of the articles were destroyed, one of the members of the unit, Capt James Lloyd, saved a collection that his great nephew, Jeremy Arter, only recently discovered. He told the Telegraph that "I was astonished when my research showed that they were meant to have been destroyed soon after the war because they were deemed 'too incriminating.'"

When artspeak masks oppression

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 22:48:00 +0000

“Without its special language, would art need to submit to the scrutiny of broader audiences and local ones? Would it hold up?” So asks online art publication Triple Canopy’s widely circulated essay “International Art English,” in which the authors catalogued the death of meaning in the language of contemporary art. It’s a perceptive study, though after offering a half-alternative (“the elite … will opt for something like conventional highbrow English”), the article ends in media reswith a sarcastic shrug: an evocative morsel of IAE — a press release — reformatted into a prose poem.

By so abstracting their position into parody, the authors misread the most significant consequence of this new language, loosed upon a world in which prisoners of conscience languish in the jails of the world’s emerging contemporary art superpowers. The unsurprising reality is that a specialized language fraught with euphemism and obfuscation is better known as propaganda.

When the CIA infiltrated Hollywood

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:22:00 +0000

AT A TIME WHEN THE CIA is still hiding the details of its extrajuridical drone strike assassination program from congressional watchdogs and the media, one would think it an awkward moment for Hollywood to confer Academy Awards on films that celebrate its secret agents.

But apparently not. While a robust debate has emerged about Zero Dark Thirty’s depiction of torture, the film largely celebrates the tireless spycraft of a CIA analyst who was complicit. Meanwhile, Argo is an unqualified nod towards the CIA’s collaboration with Hollywood in liberating hostages held in Iran in 1979.

Argo and Zero Dark Thirty are only the latest film productions the CIA has influenced in the 15 years since the Agency opened its official liaison office to Hollywood. Tricia Jenkins examines the history of this version of “Hollywood confidential” in The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television. Short and dry, her book raises serious ethical and legal questions about the relationship between the CIA and Hollywood, and the extent to which we consume propaganda from one through the other.

What does a police state look like?

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 13:29:00 +0000

What does a police state really look like in practice in America? Is it the cartoonish dystopia of sci-fi books? Is it like 1998's "The Siege," which predicted a wholesale instatement of martial law? Or in the age of the drone-wielding police department, is it something more mundane and subtle yet nonetheless pernicious? From this city in the middle of Middle America, it looks like the latter.

When people think of Denver, many think of skiing and, since the last election, marijuana. But from here in the Mile High City, things seem a bit different. In the day to day operation of the city, we aren't as much defined by snow and pot as we are by the fact that we live under the rule of an increasingly brutal police force. It is a police force that our political leaders are more than happy to deploy to punish undesirables, and worse, that the most powerful media organ is more than happy to defend.

We have become, in short, a national cautionary tale -- one that no doubt epitomizes similar trends throughout the country.

Julian Assange on WikiLeaks movie: “It is a massive propaganda attack”

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 19:00:00 +0000

As the question of truth in film continues to dominate Hollywood by way of "Zero Dark Thirty," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has spoken out against "The Fifth Estate," saying "It is a lie upon lie. The movie is a massive propaganda attack on WikiLeaks and the character of my staff."

Although the movie isn't set to premiere until November, Assange has obtained a copy of the script--and doesn't approve. From within London's Ecuadorian embassy, where Assange remains in hiding, he connected with Oxford University students via Internet and slammed the film, which allegedly contains scenes regarding a nuclear weapons program in Iran. "How does this have anything to do with us?... How is it that a lie gets into a script about WikiLeaks?" he asked. He called the scenes "an attack against us [WikiLeaks]" as well as "an attack against Iran." "It fans the flames to start a war with Iran," he said.

Pundit: GOP should buy women’s magazines

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 16:59:00 +0000

In a New York Post editorial, Instapundit’s Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a simple reason for why Republicans performed poorly with “low-information” female voters: The party didn't make nice in the media. Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson threw $150 million at the campaign but Reynolds would like to see the money spent on a friendlier brand of propaganda than attack ads:

My suggestion: Buy some women’s magazines. No, really. Or at least some women’s Web sites…

For $150 million, you could buy or start a lot of women’s Web sites. And I’d hardly change a thing in the formula. The nine articles on sex, shopping and exercise could stay the same. The 10th would just be the reverse of what’s there now.

For the pro-Republican stuff, well, just visit the “Real Mitt Romney” page at snopes.com, or look up the time Mitt Romney rescued a 14-year-old kidnap victim, to see the kind of feel-good stories that could have been running. For the others, well, it would run articles on whether Bill Clinton should get a pass on his affairs, whether it’s right that the Obama White House pays women less than men, and reports on how the tax system punishes women.

I got duped by Glenn Beck!

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 20:57:00 +0000

Two weeks ago I discovered, to my surprise, that I had line-edited an early draft of Glenn Beck’s new novel, "Agenda 21." Glenn Beck! At the time I was working on it, the manuscript belonged to its actual author, a woman named Harriet Parke, who lives a few minutes from my aunt. But a year and a few lawyers later, Glenn Beck purchased the right to call himself its creator, and Ms. Parke agreed to be presented as a ghostwriter.

I would be proud to have my name in the acknowledgments of Ms. Parke’s novel. But given that it is printed inside a book bearing Glenn Beck’s name, the work I did is now deeply at odds with who I am as an editor. "Agenda 21" is going out into the world on Tuesday, Nov. 20, as something decidedly different from the novel I edited. Yes, the story is the same. So are the concepts, the characters and the writing. But the name in the byline — that changes the book’s intent. It changes everything.

Syria’s vicious propaganda wars

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:46:00 +0000

ALEPPO, Syria — Videos posted to the internet have played a key propaganda role in Syria's bloody civil war. The footage typically shows brutal attacks, beatings and mass executions. Many clips show rows of dead women and children.

But are these videos reliable?

Last month, a fighter in Aleppo handed a reporter his cell phone, shaking his head in disbelief. “Assad, Assad,” he said.

On the screen was a video of someone beheading a prisoner with a chainsaw. It had been circulating in Syria for at least a year. The footage itself is very real, but it is five years old, and was shot in Mexico. Drug lords carried out the crime. The video has been used by rebels in conflicts all over the world.

The sham videos can have very real effects, creating sympathy for one side or the other. Last week, the United Nations accused the rebels of war crimes, based on a YouTube video of fighters executing prisoners. This type of atrocity makes intervention less appealing to the West.