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A CubaNews translation by Ana
Portela.
Recently, hysteria was unleashed in London when the British secret services announced the discovery of a plot to down planes between the United Kingdom and the United States. The British police then announced they had 15 suspects of Muslim origin, nationalized British, who were members of “radical Islamic centers” but, to date, they have not shown them or revealed their identities to the mass media that has bred panic with their alleged avalanche of objective information. It just so happens that fear has always been a useful ruse for propaganda and became an institutionalized tool of United States political propaganda when the administration of President Wilson wanted to enter World War I. At the time, the Creel Commission was set up to be in charge of obtaining support by the United States with news reporting Belgian children butchered by German troops. It was so successful that it soon became the central core of a campaign which has dominated most of last century until the fall of the Berlin Wall: the red scare. It was Walter Lippmann, a US journalist at the time, who theorized on how a democracy can manufacture consent using propaganda techniques to influence the public to accept something that, initially, it had rejected. He was also the architect of the idea of a “lost flock” that had to be guided by a minority in charge of thinking and planning for “the common good”. With theoretical tools such as these, the bases were set for what would become, in time and little push by the elite in power, the empire of public relations, an industry that today moves millions of dollars and controls something so strategic as public opinion. There is no need to be scrupulous: the recipes include ingredients such as lying, misinformation, falsifying history, demonizing, always spiked with the most cynical pragmatism. The key of this issue is to keep “the flock” from knowing its own reality with something to take his interest and, preferably, intimidated through an aggressive mass media campaign. Now it is not the Germans or the Russians but the Muslims. And if they are the Al Qaedas and Osama Bin Ladens so much the better because never before had an enemy been so used to the point that his actions give an inkling of suspect opportunity. Last May, Zogby International Institute released the results of a survey which revealed that 42 percent of US citizens express doubts about the official version of the events of September 11; they also consider that the investigation commission did a cover-up. There are, also 44 percent who consider that Bush used the attacks to launch the war against Iraq. After five years of the destruction of the Twin Towers, the worldwide war against terrorism unleashed by the United States president; a war it could not stop and which has benefited the White House and those who have the real power of that nation. Many analysts agree that the attacks in New York and Washington (September 11, 2001), Madrid (May 11, 2004) and London (July 7, 2005) have only benefited the interests of the neo-conservative political elite of the United States. First, achieving consensus to invade Afghanistan and later Iraq; second, thanks to the impact on US society which contributed to the re-election of Bush; and third, it was another important contribution to broaden the repressive horizon of the so-called Patriot Act, pillar of the National Security Doctrine. Since then, the world has lived under an atmosphere of paranoia between wars, allegedly preventive, and the discovery of terrorist plots and plans, often lacking basis and evidence, as now happens with the foiled terrorist attempt to blow up commercial flights. Bush soon rushed to see what he could gain from the spectacle when he stupidly said: “It is a mistake to think that there is no threat to the United States. Now we are a safer country than before September 11, but we are not completely safe…” Of course the US congressional elections are near. The genocide of Israel in Lebanon, and the evil actions of Yankee troops in Iraq and Afghanistan need, in this case, to hide their dreadful image. But, as the story goes, the town bully tried to inflict fear so often that he himself became afraid. As a start we must not be naïve over what the mass media repeatedly insists upon.
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