The American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women they should smoke in public. By associating smoking with women’s liberation, he made cigarettes ‘torches of freedom’. In 1954, he conjured a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the democratically-elected government, whose social reforms were threatening the United Fruit company’s monopoly of the banana trade. He called it a ‘liberation’.
Bernays was no rabid right-winger. He was an elitist liberal who believed that ‘engineering public consent’ was for the greater good. This was achieved by the creation of ‘false realities’ which then became ‘news events’. Here are examples of how it is done these days:
False reality: The last US combat troops have left Iraq ‘as promised, on schedule’, according to President Barack Obama. TV screens have filled with cinematic images of the ‘last US soldiers’ silhouetted against the dawn light, crossing the border into Kuwait.
Fact: They are still there. At least 50,000 troops will continue to operate from 94 bases. American air assaults are unchanged, as are special forces’ assassinations. The number of ‘military contractors’ is currently 100,000 and rising. Most Iraqi oil is now under direct foreign control.
False reality: BBC presenters and reporters have described the departing US troops as a ‘sort of victorious army’ that has achieved ‘a remarkable change in [Iraq’s] fortunes’. Their commander, General David Petraeus, is a ‘celebrity’, ‘charming’, ‘savvy’ and ‘remarkable’.
Fact: There is no victory of any sort. There is a catastrophic disaster; and attempts to present it as otherwise are a model of Bernays’ campaign to ‘re-brand’ the slaughter of the first world war as ‘necessary’ and ‘noble’. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, running for president, re-branded the invasion of Vietnam, in which up to three million people died, as a ‘noble cause’, a theme taken up enthusiastically by Hollywood. Today’s Iraq war movies have a similar purging theme: the invader as both idealist and victim.
False reality: It is not known how many Iraqis have died. They are ‘countless’ or maybe ‘in the tens of thousands’.
Fact: As a direct consequence of the Anglo-American led invasion, a million Iraqis have died. This figure from Opinion Research Business is based on peer-reviewed research led by Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC, whose methods were secretly affirmed as ‘best practice’ and ‘robust’ by the Blair government’s chief scientific adviser, as revealed in a Freedom of Information search. This figure is rarely reported or presented to ‘charming’ and ‘savvy’ American generals. Neither is the dispossession of four million Iraqis, the malnourishment of most Iraqi children, the epidemic of mental illness and the poisoning of the environment.
False reality: The British economy has a deficit of billions which must be reduced with cuts in public services and regressive taxation, in a spirit of ‘we’re all in this together’.
Fact: We are not in this together. What is remarkable about this public relations triumph is that only 18 months ago the diametric opposite filled TV screens and front pages. Then, in a state of shock, truth was unavoidable, if briefly. The Wall Street and City of London financiers’ trough was on full view for the first time, along with the venality of once celebrated snouts. Billions in public money went to inept and crooked organisations known as banks, which were spared debt liability by their Labour government sponsors.
Within a year, record profits and personal bonuses were posted, and state and media propaganda had recovered its equilibrium. Suddenly, the ‘black hole’ was no longer the responsibility of the banks, whose debt is to be paid by those not in any way responsible: the public. The received media wisdom of this ‘necessity’ is now a chorus, from the BBC to The Sun. A masterstroke, Bernays would surely say.
False reality: The former government minister Ed Miliband offers a ‘genuine alternative’ as leader of the British Labour Party.
Fact: Miliband, like his brother David, the former foreign secretary, and almost all those standing for the Labour leadership, is immersed in the effluent of New Labour. As a New Labour MP and minister, he did not refuse to serve under Blair or speak out against Labour’s persistent warmongering. He now calls the invasion of Iraq a ‘profound mistake’. Calling it a mistake insults the memory and the dead. It was a crime, of which the evidence is voluminous. He has nothing new to say about the other colonial wars, none of them mistakes. Neither has he demanded basic social justice: that those who caused the recession clear up the mess and that Britain’s fabulously rich corporate minority be seriously taxed, starting with Rupert Murdoch.
Of course, the good news is that false realities often fail when the public trusts its own critical intelligence, not the media. Two classified documents recently released by Wikileaks express the CIA’s concern that the populations of European countries, which oppose their governments’ war policies, are not succumbing to the usual propaganda spun through the media. For the rulers of the world, this is a conundrum, because their unaccountable power rests on the false reality that no popular resistance works. And it does. John Pilger, article September 2010, ‘Flying the Flag, Faking the News’
The media’s long-time role as disseminators of state and vested interests’ propaganda. John Pilger, lecture 2018
The most dangerous propaganda is coming out of the home of propaganda … the United States. John Pilger on Unrelenting Propaganda, interview the Katie Halper Show, Youtube 1.06.45, 2023
A complete consensus in the mainstream on the current war going on in Europe … It’s really a proxy war between the United States and Russia. ibid.
In dictatorships we are more fortunate than you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know it’s propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West, we’ve learnt to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines. Unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive. Zdenuk Urbanek, novelist & Charter 77, interview John Pilger
Since becoming a journalist I had often heard the advice to believe nothing until it has been officially denied. Claud Cockburn, A Discord of Trumpets p190
The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even Orwell's 1984 and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the advertising techniques used to package the propaganda are a little more sophisticated on the surface.
Yet just a quick glance behind the curtain reveals that the age old tactics of manipulation of fear and manufactured consensus are still being used to force humanity into accepting the terms of its own imprisonment and in turn policing others within the prison without bars. Paul Joseph Watson
If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will, without their knowing about it? Edward Bernays, Propaganda p71, 1891–1995, nephew of Sigmund Freud
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country ... We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind. ibid.
Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government. ibid.
If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it. ibid.
But clearly it is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically. Small groups of persons can and do make the rest of us think what they please about a given subject. Edward Bernays
The three main elements of public relations are practically as old as society: informing people, persuading people, or integrating people with people. Of course, the means and methods of accomplishing these ends have changed as society has changed. Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 1923
This is an age of mass production. In the mass production of materials a broad technique has been developed and applied to their distribution. In this age, too, there must be a technique for the mass distribution of ideas. Edward Bernays, Manipulating Public Opinion
The best defence against propaganda: more propaganda. Edward Bernays
When I came back to the United States, I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace. And propaganda got to be a bad word because of the Germans using it, so what I did was to try and find some other words so we found the words public relations. Edward Bernays, cited Adam Curtis ‘The Century of the Self’, 2002
The United Fruit brings in Bernays and he basically understood that what the United Fruit Company had to do was change this from being a popularly elected government that was doing some things that were good for the people there into this being close into this being very close to the American shore, a threat to American democracy. Being at a time in the Cold War when Americans responded to issues of the red scare and what communism might do. He was trying to transform this and brilliantly transform it into an issue of a communist threat close to our shores. Larry Tye, journalist Boston Globe