Propaganda

With great thanks again to Wikipedia:

In late Latin, propaganda meant "things to be propagated." In 1622 ... Pope Gregory XV founded the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide ("Congregation for Propagating the Faith"), a committee of Cardinals with the duty of overseeing the propagation of Christianity by missionaries sent to non-Catholic countries.
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Propaganda has been a human activity as far back as reliable recorded evidence exists. The writings of Romans like Livy are considered masterpieces of pro-Roman statist propaganda.

Late in the next century, the special history of the American colonies saw the publication during the Revolutionary War of Tom Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, which contained "talking points" against British rule and which was a major source for the brilliant propaganda piece, the Declaration of Independence. Soon after, in Europe, dissatisfied European peasants cast from feudalistic estates into cities in the wake of mercantile capitalism formed an unprecedented pool for revolutionary movements of their own.

By mid-19th century, Karl Marx had formulated a philosophy favoring these urban proletariats, or wage workers in the industrial cities, and disseminated his ideas in numerous writings and through political activism. Late in that century, academic social scientists recognized the growing power of the masses in more urban and democratic societies and began writing books codifying propaganda techniques.

These books attracted the attention of early twentieth century thinkers including psychologist Edward Bernays and journalist Walter Lippman, who were "hired by then United States President, Woodrow Wilson, to ... sway popular opinion in favor of entering [World War I], on the side of Britain."

The war propaganda campaign of Lippman and Bernays produced within six months such an intense anti-German hysteria as to permanently impress American business (and Adolf Hitler, among others) with the potential of large-scale propaganda to control public opinion.

Hitler also expressed a begrudging admiration for the propaganda efforts of the Communist Party in an unstable WW I Europe in achieving the 1917 Russian Revolution and summed up his thoughts on propaganda in Mein Kampf:

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be.
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The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.
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What our authorities least of all understood was the very first axiom of all propagandist activity: to wit, the basically subjective and one-sided attitude it must take toward every question it deals with.
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The broad mass of a nation does not consist of diplomats, or even professors of political law, or even individuals capable of forming a rational opinion; it consists of plain mortals, wavering and inclined to doubt and uncertainty. As soon as our own propaganda admits so much as a glimmer of right on the other side, the foundation for doubt in our own right has been laid. The masses are then in no position to distinguish where foreign injustice ends and our own begins. In such a case they become uncertain and suspicious, especially if the enemy refrains from going in for the same nonsense, but unloads every bit of blame on his adversary.
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The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing.
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But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.

Joseph Goebbels, although Hitler's Propaganda Minister, was untalented compared to his master but did become known for the "Goebbels technique, also known as argumentum ad nauseam, ... the name given to a policy of repeating a lie until it is taken to be the truth (see Big Lie).":

One should not as a rule reveal one's secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

Even this statement is an attempted attribution to the English of an idea originally expressed by Hitler in Mein Kampf:

[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

But whereas Hitler was a true master of propaganda, and his minister a far less talented functionary, today the situation is reversed: our propaganda minister is the master, and our leader his functionary. Karl Rove is so confident of his strategy that he now announces it to the public! In January of this year,

Rove noted that we face "a ruthless enemy" and "need a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment America finds itself in."

Here's more:

"[T]he people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

-- Karl Rove Hermann Goering (oops!)

Judicial Ethics and Politics

ABC News Nightline recently reported that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia missed the swearing-in of new Chief Justice John Roberts so he could attend a Federalist Society conference at a luxury resort, with his expenses paid by the Society, which had used Scalia's appearance to sell tickets to the event. Read the story here; or watch the video here.

After the report aired, the Society's president wrote ABC with a media fairness complaint, responded to by ABC but followed up by a renewed complaint. The purportedly nonpartisan Federalist Society's complaint in the matter reminded me of partisan organization pushback, especially by its invocation of the CBS National Guard story (which may well have been a setup).

While missing the swearing-in led off the story, the propriety of the trip is the real issue. The Federalist Society tends to advocate a particular philosophical approach to the law. Scalia has not been entirely assiduous in avoiding the appearance of impropriety as a Justice, having gone on a duck-hunting trip with Dick Cheney shortly after the Court decided to hear Cheney's appeal of a lower court's decision that he had to turn over information about his closed-door meetings with oil company officials.

Some notable law professors and U.S. Senators questioning the propriety of judges' extra-judicial activities have been constrained to note that rules applying to federal judges in this regard are vague and do not apply to Supreme Court Justices at all. This situation needs to change. The rules of behavior for all federal judges may need more specificity; and they should apply to the Justices as well. Fair procedures for disqualification and appointment of a Special Justice can be worked out for the rare cases of disqualification or recusal. Click on the following title to read the hard-to-find-online:

Code of Conduct for United States Judges

Scalia has also led a trend to politicize the judiciary, writing the 2002, 5-4 opinion in Republican Party of Minn. v. White allowing a state candidate for a judicial office to announce his or her views on disputed legal or political issues. All the Republican appointees save Souter joined in Scalia's opinion. Last week, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of the 8th Circuit's decision after remand also allowing judicial candidates to participate in political party activities and solicit campaign contributions.

"I feel like we are going back to the 19th century, where judges were an active part of the political arena, except judges have a lot more power now," says former Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Phillips. . . .
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"It means a judicial candidate can go up and say to someone, 'I'm dead set against abortion, I'm a loyal Republican, can you write me a check?'" says Northwestern University School of Law Professor Steven Lubet. "We're involved in a race to the bottom in state judicial elections. It's a phenomenal mess."

And it's a mess that will backfire on the Republicans when the Democrats are back in power. Politics is a double-edged sword.

UPDATE: The New York Times: Conservatives See Court Shift as Culmination

With grants from major conservative donors like the John M. Olin Foundation, the Federalist Society functioned as a kind of shadow conservative bar association, planting chapters in law schools around the country that served as a pipeline to prestigious judicial clerkships.

During their narrow and politically costly victory in the 1991 confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas, the Federalist Society lawyers forged new ties with the increasingly sophisticated network of grass-roots conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs and the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss.

UPDATE: Retired Supreme Court Justice hits attacks on courts and warns of dictatorship

UPDATE: South Dakota ups the ante in the national war over judges

UPDATE: Scalia Claims Guantanamo Detainees Have No Right to Fair Trial

UPDATE: Scalia gestures and curses (in Italian) in church.

Partisan Parrots & Trolls

Please don't dominate the rap Jack
if you got nothing new to say

This line of Robert Hunter's from the Grateful Dead's "New Speedway Boogie," first recorded on Workingman's Dead in 1970, applies big time to the blogosphere. Click on the lyric above to hear (a clip of) it as performed.

Much of what is posted as discourse on the Net today is one meme or another that someone picked up somewhere else.

The term "meme" ([miːm] in the IPA; rhymes with "theme"), derived from the Greek word mimema, "something imitated," often refers to a piece of information passed from one mind to another.

The meme is then reposted elsewhere without significant original elaboration of thought, as a manifestation of herd behavior. If a partisan parrot posts an antagonistic meme in a discussion largely populated by persons of opposing views, then the parrot becomes a troll.

Spent a little time on the mountain
Spent a little time on the hill
I saw things getting out of hand
I guess they always will

UPDATE: Democrats and Republicans Both Adept at Ignoring Facts, Study Finds; "And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that's contrary to their point of view."

History Repeats Itself

Variations of the adage that "history repeats itself" go back at least as far as 5th century BC Greek historian Thucydides in his Historia (at i. 2, 2):

I shall be content if those shall pronounce my History useful who desire to give a view of events as they did really happen, and as they are very likely, in accordance with human nature, to repeat themselves at some future time,—if not exactly the same, yet very similar.

Karl Marx wrote in 1852 that "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

Mark Twain, ever the cynic, formulated this observation, perhaps written in 1907 but unpublished until 1940 in Mark Twain in Eruption:

It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.

Twain may have been taking off on George Santayana's somewhat less pessimistic dictum in his 1905 work, The Life of Reason (vol. 1, ch. 12, p. 284), shown here in context:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.... when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.... This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.

In any event, the foregoing has primarily been a sneaky literary build-up to sharing a couple of Herblock editorial cartoons, out of over 100 he has gifted to your Library of Congress. The first is "What do you figure this one would cost?", from 1950. The second is called Taped, from 1970. Both were originally published in the Washington Post. Click either cartoon to see it in a page by itself, where you can hover your mouse over the image until the box comes up in the lower right corner, which you click to see it full-size.

Now does history repeat itself, OR WHAT??!!

A New Kind of "Cold" War

If your heating bill was disgustingly high this month, on top of prices creeping back up at the pump, it's time to ask why and what the future holds.

James Howard Kunstler has written a thought-provoking piece, "2006: The Year of Oil Collapse?", discussing some megatrends we have to respond to before we run out of fuel and start freezing in our homes: the advent of peak oil production; near-constantly rising gasoline, heating oil, and natural gas prices; the impact of those prices on living in large suburban homes built during the low-mortgage-rates housing bubble; and the threat to the economies of great nations around the world.

Russia, with its huge natural gas and oil resources, stands to gain most in an era of scarcity. See "The Kremlin and the world energy war" for details. China has become a most serious competitor for oil and is increasing investment and ties with Russia as a result, as well as with Iran.

Newsweek columnist and foreign correspondent Christopher Dickey suggests in "Rita's Revelation" that nuclear power will have to be a large part of the solution to the problems of increasing scarcity and demand for oil and gas and discusses why even oil-rich Iran wants it.

In light of these megatrends, drilling in Alaska seems no more than a stopgap measure. Americans' hunger for large, expensive-to-heat houses -- away from the underclass but often a long, expensive, and polluting commute from the workplace -- may be an inevitable casualty to rising oil and gas prices. The era of low interest rates may also be ending, as China and other nations become less confident in the value of the U.S. dollar, as the U.S. balance of payments deficit continues to grow.

What can we do? At the political level, we need to focus on the megatrends and abandon the fear- and ideology-driven overreactions to events like Three Mile Island and 9/11. On the domestic front, we need to make our inner cities safer and more desirable for working families with children, by rethinking a veritable miasma of failed social and economic policies. On the personal level, we can do our own individual but crucial part in achieving energy independence by asking for and purchasing the ethanol/gasoline "flex" cars already being successfully produced and sold by Ford and GM in Brazil.

Unlike hybrids sold in the US, for example, flex cars sold in Brazil don't cost any more than traditional models. In fact, some models are only available with flex engines now. Ethanol engines use 25 percent more ethanol per mile than gasoline. But ethanol (the alcohol produced by fermenting sugar) usually sells at somewhere between a third to half of the price of gas. Even people who were reluctant to take the plunge and buy a flex say they have been won over by the savings.

Energy independence has become crucial to American independence. Let's win this new cold war before it gets any more painful.

UPDATE: A National Review editor gives an oil-supplier country-by-country rundown of how vulnerable we are and ends with the same recommendation.

UPDATE: The Dollar/Oil-Price Connection

Bring All the Troops Home

The alleged robbery and murder of a 56-year-old Japanese woman, for $129, by a 21-year-old American sailor stationed at the U.S. Navy base in Yokosuka is "likely to further stoke opposition to U.S. military presence in Japan;" but it should also raise the question here at home: What are we doing with troops in Japan over sixty years after the end of World War II?

True, Japan is "banned from having its own official military under the postwar pacifist constitution;" but this relic of the U.S. occupation allows Japan to depend on the United States for its security rather than spending its own money. No one thinks such a scheme is needed any longer to preserve U.S. national security against Japanese aggression; yet we still have about 50,000 troops stationed in Japan.

These troops cost American taxpayers a heap of money, as do the 150,000 in Iraq, the 75,000+ in Germany, the 33,000+ in South Korea, the 13,000+ in Italy, and thousands more elsewhere around the globe, all told -- as of summer 2004 -- 387,400 troops in 120 countries.

Let's leave out for the time being the 12-17,000 troops in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and environs as possibly still needed to keep up the effort to find Osama bin Laden (if still alive), Ayman al-Zawahiri (still alive), and other al Qaeda leadership hiding in that region, although I wonder if the best strategy now might be to back off and embolden them so we can figure out where they are for a drone attack.

Even President Bush has proposed some troop reductions abroad, admitting the Soviet threat is no longer a justification; but what this nation needs is a courageous rethinking of post-World War II, Korean War, and Cold War security commitments, whereby our forces are stationed all over the planet not just as deterrents but as tripwires obligating full U.S. participation in any conflict where our troops are based. Whether to become involved in war abroad is a decision to be made by the current U.S. Congress, not by the agreements of fifty or sixty years ago.

Moreover, these troops are being maintained expensively abroad at a time when the United States is running a huge budget deficit while programs that serve people here at home are being cut. Our government, for better or worse, has taken on many of the same responsibilities as the so-called social welfare states of the developed world, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to education, and many other extremely costly programs. It is time we live within our budget -- instead of depending year after year on undependable foreign purchasers of our national debt -- and make choices between domestic security and empire.

UPDATE: Army forces 50,000 soldiers into extended duty

UPDATE: Seoul and Washington closer to divorce

UPDATE: Cato Policy Analysis: Rethinking the U.S.-Japan Strategic Relationship

Twilight in Iraq

On an increasingly valuable news and opinion portal, The Huffington Post, Simon Jenkins, a columnist and former editor of The (London) Times, and Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D, retired USAF lieutenant colonel last stationed in the Pentagon, give their perspectives on the latest in Iraq. Click on their names to read their respective predictions.

UPDATE: Republican Congressman (and physician, and former Libertarian presidential candidate) Ron Paul's October 7, 2005, speech on the floor of the House, "Staying or Leaving." If you need a teaser:

Supporters of the war in Iraq, as well as some non-supporters, warn of the dangers if we leave. But isn’t it quite possible that these dangers are simply a consequence of having gone into Iraq in the first place, rather than a consequence of leaving? Isn’t it possible that staying only makes the situation worse? If chaos results after our departure, it’s because we occupied Iraq, not because we left.

UPDATE: The Real Choice in Iraq by Zbigniew Brzezinski

UPDATE: Check out the Karen Kwiatkowski Archives, especially her piece on "Our Inscrutable Iraq Policy."

UPDATE: Chomsky: 'There Is No War on Terror'

UPDATE: Might the Arabs Have a Point? by Patrick J. Buchanan

UPDATE: USAID Paper Details Security Crisis in Iraq

UPDATE: Islamists gain ground from American push for Mideast democracy

UPDATE: Nearly half of Iraqis support attacks on U.S. troops, poll finds

UPDATE: Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq

UPDATE: "It Didn’t Work" -- William F. Buckley Jr.

UPDATE: State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2005 - Iraq

UPDATE: Iraq through the prism of Vietnam -- Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.) (NSA Director, 1985-88).

UPDATE: Iraq: Next Steps for U.S. Policy -- Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski

UPDATE: Stay the Course? What Course?