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Anatomy of a Propaganda Blitz
A regular feature of corporate media manipulation involves the launching of what we call a propaganda blitz, attacking and discrediting âOfficial Enemiesâ, often preparing the way for âactionâ or âinterventionâ of some kind.
Propaganda blitzes are fast-moving attacks intended to inflict maximum damage in minimum time. They are:
1. based on allegations of dramatic new evidence
2. communicated with high emotional intensity and moral outrage
3. apparently supported by an informed corporate media/academic/expert consensus
4. reinforced by damning condemnation of anyone daring even to question the apparent consensus
5. often generated with fortuitous timing
6. characterised by tragicomic moral dissonance.
Dramatic New Evidence
A propaganda blitz is often launched on the back of allegedly dramatic new evidence indicating that an establishment enemy should be viewed as uniquely despicable and actively targeted. The basic theme: This changes everything!
Propagandists are well aware that media attention will rapidly move on from claims of dramatic new evidence, so the durability of the claims is not a key concern. Marginalised media websites and rare âmainstreamâ articles may eventually expose the hype. But propagandists know that most corporate media will not notice and will not learn the lesson that similar claims should be received with extreme caution in future.
One of the most obvious recent examples of a propaganda blitz was the Blair governmentâs infamous September 2002 dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which included four mentions of a dramatic new claim that Iraq was able to deploy WMD against British citizens within 45 minutes of an order being given.
Senior intelligence officials later revealed that the original 45-minute claim referred to the length of time it might have taken the Iraqis to fuel and fire a Scud missile or rocket launcher. But that original intelligence said exactly nothing about whether Iraq possessed the chemical or biological weapons to use in those weapons. The Blair government had transformed a purely hypothetical danger into an immediate and deadly threat.
The fakery surrounding the Iraq War was so extreme that even the âmainstreamâ media could not ultimately ignore the collapse of the case for war. But by then the powers that be had got the invasion and occupation they were seeking.
In 1964, in what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the US government and US corporate media launched a propaganda blitz based on the claim that US destroyers had come under attack from North Vietnamese patrol boats. The goal was to justify a massive escalation of the US assault on Vietnam. Media analyst Daniel Hallin wrote that the episode âwas a classic of Cold War management ... On virtually every important point, the reporting of the two Gulf of Tonkin incidents ... was either misleading or simply false.â Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky noted that the lies were simply âin accordance with the needs of the US executive at that crucial momentâ.1
In February 2008, the US Naval Institute reported on the release of nearly 200 declassified documents related to the incident:
These new documents and tapes reveal what historians could not prove: There was not a second attack on U.S. Navy ships in the Tonkin Gulf in early August 1964. Furthermore, the evidence suggests a disturbing and deliberate attempt by Secretary of Defense McNamara to distort the evidence and mislead Congress.2
As for the first âattackâ, US naval aggression had provoked three North Vietnamese patrol boats to pursue the US aggressor in an engagement in which the patrol boats âwere almost entirely destroyedâ, while the US ship âmay have sustained âone bullet holeââ.3
In October 1990, in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, as the US worked hard to build a case for war, it was claimed that Iraqi stormtroopers had smashed their way into a Kuwait City hospital, torn hundreds of babies from their incubators and left them on the floor to die. In their book, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton described how the most powerful and heart-rending testimony came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, initially known only as Nayirah:
Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City ... âI volunteered at the al-Addan hospital,â Nayirah said. âWhile I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where ... babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.â4
In fact, Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family. Her father was Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwaitâs Ambassador to the US. Stauber and Rampton noted that Nayirah had been coached by US PR company Hill & Knowltonâs vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado âin what even the Kuwaitisâ own investigators later confirmed was false testimonyâ. The story of the 312 murdered babies was an outright lie. Journalist John MacArthur, author of The Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, commented:
Of all the accusations made against the dictator [Saddam Hussein], none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City.5
As another war loomed in March 2003, in an article titled, âSee men shredded, then say you donât back warâ, Labour MP Ann Clwyd claimed that Saddam Husseinâs goons were feeding opponents into a machine âdesigned for shredding plasticâ and dumping their minced remains into âplastic bagsâ for use as âfish foodâ.6
Who, in good conscience, then, could deny the righteousness of a war against Saddam? Alas, as Brendan OâNeil commented in the Guardian, Clwyd had based her story on the uncorroborated claims of âone individual from northern Iraq. Neither Amnesty International nor Human Rights Watch, in their numerous investigations into human rights abuses in Iraq, had ever heard anyone talk of a human-shredding machine.â7
The story was baseless nonsense.
In 2011, dramatic claims were made that the Libyan government was planning a massacre in Benghazi, exactly the kind of action that Gaddafi knew could trigger Western âinterventionâ. Again, as we will see later in this book (Chapter 5, Libya â âIt is All About Oilâ), the claim was eventually exposed as baseless even by a UK parliamentary committee report. But once again, the warmongers had already achieved the regime change and control they desired.
In August 2013, corporate politicians and journalists instantly declared the Syrian government to blame for the use of chemical weapons in the Ghouta area of Damascus. Just one day after the attacks, a Guardian leader claimed there was not âmuch doubtâ who was to blame, and yet, as we will see in Chapter 6, the mediaâs certainty was again utterly bogus.8
In May 2016, an excellent example of a propaganda blitz saw Jeremy Corbyn targeted by dramatic new âevidenceâ: namely, the discovery of a graphic posted by Naz Shah two years earlier, before she had become a Labour MP. The graphic showed a map of the United States with Israel superimposed in the middle, suggesting that a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict would be to relocate Israel to the US.
Shahâs post was highlighted by right-wing blogger Paul Staines, who writes as âGuido Fawkesâ:
Naz Shah ... shared a highly inflammatory graphic arguing in favour of the chilling âtransportationâ policy two years ago, adding the words âproblem solvedâ.9
Feeding the Naz Shah propaganda blitz in the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland, formerly comment editor, argued that leftists view Israel as âa special case, uniquely deserving of hatredâ, and that this hatred âlay behindâ Shahâs call âfor the âtransportationâ [of Israel to America] â a word with a chilling resonance for Jewsâ.10
A few days later, in the Observer, columnist Andrew Rawnsley echoed the claim that Shah believed âthat Israelis should be put on âtransportationâ to America, with all the chilling echoes that has for Jewsâ.11
By contrast, Israel-based former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook, who was given a Martha Gellhorn special award for his work on the Middle East, argued that the map âwas clearly intended to be humorous rather than anti-semitic. I would make a further point. It is also obvious that the true target of the post is the US, ...
