Disinformation is supposed to be something evil, something ethically not correct. And therefore we prefer to connect it to the past or to other political systems than the ones in the Western hemisphere. It is always the others who work with disinformation. The same is true for propaganda.
Even better, if we can refer it to the past:
A war loses support of the people, if it is getting lost. Therefore it is extremely important to launch a feeling of winning the war. Never give up emotions of victory. Governments know this and work hard on keeping the mood up. The Germans did a very hard job on that in the last months of World War II.
But the in the 1990s disinformation- and propaganda-business came back to life (if it ever had gone out of sight) through Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the reactions by democratic states. After the war, reports made visible that not much had happened the way we had been told it had happened. Regarded like this the Gulf War was the end of the
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The secret behind all this is the conception that nothing bad could ever be referred to the own nation. All the bad words belong to the enemy, whereas the "we" is the good one, the one who never is the aggressor but always defender, the savior - not only for ones own sake but also for the others, even if they never asked for it, like the German population during World War I and II.
The spiritualization of such thinking leads to the point that it gets nearly impossible to believe that this could be un-true, a fake. To imagine injustice committed by the own nation gets more and more difficult, the longer the tactic of this kind of propaganda goes on. U.S.-Americans voluntarily believe in its politics, believing also the USA works as the police of the world, defending the morally good against those who just do not have reached the same level of civilization until today.
To keep up this image, the enemy must be portrayed ugly and bad, like in fairy-tales, black-and-white-pictures. Any connection between oneself and the enemy must be erased and made impossible. In the case of
All of this is no invention of several politicians. Huge think tanks and different governmental organizations are standing behind that. Part of their work is to hide their own work, or to deny it.
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No mass-media is more efficient in disinformation and propaganda than TV. And no one seems to be better in influencing that which is considered the truth. e.g. around 67% of the Austrian population in 1999 believe that TV is the most reliable information-media.
Opinion polls show that it is said to be the most realistic media, the only one worth trusting. History tells us the contrary. The combination of words and moving pictures, together with the documentary style of the news, looks sincere, while it produces images in our heads which start working on their own. The Vietnam war was only the first war performed on television ...
But: also watching the news is part of the entertainment show of the media. And therefore they are presented in an entertaining form. Manipulation of the contents of the news is part of the show.
One factor is the issue that news must be reported in a very short period. Several seconds for each catastrophe. Scarcity implies disinformation.
Ted Koppel's movie Revolution in a box demonstrates this:
When the TV-news showed pictures of the nuclear plant accident in Chernobyl, they showed pictures of another - still working - plant. The thought behind was to demonstrate that in this world nothing can stay undetected by the media, to show that still everything is observed and under control - at least in the West.
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In the USSR manipulation of the population was one of the big tasks for the government. But manipulation got even further, for example when the English expert John Maynard came back from a visit in the Ukraine in 1933, he told about poverty but not about hunger. In fact he did not have seen anyone starving as the Soviets just showed him the things they wanted to show. Maynard was involuntarily used to spread Soviet disinformation. As a person from the West, the Western media tended to believe him.
A nearly humorous variety of disinformation was ordered by
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Nero's full name was Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (37-68 AD). Nero was Roman Emperor from 54-68 AD; during the first years in power he stood under the influence of his teacher
Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero († 1980) was elected archbishop because he was very conservative. But when he saw how more and more priests and definitely innocent people were murdered, he changed his attitudes and became one of the sharpest critics of the government. He gave shelter to those in danger, never stopped talking against violence and his Sunday sermons on the radio where moments to tell the truth to the Salvadorians, also mentioning the names of the disappeared or killed persons. As Romero got extremely popular and dangerous for the population he was killed by death squads, while reading a sermon.
Black propaganda does not tell its source. The recipient cannot find out the correct source. Rather would it be possible to get a wrong idea about the sender. It is very helpful for separating two allies.
Waihopai Station on the South Island of New Zealand was established specifically to target the international satellite traffic carried by
Source: Nicky Hager, Secret Power, New Zealand's role in the international spy network, (Craig Potton, 1996), Chapter 2