Another voluntary Disinformation

A very different form of voluntary disinformation are the calls for donations. Donations offer the possibility to do something good, to help the poor. Afterwards one does no longer have to feel guilty for being luckier than those "others". The same pictures of starving and desperate children for decades, of starving babies with big sad eyes. The pictures show a terrible life. But the idea that contributing money would change the destiny of those children and other people is a lie. States use their population for paying money to make the states' policy less unjust. In fact the money of the Western donators perpetuates the dependence and because of this prolongs the misery into a vicious circle of disinformation on both sides, but it is clever to have one's people believing that they can change the world.

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New Forms of Propaganda (in the 19th Century)

As soon as governments found out that newspapers were a fantastic and very often unsuspicious medium for supporting propaganda they tried to pull them to their side.
Two ways existed:
a) to have one's own newspaper, which implies that mostly friends of the government read it. Nothing is regarded as something neutral.
b) to keep a good relationship to the most powerful/most frequently read newspapers and then try to make one's opinion theirs.
Today mostly elected is b), trying to set up alliances. CNN and the USA during the Gulf War demonstrated an example of that.

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The Theory of the Celestro-Centric World


In 1870 the U.S.-American C.R.Teed, inspired by the lecture of the bible and elder believers (like Edmund Halley in 1692), developed a new model of the world. In Germany the idea was published by Karl Neupert. In the 1930s the theory got famous, when it was published as the new world-vision. Though the theories differed slightly, all authors imagined the world as a ball, where human beings live inside. In the middle are the moon and the sun - and also God, sitting in the center.

for further details see:
http://www.angelfire.com/il/geocosmos/

http://home.t-online.de/home/Werner_Lang

Those who believe in it, call it the truth, those who simply like the idea, may call it a parallel science. Others call it disinformation, asking for the reasons to spread it. The turning to the inside, where there is no way out, produces a different reality. It shows that realities are always produced.
Political conservatives and racists like Hitler were fascinated by the idea and tried to present it as a new truth, a new reality, which was possible to make ideological use of.

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The Tools of Disinformation and Propaganda

"In wartime they attack a part of the body that other weapons cannot reach in an attempt to affect the way which participants perform on the field of battle." (Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, p. 9)
Therefore the demonstrated tools refer to political propaganda in the two World Wars.

Propaganda has the ability to change a war, a natural evil, into a so-called "just" war. Violence then is supposedly defense, no more aggression.

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The Gulf War

By the end of our century a new method of disinformation is gaining importance: disinformation by an overflow of information.

In the Gulf War, similar to the Vietnam War, journalists had little chance to report neutrally and correctly from the battlefields. Many times they staid in places far from the actual fightings - due to censorship.
In many ways the so-called video-war reminded of a series of commercials. No wonder, the Gulf War was the first war to have a commercial advertisement agency to do the war-propaganda for the USA. They worked hard in preventing the government from a destiny like the one of the Vietnam War, when the war most of all was lost in the American homes because of anti-war propaganda.
In an interview, General Schwarzkopf admitted - still during the war - that a lot of information had been well-prepared disinformation.
And this is true for both sides:

the baby milk plant:
Western bombs had destroyed a chemical weapon factory - that's what they claimed. Saddam Hussein allowed reporters from CNN to visit the factory, hoping they would spread his propaganda. What they supposedly did, was spreading his disinformation, as long as they did not wonder that in the middle of nowhere the sign for the factory was written in English.
(Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, p. 292)

the life guard:
In December 1990, the French newspaper Nouvel Observateur published the story of Karim Abdallah al-Jabouri, Saddam Hussein's Life Guard who had fled from Iraq right after Iraq's invasion in Kuwait. Soon afterwards he was in a French TV-show, where he told atrocity stories about Saddam Hussein. The problem that emerged afterwards was that many people recognized him as a former student and employee of that TV-channel.

the baby-incubator-story of Najirah
On the 10th of October 1991 a young refugee, called Najirah, from Kuwait spoke in front of the U.S.-congress. With a lot of tears she told that she had been working in a Kuwaiti hospital, when Iraqi soldiers came in, tore the babies out of the incubators and let them die on the floor. The pictures of this declaration went around the world and were one of the reasons why the U.S.-population wanted an intervention. In 1992 the journalist R. MacArthur was able to proof that the presented witness had been the daughter of the Kuwait-ambassador in the USA and that she had not been in that hospital or in Kuwait at the mentioned time.
By then the war was over and the manipulation of the population had taken place long ago.

For reading about the U.S.-propaganda tools during that war, like surrender passes, balloons, fake banknotes, threats and many more visit:
http://www.btinternet.com/~rrnotes/psywarsoc/fleaf/gulfapp.htm (84)

http://www.fair.org/extra/best-of-extra/gulf-war-not-true.html (85)

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World War I ...

With World War I an entire system of ideas how wars work collapsed. Suddenly it was no longer mostly soldiers who had to fight. War became an engagement of every day's life. Everybody got involved.
Propaganda therefore changed as well. The campaigns were no longer temporarily and recent but had to be planned for years. Who failed in organizing it or used the wrong keywords failed. Masters of modern propaganda became the British, whereas the Germans failed completely in the beginning.

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It is always the others

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: Adolf Hitler, supposedly one of the world's greatest and most horrible propagandists (together with his Reichsminister für Propaganda Josef Goebbels) did not invent modern propaganda either. It was the British example during World War I, the invention of modern propaganda, where he took his knowledge from. And it was Hitler's Reich, where (racist) propaganda and disinformation were developed to a perfect manipulation-tool in a way that the consequences are still working today.
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 New World Order, a better and geographically broader democratic order, that had just pretended to having begun.

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Propaganda

"For propaganda is a communicative process of persuasion, and persuasion remains an integral part of human discourse in peace as well as in war. (...) propaganda is a process unique to human communication regardless of time, space and geographic location." (Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, preface p. X)

The word propaganda is coming from the Catholic Church. In the 17th century the word was used in the fights against the Protestant Reformation (see Taylor, Munitions of the mind, p. 3).

Propaganda is using words - of course. But it furthermore uses a huge variety of tools for putting through its purpose. Some of them are: hymns, marches, parades, flags, colors, uniforms, all the typical insignias of the military are pieces of propaganda. And it is no coincidence that the standardization of the uniforms for the army were an invention of Louis XIV, for whom everything seemed to be theatre, a play, a game and all of that was taken into the huge propaganda-system that had to keep his prestige up high.

Propaganda makes us think and act in a way we probably would not have chosen to without its influence. Still, in most cases the degree of influence is impossible to know. Studies proving the efficiency of propaganda are doing nothing else but guessing in big parts. But it is efficient, that we know for sure. This is true for commercial advertisements as well as for political propaganda. Short messages are the most effective form of propaganda, look at posters for elections or at advertisements for any product.
The best or most effective propaganda is that which is wanted by the people. If propaganda meets the needs of the people then it has good chances to be extremely effective. And of course those needs can be "educated", as Jacques Ellul mentioned already in 1957, in his book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.

Political will suffers from the urgency of spreading propaganda. The will to change something - even if it was for the better - is hopelessly lost, if their is no prestige or aura around an idea. A certain amount of disinformation and propaganda is the perfect tool to get ideas through.

So, actually, what is the difference between disinformation and propaganda?
One difference is that the first one is directed at reason whereas propaganda also touches emotions, most of the time even prefers to influence emotions.

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Doubls Bind Messages

Double bind messages are extremely effective.
For example in Nicaragua the Sandinistas were seen as the personification of the evil. Demonization was the tool to make the U.S.-population to believe that. And the propaganda, called "Operation Truth", succeeded - and is successful until today. The Sandinistas are still considered an enemy in the head of the people. The media played the role of spreading propaganda - nearly without any criticism.
By the end of the 1980s the USA even paid Nicaraguans for voting other parties than the Sandinistas.

El Salvador was a similar case. Again the guerrilla got demonized. The difference was the involvement of the Catholic Church, which was highly fought against by the ruling parties of El Salvador - and those again were financially and organizationally supported by the USA. The elections in the 1980s were more or less paid by the USA.
U.S.-politicians were afraid El Salvador could end up being a second Cuba or Nicaragua. Every means was correct to fight this tendency, no matter what it cost.
On the 21st of September 1996, the Washington Post published several documents proofing an old rumor: not only that Central American soldiers had been educated in a U.S.-army school (the SOA), they also were taught to use torture as a method against revolutionaries. Some of the Salvadorian "students" of that school became very famous for being extremely cruel, one of them being General Roberto d'Aubuisson (35), the person who ordered the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980.

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The Post-World-War II-period

After World War II the importance of propaganda still increased, on the commercial level as well as on a political level, in the era of the Cold War. The propaganda institutions of the different countries wanted their people to think the right way, which meant, the national way. In the USA the McCarthy-era started, a totalitarian system in struggle against communism. McCarthy even managed to publicly burn critical books that were written about him; and every unbeloved artist was said to be a communist, an out-law.
Cold War brought the era of spies with it, which was the perfect tool of disinformation. But the topic as a movie-genre seems still popular today, as the unchanged success of James Bond-movies show.
A huge net of propaganda was built up for threatening with the nuclear bomb: pretending that the enemy was even more dangerous than the effect of such a bomb.
And later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, disinformation found other fields of work, like the wars of the 1990s showed us.

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Abstract

Disinformation is part of human communication. Thousands of years ago it was already used as a political medium. In the age of mass-communication and information its possibilities have grown tremendously. It plays an important role in many different fields, together with its "companion" propaganda. Some of these fields are: politics, international relations, the (mass-)media and the internet, but also art and science.
There is no evidence at all for a disappearance of disinformation. On this account it is important to understand where it comes from, what its tools are and how nations (democratic as well as totalitarian systems), international organizations and the media work with it or against it.
This report tries to give a short insight into this topic:
on a theoretical level
by demonstrating cases of disinformation, like the 2nd Chechnya War in 1999.

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Conclusion

As we have seen in the latest wars and in art, propaganda and disinformation are taking place on all sides. No contemporary political system is immune against those two. All of them utilize them if it seems to be useful and appropriate. Democracy, always pretending to be the most liberal and most human system is no exception in that - especially not a good one.
Democracy might give us more chances to escape censorship - but only as long as the national will is not disturbed. Then disinformation and propaganda come in ...
NATO-members gave us a very sad example for this during the Kosovo crisis.

It is our hunger for sensations and glory, for rumors and shows which makes disinformation so powerful. Many books and WebPages give informations about how to overcome disinformation and propaganda - but in vain. We somehow seem to like it - or at least we need it for getting through our interests.

There is a lot what we could try to do, but very little that will succeed as people prefer to believe that disinformation is an issue of the past.

At this moment the only appropriate measure to get rid of disinformation's influence seems to be the putting side by side of different aspects and ideas, especially of opinions telling the contrary, or are at least not the same. In any other case the model will probably commit the crime it is fighting against. Because how would we be able to know?

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The Egyptians ...

Besides ordinary religious manipulation-tools the Egyptians were masters of using architecture for propaganda. In Egypt, most of all, architecture was used as a media to demonstrated power, whereas the Greek and Romans used other types of art, like statues, for political propaganda.
The pyramids, palaces, tombs became tools for power demonstrations. Paintings and carvings (like on obelisks) proved the might of the rulers.
All those signs of power were done to make people compare their ruling dynasty to gods and keep them politically silent, because religion was used for justifying mortal power. Marble, gold, jewelry and artists were the tools for those maneuvers. Whereas questions for the truth were not even asked or listened to.
Finally it was the masses who were used for propaganda, when they were not only forced to work as slaves on those signs of power but also were abused for those power demonstrations, when they had to accompany the dead king into his tomb - dying of hunger, thirst, lack of oxygen and in darkness. The more religious disinformation the more luxury. The more luxury the better. The more luxury the more power.

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Radio

Between the two World Wars the radio started becoming more and more important; as well in education (e.g. Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht) as for propaganda.
By hearing unconsciously, without listening, while concentrating on something else, it is easy to spread ideas and emotions. This fact was taken advantage of.
The German Minister for Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, imagined the radio to be the most effective tool for propaganda. In fact the radio turned out to be a method to reach all generations at the same time, even the illiterates. By sending propaganda music and interrupting programs for the latest news, mostly good ones, the radio became popular.
Radio Moscow, which started working in 1922, tried to intervene in innerstate-affairs in Britain as well as in other countries. The radio was supposed to push ahead the idea of communism.

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Cyrus Reed Teed

C.R. Teed (New York State) was a doctor of alternative medicine in the last century. He worked on alchemy, too. In 1870 he had the idea that the universe was made out of cells, the earth being the biggest one. Thus he imagined the world as a concave system. Out of this thought he founded a religion, calling it Koreshanity.

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CNN

CNN is a U.S.-TV-enterprise, probably the world's most famous one. Its name has become the symbol for the mass-media, but also the symbol of a power that can decide which news are important for the world and which are not worth talking about. Every message that is published on CNN goes around the world. The Gulf War has been the best example for this until now, when a CNN-reporter was the one person to do the countdown to a war. The moments when he stood on the roof of a hotel in Baghdad and green flashes surrounded him, went around the world.

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Philip M. Taylor

Munitions of the Mind. A history of propaganda from the ancient world to the present era. Manchester 1995 (2nd ed.)
This book gives a quite detailed insight on the tools and tasks of propaganda in European and /or Western history. Starting with ancient times the author goes up till the Gulf War and the meaning of propaganda today. In all those different eras propaganda was transporting similar messages, even when technical possibilities had not been fairly as widespread as today. Taylor's book is leading the reader through those different periods, trying to show the typical elements of each one.

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Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was the head of the NSdAP, the National Socialist Workers' Party. Originally coming from Austria, he started his political career in Germany. As the Reichskanzler of Germany he provoked World War II. His hatred against all non-Aryans and people thinking in a different way killed millions of human beings. Disinformation about his personality and an unbelievable machinery of propaganda made an entire people close its eyes to the most cruel crimes on human kind.

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Geraldton Station

Latitude: -28.7786, Longitude: 114.6008

The Geraldton station is officially called the Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station, ADSCS. The station targets mainly the second Pacific Intelsat, 703 and the two main Indian Ocean Intelsats, at 60 and 63 degrees east. Another target is likely to be the new Intelsat positioned, in 1992, at 91.5 degrees east, between South East Asia and India. So Geraldton interception concentrates entirely on Indian Ocean and Asian satellites.

Source: Nicky Hager, Secret Power, New Zealand's role in the internatinal spy network, (Craig Potton, 1996) p.183-185

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Nero

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 Seneca. In this period he was very successful in inner politics and abroad, for example in Britannia. Soon he changed into a selfish dictator, had his brother, mother and wife killed and probably burnt Rome, blaming the Christians for it. More than in political affairs he was interested in arts. when he was dismissed in 68, he committed suicide.

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NATO

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington on 4 April 1949, creating NATO (= North Atlantic Treaty Organization). It was an alliance of 12 independent nations, originally committed to each other's defense. Between 1952 and 1982 four more members were welcomed and in 1999, the first ex-members of COMECON became members of NATO (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland), which makes 19 members now. Around its 50th anniversary NATO changed its goals and tasks by intervening in the Kosovo Crisis.

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McCarthy

Born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy graduated from Marquette in 1935. In 1939, he won election as a circuit court judge. During World War II, he enlisted in the Marines and served in the Pacific. In 1944, he campaigned for senator but lost in the Republican primary. In 1946, he ran for Wisconsin's other senate seat.

In a 1950 speech, McCarthy entered the public spotlight by claiming that communists had "infested" the State Department, dramatically waving a sheet of paper which purportedly contained the traitors' names. A special Senate committee investigated the charges and found them groundless. Unfazed, McCarthy used his position to wage a relentless anti-communist crusade, denouncing numerous public figures and holding a series of highly confrontational hearings, ruining the careers of many people.

He died at the age of 49 of complications related to alcoholism.

http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/bios/31.html

http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/bios/31.ht...
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Karl Neupert

In the 1920s the Hollow Earth Theory was very popular in Germany. With the acceptance and support of the NAZI regime Karl Neupert wrote the book Geokosmos. With the help of this book the theory became a cult in Germany.

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Colouring

In November 1997, after the assassination of (above all Swiss) tourists in Egypt, the Swiss newspaper Blick showed a picture of the place where the attack had happened, with a tremendous pool of blood, to emphasize the cruelty of the Muslim terrorists. In other newspapers the same picture could be seen - with a pool of water, like in the original. Of course the manipulated coloured version of the Blick fit better into the mind of the shocked Swiss population. The question about death penalty arose quickly ....

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Slobodan Milosevic

Slobodan Milosevic (* 1941) is a Serbian political leader.
As a young man S. Milosevic joined the Communist Party, in 1984 the banker became head of the local Communist Party of Belgrade, in 1987 head of the Serb CP. Since 1989 he has been president of Serbia (since 1997 president of the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). During his reign the Yugoslav Republic broke up, bringing about the independence of Slovenia and Croatia and the war in Bosnia. In 1998 the Kosovo Crisis started.

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Josef Goebbels

Josef Goebbels (1897-1945) was Hitler's Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. He had unlimited influence on the press, the radio, movies and all kind of literary work in the whole Reich. In 1944 he received all power over the Total War. At the same time he was one of the most faithful followers of Hitler - and he followed him into death in 1945.

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