Wow. Just…wow.

This is the kind of North Korean/East German style propaganda I grew up mocking. Today, we have our own U.S.S.A. version of political and cultural ‘truths.’ The “trading cards” are the most ridiculously disgusting part of this. As SFGate reports…

Forget baseball cards. A 9/11 coloring book now comes with a complete set of terrorist trading cards. Would you want your teen trading Osama bin Laden for Yahya al-Libi?

has a PG-13 rating and tells the complete story of 9/11. Kids can color in images of everything from the airplanes knocking down the Twin Towers to the moment before Osama Bin Laden was shot. The new edition comes with several pages of perforated trading cards depicting “the men, women and governments behind terror.”

Included among their trading cards of individuals who are “behind terror,” is none other than Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks.

This is a hard book,” he adds. “It’s honest. It’s indifferent to political correctness.”

Or to just correctness, period.

The coloring book’s publisher said “it’s a teaching and learning tool that’s rated PG-13.”

But as Meredith Carroll of Strollerderby asked here, are coloring books featuring terrorist trading cards really the best way to educate kids about that tragic day?

Nationalistic jingoism made fun for children!

Read the complete SFGate article.

Michelle Simon provides This detailed and disturbing report of how the biotech industry, Monsanto in particular, engaged in an informational dirty war to defeat California’s Proposition 37. This is the state referendum which would have required foods containing GMO’s (genetically-modified organisms) to be labelled as such. In fact, some of their tactics crossed legal boundaries, including their lying in the California voter guide, the misuse of a federal seal and the misquoting of the Food and Drug Administration, misrepresenting academic affiliations, and more. I hope they are taken to court for these transgressions.

Another interesting point which has been raised (though not living in California, I can’t verify at the moment), is that there were no exit polls done on the issue at all, and that some people who have emailed and blogged on the issue have reported their surprise at the results, as there is no they know of who actually voted against it. Considering the serious issues surrounding unverifiable electronic voting, it seems to be a question which deserves closer investigative scrutiny.

Read The Report

This is an engaging and informative video report on how the Pentagon has helped shape what we see and hear regarding the military in popular culture.

War is hell, but for Hollywood it has been a Godsend, providing the perfect dramatic setting against which courageous heroes win the hearts and minds of the movie going public.

The Pentagon recognises the power of these celluloid dreams and encourages Hollywood to create heroic myths; to rewrite history to suit its own strategy and as a recruiting tool to provide a steady flow of willing young patriots for its wars.

What does Hollywood get out of this ‘deal with the devil’? Access to billions of dollars worth of military kit, from helicopters to aircraft carriers, enabling filmmakers to make bigger and more spectacular battle scenes, which in turn generate more box office revenue. Providing they accept the Pentagon’s advice, even toe the party line and show the US military in a positive light.

The rationalizing of this influence by the head of the Department of Defense Film Liaison Unit, Philip Strub, provides some interesting perspective to this debate. He claims that the Pentagon is simply looking for a “reasonably realistic portrayal of military people.” If that “translates” into a requirement for a “positive portrayal” of the military, Strub mitigates his answer with a diluting ’somewhat’.”

It is claimed that the only thing that the Pentagon finds taboo within these cinematic depictions, is if the military is shown to tolerate “bad behavior,” such as shooting a civilian, or torture. Julian Barnes, a Pentagon reporter for the Wall Street Journal, reveals that the DOD believes you cannot show that on screen, unless you also show that that person was punished. “That’s all that we ask for,” it is claimed.

But is it? Is it simply “accuracy” and “truth” that the Pentagon requires for its cooperation in such Hollywood portrayals? There is ample evidence that the Pentagon has made extensive demands for changes within the scripts, regardless of the proven veracity of the content represented within them.

Now, the argument can be (and is) made, that the Pentagon is under no obligation to support filmmaking, that it is not their mission. That is certainly true. However, a Supreme Court ruling in 1995 said that the government cannot favor speech that it likes, and not give the same benefits to speech that it doesn’t like. By giving material and financial support to films that reflect a political message that favors its interests, and denying that support to other films that might reflect a perspective that they feel doesn’t, is inherently unconstitutional. This is because it places a set of financial burdens upon one party, and not that of another, based simply on the content of their expression.

The interest that the Pentagon declares it has in simply making sure that the portrayal of the U.S. military in cinema is that it is “fair” and “accurate” becomes suspect when one compares how films such as Platoon or Full Metal Jacket are denied any support, while Top Gun is lavished with not only extensive material support, but are actively used as a recruiting tool, even to the point of setting up recruiting booths in movie theaters where the film was running.

Particularly revealing within this report is the when it talks about the popular film Charlie Wilson’s War, and how the government had insisted on the removal of a specific scene, on which pointed out the very real, direct links between the CIA’s arming of the Mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and their later connection to the attacks of 9/11. It also talks about how the film Redacted, was forced by the studios to cut out shots of actual scenes of civilian casualties in Iraq. I guess the Pentagon didn’t think the actual shots of reality were accurate enough.

I’m certainly no big fan of the filmmaker Oliver Stone, but the discussion in the later part of the program with him, filmmaker Michael Moore, and journalist Chris Hedges is quite good. The analysis of The Hurt Locker as a form of ‘war porn’ resonated with me. That film never settled well with me, and exactly why is something I’ve been trying to articulate for some time, but couldn’t quite put my finger on (besides the dreadfully cliche’d and annoying cinematography). Michael Moore nails it, though, by describing not only the cheap techniques that director Kathryn Bigelow utilizes for creating suspense, but the fact that its a film that exploits the war for a dramatic cinematic high, but has nothing to say about the actual war itself. Okay, a guy is trying to diffuse a bomb. Easy dramatics. Cheap, even. But why is the bomb there? Why is the guy there trying to diffuse it? Who are the people putting these bombs all around their own country? It makes no effort at answering those questions, which may be one reason it was as accepted as it was among the critics and establishment press. It could use the war for cinematic purposes, without actually addressing the reality underlying it.

The concluding comments in the show by the program’s host provided one final example of irony and even contradiction (considering that the show’s panel was so critical of exploiting war for audience exhilaration and entertainment; ‘war porn’). During the preparation for the show he requested footage of real wars in order to underline its true horrors. His request was rejected, as he was told that real wars are badly filmed, and are therefore hardly effective, and that manufactured images are far more convincing. So where does that leave us?

Watch the Program

Aldous Huxley’s vision of a mediated environment creating a population of servitude and “amusing ourselves to death” is brought into perspective with This provocative and engaging piece on the power and influence of media in our technological society today. It is interesting in its contrast to Orwell’s dystopian vision of a society of external control and coercion, as opposed to the one we seem to be increasingly emersed in today, the one of Huxley’s.

Neil Postman’s prescient observations on cyberculture, and living in a world of information glut, is particularly telling (and somewhat chilling).

Today’s America - Entertainment Über Alles!

Here’s an interesting - and rather accurate, I might add - educational film from half a century ago on propaganda; what it is, how it works, and how to try to inoculate oneself from being negatively swayed by it. The fact that we don’t have much more current and ongoing educational products such as this to teach students about this diseased communication process is one of the major reasons our society (and world) is in the state its in. There are some groups doing media literacy training, such as the Media Literacy Project in New Mexico and ACME (Action Coalition for Media Education), which are really good, and probably the closest thing going in this regard.

Excellent piece from John Pilger on the role and power of propaganda in our current political environment. Particularly good for bringing to light one of the primary inventors of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, the man who redefined it as “public relations.”

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the First World War, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe. In his book, “Propaganda,” published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the “intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses was an important element in democratic society” and that the manipulators “constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country.” Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism “public relations.”

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:

Read The Rest of the Article Here.

At least Pilger leaves us with some optimistic news (optimistic, that is, if one believes in living in a truly democratically accountable society).

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.

Here is some more insight on the legacy of Edward Bernays which we all live:
How Media Breeds Americans to Be Eternally Childlike Consumers

This story first broke on the Rag Blog. Then it got picked up in the mainstream blogosphere on Salon.com by Glenn Greenwald, whence it found its way to Paul Krugman’s blog and then back to Greenwald’s Blog.

So now we’ve got Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all wrapped up in a “conspiracy theory.” Guess what? The conspiracy is real.

Trust me on this; I’ve been there. I was in the Harvard class of 1969, one of only three Harvard classes ever to be opposed to killing poor people in order to make a buck (1968, 1969, and 1970). After those three classes Harvard changed its admissions policies to no longer actively recruit poor students. Faced with threats to tax its endowments, it made a big show two years ago of again making its admissions policy “wealth neutral”. But then, six months later, Larry Summers’ economic policies decimated the Harvard endowment. So it will be interesting to see how much longer Harvard sticks to its “wealth neutral” admissions policy.

- Posted by LeftofDayton.net

An interesting blurb recently reported by The New York Times: News Corp. Donates $1 Million to GOP Governors

As John Fund, former Bush speechwriter recently stated:

“…While we thought that Fox News worked for the Republican party, it appears that the Republican party actually works for Fox News.”

Read The Report (and reader comments)

Interesting perspective on the branding of Obama and the cult of personality.

A fascinating expose’ by author Alexander Zaitchik on Mr. Beck and some of his rather sordid history. This provides some important background and insight for better understanding the source of some of this demagoguery and how to challenge it.

America has this long tradition of twisted, odd, widely beloved and yet darkly dangerous right-wing cultural impresarios that pop up out of our landscape like cultural tornadoes, leaving huge swaths of derangement and destruction in their wake. Aimee Semple McPherson. Father Coughlin. Joe McCarthy. Once in a while, when the cultural cross-currents intersect just so, they rise on the whirlwind, gather huge followings, and lead their followers on a furious high-velocity turn that blows across the countryside in desperate pursuit of a utopia only they can see. These maunderings are typically mercifully short and usually end in disaster, for both the people who started the storm as well as those who got swept away in it. And all is forgotten—until the next time.

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One of the consistent threads running throughout Beck’s career has been this rather vicious mean streak that has changed over the years. It now sort of masquerades under a veneer of political argument, but at its base it’s the same kind of gut spleen that’s constantly looking for new avenues of expression…

Probably the most famous example of this mean streak that I was able to track down is the time he called up a competing DJ’s wife on the air and proceeded to mock her for having a miscarriage the previous week. She had just come back from the hospital. He did this live on the radio, which is of course illegal—he didn’t notify her that she was on the radio—and then there’s the moral question involved. He was the bad boy of an already bad-boy genre. Not many people liked him.

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OK, this is a long question, so bear with me. One of the things that’s got progressive right-wing watchers most concerned is Beck’s real skill in co-opting the language and symbols of American patriotism. The right has done this systematically for 40 years—but Beck is a genius at it.

I’m thinking specifically of the way he’s hijacked Tom Paine, who was easily the most progressive of the Founders. Paine was the first one to propose social security and welfare. The 19th century elites found him so threatening that they wrote him right out of history. Most Americans didn’t even know who Tom Paine was until FDR and Eleanor put him back in the pantheon, for reasons of their own.

Another example is how he’s publicized Jonah Goldberg’s revisionist idea that the Nazis were somehow left-wing welfare statists. Can you speak to this?

AZ: What makes that founder appropriation possible is relative ignorance on the part of his fan base. The only books on the subject they read are these religious psuedo-histories that Beck recommends to them. Also: Beck himself has only recently started to learn about this stuff, and he’s really not a scholar on early American history, to put it mildly. So it’s an easy sort of touchstone for him to seem like he’s representing the deepest and most consistent traditions in American history.

Of course, if you went back to exactly what the founders and many of their fellow revolutionaries believed—Paine being perhaps the most glaring example—it’s just absurd that he would claim that mantle. As you mention, Paine was profoundly rationalist—he despised Churches and preachers, especially money-minded charlatans like Beck. But it’s Beck’s use of Ben Franklin, my own favorite Founder, that drives me the most nuts. [Beck] has an enormous picture of Ben Franklin on his TV set a lot, and also in his radio studio. Of course, Ben Franklin was a giant of the Enlightenment: this is not a guy who’d have had any patience for Glenn Beck had they been contemporaries. And Beck himself would not have idealized Ben Franklin. For one, Franklin embodied the scientific spirit, and Beck hates science. While Franklin was making the case for lightning rods, Beck would have been running around arguing in favor of continuing to ring Church bells during storms to appease an Angry Christian God, which is what they did in Colonial Philadelphia before Franklin.

And you can just go down the line. Thomas Jefferson, of course, believed in a pretty radical egalitarian view of society. His belief in limited government wasn’t a belief in limited government for its own sake, but limited government for the sake of a society of equal citizens, in which there weren’t massive concentrations of economic wealth like the kind we see today—which Beck not only glorifies, but openly worships. There’s few things that’ll quiet Glenn Beck faster than a kind word from or the presence of a multi-billionaire industrialist.

As for the argument that the modern welfare state inexorably leads to some kind of Nazi state, or that the two even exist near each other on the same continuum, it’s hard even to know where to begin. The modern welfare states in the U.S. and Europe were built up in large part as a direct response to Nazism, as a way to preempt something like it from happening again. The idea that the welfare state leads inevitably to totalitarianism has been proven wrong. Hayek’s book, The Road to Serfdom, was a very specific warning against the British welfare state, which turned out just fine. That whole argument, which Beck makes in a clown costume, has been completely discredited by history.

Read The Complete Interview