PRISM
and the Rise of a New Fascism
John
Pilger
21
June, 2013
In
his book Propaganda, published in 1928, Edward Bernays wrote: “The
conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and
opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
“Those
who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an
invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
The
American nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays invented the term “public
relations” as a euphemism for state propaganda. He warned that an
enduring threat to the invisible government was the truth-teller and
an enlightened public.
In
1971, the whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked US government files
known as the Pentagon Papers, which showed that the invasion of
Vietnam was based on systematic lying. Four years later, Frank Church
conducted sensational hearings in the Senate: one of the last
flickers of American democracy. These laid bare the extent of the
invisible government: the domestic spying and subversion and
warmongering by intelligence and “security” agencies and the
backing they received from big business and the media, both
conservative and liberal.
Speaking
about the National Security Agency (NSA), Senator Church said: “I
know the capacity that there is to make tyranny total in America, and
we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this
technology operate within the law . . . so that we never cross over
that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
On
11 June, following the revelations in the Guardian by the NSA
contractor Edward Snowden, Ellsberg wrote that the US had now fallen
into “that abyss”.
Snowden’s
revelation that Washington has used Google, Facebook, Apple and other
giants of consumer technology to spy on almost everyone is further
evidence of a modern form of fascism. Having nurtured oldfashioned
fascists around the world – from Latin America to Africa and
Indonesia – the genie has risen at home. Understanding this is as
important as understanding the criminal abuse of technology.
Fred
Branfman, who exposed the “secret” destruction of tiny Laos by
the US air force in the 1960s and 1970s, provides an answer to those
who still wonder how a liberal African-American president, a
professor of constitutional law, can command such lawlessness. “Under
Mr Obama, America is still far from being a classic police-state . .
.” he wrote. “But no president has done more to create the
infrastructure for a possible future police state.” Why? Because
Obama understands that his role is not to indulge those who voted for
him but to expand “the most powerful institution in the history of
the world, one that has killed, wounded or made homeless well over 20
million human beings, mostly civilians, since 1962”.
In
the new American cyberpower, only the revolving doors have changed.
The director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, was an adviser to
Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state in the Bush
administration who lied that Saddam Hussein could attack the US with
nuclear weapons. Cohen and Google’s executive chairman, Eric
Schmidt – they met in the ruins of Iraq – have co-authored a
book, The New Digital Age, endorsed as visionary by the former CIA
director Michael Hayden and the war criminals Henry Kissinger and
Tony Blair. The authors make no mention of the Prism spying
programme, revealed by Snowden, that provides the NSA with access to
all of us who use Google.
Control
and dominance are the two words that make sense of this. These are
exercised by political, economic and military design, of which mass
surveillance is an essential part, but also by insinuating propaganda
into the public consciousness. This was Edward Bernays’s point. His
two most successful PR campaigns convinced Americans that they should
go to war in 1917 and persuaded women to smoke in public; cigarettes
were “torches of freedom” that would hasten women’s liberation.
It
is in popular culture that the fraudulent “ideal” of America as
morally superior, a “leader of the free world”, has been most
effective. Yet even during Hollywood’s most jingoistic periods
there were exceptional films, such as those of the exiled Stanley
Kubrick, and adventurous European films would find US distributors.
These days there is no Kubrick, no Strangelove, and the US market is
almost closed to foreign films.
When
I showed my own film The War on Democracy to a major, liberal-minded
US distributor, I was handed a laundry list of changes, to “ensure
the movie is acceptable”. His memorable sop to me was: “OK, maybe
we could drop in Sean Penn as narrator. Would that satisfy you?”
Kathryn Bigelow’s torture-apologising Zero Dark Thirty and, this
year, Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets, a cinematic hatchet job on
Julian Assange, were made with generous backing by Universal Studios,
whose parent company until recently was General Electric. GE
manufactures weapons, components for fighter aircraft and advanced
surveillance technology. The company also has lucrative interests in
“liberated” Iraq.
The
power of truth-tellers such as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and
Edward Snowden is that they dispel a whole mythology carefully
constructed by the corporate cinema and the corporate media.
WikiLeaks is especially dangerous because it provides truthtellers
with a means to get the truth out. This was achieved by Collateral
Damage, the cockpit video of a US Apache helicopter allegedly leaked
by Manning. The impact of this one video marked Manning and Assange
for state vengeance. Here were US airmen murdering journalists and
maiming children in a Baghdad street, clearly enjoying it, and
describing their atrocity as “nice”. Yet, in one vital sense,
they did not get away with it; for we are all witnesses now, and the
rest is up to us.
John
Pilger’s film on Australia, Utopia, will be released in the autumn.
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