The Power of Propaganda

prop·a·gan·da ( P ) Pronunciation Key (prp-gnd)
n.
1. The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.
2. Material disseminated by the advocates or opponents of a doctrine or cause: wartime propaganda.

Truth - a valuable and necessary commodity that is traded, manipulated, bought and sold, repressed, created, researched, dissected, accepted and rejected on a daily basis. Mostly, it relies on facts. But, what is a fact, after all?

During the late 1980s when I was an adult student in college, I awoke one day ready to begin my regular routine but, when I looked out my front window in the second story apartment I lived in, I discovered that there were police cars and an ambulance right outside my door. Without knowing why they were there, but noticing that their attentions seemed focused on the yard to the west of my place, I quickly looked out the side window and saw the body of a clothed female laying face down in the grass. I could only, rightly, assume that she was dead, since none of the first responders appeared to be working on her. I shook.

I hurried down my stairs to the front door to find out what had happened. When I asked the police officer standing on the step what had happened, he simply said, "it appears there is a deceased body in the yard". I had already figured that out, obviously, and the officer would not give me any more information about how she may have met her demise. From that vantage point, she was actually about three feet away from me, but I couldn't bring myself to look at her. As I climbed the steps back to my place, I felt a surge of panic. What if she had been murdered and the perpetrator thought I might have seen what took place? Was I safe in my little apartment anymore? I had a class to attend and couldn't wait to get out of there, so I hurriedly got myself together and headed out to the college.

I was in a state of shock and, since I had never seen a body in such a state that was deceased under suspicious circumstances, I made my way to my college adviser's office and bluntly told him, "I don't know how to feel about this". He reassured me that whatever I felt or thought at the time was perfectly natural. That didn't help much, but I had a few hours away from the scene of the "crime" to process what I had seen. I had never felt so vulnerable.

It turned out that the woman, one I knew in passing from the neighbourhood, had committed suicide by taking an overdose of pills after she had been released from a psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital. It took two days for me to find out the truth in that situation and, in the meantime, I lived in fear wondering just how secure I was in my home.

The reason I've told this story is that, whenever I think about the truth and the effects of echo chambers and propaganda, I flash back to that time as a reminder of how pliable a mind can be at an extremely vulnerable time. Quite often, I've seen people rely on someone - anyone - to tell them what to think about important events in their lives when they really don't know what to make of their current circumstances. And, when someone feels as vulnerable as I did at that time due to the presence of overwhelming fear and shock, they'd better hope that whoever they've reached out to is going to be objective, knowledgeable and free of their own personal agenda.

And, so it is as we all try to make sense of our world when it comes to issues of war, horrors, terrorism, politics, and so-called, generally accepted facts. When we live in a state of shock, we can readily grasp almost anything that will provide comfort.

When I recently read an article that appeared on Slate's website, "The Twilight of Objectivity" by Michael Kinsley, which supports the idea of opinion-based journalism over objective reporting, I flinched at the thought. With the advances made on the internet, the presence of newspaper editorial sections and the proliferation of readily available radio and television news pundits, the one thing we cannot afford to surrender is a media that gives us "just the facts, ma'am" - especially when we know that influential, agenda-driven organizations like the Pentagon and the White House have the power to distort the truth every single day by planting stories, opinions and by flat-out lying. We saw it happen with the Iraq war and it's deja vu all over again with the current warmongering about Iran.

We've seen blowback against these efforts on the internet, led by the blogosphere, but we must also be careful not to fall into the trap of taking comfort in only those opinions that soothe us. We must be ever vigilant.

It's no surprise that the general public has almost become immune to the ghastly pictures of death we see every night on our television screens or that proven facts about wrongdoings by the Bush administration seem to be taken so lightly by so many who take so long to catch up to reality. It's just too difficult for some to believe that the person who leads their country could be anything but someone who acts for the good of the people which he is supposed to serve.

Denial is an extremely powerful force, even in the presence of a well-established case for war crimes, the knowledge that American citizens are being illegaly spyed on by their government, the growing case for impeachment over the manipulation of pre-Iraq war intelligence and the fact that Bush and Cheney authorized the leak of classified intelligence information to attack a political opponent who dared speak truth to power.

As comedian George Carlin once put it:

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that shit.

And that's where the strength of propaganda comes in. Those who are too busy, too vulnerable or just too apathetic are easily influenced by whatever is the CW (conventional wisdom) of the day. That's a dangerous state to live in, but it is reality. None of us is free from influence when we are faced with situations that are difficult to comprehend, especially when the facts around the situation have been manipulated or massaged in order to meet a desired end by those with the power to have that influence.

It sometimes seems that the days of free-thinking are long gone; that the idea of trusting one's intuition is an aberration when, in reality, those aspects of our characters are the only things that will save us. We surrender them at our own peril and to that of the societies in which we live.

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale -then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"
- George Orwell's 1984