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PRESIDENT TRAJKOVSKI MET WITH FRENCH PRIME MINISTER JOSPIN.

MIA

"In a military sense, the Kosovo conflict is over, but there are still ethnic tensions. We see no reason to allow certain groups to use methods which we have condemned, and by which we justified our intervention in Kosovo," French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin said during today's meeting with President Trajkovski, who is in an official visit to France.

In that context, President Trajkovski expressed Macedonia's dissatisfaction from the inefficient engagement of KFOR troops for resolving the problems at the Macedonian-Yugoslav border in the part of Kosovo.

It was stressed that the goal of the incidents at the northern Macedonian border is to destroy what has been built for years in the Republic of Macedonia in regard to the interethnic tolerance. Both Trajkovski and Jospin stood against the ideas for construction of any new great countries.

"The dream of Great Serbia turned into a nightmare and we do not want dreams for Great Kosovo or Great Albania. They want to attract the attention of the international community, but they will not get support or assistance from us," Jospin said. President Trajkovski pointed out that Macedonia's integration into NATO would put an end to the dreams for construction of great countries.

In regard to the KFOR engagement in the region, Jospin stressed that both the Europeans and the Americans ought to discuss on firm application of the UN Security Council Resolution 1244 and to fulfill their obligations.

The French Prime Minister also supported Macedonia's commitments for resolving the problems in the region, and stressed that France is aware that every incident can get wider proportions and therefore, it needs to be resolved at the beginning.

Jospin was also interested in the position of the Albanians in Macedonia in regard to the situation at the northern border.

As one of the positive impulses in the regional cooperation, President Trajkovski pointed to the Agreement for demarcation of the border between Macedonia and Yugoslavia, to which Kosovo opposes.

Besides the situation in the region, the bilateral cooperation, especially in the field of economy, was also discussed. The political relations between Macedonia and France were positively evaluated, but it was stressed that the economic cooperation would have to be intensified.

President Trajkovski stressed that a more intensive approach to the European Union will be of great help to Macedonia. In that context, France gave support for the signing of the Agreement for association and stabilization between Macedonia and EU, which is to be signed on April 10th.

Reporting on the Summit of the Process for Cooperation in the Southeastern Europe, President Trajkovski stressed that joint commitment of the countries from the region is to get closer to Europe and to enhance the regional cooperation, especially in the field of economy.

At the end of the meeting, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin referred to President Trajkovski as "politician with a modern vision for the Balkans.

Main Albanian Party Gives Macedonians Ten Days to Open Talks.

()

TETOVO, Apr 1, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) The leader of Macedonia's biggest ethnic Albanian political party said Saturday that he had given the government until April 9 to open talks on constitutional reform and avoid further ethnic conflict.

"I suggested this date because April 9 is the day when Macedonia is to sign the stabilization and association pact," with the European Union, Arben Xhaferi, head of the Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA), told AFP.

He warned that if the government refused to open talks on granting Albanians equal constitutional rights with Macedonia's Slav majority before the deadline then DPA ministers in the ruling coalition could boycott the signing ceremony.

Such a move could be seen as a prelude to the party's pulling out of the coalition altogether, a move which observers have warned could cause many more ethnic Albanians to transfer their allegiance to the armed guerrillas who have fought a three week conflict with security forces.

Xhaferi, speaking in the DPA's Tetovo headquarters, said he was doing his best to achieve a "demilitarization of the dispute."

But he warned that the rebel National Liberation Army (NLA) had not been defeated, as Skopje claimed, and would return to fighting if the Albanian community's demands were not met.

"They have not gone, they are here, in civilian clothes. They will see the outcome of our negotiations and if they are not happy they will continue again," he said.

Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski said Saturday that the security forces had defeated the NLA "militarily and politically" after a week long offensive against the rebels in areas along Macedonia's border with UN-run Kosovo.

Xhaferi criticized the offensive, and said that any other such operations could force him to pull his party out of government.

"If the violence continues and we have casualties among civilians or the destruction of their villages we cannot stay in government," he said. "From the beginning we were against the militarization of the crisis."

He accepted, however, that by focusing attention on Albanian demands for reform of what he termed Macedonia's "mono-ethnic concept of the state" the NLA had proved itself "useful, but very dangerous."

War, Journalism, and Propaganda: An Analysis of Media Coverage of the Bosnian and Kosovo Conflicts.

SERBIANA

[Expanded Edition]
by Carl K. Savich

Introduction.

Wars and conflicts begin in the minds of men and women. Before there is a war of bullets and bombs, there is a war of ideas. Images and ideas emerge first. Before one kills another human being, one has to rationalize killing, to explain killing, to justify killing. The first casualty in war is the truth.

Following the violent breakup and dismemberment in 1991 of Yugoslavia (the impossible country, the land of demons, slaughterhouse, the paper house), the US government and media launched a racist attack on the Serbian Orthodox people and nation in a policy of vilification that demonized and satanized all Serbs. The US government and media waged an unremitting campaign of racist stereotyping, disinformation, propaganda, and vilification. Sanctions were imposed upon the Serbian people as collective punishment for their collective guilt and a massive, planned and systematic propaganda war (information warfare) was conducted as Serbs were repeatedly bombed, attacked, and threatened with total annihilation and extermination.

The Serbian people, men, women, and children, were accused of seeking a Greater Serbia and were described and labeled using the standard archetypes of propaganda and dehumanization as aggressors, murderers, invaders, thugs, bullies, rapists, illiterates, degenerates, butchers, mountain Serbs, uncivilized, Serb bastards, drunken Serbs, fascists, nationalists, Stalinists, Nazis, Bolsheviks", Byzantine, Eastern, and Communist. Serbia was described as a regional bully, a menacing local power, and a most undemocratic regime.

Secretary of Defense William Cohen called for robust bombing of all areas inhabited by Orthodox Serbs:

The response should be disproportionate to the transgression, and no area of Serbia ruled out of our bombsights.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich advocated an all-out bombing campaign:

We would reserve the right to take Serbs apart...to use air power against every position you have, against every command-and-control center, against every position everywhere ... and we would do it in three to five days ... And I would do it all with air power.

The US government armed, trained, and supplied the Muslims and Croats to kill and defeat Serbs in Bosnia and in Krajina. The US media dutifully followed the official anti-Serbian policy by reporting with satisfaction and approval as US client states killed Serbian civilians and soldiers, as the following report by John Pomfret in The Washington Post, October 31, l994, illustrates:

When Emir Muslimanovic crept up a boulder-strewn knoll overlooking the town of Kupres last week, pounced on the back of a Serb fighter old enough to be his father and slit his throat, two thoughts powered him: going home and getting even...A comrade killed another Serb by collapsing his skull with a rifle butt jab to the face.

The slitting of the throats and the bashing in of skulls of Orthodox Serbs by US trained, armed, and supplied Muslim soldiers was reported as if not human beings were being killed and mutilated, but a species of vermin, cattle, or subhumans (untermenschen or mistmenschen). In 1994, with diplomatic support from the US, Muslim troops violated a United Nations exclusion zone around Sarajevo and slit the throats of 20 Bosnian Serbian military personnel, including four female nurses, not only slitting their throats, but mutilating and then burning the corpses.

The US government and media aided and abetted the Muslim offensive from the so-called UN safe haven of Bihac, which functioned as a Muslim staging area and military base of operations. The US media applauded and acted as cheerleaders as the Muslim troops killed Serbian civilians and soldiers and ethnically cleansed over 10,000 Serbian civilians. The Muslims burned down every Serbian village and took Serbian civilians hostage. There was. however, no condemnation.

The US-planned joint Muslim-Croat military operation which took the Serbian majority district of Kupres forced 20,000-30,000 Serbs to flee their homes. The US covertly and overtly armed, trained, and supplied, and planned military operations for the Muslims and Croats---which included constructing CIA air bases, downloading US spy satellite information that was provided to the Muslims and Croats, arms shipments to Muslim and Croat forces, to assist them in killing and ethnically cleansing Orthodox Serbs. The US planned, organized, and oversaw the Croatian Army military attack, Operation Lightning, that overran the UN Protected Area of Western Slavonija, and Operation Storm, which overran the UN Protected Krajina Area that resulted in over 300,000 Krajina Serbs being ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homes and lands and that resulted in thousands of Serbian dead.

The US government and media supported the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Krajina Serbs. In the September 11, 1995 Chicago Tribune article, Elderly massacred in Krajina attack, Tom Hundley reported:

On August 25 ... Croatian troops entered Grubori and killed everyone they found. These included: Marija Grubor, 90, whose charred remains were found in her burned house ... Milos Grubor, 80, an invalid ... shot once in the head ... Jovo Grubor, 65, whose throat was slit and who had been stabbed repeatedly.

The US government and media continue to be the principal planners and fomenters of a proposed Greater Albania, which would consist of the annexation of the Kosovo-Metohija region of Serbia by Albania, a US client state. Like the cleansing of Serbs from Krajina, the US supports the cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo-Metohija and rationalizes the murders of innocent Kosovo Serbs as revenge killings, a term coined by the US State Department and passed along to the journalistic pack. The US policy only exacerbates the cycle of violence and killings in Kosovo for the US ignores the fact that Kosovo Serbs were the first victims in the region when the Ottoman Turks invaded their lands and killed and enslaved them. If revenge killings are ever justified, the Kosovo Serbs are the most entitled to revenge killings of Albanian Muslims that killed their ancestors and drove them from their ancestral lands.

How is this racist propaganda campaign and war against the Serbian people and nation to be explained and comprehended? How is this propaganda campaign of racism and bigoted satanization and demonization of an entire people and religion to be explained by an avowedly democratic and free and open society, the United States, the leader of the free world? The techniques and methods--- information warfare (war propaganda)--- used to defeat the Serbian people are those routinely used by ruthless and oppressive totalitarian, authoritarian, and undemocratic states and governments. To understand and to grasp why and how the US government and media waged a propaganda campaign or war against Orthodox Serbs, the role of journalism and war in US history must be examined and studied.

Journalism in America.

Is there a free press in the U.S.? Do we have freedom of the press, or, as Wilson Bryan Key has argued, do we need freedom from the press, which is biased, manipulative, controlling and controlled by the government and business interests?

The first newspaper in colonial America, Publick Occurrences both Foreign and Domestic (l690), was immediately suppressed by the governor of Massachusetts. The first regular newspaper in the colonies, the weekly Boston News-Letter, appeared in 1704 and was published by authority of the government, it was a government-run newspaper, published by John Campbell, the postmaster. In 1719, it was replaced by the Boston Gazette, published by postmaster James Franklin, who two years later started his own newspaper, the New England Courant, which was the beginning of independent journalism in America.

American newspapers became highly partisan after the Constitution of l787. Newspapers either adopted the positions of John Adams Federalists or Thomas Jeffersons Republicans. The US government immediately saw the value of newspapers as a tool or instrumentality of the government. At one time, President Andrew Jackson had 60 full-time journalists on the White House payroll, the precursor of the White House press corps.

It was in reaction to such political partisanship in the press that James Gordon Bennett in l835 founded The New York Herald. In 1841, Horace Greeley founded The New York Tribune. In 1851, Henry J. Raymond founded The New York Times newspaper, which in 1896 was bought by Adolph Simon Ochs who rejected the sensationalistic yellow journlalism of Pulitzer and Hearst. Ochs made the Times into the most authoritative newspaper in America and the world. The New York Times would later be a party two two landmark US Supreme Court cases on freedom of speech: New York Times Company v. Sullivan (1964) which allowed a public official to sue for libel only if there was actual malice, and the New York Times Company v. U.S. (1971), the Pentagon papers case, which denied the government request to impose a prior restraint on information impinging on national security. By l850, there were 400 dailies; in 1880, 850 dailies; and, in 1900, more than 1, 950. The mass audience or mass public newspaper emerged.

But what is the nature of all the news that fits? U.S. newspapers are comprised of approximately 70 % advertising and 30 % editorial content. Thus, about 70% of any U.S. newspaper consists of strictly commercial propaganda, advertising. The remaining 30 % of news is imbued with highly specific motives. In other words, the news is not neutrally selected, but originates from government spokespersons, government agencies, public relations firms, industry, corporate and commercial organizations, and publishers. Moreover, government and business often engage in what is known as planting within media, that is, infiltrating the media with its own personnel. In the Kosovo Crisis in 1999, this was evident when it was disclosed that U.S. Army psyops (psychological operations) Specialists, i.e., military propagandists, were working for the largest news network, CNN. These propaganda specialists, psyops specialists, were involved in propaganda operations and dissemination during the Persian Gulf War and the Bosnian Civil War. Such plants by government and industry are long-standing, common, and routine, especially in newspapers. Moreover, most readers of newspapers do not read to gain information per se, but to gain reinforcement of established stereotypes, prejudices, and predispositions, to maintain the status quo and to sell products, what appears in newspapers is all the news that sells. Thus, much of what appears as news in newspapers is not neutral, but biased and selected with connections to government and industry. Very little of the so-called free press is actually free.

In 1887, William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) ran the San Francisco Daily Examiner newspaper and made it into a success by sensationalistic and manipulative journalistic methods and techniques. In 1895, he purchased The New York Morning Journal, copies of which sold for one cent and he began making use of yellow journalism, sensationalistic, manipulative journalism.

Yellow journalism derived from the cartoon strip The Yellow Kid, drawn by Richard Felton Outcault in Joseph Pulitzers World Newspaper and which was printed in yellow ink. Outcault would later join Hearts Journal newspaper.

In 1897 and 1898, during the Cuban crisis, Hearst made use of the techniques of yellow journalism by editorially clamoring for US military intervention against Spain. Through disinformation, yellow journalism, jingoism, and media manipulation, Hearst was able to induce the US to wage a largely needless war against Spain, the Spanish-American War. The techniques and methodology used by the US media and government in manufacturing the war against Spain in 1898 are instructive and essential in understanding the role of journalism in the coverage of the Bosnian Civil War of 1992-1995 and the Kosovo Crisis of 1998-1999.

A Comparison: The Cuban, the Bosnian, and the Kosovo Crises.

The Bosnian Civil War was characterized by sensationalistic, manipulative, biased, and distorted media coverage. French journalist Jacques Merlino was one of the first to analyze the systematic propaganda campaign of the Bosnian Civil War. In l993, Peter Brock described American media coverage of the Bosnian Civil War in Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press (Foreign Policy, Winter 1993-94) as follows:

Readers and viewers received the most vivid reports of cruelty, tragedy, and barbarism... It was an unprecedented and unrelenting onslaught, combining modern media techniques with advocacy journalism ...The media became a movement, co-belligerents no longer disguised as noncombatants and nonpartisan. News was outfitted in its full battle dress of bold headlines, multiple spreads of gory photographs, and gruesome...footage. The clear purpose was to force governments to intervene militarily.

This description of the US media role in the Bosnian Civil War and Kosovo Crisis could exactly describe what appeared in Hearts Journal and Pulitzers World from 1895 to 1898. Hearst and Pulitzer, almost a hundred years before their erstwhile imitators, used the exact same media techniques and methods used in coverage of the Bosnian conflict. So Brock is not entirely correct when he states that this method of news reporting is unprecedented. In fact, this has been the pattern of American journalism at least since the time of Hearst and Pulitzer.

The sensationalistic, inflammatory, and propagandistic articles and editorials in Hearsts Journal and Pulitzers World newspapers did much to incite war hysteria and in fact did much to cause an unnecessary war with Spain. Hearst and Pulitzer, the deans of American journalism, vied with each other to see who could produce the most sensationalistic, biased, and one-sided news stories about the Cuban crisis.

Hearst himself best described this style of journalism when he castigated Pulitzer who he stated was a journalist who made his money by pandering to the worst tastes of the prurient and horror-loving, by dealing in bogus news ... and by affecting a devotion to the interests of the people while...sedulously looking out for his own. Their style of journalism became known as yellow journalism, which meant a style that made use of cheaply sensational and unscrupulous methods in newspapers to attract or influence the reader. Today, it would be termed trash or tabloid journalism.

Both Hearst and Pulitzer demanded that the US intervene and wage war against Spain. They published sensationalistic stories about Spanish atrocities and about the Spanish Governor General of Cuba, General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, who was labeled the butcher Weyler, a rapist, and a torturer.

The methodology is almost identical to that employed by the US media in covering the Bosnian and Kosovo crises. A major focus of US media coverage was so-called Serbian atrocities against Muslims and Croats and Albanians and mass rapes committed by Serbian forces. Similar to the label, the butcher Weyler, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was labeled the butcher of the Balkans until 1995, when he became transformed by the media into a guarantor of peace and essential for maintaining peace and stability in the Balkans.

Hearst sent the artist Frederick Remington to Havana and other Journal correspondents to report on the Cuban civil war. But Remington reported back that there was virtually no fighting in Cuba at all and that a major conflict could be avoided. Remington sent the following telegram to Hearst in March, 1898:

Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return. --Remington.

Hearst sent the following famous telegram in reply:

Please remain. You furnish the pictures and Ill furnish the war. --- W. R. Hearst.

In virtually all media propaganda meant to lead to war or intervention, atrocities are an essential element. Atrocities are essential to create an imperative for intervention. During World War I, British, French, and US propaganda relied on a single theme, German or Hun atrocities. German soldiers were accused of bayoneting Belgian infants, chopping off the limbs of children and eating them, raping Belgian girls, shooting children and executing hostages and committing massacres. Before the German invasion of Poland in l939, the regime exhibited through the media examples of alleged Polish atrocities against the German minority. Indeed, the Germans even manufactured and staged an atrocity, Operation Himmler, a supposed Polish attack on a German radio station in Gleiwitz in 1939 to justify the German invasion of Poland. Before the US attack on Iraq in l99l, the US manufactured a bogus atrocity to incite popular support for intervention. Iraqi soldiers were accused of turning off incubators in hospitals and allowing Kuwaiti infants to die. A Kuwaiti girl testified before a US Congressional Committee, the Human Rights Caucus chaired by Tom Lantos and John Porter, that she was an eyewitness to this alleged atrocity. After the Persian Gulf War had ended, it was exposed that the Kuwaiti girl, Nayirah al-Sabah, was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, Saud al-Sabah, and that she did not witness any of the events, which instead were manufactured by the PR firm, Hill & Knowlton, a firm like MPRI, which has close contacts with the U.S. government. Moreover, the US media ran non-stop coverage of video footage of a gas attack by Iraqi forces against Kurdish civilians accused of collaborating with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. Before the conflict, when Iraq was a client state, the U.S. maintained that responsibility for the gas attack could not be determined. Most recently, before the US invasion of Haiti in l994, President Bill Clinton distributed and made available to news reporters and journalists atrocity photographs, which the US government alleged purported to show atrocities committed by the Haitian regime which the US sought to overthrow. Wars and conflicts come and go, but the propaganda techniques and methods remain the same.

Hearsts Journal and Pulitzers World newspapers relied on biased, one-sided, sensationalistic and propagandistic coverage of the Cuban crisis. While the smaller New York newspapers, the Herald, the Post, Tribune, and Times, were anti-war and presented analyses of the conflict which discussed the complicated political issues involved and reported that crimes had been committed by both sides, the World and Journal had the highest circulation which only dramatically increased with the use of yellow journalism. Pulitzer himself was at first opposed to the war with Spain, but later changed his view when he realized that a pro-war stance led to higher circulation.

Both Hearst and Pulitzer presented a hero-villain scenario for the Cuban crisis, a good guys and bad guys role for the combatants which was simple to understand and grasp by those who knew little about the conflict. Both papers featured articles about the murder of Cuban infants and the rape of Cuban women by the Spaniards.

The World sent Sylvester Scovel, a University of Michigan alumnus, to Cuba to cover the conflict. Scovel was a strong advocate of the Cuban insurgents and reported on Spanish atrocities, vividly describing the bodies of murdered and mutilated Cubans, stating that the Spanish soldiers habitually cut off the ears of the Cuban dead and retain them as trophies. Due to this propagandistic reporting, the Spanish restricted American journalists. This led to still more inaccurate coverage, based on innuendo, rumor, subterfuge and deceit. Thus, neither the US government nor the US public was accurately apprised of what the facts were in Cuba. The Spanish side of the conflict was virtually unknown and unavailable in the US.US coverage focused on Spanish atrocities which were based on biased and usually fictitious reports by journalists and reporters who did not witness the reports but merely repeated hearsay and innuendo.

The US government armed, trained, and supplied the Cuban rebels who were led by rebel leaders based in New York City. Clearly, the US government allowed journalists and newspapers to do its dirty work, to allow journalism to act as a vanguard for the government, allowing the US government to act covertly and invisibly, although the government was clearly pulling the strings. This same pattern would be repeated with the Bosnian Civil War of l992-l995 and Kosovo Crisis of 1998-1999. The U.S. purported to be a neutral arbiter of the latter conflicts, while clandestinely arming and supplying the Bosnian Muslim Army, the Croatian Army, and the KLA, who were all proxies of the U.S. government. Behind the scenes, the U.S. sought to advance national interests by means of these proxies, allies, or clients.

As can clearly be seen, American journalism and journalists and reporters to this day are guided by the techniques and methods used by Hearst and Pulitzer, changing very little since that time. During the Bosnian Civil War, virtually all major US newspapers demanded US military intervention in Bosnia against the Serbs. The same pattern or paradigm was followed with the Kosovo Crisis. The Serbs were accused of committing atrocities and mass rapes.

On February 15, l898, the US battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor. The cause of the explosion was never determined, but the immediate US media and government reaction was to blame Spain. Pulitzer and Hearst clamored for war, with the rallying cry, Remember the Maine. Pulitzers World had the following headline: Maine Explosion caused by Bomb or Torpedo? Washington officials ready for vigorous action if Spanish responsibility can be shown. The World sent its reporters to investigate the cause of the explosion. Hearsts Journal ran the following headline: How do you like the Journals War? These incidents are reminiscent of the Orahovac massacre in Kosovo in 1998, the Racak massacre in 1999, the Sarajevo breadline massacre in 1992, Markale Market massacre I and the Markale Market massacre II which the US media and government blamed on the Serbs but which UN investigators concluded were most likely staged by the Muslims themselves. Hearsts Journal and Pulitzers World whipped up war frenzy and hysteria to a fever pitch using sensationalistic reporting, jingoism, and yellow journalism to manipulate and distort the news. The bloody war which resulted, the Spanish-American War, was called by Secretary of State John Hay a splendid little war, much like the later Persian Gulf War, which was almost a bloodless video-game war using smart bombs.

The most intense fighting of the Spanish-American War, the splendid little war, occurred in the Philippines, in which an estimated 20,000 Filipino insurgents were killed and up to 200,000 died of hunger and disease caused by the US invasion. US combat deaths were slightly over 4,000.

The US Secretary of War described the Philippine people as those who engage in base treachery, revolting cruelty. US military commanders described the Filipinos as gorillas, .savages, habitually violating all the laws of war as known to civilized nations. A second commander stated that it was difficult to ascertain who was an enemy soldier from the general population because the problem here is more difficult on account of the inbred treachery of these people, their great number, and the impossibility of recognizing the actively bad from the only passively so. Theodore Roosevelt described the US victory as a triumph of civilization over the black chaos of savagery and barbarism. In The White Mans Burden, Rudyard Kipling in l899 wrote about Filipinos and other Asians as follows: ... Fluttered folk and wild ... sullen peoples, half devil and half child.

American troops referred to the Filipinos as niggers, treacherous savages, and treacherous gugus or goo-goos, which would re-emerge as gook in World War II and the Vietnam War as derogatory terms for Asians.

The fighting in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War was called Injun warfare. One American soldier told a reporter that the country wont be pacified until the niggers are killed off like the Indians. Another soldier stated that the only good Filipino is a dead one. Take no prisoners; lead is cheaper than rice. A US private told of the results of a goo goo hunt: The old boys will say that no cruelty is too severe for these brainless monkeys, who can appreciate no sense of honor, kindness or justice ... With an enemy like this to fight, it is not surprising that the boys should soon adopt No quarter as a motto, and fill the blacks full of lead before finding out whether they are friends or enemies. General Arthur MacArthur stated that inferior races succumb to wounds more easily than Anglo-Saxons in explaining to a Congressional Committee why 15 Filipinos were killed for every one wounded.

How is one to grasp and comprehend this pattern of news reporting? One has to begin with an examination of the development and techniques of propaganda. What is propaganda?

Propaganda.

The term propaganda is derived from the Latin propagare, to propagate, to reproduce, to spread, with the meaning, to transmit, to spread from person to person. Propaganda is short for Congregatio de propaganda fide (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), a committee of Roman Catholic cardinals established by Pope Gregory XV in l622 organized as a missionary group which proselytized for conversion to Roman Catholicism.

A modern definition is the systematic, widespread dissemination or promotion of particular ideas, doctrines, or practices, meant to further a particular cause or agenda and weaken that of another; it is a systematic effort to manipulate attitudes, beliefs, or actions by the use of symbols. It is commonly used to describe any deceptive or distorted accounts, usually as a dismissive, disparaging, and pejorative term, which in its broadest sense, can be and is applied to any account one does not agree with. In its purest and essential form, propaganda consists in the manipulation of symbols----words, pictures, signs, and images. At its most pure level, words and language, and indeed, even thought can be dispensed with. Merely a stimulus or image is all that is required to produce the desired response. Hearst stated: You furnish the pictures and Ill furnish the war. Hearst, like his journalist successors of today, understood the methodology and essential principles of propaganda perfectly.

The term propaganda is unpopular as a description in American political and social discourse and analysis. Instead, propaganda and propagandists are known by different terms: public relations (PR), publicity, advertising, information warfare, spin doctors, image brokers, public affairs, promotion, marketing, media relations specialists, lobbyists. Moreover, the term propaganda has been overused so that the term is practically meaningless today. This is so because propaganda has been one of the most prevalent and widespread phenomena of the twentieth century. The dangers of propaganda were first perceived in its first widespread and systematic use during World War I, the Great War.

There is a widespread misconception and myth that propaganda exists only in totalitarian states and not in democracies. The German philosopher Georg Hegel was one of the first to show that even in democracies, the public is manipulated and persuaded by hidden persuaders and hidden manipulators. In his l821 The Philosophy of Right, Hegel explained how the public in a democracy is manipulated by commercial interests which seek to make a profit:

What the English call comfort is something inexhaustible and illimitable. [Others can discover to you that what you take to be] comfort at any stage is discomfort, and these discoveries never come to an end. Hence the need for greater comfort does not exactly arise within you directly; it is suggested to you by those who hope to make a profit from its creation.

Even in democracies, the populace is manipulated and persuaded by unseen and invisible persuaders and manipulators. Hegel was one of the first to see this, before Alexis de Tocqueville, before William Randolph Hearst, before Noam Chomsky. The French author Anatole France explained it this way: Democracy (and, indeed, all society) is run by an unseen engineer, Edward L. Bernays (1891-1995), a nephew of Sigmund Freud, was a theatrical publicist and propagandist during World War I, working for the Committee on Public Information headed by George Creel, writing propaganda pamphlets. In l928, he published the influential book, Propaganda, in which he argued that propaganda could be a mechanism for engineering consent and popular approval. Bernays virtually invented the public relations business, establishing the theoretical groundwork in Crystallizing Public Opinion (l923). The masses could be controlled without their knowledge through public relations or propaganda. Bernays stated: If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.

Bernays, known as the father of spin, was a pioneer of public relations (PR) and his work did much to open the door for the PR conglomerates of today, such as Hill & Knowlton, Ruder Finn, Burson-Marsteller, Ketchum PR, and Ogilvy & Mather. He was a public relations counselor for the American Tobacco Company, the United Fruit Company ( now United Brands),Venida Hair Net Company, Cartier, and Proctor & Gamble. His greatest achievement in commercial propaganda or PR was a brilliant campaign to convince American women that to emancipate themselves, they should smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes, the torches of freedom.

By 1996, US business would spend $l trillion on marketing. PR firms would employ over 150,000 workers and who would influence 40% of everything Americans read or see.

Bernays, the dean of the public relations profession, called U.S. Publicist No.1, defined public relations as the attempt, by information, persuasion, and adjustment to engineer public support for an activity, cause, movement, or institution. In his book Propaganda, he described public relations as follows: The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. In The Engineering of Consent, a 1947 article and 1955 book, he outlined how the engineering of consent is accomplished by public relations.

First, one must set up over-all themes for the campaign. The themes chosen must coincide with the fundamental motivations of the interested publics. Once the themes are chosen, they are expressed over and over again, in ever varied form.

Second, the theme is tied to a symbol.

Finally, to arouse interest, the PR activity must be newsworthy. Bernays emphasized that newsworthy events are seldom spontaneous but are more-often planned events, known as propaganda of the deed:

Newsworthy events involving people usually do not happen by accident. They are planned deliberately to accomplish a purpose, to influence ideas and actions.

Bernays based his methodology for PR in part upon the works of Walter Lippmann who wrote about controlling and managing public opinion or the masses in Public Opinion (l922) and The Phantom Public (l925). During World War I, Lippmann was a member of US Army Military Intelligence, engaged in propaganda operations against Germany. Like Bernays, Lippmann believed most people were irrational and acted chaotically and were unable to independently make rational choices because they could not know all there was to a topic. Lippmann argued that people could be guided by a specialized class of enlightened elites. People are simple-minded and sheep-like who are incapable of formulating or organizing their desires and wishes and interests. Both Bernays and Lippmann were convinced that enlightened elites could lead and educate the masses. Bernays stated that the public must be regimented. Lippmann saw it as the making of one general will out of a multitude of general wishes. The American masses were convinced that Coca-Cola was the soft-drink of freedom and McDonalds Big Mac was the food of freedom and that smoking tobacco products was conducive to rugged individualism, as exemplified by the Marlboro Man campaign. Moreover, Bernays was one of the first to use PR to advance the political interests of nations and foreign governments when he was retained to provide public relations services on behalf of Lithuania. Bernays organized the PR or propaganda campaign against the democratically elected leader of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, on behalf of his client, the United Fruit Company, maintaining that Arbenz was a Communist. Arbenz sought to reform the economic structure of Guatemala to help the majority Maya population by instituting land reforms that threatened the land holdings of United Fruit. The CIA and John Foster Dulles were able to use Bernays propaganda in organizing a military coup that overthrew Arbenz and installed a right wing military dictator in 1954. The new CIA-installed regime would torture and murder and displace hundreds of thousands in the Guatemalan banana republic. United Fruit relied on virtual slave labor in its economic exploitation of Guatemala to produce inexpensive bananas for the American market. The overthrow of Arbenz and consolidating the power of United Fruit in Central America were important PR successes and accomplishments of Bernays.

Both Bernays and Lippmann based their methodology on the researches in the social sciences, particularly the work of French psychologist Gustav Le Bon, in his important book The Psychology of the Crowd (1895) and Sigmund Freud, particularly Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922), which examined collective group behavior and the behavior of crowds. The research of Russian experimental psychologist Ivan Pavlov published in Conditioned Reflexes (1926) was also of influence on Bernays. Bernays had no compunction about taking findings from the social sciences and applying them to public relations.

War Propaganda.

Propaganda emerged as an instrument of persuasion and manipulation during World War I, a large-scale ideological conflict of unimagined dimensions. World War I was the first truly global war; it introduced mankind to total war and was the first truly technological war, making use of airplanes, submarines, poison gas, tanks, and the aerial bombardment of cities. World War I was the war to make the world safe for democracy, the war to end wars, when the fate of Western civilization is at stake from the attack by the Hunnish barbarians.

In 1927, Harold D. Lasswell, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, in Propaganda Technique in the World War, analyzed the techniques employed by the Allies, the French, British, and Americans, against Germany and her allies during the war. Lasswell described propaganda as follows:

A new and subtler instrument must weld thousands and even millions of human beings into one amalgamated mass of hate and will and hope ... propaganda. It is the new dynamic of society ... The fact remains that propaganda is one of the most powerful instrumentalities in the modern world. Propaganda is a reflex to the immensity, the rationality and willfulness of the modern world.

War propaganda has four major objectives:

l) to mobilize hatred against the enemy;
2) to preserve the friendship of allies;
3) to preserve the friendship and, if possible, to procure the co-operation of neutrals;and,
4) to demoralize the enemy.

Lasswell explained that to mobilize the hatred of the people against the enemy, represent the opposing nation as a menacing, murderous aggressor ... Represent the opposing nation as satanic; it violates all the moral standards (mores) of the group, and insults its self-esteem. This Allied propaganda was able to accomplish, portraying the Germans as the satanic enemy, as child killers and rapists, committing atrocities against the Belgian civilians. Thus, primarily, the Allies succeeded in portraying the Germans as aggressors and as a satanic enemy. Lasswell explained that French propaganda relied on simple satanism:

The French propaganda was lucid and simple ... her chief propaganda was that of simple satanism ...The Germans were never able to efface the initial impression that they were aggressors ... The Germans were never able to popularize so striking an epithet as Hun or Boche.

Invariably, the enemy is dehumanized and is portrayed as barbaric, brutal, cruel, uncivilized and as violators of international law and the mores of mankind and humanity. German Kaiser Wilhelm II was labeled the Kaiser, the beast of Berlin. Germans were portrayed in subhuman stereotypes, usually as apes or other animals. This was best expressed by Rudyard Kipling in 1915 in The Morning Post (London):

There are only two divisions in the world today---human beings and Germans.

There are three tactical objectives of propaganda:

1) to arouse the interest of specific groups;
2) to nullify inconvenient ideas; and,
3) to avoid untruth which is likely to be contradicted before the achievement of the strategic purpose.

President Woodrow Wilson by Executive Order created the Committee on Public Information during World War I headed by George Creel and was associated with the Military Intelligence Bureau. This was the US propaganda office.

Harold Lasswell was not the only one who studied the techniques of war propaganda during World War I. Adolf Hitler made a careful and diligent study of Allied war propaganda which he discussed in Mein Kampf, the first part published in 1924, wherein he analyzed Allied propaganda techniques:

The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the masses...The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blas young gentlemen, but to convince, and what I mean is to convince the masses...What our authorities least of all understood was the very first axiom of all propagandistic activity: to wit, the basically subjective and one-sided attitude it must take toward every question it deals with...Its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.

Many people know the Nazi regime made use of propaganda. Few, however, realize that Nazi propaganda was based and modeled upon Allied propaganda against Germany. Hitler learned the lessons well. Joseph Goebbels was an ardent student of American public relations pioneer Edward Bernays. The evil and satanic Hun became the eternal Jew who in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion sought to enslave mankind. Indeed, Hitler learned more from Allied propaganda than the intellectual elites, scholars, and academicians did. Hitler assessed American and British propaganda accurately:

The war propaganda of the English and the Americans was psychologically sound. By representing the Germans to their own people as barbarians and Huns, they prepared the individual for the terrors of war ... The function of propaganda is ... exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for ... Sober reasoning determines (the peoples) thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling ... All effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan ... To be a leader means to be able to move the masses.

Like Bernays and Lippmann, Hitler was convinced the masses must be guided and led and that to fully grasp an idea or issue it was to be repeated over and over:

The intelligence of the masses is small. Their forgetfulness is great. They must be told the same thing a thousand times.

Hitler explained that through repetition, the propaganda would ultimately and eventually achieve success:

At first the claims of the propaganda were so impudent that people thought it insane; later, it got on peoples nerves; and in the end, it was believed...The great masses of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.

Like Bernays, Lippmann, and Hearst, Hitler fully grasped the psychological mechanisms of propaganda. Repetition was important to ensure that the message becomes internalized, that is, that it enter the subconscious, where it becomes merely data and where rationality and conscious control is not possible. This is the secret of propaganda. This is how it works on a mass scale. Bernays used the analogy of a water bucket, that when rocks are dropped in it, eventually overflows, a critical mass is achieved. This is how indoctrination, brain-washing, and even education occurs. This is similar to the popular saying, If you throw enough mud, some of it will stick.

Propaganda operates at the subliminal or subconscious level and the sensory perception level. The subconscious and sensory perception and processing are largely involuntary. That is, we cannot control our mental processes at the subconscious level and we cannot control sensory processing. Once we have seen or heard data or information, we cannot unsee or unhear it. Propaganda and persuasion techniques operate at this involuntary level, the subliminal, subconscious, and sensory perception level. Conscious thought is voluntary, but sensory perception processing and the subconscious are not. All propaganda and all propagandists understand this and make use of it. Hitler stated: In the end, it was believed. Propaganda operates at this involuntary level. We have no or very little control over this level. We receive and process this data or information involuntarily and with or against our will. These factors highlight the myth and illusion in so-called democratic societies of free will and independent choice and action. The nature of sense perception and of subconscious activity limits the amount of voluntary control we can exercise. There are limits to free will and free choice. We are limited by these mechanisms of sensory perception and processing. William Wordsworth stated it this way: The eye---it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still; our bodies feel, whereer they be, against or with our will. The television generation, the cyberspace generation, our generation of mass culture and mass media with innumerable informational channels receives data and stimuli which operate at the subconscious or perception levels, that is, at the involuntary level. Propaganda operates at the conscious level, or voluntary level, but more importantly, at the subconscious and sensory perception level as well, at the involuntary level. Not everyone realizes this. But all propaganda and all propagandists utilize this fact.

The Nazi propaganda machine was also based upon the machinery of the Roman Catholic Church and the Jesuit order, as Hermannn Rauschning explained in 1939:

Hitler has a deep respect for the Catholic church and the Jesuit order not because of their Christian doctrine, but because of the machinery they have elaborated and controlled, their hierarchical system, their extremely clever tactics...

Joseph Goebbels, who was appointed Reich Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment (Reich Minister fur Volksaufklarung und Propaganda) in the Nazi regime, defined propaganda as follows:

Propaganda has only one object, to conquer the masses. Every means that furthers that aim is good; every means that hinders it is bad ... You can make a man believe anything if you tell it to him in the right way ... Nothing is easier than leading the people on a leash.I just hold up a dazzling campaign poster and they jump through it...

Goebbels made a distinction between passive and active propaganda. Like Bernays and Lippmann, Goebbels enunciated the goal of propaganda is to create a single will:

The people must begin to think as one unit, react as such, and put themselves at the disposal of the government wholeheartedly...To belabor the people so long until they succumb to us.

In Communist or Marxist-Leninist regimes and theory, there is a distinction became propaganda and agitation (agitatsyia), or agitprop. In What is to be Done? (l902), Vladimir Lenin defined propaganda as the reasoned use of historical and scientific arguments to indoctrinate the educated and enlightened, what a public relations specialist would call attentive and informed publics. Agitation is defined as the use of slogans, parables, and half-truths to exploit the grievances of the uneducated and ignorant masses. Every unit of the Communist Party had an agitprop section because under Communist thought, propaganda is commendable and honest, the ends justify the means.

The US government established two propaganda offices during World War II, the Office of War Information (OWI), specializing in overt propaganda, and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which specialized in covert propaganda or information warfare. With the defeat of Germany, the US entered into another major ideological conflict, the Cold War, which necessitated an unprecedented and immense propaganda or information campaign against the USSR and global Communism. Several government agencies were created specifically for the Cold War ideological struggle, such as the US Information Agency (USIA) which co-ordinated propaganda broadcasts by the Voice of America (VOA). The Central Intelligence Agency co-ordinated the Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty propaganda efforts. In the Cold War battle between the free world and Western democracies and the Communist bloc and satellites, propaganda was all-important and crucial. Thus, both domestic and foreign policy became ideologically charged in the US. In the last fifty years, we have witnessed the massive growth of propaganda, both commercial and political in the US.

How is propaganda to be recognized and analyzed?

Concentration Camps in America: A Case Study of Intolerance and Racism: The Evacuation and Internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The anti-Serbian bigotry and racism that the US government and media developed and manifested against Yugoslavia beginning in 1991 was also directed against Serbian-Americans, that is, against its own citizens of Serbian heritage and background. Serbian-Americans were attacked and ostracized and denied access to the mass media and to the deliberative process. Serbian-American citizens were all painted with a single brush as the enemy, them, and any dialogue was precluded. Such intolerance and repression of its own citizens runs counter to the rhetoric that depicts the US as a democratic and open and free democracy. In fact, American intolerance and racism have a long history directed against Native American Indians, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. During World War I, German-Americans were the targets. During World War II, German-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Japanese-Americans were singled out and targeted for bigotry and repression. The Japanese-Americans suffered the most under American democracy and tolerance during a time of war.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, a racist hysteria of intolerance and a lynch mob mentality seized the US which harkened back to the Salem witch hunts and the hysteria against German-Americans during World War I. The targets of this racist hysteria in 1941 were Japanese-American citizens and Japanese immigrants. Over 120,000 Japanese-Americans, men, women, and children, 72,000 of whom were US citizens, roughly two-thirds, were forced to abandon their homes, properties, and businesses and were evacuated and interned in internment camps in the Western United States.

The evacuations and internments were carried out under Executive Order 9066 signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942.Lt.General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, under the War Relocation Authority, issued Public Proclamation no. l, which ordered the evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry from California, Oregon, and Idaho to assembly centers. They were then rounded up and transferred to relocation centers in California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Arkansas, ten in all. Many were crowded into horse or cattle stalls and pigpens.

No reason for the evacuation and internments was given only that it was done for their own protection. Japanese-Americans were not found to be a threat or danger to national security. J. Edgar Hoover maintained that Japanese-Americans posed no internal domestic danger. But columnist Walter Lippmann warned that the entire Pacific Coast was in imminent danger of attack from within. Other prominent political and media figures were voicing similar racist warnings. The mayor of Los Angeles urged that the Japanese be rounded up and put in camps because they were unassimilable and because blood will tell. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote that their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese. The Los Angeles Times explained the need for this policy as follows: A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched --- so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to be a Japanese not an American. In the National Geographic for October, 1942, the need for the internments was explained as follows by a provost marshals aide: Probably not five percent of the thousands were interning would be dangerous if left at large. But how identify that small percentage? So we corral all. Lt. General DeWitt, who administered the evacuations, explained that a Jap is a Jap and that the Japs we will be worried about all the time until they are wiped off the face of the map.

On December 18, 1944, in Korematsuv. US, the US Supreme court upheld the exclusion of a single ethnic group, the Japanese, as within the war powers of the Congress and the President. The evacuations and internments based on race were upheld as legal. The final internment camp was closed on March 20, 1946.

Why were the Japanese-Americans put in internment camps, American concentration camps, most of whom were loyal US citizens? A 1983 Congressional report blamed it on race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. The report, moreover, concluded that the internments were not justified by military necessity.

Even before the 1942 internments, Japanese immigrants experienced racism in America. The Japanese were feared because they were successful farmers which American farmers perceived as a threat. In a l906 California poster from the Japanese Exclusion League, the following statement appears: No Japs in our schools! A l905 San Francisco newspaper article decried Japanese immigration, which it termed the problem of the hour and condemned the brown stream of immigrants who steal white mans work.

This paroxysm of racism and bigotry can be explained in psychological terms as an example of consensual paranoia, creating tribal and social solidarity and membership by defining an enemy, an other, an outsider, an alien. Us, the tribe, insiders, are pitted against them, the enemy, outsiders. Psychologically, the unknown and the strange is perceived as dangerous and as a threat. Consensual paranoia results. A bipolar opposition is maintained: Us versus Them, Good against Evil, insiders versus outsiders. The Japanese become the Other who must be destroyed if we are to survive. Consensual paranoia was exhibited during the Salem witchcraft hysteria, when New England colonists were threatened by Indian and French attack, and during World War I, when German-Americans were targets of racism and intolerance, and during the Red Scares following World Wars I and II, when the danger was perceived to be Communism.

In l988, 46 years after, the US Congress and president Ronald Reagan officially apologized for the evacuations and internments, US government actions, and promised every surviving Japanese internee $20,000. $1.25 billion was allocated to educate American schoolchildren about this event.

A perception of danger and threat leads to intolerance and racism, a product of consensual paranoia. Even when the danger or threat is not real but is imaginary and illusory, nevertheless, the perception of danger and threat is all that is needed. This is why propaganda targets the emotions and rarely the intellect. The propagandist merely has to present a sense or perception of danger causing fear. It is irrelevant whether that fear or danger or threat is real.

The Archetypes of Propaganda: Us and Them: A Case Study of America at War: From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima.

The war between the US and Japan during World War II, l94l-l945, is indicative of how nations wage war and illustrates the us versus them dichotomy, the bipolar opposition, required in all war and all propaganda. The archetypes of the enemy devised in the US war with Japan are crucial in understanding the US policy and strategy in the Bosnian Civil War, l992-l995 and the Kosovo Crisis of 1998-1999.

The historian Allan Nevins characterized the American war against Japan as follows:

Probably in all our history no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese... Emotions forgotten since our most savage Indian wars were reawakened by the ferocities of Japanese commanders.

The US government and media adopted an exterminationist policy towards the Japanese which called for the total destruction, annihilation, and extermination of the Japanese people and nation. John Toland, in Infamy, maintained that the war against Japan was a war that need not have been fought...fought because of...American racial prejudice, distrust, ignorance of the orient, rigidity, self-righteousness, honor, national pride and fear. The methodology and tactics used by the US to defeat the Japanese were in part based on the patterns of the Indian wars and on a Manichaean total war between good and evil, between us and them. In a poll conducted in December, 1944, Americans were asked, What do you think we should do with Japan as a country after the war? 13% of the respondents wanted to kill all Japanese, while 33% supported destroying Japan as a political entity.

The first step in defeating the Japanese was to dehumanize them as a people and to depict them in archetypical racist terms as inferior, subhuman, apes, savages, and barbarians. Standard archetypes or exemplars or avatars of propaganda were utilized to dehumanize and stereotype the enemy. These archetypes of propaganda reappear in all propaganda campaigns and all wars. This was precisely how Native American Indians were defeated and how blacks were enslaved and excluded. The Japanese were denoted as animals, reptiles, insects, as yellow monkeys, baboons, gorillas, dogs, mice, rats, vipers, rattlesnakes, cockroaches, and vermin. Depicting the enemy as an animal lessens the amount of guilt when the enemy is killed. In Nazi Germany, for instance, Jews were depicted as lice or rats to expedite mass extermination. Franz Stangl, the commander of the Treblinka concentration camp explained that dehumanization was necessary to expedite the extermination process:

To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies. To make it possible for them to do what they did.

The enemy was subhuman, or lesser than human, or not human, and thus deserved or warranted extermination. Killing such an enemy is proper and appropriate and those doing the killing should feel no guilt or moral compunction. The Japanese were mad dogs or yellow dogs, and as reflected in a statement during the war, mad dogs are just insane animals that should be shot.

A manifestation of racism and racist hysteria was to refer to the Japanese in racist stereotypical terms: Nip, from Nippon, the Japanese word for Japan, and the shortened Jap. These were the equivalent of nigger and gook and Hun. New terms were also coined by US Marines: Japes, a combination of Japs and Apes. Another neologism was monkeynips. US Marine Eugene B. Sledge recalled that native peoples of the Pacific were referred to as gooks. The major themes were of hunting and then exterminating vermin, or predatory animals, a nameless mass of vermin. Guadalcanal was described as a hunters paradise...teeming with monkey-men.
J. Glenn Gray described how American troops hunted down a Japanese soldier and killed him as if he were not a human being, but an animal, a beast of prey:

When a Japanese soldier was flushed from his hiding place...the unit...was resting and joking. But they seized their rifles and began using him as a live target while he dashed frantically around the clearing in search of safety. The soldiers found his movements uproariously funny. Finally...they succeeded in killing him...The veteran emphasized the similarity of the enemy soldier to an animal. None of the American soldiers apparently ever considered that he may have had human feelings of fear and the wish to be spared.

The dehumanization of the enemy was meant to lead to extermination and total annihilation, as was reflected in the pronouncements of US military leaders and the media. Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the US South Pacific Force, at a l944 press conference declared:

The only good Jap is a Jap whose been dead six months. When we get to Tokyo ... well have a celebration where Tokyo was.

A popular wartime saying was the only good Jap is a dead Jap. In 1943, Leatherneck, the US Marine monthly magazine, ran a photograph of Japanese corpses on Guadalcanal with an uppercase heading reading: Good Japs. The caption for the photo read: Good Japs are dead Japs.

Extermination was buttressed by dehumanization. Admiral Halsey referred to the Japanese as yellow bastards, stupid animals, yellow monkeys, and monkeymen. He stated that he was rarin to go...to get some more monkey meat and that the Japs are losing their grip, even with their tails and explained that the Japanese were a product of mating between female apes and the worst Chinese criminals. The objective was to persuade to kill, to kill them. Halsey rallied his men with the following motto: Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs. The US Marine Corps motto was: Remember Pear harbor---keep em dying.

Time magazine expressed its outrage after the attack on Pearl harbor in blatantly racist terms: Why the yellow bastards! The New Yorker depicted the Japanese as yellow monkeys while the Washington Post caricatured them as a large gorilla. Rear Admiral Husband Kimmel explained his shock at the attack on Pearl Harbor as follows: I never thought those little yellow sons of bitches could pull off such an attack so far from Japan.

Captain H.L. Pence, the Navy representative to the first interdepartmental US government committee to consider the issue of the treatment of Japan after the war, stated in May, l943, that he advocated the almost total elimination of the Japanese as a race, because this was a question of which race was to survive, and white civilization was at stake.

The chairman of the War Manpower Commission, Paul V. McNutt, told a public audience in May, 1945, that he favored the extermination of the Japanese in toto ... for I know the Japanese people.

Vice Admiral Arthur Radford, several days before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, stated that Japan will eventually be a nation without cities---a nomadic people.

William Randolph Hearsts newspapers warned of the yellow peril and maintained that Japan was a racial menace. The US war with Japan took on the nature of a race or racist war. The Japanese, along with other Asians, were regarded as despised races, unassimilable races, and inferior races. Racism is a manifestation of consensual paranoia which sees a person or group that is different in any way as a stranger, as an alien, the enemy other. Racism divides us against them based upon racial differences. In conjunction with the exterminationist and dehumanization policies, there was the use of racist stereotypes. Racist stereotyping is reflected in the following photograph caption from the National Geographic of October,l942: Who Says All Orientals Are Inscrutable? These Japanese, Arriving at an Evacuation Camp, Plainly Show Theyre Worried.

The dehumanization of the enemy is achieved also by picturing the enemy as a faceless and nameless them, removing individuality from the enemy. The enemy becomes a homogeneous mass, an object for us to hate and to kill. It is accepted that killing other human beings is morally wrong. But defeating what we perceive as hostile ideologies can be commendable. We are not fighting a people and nation, but an ideology. Guilt and responsibility are thereby lessened. Of course, it is human beings who maintain the ideologies. As Stanislaw Lec has stated, In a war of words, it is people who get killed. This is why ideology is so important in war and propaganda. The enemy, them, must appear as a single, undifferentiated mass or unit guided by one idea, a single ideology, a single purpose. The Japanese people were said to be photographic prints off the same negative. They were an obedient mass with but a single mind, a subservient mass a human herd, faceless hordes. This is a familiar and standard tactic in all war propaganda meant to lessen sympathy for the enemy people. The enemy people must be seen as an undifferentiated mass, inseparable from its leaders and government. All individuality must be eradicated. One could sympathize with the suffering and hardships of a Japanese individual caught up in a war his leaders had imposed. But as a faceless mass, the Japanese people were merely a numerical statistic, a thing, a cipher, not a person.

The exterminationist policy of the US was manifested in many ways during the war, such as not taking prisoners, killing POWs and surrendering troops, fire-bombing cities with incendiary bombs, using atomic bombs on cities, and the practice of collecting battlefield trophies from dead or near-dead Japanese soldiers. US troops routinely took gold teeth, ears, bones, scalps, and skulls from dead Japanese soldiers. In Guadalcanal Diary, Richard Tregaskis reported the following conversation between US soldiers:

They say the Japs have a lot of gold teeth. Im going to make myself a necklace ... Im going to bring back some Jap ears ... Pickled.

The Marine monthly Leatherneck ran this account in 1943: The other night Stanley emptied his pockets of souvenirs---eleven ears from dead Japs. The Baltimore Sun and The Detroit Free Press ran stories about war souvenirs. In Baltimore, a mother petitioned to be allowed to have her son mail her an ear he had cut off a dead Japanese soldier. In Detroit, a minor had attempted to enlist by promising his chaplain that he would send him the third pair of ears he collected from dead Japanese soldiers.

Eugene B. Sledge, a US Marine veteran of the Peleliu and Okinawa campaigns, recalled how US soldiers would routinely shoot even wounded Japanese soldiers to obtain their gold teeth, a practice more commonly associated with Nazi guards extracting gold teeth from Jews:

Ive seen guys shoot Japanese wounded when it really was not necessary and knock gold teeth out of their mouths... I remember one time at Peleliu, I thought Id collect gold teeth. One of my buddies carried a bunch of em in a sock. ... The way you extracted gold teeth was by putting the tip of the blade on the tooth of the dead Japanese--- Ive seen guys do it to wounded ones---and hit the hilt of the knife to knock the tooth loose... This Jap had been hit. One of my buddies was field-stripping him for souvenirs.. the guys dragging him around like a carcass...This guy had been a human being... It was so savage. We were savages.

In 1944, the New York Times reported that a US serviceman had sent President Roosevelt a letter opener made from the bone of a dead Japanese soldier. Life magazine published a photograph of a woman standing next to a Japanese skull which her fiance had sent from the pacific, with the caption: Arizona war worker writes her Navy boy-friend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her in the May 22, 1943 issue.

US soldiers routinely used Japanese skulls as ornaments on military vehicles and as war trophies, after the flesh was boiled in lye or left to be eaten by ants. On February l,l943, Life magazine published a famous photograph by Ralph Morse which showed the charred, open-mouthed, decapitated skull of a Japanese soldier killed by US Marines at Guadalcanal, which was placed on the tank. The caption read as follows: A Japanese soldiers skull is propped up on a burned-out Jap tank by U.S. troops. Life received letters of protest from mothers who had sons in the war and others in disbelief that American soldiers were capable of such brutality toward the enemy. The editors of Life explained that war is unpleasant, cruel, and inhuman. And it is more dangerous to forget this than to be shocked by reminders. Indeed, remarkably, Life received more than twice as many protest letters over a photograph of a maltreated cat in the same issue than they did over the photo of the charred skull of the Japanese soldier. This is the ultimate achievement of propaganda and dehumanization: Mans inhumanity to man, even to the point where we are more concerned for the welfare of our pet animals than we are for other human beings. Daniel Okrent, the managing editor of Life in l996, commenting on the decision not to publish the photograph of an incinerated and charred corpse of an Iraqi soldier during the Persian Gulf War, stated that at some point we have to acknowledge what people are capable of doing to one another. Such inhumanity is the necessary result of propaganda, of an us versus them bipolar opposition. Sam Keen has described this in Faces of the Enemy as follows:

In the beginning we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.

In an unconditional, Manichaean exterminationist war, the enemy is archetypically depicted as a superman or as supermen. The psychological pattern in propaganda to create an image of the enemy as a superman is rooted in a paranoid, infantile orientation. The paranoid orientation cannot accept balance or equality; the paranoid must either sadistically dominate or masochistically be an inferior victim. Moreover, anxiety and guilt is lessened when the enemy is omnipotent and criminal. This tactic is necessary to galvanize and mobilize all the resources against the enemy, which is not as easily done if the enemy is not perceived as a threat or danger. The analogy most often used in propaganda is that of the bully. The Japanese were referred to as Jap bullies and Serbia was referred to as a regional bully. The New York Times Magazine in l943 ran a caption which asked, How Tough are the Japanese? In l993, in Foreign Affairs, a caption under a photograph of Serbian soldiers in a tank asked, Can these men be stopped?

A standard element of war propaganda is to characterize any action against the enemy as defensive or reactive in nature. We only defend ourselves. The enemy are aggressors. Paranoia creates a passive-aggressive orientation. The passive-aggressive victim always reacts to the aggression of the enemy, thus all responsibility and guilt is negated. This is how war results. A passive-aggressive victim lacks balance, lacks equilibrium. As a powerless victim, the paranoid justifies his own attacks as an attempt to gain power over the enemy. A passive orientation dissipates all responsibility and guilt. An American soldier who slits the throat of a Japanese soldier did it only because he knew the Japs had done it to his buddies. Eugene B. Sledge explained: You developed an attitude of no mercy because they had no mercy on us. It was a no-quarter, savage kind of thing. Similarly, a Muslim soldier slits the throat of a Bosnian Serb soldier or nurse because he seeks to go home and to get even. The weak, innocent, defenseless were being protected and saved from the barbarous, vicious, and cruel enemy supermen. The Japanese were barbarous, uncivilized, inhuman, depraved, given to mad dog orgies of brutality and atrocity, exhibiting primitive blood lust and brutal butchery, a naked, tribal savagery. Similarly, Bosnian Serbs were termed thugs, degenerates, illiterates, butchers, rapists, efficient battlefield killers, killers, murderers. Charles Lindbergh kept a diary in which he wrote down his observations of the war in the Pacific. He noted the desire to ruthlessly exterminate all Japanese as follows: They treat the Japs with less respect than they would give to an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone.

The movie industry reinforced the propaganda archetypes of the enemy in Hollywood films. Movies, like television, alter our environments, that is, they are new ways of perceiving or perception. As Marshall McLuhan has explained, these new forms of media change the manner in which we process information and evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. By altering the medium or environment, we change our ways of perceiving the world, thus, new media change us at the epistemological level. By changing the media, the way we think and act is altered. Information becomes instantaneous and communal, processed in a global village, the information being uniform and replicated, being received as simultaneous stimuli with little time for rational examination. Movies and television have a tremendous capacity to dehumanize and to persuade. Pauline Kael, the film critic of the New Yorker, recalled the propagandistic nature of Hollywood films during World War II in reinforcing archetypes of the enemy in the The Good War by Studs Terkel. Kael recalled how a lot of the movies were very condescending to Europeans and Asiatics. Movies created a bipolar dichotomy of us versus them, dehumanizing the enemy, as Kael recounted:

I hated the war movies, because they robbed the enemy of any humanity or individuality... Even the German or Japanese who happened to be your friend ... had to be killed ... We had stereotypes of a shocking nature. They could never be people, who were just caught in the army the same way Americans were and told what to do.... I got so angry. It was so difficult to deal with, because in some intangible way they did represent the essence of war propaganda.

As explained by John W. Dower in War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, fighting the Filipinos in the Spanish-American War and later the Japanese was directly linked to US experiences fighting Indians on the western frontier. The US thus had developed an stereotypical and archetypical blueprint for the enemy other. The Japanese and Filipinos were substituted for the Native American Indians. In fact, many soldiers were transferred to Asia from frontier posts where they had fought Indians in the Spanish-American War. Arthur MacArthur, the father of Douglas MacArthur, was one of the more conspicuous U.S. Indian fighters.

The war against the Japanese during World War II was characterized as Indian fighting. The US Army Infantry Journal stated that the Japanese were as good as Indians ever were. The New York Times magazine of February 13,l942, in an article called The Nips, explained the analogy with the Indian wars as follows:

The Japanese are likened to the American Indian in their manner of making war. Our fighting men say that isnt fair to the Indian. He had honor of a sort. Moreover, even a dead Jap isnt a good Jap...Yet such are the Nipponese. In death as in life, treacherous.

The racist and exterminationist language was obvious. Asians were termed yellowbellies, yellow bastards, yellow monkeys, slant-eye, slant, squint eyes, almond eyes, slopey, or slopie, gook, goo-goo, dinks, ochre horde. Gook derives from goo-goo, the ethnic label used to describe Filipinos at the end of the nineteenth century.

The exterminationist policy was further exemplified by the massive bombing campaign directed against major Japanese cities, targeting civilians, unarmed men, women, and children. US military planners at first espoused a policy of precision bombing, targeting military and industrial targets only. But on March 9,l945, precision bombing was abandoned when Tokyo was attacked by 334 US aircraft at low altitude with incendiary bombs which destroyed 16 square miles of the city and left over a million homeless. An estimated 80,000-l00,000 Japanese civilians---men, women, and children---were killed, scorched and boiled and baked to death. This new aerial strategy, strategic bombing, was developed by Major General Curtis LeMay, who applauded the fire bombing of Tokyo that scorched and boiled and baked to death so many Japanese civilians. Strategic bombing would be employed against Yugoslavia in 1999 during the NATO bombardment of Belgrade, Pristina, Novi Sad, Kragujevac, Nis, and Cacak. Civilians and civilian infra-structure became key NATO targets. Hospitals, nursing homes, television stations, buses, trains, automobiles, tractors, and civilian homes were all targeted. Strategic bombing seeks to demoralize the civilian population by targeting civilian targets and civilian infra-structure, such as electrical power grids, energy plants, water supplies.

Incendiary bombardment of civilian targets became the prime US aerial strategy in U.S. bombing of Japan. In all, 66 Japanese cities were bombed, killing nearly 400,000 Japanese civilians. Fire bombing or slaughter bombing or massacre by bombing accounted for two-thirds of the total tonnage of explosives dropped on Japan. This type of obliteration bombing was regarded as just retribution with hardly any dissent on the home front. Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, in a confidential memorandum, described the US bombing raids on Japan as one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history. Of a total of l53,000 tons of bombs dropped on Japan, 98,000 were incendiary or fire bombs. The slaughter bombing of Japanese cities would culminate in the first use of atom bombs in warfare, used against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The estimate of the numbers killed from the atomic bombs is 130,000-150,000 for Hiroshima and 60,000-80,000 for Nagasaki. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, in explaining the decision to use the atomic bomb, stated that the face of war is the face of death ... war is death. Stimson maintained that there must be administered a tremendous shock ... such an effective shock would save many times the number of lives, both American and Japanese, that it would cost. The policy applied is that the ends justified the means.

Propaganda Analysis.

Because propaganda in its many guises---public relations (PR), advertising, publicity, marketing---is ever-present and all encompassing in society, it is rarely if ever seriously studied or even discussed. Noam Chomsky has stated that the whole topic [of propaganda in U.S. culture] is vastly understudied, for pretty obvious reasons. One in every six dollars of G.D.P. , $l trillion, however, is spent by US business on various forms of marketing, i.e., commercial propaganda. As early as l930, John Dewey remarked that we are exposed to the greatest flood of mass suggestion that any people has yet experienced. First of all, propaganda in its broadest sense, has always been a part of human social interaction and can be said to fill a social need, informing the public. Furthermore, persuasion and manipulation are a part of everyday life, as Voltaire noted in 1766: Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts. In a political context, Niccolo Machiavelli advised that occasionally words must serve to veil the facts, but this must happen in such a way that no one become aware of it, or if it should become noticed, excuses must be at hand to be produced immediately, plausible deniability. Nevertheless, although commonplace and wide-spread, political propaganda can be recognized and it can be analyzed and understood.

As we have seen, propaganda methods and techniques have not changed much in the last century. Public relations and propaganda rely on an variation of the same theme: How to manipulate and persuade the masses. Virtually all propaganda campaigns rely on: l) Repetition; and, 2) Confusion.

To grasp the mechanisms of propaganda is to understand man as social animal. As Harold Lasswell has put it, to illuminate the mechanism of propaganda is to reveal the secret springs of social action. That is, to understand how and why propaganda works is to understand mans relationship to reality and how he perceives it. The analysis must begin with a study of the origin of language because we understand physical reality and can communicate this understanding through language.

First of all, our understanding of the world is inextricably tied to our language. Language cannot be dispensed with to arrive at a pure, self-authenticating truth or method. As quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of German quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg have shown, physical reality is probabilistic, relative, and uncertain. That is, there is no objective truth out there; there is no absolute truth, but only a truth. Thus, there can in theory be no completely unbiased, objective truth. To search for absolute truth is in theory an illusion.

In language we rely on signs or symbols to create meaning. But symbols are never settled on an absolute meaning. Meaning is always to a certain extent deferred and in constant development through metaphor. We understand reality through metaphors.

Niels Bohr, for example, studied the atom, an unknown, ( metaphrand). To grasp the atom, he created a model based on something familiar, the solar system (the metaphier). Bohr then related these two, the metaphrand with the metaphier , which is a metaphorical process, as a model to assist in understanding the atom. This is how we understand or perceive reality, by creating models and applying them to phenomena. The models are helpful tools only and do not reflect absolute truth, or an absolute representation or perception of phenomena. Like the lenses in eyeglasses, they aid us in perceiving phenomena, but they all distort and structure reality. Our arbitrary and subjective structuring of reality results.

Propaganda has its basis in binary opposition, the structural division of the indivisible into hierarchical oppositions. For example, we structure reality into us/them, male/female, truth/fiction, literal/metaphoric, mind/body, cause/effect, reason/emotion. But these binary oppositions, while helpful in analyzing phenomena, delude us into believing that they are absolute and objective dichotomies. In fact, these divisions are arbitrary and rhetorical. That is, our language shapes and structures the manner in which we see and perceive reality, language becoming a perceptual strait-jacket. The Chinese philosopher Confucius deduced that a sane and well-ordered society resulted when things were named or labeled accurately. The whole art of propaganda consists in mislabeling or inaccurately signifying things.

Binary opposition assumes hierarchical opposition. The first term is automatically given superiority or pre-eminence over the second term. This structure creates a two-valued system, either true or false, either right or wrong, good or evil. A black and white, us and them scenario results, for example, Whoever is not for us is against us, The only good Indian is a dead Indian. This is the structural basis for all propaganda. Hitler understood this when he wrote that propaganda does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing ... The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people ... Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy.

Wars and conflicts change, but the archetypes or stereotypes of the enemy employed in all propaganda remain constant. The images of the enemy created or manufactured by propaganda are the result of consensual paranoia. A paranoid blames or projects its own rejected vices on the enemy, all the cruelty, sadism, hate, avarice of the paranoid is transferred to the enemy. A schizophrenia results as the paranoid mind projects the worst aspects of itself, what Carl Jung referred to as the shadow, to the enemy, while retaining all the positive aspects for itself. Everything that we find reprehensible in ourselves, which is denied or repressed, we transfer or project onto the enemy. Thus, a propagandist looks into a mirror when he manufactures the image of the enemy. This is why propaganda accuses or blames the enemy for what the propagandist seeks to do or is guilty of himself. What the propagandist accuses the enemy of is usually what the propagandist himself is guilty of. Moreover, this projection is based on an infantile, paranoid orientation that oscillates between sadistic dominance and masochistic victimization. This is why Bosnian Serb military forces were depicted as invincible supermen by U.S. propaganda, why Saddam Hussein threatens the world with weapons of mass destruction, and why there were Communist witch hunts during the 1950s era of Joseph McCarthy, during the Red Scare. Propaganda reveals more about the propagandist than it does about the enemy.

Western language structures are conducive to propaganda because of its nature as two-valued, based upon arbitrary binary oppositions. Propaganda does not seek to expand thought, but to narrow it; in fact, propaganda seeks to do away with thought altogether. The masses do not need to think at all, thought is unnecessary and superfluous, but merely to react to symbols and images, that is, to stimuli, not unlike Ivan Pavlovs dog, who salivates merely when its master rings a bell, i.e., creating conditioned reflexes (which led to the psychological school of behaviorism).

Propaganda can be analyzed and dissected by various methodologies and approaches, from a structuralist linguistic approach relying on structuralism, based upon the writings of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, in his Course in General Linguistics (1915), to the deconstructionist approach, or the General Semantics approach developed by Alfred Korzybski in Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933). The content analysis approach or symbol counting method of Harold Lasswell can be employed or statistical systems theory approaches. Finally, psychological approaches are also possible. In the 1930s, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis was established in New York for the analysis and detection of propaganda. The Institute published a periodical entitled Propaganda Analysis from 1937 to 1942 to counteract the pervasive and invidious influence of propaganda in America, by such propagandists as Detroit-based radio propagandist Father Charles Coughlin, and William Randolph Hearst. Hearst had met with Hitler in 1934, was photographed with Alfred Rosenberg, and had published a series of articles by Hermann Goering in his newspapers. In 1939, to combat this propaganda, the Institute published the book The Fine Art of Propaganda. Alfred McClung Lee of the Institute published many studies on propaganda analysis and detection in subsequent years. But with the entry of the US into World War II necessitating a large-scale ideological conflict, i.e., a propaganda war, the antipathy to propaganda was much lessened. With the emergence of the Cold War following World War II, propaganda became accepted as necessary in the ideological struggle against world Communism. Propaganda was no longer seriously studied and its analysis was disfavored by the mainstream intellectual elites.

The following propaganda techniques are found in all propaganda campaigns.

The Appeals Technique---this technique appeals to human emotions and desires in order to promote or sell something else, in the Bosnian case, the something else was US military intervention on the side of the Muslims and Croats. Thus, atrocity stories or Atrocity Appeal is an appeal to our emotions to sell intervention. The objective is to convince us that intervention is necessary to prevent future mass slaughter, to prevent genocide, to prevent violations of human rights. This is how British propaganda sold World War I to America: The US should intervene to prevent Hun atrocities, to prevent human slaughter of innocents. The atrocity stories are a means to an end, intervention. Once military intervention is achieved, the atrocities are superfluous and no longer required and thus are no longer reported.

In the Kosovo case, an imperative for military intervention by the U.S. against Yugoslavia was sought to be created by a paradigm established in the Bosnian Civil War, so Kosovo propaganda was derivative and modeled on the Bosnian propaganda which had worked so effectively. The Albanian population of Kosovo was stated to be the victims of persecution, repression, oppression, and human rights abuses. In 1998, when the KLA, the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, termed by U.S. diplomats as a terrorist organization began an all-out offensive campaign against the Yugoslav police and governmental officials, the Albanians were now the victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing, like the Bosnian Muslims had been. In short, the terms genocide, ethnic cleansing, atrocities, massacres, human rights abuses, were part of the Appeals Technique to muster support for military intervention.

Bandwagon Appeal consists in showing that one should support intervention to get on the bandwagon because the whole world supports it, i.e., the UN, the international community, the Western world, the free world, all mankind. In the Bosnian Civil War, the U.S. relied on the UN and international law because they buttressed the U.S. policy and position. On the Kosovo issue, the U.S. rejected the UN and international law because U.S. policy violated them.

Testimonial Appeal relies on experts, celebrities, or authorities to promote intervention. During the Bosnian civil war, diplomatic and intellectual elites were called upon to give their testimonials for intervention, i.e., Susan Sontag, Anthony Lewis, Lawrence Eagleberger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Elie Wiesel. With regard to Kosovo, Senator Bob Dole, Joseph Biden, John McCain, General Wesley Clark gave their testimonials for intervention.

Plain Folks Appeal relies on the appeal that intervention is appropriate because the victims are plain folks like us, relying on the us versus them dichotomy. This technique was employed by novelist and free-lance writer Susan Sontag who portrayed the Muslims as secular, urbanized, cosmopolitan, tolerant, who are, after all, just like us, that is, just like the nation that is being persuaded to militarily intervene, the US. Remarkably, to the Muslim world, Muslim propaganda portrayed itself just like them, i.e., militant and radical Muslims seeking to establish a Muslim fundamentalist state in the heart of the infidel Europe. In appealing to the US to intervene, the propaganda sought to show that the Muslims are plain folks, like you and me. The staging of the rock musical Hair and Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot and the playing of the Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Sarajevo were meant to show that the Muslims are Western-oriented, part of the Western tradition, plain folks, just like us and unlike them. Absurdly, Hair was a 1960s musical which was anti-government, anti-war, anti-nationalism, and anti-racist. The Bosnian Muslims used Hair in the service of war propaganda to advance their narrow, racist and nationalist agenda of creating a Muslim Bosnia through war. Propaganda is rarely logical or rational, but as Hitler correctly noted, is meant to appeal to the emotions, affective appeal, and only the emotions and not to the intellect, cognitive appeal.

Conversely, Orthodox Serbs were portrayed by racist stereotypes of the enemy, the other, them, as uncivilized, backward, mountain Serbs, mountainous, animal-like, vermin-like, in short, unlike us, not like us, not plain folks like us, but nationalists, zealots, uncivilized, fanatical, barbaric mountain dwellers not part of the Western enlightened tradition, not part of the West, not part of enlightened Latin Christendom(Roman Catholicism).

The Logical Fallacy Technique was rampant in the Yugoslav conflict. For instance, all sides to the conflict committed atrocities and massacres, the media reported, but only the Serbs were condemned and ostracized, only the Serbs were war criminals, only the Serbs were committing crimes against humanity, to kill an Orthodox Serb whether man, women, or child, soldier or civilian, was tantamount to justified or excused homicide, to the US media, to kill Serbs was like killing rats or vermin, a typical propaganda stereotype. When atrocities were committed against Serbs, they were rationalized as appropriate retaliation and just retribution even when unprovoked. A Croat Roman Catholic nun was asked, Do you find it difficult not to hate the Serbs? Even when lies were told by Muslims and Croats, the media concluded that, nevertheless, that the stories were generally true although specifically untrue, a reductio ad absurdum.

With regard to Kosovo, political analysts noted that Kosovo Albanians had been given greater minority rights by Yugoslavia than any other minority in the world. The Albanians, however, wanted secession and the creation of a Greater Albanian and thus boycotted the political process. The murders of police officers and government officials by terrorist methods only created instability and a lack or normalcy and legitimacy. Albanian separatism, however, was the cause of the instability, not repression or human rights abuses. Moreover, the so-called refugee crisis in Kosovo was created by the KLA terrorist attacks and then by NATO bombing. But these refugees were illogically state to be the product of Slobodan Milosevics policy of ethnic cleansing campaign according to the US media and government pronouncements.

The Misleading Association Technique---US propaganda sought to associate the Bosnian civil war to the Holocaust against European Jewry committed by Germany and German allies during World War II. Bosnian Serb detention camps were portrayed as Nazi-like concentration camps, like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau, meant to appeal to Jewish groups in the US. War crimes and war crimes trials were an attempt to associate the crimes to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. War refugees, which are a part of every war and every conflict, in this case were deemed to rise to the level of genocide and the term ethnic cleansing, used in World War II to describe the Croat-Muslim Ustasha genocide committed against Bosnian and Krajina Serbs in the NDH, was manipulated and regurgitated and turned against the Serbs. The siege of Sarajevo was associated with the siege of Leningrad during World War II where over a million Russians died. In point of fact, more people were killed in Washington, DC in l994 than died in Sarajevo that year. In all about, l0,000 died in Sarajevo on all sides in nearly four years of war. In Rwanda, by contrast, during the same period a half million to a million civilians were killed. But such is the power of propaganda, of images of war, that it appeared that Sarajevo was Leningrad in World War II. Finally, the book Zlatas Diary was published modeled on The Diary of Anne Frank, a transparent and obvious propaganda technique difficult to miss even by the naive and unsophisticated. Was the memory of Anne Frank being exploited by Muslim propagandists? Was this use of war propaganda fair to the legacy of Anne Frank? Propaganda is amoral and based on emotion, affective appeal. This is why it is so invidious because it dehumanizes both the persuader and the persuaded. In order to persuade others to kill, propaganda dehumanizes all concerned in its propagation.

Similarly in Kosovo, Albanian refugees were by the Misleading Association Technique associated with European Jews during the Holocaust. Absurdly, Albanian separatists in the Nazi Kosovar Albanian Skanderbeg SS Division had in fact rounded up the Kosovo Jews in 1944, whereupon they were murdered by the Germans. The Bosnian Muslims had two Nazi SS Divisions while the Croats ran the largest concentration camp in the Balkans, Jasenovac, during World War II. This real connection to the Holocaust was ignored and instead a misleading association was created. Here we have fantasy triumphing over fact.

The Oversimplification Technique appears in the media analysis of the conflict. The media perceived the Bosnian conflict not as a civil war, but as an aggression by one state, Serbia, against another state, Bosnia. The media did not perceive the conflict as one between three ethnic and religious groups, similar to Lebanon. The media saw Bosnia conveniently as another Kuwait. Why? Because the intervention paradigm for a Kuwait scenario already existed: The US massively bombs the capital, Belgrade, and the aggressors retreat. By contrast, a Lebanon scenario was difficult if not impossible to manage or solve. Indeed, Anthony Lewis clamored for aerial bombardment of Belgrade in l992. Oversimplified slogans emerged, lift and strike, arm and train, economic strangulation and information warfare. Serbs were stereotyped as rebels, rapists, cutthroats in an atavistic spasm of racism and bigotry by the US media and government; Serbs were seen as them while Bosnian Muslims and Croats and Albanians were us, a primary orientation of all war propaganda.

The Kosovo crisis was oversimplified as one between the repressive security forces of Slobodan Milosevic and innocent, Albanian civilians. In fact, the Serbian minority in Kosovo was being systematically attacked and murdered by the KLA which also launched an attack on the police and government personnel. The KLA was fighting for separatism and secession which every sovereign nation had a right to combat, to preserve its own borders. The anti-Serbian propaganda reduced the crisis to one of Kosovo civilians defending themselves against Milosevics forces. The Kosovo Crisis was reduced to a conflict between Slobodan Milosevic and Albanian Kosovar civilians. Can it get any simpler than that? This is an established propaganda paradigm: Valeriano Weyler, the Kaiser, Adolf Hitler, Tojo, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic would all become the focus of the propaganda campaign as the straw man targets.

The Selection Technique consists of selecting only a part of the story and presenting it as the complete picture. The media focused on Sarajevo to paint a picture of Bosnian Islam. But in the villages and rural districts, Muslims were not secular, were not cosmopolitan, were not tolerant, but were, militant, devout Muslims who sought to create a Muslim state which they ruled. This is an example of False Emphasis. Alija Izetbegovic and his Muslim party were committed to establishing a Muslim State for Muslims, but the media never showed this by using the Card-Stacking Technique, selecting only certain details of the Muslim leadership and not presenting the whole picture, i.e., that the SDA ruling party was a Muslim party made up only of Muslims, that Izetbegovic had visited Iran, that Iran was supplying weapons and funds to the Muslim leadership.

With regard to Kosovo, the US government and media repressed or shielded the fact that the KLA was a terrorist organization seeking separatism and secession through terrorism and terrorist acts. This is a classic example of the Selection Technique in propaganda.

The Word Techniques---used against an individual, cause, or idea---are the most prevalent. Name calling---referring to the Serbs as aggressors, rapists, killers---allows us to form a judgment before examining all of the evidence or the complete record. For instance, Muslims are called secular, but the fact that the regime has ties to Iran is not revealed. These words cause signal reactions, that is, prejudiced or predetermined responses. Bosnian Serbs are labeled war criminals, murderers, rebels without showing or demonstrating how this is so. By using such words, namecalling, the media wishes to tell us how to think about the events and actors in the Yugoslav conflict, in fact, to preclude thought. In Nazi Germany, for example, concentration camp guards told Jews and other inmates to repeat, We are swine!, so that they would begin to think they are subhuman. Similarly, US reporters and editors referred to Krajina Serbs as Croatian Serbs, an oxymoron coined at the US State Department, but wishing to tell readers that they should think of Serbs only as a minority in Croatia, regardless of the reality on the ground.

Conversely, with regard to the Albanian minority in Serbia, the US media employ the opposite propaganda strategy. The Albanian minority in Serbia is referred not as Serbian Albanians but as Kosovars and citizens of the Republic of Kosova. The Muslim regime in Sarajevo, which lacks the support of the majority of its constituents, is nevertheless referred to as the Bosnian Government in capital letters, while the Serbian or Yugoslav government is merely the Milosevic regime or the Belgrade regime. The internationally recognized borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina are legitimate and legal. Conversely, the internationally recognized borders of Yugoslavia are illegitimate and illegal. Why is this so? The decision is totally arbitrary, made at the U.S. State Department.

Glittering Words, or Virtue Words, are given to an actor to preclude an examination of the evidence. Thus, Muslims and Croats are pluralistic, democratic, tolerant, Western-oriented, peace-loving, innocent, secular, multi-ethnic, victims, defending themselves. But the governing SDA Party is a Muslim nationalist party made up only of Muslims with extensive and wide-ranging ties to Iran, Afghanistan, and Libya, and Algerian militants. The KLA is transformed from a terrorist organization to US allies and proxies, freedom fighters, without any rationale. Thus, the propaganda technique allows a misleading, one-sided presentation which is inaccurate and false. In essence, Glittering or Virtue Words are employed by the propagandist to preclude thought on the part of the target audience. The facts or evidence need not be examined. The conclusion has already been made for the audience, thus saving them the needless expenditure of thought. It is a thought-saving device. Why waste your time on thinking? Or examining the evidence or the facts?

Likewise, Glittering Generalities preclude a debate or discussion of the conclusions reached. This is a primary objective of all propaganda, to prevent or preclude discussion or debate, or ideally, to preclude any thought whatsoever. As Marshall McLuhan has noted, propaganda ends where dialogue begins. We are informed that Muslims are in support of a multi-ethnic state, democracy, pluralism, tolerance, the free world, the New World Order. But the ruling party is made up of only Muslim leaders who seek to create a Muslim state for Muslims only, as exemplified in The Islamic Declaration (1970, republished, 1990) by Alija Izetbegovic, described as a Mein Kampf for Balkan Muslims. The Islamic Declaration and Franjo Tudjmans The Wasteland of Historical Reality (1989) were ignored in the West, although these books clearly enunciated the respective Bosnian Muslim and Croatian positions eloquently and forcefully. The KLA separatist and secessionist goals were known by US policymakers, who labeled the KLA initially as a terrorist organization. But like Glittering Words, Glittering Generalities seek to present a one-sided, subjective view of the Muslims and Muslim leadership which is a hallmark of all propaganda.

Finally, the US media and government inconsistently applied the legal doctrines of positivism and natural law, a clear sign that a propaganda war is in effect.

Positivism stipulates that the law is to be obeyed regardless of whether one regards it as just or not. The law is the final authority. The Nazi Nuremberg laws were based on the positivist approach. The law was the law and one had to follow it, even though it is racist, genocidal, and unjust. I was just following the law, your honor. It was the law.

The natural law approach states that when one believes the law to be unjust one does not have to obey it and can violate it by rejecting it.

The US government and media inconsistently applied these two approaches. The Krajina and Bosnian Serbs must follow the law, i.e., international recognition, even if they thought the law was unjust and against their interests or even if doing so would lead to their genocide. The law was the law. But with regard to Kosovo, the law is immaterial and Albanians and NATO are free to disregard the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, international treaties, and all customs and agreements between nations.

But with regard to the Bosnian Muslims and Croatia, the US applies a natural law approach. The US allowed Muslims and Croats to violate international law, the UN Arms Embargo because US policymakers felt it was unjust. Likewise, the US itself violated the embargo in l994 because it thought it unjust, even though the US had voted for the embargo. When laws are unfair, we should feel free in violating them, the US spokespersons explained. The Muslims had a natural right of self-defense thus they need not heed the law, civil, military, international, or even human rights. Similarly, Muslims could use UN safe havens as military staging areas because the law was unjust. The Croatian Army attack on the Krajina Serb UN Protected Areas was justified by the US on the grounds that Croatia was establishing control of its international borders, i.e., a positivist approach. The law, legal principles, and international law, were merely used as a tool of propaganda in a cynical manner. With regard to Kosovo, the US acted as if it were the law, violating Yugoslav sovereignty without the slightest hesitation. Moreover, in the Bosnian Conflict, the US went out of its way to castigate the Bosnian Serbs for allegedly using cluster bombs. Then in the Kosovo Conflict, NATO used cluster bombs on Serbian civilians without any compunction whatsoever. The hypocrisy and double-standard were apparent to all. But no one cared. The propaganda had achieved its purpose.

War Crimes in Bosnia.

Was the coverage of the Bosnian civil war and Yugoslav breakup by the US media ethical, professional, and fair?

The American Society of Newspaper Editors has established a Code of Ethics or Canons of Journalism which define the ethics of the profession.

Canon I , entitled Responsibility, defines the responsibility of the journalist: A journalist who uses his power for any selfish or otherwise unworthy purpose is faithless to a high trust.

Under Canon II, Independence, a newspaper has to reveal when it receives communications from outside or private sources.

Under Canon IV, Sincerity, Truthfulness, Accuracy, by every consideration of good faith a newspaper is constrained to be truthful.

Canon V on Impartiality states that news reports should be free from opinion or bias of any kind.

When newspapers make a mistake, Canon VI, Fair play, requires that a newspaper make a prompt and complete correction of its own serious mistakes of fact or opinion. When character or moral reputation is affected, the person so accused should be given an opportunity to respond.

Television news reporters are bound by the television Code of the national Association of Broadcasters, which mandates that news reporting should be factual, fair and without bias. Pictorial material should be chosen with care and not presented in a misleading manner. Commentary and analysis should be clearly identified as such.

US media bias and partisanship was apparent in the coverage or lack thereof of events in the Bosnian civil war, thus violating many of the canons and codes of professional ethics and responsibility of journalism and television news reporting.

The US media never reported on the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian and Krajina Serbs or of Bosnian Serb villages around Konjic in May, 1992, at the start of the civil war. The media never reported on the Muslim-run detention camps at Tarcin and Celebici.

Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat forces attacked the Serbian majority villages around Konjic, expelled or ethnically cleansed the Serbs and held them at collection or detention centers and camps, the most famous of which was the Celebici camp. Serbian men, women, and children were killed, tortured, and sexually assaulted, raped, beaten, and subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment.

The Muslim-run Celebici camp consisted of a tunnel, a hangar, and an administrative building. After being collected at Celebici, many of the Serb detainees were moved to other Muslim-Croat detention camps, where they were imprisoned for up to 28 months. The Celebicic camp was in existence from May, 1992 to December, 1992.

The US media never covered or reported this camp or other Muslim and Croat camps for Serbs. It was only on March 21, 1996,that these facts came to light, when the Military Tribunal for War Crimes at the Hague indicted the following Muslims: Zejnil Delalic, who co-ordinated the activities of the Muslims and Croat troops, he was the commander of the First Tactical Group of the Bosnian Muslim Government Army; Zdravko Mucic, known as Pavo, was the commander of the Celebicic camp from May to November, 1992; Hazim Delic, who was deputy commander of the camp; and, Esad Landzo, known as Zenga, a Muslim guard at the camp.

In June, 1992, Hazim Delic and Esad Landzo selected the Serb Scepo Gotovac, aged between 60 and 70, who was then beaten and an SDA (Muslim Party, Party for Democratic Action, all Muslim members, ruling party) badge was nailed to his forehead. He died soon after.

In July, 1992, the Serb Zeljko Milosevic was beaten by guards and died soon after. Simo Jovanovic was also beaten and died. Bosko Samoukovic, aged 60, was beaten and died afterwards.

Esad Landzo selected a Serb inmate with the surname Miljanic, aged between 60 and 70, then used a baseball bat to beat him to death.

Near the end of July, Hazim Delic and Esad Landzo selected Slavko Susic, who was beaten with a bat and a piece of cable and tortured with pliers, lit fuses, and nails. He died from his injuries.

Milorad Kuljanin was shot by a Muslim guard who stated that they wished a sacrifice for the Muslim festival of Bairaim (from page 6 of the War Crimes indictment by the Hague). Zeljko Cecez, Slobodan Babic, Petko Gligorevic, Gojko Miljanic, Zeljko Klimenta, Miroslav Vujicic, and Pero Mrkajic were shot and beaten to death.

On May 25, Orthodox Serb Momir Kuljanin was tortured and beaten into unconsciousness, the Muslims burned a cross on his hand, and was hit with a shovel, was suffocated and had a corrosive powder applied to his body.

On May 27. 1992, and continuing until August, Grozdana Cecez was repeatedly raped, on one occasion by three different persons in one night. From June 15 to August, Muslim guards repeatedly raped and sodomized a Serbian detainee known as Witness A.

On June 15, Spasoje Miljevic was tortured and a mask was placed over his face, a heated knife was placed against his body, he was forced to eat grass,he was severely beaten with fists,feet, a metal chain and a wooden implement and a had a Fleur de Lis, symbol of the secular Muslim regime, carved on his palm.

Mirko Babic and Mirko Dordic were tortured and beaten with a baseball bat. Nedeljko Draganic was beaten with a baseball bat and was burned when Muslim guards poured gasoline on his trousers. Mirko Kuljanin, and Dragan Kuljanin were beaten and mistreated. Vukasin Mrkajic and Dusko Bendo had a burning fuse cord placed around their genital areas.

The Muslim guards at the Celebici camp plundered money, watches, and other valuables belonging to Serbs taken to the camp.

The US media neither reported nor covered these acts of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and crimes against humanity. The US media was in breach of its own ethical canons and codes of professional responsibility which it has established for itself. All propaganda must be subjective and one-sided.

The US media never covered the massacres committed by Muslim troops against Serbian civilians in the Serbian municipalities of Bratunac, Skelani,Vlasenica, and Milici in eastern Bosnia. These Muslim forces were commanded by Naser Oric, from Potocari near Srebrenica, indicted by the Hague Tribunal for war crimes, a policeman and former member of the Yugoslav special forces.

One of the worst massacres of the Bosnian Serb population occurred on September 26,l992 in the Serbian villages of Rogosija and Nedeljista near Milici.Muslim forces under Naser Oric, the commander of the Muslim troops in Srebrenica, massacred 37 Serbs. The victims were shot in the legs and then burned, while two were impaled. The wounded had their throats cut and their heads cut off. Some victims had their heads smashed in with axes and sledgehammers and their brains were extracted. The dead and wounded were circumcised (Islamic religious practice) and many were castrated and there was genital mutilation of the victims.

In Kamenica, seven mass graves were found containing the corpses of 38 Bosnian Serb POWs who were murdered and mutilated.

On December 14, 1992,Serbian villages around Bratunac were attacked by Muslim troops from Srebrenica. The Muslim forces killed 64 Serb civilians and burned down the houses and the villages.

On January 7, 1993, Serbian Orthodox Christmas, Muslim troops from Srebrenica attacked the Serbian village of Kravica near Bratunac and brutally massacred 50 Orthodox Serbs and then burned down the village.

The US media did not cover these events. Moreover, US military transport aircraft stationed in Germany dropped food packages meant for the Muslim troops while they were committing horrendous atrocities and engaged in a genocide against Orthodox Serbs. Unfortunately, Bosnian Serb military forces usually advanced so rapidly that these humanitarian packages fell into the hands of the Serb forces.

Because the victims were Serbs, the media did not cover these events. As Misha Glenny explained in The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Bosnian Government troops moved swiftly through the Serbian villages, slaughtering large number of civilians on the way. Because the atrocities were being perpetrated by the Muslims, they received relatively little attention in the world media.

The US media claimed and reported that the Muslim Government and its Army were secular and multi-ethnic, but when the Bosnian Government Army massacred Orthodox Serbs and burned down entire Serbian villages, they wrote Islam shall win on burned down Serbian homes, which is incompatible with a multi-ethnic and secular Army and Government. There were also thousands of mujahedeen volunteers from Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia in these Government forces, along with the Mosque Doves, Muslim Green Berets, and Black Swans, Muslim para-military formations.

The US media did not report on the Croat-Muslim massacre of at least 181 Bosnian Serbs murdered in Mrkonjic Grad in western Bosnia when NATO aircraft bombed the Serbs during a massive offensive launched by the Croatian Army which invaded Bosnia from Croatia (also not reported) with support from Bosnian Croat and Muslim forces, which ethnically cleansed thousands of Serbs.

On February 3, 1996, 18l bodies were exhumed from the mass graves in the Serbian Orthodox cemetery in Mrkonjic Grad. The victims were between the ages of 22-89. Among the bodies were those of eleven elderly women and wounds were on most of the bodies indicating torture. Many of the skulls were smashed in with dull objects. Four corpses were beheaded. When the bodies were exhumed, not a single foreign journalist appeared at the scene to report or cover it. Ten days later, when a press conference was held, there were no journalists or reporters present. Moreover, no international organizations or human rights groups were present. The genocide and ethnic cleansing of Orthodox Serbs was not news.

No journalists attended the exhumations and press conference. Instead, US journalists went where the US government told them to go.

Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo.

For decades, the Albanian majority in the Serbian province of Kosovo had systematically driven out the Orthodox Serbian population. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Serbs were forced to flee Kosovo. Serbian civilians were murdered, threatened, intimidated, and discriminated against. The 1974 Constitution created autonomy for Kosovo. What resulted was a greater drive for the creation of a Greater Albania, for secession, separatism, and independence of Kosovo from Serbia. From 1961 to 1980, 92, 197 Serbs and 20, 424 Montenegrins migrated out of Kosovo. Following the separatist riots in 1981, another 38,000 Serbs and Montenegrins migrated out of Kosovo. This silent and invisible ethnic cleansing and expulsion of the Kosovo Serbian population was not documented or condemned by the US government, media, or human rights groups. Such human rights violations against the Serbian Orthodox population of Kosovo led to instability.

The KLA secessionist and separatist terrorist war begun in 1998 had as its goal the expulsion of the non-Albanian population of Kosovo, Orthodox Serbs, Roma, Turks. The KLA indiscriminately murdered Kosovo Serb civilians, policemen, government officials, and Albanians that did not support secession. The US government and media, however, never presented the Kosovo Crisis as a separatist or secessionist conflict, but instead, as a conflict based on human rights violations and minority rights violations against the Albanian population. The Kosovo Crisis was a secessionist conflict. The US government and media sought to create an imperative for military intervention in Kosovo through propaganda. How was this done? The standard and established propaganda formula or paradigm was followed. In all propaganda meant to lead to war, atrocities are a fundamental element. Atrocities were needed. None were forthcoming. The US allies and proxies then were ordered to step up their attacks on the Serbian population and security forces. The KLA responded by murdering Yugoslav policemen and Serbian farmers. In Pec, six Serbian teen-aged youths were brutally murdered. KLA troops based in Albania increased their infiltration of Kosovo. The result was inevitable. The propaganda was working according to formula and kept to the script. The first massacre was in Orahovac in 1998. The Orahovac massacre was based totally on hearsay and innuendo and was not substantiated by any facts or evidence. The US government and media ignored it. The Canadian magazine MacLeans was one of the few major publications to cover it in the August 17, 1996 issue, Kosovo: a massacre revealed. MacLeans reporter Guy Dinmore reported that the German newspaper Tageszeitung quoted an unnamed Gypsy gravedigger as saying he had taken part in separate burials and had counted 567 bodies. Inconsistently, Dinmore quoted Fatmir, an Albanian, who told journalists that over 200 people died. An Albanian human rights group has 55 names while a source close to Western investigators said the Muslim community has a list of 215 names but it has not been made public. Several inconsistent figures emerged for the number killed in massacre: 567, 215, over 200, and 55. A primary axiom of all propaganda is not to engage in propaganda that can be easily disproved or shown to be false. The Orahovac massacre was just such a case. It was an easily disprovable atrocity or massacre, a manufactured or staged atrocity, known as propaganda of the deed in propaganda terminology and analysis. But Orahovac was the rehearsal for Racak, a much better manufactured and staged atrocity, known as propaganda of the deed. Racak was the atrocity needed to create an imperative for intervention, it functioned like the sinking of the Maine, the Gleiwitz radio station attack, the Iraqi incubator hoax, the Sarajevo breadline massacre, Markale I and II, and the Trnopolje concentration camp. The Racak massacre was the subject of much controversy. All the victims of the so-called massacre had gun powder residue on their bodies, indicating that they had fired weapons at the Serbian security forces. French journalists were eyewitnesses to the encounter and filmed the assault. There was no evidence to indicate a massacre. The bodies appeared to have been collected and transported to a ravine by the KLA to make it appear that a massacre had occurred. The evidence indicated that no massacre had in fact occurred. But the propaganda had succeeded. The imperative for military intervention by NATO had been established.

US government and media propaganda with regard to the Kosovo conflict was successful because of the Selection Technique, the Oversimplification Technique, and the Appeal Technique, Atrocity Appeal. By mischaracterizing the Kosovo crisis as one about human rights violations and a violation of minority rights the US was able to repress or deny the secessionist and separatist goals of the conflict. To do this, the expulsions of hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Serbs over many decades by Albanian separatists was likewise repressed and denied; the decades-long ethnic cleansing of Kosovo Serbs to create an ethnically pure Greater Albania was suppressed. Instead, US propaganda characterized the Kosovo conflict as one involving the human rights abuses committed against the Albanian majority in Kosovo by the Yugoslav government. The propaganda paradigm for Kosovo was based on the Bosnia conflict; Kosovo was Bosnia II. Thus, the Albanians, allies and proxies of the US government, were the victims of ethnic cleansing and genocide, the propaganda formula of the Bosnian Civil War. Albanian refugees became associated with Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. Milosevic was equated with Adolf Hitler. The exact same paradigm or formula was used in Kosovo as had been used in Bosnia. If it works, why change it?

In virtually every and all newspaper, magazine, television, or radio news reporting and articles on the Kosovo crisis the reader or viewer or listener was reminded that ethnic Albanians make up 90% of the population of the Serbian province of Kosovo. No matter how brief or how lengthy the news report on Kosovo, this standardized sentence always invariably appeared. The technical term is imbed or imbedding. This reveals a coordinated propaganda or information war with the collusion of all aspects of US media. As citizens of a democracy, we might well inquire why? Why must all American media inform us in every news account or report that Albanians make up 90% of the Serbian province of Kosovo. Are we, as American citizens, too stupid and ignorant to grasp it the first time? Isnt the constant repetition of this sentence an insult to all American citizens and abhorrent in a so-called democracy? We got it the first time. Why must we be reminded in every news report about Kosovo?

The Field Manual No. 33-1, Psychological Operations (PSYOPS). Appendix I: PSYOP Techniques of the US Army offers an explanation. Under the technique Repetition in the Field Manual, the following explanation appears:

An idea or position is repeated in an attempt to elicit an almost automatic response from the audience or to reinforce an audiences opinion or attitude. This technique is extremely valid and useful because the human being is basically a creature of habit and develops skills and values by repetition (like walking, talking, code of ethics, etc.). An idea or position may be repeated many times in one message or in many messages. The intent is the same in both instances, namely, to elicit an immediate response or to reinforce an opinion or attitude.

Compare this definition with that offered by Bernays, Goebbels, and Hitler in Mein Kampf. The definitions are identical. The constant, mindless repetition of the sentence is similar to subliminal techniques or a type of brainwashing or form of subtle persuasion common to all propaganda. Are these propaganda techniques appropriate in a democracy and free and open society? Very few persons ever noticed or cared.

Why the repetition? Majority rule is essential in a democratic state. The sentence subtly or subliminally seeks to brainwash or persuade one that the Albanian minority in Yugoslavia, but majority in Kosovo province, due to the fact that Albanians make up 90% of the population of the Serbian province of Kosovo they should have their own rule. What is unstated in the subliminal sentence is that Albanians should be able to decide for themselves to create a state out of Serbia. But is the Albanian claim to statehood genuine? This is what the mindless repetition of the sentence seeks to negate or neutralize, i.e., mindless repetition seeks to prevent or preclude a discussion of whether the Albanian claim to statehood is legitimate.

Let us examine the Albanian claim to statehood, what the propaganda seeks to preclude. Albanians are approximately 18% of the total population of Serbia. In neighboring Macedonia, ethnic Albanians are 20-30 % of the population. But why deny statehood to the Albanian population in Macedonia? In Romania, there are three million ethnic Hungarians in the Transylvania region. Should Transylvania become an independent and free state merely because the Hungarian majority demnds it? The secessionist Basque region of NATO member Spain is almost entirely made up of Basques who have demanded their own state. The Kashmir and Jumma regions of India, which are majority Muslim, demand independence from India to create a Greater Pakistan. The Palestinians, Kurds, and Chechens similarly demand their own states. Quebec demands to secede from Canada, while Chiapas demands to secede from Mexico, and Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh from Muslim Azerbaijan. Why is independence denied in these cases? What diplomatic or international law formula or rationale should guide troubled minority regions that seek to secede?

The Albanian claim to secession is much weaker than most of the cases cited. Unlike Palestinians, Kurds, or Basques, Albanians already have a homeland or home country, Albania or Shqiperia. Their claim to Serbian territory is thus not valid. What Albanian separatists seek is the creation of a Greater Albania, a readjustment of borders, territorial aggrandizement at the expense of a neighboring, sovereign state. The Kosovo crisis is reminiscent of the Suden crisis in the 1930s. The Sudenland , a region of Czechoslovakia, was made up of 3.2 ethnic Germans, over 90% of the population of the region, who demanded secession from Czechoslovakia. Such a secession would be unacceptable to any sovereign state and would inevitably lead to war. In 1938 the Munich Agreement resulted which led to the secession of the Sudenland. In short, the Albanian claim is spurious and illegitimate. The Albanians have no right in international law, in international agreements, covenants, or customs. They just dont have any case at all. This is why the constant repetition of the sentence Albanians are 90% of the Serbian province of Kosovo is so crucial. Such repetition precludes or prevents any examination or debate or discussion of the issue but seeks instead to prejudice and subliminally persuade the American citizen into falsely believing that the Albanians have some legitimate claim on Serbian territory? Are such brainwashing and subliminal propaganda techniques valid in a democracy and open society?

War and conflicts and crises change, but the propaganda techniques and methods do not change. The archetypes of the enemy, the techniques, the methodologies of propaganda remain constant.

Lessons.

What are the lessons of the Bosnian Civil War and the Kosovo Crisis? Can we learn anything from the tragedy that occurred with the breakup and dismemberment of Yugoslavia?

First of all, was the propaganda campaign successful, did it persuade the reactors (the audience) it was targeted to? The US government and media propaganda effort, one of the most massive and technologically sophisticated of the twentieth century, was an abject and total failure. The public relations and propaganda campaign failed to persuade or to convince the US public. As James Petras and Steve Vieux explained: No matter how much the mass media turned up the atrocity laden decibels, no matter how much the Muslim refugees dominated the war photos, the US public refused to be drawn in. Virtually all opinion polls and surveys showed that a vast majority of the American public opposed US financial and military involvement. The massive propaganda campaign never altered this fact. How is this to be explained?

UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali called the Bosnian Civil War a rich mans war. There were a dozen other areas around the globe much worse than Bosnia, such as Rwanda or Sudan. Kosovo, too, would be remarkable as revealing the affluence and comfortable lifestyles of the victims. The actor Richard Gere reported as an eyewitness how many of the Albanian refugees all carried expensive cellular telephones in their suit pockets. Kosovars lived in three-story houses, drove expensive foreign automobiles, and were well-supplied with arms and brand new military uniforms. Following the propaganda pattern established with the Bosnian Muslim Anne Frank, Zlata Filipovic, the Albanian Anne Frank was manufactured, an Albanian girl who reportedly was hiding from the Serbian forces, who even used an Internet computer to send her messages via the web to the U.S. to chronicle her suffering and to document the genocide and ethnic cleansing. The conflict was also an educated mans war. That is, the propaganda campaign was launched and fostered by educated, intellectual elites, the best and brightest. There was never much enthusiasm for the conflict among grass roots Americans, working and middle-class citizens. The propaganda effort was almost exclusively a product of the intellectual elites, working in conjunction with the US Government, particularly the State Department, and the US media. Ironically, as Petras and Vieux noted, the only ones persuaded or manipulated by the propaganda campaign were the propagandists themselves, i.e., the educated, intellectual elites:

US intellectuals...fell for a propaganda campaign so crude that on occasion Serbian detainees in camps or dead Serbian children were simply identified as Muslims. Editors passed over stories about Serbs in Muslim-Croat camps. The razing of 100 of the 156 Orthodox churches in Croatia alleged by the patriarchate in Belgrade was ignored. Reports of the rapes of Serbian women went uninvestigated by the media. All of this culminated in the media indifference to the ethnic cleansing in the Krajina in 1995... A spasm of media propaganda was taken at face value.

The intellectual elites underestimated the intelligence and common sense of the US public. The US public refused to be duped or tricked (persuaded or convinced) because of past experiences with the media and the cadre of intellectual and enlightened elites. Perhaps the greatest sin in politics is to lose the confidence of the public. The public is unforgiving and has an elephants memory. The 16th US President, Abraham Lincoln, best understood this when he stated as follows:

If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you may even fool some of the people all the time; but you cant fool all of the people all the time...Public opinion in this country is everything.

Democracy has limitations. Political representation is an imperfect vehicle in ensuring that the will of the public is heard. Those who would speak for us and who would work for our interests usually only end up working for themselves and their own self-interest. As Hegel stated in The Philosophy of History (1832):

The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.

As Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman noted in Manufacturing Consent, a government and interests, the mind managers or hidden persuaders, which are able to fix the premises of discourse, are able to decide what the public is to hear, see, and think about, and to manage public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns is incompatible with the democratic ideals of an independent media committed to discovering and reporting the truth.

The intellectual elites---Susan Sontag, Georgie Ann Geyer, Anthony Lewis, Cokie Roberts, Madeleine Albright, Warren Zimmermann, Jamie Shea, James Rubin---regard the American public as an ignorant and impotent rabble, a mob that has to be guided and led. Only the best and brightest, the intellectual elites, and those arrivistes and intellectual wannabes, journalists, know what is right and what is the truth. We are stupid cattle that have to be led and guided by these enlightened intellectual elites. Alas, behold, man the puppet, man the robot, the automaton, a dehumanized cipher. All we have to do is sit back and let them guide and inform and lead us. They know better than us. They are better than us.

Finally, who actually pulled the strings of the marionettes, who was the puppet master? Without any question, the US Government planned and orchestrated the massive propaganda campaign against the Serbian people. Warren Zimmermann, the last US ambassador to Yugoslavia, even admitted it. David Gompert, a former member of the National Security Council, advised that sustained economic and information warfare against Serbia should be able to defeat Serbia and called for a patient cold war against Serbia. Gompert admits that the power of information technology is growing, conceding the tremendous power of US propaganda.

But what about the media, what about the journalists, reporters, and newspapers? The pack journalism and hand-out journalists were told what to report by the US Government, i.e., the media received hand-outs for the press, thus, hand-out journalism. American journalists were beguiled and corrupted by the arrogance of power and privilege that they enjoyed as the spokespersons for the free world and as the elite vanguard of the New World Order led by the United States, the remaining Superpower. Power and privilege corrupts. The US media were no exceptions. This was apparent in their intellectual arrogance, conceit, and profound ignorance. They were not content to merely report the news; US journalists and media wanted to make news, to manufacture or engineer the news This is anathema in a democracy where freedom of thought and independence of will are deeply ingrained shibboleths. Not surprisingly, most public opinion polls and surveys indicate that the US public has lost all confidence in the mass media and distrusts and abhors it. This is obvious when we recall that the US government can turn the propaganda on or off when and if it wishes, just like a water faucet. To be sure, reporters were guided by ratings and newspapers by circulation, but the Government set the policy which the media dutifully followed. This should trouble all of us concerned with an independent press in a democracy. For how is what the US media did in the former Yugoslavia any different from what government-controlled media did in Nazi Germany or totalitarian dictatorships?

The twentieth century began with so much promise with the advent of the technological revolution. But as the century progressed, we witness the worst horrors in the history of mankind, gas attacks, bombing of cities, genocide, two world wars, total war, nuclear holocaust. As the twenty-first century begins, has the human condition improved for the better? If the events in the former Yugoslavia are a guide, we must conclude that nothing much has changed in one hundred years. We have greater comforts and longer life spans, but bought at what cost? Are we any better off at the end of the twentieth century than we were at the beginning? We each have to decide for ourselves.

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