by Patrick Lang (bio below)
There are Public Information Officers (PIOs) and then there are propagandists. The two are not the same.
PIOs have the job of releasing what is thought to be the truth to media outlets. The information is often laden with the values, point of view and hopes of the releasing headquarters but it is, nevertheless, not a deliberate attempt to deceive. Those who have seen Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “Full Metal Jacket” have seen this in action. (Yes. Yes. I know. This is not really the Marine Corps) In the film the “Joker’s” boss, a bureau chief for “Stars and Stripes” tells Joker to write more positive stories because the troops “need it.” This is stupid but not propaganda. (In fact, the troops don’t need or believe any of that crap)
Propaganda is different. It involves the dissemination of information not intended to inform, but rather to influence. It comes in three varieties:
- White. This is propaganda which is clearly identified as to source. The Voice of America, Sawa Radio, Al-Hurra TV. These are White propaganda outlets. Harmless, if often inept.
- Grey. Propaganda not clearly identified as to source. A wire service, TV station or publishing house which does not identify its ownership.
- Black. Propaganda which seeks to deceive as to source, In “normal” (non-wartime) times this is by law the domain of the CIA. In wartime it is equally the realm of the military (to the chagrin of the CIA). Propaganda directed against foreign audiences has not been thought “out of bounds” in the USA since the end of WW2. It is a fundamental principal of such action under American law that it should not be directed at the American electorate.
We must ask if this principle has been adhered to, not by the CIA, but rather by political enthusiasts and “cultists” within the “information operations” and “psychological warfare” area of military activities.
Beginning with the trauma that followed our defeat in Vietnam, there arose in the US Army a “movement” which sought an answer for the question of why our long and painful struggle had led to nothing but masses of refugees seeking refuge from the prospect of communist government. Various strange studies were funded for several years seeking answers which would not be too personally painful.
Telepathy, telekinesis, firewalking, spoonbending, distant viewing, political warfare and propaganda against both hostile and friendly targets were all studied and experimented in by men who under normal circumstances were more stable and certainly less imaginative. … continued below …
(See the interesting work, “The Men Who Stare at Goats”)
In the end the Army rejected all this and returned to its usual preoccupation, but the tendency survived in the persons of several officers who have risen to high rank. Some have been high officials in the counter-terrorism and homeland defense fields. Some are now major media figures and others officials of the Department of Defense, but outside the “mainstream” of the Army. None are in the intelligence business.
As a result of the continued existence of this”tendency,” the Bush Administration has been influenced in the direction of manipulation of public opinion here and abroad as an instrument of warfare.
We are now beginning to witness the results of such foolishness.
Pat Lang
Ref: L.A. Times
Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (interview), CNN and Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room (interview), PBS’s Newshour, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” (interview), and more .
Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
Recommended Books || More BooTrib Posts
Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
One of the principle ways people with a megalomaniacal propensity deal with their own state of denial is to seek to trick others into believing whatever irrational craziness they themselves prefer to believe. Hence the obvious and ultimately self-destructive propaganda scheme under scrutiny
Rational people generally understand that reality isn’t defined by belief, but in the case of the extremist maniacs running the Bush regime, it seems pretty clear these people neither exhibit a reality-based approach to the situation with respect to Iraq nor do they seem interested in conveying such a reality-based understanding.
Whether this is because they actually believe their own idiotic rhetoric or whether it’s because they intend for the chaos and violence to continue and escalate, (using the appearance of incompetence as a mask to cnceal a more insidious bent), this is another question. The core Jacobin constituency, the PNAC/AEI gang, I suspect, are interested in the spread and perpetuation of the war, while the academic blowhards and the wingnutosphere’s punditocracy I suspect really believe the shit they spew so relentlessly.
Bush the imbecile, however, doesn’t understand any of it enough to be even be aware of the dynamics of what’s happening in Iraq. All he knows is that he’s been “chosen”, he’s on a mission, and he’ll stay on it no matter how much of other people’s blood he has to spill, (American or Arab or Persian), until God or Cheney call him off the hunt. He slipped his leash, his anchor to reality, a long long time ago.
I think you nailed it, exactly.
Simply the natural consequences of the MBA Presidency.
The only surprise here is that this president has so quickly co-opted the ‘neutral’ bureaucrats who I used to think of as running the country on our behalf (as opposed to their temporary masters).
Seriously, anyone who’s worked for a multinational, or even a large corporation should have been able to see this coming. Why improve the product when you can pour more money into marketing and sell it as-is.
Why leave the product alone when you can squeeze out costs, toss a bit more to marketing, and sell even more at a lower quality?
The difference between running a govt and running a corporation is taught right in business school:
Privatize the profit, socialize the cost
Govt is where the socialized costs get paid. If you run Govt like a business, you have to pass the buck — but with no govt to pick up the check… I guess you just screw those you’re supposed to be responsible to. Not just the poor, but all of us — clean air, water, national parks — we all get screwed.
But with enough marketing, you can fix anything.
Marketing is just propaganda for financial gain.
Propaganda is just marketing behavior instead of product.
No decent business school that I am aware of has an MBA program that teaches what Bush has been practicing. When I taught management, the section on delegation covered assigning a job to an individual, giving him guidance as to what result was wanted, then checking up on the results and correcting the problems. It is a lot of work and can’t be done by someone who does not understand at least the basics of what is being attempted and how it is supposed to be done.
In fact what we are seeing in the White House is a jump back to the feudal system in which you assign jobs to family and people you like and trust, send them out and expect that since you know what kind of people they are they will do what you want. Instead of management (which is largely an application of principles from the science of psychology to business)you get a reversion to the more primitive system where the only thing that matters is the relationship between the leader and the follower. If you like someone, give them the job and trust them to deliver. In such a system any effort to routinely check on how the job is being done is usually considered insulting and so is not done.
Among other cases, I have seen one University President who operated as a Baron rather than a manager and leader. He would have his staff prepare a budget that was submitted to the legislature for approval, but when the money arrived he distributed it to his friends and favored subordinates directly from his office with minimal consideration of the budget he had submitted.
Of course, when someone who was not favored pointed out that he was giving scholarships to non-existent students and cashing the checks, he went to prison.
This is an extreme example, but the fact is that most family businesses are run in a feudal system rather than attempting to use rational, researched psychological techniques.
Bush uses what he calls “intuitive” decision-making and depends mostly on his supposed personal ability to “read” people. This is NOT what is taught in an MBA program. This is the system used by Lords, Barons and such in feudal systems.
Yes! Marketing as an end in itself. Eureka! Marketing replaces results on the ground.
If the madness of this marketing meme actually worked on rational people as thoroughly as they’d like, the human species would become extinct in very short order.
Unfortunatley for them,no matter how many placebos they market, none of them will cure cancer. This is the part that they don’t get. The chickens always come home to roost.
The previous comment was meant as a response to your excellent post.
You misunderstand what marketing is. You are looking primarily at the efforts to influence market demand and calling that marketing. While it is sales, it is not marketing.
The discipline of Economics in an industrial and post-industrial society points out that all production is a result of demand for the products or services. Marketing is primarily the techniques of determining what that demand is before spending the money on production.
Since the seller has to put up the money before the sale of the product or service in order to produce it, he has to have advance knowledge of what the market really is.
That is the essence of marketing – finding out what the market is before spending money to produce for it. Sales, however, involves manipulating the market so that customers buy your product rather than that of someone else. Sales is a part of marketing, but so is the logistics of getting the product to the point of sale, determining what characteristics the product has ,and so is financing the sale.
The entire system of industrial mass production for sale of various consumer products and services makes the techniques of marketing an absolute necessity in order to reduce the risk of investing in advance before the sale to produce the product or service. Mass production factories can’t exist without some assurance that the product will be sold.
Ny common usage understanding of “marketing” includes “promotion” and ce “sales” as components withing the broader “marketing” rubric.
While there may be significant relevance for economists and managers in distinguishing between marketing and sales, I think that even if the concept of marketing stood on it’s own as a “market research and evaluation” process only, I have a hrad time beklieving there’s market demand amongst the Iraqi public for fake news stories written and edited by a US propaganda firm and placed in their newspapers as real news under phony names.
My broader point about marketing, (whether misnamed or not), is that these deception professionals in the Bush regime are operating on their assumption that it’s the selling that’s of paramount importance, not whether what you’re selling is authentic or not. Cults work like this. They don’t understand that if you are planting phony stories in the press at the same time you’re crowing about teaching the principles of a free press that the cognitive dissonance such concepts triggers ultimately does more harm than good. Modifying what I said previously, marketing research might show a huge demand for a pill that cures cancer, but selling a placebo under such a marketing strategy doesn’t change the reality for those who buy it.
I think that we were both saying the same thing. In business there are some manipulative measures sometimes taken in the sale of a product and that is included under the very broad title “Marketing.” But it is only a small part of what is actually done in marketing.
The same techniques of manipulation, when used as propaganda by governments, have different motives and intent from “Marketing” and in fact the government is normally prohibited from using those techniques.
That’s why the government has Public Information Officers rather than sales personnel or Public Relations people. Sales personnel work to manipulate purchasing behavior, and PR people work to modify public attitudes. Neither is normally appropriate for government to employ.
but I think this article should get more attention. Consider the source. Pat is uniquely situated to make these points even if he is limited in how much he can divulge.
And the goat staring thing is amazing. Ever since I first discovered it, I never got over it.
I strongly recommend Warriors of Disinformation by Alvin A. Snyder. Alvin worked at the USIA during its transformation under Reagan into a highly effective propaganda machine- not only white.
One of the major shifts was due to the Reagan administration’s illegal war in Central America. The Smith-Mundt Act prohibits state propaganda directed towards the U.S. But that was no problem. Public Diplomacy went private. Old hands in the spin industry simply moved over conservative think tanks to sell Reagan’s spin. The CSIS is full of them.
A damned good spin doctor, for example, is Stan Burnett, senior advisor and probable “unindicted co-conspirator” as Otto Reich likes to define the boys at the CSIS. The thing is that Stan has recycled himself as some sort of expert in Italian affairs, when all he’s done- and quite well at that- is churn out spin strategy. It’s no wonder he’s a Berlusconi darling. And we have to put up with him and his colleagues over here.
Will do.
The private-sector aspect of this phenomenon — “scandal” or “corruption” don’t cover its systematic operation in cultural and political life — emanates from the K-Street Project and into the consolidation of the marketing-communications industry, once known as the ad industry but now encompassing direct marketing, public relations, and lobbying. This competitive but tightly self-protective oligopoly cuts checks amounting to about 65-80% of meida income, giving massive leverage to every major corporate advertiser.
The military services and the Drug Enforcement Agency have large budgets augmented by billings from contactors, much of which gets billed back to the government as overhead.
The power in that military corner gets co-ordinated with trade-association censorship in a manner that has produced the spectacle of transparent propaganda saturating our world and the utter silence of civic inquiry.
Questions that I am amazed have not been asked on this thread.
So many questions that I have posted my own diary in order to adequately ask them.
Go here (Misinformation? Disinformation? A coven of REAL spooks in the White House? Let’s have some names.) for more.
As Booman says above, this article deserves more attention.
NATIONAL attention.
Those of you who frequent other blogs, please link to this article by Col. Lang . It raises ENORMOUS issues.
AG
I would LOVE to see this diary linked on dKos.
AG
Rumsfeld, Nov. 18, 2002:
Indeed!
That was from a FAIR press release.