OMNI, PENTAGON PROPAGANDA MACHINE
NEWSLETTER #1, March 12, 2013.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture
of Peace, Justice, Nonviolence, Mercy, and Care of the Environment.
My blog: The War
Department and Peace Heroes
Newsletters on Peace, Justice, and Ecology:
Index:
See: Fulbright, Imperialism,
Language for War, Lying, Militarism, Pentagon, Recruiting, and more.
Contents #1
Dick, Control of Information in
the United States
Fulbright, The Pentagon
Propaganda Machine
Perry and Blume, Marines Pitch Recruiting to Teachers
Dick, Vietnam
War Monuments
Solomon, Deceptive Language: “Defense”
Air Shows
Google Search March 2013, First Page Tip of Iceberg
Control of information in the United States
Contents
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Anti-communism
and Anti-Sovietism
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1
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The Complex
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69
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Corporations
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175
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Government
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249
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The
Presidency
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255
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Watergate
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282
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Congress
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312
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Wars
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320
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Pentagon
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361
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Public Relations, Media, Recruiting
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373
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Education and Research
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383
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Intelligence
Agencies
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395
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National Security Agency
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450
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Global
Communications Corporations Global
Culture
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456
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Contributors
Index
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485
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Subject
Index
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523
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Bibliographic
information
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Title
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Control of
information in the
Issue 1 of Meckler Corporation's bibliographies on communications and First Amendment law |
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Author
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Publisher
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Meckler, 1987
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ISBN
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0887360823, 9780887360824
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Length
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587 pages,
2943 annotated entries
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Subjects
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SENATOR J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT, THE PENTAGON PROPAGANDA MACHINE. Vintage, 1971.
The Pentagon
propaganda machine Editorial Review - Kirkus Reviews. Senator Fulbright's fight against the military
industrial complex is on. Round one: The
Arrogance of Power. Round two: The
Pentagon Propaganda Machine. Here the Arkansan asserts that the war and the
military have become part of our environment, like pollution. The once limited
technical functions of the armed forces have expanded to a political role for
which their parochial training has not prepared them. Fulbright discusses the dangerously vast and powerful
communications network by which the Defense Department [Dick: Same old War
Department.] propagandizes its own
policies and represses dissemination of opposing views. Through pro-war speeches
by high ranking officers to community groups at taxpayers' expense, by
controlled extension of research grants, and by pseudo-accurate depictions of
military activities in Pentagon-prepared news clips, the military has become the Big Brother enforcer of U.S.
Marines aim to counter teachers'
opposition to recruiting students By Tony Perry and Howard Blume, Los
Angeles
Educators
visit Marine Corps Recruit Depot San
Diego
Staff Sgt. James McFalin gets some
laughs as he tells educators from
|
·
Related
In
a series of Power Point briefings, officers and enlisted personnel stressed the
discipline, sense of purpose and educational benefits of military service. A
young Marine can get a college degree while on active duty or attend college or
technical school at government expense once his or her service is completed.
As
the week continued, it was clear that part of the pitch stuck with the
educators.
"It's
impressive," said William Lozoya, a music teacher and band director at San Fernando High School
Brian
Metzger, an English teacher at Highland Park High, said that counselors at his
school "actively discourage anyone from enlisting. Now I can at least
provide a more balanced view for students to make up their own minds."
Miles
Bonner, guidance counselor at Sun Valley High, said he planned to present
military service "as a viable option that students should consider."
Melissa
Cheng, Chinese-language teacher at South Pasadena High, said she believes she
can now overcome resistance from her students' parents. "Chinese parents
have a kind of bias against the military," she said. "But the Marine
Corps believes in discipline and honor, which are very Chinese values."
Not
everyone comes away from an educator workshop so enthusiastic.
Arlene
Inouye, a speech therapist in L.A. Unified who has spearheaded the
counter-recruiting effort, attended a workshop several years ago but was
unmoved. Still, she was impressed with how respectfully she was treated by the
Marines.
"They
really want you to come because they're so convinced," said Inouye, the
elected treasurer of the Los Angeles
Copyright © 2012, The
Los Angeles Times
[Dick: I could not
find the original on-line. The above
summary, the only one I found, omits much significant information. For example, this is a major center for
military propaganda. The original
article writes: “A dozen times a year,
the Marines welcome groups of 80 educators to the San Diego Mississippi , the San
Diego
TELLING THE STORIES OF US
The Wars, The Vietnam
Veterans Memorial, and Chris Burden’s The
Other Vietnam
By Dick Bennett
Rise of US
Imperialism Post-WWII
WWII under President Roosevelt released not only
indescribable, immeasurable destructive energy, but also an enormous wave of
idealism for the future: workers union rights, the Four Freedoms, the United
Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But soon, by 1946 the reaction swept in just
as following WWI against the League of Nations . Instead of the dream of ending wars by
nations united for peace and cooperation, nations resumed their old us and
them. The United States empire, already
established in the Pacific, took flight as the Leader of the Free
World—Taft-Hartley legislation, Truman Doctrine, Cold War.
Following Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the US
began to developed new nuclear weapons, most of them over several decades, each
matched by the Soviet Union (US/SU), which
innovated once or twice itself in the world’s most dangerous arms race. In 1947 the foundation was laid for the US
National Security State: the Armed
Forces united under the Pentagon, the
War Department euphemized into the Department of “Defense,” the CIA and the National Security
Administration established.
Korean and Vietnam
NATO was formed for the “Free World “ against the
Soviets. The Soviets created their bloc
against Western invasion—from Napoleon to Hitler and, they feared, to
NATO. And the Cold War shifted into
high gear. But Victorious WWII was not
to be repeated by the US . The Korean War ended in stalemate. And then the Vietnam War torpedoed the US Imperial Ship of State. How measure victory and defeat? If your goal was body count, then the US
won: between two and three million
Vietnamese were killed; tens of thousands more if you count fetuses
aborted. But by other measures the US
lost, and retreated back to the mainland.
Vietnam War Syndrome
This defeat has
rankled military leaders and the warrior patriots in government. It became important to them to regain the
confidence commensurate to an Empire based upon armed force, invasion, and
eventually occupation. Like football
teams that play sure losers to start the season, the US began with victories in the
1950s—including overthrowing the elected Iranian and Guatemalan
governments. But Vietnam surprised the imperial
Pentagon, for how could an impoverished country withstand the firepower of the
US of A?
The withdrawal was a humiliation for the gunslingers. They would not rest until the stain was
erased. President Reagan invaded Nicaragua and Grenada . President Bush I invaded Panama and Iraq . President Clinton invaded Serbia . And President Bush II invaded Afghanistan , Iraq ,
and Pakistan .
President Obama
Thus President Obama’s policy statement May 2012 was no surprise as much as it was a
culmination of long Pentagon and other
warrior pressures. In May, 2012,
President Obama signed a proclamation establishing the “Commemoration of the 50th
Anniversary of the Vietnam War” to begin this year, to last for thirteen years
(to Veterans Day 2025), and to be conducted by the Pentagon. (2012 is the 50th if you mark the
war’s beginning in January 1962, when open combat by US forces began.) Why this attention? It is certainly not to acknowledge the
deaths of several million civilians,
atrocities like the My Lai Massacre, war-crime chemical weapons (Agent
Orange: dioxin), or the use of twice the
explosive tonnage as employed by all sides in WWII and against a mainly peasant people who had
fought to liberate themselves first from
French colonialism and then from US neocolonialism. No, for Obama, campaigning for the
presidency, the “national shame” was failure of the US to fully honor our
killed and surviving troops, and the commemoration is meant to assuage guilt
fully and finally by commemorating each battle of the war (Hue, Khe Sanh,
Saigon, and on and on) and those US soldiers who fought in each, whether guilty
of atrocities or not. Thus it is an
attempt to delete from the national memory, according to one historian, the
“basic facts about the most horrendous imperialist (North-South) war of the
twentieth century, as well as the most unpopular war in U.S. history.” Erasing the Vietnam Syndrome forever, Obama
asserted, would make the US
“stronger than before.”
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Chris Burden’s The Other Vietnam
Obama’s effort to efface responsibility for massive US
criminal behavior and to blame the victim is inseparable from the history of
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (and similar memorials around the country). For example, in 1977 President Carter, who authorized
the establishment of the Memorial, denied any US
obligations to Vietnam ,
because the destruction, he said, was mutual.
The eventual memorial as finally assembled offers mixed
purposes and affects. The original Wall,
designed by Maya Lin, does not heroize warriors; it is the antipode of the
Marine Corps Memorial. It softens the
divisiveness of the war by omitting opponents of the war, patriotic effusions,
or signs of defeat and humiliation.
Rather, by listing the names of the killed soldiers, the monument
neutrally permits to each visitor their private reflection on personal
loss. Ordinary people interpret the
discourse of the dead without national intervention..
The Additions
Of course, such a monument for people, not nation, outraged
many. One Pentagon officer wondered why
“we” should build a memorial to losers.
Like him, many saw Lin’s Wall as a counter-monument to national glory
and soldiers’ heroism, some approvingly, others disapprovingly, some of those
vehemently: they wanted a triumphal monument, like the Iwo
Jima monument. The
monument’s chronological, democratizing, equalizing (for Lin “the heart of the
design”) differed from traditional hierarchical war monuments and the
hierarchical orientation of officials. The conflict resulted in the present
compromise: the addition of a sculpture
of three combat soldiers and a US
flag. Finally was added a sculpture of
women, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, another arrangement of three figures. In the opinion of some commentators, these
additions, even the women’s memorial, obscured the Wall’s inclusivity and
equality with “patriarchal demands.”
Awareness of
Incompleteness, the Need for Further Addition or Alternative
But these debates and these additions do not grasp the
disquietude many of us feel morally when we contemplate the immense absence the
Wall displays. The Wall of Names, in its
original spare design and especially with its additions, expresses the
assumption that the US is the sole injured party, because it deletes reference
to the devastation of Vietnam and the slaughter of two to three million
Vietnamese, not to mention those killed earlier by the French with our
financing It is the Wall of US names. The Vietnamese youth killed for US
anticommunism and Sovietphobia, the Vietnamese children lost and injured by
bombs and dioxin for US nationalist and commercial expansion westward, deserved
no remembrance, no pity. The arrogance
of our leaders, their patriotic rhetoric and duplicitous justifications for
mass killing made them incapable of perceiving the enemy’s children as
victims.
Given all of these failures, Chris
Burden’s sculpture, The Other Vietnam
Memorial, takes its place
as the great alternative to the Vietnam
Memorial Wall and as the greatest memorial shaming of US nationalist
barbarism. First shown in 1991 in the Museum of Modern Art
Even more significantly, Burden’s
great monument to memory and empathy reminds us not only of US Vietnam War
crimes but of the similar crimes in the several dozen US invasions of other countries
since WWII. Instead of the
glorification of chauvinism, killing, soldiers, military glory, and jingoistic
nationalism, Burden, by offering an alternative, inclusive vision of species
unity, calls into question the past 70 years of fear-and-hatred-mongering and
its product, permanent war. It does not
offer consolation and closure, as does Maya Lin’s Wall, at least to some. Rather, it calls for sympathy and justice for
innocent “enemies,” for the abolition of jingoistic monuments, for resistance
to present and future US wars of aggression, and once seen it will not let us
sleep.
References:
---Boime, Albert. The Unveiling of the National Icons: A Plea
for Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalist Era.
Cambridge
UP, 1998. Epilogue: The Vietnam
Veterans Memorial..
---Foster, John Bellamy.
“Notes from the Editors.”. Monthly Review (Sept. 2012).
---For a list of recent books on US imperialism and
militarism see the 46 references for
OMNI’s US Imperialism Book Forum (Sept. 21, 2012). Especially recommended: Blum’s Killing Hope and Rogue Nation, Nicholas Davies’ Blood
on Our Hands, and Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback tetralogy.
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IT’S THE WAR DEPARTMENT
Norman Solomon, Verbal Tics and
Political Routines, Nation of Change, January 30, 2013.
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|
 Op-Ed: A lot of what we say and
do becomes habit-forming. Groundhog Day 2013 could serve as a reminder that
some political habits should be kicked. Here are a few starting with “defense budget.” No, it’s not a
defense budget. It’s a military budget.
But countless people and organizations keep saying they want to cut “the
defense budget” or reduce “defense spending.” The fact that there’s something
officially called the Department of
Defense—formerly the Department of War, until 1947—doesn’t make its huge
budget a “defense budget.” |
AIR SHOWS GROUNDED BY BUDGET CUTS—AT LAST
Russ Bynum.
(AP). “Budget Cuts Ground Jet
Shows.” Arkansas
GOOGLE SEARCH, March 12,
2013, FIRST PAGE
1.
Owner of Pentagon's Propaganda Firm Admits to Attacks on ...
www.globalresearch.ca/owner-of-pentagon...propaganda.../31037
The co-owner of a major Pentagon propaganda contractor publicly
admitted Thursday that he was behind a series of coordinated misinformation
campaigns ...
2.
Amendment puts spotlight on Pentagon propaganda - USA Today
www.usatoday.com/news/...05.../pentagon-propaganda/.../1
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May 9, 2012 – House member threatens an amendment to block funding forPentagon propaganda efforts Wednesday,
citing
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3.
Pentagon overseas propaganda plan stirs controversy
www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/.../pentagon.../1715741/
Nov 19, 2012 – Pentagon officers are being
advised on countering Taliban propagandausing deceptive
practices by a marketing expert, according to ...
4.
The Pentagon Propaganda Machine by Senator J. William Fulbright
www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Pentagon.../Pentagon_Propaganda_JW...
The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. by Senator J.
William Fulbright. Vintage Books, 1971, paper. p4. Since the I950s, as we have
moved from crisis to crisis, ...
5.
Images for Pentagon Propaganda
o
o
o
o
o
6.
Co-Owner Of Pentagon Propaganda Contractor Admits Attacking ...
www.npr.org/.../co-owner-of-pentagon-propaganda-contra...
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May 24, 2012 – The Pentagon repudiated the smear
campaign saying they are "intolerable."
|
7.
Propaganda 101: Pentagon To Debut Most Expensive Weapons ...
www.infowars.com/propaganda-101-pentagon-to-debut-most-exve-...
Oct 16, 2012 – The pentagon has reportedly “chosen”
the Hollywood
8.
Pentagon Media Propaganda: Finding New, Clever Ways to Sell Old ...
truth-out.org/.../11716-finding-new-clever-ways-to-sell-old-bad-idea...
Aug 31, 2012 – JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR
BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT Smug, greedy, well-fed white men have invented a language
to conceal their sins.
9.
GAO auditing Pentagon propaganda campaigns - ABC News
GAO auditing Pentagon propaganda campaigns. By Tom Vanden
Brook, USA WASHINGTON
10.
The Pentagon's Propaganda Machine? - ABC News
|
Apr 21, 2008 – The New York Times spilled a lot of ink yesterday on thePentagon's relationship with TV
military analysts. The article raised some good points ...
|
11.
Academy Awards + Michelle Obama: Acknowledgment of
Hollywood ...
www.thomhartmann.com/.../academy-awards-michelle-obama-...
Feb 25, 2013 – Hollywood
END PENTAGON PROPAGANDA MACHINE NEWSLETTER #1
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