3-07-06, 8:54 am

It is a truism that knowledge is power. It is also true that ruling classes seek to hoard knowledge and use mass media to distribute propaganda. Not all propaganda though, is bad, and not all of it is disconnected from real knowledge. Like advertising, of which it is a component, political propaganda informs for the purpose of persuading. Its framework, sources and social purposes for its intended audiences determine its value. During World War II, the Office of War Information made a series of propaganda documentaries, Why We Fight, for the armed forces under the overall direction of Frank Capra, a Hollywood director most famous for such contemporary political films as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe. While the Why We Fight films romanticized and sanitized US history (for example, The Negro Soldier, a film aimed at African Americans, which the army thought was too radical, didn’t even mention slavery) and society and demonized the Axis enemy (Murder, Inc), they had a certain power and played a positive role in mobilizing millions to fight for freedom and tolerance against a brutal enemies.

Simplistic as they were, the films gave soldiers better idea about the nature of the fascist enemy than they received in the conservative mass press. The idealized America that they portrayed, one of tolerance and egalitarianism, was also worth fighting for and making real. Even the Soviet people and their planned economy in the Why We Fight film, the Battle Russia, were portrayed as heroic allies making an indispensable contribution to victory. After the war, artists who produced less pro Soviet films often faced blacklisting. Eugene Jarecki chose the title Why We fight for his new powerful documentary examining the Bush administration war against Iraq in terms of long-term U.S. historical trends. His history is literally the flip side or dark side of the original series. Bush administration apologists William Kristol and Richard Perle attempt not too successfully to defend administration policies in terms of 'realism' and power politics against progressive man of letters Gore Vidal and old China scholar and CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson who condemn that policy in terms of an imperial expansion that makes enemies and influences people against the United States. The most powerful insights come from government and Pentagon analysts and victims who simply tell the story of how they were turned into advertising men and women for the Bush administration war policy.

Walter Sekzer a retired NYPD police officer who lost a son in World Trade Center remembers calling the networks as they continued to show the collapsing towers over and over again, for ripping his heart out. Analysts make the point that world opinion was never more united in sympathy with the U.S. What the terrorists, who themselves were the product of 'blowback' from the Reagan supported war in Afghanistan, had accomplished was to unite most of the human race against them. As students of terrorism have noted since the early 20th century, terrorism is always the strategy of the weak, those who cannot fight a conventional or guerilla war. Terrorism almost always boomerangs against its practitioners by turning opinion everywhere against the terrorists. After bungling the immediate response to the attacks the administration provided safe passage out of the U.S. for the billionaire bin Laden family while it arrested thousands of innocent people of the Muslim faith without probable cause. They then simply turned the attacks into an excuse for what they had wanted to do from the beginning – massively increase military spending to finance a policy of unilateral military intervention and launch a war against Iraq, an isolated but strategically important country with huge oil resources Everyone in non-propaganda positions in the administration knew that Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks but no one could say that. Orders came down to analysts to develop 'talking points' in support of administration policy.

As in other areas of public professional work, especially science, the administration rewarded those who gave it self-serving propaganda and didn’t even appear to understand that its researchers and policy advisors and planners have other functions beyond providing such propaganda based on edicts from above. As the statements of scholars and former pentagon professional staff people are juxtaposed against the statements of Bush, Rumsfeld et al and the post-mortem rationalizations of administration supporters, the enormity of the distortion and the complicity of both mass media and all establishment groupings, including most of the Democratic Party leadership, in the deception becomes inescapable. The film makes clear that critical and analytical skills and use of sources that would get a college student in a history or political science class a D+ if the instructor were charitable were employed by the Bush administration to launch a major war. I would take some issue with the film’s reversal of the old Why We Fight series celebration of American history and culture – there is another America which has always stood against the ruthless drive for self-aggrandizement at the expense of the whole world and this documentary helps to empower viewers those who remain committed to that America – a society which strives to achieve working class democracy, social justice and peace – with the knowledge to understand the policies of the Bush administration.

For that reason the new Why We Fight, which is currently playing in movie theaters, deserves to be shown widely and used widely to educate Americans about the dangers of this administration, which people in the U.S and through the world increasingly see as resembling in its global policy and its use of underlings as allies the fascism that the original Why We Fight films fought against.



--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.