{"article":{"id":65945,"heading":"Now They Tell Us.","author":"C\/O Diogenes","created":"2003-06-20 22:22:55","modified":"2003-06-20 22:25:26","last_modified":"Sat, 21 Jun 2003 05:25:26","article":"
NOW THEY TELL US
June 3, 2003
by Joe Sobran
C.S. Lewis once overheard some soldiers conversing
during wartime. He was startled to discover that they all
casually assumed their government was lying to them. They
weren't the least bit outraged by it; they simply took
for granted that this is what governments always do. It
was putting their lives at stake, yet they didn't trust
it to tell them the truth. Lewis was shocked that they
weren't shocked.
Plain men are pretty hard to fool. The French
observer Jacques Ellul has written that educated men are
far more susceptible to propaganda than the uneducated.
And since most people now go to college, it would seem
that propaganda may now be at the height of its
influence.
Why is this? We like to think that education creates
an immunity to propaganda, a rational, skeptical outlook.
In fact, it may do just the reverse. It may create in us
a disposition to settle for fancy words and high-sounding
slogans instead of results. Colleges are hotbeds of
ideologies. The Baby Boomers, when they reached college
age, exemplified this perfectly. Around the world a whole
generation of Marxists sprang not from the \"proletariat\"
or \"the working classes,\" but from the campuses.
Marxism was what the French call a false but clear
idea -- the sort of seductive oversimplification, or
intellectual panacea, that a bit of education makes
tempting. Other such ideas, full of mass appeal for the
modestly college-educated, include liberalism, feminism,
Zionism, and neoconservatism.
The war on Iraq was the fruit of neoconservative
propaganda. One of its authors, the hawkish deputy
defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, has now admitted to
VANITY FAIR magazine that Saddam Hussein's supposed
weapons of mass destruction were only a \"bureaucratic
reason\" for the war, a reason everyone in the Bush
administration could agree on.
Not exactly a lie, perhaps, but a sort of convenient
fiction. Of course no such weapons were used by the
Iraqis during the war, and the victors have been unable
to find them. President Bush still insists they will turn
up sooner or later.
Wolfowitz's admission has caused a stir in this
country, but a real uproar in England, where Prime
Minister Tony Blair may lose his job over it. The
British, even those who favored the war, are taking this
issue very seriously.
The pro-war press in America is trying to play down
the phantom WMDs. As INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY puts it,
\"Finding banned weapons to placate the anti-war crowd
should be far, far down the list\" of \"unfinished tasks in
Iraq.\" To placate the anti-war crowd?
For months the administration harped on WMDs as the
chief reason for war on Iraq. Remember Colin Powell's
long aria to the United Nations Security Council? That
was supposed to be the moment of truth, the dramatic
moment when the hawks would lay all their big cards on
the table, though it turned out to be a farrago of
dubious sources. It has since transpired that U.S.
intelligence agencies doubted that Saddam Hussein had any
WMDs to speak of.
So now we are told that only nit-pickers of \"the
anti-war crowd\" ever made an issue of the forbidden
weapons. And wouldn't you just know, they're doing it
again!
The new propaganda line is that Saddam Hussein was
so evil -- as witness the exhumed corpses of his many
victims -- that the war was justified in order to
liberate the Iraqi people from his tyranny. So it had
nothing to do with American defense and national security
after all. Just as \"the anti-war crowd\" was saying all
along.
Propaganda, like dairy products, should come with an
expiration date. It's usually abandoned once it has
served its purpose. The WMD story worked very well when
it was needed to whip up war fever. It provided a
temporary excuse, disarmed skepticism, isolated critics.
Now it isn't needed anymore and should be discarded
before it becomes too ridiculous.
\"The anti-war crowd\" were neither a subversive,
Kremlin-funded organization nor an auxiliary of al-Qaeda.
They were merely scattered individuals who tried to keep
a grip on their common sense in the face of what they
recognized to be a lot of hooey from their own
government. So they were right. What's the point of
bickering with them now? They lost.
It's always instructive, and often entertaining, to
compare postwar propaganda with pre-war propaganda. As
the victors tell it, the reasons for war tend to get
nobler and nobler with time, and their more absurd lies
often fall quietly away in the retelling.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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http:\/\/www.sobran.com\/e-mail.shtml<\/a>, write
fran@griffnews.com<\/a>, or call 800-513-5053.\"\n","contact":"","link":"","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/plain","summary":"How much of what the Bush Junta said was there justification for war was true. Paul Wolfowitless has said it was a consensus reason. How nice. What this means is that it is not the real reason.","numcomment":1,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/","filesize":null,"article_url":"\/news\/2003\/06\/65945.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[{"id":65947,"heading":"WTFO?","article":"More and more people are waking up to the reality. Keep pushing the truth.\r\n\r\nBUSH LIED!\r\n\r\nCHILDREN DIED!\r\n\r\nIt really is that simple.","author":"Diogenes","parent_id":65945,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2003-06-20 22:25:26","modified":"2003-06-20 22:25:26","fileurl":""}]}