The Iraq prevarication has ended and I cannot help but reflect on the power of the propaganda machine that so deftly steered public emotions through false pretensions of terrorist threats, nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and empty moral rhetoric about expanding human rights.
Propaganda made us malleable to this crusade-like attempt to insert a secular Christian democratic ideology under an American flag of aggression.
We sat around our televisions on the fateful night of March 19, 2003 as “surgical” missile strikes lighted the skies of Baghdad in a surreal display that was absent the savage ravages of collateral human carnage.
The war was distant, exploding under the cover of darkness and we saw none of the civilian impacts of this execution of military preeminence called “shock and awe”.
Major news outlets maintained the subtle connections with 9-11 that fed into public fear and the unfulfilled need for retribution.
The media streams vigilantly gave the American government the airtime they required to propagate stories of weapons of mass destruction and to portray Iraq as a safe harbor for Islamic extremists and al-Qaida.
Herded perceptually, the receiving public did not realize that what the media does not tell us is often more important than what they do tell us.
The United Nations inspections, just before the March 2003 attack, found no weapons of mass destruction and this combined with Saddam Hussein’s long-standing reputation for brutally disposing any al-Qaida and Islamic extremists should have stimulated a media frenzy of questions about the rationale for American insurgence; it did not.
The propaganda machine focused on U.S. military precision that claimed limited civilian casualties, while it sanitized the civilian face of war through censorship. The carefully vetted exposure to combative Iraqi casualties furnished a thin veneer of journalistic objectivity, but that was lost to the self-serving portrayal of American soldiers as liberators of a desperate Iraqi populace desiring extrication from the tyrannical clutches of fundamentalist Islam and Saddam Hussein.
Propaganda made Americans believe the insurgence was going to be brief, even though thousands of years of military history has taught us that once you use force to control people it takes even greater force to maintain control.
Years chased years and testimony to the power of propaganda is our general acceptance that this insurgence was reasonable, and even honourable. Buried with the smashed bodies of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians are stories we will never hear, pictures we will never see.
Our minds were coalesced with a scripted vision of a war ending with healthy soldiers returning from Iraq to the arms of their children. Where was the face of debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder, veteran suicides and horrific injuries?
Sigmund Freud’s genius for understanding the human mind was exploited with the institutionalization of mass persuasion through propaganda, a process which President Woodrow Wilson quickly capitalized on to inspire and pressure naive young men into becoming bloody fodder in a horrific war of attrition, and which nurtured Hitler’s pogrom of industrialized genocide.
We need to understand the power elite have control of our collective thinking and we can only separate truth from illusion by freeing our minds through self-education, control of want, and realizing the subtext of television and the Internet is mind-manipulation.
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Retired Nanaimo resident Ron Heusen writes every second week. He can be reached through the News Bulletin at editor@nanaimobulletin.com.