Showing posts with label propaganda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label propaganda. Show all posts

25 September 2008

First report

[There are no illustrations in this longish posting because I cannot imagine what would be appropriate. When in doubt, ignore pictures is not a bad motto.]

Part of Monday was spent at a conference organized jointly by (deep breath) the Center for Security Policy with the New Criterion, Hudson Institute, City JournalManhattan Institute and our own Centre for Social Cohesion. With such illustrious sponsors there were illustrious speakers, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mark Steyn, Daniel Johnson, Melanie Phillips, John O’Sullivan and David Pryce-Jones. Several postings will be needed to do it all justice and this is merely a preliminary musing.

The theme was “Free Speech, Jihad and the Future of Western Civilization” with a sub-heading mentioning libel tourism, a peculiarly British problem but that was not one of the main subjects. Since there were no lawyers on either of the panels, there could be no discussion of how the libel laws of this country can be changed as, we all agree, they must be.

A repeated theme elaborated by several speakers was the notion that the danger we are facing through soft jihad is greater than any we have faced before as neither Nazism nor Communism were so obviously ensconced in our society. There were no schools named after Lenin or St Adolph churches on street corners. Thus, our refusal to fight the jihad is liable to destroy Western civilization in a way the other two ideologies could not.

Let me, respectfully, disagree with that. The presence of mosques and madrassas (that means school) on our street corners need not be a problem as long there is a reasonable oversight as to what is taught there. No religious or educational institution is supposed to encourage people to go out and murder various others. By and large the people who attend these institutions have no power or influence in our society. (In fact, many of the youngsters have little to look forward to and that is a separate problem that needs to be addressed.)

Obviously, we cannot allow the building of extraordinarily large mosques, whose minarets will dwarf all Christian churches; nor can we have muezzins calling the faithful to prayer five times a day in Oxford. This is not a Muslim country.

However, there is an important difference between the inability displayed certainly by the establishment and various institutions in the West to fight for our culture and our civilization as against soft jihad and the refusal to do so when Nazism and, more importantly, Communism was the threat.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury speaks of the “inevitability” of Sharia law being accepted on equal footing with the ordinary law of the land or the Lord Chief Justice speaks of being
willing to see sharia law operate in the country, so long as it did not conflict with the laws of England and Wales, or lead to the imposition of severe physical punishments,
they do not really mean that they see Sharia as being superior to Western law.

Admittedly, it is difficult to work out what the Archbishop means at the best of times and Lord Phillips appears to think that Sharia should go beyond dispute resolution and, possibly, apply to marriage arrangement with all that implies for Muslim women. Nevertheless, both statements are expressions of moral paralysis and, possibly, physical cowardice rather than belief in the system.

This is very different from the real fifth column that all Western countries had for Nazi and, much more so, Communist ideology. The politicians, officials, diplomats, film producers and actors, officers during the latter half of the Second World War, academics, teachers, and others promoted Communism, openly or covertly, because they believed that the Western system of social, political, economic and moral ideas must be destroyed in order to create a higher societal structure. Not only was that much more dangerous it was also much more long-lasting.

I would argue that our perplexity in the face of the latest enemy and inability to proclaim the superiority of our own values of political, religious and social freedom have been caused to a very grerat extent by the infiltration of the much more dangerous enemy the West faced for decades until the Soviet Union collapsed in the early nineties.

At the conference Ayaan Hirsi Ali talked of soft jihad as termites. You may think your beautiful furniture is still standing but as soon as you move it there is a complete collapse – the termites have destroyed it. I am afraid it was the Communist infiltration that were the termites and the furniture that was in place and looked so nice cannot stand up to the strong movement that is being inflicted by the jihadists.

In the same way, many of us would argue that another specie of termites are the tranzis and, particularly, the European Union that is lodging in our furniture and destroying it from inside.

The extent to which that system’s agents penetrated our society has been documented in greater detail for the United States than for any European country, including Britain. Partly, this is a matter of luck – the CPUSA’s documents have ended up in the hands of competent researchers and historians, thus making it possible for the Yale series on the history of Communism to be published, starting with “The Secret World of American Communism” in 1996.

Then there are is the historical fact that the Venona documents that produced a remarkable list of individuals, some of whom have not yet been identified, were decoded in the United States, though often with British help. The declassification of documents was possible because of America’s Freedom of Information Act, which actually allows people to find out matters of some importance. Similar attempts to find out names of agents have failed in Britain and in European countries.

There are other issues: the famous libel laws that have prevented many an historian from disclosing the truth about the situation in Britain; and a curious desire to bury and ignore the past, often coupled with misplaced compassion for the now elderly agents or their families if they themselves have died.

Even in the United States McCarthyism is a word to invoke shivers of horror in many a right-thinking individual and George Clooney can get away with making a deeply dishonest film about the period, “Good night and good luck”. Ed Murrow may have been “a useful idiot” but the man at the heart of the story, Lawrence Duggan, was most definitely a Soviet agent and his death, allegedly a suicide, remains deeply suspicious.

The announcement that the Rosenbergs were definitely spies by one of their co-agents produced a frisson of astonishment in the New York Times.

In other words the debate is not ended and a great deal more is likely to come out on the subject of those “invisible” groups of agents, most of whom were in some position of power and influence. Compare that to the position the soft jihadists hold in our society.

Some, either Muslims themselves or their sympathizers, who, nevertheless, do not actually want to live in a Sharia-run society, have acquired positions in such organizations as the Canadian Human Rights Councils (that are now being investigated and may well cease to exist soon). Some, like Khalid bin Mahfouz, have enough money to manipulate the disgraceful British libel laws in order to impose censorship on all those who try to discuss what he has been doing with his money. But most of the mosque-goers and madrassa-attenders are on the fringes of society. That causes problems of its own but they cannot be compared with the likes of Harry Dexter White or Alger Hiss.

This is not to say that I do not find soft jihad seriously disturbing. Attempts to silence research, debate, even artistic expression whether through our libel courts, the Canadian Human Rights kangaroo courts or the manipulation of the American legal system and academia (so what else is new?) are outrageous and must be resisted.

(Incidentally, all those people who were so schocked by the fact that Governor Palin, as Mayor of Wasilla, asked the City Librarian about the possibility of certain books being withdrawn, not actually suggesting that she should do so, were very silent when Cambridge University Press, terrified by Khalid bin Mahfouz’s determination to bankrupt them if necessary, demanded that all libraries worldwide should withdraw copies of “Alms for Jihad”. Luckily, the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association recommended that American libraries refuse to comply and many readers seconded that.)

The decisions taken by the OIC and the Human Rights Council are also worrying. We all know that these organizations should have no influence on what happens in our countries at all and we also know that there will be creeping indirect influence. In fact, as I have suggested before on the BrugesGroupBlog, the transnational organizations are, in many ways, a greater danger to us than the Islamists.

We cannot allow books being pulped or withdrawn from publication because there are people around who do not like what is being said with respected writers and researchers like Rachel Ehrenfeld being prevented from publishing her work; we cannot have journalists like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant bullied and harassed by sinister commissars for truth, who are not accountable to anyone and who have no legal framework within which they must operate (though, I understand they are now being investigated by various law enforcement agencies); we cannot accept that the likes of Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch should be silenced because they dare to point to unpalatable truths.

At the same time let us not forget that there are other forces that try to abolish liberties that had been fought for. The EU, as my colleague has reported, is once again trying to control blogs and bloggers, no doubt for the good of us all.

Over on the other side of the Pond, there are constant Democrat threats or promises to reintroduce the “Fairness Doctrine”, whose aim is to close down the highly successful right-wing radio channels and programmes. There were reports of Obama campaigners closing down Clinton-supporting blogs and trying to derail interviews with the likes of Stanley Kurtz on the subject of Obama’s links with the not-all-that-remorseful former Weatherman Bill Ayers and their joint behaviour over the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Those egregious Holocaust denial laws not only go on in countries like Germany but there have been proposals to extend them to other countries. And, of course, we all, in Britain, live under the constant threat of the libel laws as operated by rich crooks with the aid and support of some (not many) members of the judicial profession.

The point I am making that the censorship and other aspects of the soft jihad are imposed through fear not through ideological agreement. In the first place, it is physical fear. If we don’t agree to stop investigating the Koran or pointing out that almost all recent terrorist acts were committed by Islamist groups, they might come after us. We might be blown up or murdered in the street like Theo van Gogh was. At best we shall have to live under permanent protection like Ayaan Hirsan Ali and other outspoken Muslims and ex-Muslims do or like Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian does, or like the Danish cartoonists do.

There is also the matter of intellectual cowardice. Too many people in the establishment and, one has to admit, outside it are terrified of proclaiming a point of view, particularly if it sounds nasty or unpleasant. The exceptions are the United States and Israel. You can say anything you like about them. Actually, you can say anything you like about any right-wing analyst or politician, as Governor Sarah Palin has found out.

The third intelinking thread is moral cowardice or, rather, a moral paralysis, the result, I submit, of the activity of those termites. Faced with a determined onslaught by people who are not particularly interested in convincing us but in overcoming our possible resistance by any means necessary, too many of us find it hard to define what it is we are fighting for and how to go about the fight.

The EU, needless to say, has been part of the problem. By insisting that member states abandon their own identities and histories in order to become part of the grand project; by officially proclaiming that part of the project is not upsetting anybody (except those who oppose it) as Commission President Barroso made it more or less clear in a waffly statement about the Danish cartoons and certain reactions to them, the EU has made our fight against the enemy that is trying to destroy our culture that much more difficult. Come to think of it, the EU, together with other tranzis and many of our own establishment, has refused to acknowledge that the enemy exists and is armed.

However, this is a war we can win. The Islamists, unlike our earlier enemies, are offering very little. Few people want to live under Sharia law or go back to a particularly backward version of the social structure of the Dark Ages. So they are beatable as long as we remain determined to do so and that means, among other things, not handing over Muslim populations to their rule.

The idea of imposing Sharia on Muslim communities in the West, thus creating a legal apartheid and condemning millions of people who should be living under our laws to that backward social structure ought to be repugnant.

We can stand up to these people, rescue their victims (those unfortunate youngsters who have been seduced by highly unpleasant imams and the women who are trapped in Sharia family rules, for instance) and, in the process, reassert those values that make the West, in particular the Anglosphere, the most attractive and energetic part of the world.

Going back to the conference, I want to quote two of the speakers (others will turn up in other postings), both writers I admire greatly and who have made appearances on the blog: David Pryce-Jones (here is his blog) and John O’Sullivan.

Mr Pryce-Jones is an expert on Middle Eastern history and very knowledgeable on Islam. In fact, he is considerably more knowledgeable than many of the Imams that spout hate-filled rubbish and all those who protest against “Islamophobia”. (Nothing new in that, many eurosceptics are more knowledgeable about European countries and their history as well as the EU than all those who scream “swivel-eyed Europhobes”.)

He started his comments by mourning the degradation that has fallen on the North African and other Arab Muslim countries in the last few decades, blaming it on the absolutist political systems that have grown up in them since the Second World War.

The nationalists got rid of the few nascent political institutions that the French and the British left behind (very few, as it happens) and turned the countries into oppressive one-party states. When these did not produce all or even some of what they promised, a power struggle ensued with the radical Islamists taking over, often in very bloodthirsty fashion. (Let me just add that the story of radical Islamism growing out of left-wing, Soviet supported Communist or quasi Communist regimes has not been properly told. It is so much easier to blame Western imperialism. The latest issue of the Salisbury Review has a fascinating article on this process in Algeria by the Portuguese writer and politician Patricia Lança but you have subscribe to the magazine to read it in full.)

Breaking absolute power is immensely difficult though, as Mr Pryce-Jones pointed out, the much-maligned Bush regime seems to have managed it and Iraq may well turn into an exemplar for the rest of the Middle East. It is certainly a worrying precedent for the rulers of those countries.

In the meantime, Mr Pryce-Jones advocates a new and more attractive Congress for Cultural Freedom that will give a forum to those Muslim thinkers and writers who are not so much “moderate” as that is a meaningless term but intent on turning Islam into a modern ideology that can survive without too much bloodshed into the twenty-first century and develop into the future.

The original Congress for Cultural Freedom was set up by the disillusioned left to counter the very effective Communist propaganda and other activity that was destroying Western culture and society. It was financed by the CIA because no-one else would. I think we can all agree that its work was but partially successful.

A Congress that would be opposing Islamism will have to be different as it will have to concentrate on the Muslim countries and communities themselves. In the West, it will have to proclaim the importance of Western values and culture and fight cowardice and abject desires to surrender rather than a powerful ideology.

John O’Sullivan, Executive Editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, pointed out that not all threats to free speech come from radical Islam. He should know. He and his staff are fighting very tangible threats and attacks in many countries, not least Russia.

He further pointed out that the lack of decent British patriotism that can be passed on to the young (and old but let that pass) has created problems for everyone in this country, not just the Muslim communities. (This, too, is a point we have made frequently on this blog.)

He suggested a programme of five points:

End multiculturalism and concentrate on teaching that decent British patriotism that includes a great deal of history, not forgetting that within a liberal (in the true sense of the word) Western culture there can be many divergences.

Something nasty to be done with the establishment, whose idiocy and dishonesty has, if not exactly landed us, certainly has kept us in the mess we are in. Of course, the establishment tends to be rather left-wing these days so let us not have any more nonsense about the poor underprivileged left, ranting against power structures that disappeared decades ago.

A serious reform of the police, which has become “the paramilitary wing of the Guardian”, a phrase so clever that many of us in the audience immediately made a note of stealing it.

An alteration to immigration rules that would prevent all those endless first cousin marriages to people from backward villages in the Indian sub-continent. This, needless to say, will start working towards an improvement in the situation of women in the Muslim communities.

The fifth point was the most important one as this is something we can all do immediately: resistance to foolish intellectual fashions, no matter where they come from.

So there we are dear readers. A first report on the many subjects raised by an important conference and a general musing on the subjects covered. I may add that quite a few people on the panel and in the audience might not have agreed with my opinion. Unsurprisingly, I remain convinced by them.

25 January 2008

Do we know what it is we do not know?

The follow-up question there would be: and do we care that there are things we do not know we do not know.

First, let me deal with a seemingly small problem that has arisen and about which my colleague wrote in what I thought was a very moderate fashion (well, at first, anyway). It is related to the main theme, I promise you.

The point at issue was the use of material laboriously put together by the editors of this blog, chiefly my colleague, by members of the MSM without any acknowledgement and the subsequent mutual admiration society between them, their friends and sundry bloggers. Devil’s Kitchen is excepted as are all bloggers who use our material and link back to the original. That is what the blogosphere is for and we have no desire to stop that.

On the other hand, neither of us is very keen on the advice that we should shrug our shoulders and get on with life; these things happen and anyway the cause matters more than the individual. Well, that’s very nice, of course, but it is not your work that is being nobbled and we have not empowered anyone to accept apologies on our behalf.

What attitude like that shows is the sort of contempt we have in this country for intellectual labour and achievement, whether it is a piece of research, translation (as I know to my cost) or a programme to enable large companies to get financial information tailored to their needs faster (as I know from someone who works for a very big international news and financial information agency).

These are all products, hard though it is to understand about something that is not a widget and cannot be picked up. The achievement of creating them should be acknowledged.

Intellectual property is a thorny subject but we, on this blog, ask for no money from people who use our material. You are all welcome to it. We ask for acknowledgement. Incidentally, the Daily Telegraph, owner of all those clogs, goes ballistic if their material is used without payment, never mind a link or two. (I have now seen the exchange between Daniel Hannan and my colleague, as well as the odd unpleasant interjection from the odd forum reader and shall leave that particular subject alone. The principle, as far as the MSM is concerned, stands.)

Nor am I impressed by the argument that the cause matters more than the individual. First, let me say, define the cause. I think you may find that the cause as interpreted by various members of the Conservative Party may not be our cause. In any case, if one believes in liberty, as this blog does, one must believe in the importance of private property and that extends beyond widgets.

For the rest of it, people who say never mind who your allies are, think of the cause, remind me of those misguided souls who insisted that one must not oppose anything the Soviet Union did because that plays into the hands of the Fascists or the Nazis. Then the Soviet Union played into the hands of the Nazis; then luckily for the misguided souls, the thieves fell out. Alliance with the Soviet Union may have seemed like a very good idea on the morning of June 22, 1941 and, in any case, there were few choices, but the long-term damage that did is still with us.

This brings me rather neatly to the main theme of this posting. We are fighting a war of propaganda on various fronts, not least in the war against terror or against terrorism, if you prefer.

Let me remind our readers of the following statement by Donald Rumsfeld on February 12, 2002:
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are "known knowns"; there are things we know we know. We also know there are "known unknowns"; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also "unknown unknowns" — the ones we don't know we don't know.
According to the Wikipedia entry on the subject it was not an original thought, which miraculously makes it clever, though the evidence for that is not presented and is likely to be rather spurious. Furthermore, the Plain English Campaign awarded it the Foot in Mouth Award in 2003 but that must have been before they were told that it was not original by Rummy.

Frankly, the Plain English Campaign had better award itself the Stupidity of the Year Award. That sentence is very clear, very plain and makes perfect sense, unlike numerous pronouncements by said campaign. (I am told by my colleague that said campaign gave an award to the MoD website for clarity. I rest my case.)

It has, however, been a staple of jokes by clever-dick British journalists, satirists and even, I am sorry to say, bloggers. Two of those I read regularly referred to the statement sniggeringly in the last week. I shall not link to them because I do not want to embarrass them and because they were both rightly lambasted by their readers.

The idea of “unknown unknowns” is well known (if I may put it that way) to all businessmen, managers and even theoreticians of management. Would that it were well known to our policy makers and the people behind them, who supposedly produce the background work. I despair of commentators understanding anything.

As it happens I was reminded of Rumsfield’s dictum this week, reading the obituaries in the Guardian, the Times and the Daily Telegraph of a man I knew slightly for reasons that I need not go into and will not be guessed by our readers (in other words, do not waste your time or space on the forum), Charles Elwell.

Charles, as our readers can see from the two pictures I have posted, was the quintessential Englishman, tall, handsome, bumbling in manner and with a ridiculous sense of humour. It was hard to remember that he was one of the sharpest MI5 operatives this country ever had, cracking the Portland spy ring and uncovering John Vassall’s activities.

After an extremely good war, which included a stint in Colditz, he joined the Service, subsequently marrying one of his colleagues, Ann Glass, herself no mean operative. Ann Elwell, as I knew her, was impossibly glamorous in charm, person and intellect to my youthful eyes and it was even more difficult to imagine her as a successful agent.

Between them, Mr and Mrs Elwell did more for this country and its security than 99.9 per cent of all those self-important politicians, national or local or, for that matter, in Brussels, put together. I am happy to be able to pay this tribute to them here.

However, one must move on. There was an interesting point made in all the obituaries. In the 1970s Charles Elwell moved from counter-espionage to counter-subversion where he produced evidence, which was necessarily tentative, of widespread Soviet activity in the field of subversion. His bosses decided that he was exaggerating and he left the Service in sheer frustration.

Subsequently, he managed to find a useful outlet in the Institute for the Study of Conflict, where he published regular background briefings, which were considered by the authorities to be exaggerated. Even now, after much of what Charles Elwell said has been confirmed by the documents extracted from the KGB archives and published during those few years when it was possible, the obituaries still seem to agree with those MI5 bosses. One cannot help feeling that it is still considered to be somewhat infra dig to be digging into what the Soviets were really up to in all those decades.

The trouble that subversion and its close relation, agents of influence, come under the heading of “unknown unknowns”, considered to be unsuitable for our security agents and, these days when we no longer have institutes for the study of conflict or terrorism or any suchlike matter, even for analysts outside the system.

So we have a situation in which all warnings of Soviet subversion, including the stories that Islamic groups were being funded, armed and trained, were largely ignored or placed into the “exaggeration” file. Others tell that warnings from the early nineties that odd things were happening in some of the British mosques were also filed among the exaggerated “unknown unknowns”.

We are fighting an enemy that is adept at many things, including propaganda. The one thing they do not seem to be able to manage is build up a decent state with decent life for the people in it. So if they cannot have it, nobody can and they will try to make sure that will happen.

They are adept at propaganda and subversion because they were taught by the best – the Soviet elite, while people in the West, Britain in particular, sat back and talked grandly about exaggeration, just as now we snigger at the expression “unknown unknowns”.

Yet what we know about our enemies is still pitifully small and no amount of whining about those nasty Americans deciding that they were the enemy and, therefore, using "inappropriate vocabulary" forcing us to go along with it (something that I hear quite often from people in position of power and influence) while we just want to understand them and show our love for them so they love us back, will help. What we need to do is to go out there and try to find those “unknown unknowns”. Come to think of it, we could start with some of the “known unknowns”.

Coming back to the subject of our other enemy, the European Union and its minions, the same problem can be seen. That Rolls Royce of officialdom, the British civil service, has had rings run round it by the despicable Europeans for decades. No, not all of them wanted to give up everything that may have been once upon a time part of this country’s history and tradition.

Nowadays we call it the Anglospheric tradition, but that, too, gets a superior sniff from too many people, though that comes into the category of "known unknowns".

Quite simply, through not doing their homework, through not trying to understand the “known unknowns”, let alone the "unknown unknowns", they lost out. We all lost out and we are continuing to lose out.

While piecing the picture together, as best we can on this blog (yes, thank you, I don’t need any more lectures on how I must be generous with my work and how the cause matters more than anything – see all the arguments above and leave), we have realized that the EU elite is having a more difficult time than most people realize.

Seemingly victorious, they are feeling their edifice beginning to shake around them, though we, out here, may not feel the tremor yet. It is hard to know what is going on really, what are the “known unknowns” and what are the “unknown unknowns”. Any tenuous work we may do is either drowned out by the usual suspects bleating their political slogans or chanting about the need for another campaign, any campaign or it is dismissed as being an exaggeration.

One of our constant complaints on this blog has been the lack of respect the eurosceptic movement has shown for intellectual work – for research, for analysis, for attempts to get beyond the “known knowns”. All attempts to set up a genuine think-tank that would deal with these problems have failed; all money raised has gone to pointless campaigns, unnecessary umbrella organizations or superficial publications that promote politicians or their parties.

So here we are, still in a mess, still squabbling and still unable to see beyond those “known knowns”. I don’t mind the squabbling as occasionally something comes out of it but I do, very seriously, object to our inability to understand the concept of “unknown unknowns” and to get to a point when we get to know some of them. There can be no solution to problems we cannot even begin to define.

15 April 2007

Can't wait to see this one

Our readers might recall that not so long ago I wrote about the German film “The Lives of Others” that, contrary to expectation as it showed the East German Communist system in a bad light, won the Oscar for best foreign film, having won various other awards besides.

A week or so ago I was told by a friend who lives in the United States (for those who are interested in such matters, he calls himself English of Irish descent if he bothers to define himself at all) that the film was going to be remade, substituting Bush’s America for Honecker’s German Democratic Republic. We spent some time discussing as to who might play the Berlin Wall but came to no conclusion. Surely, I thought, this was just a rumour.

Alas, no. According to an article by Sheila Johnston in the Daily Telegraph last Saturday, the film has been acquired for remake by American movie moguls Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Well, acquired for remake does not mean being remade but it is an ominous message.

What does the Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, he film’s writer/director think of that East German theme being transferred to Bush’s America?
For the first time in recent memory, the American government has been given a lot of power. And one of the first things a government will do then is to start spying on its citizens, especially when it feels it's using it for the good of democracy.

Sadly, these things that the film is about will happen all the time and everywhere.
To some extent he is saying nothing very much or positing a truism – governments want more power. But that last sentence, if he did say it, indicates that either he really is not all that interested in the subject of the remake or he has been imbued with the Hollywood luvvie psychology in the short amount of time he spent there.

Who is going to play the Berlin Wall? How will they show the all-powerful nature of the secret police? Not by that idiotic Valerie Plame story, as retailed to all and sundry by Our Val and hubby Joe, I trust. What of the fact that even the best known author cannot just up and leave the country? Or of the fact of there being no opposition and criticism of the party (except within certain limits) is not allowed? Above all, the very fact of making such a film, let alone the constant shrill anti-Bushism that those fruitcakes indulge in makes something of a nonsense of the claim that Bush’s America is similar to Honecker’s East Germany.

The story reminded me of one stay in Washington DC a couple of years ago. I came down to breakfast in my hotel and found that people sat around a big table and chatted. I was pleased as I was on my own and joined in. I must admit that national stereotypes played true to type. The Australian lady talked cheerfully about her travels and did not want to get involved in any other conversation. The quiet British chap excused himself as soon as there was the slightest possibility of a political discussion.

That left a lady who was in Washington either to look for a job or to lobby somebody, an aging hippy chap with a wispy beard, colourful t-shirt and beer belly and me. My two companions assured me that they were now living in a fascist society and I was visiting a fascist country and I had better know this.

Now, usually, my reply runs along the lines of “are you sure you want to tell me this as you don’t exactly know that I will not report it to the secret police”. This time, I thought, I’d play it straight. I was shocked and horrified by what they had to tell me and demanded examples.
Therein lay the rub. Their examples led nowhere. There was the case of the Hollywood actors who might have been blacklisted as people were under McCarthy (not so that you’d notice but that’s a separate issue) but, actually, were not. In fact, they were all making films and endlessly ranting about President Bush.

Then there was the fact that libraries could trace people through their tickets if they took out suspicious sounding books on making bombs or suchlike activity. Well, no, since I asked, the aging hippy did not know anyone to whom this happened and had heard of no concrete examples but it could have happened.

Finally, there was the professor who was picked up by the police because one of his students had gone on an anti-war demonstration. Oh my, I said, what happened to him? Nothing, it seems. He was released after a couple of hours. What we call helping the police with their inquiries.

Eventually, I excused myself politely as my interlocutors were beginning to look uncomfortable. This was truly depressing, I thought. Here were two people who obviously spent a good deal of their time thinking and talking about the fascist state of America under Bush and they could come up with no examples at all.

Any one of us who paid the slightest attention to the Communist countries and East Germany, in particular, can cite any number of clear and cogent stories.

What are they going to have in the American version of “Other People’s Lives”? The whole enterprise demonstrates something that is rarely acknowledged but is undeniably true: the Left in America may whine at great length about the international order, the need to be part of it and the terrible way in which the Bush administration has put America on collision course with it but, in actual fact, it knows nothing about the world. Its obsession with America and what happens there is so overwhelming that it cannot even envisage the possibility that some political systems might be considerably worse than the one they live under even if the Democrats are not in power.

Well, fine, I hear our readers say, but how does it affect Britain? This is, after all, a question of what is happening in the United States.

There are many reasons why this is important to us as well. The most obvious one is that the American film industry is very powerful and its images become the staple of many different cultures and peoples. Thus, a remotely successful Hollywood film (and, to be fair, there is no reason to suppose that it will be that, as too many of those left-wing propaganda ones have bombed) creates a certain image to be accepted by people without too much thinking or understanding. In this case, the image will be that Bush’s America, which will come to an end in January 2009, in any case, is no different from the GDR, which was brought down by a popular though bloodless revolt. The blood had flown earlier.

Furthermore, any discussion of the future requires an understanding of the past. A discussion of what is to happen in Europe and the world requires the knowledge that the twentieth century had seen two horrific political systems that, between them, were responsible for the murder to many millions, torture of many tens of millions and destruction of whole societies. In between there was a destruction of human relations, of love and loyalty. This is not the same as suggestions of security profiling or of Democrats losing the presidential election.

Nor is it the same as Blair or any other Minister and Prime Minister telling an easily disproved lie to Parliament. Reprehensible, of course, but hardly catastrophic. While the Bush Derangement Syndrome, so prominent in American politics, media and new media, is on the Left, the Right being content with criticizing without getting hysterical, the Blair Derangement Syndrome is both on the Left and the Right. If Bush’s America is just like the GDR of evil memory, then so is Blair’s Britain as far as many people are concerned. That shows a similar obsession with one’s own world to the point of complete exclusion of everything and everyone else.

This lack of understanding helpful in discussions of what is wrong with the European Union. If Blair is no different from Walter Ulbricht or Erich Honecker then what exactly is the problem with the European Commission? Why would its unaccountability, or the managerial, undemocratic way of European legislation be of any importance if the Labour Government or, for that matter, the Republican Administration, can be seen to be the same as the Politburo of a Communist state?

In the next few days I shall try to see “The Lives of Others”, as it has finally opened in the UK. Then I shall continue to wait for the film that will make nonsense of it and of the experience that lies behind it.

19 February 2007

What is to be done?

For those who do not know about the history of the Russian radical movement I should explain that the title was not invented by Lenin. Very little was. This was a title given to an interminably long and boring novel by Chernyshevsky, which outlined in fictional form the ideas of radicalism. One of the great mysteries of the Russian soul is how a novel of such incredible turpitude should have become so popular in a country, which, at the time, boasted some of the greatest novelist in the world.

The title, however, is useful and can be applied to many problems that we face today, including that of the propaganda war that we, all of us, are fighting. On balance, it is hard to define who “we” are, as the war this country and its allies are engaged in is not immediately obvious to many people, as World War 2 was. Then again, we had the same problem with the Cold War, which occasionally degenerated into a fairly warm one, but mostly went on in a way that was incomprehensible to many, largely because they did not want to comprehend it.

As I have already pointed out, the fight of those who believe in liberty and other loosely defined Western values (I can see this is going to be a fun thread on the forum) is hamstrung by the public opinion created in the West some decades ago by several masters of propaganda. It is only now that we are beginning to fight back seriously, not least with the growing discussion and theories of the Anglosphere.

The front line in the battle has moved to the Middle East (apart from Hizonner the Mayor of LondON nobody has a good way to say about Hugo Chávez, after all, as the man proceeds to wreck a reasonably working economy). Al-Jazeera reports, accurately enough, that the latest summit of Condi Rice, Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert has gone precisely nowhere.

There are good reasons for this and Secretary of State Rice seems unable to grasp them. Or, maybe, those who brief her cannot grasp simple facts. The point that seems to be obscured by the mellow propaganda is that neither Hamas nor Fatah want to acknowledge Israel’s right to existence or to agree that terroristic activity should stop.

In his aptly named article “The Stink”, Bruce Thornton on the Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers sums up:
The only honest group has been Hamas, which tells us plainly that it wants to destroy Israel. But if we watch what they do rather than listen to what they say, so do a critical mass of Palestinian Arabs, including the so-called moderate Mahmoud Abbas. His disagreement with Hamas is not over whether the existence of Israel will be accepted, but over tactics and timing: Hamas thinks Israel can be destroyed sooner with more terrorist violence, Abbas thinks later with dishonest “agreements” and demography. Just listen to the so-called “condemnations” of terrorism that issue from Abbas. After last month’s murder of three Israelis by a terrorist bomber in Eilat, Abbas condemned the attack as “not in the interests of the Palestinian people” — which implies that such murder is acceptable as long as it is in the interests of the Palestinian Arabs.
Of course, their efforts to destroy Israel and murder as many Israelis as possible, as well as those Palestinians they accuse of working for the Israelis and, indeed, to harass the Christian Palestinian community out of existence, not to mention destroy historic evidence of the fact that Jews have been in Jerusalem for something like 3,000 years do get derailed by their inability to agree on anything and an ongoing desire to kill and maim each other.

It is, however, extraordinary that these very simple facts and information are so easily buried by cleverly disseminated propaganda.

We followed some of the creation of this propaganda last summer during Israel’s war against Hezbollah, when the latter seemed to be in total control of the “news” output by the MSM and only the blogs managed to speak up about the truth.

One of our complaints at the time was the little help we received from the Israeli embassy in London, from the leaders of the Jewish Community (ably and repeatedly lambasted by Melanie Phillips) and by the Israeli Defence Force.

It is completely untrue that the IDF lost the shooting war against Hezbollah and, of course, it is completely untrue that Lebanon is now happily at peace, with the Israeli forces out of the country and UNIFIL patrolling the border without any rights to disarm terrorist organizations. Hezbollah, as we have reported on numerous occasions, is still interested in destroying Lebanon rather than allow it to become a more or less peaceful, pro-Western state that is not controlled by Syria or Iran.

What the IDF and Israel lost and lost heavily was the propaganda war, largely because of their ineptitude in this field. It is hard to tell where this ineptitude comes from. It has been suggested to me that Hebrew culture is too straightforward to play “linguistic jiu-jitsu” but I find that hard to accept completely. Not that I know a great deal about Hebrew culture but I do know that some of the best propagandists of the twentieth century have been Jews and I cannot see why this talent, present in so many should not be used to Israel’s advantage.

The problem, I am happy to say, has been noticed in Israel as well, as this no-holds-barred article in the Jerusalem Post indicates.

As the author Amotz Asa-El puts it, Lt-Gen Gabi Ashkenazi, new Chief of General Staff, may not put this at the top of the agenda but it really ought to be:
The problem is simple: In last summer's war, what began with Israel's portrayal as a just victor ended with its depiction as an unjust loser. It is even more perplexing considering that the IDF Spokesman's Office was reasonably budgeted, staffed and trained. In fact, the IDF's media operation had been revolutionized since the days when it saw the press as an intrusion on the battlefield.
Amotz Asa-El goes through the whole sad saga of incompetence and wrong persons being appointed. Clearly, it has not really sunk in deeply that the IDF’s media operation should be conducted by someone who knows what the media is like, how it operates, what kind of stories it likes.

Furthermore, the someone should have a clear idea of the importance of instant (and I do mean instant) rebuttal. Even Mr Asa-El seems unable to grasp what actually happened at Qana (or Kana). Perhaps we should send him a copy of the pdf so painstakingly prepared by my colleague.

As the blogs proved conclusively, at Qana and in other places, Hezbollah simply concocted news stories that were then reproduced as real by the Western media. The IDF media sector should have pounced on every single one of them, demanding explanations, evidence and independent confirmation. Instead, they apologized, then muttered about things being not quite the way they were depicted.

The Israelis should have had the world media in the northern towns and villages that had been consistently shelled for a long time before the attack, not accept the “world’s judgement” that they simply over-reacted to the kidnapping of two soldiers (not the murder of eight others, oh goodness me, no).

The trouble goes back to at least 2,000 with the Mohammed Al-Dura story, which we have written about on this blog. Terrorists blow up children with impunity. Those pictures are too horrific to show.

Therefore, the iconic picture of the way children are affected, has been the little boy of unknown provenance, unknown name and unknown destiny, crouching behind his father at one of the carefully staged “battles”. Did the Israelis demand explanations, evidence and independent confirmation? Did they heck. Just rolled over and apologized, only then muttering about it not being quite like that.

The point is that the Western media is already predisposed to creating a certain story in which Israel is the aggressor; the Jews having arrived from Eastern Europe, have taken over land that has “always” been Palestinian (whoever the Palestinians may be) and every problem in that part of the world is caused by Israeli aggression.

Hamas, Hezbollah and the others use this. Israel has been outmanoeuvred on the battlefield of propaganda. The IDF has been slow to react, unable to deal with the Western media, incapable of understanding the growing importance of the blogosphere, large tranches of which are on her side.

Of course, the problem may be rooted in even older matters. There is no need to discuss that here. We have to deal with the situation as it is.

Mr Asa-El puts blame for the latest debacle squarely on the previous Chief of General Staff, Dan Halutz, and his protégée, the lady who is still in charge of the IDF media section, Miri Regev.[The two are pictured at the top.]

With all due respect, one has to say that Ms Regev has been an unmitigated disaster and one wonders what General Halutz was thinking of in appointing her.

The lady, it would seem, does not speak English, the language of the international media. She has no interest in the international media but only in promoting her boss in the Israeli one. As if it mattered how many pictures of General Halutz appeared in Israel.
Regev's career as a press officer focused on dealing with the Hebrew press and with logistics. To her, the foreign press - the alpha and omega of that fourth arena where Israel was taking a beating, and which she was assigned to conquer - was but a sideshow. And so, rather than spend the war personally briefing the world's major media figures, she spent it behind Dan Halutz's shoulder, evidently thinking her job was to push her boss into Israeli papers, rather than get her own face on foreign TV.

At the same time, when the IDF began its frantic search for a "victory photo," Regev failed to supply it. True, this task would have been simpler had there been a victory to photograph, but the fact is that some things could have been done. For instance, after the war I learned from combatants that when surrounded, Hizbullah troops would often commit suicide, in some cases shooting themselves in the temple with pistols in the very presence of approaching Israeli troops.

I doubt this could have been photographed. Yet had this been made known immediately, it would have proven valuable to the press as a story, and to the IDF as a reminder to the foreign press that Israel's enemy was not the freedom fighter it tried to portray, but the fanatic suicide attackers who have been haunting the West from Bali to Madrid.

Why was this lost on Regev? Because she has poor English and has never been a journalist. How can she know where to lead the foreign press if she can't read an issue of The Economist or hold a serious conversation with a New York Times editor? Regev was as clueless about the foreign press as Halutz was about the ground forces.
Replacing Ms Regev with a savvy Anglophone journalist would be a step in the right direction. I suspect, more is needed by way of mentality change in the Israeli military apparatus.

Why does this matter? Why should we not simply shrug our shoulders and say, well, if they are that stupid, let them get on with it? Because, as I have said before, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, surrounded by tyrannies and terrorists, all intent on destroying it. Because Israel is fighting our battles and we need to support the country. But, hey, guys, meet us half-way.

COMMENT THREAD

11 February 2007

The big lie or many small lies?

Here is an interesting question for all our readers? Who burnt down the Reichstag in 1933? Can you recall the name of Marinus van der Lubbe, the somewhat crazed Dutchman, who actually set it on fire? And even if you can, do you not think that there was somebody behind it all? After all, it could not be just a lone lunatic?

It would be interesting to know how many of those who read the above paragraph nodded and said: “Of course, Hitler ordered and manipulated van der Lubbe (assuming you can recall the name) and then used the fire to get rid of the opposition and to blame the Communists.”

I am willing to bet that nobody said: “Oh yes, it was the Communists and they managed to get away with it because Dimitrov’s trial (assuming you can recall that name) was unsuccessful. Hitler merely took advantage of the event.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between good and bad propaganda.

The truth is that van der Lubbe did act on his own. This has been investigated and proved by a number of historians. No evidence has been found of anybody else’s involvement. (And, please, do not remind me of such things as Kirov’s murder, in December 1934. The evidence for Stalin’s involvement is everywhere.)

Further, Hitler did take advantage of the fire to do what he had always planned to do and destroy the remnants of German democratic parliament and ban the Communist Party of which the Nazis were oddly afraid. All of that is true.

Now we come to the battle of the propagandists. Everyone, but everyone, quotes Dr Göbbels’s comment about the big lie and compares every would-be spin doctor with him. But who actually believed Göbbels? A large proportion of the German people for a time and some supporters in other countries who wanted to believe him.

As opposed to that, millions of people across the world repeat certain "truths" for which there is "full agreement" without once realizing that it is propaganda first started by that genius of spin doctoring and promoter of the Comintern, Willi Münzenberg, without even knowing his name or comparing any tuppenny-ha’penny press officer to him. Now that is propaganda. Sheer genius. Achieved by a long list of small and medium-sized lies.

Back to the Reichstag fire. It occurred on the night of February 27, 1933 and the perpetrator was not hard to find. Van der Lubbe, a supposed Communist and an unemployed bricklayer, clearly mentally disturbed (though the assumption that he was actually mentally defective comes from his obviously drugged state during the trial and a great deal of Communist propaganda), was found inside the building.

The following day the recently elected Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, went to see the President, Hindenburg, who signed an order that closed down all non-Nazi parties and banned the Communist one.

A few days later the Gestapo arrested four Communists, intending to try them with van der Lubbe. Ernst Togler was a senior member of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands - German Communist Party), one of those who had not managed to escape. An arrest warrant was issued for him immediately and he surrendered himself to the police, something the KPD would later hold against him.

The other three were Bulgarians: Georgi Dimitrov, Vasil Tanev and Blagoi Popov, members of the Comintern.

What the Gestapo had not realized that Dimitrov was the head of the West European section of the Comintern and, thus, a close adviser of Stalin's, one of the few people the latter would make an effort for. Normally Communist parties and their members would be sacrificed without a blink of an eyelid.

In addition, the man who had been charged to promote the cause of the Soviet Union and the Communist International through apparently innocuous publications, Willi Münzenberg was reasonably anxious to become involved.

Münzenberg was a German Communist, one of the few from a working class background. He was a deputy in the Reichstag and the owner of two newspapers and a publishing firm. He was also the most skilled propagandist the Soviet Union and its cause ever had. He did not write propaganda, he organized it, setting up hundreds of committees, using front organizations to run other front organizations, inspiring intellectuals to become fellow travellers and to manipulate other, innocent and ignorant intellectuals. In other words, he was the man who created the atmosphere in which it is considered to be normal to be on the left of the spectrum and intensely moral to support some of the worst tyrants in the world, as long as they seem to be a left-wing cause.

As Stephen Koch, author of "Double Lives" wrote in the New Criterion:
He wanted to instill the feeling, like a truth of nature, that seriously to criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by an uplifting refinement of sensibility.
Before 1933 he had been enormously successful in his organizational activity. His biggest achievement was the Sacco-Vanzetti case. He took the case of two obscure Italian anarchists who had been accused of robbery and murder (of which Sacco was almost certainly guilty and Vanzetti possibly innocent) and turned it into a left-wing cause célèbre, achieving two things.

The campaign pulled together disparate left-wing and well-meaning individuals and organizations under covert Communist control, in the process destroying the anarchist movement in the United States.

It countered the potent myth of the Open Door and the American Dream for immigrants, a rival myth to that of the Soviet utopia, by creating an image of America of a murderous, xenophobic society that destroys innocent immigrants if they happen to have the wrong political view.

We can date the irrational anti-Americanism so prevalent in Britain, Europe and the American left from that campaign. Münzenberg’s work lives on.

In the months leading up to Hitler taking power the entire KPD behaved with exemplary foolishness, underestimating the Nazis and concentrating on internal dissent, purges and the fight with the Social-Democrats. Münzenberg was part of that mess.

Immediately after the Hindenburg decree he fled to Paris where he began to organize a counter-offensive.

Its first aspect was "The Brown Book", followed later on by "The Second Brown Book". Münzenberg mobilized many of the West's intellectuals whom he had already enmeshed in his network or the Münzenberg Trust as it was known, to support this endeavour. Names of others, such as Albert Einstein, who protested, were simply added.

"The Brown Book" was probably written largely by Willi's henchman and probable NKVD agent, the Czech Communist Otto Katz, who may well have been involved later on in Masaryk’s “defenestration”. Subsequently, the grateful Communist government of Czechoslovakia put him on trial together with Rudolf Slánský in the great show trial of 1952. (Incidentally, the trials of the tortured and pressurized accused were filmed and shown. Their self-abasement was made public at the time and later.)

Katz, the ruthless manipulator and brilliant propaganda writer, was accused of Zionism and espionage, confessed to all his "crimes" and begged to be executed as he had no right to live. His masters obliged and he was hanged.

As Stephen Koch, author of “Double Lives” and Sean McMeekin, author of "The Red Millionaire", Münzenberg's biography, pointed out "The Brown Book" so highly praised at the time and so valued by various historians, was largely a pack of lies. In fact, the lies were not really substantiated and only self-imposed hypnosis could have made all those writers and reviewers swoon with praise at the time.

There were three parts to the book. The first one told inaccurately of the Nazi rise to power, blaming largely the Social-Democrats and, naturally enough, being rather reticent about the war the KPD waged on the SD and the Weimar democracy in general.

The second part dealt with Nazi oppression in general and was, as Sean McMeekin puts it, "intuitively correct", though short on facts. "The Brown Book" emphasised oppression as it affected left-wing parties and individuals not those dreadful people, capitalists, under which rubric came anyone who did not support the KPD.

Nor was there anything about the growing persecution of Jews. Instead of giving examples, the book and its supposed author, merely quoted Lenin's attack on rich and powerful Zionists, adding quite dishonestly, that rich German Jews had not felt any discomfort under the Nazis. In fact, there was a great deal of indignation that the Nazis accused various non-Jewish left-wing and, above all, Communist activists of being that.

How ironic that the real author of this document should have ended his life as a "Zionist spy". Communist history is full of ironies of this kind.

The third part dealt with the Reichstag fire and produced the accusations that it was organized by the Nazis, specifically by Göring. To prove this there were fraudulent charts and "photographs" produced that showed a network of subterranean passages through which the Nazis could have entered while van der Lubbe was torching the place, to give him a hand.

To top the accusations, there were clear innuendos that van der Lubbe was the SA Chief Ernst Röhm’s catamite, possibly a sexual toy boy to the SA in general.

Even at the time this was thin and has since been disproved quite categorically by, among others, Fritz Tobias in his 1964 book, "The Reichstag Fire". No other writer has produced any evidence to back the half-baked assertions of "The Brown Book" and "The Second Brown Book". They have, nevertheless, penetrated into popular psyche to quite an astonishing degree.

Münzenberg's other ploy was the London counter-trial, the template for many other subsequent "trials". It was timed to open the day the Leipzig trial of Van der Lubbe, Dimitrov and the others was to start, September 21, 1933.

The counter-trial was chaired by D. N. Pritt KC, barrister and member of the Labour Party, who was also one of the leading fellow travellers. In subsequent years he would use his standing as a barrister and a "silk" to explain why the Soviet show trials were legally entirely correct and how the guilt of the accused had been proved beyond any reasonable doubt.

The other "judges" were Maìtre Pierre Vermeylen of Belgium, George Branting of Sweden, Maìtre Vincent de Moro-Giafferi and Maìtre Gaston Bergery of France, Betsy Bakker-Nort of the Netherlands, Vald Hvidt of Denmark, and Arthur Garfield Hays of the United States.

The lawyers, except for Pritt, complained about the atmosphere in the “court room”, the pressure under which they were put by Münzenberg, the lack of evidence and the laughable testimony produced by friends of Willi wearing SA uniforms and masks.

For all of that, the counter-trial was a huge success. After a week's deliberation it came to the conclusion it started with, that the fire had been initiated by Göring and carried out by SA officers, with van der Lubbe, probably a homosexual lover of one or more of them, lined up as the fall guy. This was, astonishingly enough, accepted by all the bien pensants and many other well-meaning people.

Meanwhile, the real trial, in Leipzig was also a success for the Comintern. Dimitrov, a superb speaker, dispensed with his defence lawyer and used the four month long trial to proclaim repeatedly his and his comrades’ innocence and the Nazis’ guilt as well as the guilt of all those who did not support the Communist line.

Van der Lubbe, by now probably heavily drugged, drooling and giggling, continued to insist (in so far as he could insist anything) that he did it all by himself to call attention to the plight of the German workers.

On December 21 the trial came to an end. Van der Lubbe was found guilty and subsequently executed. The charges against the others were dismissed for lack of evidence, something that would not have happened under Stalin and did not happen at the counter-trial.

Ernst Togler was kept in "protective custody" until 1935, then released. He was purged from the KPD because of his surrender to the police, went abroad and worked in Belgium, returning later to work, according to him under duress, for the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda. He survived till the early sixties.

Dimitrov, Tanev and Popov returned to the Soviet Union in February 1934, almost exactly a year after the fire, to a hero's welcome.

Why were the charges dismissed? One theory is that the German courts were still sufficiently independent not to bow to pressure from the Nazi hierarchy. This is not impossible. And, of course, there really was no evidence against Dimitrov and the others.

Another aspect of the story is the arrest of seven German airmen who were undergoing training secretly in the Soviet Union. They were released after the Bulgarians had been acquitted and sent back to the USSR. It is hard to dismiss the notion of some agreement there. Stephen Koch thinks that the agreement went deeper and the whole Leipzig trial was a put-up job, with both Hitler and Stalin seizing the opportunity they were presented with.

Back in the USSR Dimitrov became head of the Comintern and a fervent Stalinist, though Robert Conquest mentions in “The Great Terror” that he, unusually, tried to save some of his Bulgarian comrades during the purge and may, even, have succeeded with one.

Whether he tried to save his co-defendants is unclear but, in any case, he did not succeed. Both Popov and Tanev disappeared into the Gulag, with only the first of them emerging after many years.

Dimitrov eventually became the Prime Minister of Communist Bulgaria and died in 1949 while on holiday in the Soviet Union. Rumours of him having been poisoned or irradiated have persisted ever since. It is true that Stalin had been displeased with his secret negotiations with Tito.

And what of Münzenberg, the evil genius, the man who created the modern intellectual atmosphere, who, unknown to most and working in the shadows, consolidated Western opinion about at least two crucial events?

Alas, he did not live long enough to see the network he had set up of front organizations, fellow travellers and agents of various kind achieving their biggest success of demonizing Senator Joseph McCarthy and all who were associated with him and turning the Communist agents he had tried to uncover into martyrs. That opinion, too, persists to this day, as witnessed by the completely untruthful “Good bye and good luck” made by George Clooney and despite the research of such people as Ronald and Allis Radosh, authors of “Red Star Over Hollywood” and the Yale University series of published documents about American Communist activity. Another triumph for the real propaganda.

Willi, however, had no more triumphs after 1933 though he continued to weave his spider’s web for a while. From 1935 on he watched his various friends and comrades disappear into Stalin’s prisons to reappear in show trials. He was purged from the KPD and in 1938 he broke with Stalin.

He then spent two years talking to British and French agents, explaining to them the truth or as much of the truth as he was prepared to divulge about the Soviet Union and the Comintern. He also started making plans for another propaganda campaign some time in the future, a left-wing anti-Soviet one. Many of his ideas were taken up after the war by the organizations and publications that came out under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom but Willi did not live to see that either.

He did carry out one coup against Stalin. Soon after the Nazi-Soviet Pact he published the names of 40 German Communists who had been murdered in Soviet prisons.

In early 1940 he was interned in France with all other German citizens. He had been advised to submit to that rather than try to escape by a couple of British agents he had been in touch with. Unfortunately, apart from the fact that Willi must have been watched by the NKVD, this was the period when the various British security services played unwilling host to a number of Soviet agents.

As the French surrender drew closer those in internment camps were either released or allowed to escape. Münzenberg headed off with a group southwards but reaching Montalon separated from the main group with three others, promising to return later.

None were seen again. One, Hartig, a supposed left-wing social-democrat, turned up later in Paris and worked with the Nazis. Two other young men, who had made enormous efforts to befriend Willi, vanished.

This was June 21, the day of France’s surrender. In October of that year, a body was found in the woods nearby of a man who had been hanged but as the rope had snapped, he had fallen under the tree. The body was in a very bad state of decomposition but papers in his pocket showed that this was, indeed, the former propaganda chief of the Comintern.

Some people think of it as a suicide but most assume that the two young men were working for the NKVD who wanted Willi dead and who accomplished the crime, possibly with the help of the Gestapo, who also wanted him dead.

In any case, what matters is the evil that he did, which lives on. Few people know the name of Willi Münzenberg of his henchman Otto Katz. Yet over several decades millions across the world have repeated "truths" and opinions that had been created for them by these two. Not many people believed Dr Göbbels's "big lie" but too many still believe the medium lies that were piled up by the Comintern.

As I said at the beginning of this long piece: that is propaganda. Forget the "big lie". It is the continuing small ones that matter.

We can see this with the successful propaganda coups of today. I am not, as it happens, talking about NuLab's spin machine, as unsuccessful an operation as anyone has ever seen. Every single spin is known immediately to the media and those who follow politics. What use is that to anyone?

It is a big mistake to suppose that it was the spin machine that ensured Blair's three elections. It was actually, the Conservative Party, whose own attempts at spin or propaganda are too pathetic even to discuss.

No, I am talking of the saga, we have followed on this blog – the carefully staged pictures and videos in Jenin, Gaza and Lebanon by terrorist organizations whose leaders had been trained in the Soviet Union, as it happens.

Soviet training would have included the use of propaganda as a battle tool and, on the whole, it is a pity that the Israelis have not undergone the same process. Between them Hamas (until they started fighting Fatah) and Hezbollah have shown themselves to be past masters at the game, helped, of course, by that public sphere of opinion created in the first place by Willi Münzenberg.
The question that needs to be asked is the degree of involvement on the part of the media and other agents of influence who are using the staged pictures and videos to promote the cause of the supposed victims of Israeli aggression, backed by the Americans.

When Münzenberg spun his web he distinguished for his own purposes between those who were witting and those who were unwitting accomplices. The latter he called “innocents” and referred to with great contempt. But he knew for certain that his words would not become the truth for so many if those unwitting accomplices were not active.

Was the media a witting or unwitting accomplice then and is it now? Some journalists knew exactly what they were doing, as did some lawyers, academics, writers and political activists. They may have pretended to be merely men and women of the left, often of the moderate left, but were, in actual fact, Communist agents of different kinds.

Let us recall that none of those accused by Senator McCarthy or HUAC were innocent, even if they lied when confronted. Interestingly, none used the defence that would have shown them to be genuinely well-meaning, that of freedom of speech. Many Hollywood supporters of the infamous ten were disgusted by the fact that, instead of admitting to their political views and pleading the First rather than the Fifth Amendment, they lied, continuing to play the Communist Party’s games.

Surely, nobody can possibly look at the pictures from Qana, especially the latest one my colleague has reproduced, and see the media as unwitting accomplices. How could they watch those carefully staged shots and not know that they were being manipulated into purveyors of propaganda?

Then again, few of them can believe in the cause that they are promoting, in the way Willi did to the end of his life.

One wonders what Willi would have said of them. Somehow, I suspect it would have been seriously rude.

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