[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Unspoken Rule of Media Reporting

[Bill Totten]

The BBC's The Century of the Self

Medialens Media Alert (April 03 2002)


Focusing heavily on the machinations of public relations guru Edward
Bernays, the BBC2 series, The Century of the Self, began its second
programme with this account of post-war US history:

"Politicians and planners came to believe that Freud was right to
suggest that hidden deep within all human beings were dangerous and
irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the
unleashing of these instincts that had lead to the barbarism of Nazi
Germany. To stop it ever happening again, they set out to find ways to
control the hidden enemy within the human mind." {1}

It is a remarkable claim, and one that could only be taken seriously in
a culture that has been largely stripped of political awareness. In fact
post-1945 (like pre-1945) "politicians and planners" set out to promote
dangerous and irrational desires and fears in the service of profits and
power, not peace. Similarly, far from setting out to "stop it ever
happening again", post-war US policies generated repetitions of
Nazi-style barbarism throughout the Third World.

Australian academic Alex Carey described the actual problem perceived by
elites following both the first and second world wars:

"Major wars create major problems for the defenders of the established
order. For modern wars require the support of everyone; and so wartime
propaganda idealises the humane, egalitarian, democratic character of
the home society in a way that no elite or business interest has any
intention of allowing actually to come about." {2}

Historian Elizabeth Fones-Wolf notes that the growth in workers'
expectations and power during the 1940s and 1950s was a major factor in
shaping elite policy, leading to a fierce business backlash:

"Important segments of the business community responded to this economic
and ideological challenge with an aggressive campaign to recast the
political economy of America. They sought to undermine the legitimacy
and power of organised labour and to 'halt the momentum of New Deal
liberalism'." {3}

The response was immense in scale, involving all the leading business
organisations, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Committee for
Economic Development, the National Association of Manufacturers, and
industry-specific bodies:

"Manufacturers orchestrated multimillion dollar public relations
campaigns that relied on newspapers, magazines, radio, and later
television, to re-educate the public in the principles and benefits of
the American economic system ... employers sought to undermine unionism
and address shop-floor conflict by building a separate company identity
or company consciousness among their employees. This involved convincing
workers to identify their social, economic, and political well-being
with that of their specific employer and more broadly with the free
enterprise system." {4}

This was a nationwide propaganda campaign that had nothing to do with
lessons learned from Nazism, and everything to do with power and profits.

Notwithstanding its claims of an elite determination to ensure that Nazi
barbarism could never be repeated, The Century of the Self revealed, as
Tim Adams of the Observer puts it, "how Bernays single-handedly toppled
the popular Guatemalan government with one or two publicity stunts,
playing on Cold War fears, and acting on behalf of a banana
corporation". {5}

Adams' remarkable naivety is revealed by the briefest of glances at the
facts. Elected in 1950, in Guatemala's first ever democratic elections,
the aim of the popular Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz was to
transform Guatemala from a backward country with a predominantly feudal
economy to a modern capitalist state. As part of this process, Arbenz
felt he had a strong mandate to instigate land reforms. Around 100,000
peasants received land through the reform; 234,000 acres of unused land
owned by the US-owned United Fruit Company (UFCO) were expropriated with
the offer of compensation that UFCO found "unacceptable". Displeased by
Arbenz's reforms, UFCO began to apply pressure on the US government and
the CIA to take action.

In response, the US State Department, working closely with the CIA,
evolved a covert plan to overthrow Arbenz, with the name PBSUCCESS. The
absurdity of the idea that Bernays was somehow a rogue genius operating
"single-handedly" is revealed by Stephen Schlesinger, who reports that
"the [1954] Putsch was conceived of and run at the highest levels of the
American Government in closest cahoots with the United Fruit Company and
under the overall direction of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles,
backed by President Eisenhower". {6}

Unmentioned by The Century of the Self, the campaign against Guatemalan
democracy constituted a small part of a vast state-corporate campaign to
undermine democracy and independent nationalism throughout the Third
World: in Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico,
Brazil, Haiti, Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam, and so on. Noam Chomsky and
Edward Herman have explained the link between terror and corporate
profiteering:

"The development model applied by ... [the US and its partners in the
Third World] is so blatantly exploitative that it has required terror
and the threat of terror to assure the requisite passivity". {7}

The violence has long been targeted at civil resistance:

"An important function of the military juntas has been to destroy all
forms of institutional protection for the masses, such as unions,
peasant leagues and cooperatives, and political groupings, making them
incapable of defending themselves against the larger interests served by
the state". {8}

Curiously, Adams' suggestion that Bernays played on Cold War fears when
organising the attack on Guatemala was simultaneously rejected and
accepted by the programme itself:

"In reality Arbenz was a democratic socialist with no links to Moscow.
But Bernays set out to turn him into a Communist threat to America." {9}

In other words, US elites did not "play on" Cold War fears, they created
and then exploited them in pursuit of profit. This is hard to say in the
mainstream media and so, in summing up Bernays' role in Guatemala, the
programme declared:

"Bernays had manipulated the American people, but he had done so because
he, like many others at the time, believed that the interests of
business and the interests of America were indivisible, especially when
faced with the threat of Communism".

Even when the "threat of Communism" had been invented by Bernays and
others to justify an attack!

As a result of this attack, Nazi-style barbarism was unleashed on
Guatemala. The programme managed to hint at the reality when it quoted a
CIA operative:

"What we wanted to do was have a terror campaign, to terrify Arbenz
particularly, to terrify his troops, much as the German Stuka bombers
terrified the population of Holland, Belgium and Poland at the onset of
World War Two, and rendered everybody paralysed". {10}

But, typically for the BBC and other mainstream media, The Century of
the Self ended its review of Guatemalan history where Western
responsibility for mass murder begins. The programme made literally no
mention of the hundreds of thousands of people killed and tortured by
the US "terror campaign".

On June 18 1954, the US plan for Guatemala came to fruition when its
client, Castillo Armas and his forces crossed the Honduran border; on
June 27 Arbenz resigned, and Armas was installed as president. Armas
immediately returned land back to United Fruit and abolished tax on
interests and dividends to foreign investors. Arbenz was later found
drowned in his bath, whereas Armas received a ticker-tape parade in New
York City and honorary degrees from Columbia and Fordham universities.

Following the invasion, the military elite took control of the economy
and the country more generally, with government troops patrolling both
city and countryside in full battle gear. More than 200 union leaders
were immediately killed. Within two months of the invasion, some 8,000
peasants had been murdered in a terror campaign that targeted UFCO union
organisers and Indian village leaders. The US Embassy lent its
assistance, providing lists of "communists" to be eliminated or
imprisoned and tortured.

Exiled journalist Julio Godoy, who had worked on the Guatemalan
newspaper La Epoca, whose offices were blown up by government
terrorists, compared conditions in Guatemala with those in Eastern Europe:

"While the Moscow-imposed government in Prague would degrade and
humiliate reformers, the Washington-made government in Guatemala would
kill them. It still does, in a virtual genocide that has taken more than
150,000 victims [in what Amnesty International calls] 'a government
programme of political murder'." {11}

According to Amnesty International, victims were found "with signs of
torture or mutilation along roadsides or in ravines, floating in plastic
bags in lakes or rivers, or buried in mass graves in the countryside",
many of them being from the peasantry and urban poor. {12}  Over 440
villages were totally destroyed, with vast areas of the highlands wrecked.

All of this was known to US government officials. The head of
intelligence at the State Department wrote: "At the heart of the secret
anti-communist force is a special unit of the army which kidnaps, kills
in the street, plants bombs and executes real or supposed communists". {13}

After the coup, as the slaughter continued, total US and multinational
aid and credits to Guatemala increased 5,300 per cent. This support of
terror is standard - the leading academic scholar on human rights in
Latin America, Lars Schoultz, notes that US aid "has tended to flow
disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their
citizens ... to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of
fundamental human rights". {14}  Similarly, the 1973 coup in Chile which
established the Pinochet regime led to a 550 per cent increase in US
economic aid and a 1,000 per cent increase in US and multinational credits.

The BBC's failure to mention the horrific consequences of US policy in
Guatemala might be dismissed as an isolated oversight. But in fact it is
part of what John Pilger describes as the "unspoken rule of reporting
whole societies in terms of their usefulness to western 'interests' and
of minimising and obfuscating the culpability of 'our' crimes". {15}

Readers should not be surprised if some or all of the above is
unfamiliar to them. Schlesinger explains:

"What strikes an observer immediately about the Guatemala affair is how
history has over the years practically abandoned it. No book has ever
explored it; no Senate committee has ever investigated it." {16}

But all of these omissions have gone unnoticed by the many 'liberal'
journalists who have commented favourably on the series, and who seem to
have been amazed by its revelations. Tim Adams of the Observer enthused
about the programme, calling it "remarkable". The New Statesman's Andrew
Billen called it "riveting" and "remarkable". {17}  The Guardian's
Madeleine Bunting described it as "compelling ... and profoundly
disturbing".  {18}  Nick Cohen of the Observer declared the series "a
resounding justification for the licence fee". {19}

In a different world, these journalists might have reflected on the fact
that they are themselves employed by the same mendacious corporate
system that has fought so hard to control the public mind. They might,
for example, have noted that their papers are also profit-seeking
businesses dependent on advertisers for fully 75% of their revenue. The
reality being, of course, that the corporate media has always played a
pivotal role in the campaign for corporate control of society. Thus
James Reston, former editor of the New York Times, revealed, that "we
left [out] a great deal of what we knew about US intervention in
Guatemala and in a variety of other cases" at government request or for
political reasons known only to the editors. The government lied, but
the Times published their claims even though it knew the statements were
untrue." {20}

The Century of the Self is certainly unusual - the mainstream generally
prefers to remain silent on the issue of corporate propaganda. Thus the
National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) - cited by Fones-Wolf and
others as being at the heart of the corporate propaganda campaign over
many decades - has been mentioned (as of March 28 2002) three times in
the Guardian and Observer, and once in the Independent since 1998. None
of these mentions referred to the NAM's role as a giant source of
cynical propaganda. Today, the NAM is alive and well, and right at the
heart of the (successful) attempts by big business to obstruct action on
climate change.

Notes

{1} The Century of the Self - The Engineering of Consent, BBC2 (March 24
2002)

{2} Alex Carey, Taking The Risk Out Of Democracy, University of New
South Wales Press, 1995, page 137

{3} Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise - The Business Assault on Labour
and Liberalism, 1945-60, University of Illinois Press, 1994, page 4

{4} ibid, page 6

{5} Adams, 'How Freud got under our skin', Observer (March 10 2002)

{6} Quoted, Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala, University of Texas Press,
1982,  page 176

{7} Chomsky and Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World
Fascism, South End Press, 1979, page 11

{8} Chomsky and Herman, ibid, page 11

{9} The Century of the Self - The Engineering of Consent, BBC2, March 24
2002

{10} Howard Hunt, Head of CIA Operations, Guatemala, 1954

{11} Quoted, Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Odonian Press,
1993, page 50

{12} Amnesty International Briefing on Guatemala, London, 1976

{13} Quoted, the Guardian, 'How the CIA kills its foes', August 27 1999

{14} Quoted, Chomsky, Year 501 - The Conquest Continues, Verso, 1993,
page 120

{15} Pilger, 'Should we go to war against these children?', New
Statesman, March 21 2002

{16} The Nation, October 28 1978

{17} Billen, 'Full of their selves', New Statesman, March 25 2002

{18} Bunting, 'Slaves of our desires', Guardian, March 25 2002

{19} Cohen, 'Primal therapy', the Observer, March 31 2002

{20} Quoted Edward Herman, Z Magazine, May 1998


SUGGESTED ACTION

Write to Adam Curtis, the maker of The Century of the Self, and the
BBC's commissioning editors, at: Email: http://www.bbc.co.uk/feedback/

You can also leave messages at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/contact/com_email.shtml

Ask why The Century of the Self gave so much detailed attention to
Guatemalan history, and yet failed to mention US responsibility for the
150,000 civilians killed in its assault on Guatemala. Ask why the series
focused on this isolated US intervention without mentioning that it was
a small part of similar interventions elsewhere in Latin America and in
the Third World generally. Is this wider pattern not central to
understanding the real significance, and costs, of corporate control of
domestic and foreign societies in the 20th and 21st centuries?

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