by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
“Darkness isn’t the opposite of light, it is simply its absence.” – Terry Pratchett
As we’ve previously discussed in the Propaganda Series, The Sound of Silence, propaganda is not always language or images. Sometimes it is the lack of words. It is just as important to “listen to what is not said” as it is to “listen to what is said”. Sometimes though, propagandists try to time travel. They employ a tactic in an attempt to change the present by attempting to change the past. I say “attempt” for reasons that will be clear soon enough.
When a propagandist tries to pull off this particular trick, they don’t need a fancy machine or a black hole or a magic potion as is the staple trope of science fiction and fantasy time travel. They need nothing more complicated than a pen or a typewriter. In the present, a word processor and some basic HTML coding skills will serve that purpose. Maybe Photoshop or GIMP. When a propagandist tries to change the present by changing the past, they don’t call it time travel. No. They don’t call it anything, because they really hope you don’t notice what they are doing. Silence will work often, but they are not above a bit of misdirection. Well executed propaganda does, after all, have much in common with stage magic.
When we citizens and media consumers catch their slight of hand, we don’t call it time travel either. We call it historical revisionism. Just this week, the Obama Administration was caught red-handed doing precisely that in relation to the Edward Snowden case.
First, let us consider what exactly is historical revisionism. Is the term itself value loaded language? Is it always a bad thing? Is it always propaganda? The term in common usage certainly has a connotative meaning that is not the same as its denotative meaning. As with the word “propaganda“, the connotative meaning is usually pejorative and implies lies, falsehoods and distortions of past events. Also like the word “propaganda”, the term “historical revisionism” has a larger denotative meaning that may or may not be value loaded.
At one level, historical revisionism is simply a scholarly endeavor to rewrite history based on new research or theories that either modify or contradict earlier historical writings. There is nothing wrong with that. Historical revisionism in that context performs a valuable function in the study of history although it is usually hotly challenged within academia as history is an often soft social science where the status quo holds a lot of sway. That challenging environment is also not a bad process by connotation as the process itself of claim and counterclaim often results in a refinement of both theory and the understanding of new evidence in context as well as eliminating false assertions and whole cloth fabrications from being incorporated into our understanding of history as fact. Even so, the study of history faces certain challenges in addition to access to new data. There is (what I find to be most interesting) the challenge that new information from other fields of science present. Genetics, paleoclimatology, paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, chemistry . . . even astronomy – all can, do and have changed our understanding of history. There is also some psychological and intellectual challenges to the study of history that can impact historical revisionism. In fact, there are two logical fallacies that historians often fall prey to: the eponymous Historian’s fallacy – when one assumes that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision – and presentism – where present-day ideas, such as moral standards, are projected into the past. Historians also have to contend with the context of the society in which they live. Contemporaneously popular ideology and culture may skew historical revisionism as can political considerations like nationalism. However, as useful as historical revisionism as an academic endeavor can be, it has a dark side and that dark side can most often be seen in how contemporaneous ideology, culture and politics can make history a lie about the past designed to serve the present.
This kind of historical revisionism is what most think of when they use the term as a pejorative. There is a special word for this kind of manifestly bad historical revisionism – negationism. Derived from the French term négationnisme, which means Holocaust denial, the basic idea applies to more than just Holocaust denial, but to making anything a “never was”. This is basic denial as a propaganda strategy/tactic. Negationism also includes the propaganda strategy/tactics of deception, distortion, relativism and trivialization, very often executed to varying degrees as part of the same campaign. The Nazis engaged in wholesale historical revisionism in the form of book burning, altering history and science texts to provide examples of “Aryan superiority”, distorting their history and the history of the Jews and Roma to provide relativistic rationales for their persecution and to trivialize the true scale and horrific deeds done in the campaign of genocide they called “The Final Solution”. This suite of tactics is not unique to the Germans. The Chinese did the same thing during the Cultural Revolution. The Japanese did (and still do) teach revisionist history about the events leading to World War II. The Soviets made historical revisionism into a propaganda art form. In America, we teach grade school and high school kids a sanitized version of American history that does a great disservice to the truths of the effective genocidal campaigns against the Native American peoples.
Clearly, historical revisionism is a value loaded term and, while it can be a good thing for the academic pursuit of history, it can be as a political practice a very dangerous very damaging form of propaganda.
In 2008, Obama had a website that detailed his vision for reform. Until very recently, this website was linked to on the White House official website and provided a valuable tool for comparing Obama’s promises to his performance. According to the Sunlight Foundation, that website in that form could last be viewed on June 8, 2013. Remember that date. It’s about to be relevant. That link to Obama’s agenda and promises is no longer on the White House website and the Change.gov of today is this non-comment of a splash page with a link to http://change.gov/content/home that returns a blank page reading :
Sorry, File Not Found: 404
Invalid URL /content/home
All of the website’s pages are now and have only recently become inaccessible from the site. What was the Obama Administration so interested in making disappear? What needed to be never was? Perhaps they wanted to remove all record of Obama’s campaign promise to strengthen protections for whistleblowers. In case you don’t recall, his promise, once found in the Agenda/Ethics section of Change.gov, went like this:
Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.”
June 8, 2013 was two days after the first revelations were made about the NSA’s phone surveillance program by the then unrevealed Edward Snowden.
Apparently the Obama Administration and their flunkies have no idea how technology really works, but you can’t be held accountable for a promise you made if you (try to) erase all record of it, can you? That’s the whole point of making something never was. Unfortunately for them and their propagandist historical revisionist tactic but fortunately for actual history, memory in the digital age is persistent. The original home page for Change.gov can be seen here and the original content of the Agenda/Ethics page (quoted above) can be seen here.
As noted by Luke Johnson at the Huffington Post, “Prior to the Snowden leaks but after Pfc. Bradley Manning gave classified information to WikiLeaks, the Obama administration launched the Insider Threat program to combat leaks, in part by asking coworkers to keep a close eye on their fellow employees. The program also ordered more protections for those who use proper channels, but four national security whistleblowers have said that they became targets of Justice Department investigations after bringing concerns to the Department of Defense Inspector General.”
I think historical revisionism as a political propaganda methodology is in many ways worse than a simple lie.
Was this an attempt at historical revisionism in the most pejorative sense?
Is there another explanation that defies the timeline of removal?
Could there be other promises made they wish to “never was” in addition to the promised protection for whistleblowers?
What do you think?
Source(s): Huffington Post, Wikipedia, Change.gov, The Wayback Machine Web Archive (1, 2), Sunlight Foundation, http://www.mcclatchydc.com, Firedoglake
The Propaganda Series;
Propaganda 105: How to Spot a Liar
Propaganda 104 Supplemental: The Streisand Effect and the Political Question
Propaganda 104 Supplemental: The Sound of Silence
Propaganda 104: Magica Verba Est Scientia Et Ars Es
Propaganda 103: The Word Changes, The Word Remains The Same
Propaganda 102 Supplemental: Get ‘Em Young
Propaganda 102 Supplemental: Holly Would “Zero Dark Thirty”
Propaganda 102: Holly Would and the Power of Images
Propaganda 101 Supplemental: Child’s Play
Propaganda 101 Supplemental: Build It And They Will Come (Around)
Propaganda 101: What You Need to Know and Why or . . .
Related articles of interest;
Mythology and the New Feudalism by Mike Spindell
How about Some Government Propaganda for the People Paid for by the People Being Propagandized? by Elaine Magliaro
Is Freedom of the Press Dead? by Lawrence E. Rafferty
~submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
Jill: there is no First Amendment testimonial privilege, absolute or qualified, that protects a reporter from being compelled to testify by the prosecution or the defense in criminal proceedings about criminal conduct that the reporter personally witnessed or participated in.”
Well, there would be a question for my lawyer, were I a reporter.
By the Fifth Amendment, I do not have to testify against myself. So if I personally think my testimony about what may have been a crime might be self-incriminating, why can’t I plead the Fifth?
And if I am asked WHY I think it might be self-incrimination, can’t I still plead the fifth, since that would require me to explain my actions that I think might be self-incriminating, and would therefore still be providing information that could be used against me?
mk,
I hope you have a better day tomorrow! 🙂
what do i think? i think it’s getting dark and i’ve been blaming my age for the diminishing light, but my age is not the cause. i see now that throughout my life, what people, companies, politicians, doctors, lawyers, teachers, government, institutions, corporations, etc. say does not line up with reality. when churches can molest children for two thousand years, when presidents can ignore the constitution, when banks/wall st. can launder drug money and commit other crimes, and change the laws so that only individuals pay for their crimes, when the supreme court allows unlimited amounts of money into our election systems and strikes down much of the voting rights act, we individual humans are too overwhelmed to deal with it alone, and we seem unable to band together to change it.
we are all liars/deniers and we deserve our current reality. we can’t escape and we can’t change, we have peaked, we are doomed to continue in this way…
i must accept this reality that we are moving on to our destiny to destroy our environment until it’s no longer habitable for humans.
of course i could possibly feel different tomorrow, but that’s what i think today.
I wonder if President Obama is conscious of these changes. Is he deliberating taking on an evil mindset to hide the truth and use propaganda techniques deliberately to fool the masses? Or, is he like the guy who thinks he knows better how things should be done, and then when he becomes in charge, he starts to realize all the reasons his predecessors did what they did, and so he follows suit. Or are the changes being done unwittingly? Is it just the character and demands of the office that he holds which changes him and he doesn’t even realize it? What do you all think?
Mike,
Real men eat the worm!! 🙂
Whatever your personal opinions, groups you are a part of or support I think you’d want to read this & at least view the 1st video on the link.
As long as you are promoting non-violence I can respect your position.
And at the same time even if I don’t like you position the last thing I’d wish on you is for some fool around you or your group to be caught involved engaged in the below type criminal behavior because then it discredits you & all others around.
If you find some of this type criminality as below going on inform your friends/associates/law enforcement immediately.
Maybe LE can not help, but at least you’ll be on record exposing those crimes to the public.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-26/guest-post-how-establishment-will-attempt-bring-down-liberty-movement
So… Robert Redford’s next movie will be…
“All The President’s Henchmen”…
War is peacekeeping..
Slavery is freedom..
Ignorance is mandated..
The truth will get you fired.. or indicted.
O.S. Yes, that is exactly what I think and have been warning about since Bush/Cheney and Obama.
Actually, I’ve worried about that before, but things have intensified since that group took over. I have been dismayed that it has taken left leaning people so long to figure that out. A lot of damage has been done because people on the left refused to come to terms with what was happening in our nation. So no, it’s not really been “Y’think” until just recently.
Would someone please unlock a post I tried to make on NAL’s writing. It will double post otherwise, if it posts at all. I would like it to not double post. Thank you.
Jill sez: “We aren’t getting the information we are entitled to have.”
*******************************
Y’think?
In a massive shift in attitudes, voters say 45 – 40 percent the government’s anti-terrorism efforts go too far restricting civil liberties, a reversal from a January 14, 2010, survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University when voters said 63 – 25 percent that such activities didn’t go far enough to adequately protect the country.
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/images/polling/us/us07102013.pdf/
And then there is this:
“… the impact of Edward Snowden. Suddenly, the “Security State” is in the spotlight rather than hidden in the shadows…. But the surprisingly close tally (Amash’s bill) — 217 against, 205 for — shows how profoundly the Snowden disclosures have resonated. The fact that there was a vote at all was significant.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/rieder/2013/07/25/story-money-columnist-rieder-snowdens-impact/2586011/
No more change for you.
The FBI shut down an advertisement asking for drone operators to speak on his film: “It is a lot like playing a video game,” admits a former Predator drone operator matter-of-factly to the artist Omer Fast. “But playing the same video game four years straight on the same level.” His bombs kill real people though and, he admits, often not the people he is aiming at.
The remarkable insight into the working life of one of the most modern of military operatives is provided in a 30-minute film which will show at the Imperial War Museum in London from Monday, the first in a new programme of exhibitions under the title IWM Contemporary.
The work by Fast, an Israel-born artist who lives and works in Berlin, is called 5,000 Feet is the Best, which takes its name from the optimum flight altitude of a Predator drone.
What Fast’s film does brilliantly is evoke the weirdness of people in Nevada endlessly trawling foreign countries for “bad guys” which they then get permission to fire on.
Fast interviews a former US air force drone operator who admits to making mistakes. “You see a lot of death,” he says before pondering why he carries on – perhaps because if it was not him then it might be some “new kid doing it badly”.
Fast advertised online for drone operators to come forward and some did, although the advert was subsequently closed down by the FBI and rather fewer operators were forthcoming.
One was willing. Some of his testimony in the film is the real man, blurred, and more uses an actor playing the operator talking to a journalist in a Las Vegas hotel room.” (guardian)
We aren’t getting the information we are entitled to have.
I’m glad you wrote about this Gene. Here is one, really disastrous consequence of Obama’s war on whistleblowers. This is about Risen at NYT. ” The chilling ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said that even though a journalist has promised confidentiality to a source, “there is no First Amendment testimonial privilege, absolute or qualified, that protects a reporter from being compelled to testify by the prosecution or the defense in criminal proceedings about criminal conduct that the reporter personally witnessed or participated in.” National security necessitates that those who illegally leak classified information be brought to justice, the court said. It added that it saw no clear legal justification for treating a reporter differently than any other citizen, and that “other than Sterling himself, Risen is the only witness who can identify Sterling as a source (or not) of the illegal leak.”
Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times, told me she was “bitterly disappointed in the court’s decision,” calling it a blow to “the ongoing important work that journalists do in holding powerful institutions and the government accountable to the people.”
The case has real-world consequences not only for journalists but for all Americans. It is part of a troubling trend that includes unprecedented numbers of criminal investigations involving leaked information; the obtaining of reporters’ phone records; and even one government claim that a journalist “aided and abetted” a leak. “
For those who can feel or sense their cultural amygdala at work, note your response to this headline:
Now decide for yourself whether it is propaganda or not here.
Whether it is propaganda or not, wars are very expensive … and the money to pay for the oil addiction … is not well spent is it?
Here is an example of what propaganda can do to the human mind:
SlingTrebuchet 1, July 28, 2013 at 9:51 am
“The greatest propagandist is Oil-Qaeda …”
Followed closely by Chemical-Queda …
============================
Remember that so many chemicals and pharmaceuticals are made from “the lifeblood of America’s economy”, a.k.a. oil, as are literally thousands of other commodities:
(A Closer Look At MOMCOM’s DNA – 2). The largest military forces in all history are amassed in the middle east and around it because of oil.
We don’t know that because of propaganda which Gene H has been exposing in this series.
“The greatest propagandist is Oil-Qaeda …”
Followed closely by Chemical-Queda …
http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/2013/07/tafta-industry-comments-and-democracy.html”
The greatest propagandist is Oil-Qaeda …
Mike S:
I do my best work on mezcal — or at least I think I do.
Mark,
The trick is not swallowing the worm.
BarkingDog: “I have to use Pig Latin on some of my words to get by WordPress.”
Lately I find that I have often have to post an exact copy/paste of exactly the same bytes to get by WordPress in this particular blog. “This commemt could not be posted”.
Closing the tab and re-opening the link from the email seems to help, but sometimes a third or fourth attempt succeeds.
Maybe it’s my paranoid browser settings and ‘stuff’ getting into a deadly embrace with WordPress. Maybe the WordPress database gets a fever when having to handle a very large blog. Maybe it’s aliens or dogs.
In fairness to Obama, he did promise not to look back at the war crimes and torture dungeons of his predecessors. Can we draw a line and move forward? Yes we can.
He was a man of his word on that one.
He did a slight ‘mispeak’ about closing the obscenity that is Guantanamo.
“Sometimes though, propagandists try to time travel. They employ a tactic in an attempt to change the present by attempting to change the past. ”
Sometimes they suceed with a form of time travel. They changed to present to give us a future in 1984.
From http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/nsa-they-know-much-more-you-think/
——————————————————————
One man who was prescient enough to see what was coming was Senator Frank Church, the first outsider to peer into the dark recesses of the NSA. In 1975, when the NSA posed merely a fraction of the threat to privacy it poses today with UPSTREAM, PRISM, and thousands of other collection and data-mining programs, Church issued a stark warning:
Church sounds as if he had absorbed the lessons of 1984. From the recent evidence, they are still to be learned.
——————————————————————-
That was someone in 1975, looking at what was happening.
.
I fall about laughing/crying when I hear the gun lobby talk about Constitutions and resisting an oppressive government. They haven’t a clue.
Never mind resisting. People can’t even begin to investigate wrongdoing without ‘someone’ being aware of their every move and contact.
.
Thank God we have a fearless free independent press.
As in:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jul/28/edward-snowden-death-of-internet
“Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces” are Eurasia and Eastasia.
Snowden, Manning, WikiLeaks are all part of Goldstein’s Brotherhood