It Isn't Spin: trivialising government propaganda. posted by Richard Seymour

Barely noticed last week was the revelation of how much of our money the government spends on propaganda campaigns against us. Part of the reason for the obscurity of this news is that the issue has been trivialised beyond compare by our ever watchful media. One of the crucial findings was that the government department with the biggest PR staff, and the biggest rise in funding, was the Ministry of Defense. We know what this is for. Remember the comment of the Defense Committee, regarding the attack on Yugoslavia?: "the campaign directed against home audiences was fairly successful".

One of the more recent PR initiatives of the Ministry of Defence has been, get this, The Defence Schools Initiative. It's all about apprising youngsters of the "realities of running a Government and handling crisis situations, and helping them to grasp what it actually means to be a British citizen and the unique role that Britain plays on the world stage". The aim is to "educate the pupils on the role and function of a Government department (in this case the MOD), the values of citizenship, humanitarian aid, ethnic diversity, human rights, veterans, conflict resolution and crisis situations." Indeed, "There are many practical elements, as well as the role-play scenario, including an inspection of an Army ration pack, analysing its nutritional benefits and looking at the distribution of food to troops and civilians worldwide."

Now, this wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that schoolchildren have been by far among the most militant antiwar activists, would it? I still remember the extraordinary speeches delivered by some secondary school girls at the massive Stop the War protests. I would have been terrified of addressing so many people: they were not. Indeed, they bravely marched out of school the day war began only to find themselves getting roughed up by the police that actually made the news. A briefly bad start to the government's campaign against domestic audiences, before the media fell completely and obediently into line.

The Ministry of Defense has now removed a rather important document from their website, but the WayBackMachine has come to the rescue. Let's sample some of the Ministry's thinking on winning public support for wars, shall we?

"We need to be aware of the ways in which public attitudes might shape and constrain military activity. Increasing emotional attachment to the outside world, fuelled by immediate and graphic media coverage, and a public desire to see the UK act as a force for good, is likely to lead to public support, and possibly public demand, for operations prompted by humanitarian motives ... Public support will be vital to the conduct of military interventions. Support will depend in large measure on the success of such interventions. If a military operation were seen to result in defeat, this would seriously undermine public support for future operations. The way in which operations are conducted will also be vital to maintaining public support, particularly where our participation in an operation is discretionary. Potential adversaries may seek to undermine public support to delay or derail intervention. Effective communication strategies to promote wider understanding of the rationale behind the conduct of operations will be vital if we are to avoid constraints which compromise our ability to achieve military objectives."

We know what sort of restraints they mean: only last year, senior figures in the Defence establishment were complaining of the "unfair legal restraints" on the behaviour of the British Tommy. After all, if you can't kick an Iraqi's head in, what is the point of being a soldier?

Of course, the MoD has a very sophisticated understanding of the changes in social values among people, and are trying very hard to embed a new understanding of the military as a sort of charitable institution or a rescue outfit, especially in the minds of the young. As their comments indicate, they are very mindful of how "emotional attachment to the outside world" can be manipulated, "fuelled by immediate and graphic media coverage". They are also aware, of course, that the media takes the lead in large part from the government on what is important and what is not in international affairs. (Hence: saturation coverage of Kosovo in early 1999; close to zero coverage of Aceh at any point - the difference being that in one case, the British government purported to oppose the killing and in the other, the British government were busily assisting it.)

So don't call it "spin". They are using your money to persuade you and your children especially to kill and be killed; they are using it to prepare people to believe any old mind-rotting shit about 'humanitarian intervention' that can be used to sell any particular wilderness they want to create.

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The biggest recipient of all such funds and staff, however, is the Central Office for Information, which would in another age be called the Ministry of Information. I'm not merely being hyperbolic: it was established in 1946 after the wartime Ministry of Information was disbanded. In the old days, between cheerful films and pamphlets advising one not to sneeze in public, it used to assure people that things weren't so bad, and remind them of the glories of empire. They don't make them like that any more, because people are thoroughly inoculated to that level of crude propaganda, although they do still produce cheerful films with comical folks going about things in their chipper British way, advising one about recent government commitments to getting disabled people back to work and that sort of thing - predictably its spending went way up prior to the last election. The government describes this department as a "centre of excellence in marketing communications", which it undoubtedly is: because, despite the fact that you've been imbibing its products all your life, you probably never knew it existed.