Donald Rumsfeld Proposes Creating Ministry of Truth

He's been pushing this idea for a while. Pulled his head in a bit after that fiasco with feeding fake stories to tame Iraqi journalists.

But it still scares the crap out of me. He's a bad bad man.

Ideological corruption, depends on double standards, class standards. So to have a truth ministry based on imperial and class standards, just requries both Liberals and Conservatives, to find a way to cheerlead another imperial war, which can be done easily by a nod and wink to Israeli Zionists, and then Rumsfeld, will have his corrupt coalition of the truth, both parties cheering, for Israeli aggression, just as they already did in the Kyle Lieberman resolution, or the way these corrupt feminists, Hillary, Pelosi, and Jane Harman have done, give Bush the green light in advance to attack, (based on the wink and nod to Israel) so that liberals will not have to take a stand against their double standards, appeasing standards, class standards, as junior partners in Amerikan empire.

I really loved the headline, it's a lot better then what the Times ran.

Then he proposed a solution: to "tell the story of a nation that was carved from the wilderness and conceived in freedom" by means of a "21st-century agency for global communications." Such an agency would respond to the media attacks leveled at the United States by Islamic radicals, using everything "from blogs to online social-networking sites to talk radio," The Air Force Times said.

You wouldn't know it from the description, but there were a few people living out "in the wilderness."

Donald Rumsfeld Proposes Creating Ministry of Truth

Yes! ...and "The Donald" is the first reject.....How fitting!

He's been quite clear that he's sick of the whole "free press" model, because it emboldens the not-the-administration.

They've been practicing, the Declassified Archives has the Iraq War Media Plan, not everything that's gone on of course but enough to get a feel for the WHIG, that's the White House Information Group, and the style of "communicating" the message.

No doubt there are opportunistic people everywhere. No doubt there are greedy, vicious, sectarian Iraqis, but it sure seems plausible that a lot of the "sectarian" killings might have been carried out (at least initially) by occupation forces (or their local allies) to further segregate and polarize Iraqi society.

I recall reading an article about Shia-Sunni romances that were not so uncommon in the pre-invasion days. Since then, they have become much less common as neighborhoods became increasingly segregated.

BlaiseP

Heh. The only thing Orwellian about this entire page is the headline the author chose for a New York Times piece in which Rumsfeld (who's just one of many commentators who've said the same thing) remarks that the US is doing a remarkably bad job in the "soft power" venue of communications with the Muslim world. The VOA was a very important tool for the West during the Cold War and it can be in this war too if done properly. But it needs to be a lot more concerted and a lot more diverse than simply piping in Western music as is done with Radio Sawa.

Are you even familiar with the VOA and the role it played in freeing the captive nations of the old Soviet bloc? I'll take its record over that of its rival Pravda anyday and millions of people did. And please do not mix apples and oranges. Putin's propaganda operations are aimed primarily inward in his crackdown on domestic news organizations in Russia. And don't you think there's a reason that many Muslim despotisms have internet access monitors? Not much they can do about satellite though which explains their popularity in much of the ME.

Ah a clever rebuttal without actually answering the question, Bill. In favor of "Ministry of Truth" or no?

but the real trick is determining who "we" means in this context. By "we" do you mean you and I, or the media, or the government?

The "we" is the amorphous blob they hate so much, "they" being "the Arabs" or "the terrorists" or "the Muslims". When I speak to individuals, they will say, "oh, we love you, it's your government and its policies we hate." The USA has the world's best advertising agencies, intricate market feedback mechanisms, and still we can't compose a decent ad campaign.

We're not going to have a dialog with some Baghdad Bob agent of a dictatorial regime, and let's face it, most of the Muslim world exists inside dictatorships. We need guys like Dennis Ross and our own Muslim clerics to appear on Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. We'll have a window of opportunity at the next elections, we need to muster those platoons now, to take advantage of it.

You can't go wrong underestimating the intelligence of the American public, or humanity in general. The one commodity in plentiful supply in the Muslim world is suspicion. We must play to that suspicion, saying "America is not against Islam, we have millions of Muslim citizens We overthrew the great enemy of Islam, Saddam Hussein, who murdered his clerics. We protected the Muslims of the Balkans, when nobody else would. Who gives the most aid to the Palestinians? It is America. Iraq has a free press and is an Islamic republic, these are not the deeds of haters of Islam. Our quarrel is not with Islam, and you know it in your hearts. Those who say such things have deluded you badly. You are not ignorant, think for yourselves. Wicked men lead you into evil for their own ends, read your Qu'rans and see

إِلاَّ الَّذِينَ عَاهَدتُّم مِّنَ الْمُشْرِكِينَ ثُمَّ لَمْ يَنقُصُوكُمْ شَيْئًا وَلَمْ يُظَاهِرُواْ عَلَيْكُمْ أَحَدًا فَأَتِمُّواْ إِلَيْهِمْ عَهْدَهُمْ إِلَى مُدَّتِهِمْ إِنَّ اللّهَ يُحِبُّ الْمُتَّقِينَ "Treaties are not dissolved with those Pagans with whom ye have entered into alliance and who have not subsequently failed you in anything, nor aided any one against you. So fulfill your engagements with them to the end of their term: for Allah loves the righteous."

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُواْ لاَ تَتَّخِذُواْ آبَاءكُمْ وَإِخْوَانَكُمْ أَوْلِيَاء إَنِ اسْتَحَبُّواْ الْكُفْرَ عَلَى الإِيمَانِ وَمَن يَتَوَلَّهُم مِّنكُمْ فَأُوْلَـئِكَ هُمُ الظَّالِمُونَ "O ye who believe! take not for protectors your fathers and your brothers if they love treachery above Faith: if any of you do so, they do wrong."

___

Now I could preach whole sermons out of the Qu'ran, showing Islam has always a political system, and Islam has a duty to behave honorably. Two can play this preaching game, and I could lay out a fine case for the decadence and intolerance of the bozos who currently dominate the Islamic Rhetoric game.

Right on, BlaiseP!!! Brilliant!

Using suspicion as leverage probably isn't going to work, because currently the Muslim world is suspicious of nowhere more than the US itself.

I don't know, Belarius. The average American strikes me as pretty spoon-fed and gullible.

and I could lay out a fine case for the decadence and intolerance of the bozos who currently dominate the Islamic Rhetoric game

I would be very interested in reading that, BlaiseP. I think you are right on in your assessment of what's needed. Why not start it here on Newsvine...oh:-) you have already. Well, more, more, please.

I believe BlaiseP was talking about using leveraging the suspicion over there, which is already quite prevalent. If the Muslim world has a surplus of suspicion, America has a deficit. This is, after all, "the United States of Amnesia."

Rereading the sentence of yours which I quoted, I see that I read it wrong. You were saying that people in Muslim countries are *most* suspicious of the USA, if I am not further mistaken. That very well may be the case.

Cheers!!

Belarius: I'm not sure such an agency needs to be government-operated. Nor is propaganda exclusively marketing lies: to work, propaganda must be believable.

You are being willfully obtuse. I have not demonstrated the dangerous desire to think in terms of homogeneity that is a problem both in America and abroad. I have shown the exact opposite. In the United States, we have hundreds of thousands of Muslims, who live in peace with their Christian and Jewish neighbors. I'd start with a picture of a kosher butchery I know exists on Devon Street in Chicago, showing the Hasidic Jews and orthodox Muslims standing in line together for meat. That scene is re-enacted every day. I'd show Serbs and Croats, sitting around, joking about how they'd probably be killing each other if they were back in their homeland. That's a scene I've seen, watching the World Cup in a Polish bar at 4 in the morning.

Sure they're suspicious of us. We've never made our case clear. What do you want here, exactly, other than to slam me personally, for saying America ought to enunciate its position clearly, and defend the notion of E Pluribus Unum. From the many comes the one. That's our motto. It's on our money. America is a noble experiment, we come from everywhere. We fail many times, but we get back on our feet and try again. We don't hide our problems, we have a free press.

If I was to compose my E Pluribus Unum ad campaign, none of the ads would be in English. They'd feature little conversations, as real to life as possible. It would show previous enemies in the USA, now living in peace with each other. The ending graphic would be "We Are From Everywhere"

Well, thanks for not thinking I'm a xenophobe.

Look, the USA needs to make its case clearer. Our enemies tend to hog up the bandwidth. Yes, we are hypocrites to some extent, but we make that point clearly enough ourselves. Remember, this is our government, we're responsible for electing these bozos. We appointed the CPA, and Bremer screwed all that up. The people we sent into the CPA were Republican factota, squirrelly little hangers-on in previous Republican campaigns. They didn't speak Arabic. They were tasked with looking like our administration, which is composed of the varsity squad of the same hangers-on.

Don't be too sure how much people listen to American media overseas. The Arabic world is, as I have said elsewhere, staggeringly illiterate. They get their news off the TV and radio in their native languages. We used to have the VOA, which was listened-to.

Yes, there's always a gap between words and deeds. This doesn't circumvent the need for words, especially when this war against terror is mostly a war of ideas. It's a war we need to win.

We could send them "Ishtar", the MOAB (mother of all bombs).

:P

Thanks for the rescue from the (subtle) ministry of truth's special memory hole, djd.

August, 2002:

U.S. President George Bush today signed into law the American Servicemembers Protection Act of 2002, which is intended to intimidate countries that ratify the treaty for the International Criminal Court (ICC). The new law authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the court, which is located in The Hague. This provision, dubbed the "Hague invasion clause," has caused a strong reaction from U.S. allies around the world, particularly in the Netherlands.

That's just so in case Rumsfeld gets arrested in France, or somewhere, they can go in to rescue him;-)

That BananaTV is hilarious:0

Loved the article.

This line is a classic:

They eat their own babies, and then wonder why they have no future!

. Stop me before others question the very foundation of our glorious capitalistic regime of oppression.

Hell no, that's the part where I get up on my feet and start cheering!!