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- 58 SELLING WARS By Gunnar Garbo Introduction When Hitler’s troops invaded Norway in 1940, their planes spread leaflets in addition to bombs, declaring that the troops came to protect the Norwegian people and secure our freedom and independence. In warfare lies like these are common. Two non-profit journalism organisations in the US documented that during the first two years after 11 September, President Bush and his top officials issued at least 935 false statements about reasons for attacking Iraq. Bush led with 259 lies.19 But the tradition of leaders’ lying is older. Already Plato proclaimed the right of leaders to tell lies in order to deceive both enemies and their own citizens for the benefit of the state. A person who enthusiastically picked up Plato’s advice was the Chicago professor of philosophy Leo Strauss, who taught his doctrines to a number of the top people who joined the staff of the Bush administration. Abram Shulsky, who produced a considerable part of the misinformation about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, once said that he had learned from Strauss that “deception is the norm in political life” ( Drury 2005:1). In his farsighted book 1984 George Orwell, however, pointed out that it is not enough for authoritarian leaders just to tell specific lies. He found that their ulimate aim is to create a new reality in the minds of people, different from the real world. Orwell (1977: 16) gave us illustrative examples like: War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery and Ignorance Is Strength. If the leaders can make most people internalise doublespeak of this kind and believe that the new way of speaking depicts reality, they have actually changed the world in which we live. What we say goes In connection with the First Gulf War President Bush sr demonstrated that he had learned “the manufacture of consent”. Stating that the US had got a new credibility, the president proclaimed: “What WE say goes.”. The administration of his son was following in senior’s footsteps. A year after 9/11 Ron Suskind, a columnist who had investigated the White House for a number of years, happened to mention the intellectual principles of empiricism and enlightenment in a conversation with a 19 http://transfondo-noticias.blogspot.com/2008/01/false-statements-preceded-war.htm Accessed: 26.01.08. - 59 presidential adviser. “That’s not the way in which the world really works anymore”, was the answer he got. “We are an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality, we’ll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too. WE are history’s actors, and all of you will be left to just study what we do” (Suskind 2004). This is the arrogance of power. It is the way empires talk. Dictatorial authority displaces arguments. The trick is to reduce the general public to a proper spectator role. As Noam Chomsky (1991) points out, the general population should be deprived of the kinds of association that might lead to independent thought and political action. Constructing a grand edifice of lies terrorising the domestic audience by images of menacing threats from “failed states” like Iran and North Korea they manufacture consent to military interventions - instead of trying to solve conflicts by peaceful means, which they are committed to by the UN Charter. The Global War on Terror Sometimes factual developments come in handy for the deceivers. Karl Rove, who for several years was President Bush’s closest adviser, recently said to an audience that “History sometimes sends you things, and 9/11 came our way”. In an article about Euphemism and AmericanViolence, Professor David Bromwich (2008) referred to this and pointed out how President Bush viewed the September 11 attac as an opportunity. The leadership should do far more than respond to the attack, he felt. Better to use it as an opportunity to “go massive”, as Donald Rumsfeld put it: “Sweep it all up. Things related and not”.20 That is what they did. Instead of treating the 9/11 attack as an international crime, which it was, they responded by launching what they called a global war on terrorism. This phrase was a carefully chosen example of double-talk. It might indicate something as harmless as “a war on aids” or “a war on poverty”. But it could also mean an aggressive use of military weapons. The...

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