As I have previously discussed, one of
the standard techniques in the propagandists' toolkit is lying by
omission. By leaving out significant facts, a false picture of
reality is created and implanted into the minds of the target
audience. [See "Lying By Omission," July 8, 2013.]
I
happened to turn on the radio yesterday and Harry Truman was reading
his announcement of his annihilation by atomic bomb of Hiroshima,
Japan (in August 1945, followed three days later by his wiping
Nagasaki off the face of the earth with another a-bomb). [1]
“The first atomic bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima,” he said. And then the audio cut to something else.
Interesting edit, right in the middle
of his sentence. I happen to know what he said after the pause, “a
military target.”
The
quasi-U.S. government radio network NPR provides a platform for one
John Hockenberry, where he has his very own show dealing with
contemporary issues in a middle-brow fashion. This was his show, and
he was running an introduction to an interview with Ian Buruma, who
wrote a book about the year 1945. Hockenberry kicked off by
mentioning “narratives.” That's a fancy media apparatchik way of
saying competing versions of reality. [2]
Buruma knew enough not to point out the
dishonest omission of the last part of Truman's sentence. After all,
he doesn't want to be blackballed by the bourgeois media, especially
in the middle of his book promotion tour, by being “controversial.”
Now, probably most people today don't
think of Hiroshima as a “military target.” It was a defenseless
city, and the victims were almost all civilians- especially women and
children, as the men were off to war (or dead already in combat).
Hockenberry and his ilk know how
important it is to prevent people from reaching their own
conclusions, and thus “dangerous” information must be hidden from
them.
So the American public must be
protected from the knowledge that Truman was a smarmy liar and
propagandist. Truman has been made into an iconic figure in the
pantheon of U.S. political bosses, quite undeservedly, apart from his
war crimes. There's the matter of his initiation of the purges and
repression of the misnomered “McCarthy era,” which lasted from
about 1947 until the early 1960s, when a new wave of repression aimed
at the anti-war, black liberation, and other social and political
movements was launched by the permanent institutions of the political
police state. (Most important among those institutions are the FBI,
the Department of “Justice,” the CIA, the military, and of course
local and state police and governments, often directed and
coordinated by the Federal government, especially the FBI.)
Another awful president made into an
iconic figure is the virulent racist and father of the American
political police state, Woodrow Wilson. And then there's another
Official hero, the fascist butcher and backer of apartheid Ronald
Reagan, the Godfather of the jihadist movement which grew out of the
Afghan war of the 1980s. (Jimmy Carter actually started that one, and
the contra terrorist campaign as well.)
[1] No, he wasn't returned from
the dead. It was a recording, of course.
[2] Books
about a single year is currently a publishing industry gimmick.
Buruma isn't the only one
cashing in on this silly exaggeration of one or another years as
World Historic. The fact that what are now deemed significant events
sometimes cluster together in a calendar year is more likely random
mathematical coincidence (and a product of selection bias by authors
looking for a thematic hook for their latest tome) than a matter of
historical tectonic plates shifting all at once, as is the conceit of
the authors. Next year they'll come up with a different gimmick,
trust me. Publishing is more and more like the fashion industry, a
matter of invented (and frivolous and pointless) novelty for
novelty's sake, signifying nothing.
