John Hockenberry Illustrates Lying By Omission

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.