JOHN PILGER

clipped from: original.antiwar.com, John Pilger , Charge of the Media Brigade

The Pentagon, says the Associated Press, spends $4.7 billion on public relations: that is, winning the hearts and minds not of recalcitrant Afghan tribesmen but of Americans. This is known as “information dominance,” and PR people are “information warriors.”

The psychopathic is applauded across popular, corporate culture, from the TV death watch of a man choosing a firing squad over lethal injection to the Oscar winning Hurt Locker...

The U.S. is engaged militarily in 75 countries. There are some 900 U.S. military bases across the world, many at the gateways to the sources of fossil fuels.

But there is a problem. Most Americans are opposed to these wars. That their brainwashing so often fails is America’s greatest virtue.

Melvin Goodman...in the CIA more than 40 years...described the...Cold War as
exaggerations of Soviet “aggressiveness”.

“What mattered to the hardliners in Washington,” he said, “was how a perceived threat could be exploited.”

Little has changed. In America, in 1939, W.H. Auden wrote: