The Public Relations Firms of Dictators
Nick Mamatas,
Disinfo.org
Running
a dictatorship isn't all it is cracked up to be. Once, centuries ago, a tyrant
could wave a hand and a phalanx of soldiers would spill into the Great Hall
dissidents would be dispatched instantly, and their viscera placed at the feet
of the dictator. In these days though, where many people have somehow adopted
notions of the general equality of human beings and of limitations to the power
of the state, slaughtering people is much more complex.
Enter public relations. Some of
the bloodiest regimes on earth have hired PR firms to defend their activities.
Both the leading governments of the world and banana republics have tried to
sell their adventures in ordnance and warfare like soap, and the public has
bought it.
Burson-Marsteller, the world's
largest PR firm, has a rogue's gallery of despotic clients. The firm worked
with the Nigerian government to obscure evidence of genocide in Biafra. The
company also set up smoke screens for the Argentinian government to continue
"disappearing" people, and worked with South Korea's military government in
order to prepare the world for the 1988 Olympics, which occurred just a year
after the "People's Power" movement finally ousted the dictators. And while
some dictators are called red, their money is still green. B-M also represented
Nicolae Ceaucescu, Romania's mini-Stalin, until the Christmas revolution broke
the back of that regime. Apparently, Ceaucescu forgot that impoverished citizens
of command economy regimes tend to not to own televisions (thus, the people
missed many of his photo ops). However, the Romanians filmed Ceaucescu's genocide
trial, and staged his death for the global media's cameras.
Americans, on the other hand, watch
too much television. The Bush administration and other saber-rattlers took advantage
of the eyes-open brain-shut power of the hypno-ray in the buildup to 1991's
Persian Gulf War. Hill and Knowlton, a public relations firm, fabricated the
story of Iraqi soldiers dumping Kuwaiti children out of hospital incubators,
and even got the story before Congress. Even Amnesty International was suckered.
The "witness" Nayirah was later revealed as the daughter of Sheik Saud Nasir
Al-Sabah, Kuwait's Ambassador to America. Covert Action Quarterly (Spring
1993) discovered that Hill and Knowlton had been paid US$11 million to conduct
the campaign by the Citizens for a Free Kuwait. The same year, a joint British/Canadian
news crew interviewed medical teams and visited Kuwaiti hospitals, and proved
that the incubator story was false.
More recently, Ruder Finn took
an assignment by Bosnian and Croatian groups and happily pumped out stories
designed to equate Slobodan Milosevic with Adolph Hitler.That the Croatian forces
during World War II were actually explicitly pro-Nazi didn't seem to come to
the fore until later, after many mainstream groups dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism
and ethnic oppression in particular joined with the Croatian government in its
denouncement of Serbia as a fascist state.
Pictures can fool the world, and
recently, one of them did. In 1992, an Independent Television News team led
by journalist Penny Marshall shot footage of men staring out from behind barbed
wire. They were Bosnian prisoners inside a Serbian concentration camp, ITN explained.
The picture was very misleading: the ITN photographers were actually inside
the compound, and their subjects were outside the fence, looking in. LM, a libertarian
magazine that had been founded by some disaffected former Marxists, pointed
this out, and was promptly sued out of existence thanks to Britain's stringent
libel laws.
Not every would-be dictator has
the charisma of a Castro, or the stately profile of a Chun Doo Hwan. Thanks
to the science of public relations, dictators don't need to be naturally talented.
B-M calls its work "Perception Management" and when state and capital combine,
perception can be managed as easily as working life or military deployments.
It is still good to be king.
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