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Frank Harris · Joined: 29 Dec 2005 Posts: 25 Location: UK

John Pilger is fond of the quote from an East European dissident 'Truth is always subversive'. From memory Dr Goebbels said: 'Truth is always the enemy of the state'. But elsewhere he made the common sense point that all that mattered was the propaganda value - whether true or false was subservient (first ask: 'Why are they telling us this?' Only then ask if it is true). So is 'Truth is nearly always subversive' true?

This is extremely important because it is fairly easy to spot propaganda, once one becomes attuned, and if you can say: 'It's propaganda so it's probably false' this is a big thing. And this depends upon whether propagandists are reluctant to tell the truth. If they don't care whether it is true or not, but simply concentrate on its propaganda value, then spotting propaganda only suggest a probability of untruth not a near guarantee.

I previously had the common sense idea that the propagandist told the truth if it suited his masters, but I recently changed to the view that the propagandist is a reluctant truth teller.

It is noticeable that politicians automatically get into trouble from the propaganda apparatus if they tell the truth: Teflon President Reagan, rarely attacked, got into trouble when he made the ecologically defensible point (I am a practiced ecologist) that trees might cause acid rain; Prime Minister John Major was attacked by the media when he said qualifications didn't matter.

To make our ideas concrete, consider this: Orphanage children from Britain were sent to Australia. The Australian premier apologised a few month ago. Why were they sent? Because Australia needed a bigger population in order to get a big economy. [America wanted to use Australia as the regional superpower so it had to be endowed with a large economy.]

Let's forget about what the US wanted; surely the television people could have said: 'They wanted a big economy so they had to get their population up.' But the propagandists know it is dangerous to tell the truth. Why? Well, it might start a train of thought: 'In that case you could destroy a country's economy by reducing its population.'

In other words: give the farm animals, the crop, one bit of truth and they'll start building other truth on top of it.