“The first casualty of war is truth,” said US Senator Hiram W. Johnson of California in 1929, during the debate on the ratification of the Kellogg-Briand pact, a noble but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to ban war. Reflecting on World War I, which had ended a decade earlier, Johnson continued: “It begins, as we have been accustomed to until recently, with that form of propaganda in which […] patriotism is exalted and lies are told to make people hungry for war and to make them feel the desire to fight. We’ve seen it in the past; it will happen again in the future.
Time and again, Hiram Johnson has been proved right. The US government’s impulse to control information and manipulate the citizenry to support war is deeply entrenched. The last twenty years, dominated by the so-called “war on terror”, are no exception. Sophisticated public relations campaigns, compliant media and the Pentagon’s omnipresent propaganda machine operate in tandem to “manufacture consensus”. This is how renowned scholar Noam Chomsky and the late Professor Ed Herman put it in the title of their groundbreaking book “The Guardians of Freedom”, borrowing the phrase from Walter Lippman, considered the father of public relations.
One outlet that has consistently challenged the warmongering narrative pushed by the US government under both Republican and Democratic presidents has been the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks gained international attention in 2010 after publishing a series of leaked...
A short video circulating widely on social media claims that US Representative Ilhan Omar referred to World War II as “World War 11” while discussing the Alien Enemies Act. The clip has been share...