It was Frederick the Great of Prussia who said that he and his people had come to a mutually satisfactory agreement –they were free to say what they liked and he was free to do what he liked. Frederick obviously was an autocratic monarch who did not worry himself too much about the opinion of his subjects.
Present day governments, elected or otherwise, can hardly afford not to appear to care, so they do the next best thing. They try to mould opinions and perceptions, as do toothpaste sellers, fashion designers, car manufacturers or anything else that can be sold at profit. Governments do this essentially to ensure their perpetuity and sometimes for the people they govern while the manufacturer does it for profit. Perception management by governments is called propaganda and psychological warfare (psywar) while the private entrepreneur describes it as advertising.
Psywar is as old as history and an essential ingredient of statecraft. It is the fourth arm of combat, usable all the time. Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Sun Tzu’s Art of War refer to this. The Nazis had their Lord Haw Haw trying to undermine the morale of the British forces while in the 1965 India-Pak conflict we had our immensely popular ‘Radio Jhoothistan’. The Iraqis had someone the invading Americans called Baghdad Bob, as he tried to boost the morale of his people in 2003.
In the early days of the Cold War, psywar and propaganda were used to keep Communism at bay. Saving Europe from Stalin’s depredations was the rallying call for all of America. Noel Coward, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, the Rockefellers and the Henry Fords were part of an endless list of an American Who’s Who. Eminent Europeans also joined the enterprise. The CIA led this multi-million dollar campaign operating on the principle of plausible deniability. For seventeen years, a CIA officer, Michael Josselson, managed this campaign with an almost fanatical zeal. At its height, this programme of cultural propaganda had spread to 35 countries under the umbrella of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Congress funded magazines, held art exhibitions, organised philharmonic orchestras, ran a radio station from Germany which quickly acquired 29 other stations, and also ran the Encounter magazine for a number of years.
Sometimes things do get out of hand leading to spine chilling realities. The 1960’s film, ‘The Manchurian Candidate,’ was about an American soldier captured by the Soviets and taken to Manchuria for brainwashing into an assassin. While the film was a box-office sell out, the Americans did have their very own controversial project – MK-ULTRA --for mind control. There were experiments on unwitting human guinea pigs to assess the effect of mind-altering drugs like LSD – all in the name of protecting freedom. Earlier, the Nazis had similarly experimented and, as it turned out later, so had the Russians. This was a quest for dominance at its sinister best, showing excessive zeal born of arrogance. The results of these experiments are still shrouded in secrecy.
The Cold War was won not just through ‘Star Wars’, military alliances, friendly dictators, proxy wars and the Afghan jehad that overstretched the Soviet Empire. The Berlin Wall came down as much through the sustained efforts of the cultural cold warriors who had prevented an exhausted post-war Europe from succumbing to Communism. The Afghan jehad in the 1980s was as much a matter of perception management as a campaign on the ground; so was the First Iraq War of 1991 when instant global TV came of age as did the Indian TV during the Kargil War in 1999.
It is more a case of managing perceptions or creating images in peacetime. The more innocuous ones are the larger than life images of a minimally clad Lord Greystroke a.k.a. Tarzan swinging from tree to tree in the jungles of Africa saving the British Empire from cousin Kaiser Wilhelm or Superman in his blue and red sartorial elegance saving the world from evil.
These days ‘spin doctors’ are an essential component of governance and indulge in George Orwell’s Doublethink –the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting them and being able to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them. Thus the current American concept of pre-emptive war really means that while war is undesirable, a war to prevent even a remotely perceived war, is desirable.
Effective psy-war the ability to put forward and defend an idea or offering a better way of life that is appealing to the recipient and not merely the giver. The ultimate test for a successful psy-war or propaganda is when it appears never to have been carried out at all and when it is able to make the audience ask for the things that can be given. The favoured tactic could be the ‘necessary lie’ based on some basic truth for it to be acceptable. It was this absence of any truth in the allegations that Saddam Hussein had acquired WMD’s and was in cahoots with the Al Qaeda that led to a catastrophic campaign.
In the Indian context, conducting a long-term psy-war campaign during peacetime requires unusual tenacity and hard work. We are dealing with an implacable foe, whose long-term objectives are at variance from current overt declarations, who cheats his benefactor habitually and connives at selling atomic secrets for ideological reasons. Under pressure from the US and embattled on its western frontier, the Pak establishment has made some tactical adjustments without any change of heart. Benazir Bhutto’s disclosures in the revised edition of her autobiography, ‘Daughter of the East’, confirm this.
Besides, terrorists use modern communication systems for effective anti-State propaganda. Al Qaeda leaders have used this repeatedly from their hideouts in Waziristan. The Pakistani terrorist outfit, the ISI-backed, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, has not only thousands of well-trained fighters, it has a huge propaganda network. It has several publications in different languages and its main publication, Al Dawat sells more than 80,000 copies at major bookshops across Pakistan. Other terrorist organisations have similar publications with an elastic definition of truth.
The Internet has become the new medium for propaganda by terrorists or insurgent organisations. The easy unregulated access and speed and anonymity of communication with global audiences has enabled many organisations like the Lashkar, Hizbul Mujahedeen and the LTTE to run their websites. Nothing helps the terrorist more than having the media, in its competitive urge to portray truth, showing mangled bodies and chaos that follow a terrorist attack. This is striking terror in the hearts of the people at no cost to the terrorist. At times, search for truth must be limited by self-restraint.
Since perception-building is a long haul, relying solely on the transient bureaucrat equipped with opinion but without expertise will leave the system stultified, dogmatic and even totalitarian. It is also important for the credibility of such ventures that they are not required to support government policy in all its aspects. It has become necessary to involve private entrepreneurs in some of these ventures because they have the skills and the flexibility to act.
The Indian challenge is to make our presence felt abroad without this being seen as another boring government endeavour. A country that aspires to greater glory must have a credible voice and image building can be a collective national enterprise. Psy-war does not have to be a sinister venture. It is more about spreading the country’s soft power and its voice and influence, at least up to the range of Agni-III.
Source : Hindustan Times 16th April 2007
0 comments:
Post a Comment