saw this film at the anti-war storefront on monroe avenue, in rochester. being a hyphenated american who moved to the u.s., as an adult, from one of the oldest parts of the world, i was born with a healthy dose of skepticism in my blood. i know that governments lie, that the press can skew reality, that there is such a thing as propaganda. the middle east conflict is a case in point and so is the war in iraq.
“peace, propaganda and the promised land” is an excellent documentary that explains the step by step process of filtering information and using a mammoth PR machine to manipulate public opinion. many cannot accept this so-called mind control, especially when it applies to an open, free market society like ours where the unrestricted flow of information forms the very basis of our economic/political system. this too is a mirage. the only difference between american-style minutely researched, consumer-savvy, impeccably packaged, and innocuously dessiminated propaganda and soviet-style, grainy, no frills attached, in your face, badly executed propaganda (much ridiculed during the cold war), is in production values. ours is simply better quality. like a carefully flavored smoothie it goes down easy and feels good once it’s been ingested.
but i will let you decide for yourself. if you’ve never read noam chomsky, robert fisk or alexander cockburn, this documentary might be a true eye opener for you. i found it on youtube.
the film was introduced by judith bello. read more about the post-screening discussion moderated by judith on her blog under “reviewing the presentation and jenin jenin” (aug 11, 2007). she talks about “an individual in attendance who persistently and emphatically interpreted every assertion back into the standard frame of information, the very frame that the film was designed to discredit”. i attribute that to ignorance but also to the staggering power of language – our thoughts and ideas are constrained by the linguistic and therefore conceptual framework we are given. i was reading “weasel words” by john lahr (new yorker, dec 19, 2005) a review of the harold pinter double bill (including “the room” and “celebration”) and some of lahr’s comments jumped out at me. he talks about pinter’s obsession with the “psychological truth that he continued to explore brilliantly for half a century: mankind’s passion for ignorance. blindness, as pinter has dramatized it over the years, is something internal. the habit of not seeing is for his characters a sort of narrative device, an evasion of self-awareness that allows them to sustain their stories of themselves; the very syntax of their speech carries them ever farther from a real understanding of their emotions”.