An Invisible Government
by John Laughland
All News is Lies
Sean McMeekin’s recently published biography of Willi Münzenberg, the man rightly dubbed in the subtitle “Moscow’s propaganda wizard in the West is a useful addition to the small literature on the all-important subject of media manipulation. It, and the other books on Münzenberg and related subjects, enable us to understand how secret services and covert operations are used to control public access to information, and to influence public opinion for political purposes.
Several people are credited with inventing the modern propaganda techniques which are so crucial in the modern age of mass communication. One of the most important theoreticians was Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, who wrote in Propaganda in 1928 that it was entirely natural and right for governments to organise public opinion for political purposes. The opening chapter of his book has the revealing title, “Organising chaos”, and Bernays writes:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised opinions and habits of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
Bernays says that, very often, the members of this invisible government do not even know who the other members are, but that propaganda becomes sinister only when it is deliberately mendacious. Otherwise, he says, propaganda is the only way of preventing public opinion descending into dissonant chaos. Bernays continued to work on this theme after the war, editing Engineering Consent in 1955. Two of his contributors to that work make the point that every leader must play on basic human emotions in order to manipulate public opinion. For Doris E. Fleischmann and Howard Walden Cutler:
Self-preservation, ambition, pride, hunger, love of family and children, patriotism, imitativeness, the desire to be a leader, love of play—“these and other drives are the psychological raw materials which every leader must take into account in his endeavour to win the public to his point of view.“ To maintain their self-assurance, most people need to feel certain that whatever they believe about anything is true.
But it was Willi Münzenberg, even more than his Nazi opposite number, Joseph Goebbels, who put this theory into practice. Goebbels admired his Communist opposite number in Germany, because it was Münzenberg who invented most of the mechanisms and methods of propaganda for which the German Minister of Popular Enlightenment later became infinitely more famous. Münzenberg was intimately involved with the Communist project from the very beginning – “he belonged to Lenin’s circle in Zurich, and in 1917 he accompanied the future leader of the Bolshevik revolution to the Zurich Hauptbahnhof, from whence he was transported in a sealed train, and with the help of the German imperial authorities, to the Finland Station in St. Petersburg.
Lenin called on Münzenberg to combat the appalling publicity generated in 1921 when 25 million peasants in the Volga region started to suffer from the famine which swept the newly created Soviet state.
Münzenberg, who had returned to Berlin where he was later elected to the Reichstag as a Communist deputy, was charged with setting up a bogus workers’ charity, "the Foreign Committee for the Organisation of Worker Relief for the Hungry in Soviet Russia", whose purpose was to pretend to the world that humanitarian relief was coming from sources other than Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration.
Lenin feared not only that Hoover would use his humanitarian aid project to send spies into the USSR (which he did) but even more importantly, that the world’s first Communist state would be fatally damaged by the negative publicity of seeing capitalist America come to its aid within a few years of the revolution.
After having cut his teeth on “selling” the death of millions of people at the hands of the Bolsheviks and their mad anti-agrarian policies, Münzenberg turned his attention to more general propaganda activities. He amassed a large media empire, known as “the Münzenberg trust”, which owned two mass circulation dailies in Germany, a mass circulation weekly, and which had interests in scores of other publications around the world. His greatest coups were to mobilise world opinion against America over the Sacco-Vanzetti trial (that of two anarchist Italian immigrants who were sentenced to death for murder in Massachussetts in 1921) and to counteract the Nazis’ claim in 1933 that the Reichstag fire was the result of a Communist conspiracy. The Nazis, it will be remembered, used the fire to justify mass arrests and executions against Communists, even though it now appears that the fire genuinely was started on his own by the man arrested in the building at the time, Martinus van der Lubbe. Münzenberg managed to convince large sections of public opinion that the Nazis had started the fire themselves in order to have a pretext for removing their main enemies.
Münzenberg’s strategy was simply to influence opinion-makers in whatever way he could, whether they were overtly political or not. His contacts included many of the great literary figures of the 1930s, a large number of whom were encouraged by him to support the Republicans in the Spanish civil war and to make that into a cause-célèbre of Communist anti-fascism. (As François Furet reminds us, Communist anti-fascism preceded the rise of Nazism, with which in any case Stalin was to form an alliance in 1939.) It will not come as a surprise to readers of this column to learn that many of the strategies perfected by Münzenberg were later adopted by the West, especially the British and the Americans.
The history of this strategy is superbly documented by Frances Stonor Saunders in her book, Who paid the Piper? published in the US under the title The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the world of arts and letters. In minute detail, Stonor Saunders explains not only how, as the Cold War started, the Americans and the British started up a massive covert operation to fund anti-communist intellectuals, but also — crucially — how much of their attention and activity was directed at left-wingers, in many cases Trotskyites who had abandoned their support for the Soviet Union only in 1939, when Stalin signed his non-aggression pact with Hitler, and in many cases people who had previously worked for Münzenberg.
The key point, for our understanding of today’s politics, is that many of the cultural figures at this juncture between Communism and the CIA at the beginning of the cold war were future neo-conservatives luminaries, especially Irving Kristol, James Burnham, Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling.
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The left-wing and even Trotskyite origins of neo-conservatism are well-known—though new details still astonish, viz. Lionel and Diana Trilling were married by a rabbi for whom Felix Dzherzhinsky—founder of the Bolsehvik secret police, the Cheka (forerunner of the KGB), and the Communist equivalent of Heinrich Himmler—represented a heroic paragon. These left-wing origins are particularly relevant to the covert operations discussed by Stonor Saunders, because the CIA’s goal was precisely to influence left-wing opponents of Communist, i.e. Trotskyites. Stonor Saunders quotes Michael Warner [Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 38/5, Summer 1995] when she writes,
“For the CIA, the strategy of promoting the Non-Communist Left was to become 'the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s political operations against Communism over the next two decades.'"
This strategy was outlined in Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center (1949), a book which represents one of the cornerstones of what was later to become the neo-conservative movement. Stonor Saunders writes,
“The purpose of supporting leftist groups was not to destroy or even dominate, but rather to maintain a discreet proximity to and monitor the thinking of such groups; to provide them with a mouthpiece so that they could blow off steam; and, in extremis, to exercise a final veto over their actions, if they ever got too “radical”.”
Many and varied were the ways in which this left-wing influence was felt. In music, for instance, Nicholas Nabokov (the cousin of the author of Lolita) was one of the Congress’ main agents. In 1954, the CIA funded a music festival in Rome in which Stalin’s “authoritarian” love of composers like Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky was “countered” by unorthodox modern music inspired by Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system. “For Nabokov, there was a clear political message to be imparted by promoting music which announced itself as doing away with natural hierarchies.” This cross-over between culture and politics was explicitly promoted by a CIA body which went under an Orwellian name, the Psychological Strategy Board. In 1956, it covertly promoted a European tour by the Metropolitan Opera, the political purpose of which was to encourage multiculturalism. Junkie Fleischmann, the organiser, said;
We, in the United States, are a melting-pot and, by being so, we have demonstrated that peoples can get along together irrespective of race, colour or creed. Using the “melting-pot” or some such catch phrase for a theme we might be able to use the Met as an example of how Europeans can get along together in the United States and that, therefore, some sort of European Federation is entirely practicable.
This is exactly the same argument employed by, among other people, Ben Wattenberg, whose book The First Universal Nation argues that America has a special right to world hegemony because she embodies all the nations and races of the planet. The view has also been expressed by Newt Gingrich and other neo-cons.
Other themes promoted include some which are at the forefront of neo-conservative thinking today. First among these is the eminently liberal belief in moral and political universalism. Today, this is at the very heart of George W. Bush’s own foreign policy philosophy: he has stated on numerous occasions that political values are the same all over the world, and he uses this assumption to justify US military intervention in favour of “democracy”. Back in the early 1950s, the director of the PSB (the Psychological Strategy Board was quickly referred to only by its initials, no doubt in order to hide its real name), Raymond Allen, had already arrived at this conclusion:
The principles and ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are for export and – are the heritage of men everywhere. We should appeal to the fundamental urges of all men which I believe are the same for the farmer in Kansas as for the farmer in Punjab.
To be sure, it would be wrong to attribute the spread of ideas only to covert manipulation. They have their force in large-scale cultural currents, whose causes are multiple. But there is no doubt that the dominance of such ideas can be substantially facilitated by covert operations, especially since people in mass-information societies are curiously suggestible. Not only do they believe what they have read in the papers, they think they have arrived at these conclusions themselves. The trick of manipulating public opinion, therefore, lies precisely in that which Bernays theorised, Münzenberg initiatied, and the CIA raised to a high art: according to CIA agent Donald Jameson,
“As far as the attitudes that the Agency wanted to inspire through these activities are concerned, clearly what they would like to have been able to produce were people who, of their own reasoning and conviction, were persuaded that everything the United States government did was right.”
Otpor logo - Serbian youth movement funded by the U.S. government, which greatly contributed to the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević.
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