Written 2001 October 19, Friday

Philip Morris (makers of cigarettes, Kraft foods, and more) donating a couple million dollars to charitable causes and spending more than that on advertisements telling the media-consuming world about the donations is a propoganda campaign.

Fewer than forty thousand meals per day for what will probably be five and one half million starving people by the end of 2001 is a propaganda campaign.  (Personally, when I starve I do so three meals a day).  I don’t know how much the government is spending telling us about this food aid, especially with the press promoting it free, but I can assure you that it can hardly merit one line on the budget of the air war on Afganistan.

Then we have the the noble call for the children of this great, but apparently gullible, country to donate a dollar for Afghan children.  (Maybe the potential one hundred million dollars will be used to make bomb-resistant trucks to carry the food in through the U.S. missles and bombs).  This is shameless propaganda.  If the Bush regime wanted aid done right, they would have government do it.  Congress would slavishly appropriate several billion or a hundred billion dollars for acquiring and delivering food, water, medical supplies, and medical care.  But they are not serious about humanitarian aid.  They are serious about a propaganda campaign promoting approval of their military strategy and anything else they want to do.  Propaganda about humanitarian aid is part of this propaganda campaign.

I call it a propaganda campaign and not a public relations campaign because that would turn a potentially meaningful phrase into a euphemism.  According to Charles Marram, who did PR for Hewlitt-Packard (he’s now with an HP spin-off called Agilent) and teaches a PR course at UMass, public relations involves listening to “stakeholders” and – get this – even changing as a result.  Advertising one’s charitableness or dropping a negligible amount of food on an area in which the population is starving is propaganda.

Norman Solomon’s 2001 October 8 Media Beat column covers the general situation pretty well, and his 2001 October 12 column conveys the simple propaganda that the food drops and the Bush administrations children-donate-a-dollar campaign are.

Bad living and dying in Afganistan would exist without U.S. bombing etc.  But much much worse life and much much more dying will occur because of the actions of our government, among people who are innocent of any action against the U.S.

Definitions:

regime

a government in power; administration [(it’s connotation, not definition, that seems to matter here.  To say “regime ”sounds more biased than even to say “unelected administration.”)]