Dear Editor:
The Australian Scholar Alex Carey said that there were three developments of great political importance in the 20th century – the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
This corporate and government attempt to control the public mind was accelerated greatly by World War I.
Most Americans had a very unfavorable opinion about World War I. The IWW and socialist leaders saw it as an imperialist war among capitalist nations caused mainly by Germany having fewer colonial possessions than other European powers.
Also, Americans realized that it was a horrendous slaughter. Armies charged across open fields against machine guns and barbed wire. After a single battle, tens of thousands of men lay dead on the battlefield and little ground was gained. Poison gas was used. French soldiers mutinied and many of the leaders were shot.
President Wilson had the daunting task of making the war popular or at least tolerable for the majority of Americans.
The Creel Committee was established using the ideas of corporate apologists and propagandists like Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays. Lee had been hired by John D. Rockefeller to minimize the damage to his image caused by the Ludlow massacre of coal miners and their families in Colorado.
Edward Bernays was a nephew of Sigmond Freud and his greatest success was making smoking popular with women by hiring attractive debutantes for New York’s Easter parade and having them proclaim that their cigarrettes were “torches of liberty.”
The main idea the Creel Committee developed was to demonize the Germans. They were called Huns, and it was said they bayoneted babies and committed other atrocities. Cartoons of German soldiers as snarling beasts were produced.
This propaganda worked so well that it not only enabled the United States to enter World War I, but also to arrest the leaders of the IWW as unpatriotic and to attest and jail Eugene Debs, the great socialist and former candidate for president. Radicals like Emma Goldman were deported from the country.
Now, when foreign leaders like Castro, Noriega, Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein and milosevic are demonized and ideologies like communism are demonized, it should cause any person cognizant of this history to wonder if these people or ideologies are really that evil or ifthey are just obstacles to corporate power, profits and domination of the Earth, as epitomized by the World Trade Organization.
Most Americans associate propaganda with dictatorships.
However, the most effective propaganda is invisible and with all the experience of the advertising industry and the expertise of the finest psychologists, propaganda in the United Sttes has reached a zenith of sophistication.
Unfortunately, the United States being the richest and most powerful country holds the key to the future of the planet, and unless Americans can see through this corporate propaganda in time, the results could be disastrous.
Gary Sudborough
Bellflower, Calif.

Author