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p Lenin noted that "when the bourgeoisie’s ideological influence on the workers declines, is undermined or weakened, the bourgeoisie everywhere and always resorts to the most outrageous lies and slander.”  [76•1  This assessment is fully confirmed by today’s incessant campaign of misinformation the West is waging against the socialist countries and many independent developing states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

p An aggressive, anticommunist thrust is typical of current imperialist propaganda aimed at foreign countries.

p Imperialist propaganda is also a means of manipulating mass consciousness in the interests of monopoly capital at home too. This propaganda strives to disguise the aggressive nature and the antipopular foreign policy of imperialism; it builds up international tensions and fans the flames of armed conflicts.

p Slander of the U.S.S.R. and the entire socialist community is the chief weapon employed by Western propagandists. The American strategists of psychological warfare have borrowed much in terms of both method and content of slanderous campaigns against the Soviet Union from Nazi 77 propaganda.

p Washington studied closely and adopted the Nazi technique of the "Big Lie." Goebbels’s diaries, in several volumes, have been translated and published in the United States. The Hoover Institution not only stores but also widely uses Nazi propaganda archives.

p Deliberate lies have long been raised to the status of national policy in the United States. Washington officials hate to be reminded of the famous phrase of Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Relations in the 1960s; "The government has the Right to Lie ... if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid.”  [77•1 

p This quotation is a rare example of an American official telling the truth. What he said was later virtually echoed by former U.S. State Secretary Alexander Haig, who admitted that all his predecessors at this post had had to tell lies. Here is one example.

p “The Growing Military Threat from the Warsaw Pact," a report prepared by the U.S. delegation, was distributed at the April 1981 session of the North Atlantic Defense Planning Committee in Brussels. The fact itself could have been passed over as yet another familiar U.S. effort to spread outright lies, promote fear and juggle figures—something Washington resorts to each time it wants to pressure its NATO allies into accepting decisions it wants adopted.

p However, this time the U.S. delegation, led by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, beat all 78 records. The American administration launched an obviously fraudulent operation in Brussels. The report of the Defense Planning Committee included a fabricated quotation from Leonid Brezhnev’s 1978 speech in Prague. Allegedly, the Soviet leader said the U.S.S.R. used detente to be able to "impose its will wherever necessary.”

p No sane person would believe that Leonid Brezhnev could have ever uttered anything of the kind. No denials are necessary to refute this crude invention. Still, this is a graphic example of the thoroughly fraudulent policy the NATO top brass pursue to implement their reckless aggressive schemes.

p The "military threat" allegedly emanating from the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Treaty allies—a myth assiduously cultivated by imperialist propaganda—is the epitome of this policy.

p Never before has the world witnessed propaganda of war and violence as frenzied as today. The current effort of the right-wing-controlled bourgeois mass media to convince public opinion that a nuclear conflict is possible has noprecedent in the past. Television, radio and the press keep showering millions of people with trumped-up charges of Soviet "aggressive expansionism.”

p Gus Hall, General Secretary of the Communist Party U.S.A. has described this anti-Soviet propaganda as a campaign of the big lie. "The perpetuation and dissemination of this lie," he wrote in the Daily World on June 10, 1982, "has always been an obstacle to peace and progress. 79 Now, however, it must be seen in the context of the direct threat to human survival. Because it is used to justify the dangerous policies of nuclear insanity, of nuclear first strike and limited nuclear war it threatens the peace of the world and the survival of humanity.

p “The big lie is just that—a big lie! It is a conscious, calculated, criminal brainwashing propaganda campaign.”

p The "Soviet military threat" lie is an exercise in deliberate deception of public opinion. It is used as a cover to conceal the blatantly aggressive imperialist policies and hegemonistic claims aimed at escalating the arms race and resisting the liberation struggle in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

p Militarist groups and the military-industrial complex, which exert a considerable influence on the mass media, scare the population with fables about the threat from a "potential enemy" with the sole object of boosting military expenditure and ensuring their own selfish interests. This point has been made by Sean MacBride, Lenin and Nobel Peace prizes winner.  [79•1 

p War propaganda holds a special place among the other means Washington uses to prepare for aggression. While the arms race and the militarization of the economy and of the way of life represent the strategic and economic preparation for war, war propaganda is the chief means of its ideological preparation.

p The attempt to scare people at home and abroad by the bugbear of the nonexistent 80 Soviet military threat is one of the main techniques American propaganda uses to prepare nations psychologically for war. The upswing of war propaganda should be viewed in close connection with the sharp rise in the aggressiveness of U.S. imperialism in recent years.

p The frantic war preparations by the NATO countries are accompanied by a noisy propaganda campaign charging that the socialist camp threatens the very survival of Western democracies, that the West is lagging behind in armaments—hence the need to rearm the NATO countries by deploying the new U.S. missiles there.

p Each step of the U.S. militarists toward the implementation of their aggressive schemes is taken against the background of war hysteria. Congressional discussion of military appropriations is preceded by well-orchestrated campaigns in the mass media over the supposedly inadequate strength of the U.S. armed forces and armaments—although their size is unprecedented. Newsweek once warned its readers not to be surprised by reports which might appear in the coming weeks of foreign submarines sighted off American shores: veteran Congressmen said that sensations like those appeared each time Congressional committees began to discuss the defense budget.

p As early as 1913, Lenin exposed the capitalist " ‘mechanics’ of arms manufacture," supported by fraudulent propaganda over the need to increase military expenditures "exclusively in the interests of peace, for the preservation of culture, in the interests of the country, civilisation, 81 etc." While this propaganda keeps up the noise, "a shower of gold is pouring straight into the pockets of bourgeois politicians, who have got together in an exclusive international gang engaged in instigating an armaments race among the peoples.”  [81•1 

p War propaganda often reaches its peak in open calls for mass extermination. The aim is not only to influence people at home but also to intimidate and blackmail other countries. This propaganda publicizes inhuman weapons of mass destruction—chiefly nuclear, bacteriological, chemical, and lately neutron weapons.

p The subjects of these inventions -vary according to the Pentagon’s demands and military programs. As soon as the Defense Department turned its attention to the use of outer space for military purposes, the press began to publish crude fabrications claiming the Soviet Union was preparing for space warfare. In an effort to completely “bury” the SALT-2 Treaty signed by President Garter, the Reagan administration charged that the Soviet Union was violating the treaty’s provisions.

p The United States started a noisy slanderous campaign over the question of chemical weapons. The U.S. State Department produced a special report claiming that chemical weapons were being used by the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan and by the U.S.S.R. and Vietnam in Kampuchea and Laos. Facts belie these fables. Scientists in 82 many countries, including the United States, have proven that these charges against the Soviet Union, ’Vietnam and other countries of Indochina are completely groundless. U.N. experts have arrived at the same conclusion. A spokesman of the International Red Cross has dismissed these allegations as irresponsible empty talk.

p This, however, did not prevent U.S. propaganda from advertising similar inventions’ designed not only to generate fear in the international community but also to step up the U.S. preparations for chemical warfare. Two days after the State Department report appeared, a Congressional committee cited this paper when it took up the question of sharply increasing allocations for the manufacture of chemical weapons.

p Washington used the myth of "Soviet chemical weapons in Afghanistan, Laos and Kampuchea" in a bid to make the world forget the crimes the United States committed against the peoples of Indochina—the large-scale chemical war U.S. imperialism waged there for over a decade.

p The Americans dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of toxic agents on these countries, killing thousands of civilians and doing great damage to the soil, water and air there, and affecting the health of several generations in Vietnam, Kampuchea and Laos, and of tens of thousands of American servicemen. The chemical weapons carried by the terrorist gangs invading sovereign Afghanistan are also inscribed "Made in U.S.A.”

p The lie alleging that the U.S.S.R. and the 83 other socialist countries are aggressive is outrageous and groundless. Committed to the principles of peaceful coexistence and the provisions of the Helsinki Final Act, these countries have repeatedly proposed an end to the arms raceabove all, in nuclear missiles—a renunciation of their use, reduction of armaments, and disarmament.

p In January 1983, the socialist states party to the Warsaw Treaty Organization called on the NATO states to conclude a treaty on the renunciation of the use of force and on the maintenance of peaceful relations, and put forward a whole set of peace initiatives. Furthermore, the Soviet Union pledged non-first-use of nuclear weapons. Neither the United States nor the other nuclear powers have so far followed suit.

The Soviet Union has no need of the territories or wealth of others. A nation which lost over 20 million people in the last world war, the U.S.S.R. wants to live in peace, as good neighbors and sincere friends with all other nations.

p The West is keeping up its openly instigative and subversive propaganda to discredit the gains of the peoples embarking on the path of building a new society.

p Particularly hostile propaganda campaigns are directed mostly at those African, Asian and Latin American countries which break their ties of dependence on imperialism and Western monopolies and turn to genuinely independent development.

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p The Western mass media keep interfering in the internal affairs of newly independent countries and try to discredit them on the international scene. This has prompted Indira Gandhi to say that Western news agencies disseminate mostly negative reports about developing countries. Similar conclusions have been drawn by public figures in other newly independent nations too.

p In March 1982, President Siaka Stevens of Sierra Leone told newsmen that the Western press maintained biased and distorted coverage of events in developing African nations, including Sierra Leone, that Western journalists deliberately ignored that country’s successes while stressing only negative aspects.

p President Milton Obote of Uganda harshly criticized the Western media for presenting unobjective and slanderous reports about his country. He stressed that Western radio stations, especially the BBC, were hostile to the Ugandan government. Contrary to obvious facts, he added, Western reports ascribed to the Ugandan army the crimes committed by gangs linked to foreign reactionaries.

p The press in the West attacks furiously revolutionary change in developing countries. Suffice it to recall the slander imperialist propaganda has heaped on Vietnam, Kampuchea, Afghanistan, Iran, Cuba, and Nicaragua.

p In March 1982 The Washington Post published an article about the way the CIA had used the American mass media to prepare the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. The article quoted a former CIA officer as saying that in 1965 the Johnson administration and the CIA concocted " 85 evidence" to argue that the hostilities in Vietnam were continuing due to arms deliveries from abroad. The objective of the ruse was to prepare the ground for intervention by the United States. By accident, the officer came across files containing detailed plans for the preparation of such fabrications.

p One of the papers described a plan of loading a vessel resembling a Vietnamese coastal cargo ship with CIA-supplied weapons originally manufactured in socialist countries. A mock battle was to be staged in which the ship would founder close to the shore. The captured weapons were to be shown to Western journalists as proof of foreign assistance to the Vietcong.

p Another example of the “free” Western press manufacturing numerous trumped-up stories about Indochina concerns Kampuchea. In February 1982, a new scandal broke out in the American press. The American journalist Christopher Jones admitted that an article he had written for The New York Times Magazine about the four weeks he had spent with Pol Pot’s guerrillas in Kampuchea was a fraud.

p Instead of going to Kampuchea, Jones said, he spent the month of July working on the article in his parents’ apartment. In August, with the job finished, he flew to Locarno, Switzerland, and sent the article to New York from there, to create the impression that he had just arrived in Switzerland from Thailand to take a well-deserved vacation after a difficult and dangerous journey through the jungle.

p Jones wrote about his adventures in Southwestern Kampuchea, where Pol Pot’s troops had 86 supposedly established a stronghold and about his trek to the South together with the Khmer Rouge. The article also purported to describe a battle in which Vietnamese helicopter gunships and tanks took part. There had been no reliable reports of any such battles in Western Kampuchea. Besides, doubts could be raised by Jones’s graphic account of the battle at the end of which, the author claimed confidently, he had spotted Pol Pot himself through field glasses on a distant hill slope. No outsider has seen this elusive man since 1979. Further, no Westerner had visited the area where the battle supposedly took place—the remote and dangerous Jardamon mountain range—since the start of the hostilities in 1978.

p On January 13, 1982, The Village Voice of New York published an article saying the part of Jones’s story about a blind Kampuchean minstrel was obviously borrowed from a book by Andre Malraux, the well-known French author and public figure, who had visited Indochina in the late 1940s. When Jones was accused of plagiarism, he .said he needed "a piece of color.”

Explaining his way of thinking up characters, Jones said he had compiled a list of all the Khmer names he knew and then started to cross out those that did not sound right. Kampuchean officials have said that "Comrade Kanika," the name used in the article to describe a "muscular man with close-cropped gray hair," was in fact that of a woman working in the Khmer Rouge office in Paris.