PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
MOSCOW
[1]Translated from the Russian by Dmitry Beliavsky
Designed by Vadim Novikov
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[2]CONTENTS
Page
In Lieu of an Introduction.............. 5
Earth's Informosphere................. 7
The Information Business of Imperialism ... 18
The ``Nonprofit'' Disguise ............. 32
Spiritual Colonialism.................. 39
The Press Serving Neocolonialism........ 51
A World Psychological War? ............ 66
A New Mass Impact Weapon............ 66
The Right to Lie.................... 75.
The Propaganda Blockade ............. 87
``The Long Arm of Moscow" Yet Again .... 92
What Is ``Truth''? . .•................. 99
Poisoned Pens, Cloaks and Daggers........108
Journalists in Plain Clothes.............108
The Pentagon as Propagandist...........114
The Radio Armaments Race............120
Pulling Together....................127
Lies Mass-Produced ...................137
Against Communication Imperialism......152
One-Way Street....................152
Information and International Law.......165
The War Against UNESCO.............173
Toward a New Information Order........190
Documents (Appendix) ................211
[3] ~ [4] __ALPHA_LVL1__ IN LIEU OF AN INTRODUCTIONWhen a Latin American opens his morning paper, eight out of ten stories he reads have nothing to do with the problems of his continent. Six out of ten reports have been supplied by AP, UPI, Reuters or Agence France-Presse. In the evening, Latin Americans watch television which presents news items in the same proportion and also from foreign sources. The situation is similar in the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa too.
It has been estimated that today, the flow of information from developed capitalist nations to Asian, African and Latin American countries, where the majority of mankind lives, is 100 times the amount of news going in the opposite direction. Virtually the entire press, radio, television, and even the film industry of these continents are prisoners of Western propaganda and information services. The reasons are quite clear: capitalism has always used ideology and culture as a smokescreen to disguise its expansionism. The myth of the "civilizing mission" of the West was used to justify annexation of foreign territories, and oppression and plunder of colonies. One hundred years ago, on receiving a report that a territory in the heart of Africa had been safely acquired, King Leopold II of Belgium exclaimed with hypocritical fervor that 5 opening the way for civilization into the only part of the globe it had not yet penetrated, bringing light to the darkness that was reigning there was a crusade worthy of the age of progress. We all know what this crusade brought to Africa: it preserved poverty, illiteracy and economic backwardness for many decades.
Now that the colonial system in its classic form has practically disappeared, the imperialists still use ideological weapons to secure adVantages for themselves. Holding forth on the free flow of information, the West imposes its own views on world developments, its ideals and values on the peoples of newly independent countries. The goal it pursues is clear---to slow down national liberation and create a climate favorable to bolstering its economic domination---in other words, to replace classic colonialism with the new colonialism of transnational corporations. And so the shock waves of the "information explosion" are radiating from Western propaganda centers, both private and government-owned. In a word, the mass media remain a powerful ideological tool the imperialists use to back their economic and political expansionism.
Naturally, those who have thrown off the colonial yoke and are building a new life are not happy with this state of affairs. They uphold their right to inform their people, to develop their own cultures. This struggle is gaining momentum.
[6] __ALPHA_LVL1__ EARTH'S INFORMOSPHEREThe "computerization of society," the " information explosion," "information warfare"---these subjects and titles which appeared in highly specialized monographs only recently---are today discussed in the press and on television.
Electronic systems offer vast opportunities for storing all kinds of information. The introduction of computers into printing has revolutionized the newspaper industry. Not only Europeans or North Americans but also villagers in the Himalayas and bedouins in the Sahara are now feeling the impact of electronics in their daily life. Communication satellites in outer space and transistor radios in the hands of illiterate nomads have become a sign of the times. The hunger for information is rooted not only in man's innate curiosity, but also in the objective laws of social development, the internationalization of our world and the expansion of economic, cultural and other international ties.
The 4.5 billion people of Earth today own over one billion radio receivers and 500 million television sets. Theoretically, all of them can simultaneously be shown what is happening at the Soviet Salyut space station or the launching of the American Space Shuttle. Modern technology enables everyone to witness developments of global and even cosmic significance---all it takes is 7 the activation of the three international television systems:' Inversion, Eurovision and INTELSAT.
Every family can now attend cultural festivals and world athletic competitions. The ball sent by Rossi, the Italian soccer player voted the best player of the 1982 world championship in Spain, hits the goalpost---and two billion people on all continents gasp in front of their television sets.
The world receives information from 150 major news agencies, 30,000 radio and television stations and 8,200 daily newspapers with a total run of 440 million copies. The press, radio, television and documentary films make millions of people virtual eyewitnesses of events taking place anywhere in the world and work to shape public opinion on key issues of world politics. The international climate, the possibility of averting a destructive new war, solutions to global problems, and trust among nations depend to a great extent on what kind of information is disseminated in different parts of the world.
``Everyone can see," "hear," ``read''---these phrases are a sign of the times. Nevertheless, the lines written about Africa by the Soviet poet Leonid Martynov 20 years ago still sound topical today:
By fresh wounds in her body
She traces battle scenes,
And learns about her future
From foreign magazines.
There are about 4.5 copies of newspapers per 100 Africans and one television set per 300---- several times less than the corresponding figures for Europeans or North Americans. Eight 8 African countries publish no newspapers, 13 have only one each. As a rule, the number of copies does not exceed 10,000, Television is nonexistent in 30 Asian and African countries, and 18 African and 16 Asian nations have no news agencies of their own. Asia, Africa and Latin America, where some two-thirds of the world population live, account for only five per cent of the world's television facilities, 15 per cent of all television sets and 12.5 per cent of the world's newspapers. But even this meager share of the mass media largely belongs to foreign capital and, while officially considered national, these organs do the bidding of their owners. This is not a sign, but a paradox of the times, a holdover of colonial rule. Singularly enough, in our age when communication and information means are developing at a breathtaking rate, the disparities in the per capita numbers of television and printing facilities, newspapers, radio receivers and television sets are not diminishing, but growing.
Even a cursory analysis of statistics---and not only in the information sphere---supplied by the United Nations and other international organizations immediately shows that only a small part of the world population lives "in our day and age," while some 70 per cent of mankind have hardly reached the 19th-century level of Europe. The figures reflect an ugly truth: about 900 million people suffer from hunger; as many are afflicted by chronic malnutrition; one-third of the world population, according to UNESCO, is illiterate; and 50 per cent of the inhabitants of remote areas live in conditions unfit for human beings, and are deprived of the most elementary 9 social services.
It is not enough for a national of a developing country to be literate to know what is happening in the world. In many Asian, Latin American and African countries, far from everyone can afford to buy newspapers, magazines and other products of the printing industry. For example, an annual subscription to a local paper costs a teacher in Bombay the money he earns in 23 days; the figure for an average technician in Bangkok or Manila is 11 days.
As a result, millions of people are deprived of access to information, to books and films, and are virtually isolated from the outside world. Although instantaneous communication with any spot on the globe is now feasible through the use of satellites, most developing countries depend on the old telephone network, which comprises the cables laid on the ocean floor by Great Britain, the United States and France in the 19th century, the heyday of colonialism. The Ivory Coast can call Zaire only via the Paris telephone network; a call from Kenya to neighboring Tanzania is routed through London; and a call from Bolivia to neighboring Paraguay, via New York.
World public opinion is naturally concerned with how information is controlled and produced. Currently, the United States, Japan and several West European countries control 75 per cent of all the editions published in the capitalist world. For example, control is exercised over the publication of encyclopedias and various reference books, which interpret the experience and history of many developing countries in a biased and sometimes deliberately distorted way. The 10 monopoly over the "culture industry "means, among other things, the publication of manuals, textbooks and fiction through which the West imposes its own languages, lifestyles, social values and consumer patterns on developing countries. This process is far from spontaneous.
As the national liberation movement rises, and as the capitalist system undergoes new grave changes, the struggle is shifting to the sphere of ideology too. Today, imperialism is concentrating on its ideological services, so they could form a powerful spearhead capable of resisting social change on the local and global scale. Expansionism works in the economic, military and ideological spheres. Now, the teletypes of Western news agencies serve the aims gunboats used to serve in the imperial era. The French researcher Herve Bourge notes in this connection that freedom of the press as interpreted in the West and as applied to developing countries means merely freedom for the rich to control the media and silence the poor.
But London, New York, Paris or Brussels can no longer decide the fate of entire continents or tell hundreds of millions of Indians or Africans how they should live. Today, the Western propaganda machine has to search for new arguments to justify its old policies. One can no longer simply proclaim the "divinely ordained" right of the white man to bring the light of civilization to peoples at a lower stage of social development---in other words, to rule and exploit them. That kind of crude demagoguery was used to veil the orgy of colonial plunder in the early capitalist period. Now, one has to count with 11 the changes brought about by the disintegration of the colonial system and the strengthening of socialism. Hence the increasingly important role of "ideological warfare" against newly independent nations.
Hence also the remarkable interest Western ideologists now display in the so-called "Third World," which they ignored and despised for so long. Bourgeois researchers and experts in propaganda and sociology have begun to look feverishly for new techniques of ideological influence to facilitate the implanting of intricate and disguised forms of neocolonialism which would rely not only on military might but also on those within developing countries who share neocolonialist ideas. Methodically and persistently, Western propaganda foments nationalist sentiments among Latin Americans, Africans and Asians, aiming to influence the lifestyles of, above all, the ruling classes and intellectuals in developing countries.
In our age, the imperialists cannot expect to succeed if they openly proclaim their true aims. They are forced to build a whole system of ideological myths designed to obscure their real intentions and to lull nations into a false sense of security. No expenses are spared to achieve this goal.
Unfortunately, the information industry of the capitalist world is in the hands of monopoly capital, which fully controls this sector through several giant concerns. In the nonsocialist world, they control some 80 per cent of the total circulation of daily newspapers, 90 per cent of internationally broadcasting radio stations and 95 per 12 cent of all television facilities. Almost 80 per cent of the information disseminated in capitalist and developing countries originates in the four largest bourgeois news agencies---UPI (United Press International), AP (Associated Press), Reuters and France-Presse. The information provided by the few national information agencies belonging to developing countries is not featured in the newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts or television programs of the imperialist powers. The only exceptions are reports on coups, armed clashes, religious riots, border skirmishes, accidents, famine, or natural disasters. The socio-- economic gains of newly independent nations are either ignored completely or distorted.
Typically, Western governments and mass media tycoons immediately brand any attempt to end this dependence---for example, by setting up independent information centers or strengthening the existing national agencies---as flagrant violation of the so-called freedom of information.
Meanwhile, everything possible is being done to play down the emergence of transnational corporations---powerful monopolist cartels---in the information industry. The American sociologist Herbert I. Schiller says in his book The Mind Managers: "...These aggressive bussiness empires organize the world market as best they can, subject, of course, to the uneven and partial constraints of national regulation, often minimal, and differential levels of economic development in the areas in which they are active. In furthering their goals of securing worldwide markets and unimpeded profitability, they are compelled 13 to influence, and if possible dominate, every cultural and informational space that separates them from total control of their global/national environment. This not a short-run necessity: it is a permanent condition that arises out of a market system and the way that system establishes its priorities and consequently its rewards and sanctions.''^^1^^
Currently, 1.5 such TNCs dominate the manufacture of radio, television and printing equipment, including electronic printing devices, radio and television communication satellites, paper, inks and other elements of the mass media technical infrastructure. They buy up publishing companies, radio and television stations, newspapers and magazines, and they virtually have a grip on the information market. U. S. capital predominates in ten of these corporations. No wonder that the United States increasingly directs and coordinates the activities of the centers of communication imperialism.
Besides, for all the seemingly great distance between their major business objectives and this field, TNGs have been invading the sphere of ideology increasingly often, especially in recent years. According to the well-known U.S. diplomat and historian George Kennan, the interplay of the interests and connections of business, politics and ideology has led to the emergence of a motley, but large and noisy crowd. The monopolies belonging or closely _-_-_
~^^1^^ Herbert I. Schiller, "Communication and Cultural Domination", International Journal of Politics, IASP, Inc., New York, Winter 1975-76, p. 7.
14 related to the so-called military-industrial complex---IBM, Westinghouse and Western Electric of the United States, Siemens of West Germany and Matra of France---are especially active in their efforts to gain control of mass media. We are obviously dealing with an attempt to blend propaganda and military production and to turn ideology into a cog in the machinery of oppression, aggression and plunder. Here is where all sorts of anticommunist myths and various hysterical and thoroughly slanderous propaganda campaigns are conceived, nurtured and fanned.The militarization of social thinking, lifestyles and politics has gone particularly far in the United States. The idea that violence and wars are inherent in human nature is present in statements made by the current American leaders. High-level government officials maintain that nuclear war is not all that terrible, that it is winnable. War propaganda goes hand-in-hand with crude demagoguery and slander aimed against the Soviet Union and the other countries of the socialist community, against progressive regimes in developing nations, and all forces of social progress and national liberation. Imperialist efforts to brainwash Asians, Africans and Latin Americans are on the rise. The U.S. ruling quarters and their allies speak openly of their plans to use any means, including armed force, so as to retain or establish control over areas allegedly of "vital importance" to the West. They proclaim their intention to resist social and other domestic changes there, since the United States sees them as a sign of danger.
Western propaganda is in the vanguard of imperialist policy, clearing the path for the latter, 15 justifying its crimes and trying to make it appear respectable. To achieve this, the concepts of good and evil, of progress and reaction are actually transposed. For example, in stories about El Salvador the word ``terrorists'' stands for patriots, "fratricidal war" for the liberation struggle, "social force" for murderers, ``government'' for fascists, and ``advisers'' for American interventionists.
Actually, the entire world is the target of the political and ideological U.S. imperialist effort. The image of diversity deliberately created for imperialist propaganda is used to facilitate the manipulation of people's consciousness in the interests of capitalism. Today, reactionary propaganda is trying to make people in the nonsocialist part of the world forget the notions of peaceful coexistence and cooperation, of friendship among nations, to rob them of the belief that states with different socio-economic systems can work together to solve urgent global problems. There is incessant talk to the effect that force is what shapes and will shape for ages to come the course of developments, that military might and readiness to use it without hesitation at any moment are what is behind whatever happens in international relations.
The warlike, chauvinist course of the U.S. administration increasingly alarms responsible political figures, including those in the United States, and prompts sizable social forces all over the world to oppose it.
The change in the alignment of world forces, the rising prestige of the socialist countries, the eradication of classic colonialism, the growing 16 weight on the international scene of former colonies and of the nonaligned movement, and finally, the fact that many developing countries favor a socialist-oriented course have created favorable conditions for rebuffing aggressive imperialist schemes. The peoples subjected to colonial rule in the past are now fully aware of the importance of the mass media for their national resurgence.
[17] __ALPHA_LVL1__ THE INFORMATION BUSINESS OF IMPERIALISM __ALPHA_LVL2__ [introduction.]Mark Twain once remarked ironically that there were only two sources radiating light throughout the world---the sun in heaven and the Associated Press on Earth. In those days,four major agencies reigned supreme on the international information market: Reuters of Great Britain, Havas of France,Wolff of Germany and the Associated Press of the United States. They had divided the world into spheres of influence, and each agency had a monopoly in collecting and disseminating news. That was the way a phenomenon began to emerge over 100 years ago which Urho Kekkonen, former President of Finland, has described today as "communication imperialism.''^^1^^
Of course, many changes have occurred since the times of Mark Twain. Havas and Wolff have disappeared, and their successors had to make room rfor pushy American competitors. Radio and electronics have replaced pigeon posts and telegraph lines. The socialist world has freed itself forever from the capitalist news monopolies. Nevertheless, communication imperialismstill holds sway over some two-thirds of the world population---primarily in Asia, Africa _-_-_
~^^1^^ Television Traffic-a One-Way Street?, UNESCO Report No. 70, 1974, p. 44.
18 and Latin America. The imperialist cartel, which controls most of newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, the film industry and the network of film theaters denies the nationals of scores of developing countries their right to freedom of information.Although many of these countries have thrown off the colonial yoke and embarked on the path of independent development, most of them are still unable to learn about foreign and domestic developments from their own newspapers, and radio and television broadcasts.
In her paper analyzing the spiritual impact of the West on the developing world, the American researcher Rita Cruise O'Brien says that in their cultural expansionism, such media giants as the BBC, the French RTF and the American NBC are pushing farther and farther in Africa, Asia and Latin America.^^1^^
Note that, compared to official propaganda agencies targeted against foreign countries, the mass media owned by monopoly capital---news agencies, the press, radio, television and commercial advertising---affect a much greater audience much more powerfully. Also, the information sector, which comprising the biggest TNCs, combines and coordinates its operations with those of Western government agencies; they pool their efforts in a bid to dominate the _-_-_
~^^1^^ See: Rita Cruise O'Brien, Domination and Dependence in Mass Communication: Implications for the Use of Broadcasting in Developing Countries, I.D.S. Discussion Paper No. 64, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, October 1974, in: Herbert I. Schiller, op. cit., p. 12.
19 intellectual life of the peoples subjected to imperialist neocolonialist expansionism.Gunboat diplomacy has now become obsolete, but mass media diplomacy is flourishing. However, recent developments show that the imperialists today favor a combination of "media diplomacy" with the techniques of military and diplomatic blackmail, intimidation of other countries, ideological subversion and terrorist acts.
News agencies are the most traditional tools of imperialist ideology, offering the broadest and most important channels for external propaganda. They have virtually monopolized the supply of information to the press, radio and television of all developed capitalist and develop' ing countries (see table).
These multinational monopolies shape power structure designed to imprint people's minds with cultural imperialism. The monopolies and their retainers select only the kind of information they want to disseminate; they are the ones who decide what region, country or social system they will report on.
The Western mass media are given a clear-cut social mission: France-Presse is virtually controlled by the French government, Reuters has long been the champion of Great Britain's colonial interests; AP and UPI are loyal servants of U. S. monopoly capital. In the past, this even used to be advertised. For example, in 1930, Sir Roderick Jones, President of Reuters, told journalists that, over the 60 years of Reuters' activity in the Far East, his agency had been the most powerful factor of all that had worked to __PARAGRAPH_PAUSE__ 20
MAJOR INTERNATIONAL NEWS AGENCIES*
Number Number of Number Number Number of coun- subscribers of coun- of per- of corres- tries ser- tries sonnel pendents viced with abroad accredited corres- pondents 1 2 3 4 5 6 AP 108 1,320 news- 62 foreign over 3,000 560 papers; bureaus 3, 400 trans- mitters in* Based on data published in: World Communications, a 200-Country Survey of Press, Radio, Television and Film, Gower Press (Unipub), the UNESCO Press, Paris, 1975; Many Voices, One World, Kogon Page (Unipub), UNESCO, Paris, 1980.
[21] __PARAGRAPH_CONT__ enhance the prestige and influence of Great Britain both directly and indirectly.Political motives are so strong in the operation of major Western news agencies that they often dominate over the commercial interests of these TNCs, which claim to be only private enterprises. For example, there have been cases when UPI continued to service this or that customer in the developing world even when the subscriber became insolvent. This kind of charity proves that the allegedly purely commercial corporations do have serious political interests. Obviously, these companies are helping the ruling quarters of capitalist countries and monopoly capital itself to ideologically manipulate public opinion both at home and abroad.
The information produced by Western news agencies has always served the goals of imperialist propaganda. As early as the late 1950s, Juan Jose Arevalo, former President of Guatemala, noted quite justly in his book Anticommunism in Latin America that U.S. news agencies had introduced "Hearst's methods" into the bourgeois Latin American press. These methods are: "...to fabricate news and present it as authentic; to mutilate news by truncating it; to turn slander into news and deny answering space to the victim; to edit news by adding alien elements; to delay publication until the news loses its effect; to interpret news arbitrarily; to bury important items under a deluge of commercial notices; to ban publication of certain stories; to attribute fictitious statements to someone; to put a phrase in quotes creating the impression that it is a quotation; to say in the 22 heading what the story does not say, etc.''^^1^^
The position taken by UPI or AP vis-a-vis this or that foreign government or international event always reflects the approach of the U.S. State Department. This was borne out during the 1982 conflict between Great Britain and Argentina, when U.S. news agencies described the aggressive foray of British imperialism as legitimate and just. Or take the pro-Israeli reporting during the 1982 Israeli aggression in Lebanon.
The imperialist countries' news agencies, especially UPI, do not shy from concocting blatant fabrications. An American newspaper editor has said that UPI still operates on the principle of "get the story first and worry about the facts later.''^^2^^ We are not talking about hasty or incompetent reporting but about a planned strategy aimed at misinforming public opinion.
Unfortunately, most of developing countries' information media---whether a news agency, a big newspaper, a radio corporation or a television company---cannot afford to maintain a staff of foreign correspondents. The following figures on the biggest Asian news agencies highlight this disparity: the Press Trust of India transmits 75,000 words daily; Antara, the Indonesian National News Agency, some 69,000 words in Indonesian and some 27,000 words in English; the Philippines News Service, 150,000 _-_-_
~^^1^^ Juan Jose Arevalo, Anticommunismo en America Latina, Editorial America Nueva, Mexico, D. F., 1959, p. 162.
~^^2^^ The Wall Street Journal, July 11, 1979.
23 words; and the Bernama National News Agency of Malaysia, 200,000 words---that is, taken together, they all produce a little over one per cent of the information turned out by the four imperialist news agencies.But that is only one aspect of the problem. The transnational giants of the electronic industry carry an equally great if not a greater weight. They have monopolized the manufacture of the means making up the communication network of the capitalist word---the network connecting TNCs, governments and military agencies. Today, it is common knowledge that communications play an instrumental role not only in ideology but also in production, management, marketing, labor distribution, in the social, military and, in the final analysis, political spheres. Better communications make it possible to gain certain political, economic and military advantages over competitors. A few transnational corporations control 75 per cent of all the systems and means of information in the capitalist world. In terms of annual turnover, the leaders are IBM, General Electric, ITT, Western Electric and Westinghouse of the United States, Philips of the Netherlands and Siemens of West Germany.
There is something sinister about the way the West dominates radio and television in developing countries, lately subjected to particularly vigorous Western propaganda. Switch on your radio in Bamako or Beirut, Manila or Singapore, Caracas or Dakar, and often for several hours running, you can hear programs rebroadcast from Paris, Munich or London. The share 24 of imported programs in several countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America is as great as 90 per cent, for they still suffer from an acute lack of financial resources, personnel, and television and radio equipment Together with sophisticated Western equipment, they import the crudest examples of bourgeois culture. Guatemala imports 84 per cent of its television programs; the corresponding figures are 78 for Singapore, 71 for Malaysia, 64 for Zambia, 63 for Nigeria, 62 for Uruguay, 57 for the Yemen Arab Republic, 55 for Kuwait and Chile each, 52 for Iraq, and 50 for the Dominican Republic.
Western documentary film studios are also monopolies. The biggest of these---the British Visnews, the Anglo-American UPI-TN, the American CBS News and ABC News, and the West German DPA-E-TE-S---are part of the leading news agencies or television companies and have a broad range of programs and powerful facilities at their disposal. Developing countries usually show documentary films produced by these studios.
The massive invasion of newly independent countries by the Western media is determined to a great extent by the dependence of these nations on the TNCs which produce printing, radio and television equipment, and have monopolized advertising. These corporations are not only completely uninterested in defending but even act frequently against the national interests of newly independent countries. These TNCs are important in the effort to make capitalist countries political and economic slaves of 25 international capital.
As a rule, manufacturers of electronic equipment are monopolies in their home countries. For example, in recent years five to seven electronic companies have invariably appeared on the list of the top 20 monopolies in the United States. Significantly, the electronic giants receive at least 40 per cent of their profits from abroad. In particular, ITT, notorious for its involvement in the fascist coup in Chile, received,' in 1974, 6.2 billion dollars from the 67 countries where its subsidiaries operated--- against its total production volume of 11.2 billion dollars. The key electronic TNCs are controlled by three banking groups---the Morgan Guaranty Trust, the Chase Manhattan Bank and the First National City Bank---that is, the biggest financial cartels of the capitalist world.
The TNCs' grip on the electronic industry proves that the bourgeois mass media are being currently transformed into a tool of international capital---primarily U.S. capital. Political and socio-psychological expansionism is an inevitable concomitant of imperialist economic expansionism; in other words, foreign investment leads to export of ideology.
With the increase of their direct investments and the creation of their subsidiaries in Africa and Asia, TNCs have become capable of exerting ideological influence on other countries by shaping elite strata and imposing on them Western habits and intellectual, behavioral and consumer patterns. Commercial advertising is the channel used for this purpose. In many Asian, African and Latin American countries, 26 the cost of advertising, on the average, makes up 30 per cent of these nations' education, science and culture budgets. In these countries, even the progressive press is forced by financial considerations to publish whole pages of Western advertisements, which, the Tanzanian Daily News has noted, are strikingly antisocialist and anti-African. Progressive African figures have repeatedly stressed that this type of advertising encourages renunciation of traditional cultural values and foists Western consumer attitudes on Africans. The poet Bernard Dadie of the Ivory Coast described this succinctly when he wrote: "A car I can't afford to buy, and so to them I am small fry.''
Western advertising should be viewed as an internationally important factor, because the few capitalist countries which produce most of the world's advertising, exert powerful influence on the rest of the nonsocialist world not only in political but also in economic terms. In many newly free countries, monopoly capital uses well-paid advertising to control the mass communication media and at home, to push radio, television and the press in the desired direction. In the final analysis, the economic might of the transnational companies operating in developing countries contributes to the rapid spread of a dangerous social disease---the disease of consumerism propagated by ubiquitous advertising. "Consumer society" values and ideas permeating Western-produced information, advertising and entertainment run counter both to the ultimate goals and to the current objectives of newly independent countries. Western 27 propaganda clashes with distinctive national cultures, provokes grave domestic conflicts, fosters reckless permissiveness in the elite, corrupts it ideologically and isolates it from the masses, it also indoctrinates young intellectuals with bourgeois values. Corruption, egoism, the cult of money and high life and other shining examples of Western culture are deliberately transplanted into the socio-political and cultural realities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The result is a peculiar symbiosis of tribal prejudices and so-called mass culture---precisely what monopoly capital needs. The unchecked, ``free'' operation of the Western mass media in Asia, Africa and Latin America naturally produces an adverse effect and prevents many countries in these regions from preserving their distinctive cultural images. And, as the prominent Indian journalist Dinker Rao Mankekar says, transnational agencies are neither socially nor legally responsible for their actions to either their host country or to world public opinion.
Many competent commissions and participants in various international conferences have analyzed the situation currently obtaining in the field of information in Asian and African countries. A representative conference of publishers and editors organized by UNESCO in Florence in the spring of 1977 discussed in detail questions of "free and balanced exchanges of information" between developed and developing countries. One of the commissions established by this forum drew up a document stating that in Africa, the newspapers, periodicals, films and television programs of developed 28 countries return the highest profits (in particular, in the French-speaking countries)---a situation partly due to the meager circulation of national publications.. These Western- newspapers, periodicals and films rarely deal with Africa proper and draw the attention of the audience to completely alien problems. The Western mass media offer extremely scant information about African developments and rarely analyze African problems.
With regard to Asia, the commission stated that the giant transnational communication companies were often capable of daily spending sums equivalent to annual budgets of national news agencies. The impression was, the commission noted, that in Asia, public opinion was being increasingly shaped by transnational corporations.
The situation in Latin America was described as follows: first, 16 major Latin American dailies receive 80 per cent of all foreign news reports from UPI, AP, Reuters and FrancePresse. These agencies transmit practically no information from Latin America. Besides, only a small percentage of the stories on Latin America these agencies do report finds ' its ways into the press, radio and television. A survey of 108 evening news programs transmitted by the three largest U.S. television networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) showed that international news items made up only 20 per cent of the information supplied, and of these 20 per cent, only two per cent related to Latin America.
Second, the news agencies of the leading capitalist countries focus on topics of interest to 29 the information markets they regard as the most important---that is, to Western nations.
Third, the current world information structure practically ignores what is actually happening in Latin America.
Fourth, the image of persons, organizations or governments advocating socio-economic change in Latin America is mostly negative. For example, during the period surveyed, Ecuador deported several Catholic clergymen who had arrived there to take part in an international conference on various topical issues. The reports filed by the four agencies described the conference as "unusual," the arrival of the clergymen as " clandestine," and the clergymen themselves as "Reds," "Marxists," and "Communists." This was a rehash of the official statement by the military government concerning the decision to deport the clergymen, while their explanations arguing that the conference was legitimate were ignored.
No wonder political figures, sociologists, journalists and intellectuals are seriously discussing the problem of Western ideological expansionism in Asian, African and Latin American developing countries. This discussion is pursued in the press and at various international forums. Some of these countries are taking steps to protect themselves from the influence of bourgeois propaganda; joint steps to resist it are also being drawn up.
Now that practically all former colonies and dependent territories have gained political independence, developed capitalist countries, above all the United States, are conducting their 30 propaganda in the guise of such concepts as the "free flow of information," "free exchange of ideas" and "free cultural exchanges." The old "freedom of the press" slogan is also being used---interpreted by bourgeois ideologists more broadly in our age of scientific and technological revolution as "world press freedom." Of course, the substance of this slogan remains unchanged---in Lenin's words, the "freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake 'public opinion' for the benefit of the bourgeoisie."^^1^^ The only difference is the growing technical opportunities for the imperialists to pursue this "freedom of the press." Special international organizations have been even set up uniting the biggest capitalist communication monopolies in their crusade to ensure "world press freedom.''
For example, since 1973, the so-called World Press Freedom Committee has been active in Boston. The committee comprises press trusts, radio and television companies and news agencies from several Western countries. The charter of this organization states quite openly that all its members are to use information supplied by AP, UPI, Reuters, and the like. A book published by the committee stresses that its main objective is to increase the global flow of information---the same "free flow of information" from Western sources. Many other similar organizations in the West also pay lip service to _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "A Letter to G. Myasnikov," Collected Works, Vol. 32, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, p. 505.
31 ``freedom of the press" to disguise Western ideological expansionism in developing countries.Reflecting the interests of big capital, the mass media are playing a dual role in Asia, Africa and Latin America. First, like any other branch of the capitalist economy, they are striving to secure the biggest possible profits by ruthlessly exploiting their weaker partners, to suppress and subjugate them economically and, in the final analysis, ideologically. Second, they are powerful tools for ideologically brainwashing newly independent nations, and modern scientific and technological advances are used to achieve this end. This explains the particular attention the ruling classes of capitalist countries pay to the information industry. That is why the so-called privately owned mass media engage in the propaganda of bourgeois ideology, of the capitalist way of life, of the objectives of Western diplomacy---that is, in propaganda aimed at foreign countries---as much as the special government agencies of Western countries. The ruling elite of the imperialist powers sees the struggle against revolutionary and progressive forces and the vigorous ideological expansionism on all continents as a task just as important as that of spiritually subjugating the working masses in the West itself.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ The ``Nonprofit'' DisguiseNo single population group in capitalist countries, whether in terms of occupation or age, escapes the information juggernaut. The reason 32 for the oversaturation of the information market is neither lavish abundance nor carefree extravagance. The flow of information is carefully directed and regulated.
No one can offer even an approximate estimate of how much money is actually spent on ideological indoctrination in Western nations. Different sources put U.S. allocations on external propaganda at five to ten billion dollars annually. U.S. News & World Report, which speaks on behalf of the American business community, admits that even Washington's official allocations earmarked for the propaganda of the Western---mostly American---way of life and for instilling bourgeois moral and spiritual values in the minds of working people in various countries are at least 2.5 billion dollars a year.^^1^^
The fact that the right wing is gaining ground is easily traceable in the development of the bourgeois mass media. Of course, contradictions--- sometimes quite acute ones---do arise between different groups of the bourgeoisie, and this is reflected in the media. Suffice it to recall the resounding campaigns in the United States over the Watergate affair or concerning corruption among Presidential aides. However, as soon as the very basis of the capitalist system is called into question, the press immediately discards its mask of independence and rallies to the defense of the ruling quarters. Its pluralism, extolled so much by bourgeois ideologists, turns _-_-_
~^^1^^ See U. S. News & World Report, Vol. LXXXVII, No. 9, August 27, 1979, p. 43.
__PRINTERS_P_33_COMMENT__ 3--848 33 out to be a gaudy but thin veil concealing the brainwashing mechanism from the people.Major ideological guidelines for this mechanism are usually developed by privately owned "think tanks" attached to universities and research centers. The documents and surveys prepared there contain recommendations for domestic and external propaganda and deal both with the current and with the long-term, strategic objectives of the imperialist countries. Monopoly capital controls the operation of these "think tanks" indirectly, through ``nonprofit'' foundations. Monopolies invest part of their multibillion profits as tax deductible contributions to these foundations. The monopolist steps back, and the highly skilled experts in international relations, propaganda and regional problems---people who take great pride in being "free agents"---are now looking not at an exploiter but at a starry-eyed idealist, the founder of foundation. That is how the illusion of indepedence both of the government and of the capitalist is created.
In fact, such organizations exist in all major Western countries, but they are especially widespread in the United States, where over 17,000 such foundations operate. Of these, over half the money invested is concentrated in some 250 foundations, above all the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation with assets of, respectively, three billion and 850 million dollars. Naturally, the richest customer calls the tune. The Ford Foundation conceals its political aims behind an elaborate smokescreen of scientific doubletalk, while its practical 34 operation is tied to imperialist policy and propaganda. Its foremost concerns are opinion polls and political forecasting designed to produce advance information on undesirable developments the United States may have to face abroad. The Ford Foundation provides generous subsidies not only to private universities in foreign, primarily developing, countries, but also to U.S. universities, orienting them toward foreign studies.
Many American universities also receive such commissions from the foundations and government agencies, including the intelligence community. The University of California, Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are especially active in this field. Simultaneously, these and many other research centers exchange students and staff with their foreign counterparts. The aim is to assist in the implementation of U.S. foreign policy, propagate bourgeois ideology and fight against communism.
Ideas underlying foreign policy propaganda campaigns are supplied by what Newsweek has described as the new "idea factories of the right.''^^1^^ The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, one of such centers, focuses its studies on anticommunism. While he was Governor of California, Ronald Reagan was elected an honorary member of this institution. After he became U.S. President, he made many leading researchers from this mainstay of _-_-_
~^^1^^ Newsweek, Vol. XCVII, No. 22, December 1, 1980, p. 28.
35 conservative thought advisers to his administration.Other "think tanks" of the right, including those dealing with foreign policy propaganda, include the Institute for Contemporary Studies, which specializes in current data analysis, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis ("we stress the danger of international Communism and the need for a strong defense for the United States," its assistant director has said^^1^^), and Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, set up in 1962. Established to devise a "grand strategy" for the United States, it is working, among other things, to substantiate the need for a permanent American military presence in hot spots around the world.
Ronald Reagan's arrival at the White House has enhanced considerably the role American ``nonprofit'' foundations, universities and research centers play in identifying the immediate objectives of imperialism abroad, including its ideological tasks. In late 1980, a group of Ronald Reagan's advisers (professors Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Pipes of Georgetown University, and others) drew up recommendations for the new U.S. administration, including some on external propaganda. Essentially, they advised replacing Jimmy Carter's doctrine of " protecting human rights" with an open effort to • defend authoritarian regimes.
The Heritage Foundation, an ultraconservative organization established in 1973 to analyze a broad range of U.S. foreign and domestic _-_-_
~^^1^^ Ibid., p. 29. 36
36 policy issues, has a special role to play in the shaping and implementation of U.S. external propaganda. The White House, Congress, the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA are among its customers. One might also recall that the election platform of Ronald Reagan and of the Republican Party as a whole was shaped largely by the Heritage Foundation.The ``nonprofit'' foundations cooperate with one another and with their creators, the U.S. corporations operating abroad, represent U.S. government and civic organizations and provide cover for U.S. intelligence services. In other words, the foundations not only prepare but also implement ideological subversion.
They are working above all against the socialist system, the liberation and democratic movements, to secure world hegemony for the richest and closest-knit handful of financiers and industrialists and for politicians serving big capital.
Using these foundations, universities and other research centers which prepare ideological and political concepts for the mass media, monopoly capital controls---directly or through the distribution of huge advertising fees---and thus inevitably predetermines the position of the press, radio and television. As Roy Thomson, an international newspaper tycoon, has said, wealthy people tend to be conservative. Those journalists who, in the eyes of their masters, are not conservative enough, are dismissed from their jobs.
Those working for the press, radio, television and the film industry are subjected to intense 37 pressure from bourgeois governments too. For example, the British Foreign Office regularly mails propaganda materials to columnists. In the United States, there have been sensational disclosures to the effect that many influential journalists have either written for many years what the CIA has wanted them to write or simply signed copy sent out from Langley.
Communication imperialism is a form of the struggle the moribund system is waging against today's revolutionary, progressive forces. As an ideology, it means propaganda of anticommunism, social inequality, militarism and racial hatred. As a policy, it represents a broad range of carefully designed measures to discredit revolutionary and national liberation movements, undermine the foundations of the social system existing in countries where the working class has won, and diminish the attractiveness of these nations' example for other peoples.
Under social contract to the bourgeoisie, information monopolies misrepresent developments in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the socialist countries.
Communication imperialism is the main obstacle to the establishment of a new international information order. Resistance to imperialist trends in the sphere of information is an urgent task of progressive forces throughout the world.
[38] __ALPHA_LVL1__ SPIRITUAL COLONIALISM __ALPHA_LVL2__ [introduction.]A mere 50 years ago the colonialists had to practically force Africans to come and see Western films. On orders from their tribal chiefs, intimidated or bribed by film distributors, people had to give a chicken, a basketful of rice, a wood or ivory carving to pay for entrance to something very remotely resembling a movie theater. The ticket was an ink stamp applied to the "film-goer`s'' hand.
Of course, things have changed since then, but the essence of this phenomenon---a strange blend of business and mandatory introduction of millions in Asia, Africa and Latin America to so-called Western mass culture---has remained unaltered. The scope of cultural infiltration has grown thousandfold, and the techniques used now bear no relation to what was used before. The neocolonialists are using television, a powerful means of mass communication which has swiftly and enormously expanded the capabilities of the film industry.
INTELSAT, a space telecommunications transnational corporation comprising 90 capitalist and developing countries, was established as early as the mid-1960s for the commercial use of satellites in television broadcasts, telephone and telegraph communications. The biggest shareholder of INTELSAT is COMSAT, a 39 U.S. company. Naturally, this system is used in the interests of monopoly groups based in imperialist powers, primarily the United States.
As a result of this kind of often forced Americanization and Europeanization of newly independent countries' television, the daily audience outside the United States watching American television programs is now 65 million. During the discussion of a bill to ban participation in foreign-owned mass media, Eduardo Valverde, prominent art critic and member of the Costa Rican parliament, said that more than 85 per cent of the programs watched by Costa Ricans were produced abroad by people who neither knew nor cared for the customs, traditions, national features or cultural and democratic aspirations of Latin Americans.
Current bourgeois management theories see television as an important and organic factor of control over human behavior. Television is the subject of thousands of papers written in the search for the best way of exerting ideological influence. A recent example is a monograph issued by the RAND Corporation, a center specializing in strategic studies. The authors of this collection have reviewed over 2,500 books, using data from scores of opinion polls, and analyzed hundreds of television programs shown over recent years. Their conclusion is that television is ahead of the other mass media in shaping social consciousness. Among children and teenagers, the collection notes, television has become more influential in educational terms than their parents or schools, while with adults it has emerged as the chief source of 40 information which determines their social behavior. That is why American political scientists suggest reliance on a theory maintaining that the viewer is the target of televised propaganda. Ardent champions of American econdmic and social values are selected to create political news. They cover developments proceeding from their philosophy. Usually, they are more eager to notice what is bad than what is good about socialist and developing countries. They tend to find propaganda in Soviet statements more often than in American ones. Thus the professional criteria of journalists reflect their status as hired hands of profit-oriented businesses, as loyal servants of capitalism.
In order to export their ideological products, U.S. monopolies deliberately deflate their purchase prices, in particular when selling to developing countries. As a result, in any Latin American country the balance of television program exchanges is several thousand to one in favor of foreign, primarily American companies. Purchasing television programs and films in the United States is much cheaper than producing them locally. In 1976, a half-hour television program produced in the United States at the cost of up to 200,000 dollars could be offered to Costa Rica for 60 to 70 dollars and to Kenya, for 25 to 30 dollars. Meanwhile, the production of the cheapest television serial in Mexico costs several thousand dollars. An educational television program in Pakistan employing only one announcer costs almost 300 dollars per hour.
The commercial losses U.S. monopolies incur as a result of this dumping price policy are offset 41 by U.S. government agencies and the sponsors which pay large sums to radio and television companies for advertising their products abroad. For example, the Ford Foundation finances a center supposedly studying educational television abroad but actually coordinating ideological propaganda in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Monopolies' foundations also subsidize numerous American television programs produced for export. Among the participants in their production are the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment, various advertising companies, the Pentagon, and the electronic communications monopolies.
Since television is so far poorly developed in many African and Asian countries, special attention is being paid to motion pictures---the most profitable art industry reaching the biggest audience. Darryl Zanuck, the well-known American film producer, says that films circle the globe, reaching equally easily the educated and the illiterate, government officials and those who shape public opinion outside the government. Even in India, the world's biggest. producer of films, the American and the British film industries still hold strong positions. In most African countries, which have no film studios of their own, Hollywood, the capitalist dream factory, reigns unchallenged. According to Jeune Afrique, American films take up some 60 per cent of the screen time in African movie theaters. As was noted in the book American Film as Seen by Egyptians: "With many of us, American films have become part of our daily routines, coloring in this or that 42 way our thinking, our ideology. American films can strongly affect the minds of the audience, because in the ideological struggle, the American film industry is not only an important but also a dangerous weapon---perhaps more dangerous than we think.''
The younger generation in developing countries is among the first to be affected by Western films, distributed in huge quantities by the mass media. Bourgeois films are aimed at instilling in children and teenagers a cult of violence and cruelty, rejection of ideological and spiritual values, at racial intolerance, at convincing them that social injustice is unshakable, as is private property, its guarantor. Young people are corrupted by the flow of Western pornographic films and television shows advertised by the mass media. E. Daly, an American television producer of children's shows, has commented bitterly that the crescendo of violence and crime on television robs the younger generation of faith in the future. Teenagers succumb to such a huge onslaught of actual and fictitious violence that they can no longer tell truth from fiction.
Most Western television shows and motion pictures center on crime, adventures of criminals, suicide, all kinds of perversions, gang fights, beatings, assassinations, robbery, the drug traffic, police stories, and the like. The trend setters here are the U.S. mass media. For example, Hollywood designated 1979 as a gangster movie year---apparently as a contribution to the UN-designated International Year of the Child.
American television serials featuring 43 numerous sadistic episodes are publicized widely in many Asian and African countries. A British government committee set up to study the prospects of television has noted that sex and violence are especially open in U.S. television shows exported abroad. Most American films destined for foreign consumption can safely be called skin flicks or gangster movies.
``Only entertainment?" the French journalist Maurice Maschino asks in Le Monde diplomatique. "Gradually, the public gets used to violence and is no longer outraged. When violence occurs in real life, it is no longer a case of drama, injustice or evil, but a spectacle. Like in the movies. Like on TV. Turned into a routine occurrence, it is no longer outrageous: 'Only 100 dead? '
``Commonplace violence. It paralyzes the audience's ability to feel revulsion and turns people into accomplices, ready to be attacked by others and ready to attack others in ' legitimate self-defense.'"^^1^^
Journalists from O Estado de Sao Paulo, a Brazilian newspaper, have calculated that six television stations in Sao Paulo, the biggest Brazilian city, showed 64 murders, 38 gunfights, 22 fights, 3 robberies and 9 automobile accidents within three hours in one randomly selected evening. Brazilian sociologists point to a direct link connecting the frightening rise in juvenile delinquency and crimes committed by young offenders to the "canned entertainment" imported from the United States. One-- _-_-_
~^^1^^ Le Monde diplomatique, fevrier 1979, p. 19.
44 third of Hollywood's output goes to Latin America. And although Brazil is the Western world's third biggest producer of motion pictures, it is among the top ten importers of American films.Playing on the theme of violence pays handsomely---the viewer (or listener or reader) is supposed to be jolted emotionally by the enactment of a brutal murder or sadistic violation of the body of a helpless victim. The up to 300,000 hours a year of television shows exported by the United States returns over 100 million dollars in profits to the exporting companies. The French senator Henri Caillavet has aptly called the Western mass media "an inexhaustible cave of Ali Baba from where several highborn bandits commit raids to indulge their insatiable greed." The difference from the Arabian fairy tale is that today, wealth has taken the place of "Open, Sesame" as the key to this cave.
In recent years, the Western film and television industry has flooded developing countries with "horror films." There are also motion pictures combining hard-core eroticism with crude anticommunism. Those who produce such films would like to promote escapism so that the audience would forget about the diseases afflicting the capitalist system and give up searching for ways to change life in their countries.
Cheap substitutes have replaced true film art in some Asian and African countries. Aiding the invasion of these nations by the bourgeois film industry is among the objectives of USIA, the United States Information Agency, a powerful weapon of psychological warfare.
45The Pentagon, too, exports its propaganda to developing countries. The U.S. Defense Department issues a special annotated catalogue of television films and documentaries; those made for foreign audiences are marked accordingly. A typical example is The Anatomy of Aggression, a 30-minute film which, the catalogue says, cites cases of communist aggression committed since the end of World War II and traces the steps taken by the United States to resist them. Actually, it is about nations that have, at one time or another, risen against imperialism and colonialism and about the way the Pentagon has suppressed by force of arms national liberation movements in various parts of the world. The film is a gross misrepresentation of facts and historical developments. Other Pentagon films are equally "objective.''
The British film industry, by now almost fully controlled by American capital, has largely switched to expensive ``cosmopolitan'' films, produced according to commercial and propaganda recipes and designed to be sold on the international market---primarily in the newly independent countries where television is still underdeveloped.
British films slated for export, says British film critic Nina Hibbin, are increasingly turning into a vehicle of American ideas, American themes and American tastes. As a result, she notes, by the middle of the past decade Britain produced and exported, on the average, one anticommunist spy thriller every two weeks. For all its commercial ebb and flow, this trend is still on today. Naturally, the atmosphere of spy scares 46 affects, first and foremost, the viewers in the countries which buy British films.
Playing on race prejudice, the Western motion picture and television industries have recently begun to cater to African audiences by producing so-called Black kitsch. These films are usually about a Black version of a white superman, whereas the social problems or the plight of national minorities and migrant workers in the West are totally ignored. Shown in developing countries, such films foster the myth of the free and easy life of the nonwhite population in the United States. Meanwhile, the Western media present an extremely biased image of newly independent nations. The West refers to the economic backwardness, poverty and illiteracy in "Third World" countries as features innate to them, hushes up the history of the indigenous population, its culture, traditions and colonial past, accentuates occasional disagreeable phenomena rooted in tribal prejudice and stresses whatever seems exotic---and all this is presented in a way calculated to scare the audience. This everyday racism vis-a-vis Asians, Africans and Latin Americans ignores the colonial and neocolonial patterns of dependence and the actual problems of developing countries, avoids any questions or doubts as to the role imperialism has been playing in the lives of these peoples. In other words, a distorted image of newly independent countries in the Western mass media, as well as the existence of transnational monopolies in the Held of information, aid in the preservation of Western economic domination in these regions.
47It follows that he who, as the Western mass media claim, has only himself to blame for his poverty, illiteracy and backwardness, really needs the assistance and support of the imperialist powers. They are the only source of civilization, culture, science and technology for the "Third World.''
One must admit that the information media in newly independent countries sometimes offer their customers not only Western products but also their own made to resemble the latter.
One example is the Bingo monthly, a Senegalese publication. The analysis of its content performed by the Swiss sociologist W. Meyer bears out this conclusion: much space is taken up by stories about the local elite, athletes and -actors; there are numerous Western-style advertisements of automobiles, cigarettes and liquors and the like. In other words, the monthly propagates capitalist consumer patterns and Western standards and lifestyles alien to the country in question.
Unfortunately, Western standards and values are offered not only by the mass media but also by school textbooks (textbooks and manuals account for 80 per cent of all book sales in Africa). This means that from their early years, children do not learn about their national culture, traditions or history, or even about contemporary developments; instead they read paeans to "civilized countries" which oppressed, robbed and humiliated their peoples for many years. Africans and Asians are being told all the time that they can never reach the level of West Europeans, if only because the color of their 48 skin is different. This obvious conflict generates either obsequiousness or hatred of the "cultural enemy." But when politicians in this or that country encourage the adoption of Western standards and lifestyles, this breeds an inferiority complex---the desire to be more European than Europeans. And this disdain for one's own culture, national history, language and people is the worst thing that can happen.
As to ``African'' television programs, they originate in France, Britain, the F.R.G. and the United States. At first French and British programs dominated; now the United States has pushed the former colonial powers aside and is foremost in television exports.
The leading position in television programs belongs to light serials like Bonanza and Daktari. Daktari was made on a ranch near Hollywood. Later, sequences filmed in Africa were inserted.
Daktari celebrates inequality as a model of behavior, of relations between the "civilized whites" and the "backward Blacks." The serial shows that Blacks possess latent intelligence, that they can learn and even resemble whites in some things, but their infantile ways, the superstitions and prejudices life has ingrained in them prevent them from achieving the living standards of the whites. The conclusion is obvious: only whites can help them.
Racist ideology is clearly perceptible here. Serials like Daktari are constantly fed to Western audiences, cultivating a sense of superiority in them, and to African viewers, fostering an inferiority complex. Developing countries often pay 100 times less for such serials than do __PRINTERS_P_49_COMMENT__ 4--848 49 Canada or West European countries.
The distribution of television news follows the same pattern. However, if a developing country commissions, say, Visnews to produce a special film, the cost is very high. British Visnews prefers showing a bank robbery instead of the way Tanzanian villagers or Indian craftsmen live.
That is why Kenyan television shows British parliamentary debates and cannot report on an agricultural exhibition in neighboring Uganda.
The above examples prove that communication imperialism operates in perfect harmony with Western political and economic objectives. These examples expose the "free flow of information" concept, demonstrating that a flow directed by several transnational corporations is one-sided and reflects the political and economic interests of the imperialist powers.
Under the aegis of UNESCO, the Finnish researchers Tapio Varis and Kaarle Nordensteng of Tampere University have analyzed the structure of television programs from 50 countries and their distribution abroad. Their conclusions are as follows.
1. The production of television programs slated for distribution abroad is a profit-oriented operation concentrated in several countries.
2. The distribution system created by affluent' Western nations, primarily by the United States, enables developing countries to purchase television programs at a discount.
3. Imported television programs take up most of the broadcasting time in most developing countries.
504. Imported programs are mostly motion pictures, television movies and light shows.
5. The export and exchange of television news is concentrated in the hands of three Western agencies: Visnews, UPI-TN and CBS-News.
UNESCO experts estimate that British and French television each exports to developing countries 20,000 hours of broadcasts a year. The figure for West German television companies is 6,000 hours and for the United States, 300,000 hours.
At the same time, the television shows and motion pictures of former colonies are virtually unknown to North American and West European viewers---even works by such outstanding film artists as Satyajit Ray, Arundhati Devi and Tapan Sinha (India). Their highly creative films raising urgent social problems get biased, negative reviews from American and West European film critics. They are neither publicized nor supported by government agencies and are simply rejected by distributors. Imperialist ideologists go to great lengths to picture developing nations as culturally backward. This fallacious racist argument is used to justify imperialist expansionism in ideology and culture, as well as the discrimination of literature and art from developing countries.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ The Press Serving NeocolonialismThe bourgeois press, a loyal servant of monopoly capital, is the oldest and the next most powerful tool (after television and the film __PRINTERS_P_51_COMMENT__ 4* 51 industry) of imperialist ideological expansionism in developing countries.
As far back as 1897, William Randolph Hearst, the owner of the New York Journal, one of the first empire builders of the U.S. press, sent his famous cable to his Havana correspondent: "...You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." The war duly began---through the efforts of Hearst and other U.S. tycoons--- and the correspondent supplied the pictures. As a result, the United States acquired Cuba.
The century-old textbook example is followed to this day. The only thing that would be impossible now is such a cable. Public opinion would be shocked at anything as cynical sent unscrambled, and a storm of protest would break out. Essentially, however, the pattern of the Cuban adventure repeats itself regularly in the actions taken by Western governments and their "fourth estate.''
Suffice it to recall the "Tonkin incident," used to justify the U.S. aggression in Vietnam. Or take the slanderous hullabaloo the imperialists are still mounting over Afghanistan as a pretext for their renunciation of detente.
The doctoring of news is a common occurrence in the bourgeois media. The ``free'' Western press usually resorts to this dirty trick in the course of crusades aimed against the socialist countries and national liberation movements. Crude inventions and blatant lies have been invariably present in the campaigns over "human rights," the "Soviet military threat," " international terrorism," and the like, in the attacks directed against Poland, Nicaragua and the 52 Salvadoran freedom fighters. In recent years, inventions resembling Hearst's ploy have been especially frequent in the Western press. For example, immediately after the introduction of martial law in Poland, Sigme, a French publishing house, produced a photograph depicting this "dramatic moment in the life of the Polish nation." Before this artless collage was exposed for what it was, it was featured in many bourgeois publications.
Another example has been supplied by Le Figaro magazine, the weekly supplement to Le Figaro. The magazine ran a two-page `` sensational'' pictorial report---photographs of mutilated, half-burned corpses. The caption said these were the remains of American Indians brutally murdered by Marxist commandos. Le Figaro magazine explained that units of the Marxist army of Nicaragua had invaded Honduras and used machine-guns and grenades to kill 200 Indians, including women and children.
The Nicaraguan embassy in Paris issued a protest and a denial. Le Figaro magazine was caught red-handed, and public pressure forced it to publish this denial, which proved beyond doubt that the photographs had been taken during the rule of Somoza, and not in December 1981. The denial was substantiated so well that even Adrian Fisher, a U.S. State Department spokesman, admitted that the report was fraudulent.
However, gross lies are not as dangerous as the constant propaganda of capitalist.ideology and the apologia of Western intentions supported by skillfully manufactured ``objective'' reports. American and West European propaganda is 53 making wide use of the habit of reading Western newspapers and magazines, ingrained in developing countries since colonial times.
Time, Newsweek and the British Economist are typical examples of the type of Western information and propaganda organs widely distributed in developing countries. Their marketing is handled by an extremely well-developed network of regional bureaus and printing houses which produce such editions as Time Asia (circulation 180,000) or Time Latin America (circulation 115,000). Besides, there are over 200 versions of Time magazine which differ only in the advertisements of American goods, depending on the area covered by the given version. Add to that the two million copies of Time a year distributed free of charge by the USIA in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Time and Newsweek are, of course, not the only American publications trying to spread their influence in the developing world. In 1976, The Wall Street Journal started a special edition for Asia. In 1980, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Whitney Communications, the monopolies who are joint proprietors of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune, decided to launch an Asian edition of this newspaper and earmarked several million dollars for the purpose. Besides, the news bureaus of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post daily transmit 35,000 words of mostly editorial copy to over 100 customers in 40 countries. The London Times and Le Monde of France maintain similar services, although on a smaller scale.
54There is no doubt that American periodicals of the Time type deal in propaganda. They try to create an attractive image of the United States, publicize a one-sided view of U.S. and world developments, advertise American "mass culture," and propagate consumerist psychology among their readers in order to help sell goods the monopolies produce for export. And, surrounded by advertisements of American cars and cigarettes, Japanese watches and cameras, French perfume and Scotch whisky, there are the anticommunist articles and reviews---proving yet again that the ideological and the economic interests of the imperialist press are an indivisible whole.
In late 1978, public attention in Africa was attracted by the scandal which broke out in Britain over' the disclosure that West Africa, a London-based periodical distributed in this region, received regular subsidies from the South African Department of Information. Kenneth Mackenzie, the magazine's editor, said the insult was unbearable and tendered his resignation. Consulting editor David' Williams and other staff members also made a show of resigning. Soon, however, the fences were mended, and the next issue of the magazine was again signed by Mackenzie as editor. A statement published in this connection said, among other things, that the editors were aware of and totally rejected certain allegations concerning the ownership and the persons in charge of the magazine. The statement added that the editorial office reaffirmed the complete freedom and independence that the editor of West Africa 55 had traditionally enjoyed and that the editor alone was responsible for the contents of the magazine.
It looked like West Africa succeeded in denying it had any compromising links with the racists. But this did little to allay the Africans' suspicions regarding the magazine's much-- vaunted independence. Count Ghislieri still remains its proprietor. He is a man backed by the British commercial and industrial monopolies which exploit Africa's raw materials and human resources and see this continent as a profitable market for their goods. Advertisements of these products take up half the pages of the `` independent'' magazine. This periodical naturally holds a clearly neocolonialist position: it upholds the interests of Britain's big capital, does its utmost to discredit noncapitalist orientation and preaches anticommunism. Public denials of connections with the South African racists merely divert attention from its far more important links with those it has been serving faithfully for over 60 years.
Let us now take a look at the publishing industry. Today, the situation is such that many scholars, authors and experts from developing countries are forced to have their books published in Western capitals---to see them published at all. Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the world-renowned Pakistani poet, wrote in the Lahore weekly Viewpoint that in order to acquire a reputation even in one's own country, an Asian or African author invariably has to approach a Western publisher. Estimates that are far from exhaustive indicate that U.S. publishing houses alone 56 annually sell some 300 million dollars worth of books in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The latter has been divided into exclusive domains among several U.S. publishing conglomerates, above all the Hearst Corporation, Western Publishers, Walt Disney Productions, and Reader's Digest. The Hearst Corporation alone distributes monthly over 15 million copies of books, brochures, pictorial novelettes, cartoons, and all kinds of manuals and almanacs. Another fact is even more alarming: the world market has been virtually saturated with products of ten giant transnational corporations in the field---- McGrowHill, Xerox, CBS, RCA, Prentice-Hall, Scott, Fresman & Company, ITT, Westinghouse, and the General Learning Company.
The literary market of Asia and Africa is controlled by American, French and British publishers. The latter maintain a secure position in almost 70 overseas countries---from Australia and Singapore to Tanzania and South Africa. These comprise the "traditional British market," the "British empire of books." Book exports yield more than 100 million pounds a year. According to Ronald Barker, Secretary of the British Publishers Association, British and American publishers annually supply Asia, Africa and Latin America with up to 30,000 titles of their so-called mass market books.
The French publishing groups Hachette, Bordas, Gallimard and Presses de la Cite are wellestablished in African French-speaking countries and in several Asian nations. Hachette controls a great number of publishing houses, newspapers and magazines. Its international department 57 has offices in 33 countries. Currently, editions in foreign languages already account for almost half its output, while foreign sales represent over one-third of its annual sales total.
As regards control over and participation in the publishing business on the part of official organs of external-oriented propaganda, there was a time when USIA rendered extensive financial assistance to U.S. and other publishers in the annual production of over 1,000 book titles in more than 30 languages. USIA also exercised rigid control over which books were selected for export. In 1978, American publishers submitted over one million copies of books to this agency. These editions included up to 50 bestselling titles for 1978 forwarded to the special libraries and bookstores of USIA foreign bureaus or distributed via other channels.
But naturally the point is not so much how many books are exported. After all, there is nothing wrong about countries with a poorly developed publishing industry receiving readymade spiritual fare. The important thing is what sort of diet the propaganda kitchen of the West prepares and offers them. The London Financial Times wrote openly that the distribution of British-produced books abroad was chiefly motivated not so much by considerations of profit as by propaganda of bourgeois ideas, publicity of the Western way of life, defense of the capitalist system, and efforts to discredit socialism.
Cheap books requiring no intellectual effort on the part of the reader make up a lion's share of the books produced by French publishers 58 too. They offer bestsellers which lead the reader away from social problems, into a world of entertainment, pornography, and spy adventure. This is especially true of the Presses de la Cite group, which specializes in spy thrillers, crime dramas and stereotype anticommunist novels.
A similar policy is pursued by Hodder and Stoughton, the London-based publishing house known for its CIA connections since the publication of a slanderous book on Afghanistan by Edward Hunter, an American spy posing as a writer. Hodder and Stoughton was the publisher of The Honorable Schoolboy, a 500-page novel by John Le Carre (the penname of David Cornwell). This book was advertised widely in the press of developing countries and reprinted immediately by several American publishers. The haste was explained by the novel's anticommunist thrust.
The Honorable Schoolboy and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, an earlier anti-Soviet creation of Le Carre, are on the USIA list of books recommended for inclusion in foreign libraries. A vigorous advertising campaign helped sell over two million copies of The Spy in Asia and Africa alone.
Unlike his colleagues---Eric Ambler, Mickey Spillane, Allen Drury or Lionel Trilling---David Cornwell is a former CIA officer, a man with professional intelligence experience. Hodder and Stoughton, which invested a substantial sum into the advertising campaign for The Honorable Schoolboy, lays particular emphasis on this aspect of the author's biography.
The Judgement Day Manuscript, a new opus 59 by Barbara Rodgers published by Dodd, Mead and Company, uses the supernatural to divert the readers' attention from serious social and political developments in the Middle East. Rodgers writes about perspicacious and skillful CIA operatives confronting---who else?---sinister Russian agents. The Americans have to cope with a very complex situation: they encounter a messiah and Satan himself. Satan incites the Arab oil-exporting countries to raise oil prices, thus precipitating an energy crisis in the West, while the PLO is directed by a disciple of the Evil One.
In his evaluation of such works, the Indian literary critic Dr. Sudhesh stressed in the newspaper Jan Yug: "The Western mass culture offered to Indian readers and viewers often describes various swindles and, most importantly, adventures leading to the capture of an East European spy. Whatever viewpoint is used to assess it---whether in term of content, language, presentation, innovation, or purpose---such an article of mass culture is totally devoid of qualities inherent in real literature and art.''
Still, such "works of art" are mass-produced on a great scale and made into bestsellers. Vigorous advertising helps to distribute them in many developing countries.
Currently, Great Britain and the United States---the biggest and the second biggest exporters of books in the capitalist world---are working very hard to turn literature into a tool for consolidating the system of oppression and exploitation of former colonies and dependent countries.
60Many of the almost 6,000 American publishing companies have offices abroad and employ advertising and marketing agents maintaining close contacts with the local newspapers and periodicals in order to publish reviews of books offered for sale. The big publishing monopolies of the United States and other Western powers claim that the number of copies printed and sold to certain countries is a trade secret; this makes it difficult to comprehensively evaluate the scope of this ideological offensive directed at the readers.
A fuller picture of the way these efforts are pursued on the global scale can be drawn from the officially published information on the publishing activity of U.S. government agencies. For example, it has been reported that the U.S. administration annually spends 500 to 800 million dollars on its publishing effort---that is, over half the budget of the U.S. State Department. The U.S. Government Printing Office, the biggest publisher not only in the United States itself but in the capitalist world as a whole, publishes, at government expense, a great amount of propaganda for distribution abroad.
USIA, which issues many books and brochures in various languages in many Asian, African and Latin American countries, operates in close contact with other U.S. government agencies---the State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA. USIA maintains publishing centers in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires. The Indian journalist Dinker Rao Mankekar, formerly president of the New Agencies Pool of the Nonaligned Countries, 61 reviewed UNESCO data and concluded that USIA aided American and other publishers in the annual publication and distribution in developing countries of some five million copies of propaganda editions in 25 languages, The sphere of influence of this "cultural imperialism," as he described it, includes many developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The agency works vigorously to establish contacts with local publishers and to conclude contracts with them on producing propaganda literature. These books, published with USIA assistance, are distributed free to colleges, universities, libraries, and individuals. The local book dealers and publishers financed by the International Communications Agency sell books at a discount.
The people in charge of USIA believe that the ideological effect of such literature fully compensates for its production costs. Together with the Agency for International Development, USIA coordinates the work of the Regional Center for Technical Assistance, whose publishing departments have produced, over the years, more than five million copies of over 2,000 books and pamphlets for distribution in developing countries. This literature asserts that economic cooperation with U.S. monopolies benefits newly independent countries and offers recommendations for economic and cultural policies. Simultaneously, it aims to discredit the socialist-oriented countries of Africa and Asia, grossly distorting the Leninist theory of building socialism and its implementation in the socialist community of nations.
62USIA often cooperates with American university presses created with assistance from nonprofit foundations. On commission from the propaganda agency, these publishers produce ``scholarly'' works offering development forecasts and highlighting various aspects of the situation in Africa and Asia. Capitalist recipes for newly independent countries are often disguised, even by Marxist-sounding terminology.
The U.S. imperialists have been increasingly turning to Africa in recent years. This is reflected, among other things, in the growing number of publishing companies specializing in books for Africans in the English, French and many African languages---Black Academy Press, Black Star Publishers, the Afro-American Publishing Company, and others.
The activities of American book wholesalers have a clearly defined political thrust. For example, the American New Company distributes abroad only books publicizing the " American way of life." Monopolization in the publishing and bookselling business enables U.S. propaganda agencies to channel these operations accordingly.
Cartoons---not only comic strips in Sunday supplements of Asian and African newspapers but also those published as books---make up a considerable part of the Western mass market book exports. Given the low literacy level of the local population, pictorial adventure and science fiction novels are published in millions of copies. The authors try to reflect the distinctive features of the target countries in the appearance, names, manners and even favorite swear 63 words of the characters. The heroes of such series are usually supermen who defeat "Reds," gangsters, aliens from outer space, and fantastic beasts.
Naturally, this refers not to cartoons per se, a fascinating genre of graphic narrative, but to the cheapest and most primitive comic strips. According to Eduardo Mora Valverde, a Costa Rican researcher, of the 50 cartoon series regularly distributed in his country by U.S. newspaper trusts and publishing companies, 43 concentrate on crime, violence, the supernatural and political slander.
Such is the "free flow of information" flooding developing countries. The covers it uses today are either the "culture synthesis" theory---a symbiosis of Western and Oriental civilizations---or the concept of "rising to the level of contemporary literature and art"---a call to conform to stereotypes and imitate Western "mass culture.''
All these theories and concepts reflecting bourgeois ideology are based on one incontrovertible fact: Western neocolonialist expansionism in the field of information and culture is made possible by the better-developed material infrastructure of industrialized capitalist nations. Specifically, they possess powerful printing, television and motion picture industries and a • broad network of agencies for the propaganda of the Western way of life. "The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the 64 whole subject to it.''^^1^^ This definition is also fully applicable to the cultural exchanges between developed capitalist nations and developing countries.
_-_-_~^^1^^ Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, "The German Ideology," in: Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976, p. 59.
__PRINTERS_P_65_COMMENT__ 5--8 [65] __ALPHA_LVL1__ A WORLD PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR? __ALPHA_LVL2__ A New Mass Impact WeaponThe world is facing the danger of war. After the two world wars mankind has lived through in the 20th century, the threat of a third such war has emerged---a war man will not survive.
However, one might say that a world war has already started---a psychological war. That is, so far only psychological. But then?
The different races, languages and national frontiers are not the only things which divide today's world. Mankind is also divided into two opposite socio-political systems, and their rivalry, especially in ideology, is an objective factor of world development. Questions relating to this ideological rivalry are becoming increasingly topical, because the war for men's minds has emerged as one of the decisive factors in the competition of the two systems.
Must this ideological rivalry, economic competition and political opposition inevitably evolve into an open, even armed conflict? The socialist countries hold that this can and must be avoided. "As we see it," noted Yuri Andropov, General Secretary oftheCCCPSU, "the historical contest between the two social systems, the battle of ideas, is something wholly natural and follows from the existence of socialism and capitalism. But we are firmly against the historical contest being directed to cutbacks in peaceful 66 cooperation, let alone being put on a plane of nuclear war.''^^1^^
The class struggle of the two systems in the economic, political and, of course, ideological spheres will continue. It cannot be otherwise, because the philosophies and the class objectives of socialism and capitalism are mutually opposite and irreconcilable. Still, the socialist countries want this historically inevitable struggle to be waged by peaceful means. The Soviet Union maintains that the objective ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism is no obstacle to the development between countries belonging to these opposite social systems of normal relations, and even mutually benefitial cooperation based on the principles of peaceful coexist - ence.
One would be hard put to find in the contemporary international relations an aspect without direct or indirect connection to the central issue of our time---the issue of maintaining peace and ensuring international security. This is especially applicable to the sphere of mass information and propaganda---a sphere where the political and ideological rivalry between progress and reaction, peace and war, socialism and imperialism is especially acute.
As never before, external-oriented propaganda now influences politics and, consequently, international relations. Of course, any state is entitled to use the means at its disposal to disseminate information about its gains and its way of life, to publicize its dominant social, economic and _-_-_
^^1^^ Pravda, May 4, 1983.
67 political ideas. The important thing, however, is what methods this propaganda uses and what aims it pursues, whether it is a form of contact contributing to international understanding and cooperation or a weapon of psychological warfare. The information media of the socialist countries see their mission in disseminating the truth about the life of their peoples and objective by covering international developments. Any attempts at generating international tensions or interfering in the affairs of foreign countries are alien to them. In other words, the information they supply plays a constructive role in the overall context of the peaceful foreign policy of socialism.In their day-to-day efforts, the Soviet mass media are invariably guided by the principles and standards the Soviet Union observes steadfastly on the international scene. They never display any disrespect vis-a-vis other nations or their public figures. The Soviet State has unswervingly followed this policy of principle since its inception. In Lenin's words, "All our politics and propaganda ... are directed towards putting an end to war and in no way towards driving nations to war.''^^1^^
The position held by the U.S.S.R. and the rest of the socialist community rules out ideological sabotage and prohibits the use of propaganda and international information for interference in the internal affairs of other countries. External-- _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Eighth All-Russia Congress of Soviets," Collected Works, Vol. 31, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974, p. 470.
68 oriented propaganda should be based on the recognition and strict observance of the principles already underlying relations between socialist and capitalist states---principles incorporated in such universally recognized legal acts as the U.N. Charter and the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, This position of the Soviet Union has a political reflection: in the U.S.S.R., there is a law against propaganda of war and racial or ethnic hatred.The Soviet Union is working vigorously, to prevent those who, having launched an offensive against detente, dream of reviving the Cold War from making use of the international mass media.
In 1953, the U.S.S.R. submitted to the United Nations a draft definition of aggression postulating that a state encouraging the propaganda of war, of the use of nuclear, bacteriological, chemical and other mass destruction weapons, a state contributing to the propaganda of fascist or nazi views, racial or national exclusiveness, hatred or scorn of other nations was guilty of committing an act of ideological aggression.
Unfortunately, imperialism sees the sphere of ideology not as an arena of honest competition between philosophies in which only social practice determines which philosophy is true, but as a theater of operations in the psychological warfare waged against the socialist countries. For the West it is not confined to the battle of ideas. It employs a whole system of means designed to subvert or soften up the socialist world.
Bourgeois mass media are systematically conducting hostile campaigns against the socialist 69 countries. They malign and distort everything that goes on in them.
Hostile forays aimed at the Soviet Union and the entire socialist community, and detente form a large part of Western mass media efforts.
The leading imperialist powers, primarily the United States, essentially maintain that, unlike other fields of international relations, international information and propaganda should not subject to regulation and should function independently of the various international agreements. Actually, this means justification and legalization of any and all forms of subversive propaganda, including psychological warfare, misinformation, interference in the internal affairs of other countries, and even outright violation of foreign legislation. Such external-- oriented propaganda is supposed to resort to misinformation and anti-Soviet and anticommunist hysteria so as to create and maintain tensions between countries with different social systems.
The West sees propaganda, especially propaganda aimed at foreign audiences, as a sort of mass impact weapon requiring efficient and mobile delivery means. This function, the Western doctrine holds, is to be discharged by highly sophisticated mass media. It follows that imperialism tries to remove all restrictions in this field---whether political, legal, or moral.
Psychological warfare against the socialist countries is today an important element of the foreign policy strategy and tactics of the biggest capitalist powers, especially the United States.
Government-appointed but privately financed, the U.S. panel on international information, 70 education and .cultural relations offers this explanation of the new role the mass media play in international relations: "...While the United States retains considerable, perhaps predominant, power in international affairs [a clear case of wishful thinking---Authors], the capacity of America to dictate the course of international events has diminished. This means that the United States will have to count more than ever on explanation and persuasion. The new premium on persuasion makes cultural diplomacy essential to the achievement of American policy goals.''^^1^^ The same idea was expressed more bluntly in the report of a Presidential committee to study information activity abroad (the Mansfield-Spraig Committee). The report asserts, among other things, that if governments cannot effectively publicize their policy and actions among influential quarters abroad, this may undermine their programs and endanger their security.
President Carter believed that external-- oriented propaganda was a key element of U.S. foreign policy of vital importance to national security. The opinion of the well-known U.S. diplomat and propaganda expert George Allen, former director of USIA, is that propaganda is to the diplomats what gunpowder is to the military.
When the Reagan administration, with its aim of wrecking detente and escalating confrontation, assumed control, the psychological warfare machine switched into top gear, and imperialist propaganda stepped up its efforts to poison the _-_-_
~^^1^^ Herbert I. Schiller, op. cit., pp. 22-23.
71 international climate.Charles Wick, the newly-appointed head of USIA and Ronald Reagan's close friend, declared that the United States was de facto in a state of war with Russia.
Washington's loud declarations of its intention to resort to armed force include a statement by William Clark, the President's national security assistant. Speaking at Georgetown University, he said that to be effective, U.S. strategy should comprise diplomatic, political, economic and informational components supported by military power.
That this view of propaganda is held by the U.S. leaders is borne out by the fact that President Reagan and his closest associates personally take part in the most unbridled propaganda campaigns and shows.
Today, one can state, that the military machine and the propaganda apparatus are merging. The result is that a sort of a military-- propaganda complex is emerging alongside the militaryindustrial one. While previously the Pentagon was chiefly lobbying among congressmen to secure new military appropriations, it is now trying to influence world public opinion by publishing and advertising its report on "Soviet military might." Some in the West increasingly often paraphrase Clausewitz and say that propaganda is the continuation of war by other means.
Imperialism wages psychological warfare in different directions---against socialist, developing, and even other capitalist countries. The aim is to erect obstacles to progressive change, restore the imperialist powers to their former role 72 of masters of the world, keep international tensions mounting by spurring up the arms race, and spiritually enslave millions of people.
The enemies of socialism, peace and cooperation realize that the policy of peaceful coexistence and greater detente limits their chances of openly interfering in the affairs of other nations. That is the reason why they are trying to turn the mass media into an instrument of subversion---above all, against the socialist countries.
There is no doubt that the U.S.S.R. is the prime target of Western psychological warfare. Besides, it is directed increasingly often against the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, Cuba, and Vietnam. In the new round of psychological warfare, the West strives to infiltrate the socialist countries' economic and social structures, shift operations into their societies, destabilize the political situation there, and openly interfere in their internal affairs. Ideological subversion is interspersed with blatant calls to launch war on socialism.
Those who oppose detente, the socialist camp and the national liberation movements use a variety of techniques, including those borrowed from the Cold War arsenal. Let us recall one example of this. In the 1950s, Radio Free Europe used to launch many balloons loaded with anticommunist leaflets from Munich in the direction of the socialist countries. Between January and June 1954 alone, 350,000 such balloons bearing several million copies of leaflets were sent up. The grim spirit of that period was revived in the 1980s when a similar operation was organized against socialist Poland. In March 73 1982, some 10,000 balloons with instigatory leaflets were launched toward Poland from the Danish island of Bornholm. The Polish Foreign Ministry described it as an act of propaganda aggression against Poland.
American subversion of Poland was not confined to purely propaganda operations. Propaganda was directly linked to attempts to eliminate socialism in Poland, destroy the existing government and social system and aggravate the chaos. There were instigatory calls by top White House figures urging strikes, subversion of the political and economic foundations of the Polish state, and criminal violations of law and order. U.S. intelligence services supported this by supplying counterrevolutionary groups with weapons, radio and printing equipment, etc.
This was nothing but gross violation of international law and of the sovereignty of socialist Poland, a case of blatant instigation to terrorist and subversive propaganda acts. It is a fact that in the summer of 1981 special radio transmitters were operating in the U.S. Consulate in Cracow, inciting the population to take action against the government.
This psychological warfare against Poland is nothing less than a form of ideological aggression which is contrary to international law, to the UN Charter and to the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, signed by the President of the United States. The Final Act states that the signatory countries "will refrain from any intervention, direct or indirect, individual or collective, in the internal or external affairs falling within the domestic jurisdiction of another participating 74 State, regardless of their mutual relations." The Act also says that "they will, inter alia, refrain from direct of indirect assistance to terrorist activities, or to subversive or other activities, directed towards the violent overthrow of the regime of another participating State.''
Imperialism wanted the situation in Poland to act as a detonator in its efforts against the other socialist countries. The West is attempting to coordinate psychological warfare against Poland with its propaganda forays against the U.S.S.R., Czechoslovakia, the G.D.R., Vietnam, Kampuchea, Cuba, Nicaragua, and other countries.
The imperialists are making wide use of propaganda to justify their attempts at counterrevolutionary interference in the internal affairs of newly independent countries, which is shown by the development around Ethiopia, Angola, Iran, and Afghanistan.
Western bourgeois propaganda is at its most imperialist when it deals with national liberation and revolutionary events in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This propaganda was used as a cover for armed aggression against countries fighting for independence---be it Algeria, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, or scores of others. Propaganda strives to justify Israel's annexationist wars against the neighboring Arab countries. It contributed to the overthrow of the legitimate governments of Mossadegh in Iran and of Lumumba in the Congo.
It was no accident that the comprehensive American interference in Chile aimed at destabilizing the Allende government consisted largely 75 of a frantic propaganda campaign and support of the opposition mass media.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ The Right to LieLenin 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.''^^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.
An aggressive, anticommunist thrust is typical of current imperialist propaganda aimed at foreign countries.
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.
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 _-_-_
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Bourgeois Intelligentsia's Methods of Struggle Against the Workers," Collected Works, Vol. 20, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, p. 485.
76 propaganda.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.
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.''^^1^^
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.
``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.
However, this time the U.S. delegation, led by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, beat all _-_-_
~^^1^^ World Marxist Review,No. 5, 1981, p. 117.
77 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.''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.
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.
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.''
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. 78 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.
``The big lie is just that---a big lie! It is a conscious, calculated, criminal brainwashing propaganda campaign.''
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.
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.^^1^^
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.
The attempt to scare people at home and abroad by the bugbear of the nonexistent _-_-_
~^^1^^ New Times No. 47, 1979.
79 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.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.
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.
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, 80 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.''^^1^^
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.
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.
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 _-_-_
^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Armaments and Capitalism," Collected Works, Vol. 19, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973, p. 106.
__PRINTERS_P_81_COMMENT__ 6-848 81 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.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.
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.
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.''
The lie alleging that the U.S.S.R. and the 82 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.
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.
__*__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.
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.
83The 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 " 84 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.
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.
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.
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.
Jones wrote about his adventures in Southwestern Kampuchea, where Pol Pot's troops had 85 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.
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.
86 __ALPHA_LVL2__ The Propaganda BlockadeThe bourgeois mass media are screaming bloody murder over the situation in and around Afghanistan. Playing on the fact that only yesterday, many people in the United States and Western Europe knew next to nothing about that country and are now virtually deprived of objective information of developments there, the Western media of misinformation shower their audiences with all sorts of inventions, slander, sensational ``revelations'' and instigative rumors. Everything is used---from doctored facts and half-truths to outright lies.
The goal is clear---to support by slander the gross imperialist interference in the affairs of this independent nonaligned country and to discredit, in the eyes of world public opinion, the Afghan revolution, the present Afghan leadership and the Soviet Union which has extended friendly assistance to its southern neighbor.
Having launched an undeclared war against Afghanistan, the imperialist powers, above all the United States, began to seal it off with a "cordon sanitaire" of misinformation. It does not matter if in a few days or even hours yet another ``sensation'' is exposed as a fake. The authors maintain that it will have served its purpose. Besides, they can well expect the monopolist "big press" not to publish any denial because it will be busy with a new farrago of lies.
Many major Western news agencies and publications have joined the anti-Afghan campaign of slander. Here are several examples of the news they have manufactured:
87__NOTE__ Not blockquoted in original, but shoulda been.''Afghanistan has the ruble as the coin of the realm." "Soviet troops are using napalm, toxic agents and nerve gas against Afghan insurgents." "Soviet cargo planes have airlifted two battalions of South Yemeni troops into Afghanistan." "Along the Afghan-Iranian border, Soviet troops are poised for an attack to capture the Iranian oilfields." "Soviet army officers took part in the execution of over 1,000 civilians in the Afghan village of Kerala.''
Not a single of these items contains a grain of truth; all are open and premeditated slander directed at Afghanistan and the role played by the limited contingent of Soviet troops invited there by the country's government. Nevertheless, the Western press, radio and television continue to pour out these out-and-out lies.
Aside from distorting the actual state of affairs, there is another objective to the massproduced anti-Soviet and anti-Afghan fabrications readily reported by bourgeois propaganda. The architects of the imperialist plans to interfere in the internal affairs of the D.R.A. and other countries of Southwest Asia use these inventions as a curtain of lies to conceal the implementation of their own aggressive schemes. It is no accident that reports about "Soviet troops massing on the Afghan-Iranian border" appeared at the time of full-scale preparations for the U.S. military foray into Iran to free the American hostages in Teheran.
U.S. State Department spokesmen expressed ``indignation'' at the alleged use of chemical weapons by Soviet troops against Afghan civilians. While these declarations were being made, 88 grenades manufactured in Pennsylvania and containing toxic agents were secretly handed over to the saboteurs about to infiltrate Afghanistan.
Imperialist propaganda raises a hue and cry over the "brutal treatment" of Afghan civilians by Soviet servicemen but it says not a word about the real atrocities committed by the bandits against old people, children, doctors, and teachers in Afghanistan. This propaganda has managed to report the presence of nonexistent Cuban, Czechoslovak and South Yemeni soldiers but it stubbornly refuses to notice either the foreign mercenaries sent into Afghanistan or their training camps in Pakistan, or their foreign instructors.
The United States sees Latin America as the ``backyard'' of its empire. In this region, too, every means, including massive ideological pressure, is used to check or reverse the advance of liberation.
Propaganda campaigns conducted by the U.S. mass media have been supporting and complementing CIA subversion against Latin American countries by preparing the ground for coups. Throughout the dramatic history of the United States' relations with its neighbors to the south, propaganda barrages have been used to support gunboat salvoes and armed invasions.
Only a few examples will suffice to prove that today, the United States is still resorting to propaganda to interfere in the internal affairs of Latin American countries.
For over 20 years, the economic blockade of Cuba has been compounded by a propaganda blockade. In the fall of 1981, the U.S. press, 89 citing "highly reliable sources," told the world that Cuba had sent 500 to 600 servicemen to Nicaragua so as to seize control of the situation in El Salvador and establish a "revolutionary Marxist government" there.
An ABC television program inflated the figure to 3,000. The ABC added that 1,000 combat planes and helicopters were being shipped to Nicaragua from Vietnam. It was a clear case of the snowball effect.
The Cuban government immediately stated that this report was absolutely groundless. Havana called on the U.S. Secretary of State to provide unequivocal answers to the following questions:
---Could he confirm that Cuba landed 500 to 600 servicemen in Nicaragua?
---Was it true that the United States had proof of this?
---Was it true that Mr. Haig had reported this to foreign governments adding that he had positive proof of this and threatening Cuba in the process? He was welcome to state on what day, at what hour and from what plane these people had disembarked, and produce all the necessary proof.
There was no response from the U.S. government to this Cuban challenge.
The date cited in the American fabrication coincided with the arrival in Nicaragua of 2,000 Cuban teachers (more than half of them women). Their names, addresses, and missionteaching Nicaraguan children---were never kept secret.
Over the past several months, both the 90 irresponsible ``free'' press of the United States and high-level spokesmen of the administration have been publicly caught in the act of lying.
In March 1982, in a vain effort to substantiate its claims of Cuban and Nicaraguan interference in the affairs of El Salvador, the U.S. State Department organized a special press conference. The ace-in-the-hole testimony was to be provided by a Nicaraguan citizen, a national liberation fighter taken prisoner in El Salvador in January 1981.
However, as soon as the witness appeared before U.S. newsmen on March 12, he began to testify differently from what he had been told to say. Orlando Jose Tardencilla, aged 19, denied categorically that he had undergone military training in Ethiopia and Cuba, that he had then been specially sent by the Nicaraguan government into El Salvador. He also exposed the dirty work of U.S. intelligence in the preparation of this provocation.
When the State Department presented Tardencilla to journalists so he would confirm the involvement of Nicaragua and Cuba in the Salvadoran developments, he declared that he had never been to Cuba or Ethiopia, that he had never seen a single Nicaraguan or Cuban in El Salvador, and that he had made all his previous statements under duress.
To the chagrin of the State Department which had advertised his testimony as proof of foreign interference in El Salvador, Tardencilla said that apparently he had been brought there for propaganda purposes.
U.S. embassy officials had told him that he 91 was to confirm the Cuban presence in El Salvador and that if he refused he would be killed. So all his earlier statements about military training in Ethiopia and Cuba were not true.
The press conference had to be wound up in a hurry.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ ``The Long Arm of Moscow" Yet AgainWashington is clearly put out by the fact that, running counter to the interests of most nations, U.S. policies are increasingly denounced all over the world. U.S. leaders are obviously irritated by developments in the "Third World," where nations are striving steadily to strengthen their independence and sovereignty and where national liberation is on the rise. The White House is also reacting painfully to the unprecedented upsurge of the antiwar movement in Western Europe, which hampers the implementation of the Pentagon's plans and to the lack of the necessary support for Washington's militarist policies even on the part of its closest allies.
In their efforts to explain the causes that increasingly bring U.S. policies into conflict with world politics, U.S. leaders try to blame all the cpntemporary developments they object to on, of all things, action taken by the Soviet Union and its allies.
The U.S. Congress, the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA are constantly producing and promoting in the U.S. mass media all sorts of ``evaluations'' and ``estimates''; sensational ``hearings'' are being held; ``reports'' and similar 92 trumped-up papers are being manufactured-^all for the sake of concealing from world (and U.S.) public opinion the actual imperialist and militarist thrust of U.S. foreign policy.
One such attempt to deceive public opinion was the 1982 U.S. State Department report which argued that Moscow was behind all national liberation and antiwar movements. The authors of the report even claimed that the weaker position of the U.S. dollar was in no small degree due to action taken by "Soviet agents" who, by promoting inflated gold prices, tried to encourage doubts in the stability of America's currency. Why, they said, it was perfectly clear who was behind the worldwide protests against Washington's militarist plans to escalate the arms race. The report asserted that all this was a direct result of vigorous activity by the Soviets.
The authors of the report recalled with particular irritation the widespread protest movement against neutron weapons in 1977 and 1978 which had forced the then U.S. administration to back down a little. Ignoring the mass demonstrations and rallies of protest in the F.R.G., Great Britain, Italy, France, and other countries against the NATO plans of deploying new U.S. medium-range missiles in Western Europe, those who wrote the State Department report claimed that it was a Russian ploy to create the impression of popular opposition to the NATO decision.
Washington's clumsy inventions are echoed by the more ardent advocates of "Atlantic solidarity" in Western Europe. For example, former 93 F.R.G. Defense Minister Hans Apel has stated he is convinced that Moscow extends financial support to the peace movement in the Federal Republic. At the 25th annual Bundeswehr command conference, he said he was positive that Moscow provided the movement with organizational backup, political support and, undoubtedly, financial resources.
These are patently nonsensical charges. It is not Moscow but Washington's militarist policy that prompts West European peace fighter to take to the streets that was admitted by the American press itself. As to the way their actions coincide and interlock, President.Reagan should be considered their chief coordinator: after all, it was his trip to Western Europe that set off unprecedented antiwar and anti-American demonstrations in Rome, London, Bonn, Paris, and West Berlin---throughout his itinerary--- in May and June 1982.
Refusing to recognize this obvious truth, Secretary General Joseph Luns of NATO keeps repeating the West has ample proof that pacifist movements in Western Europe are financed by the Soviet Union and that their arguments coincide with those advanced by the U.S.S.R.
So this is the crime peace advocates in Western Europe are accused of: they, like everyone in the Soviet Union, want a better international climate and fight for a peaceful life for themselves and their children.
Similarly, the U.S. propaganda campaign over the alleged involvement of the Soviet Union in international terrorism has confirmed the incontrovertible fact that lies have become an integral 94 part of imperialist foreign policy.
^Let us look at the way Yonas Alexander, director of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, ``proves'' that the 'Soviet Union supports terrorists. "Where terrorism flourishes," he says, "it almost always is in Moscow's interest." U.S. News & World Report goes even farther: "Direct links between Moscow and terrorist groups are elusive, but there is ample evidence that the Kremlin supplies terrorists and guerrillas around the world through its surrogates." Naturally, the article's author has failed to cite a single grain of this "ample evidence.''
``...Disinformation," the US researcher Fred Landis writes, "is the key to the relationship of the CIA and the media and historically ... has been the single most frequent covert action by the CIA.''
It may well be that the misinformation emanating from Washington and the efforts of the U.S. agencies dealing in subversion have never before reached a level as high as that of the campaign over "international terrorism," initiated and orchestrated by the White House. The notion of terrorism had to be expanded considerably so it could include everything Washington found objectionable---actions taken by other countries, upsurges of national liberation, and simply any ``undesirable'' changes on the international scene. A new definition of terrorism had to be found, and this mission was entrusted to the newly-constituted Senate Committee on Security and Terrorism. In April 1981, three months after the inauguration of Ronald 95 Reagan, the new definition was ready. Prepared by the CIA, it postulates that terrorism is the threat or use of violence for the sake of achieving a symbolic political effect so as to exert psychological influence not only on the target group but also on broader population groups. One might note in passing that this definition can well apply to the frenzied misinformation campaign on the subject of terrorism: it is an obvious case of gross violation of mass consciousness in various countries designed to achieve a definite political effect.
The Terrorist Network by Claire Sterling, an American journalist, was among the first works produced in the West to provide ideological and factological support for the U.S. government's concept of "international terrorism." Ms. Sterling claims "there is massive proof that the Soviet Union and its surrogates, over the last decade, have provided the weapons, training and sanctuary for a world-wide terror network aimed at the destabilization of Western democratic society." She adds that "by CIA count ... over 140 terrorist bands from nearly fifty countries or disputed territories were connected in some way one to another by 1976.''
Arguing that the Soviet Union is implicated in terrorist acts, Claire Sterling maintains that "the most deadly have come in a strategic crescent from Turkey westward through Italy and up to Ireland." The lady author apparently wants to add a new term---"crescent of terrorism"---to Zbigniew Brzezinski's "crescents of instability." Other experts on "international terrorism" offer equally primitive arguments.
The moment it was reported the man who 96 shot at Pope John Paul II had a dark face, television announcers began to blame the crime on Chilean antifascists or Palestine freedom fighters. Even after it had been conclusively determined that the attacker was a Turkish fascist, an attempt was made, flying in the face of the obvious facts, to impute the crime to the socialist countries. After the explosion in Munich staged by neonazis in the fall of 1980, Franz Joseph Strauss immediately charged that "leftist radicals" were responsible for it. Even after the assassination of a PLO representative by Israeli terrorists in Brussels in June 1981, CBS anchorman Dan Rather tried to ascribe it to "Arab extremists.''
The architects of anti-Soviet campaigns also use the services of people who have made misinformation their profession. For example, soon after the U.S. administration started the " international terrorism" campaign, a lengthy article on the subject, obviously commissioned by the U.S. State Department, appeared, virtually simultaneously, in several American and West European publications signed by different people. One was Arnaud de Borchgrave of Newsweek, well-known as an expert on misinformation; another was Robert Moss, the British journalist repeatedly exposed as a CIA stooge.
The choice of these two authors to lead the anti-Soviet chorus was not accidental. Here are a few details characterizing these well paid fighters against "Soviet terrorism": in 1979, a former assistant to the Shah of Iran reported that the Iranian government had presented several Western journalists with expensive gifts in exchange __PRINTERS_P_97_COMMENT__ 7-848 97 for favorable articles about the foundering regime of the Shah. The aid said he had personally handed over two Persian carpets worth 10,000 dollars each to de Borchgrave in the Teheran Hilton. He also mentioned several European journalists who had received from the Shah large sums of money, free airline tickets, free bookings of deluxe suites in plush hotels and expensive gifts. Robert Moss was one of these newsmen.
The expose of Robert Moss as a CIA contact touched off a scandal in Britain's House of Commons because it turned out that Moss was a ghost writer for Margaret Thatcher.
Government officials in Iran under the Shah and in Nicaragua under Somoza saw Moss as an intellectual mercenary available for participation in their ideological wars. For a price, Moss was ready to go to Rhodesia, South Africa, Iran or Nicaragua, and link his routine story about a KGB conspiracy to local conditions, thus justifying the reprisals against the political opposition and the violations of human rights.
Nevertheless, no matter how hard they try, neither these authors nor the directors of the new anti-Soviet farce about ``terrorism'' can convince the audience that their show is anything more than make-believe.
The American press has reported that Alexander Haig's charge of Soviet support for international terrorism which he made eight days after the inauguration of the Republican administration was like a bolt out of the blue for Washington's intelligence services. According to the NYT, now that resistance to terrorism has become the leitmotif of U.S. foreign policy, 98 intelligence officers say their agencies are still casting about in search of proof.
The U.S. propaganda services are also searching for nonexistent information about Soviet involvement in international terrorism while the United States itself actually resorts to gangland methods in its policy and propaganda.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ What Is "Truth?''This question has been plaguing mankind for a long time, at least since the days of Pontius Pilate. It is not an easy question and, apparently, no one has been able to give an exhaustive answer to it that could be acceptable to all---until recently. Recently, however, the Reagan administration did offer quite a definitive answer, brilliant in its simplicity. ``Truth'' is a new longterm propaganda program announced by the United States government and aimed against the Soviet Union.
King Midas turned everything he touched into gold. The White House has the Midas touch in reverse---the words uttered turn into the opposite of what they are supposed to mean.
Take the succession of propaganda mottoes U.S. Presidents have adopted before starting on their crusades against the socialist countries in recent years. The campaign to "protect human rights" announced by President Carter meant support for the Shah's tyranny and for the Chilean fascists. Ronald Reagan's crusade against "international terrorism" means a policy of terror perpetrated by the rulers of Israel and __PRINTERS_P_99_COMMENT__ 7* __NOTE__ (loop for i in local-write-file-hooks do (insert (prin1-to-string i) "\n")) __NOTE__ _-compress-multiple-newlines t2h-fill-paragraph-control-M lb-tx-check-^^ lb-tx-check-LVL0 lb-tx-check-buffer4-singularities lb-tx-check-buffer4-trailing-dash lb-tx-check-control-M-aka-CR-aka-carriage-return lb-tx-check-buffer4-para-break-before-last-line tx-editing-insert-textfiles-born-stamp-after-title tx-editing-check-time-file-stamps _-highascii2html_entities tx-check-buffer-LVLs lb-tx-check-page-numbers lb-tx-check-footnotes-editing 99 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1984/NIOPW263/20100211/199.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2010.02.11) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ South Africa, South Korea and El Salvador with American money and weapons.
Project Truth, the new Washington invention, has also become a symbol of lies and misinformation.
Actually, the new invention is not all that new. Let us take a look at the past, especially at the 1950s, the height of the Cold War.
At that time the U.S. National Security Council concluded that substantial propaganda efforts must be exerted to supplement the rearmament program. Then the U.S. President announced the launching of a broad-scale campaign entitled "Truth." The Americans, the President said, had to force the world to listen to them in the great campaign for truth, and this task did not differ from the other components of and was inseparable from U.S. foreign policy. It was, he said, a necessary component the Americans were doing and as important as military power.
This statement was not made in November 1981 when the President and the National Security Council authorized the start of Project Truth, but in April 1950, by President Harry Truman. At the time the papers dubbed this Presidential appeal "Washington's propaganda stick." In 1950, the ``Truth'' campaign was mostly aimed at weakening Soviet influence and undermining the positions of the socialist governments. In fact, it was an American declaration of psychological war against the Soviet Union and the people's democracies.
Thirty years later, President Reagan repeated Truman's statement almost word for word. 100 Speaking at the Voice of America office he said truth was a vitally important weapon in the U.S. arsenal. The threat to freedom had not diminished, he maintained, while the enemy persisted in its totalitarian designs, so in this struggle no weapon was more potent than the truth. President Reagan's countless repetition of the word ``truth'' does not make it truthful; conversely, the program he christened ``Truth'', has been exposed as a blatant fraud.
Significantly, the words ``truth'' and `` weapon'' appear together in statements by President Reagan and his aides, the way they did in Truman's day. The chief mission of the newly-- discovered ``truth'' is to assist in the operation of the United States' huge war machine and meet the needs of its aggressive foreign policy.
This explains why Charles Wick, USIA Director, while speaking before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 17, 1982, described his agency as a highly important and indispensable element of the apparatus ensuring the country's national security. Following up on his ideas and pushing the U.S. administration to interfere even more vigorously in the affairs of the socialist countries, The Washington Post wrote that a sum making up a fraction of the cost of one B-l bomber (250 million dollars) but used to keep the ``patriots'' in Poland informed would prove as useful as all the B-l bombers there were.
In stepping up their slanderous campaign against the socialist countries, the ruling quarters of the United States see subversive propaganda as an integral part of their overall strategy of 101 fighting socialism.
Hence the efforts of the current occupants of the White House to give an additional impetus to anti-Soviet propaganda by using the large-scale operation described even in the United States itself as transition to an all-out propaganda war against the Soviet Union.
Project Truth is supposed to provide ideological backing for the administration's practical steps in the field of foreign policy. Asserting that the campaign helps unravel the ``true'' causes of major international events, the program's designers are in fact trying to exert, by lies and misinformation, psychological pressure on world public opinion, vindicate the -United States' aggressive militarist course and slander the peaceful foreign policy of the U.S.S.R. The officially announced purpose of this undertaking, authorized by the U.S. National Security Council as early as August 1981, is to offer resolute and effective resistance to Soviet propaganda by disseminating via USIA foreign bureaux "truthful and authentic" (that is, specially doctored) information so as to refute false rumors and inventions about the role and policy of the U.S. government.
In the context of this campaign, the American press has reported, the Reagan administration intends to make the tone and content of all information disseminated by the United States abroad more caustic: first, by pointing to the "Soviet threat to peace," exposing Soviet propaganda and emphasizing "the week points of Marxist societies," and second, by effectively publicizing America's achievements and 102 objeclives, stressing its commitment to the principle of "ensuring peace from positions of strength," and extolling "the strong points of the United States and the positive aspects of the capitalist system.''
This mission has been assigned to all U.S. propaganda services, primarily to USIA. The plan envisages the use of all the available resources and channels, including the Voice of America, the numerous magazines published by USIA for foreign countries, television programs, as well as cultural and educational exchanges. Soviet Propaganda Alert, a special monthly, has been launched, to be distributed widely among government agencies, U.S. embassies abroad, the mass media, civic organizations, etc.
As Americans admit themselves, the antiSoviet hysteria is now running so high in Washington that the impression is that the United States is already in a state of war with the Soviet Union.
Notably, in terms of organization the American strategists of psychological warfare returned to structures that existed during the Cold War. An interagency commission has been set up, empowered by the President to direct U.S. propaganda and coordinate the operations of U.S. and other NATO government agencies under Project Truth. This commission includes, among others, representatives of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department. Again, here we have an officially authorized merger of U.S. intelligence and propaganda services in joint subversive operations.
Add to USIA the propaganda branches of the 103 CIA and such specialized subversive centers as Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, and the picture of the huge machine of psychological warfare, born of the aggressive foreign policy and the anticommunist ideology of U.S. imperialism, is complete.
To undercut the antiwar upsurge in Europe and to try and shift the blame for the extremely dangerous deterioration of the international situation and for the mounting arms race on the Soviet Union is, no doubt, one of the key objectives of this effort.
This was borne out, among other things, by one of the first propaganda operations under Project Truth, the one launched in November 1981. It was the carefully stage-managed advertising campaign oyer President Reagan's statement in which he virtually demanded unilateral disarmament from the Soviet Union; the demand was thinly veiled as a "zero option" for Europe. The President's speech was not only televised nationally in the United States but also broadcast to Western Europe (USIA paid for a direct satellite transmission). The President himself, not to be accused of false modesty, called his speech a "peace initiative" comparable in significance to man's first step on the Moonperhaps because weight was lacking in both cases.
Another Project Truth operation---and another example of a cheap political farce---was the instigative show on January 31, 1982, entitled "Let Poland Be Poland! ", televised in several West European countries.
Project Truth envisages a sharp rise in the radio war the United States is conducting against 104 the socialist countries.
This rise was preceded by an increase in allocations and the mushrooming of VGA branches all over the world. The southern African branch is about to begin- operations in Botswana, beaming its broadcasts at Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Swaziland and Angola. A large VOA center is being planned for Asia, to support the Mideast branches of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. Hostile propaganda is to be broadcast to Cuba by a new station located in the United States.
The President of the United States himself takes direct part in the radio propaganda effort. Since April 1982, he has been on the air almost daily, commenting on the major domestic and foreign policy steps of his administration. Journalists have concluded that this is an attempt to lean on Ronald Reagan's professional skills: prior to becoming a film actor, he used to be a sport commentator.
But the extraordinary efforts by the U.S. leaders to intensify the propaganda offensive against the socialist countries and developing nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America are not rooted in personal preferences. The motives lie much deeper. The increase in the scope of psychological warfare and in the anti-Soviet elements of bourgeois propaganda is a direct consequence of the. steep rise in the aggressiveness of U.S. imperialism. This is felt in all aspects of international relations---in the political, diplomatic, economic and military fields and, naturally, in ideology and propaganda.
The record shows that Western 105 anticommunist propaganda rose to the pitch of hysteria each time imperialism suffered painful foreign policy setbacks. Recent years are seen in Washington as a period of heavy weather. The prestige of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries has kept rising; Asian, African and Latin American peoples have been winning new revolutionary victories. The sphere of imperialist domination has been contracting; contradictions within and among capitalist countries have been growing increasingly acute; and the political and economic influence and weight of the United States.has been on the wane.
The more reactionary forces in the American ruling class tend to put blame for all this on the Soviet Union and its allies. It is not the first time this class resorts to unbridled anticommunist propaganda in an attempt to somehow offset its foreign policy failures.
Project Truth offers additional proof that by systematically organizing hostile campaigns against the socialist countries, imperialism strives to replace ideological competition with psychological warfare.
The total psychological war mounted by Washington passed three stages of escalation. Soon after Project Truth was put into orbit, President Reagan served notice at Westminster in June 1982 of a new ``crusade'' against communism. A "propaganda planning" committee was formed at cabinet level to back it organizationally. The committee, which includes the State Secretary, the Secretary of Defense and the USIA Director, is headed by the presidential national security adviser. Its main objective is to 106 secure better "overall coordination" of public information to counteract the Soviet peace offensive.
In February 1983, Washington made much noise about the Program of Democracy and Public Diplomacy based on a presidential national security directive. Its officially announced purpose was to help "foster the infrastructure of democracy" across the world.
Under this program, the emphasis is being laid on training top officials in the "theory and practice of democracy," combatting "undemocratic elements" in foreign lands, and strengthening the rate of "the basic institutions of a democratic society," among which it lists parties, mass media, universities, the judiciary and police. So today we are witnessing a daily avalanche of CIA-fabricated slander being showered through the Western press on the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.
After the Program of Democracy and Public Diplomacy was launched everything that was previously the business of U.S. intelligence and came under the head of "covert operations," has been made public official U.S. policy and is being carried into effect by the entire powerful state machinery of the U.S. administration.
Democratic quarters throughout the world have correctly identified Washington's new propaganda campaign as a futile attempt to disguise the aggressive, militarist and antipopular policy of U.S. imperialism.
[107] __ALPHA_LVL1__ POISONED PENS, CLOAKS AND DAGGERS __ALPHA_LVL2__ Journalists in Plain ClothesThe marble wall of the main lobby at CIA Headquarters in Langley bears this quotation from the Gospel: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). The CIA top brass interpret this motto to suit their own needs---to justify spying and subversive propaganda against those nations whose socio-political systems or policies are seen as disagreeable in Washington. The Agency maintains a staff of 2,000 to conduct subversive propaganda; besides, some 1,000 propagandists are under contract to the CIA.
Together with the CIA which allocates over two billion dollars a year for subversive propaganda (this sum is greater than the budgets of AP, UPI or Reuters), the USIA and the Pentagon also work in this field, spending up to one billion dollars annually for this purpose.
Created in 1947, the U.S. National Security Council, at its very first meeting, charged the CIA with taking covert psychological action to influence domestic developments in other countries. Since that time, Langley has carried out hundreds of covert operations sanctioned by the White House. According to a Senate committee report, 81 officially acknowledged psychological warfare operations were conducted under President Truman, 170 under President 108 Eisenhower. 163 under President Kennedy, and 142 under President Johnson. This activity continued under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, but the report cites no figures for these periods. One should note that even without authorization from Congress or the President, the CIA has conducted numerous operations of this kind.
For the spiritual oppression of newly independent nations the CIA uses a ramified network of newspapers, periodicals, news agencies and publishing companies which it finances and controls to varying degrees. This intelligence and propaganda network comprises up to 800 entities. The New York Tiynes has remarked in this connection that money is the link connecting U.S. intelligence with its "propaganda empire" and ensuring partial and sometimes complete control over the empire's operation.
A detailed picture of this was presented by Argumentos, a Spanish periodical which, in late 1981, featured a special report on the CIA and the mass media. The Central Intelligence Agency, the magazine notes, manipulates information, invents and disseminates deliberately false reports with the aim of creating conditions detrimental to such political developments as those currently unfolding in Nicaragua. The CIA fabricates articles which are featured in major publications without reference to their true sources and uses journalists working in different countries as agents. It finances propaganda campaigns, motion pictures and stage shows in order to misinform public opinion.
The Central Intelligence Agency has repeatedly used important news agencies and other 109 media as a cover for its agents. Without concluding any contracts, it pays journalists to act as spies. It is the proprietor or founder of over 50 organizations dealing in information. The books financed by U.S. intelligence are numerous enough to fill a library.
One of the techniques employed by the CIA in its connections with the press is defined in a CIA interoffice memorandum as regular contacts with the media. Journalists specializing in military matters or foreign affairs are invited to Langley. There they are received by the CIA's chief public relations officer or one of his assistants who provide them with information outlines on the issue in question, quoted subsequently in the press as reported by a " government official.''
Some journalists receive CIA materials by mail. Often, the only thing the addressees are supposed to do is sign the copy and draw payment for it. Then the item is published in this or that newspaper.
The CIA also works with foreign journalists. In 1978, Admiral Stansfield Turner, at that time CIA Director, said that the extensive information supplied to journalists by their numerous sources could be of great value to the U.S. intelligence community. This information is also gathered by CIA agents holding diplomatic passports and posing as U.S. embassy officials in many countries. They are particularly interested in and maintain contacts with people working for the mass media.
Organizing propaganda campaigns, an important element of the covert operations conducted 110 by U.S. intelligence, is among the main aspects of CIA activities. For example, in the early 1970s, a campaign of this kind was launched to discredit the Allende government in Chile. In 1975, the CIA manipulators of information worked hard to turn the political process in Portugal to the right. In 1975 and 1976, six million dollars were spent on the propaganda groundwork for the parliamentary elections in Italy. To "keep Britain from going Soviet," vigorous efforts were undertaken to ensure a Conservative victory in 1979. American cloak and dagger experts have interfered in the internal affairs of India too.
The American economist and author S. Gerwasi estimates that some 3,000 CIA staff members are busy preparing "black propaganda.''
U.S. intelligence is particularly free and easy in Latin America, acting through a network of news, agencies supplying the local press with subversive information. Close contacts are maintained with many newspapers and magazines. According to Covert Action, the Latin American news agencies with CIA connections include Orbe, the Copley News Service, Forum World Features, and Latin.
Foremost among them is Forum World Features. During the 1970 election campaign in Chile, in the course of six weeks, Forum helped to publish hundreds of articles in the Chilean and world press aimed at preventing Allende's election as President. The Copley "News Service, one described by The New York Times as the eyes and ears of the CIA in Latin America, has been collaborating with Langley for over 25 111 years. Orbe, which supplies the press of many Latin American countries with all kinds of articles, is controlled and financed by U.S. intelligence through its agents in the Chilean capital. The Washington Post has called the Latin news agency "the news agency of the CIA," although Latin itself maintains it is a "Third World news agency.''
U.S. intelligence also controls the Inter-- American Press Association which provides information for some 1,000 newspapers in Latin America. CIA agents are on the board of directors of the Association; they have even served as its presidents---like the late James Copley who in 1953 founded the Copley News Service with CIA assistance. The Association specializes in organizing slanderous campaigns against the Latin American governments which displease Washington in one way or another. Currently, such hostile campaigns are being conducted with particular fervor against Cuba and Nicaragua.
The CIA has set up several dummy organizations and services to direct and coordinate imperialist propaganda in Asian developing countries. The Asia Foundation involved in intelligence and subversive operations in some 20 Asian countries through its bureaus there, is among the better-known such agencies. In India, for example, the Foundation tried to influence the outcome of general and state legislature elections by engineering the publication of appropriate reports in the local press. The Foundation's1 board does not bother to hide its anticommunist thrust. R. Blum, a CIA officer and the Foundation's first president, said openly that its mission 112 was to help Asian countries fight communism on their own soil.
The CIA also directs the operation of the Peoples of Asia Anticbmmunist League, an organization that has been active in the fight against the national patriotic and liberation movements for over 25 years. It tries to infiltrate its agents into progressive parties and groups and is behind the frenzied anticommunist propaganda in several Asian countries.
An international organization allegedly dealing with the problems of freedom of the press and information is a recent addition to the branches U.S. intelligence maintains in developing countries. It is a joint U.S.-Egyptian enterprise officially charged with fighting the spread of communist ideology in the Middle East. The CIA and USIA are the chief sources of ideas supposed to discredit scientific socialism; the leaders are Hassan Al-Musailhey, an Egyptian army general, and Salah Shahed, a "champion of anticommunism," also an Egyptian.
U.S. intelligence is busy in other parts of Africa too. Here psychological warfare is waged through the various ``research'' centers and educational and cultural institutions.
The New York-based African-American Institute is one such ``nongovernmental'' establishment. While stressing its independence, it is in fact a vehicle of Washington's official policy, operating in close contact with the U.S. State Department, the CIA and AID. The Institute deals with the education and on-the-job training of Africans in the United States, and with publishing and disseminating books and propaganda __PRINTERS_P_113_COMMENT__ 8-848 113 editions. According to Ken Owen of the Washington bureau of the Johannesburg The Star, prevention of revolution in South Africa is among the prime objectives of the AfricanAmerican Institute.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ The Pentagon as PropagandistAside from the CIA, the Pentagon is also active in the psychological war against developing countries. It commands a ramified apparatus for exerting massive ideological influence on Americans and millions of people in other countries. The U.S. historian Theodore White had good reason to call its propaganda system a powerful brainwashing machine. Many of the Pentagon's press organs have as their targets not so much the U.S. troops stationed around the world as a much broader range of readers abroad. The U.S. Department of Defense directs its ideological pressure in developing countries primarily at army officers and through them, at the rest of the servicemen. Aside from the U.S. military personnel, only the Pacific edition of The Stars and Stripes, the American army newspaper, is read daily by at least one million people in South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and more than 40 other Asian countries, as well as in Guam and Australia. In several Asian nations, The Stars and Stripes operates a network of news counters and nearly 100 bookstores which sell almost 500 different U.S. magazines and 12,000 titles of books a year.
The Military Review, the theoretical journal 114 of the U.S. Defense Department, is also a propaganda vehicle. After World War II it has added a Spanish and a Portuguese edition to the English version. It is sent to 80-odd countries; the subscribers include over 120 foreign libraries and more than 40 other agencies and organizations abroad. Besides, the Military Review is received by 140 newspapers and periodicals in various countries and by 15 news agencies.
An important role in the Pentagon's ideological subversion is played by the Armed Forces Radio-Television Service (AFRTS) which comprises some 400 radio and television stations, grouped into five major networks. One of them operates in the Far East (the Japanese islands of Honshu and Okinawa and South Korea) and another, in Southeast Asia, in the Philippines.
Over 60 broadcasting stations are deployed on U.S. naval vessels cruising off the coasts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. During debates in Congressional committees, Pentagon leaders have repeatedly stressed with pride that the AFRTS has long outstripped the Voice of America as far as the number of listeners is concerned.
AFRTS stations are staffed chiefly by U.S. citizens, most of them graduates of the Defense Department School of Information, located near Indianapolis and training journalists, photographers and radio and television newsmen.
AFRTS radio and television programs are produced in the Washington and Los Angeles bureaus of the Service by special teams of military correspondents and cameramen, as well as by commercial radio and television stations and __PRINTERS_P_115_COMMENT__ 8* 115 privately owned motion picture companies supplying their products free to the AFRTS. According to U.S. News & World Report, 3,000 to 3,500 television films and about as many radio programs are commissioned by the Pentagon annually.
The sums the Pentagon spends on global propaganda campaigns are increasing each year, and this enables the United States to internationalize, via its Defense Department, the channels used to ideologically influence world public opinion. This is achieved by harnessing to the Pentagon's propaganda machine similar services in other NATO countries. The use of the mass media for subversive purposes has become a traditional agenda item at sessions of the North Atlantic Council and its various committees. NATO's ideological apparatus, officially called the North Atlantic Information Service, is a complicated structure which includes departments and sections specializing in radio propaganda, visual aids, publishing and the press. Foremost among them is the Information and Cultural Ties Committee, which elaborates plans and methods for ideological struggle against communism, analyzes international information and on this basis submits specific propaganda recommendations to the relevant services. It also serves as an advisory body and information pool used by the NATO countries in their ideological effort. Besides, it carries out and coordinates subversive propaganda operations against the socialist camp and developing countries.
The people in charge of U.S. propaganda agencies have repeatedly tried to secure for 116 propaganda aimed at foreign countries a status distinct from other fields of activity: their demands led to the 1946 decision on transferring supervision of this propaganda from the Defense to the State Department. A special office on international information and culture was set up under the latter body.
In 1950, the U.S. National Security Council decided that American propaganda should be intensified and its scope extended.
On August 17, 1950, the U.S. government announced the creation of a new propaganda organ under the State Department. It was responsible for directing psychological warfare against "international communism," propaganda and subversive operations designed to ensure the implementation of aggressive U.S. schemes. That this agency engaged in subversion was also clear from its composition: it included representatives of the military and of the intelligence community.
On June 20, 1951, one more propaganda body was established by executive order---an institution dealing with psychological warfare. This move made management of psychological warfare a function of the National Security Council and brought propaganda still closer to subversion. The Presidential directive authorized the new body to elaborate a policy of ideological war preparation and direct the implementation of this policy by all U.S. propaganda agencies, both government and private.
A special Presidential committee on psychological warfare was also set up, to study ways of coordinating and intensifying all Cold War and 117 subversive operations.
In 1953, a radically new period began with the establishment of the United States Information Agency (USIA), an organization in its own right with a variety of propaganda means at its disposal, including permanent missions in many countries. The USIA was very active around the world---for example, in the early 1970s, it published 56 anti-Soviet periodicals in foreign countries. The Voice of America is also part of the USIA framework.
The creation of the USIA, and official tool of the U.S. government abroad, coincided with the rise of increasingly aggressive trends in U.S. foreign policy. As Herbert Schiller wrote, "American foreign policy assumed its task of thwarting or controlling social change in other nations to protect investment opportunities for American business." The Presidential Memorandum of 1963 left no doubt as to the tasks of the agency: "The USIA, it said, should 'help achieve United States objectives by ... influencing public attitudes in other nations.' "^^1^^
Throughout the history of the USIA, its leaders have tried,to convince public opinion that the agency does not deal in subversion but merely disseminates "objective information." This demagoguery has been used to cover up largescale psywar operations organized and directed by the CIA.
In the late 1970s, the existing propaganda structure no longer met the requirements of U.S. _-_-_
^^1^^ Herbert I. Schiller, The Mind Managers, Beacon Press, Boston, 1973, p. 44.
118 foreign policy. After several special studies, it was decided to reorganize this structure. The reorganization took place under President Carter. On April 1, 1978, a new centralized propaganda body began to function in the United States--- the International Communications Agency (ICA), which united the USIA and the Department of State Bureau for Education and Culture. The ICA was to control all American propaganda aimed at foreign countries, coordinate the information prepared by various propaganda bodies for dissemination abroad, direct the implementation of U.S. "educational and cultural" programs in other countries and the various exchange programs.The ICA Director was responsible only to the President and the Secretary of State. He became their chief adviser on international information and propaganda. The aim of the reorganization was to step up American propaganda abroad and improve support for U.S. foreign policy. The financial status of the new organization was also improved: in its first year, the ICA budget almost doubled and reached 400 million dollars in 1979.
In 1982, President Reagan restored the old name---USIA---to this organization. The original name---ICA---was too close to another acronym---CIA---and, as its leaders admitted themselves, gave rise to "confusion." However, no matter what the title, the functions this agency discharges in the field of propaganda are similar to those of the CIA.
The USIA has a staff of about 9,000 people, maintains propaganda centers in 126 countries, 119 publishes periodicals in 20-odd languages, sends free radio and television materials to several thousand addresses, and controls more than 200 film libraries.
In 1983, the United States spent 640 million dollars for propaganda conducted by the USIA. Naturally, the reorganization at the top level of U.S. propaganda agencies should also be viewed in the context of the overall intensification by U.S. imperialism of its ideological struggle against the U.S.S.R and other socialist countries. Washington confirms officially that all the activities of the USIA are connected with the " strategic policy of the United States" and that they should be of service to complement in propaganda terms the foreign policy moves made by the U.S. government.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ The Radio Armaments RaceFrom the very first postwar years, U.S. psychological warfare agencies saw radio as the key element in the system of the methods they used. This opinion became especially pronounced against the background of the so-called information explosion, with considerable technological improvements in transmitters and receivers. Besides, to this day radio has no equal in the promptness of coverage and the size of audience. Radio is undoubtedly the most effective form of strategic propaganda, if ``strategic'' here has the same meaning as in "strategic aviation." Radio is a most valuable instrument of foreign policy; the strategic role of radio stations should be 120 revised and radically reassessed with due regard to the strategic priorities.
Over 30 years separate these two statements. The former was made by Grossman, one of Britain's foremost experts in psychological warfare, in the late 1940s. The latter is a current opinion expressed in an official publication of the U.S. Congress. And although many other propaganda channels have emerged over these decades, radio broadcasts in foreign languages are still considered in the West a highly important means of influencing audiences abroad.
Significantly, top level USIA officials have from the very start attached particular attention to subversive radio propaganda against the socialist countries. This purpose is served by the Voice of America, the main subversive radio station of the United States. Transmitting programs in 39 languages, its total weekly broadcasting time is 940 hours. Its 1982 budget submitted by President Reagan envisaged an increase in the allocations from 101.5 million to 188 million dollars. The VOA chiefs keep insisting that radio is the only means of external-oriented propaganda capable of bringing the truth about the United States and world affairs to the listeners. That is why 77 per cent of VOA broadcasts are beamed to socialist countries.
Washington sees radio broadcasts aimed at foreign countries as the most effective form of "strategic propaganda.''
It was no accident that the New York Daily News called on Washington not to lose sight, while discussing tanks, B-l bombers and MX missiles, of the comparatively inexpensive radio 121 broadcasts designed to sow the seeds of discontent in the hearts and minds of East Europeans.
VOA associate director, F. Nicolaides has bluntly recommended that the Voice of America should work to destabilize the Soviet Union and its satellite states and drive a wedge of dissent and suspicion into the relations among the leaders of the various communist bloc countries. A similar view of the goals of U.S. radio propaganda against the Soviet Union is advocated by Senator Karl Mundt, a well-known cold warrior. In his opinion, American radio propaganda persuades Russian listeners to sabotage the defense industry and delay the implementation of the five-year plan aimed at ensuring greater agricultural and industrial productivity.
In March 1968, the Voice of Free Asia, a new radio station, began its regular broadcasts from Thailand in English, French, Vietnamese, Thai, Laotian, and several other languages. Built with CIA money and outfitted with the latest equipment, it was a ``grant'' to the then military regime of Thailand for which it paid a token price of one baht (about 20 cents). It is obvious, however, that Thailand got only what it paid for: eight hours of broadcasting time a day. The staff of the station was selected by the CIA. All the materials are supplied by U.S. intelligence and by American news agencies.
A similar pattern was employed in 1976 to establish the Voice of Free Africa. Each ``voice'' has its own Distinctive mission in the overall subversive effort of imperialism. Each works incessantly to distort the essence of progressive reforms in countries which have chosen the path 122 of progressive development.
The Voice of Free Africa tries to discredit national liberation leaders and whitewash the illegal arms deliveries from the West to the racist regimes.
The CIA uses some developing countries not only as targets of the broadcasts but also as sites of such notorious installations as radio monitoring centers. Commenting on the decision to set up a VOA relay station in Sri Lanka, the Indian press noted that it would, first, disseminate propaganda arguing the ``necessity'' of a U.S. military presence in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, second, jam broadcasts transmitted from neighboring countries and considered objectionable by the United States, and third, monitor international communications in this region.
The BBC also maintains radio monitoring centers in developing countries. One is located in Lilongwe, Malawi. The information gathered here is forwarded not only to London but also to South Africa, to be used by the racist regime in its own radio propaganda beamed to independent African countries. The data supplied by the BBC station in Lilongwe was exploited widely by the Voice of Free Africa which claimed that it was based in Mozambique and operated by ``guerrillas'' fighting the country's legitimate government. In actual fact, its headquarters was in Gwelo, Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia). This radio station ceased its broadcasts only in February 1981, on the eve of the Zimbabwe elections. The press has reported that BBC monitoring stations are also located in the British 123 embassies in Accra, Ghana, and Abidjan, the Ivory Coast.
Iran, Afghanistan and other countries in the Middle East make up another region where Western propaganda is increasingly active. In 1979, the BBC hired translators into Kurdish and in 1980, speakers of Pushtu and Dari, languages spoken both in Iran and in Afghanistan. Also in 1980, Persian-language broadcasts from London were increased by almost two hours a week. The broadcasting time of U.S. programs beamed to Iran and Afghanistan is even greater.
In mid-May 1980, the so-called Free Voice of Iran began its broadcasts. According to The New York Times, the transmitters of this CIA-created station were located in Egypt: one near Alexandria and another close to the Suez Canal. President Sadat is said to have given personal orders to issue Egyptian transmitters to the Americans. The Persian-language programs of the Free Voice of Iran contained instigative calls to `` liberateIran''; Iranians were urged to "take up arms.''
The Voice of America is also transmitting programs to Iran, advising Iranians to return to a pro-American stand. As to Afghan listeners, VOA feeds them the latest news about the raids of saboteurs and mercenaries extolled as " freedom fighters.''
In 1980, the VOA decided to expand its Urdu and Bengali programs by 50 per cent (languages spoken in Pakistan, Bangladesh and several Indian states) and to double its Turkish broadcasts. The fact that in 1979 Washington introduced a new service in Hausa (a language spoken in many African countries) and is now 124 constructing a transmitter in Botswana (to step up propaganda aimed at Southern Africa, including Angola) demonstrates the rate of the "radio armaments race" directed against independent developing countries.
In the 1950s, the U.S. propaganda apparatus was expanded considerably, Radio Liberty (RL) and Radio Free Europe (RFE) were established, and the Mutual Security Act was passed. Spearheaded against the socialist community, it authorized an appropriation of 100 million dollars for creating subversive centers and arming gangs of defectors from socialist countries. RL and RFE chiefs state openly that the "struggle for the overthrow of communist regimes in Eastern Europe" is their chief objective. RL and RFE broadcasts to the Soviet Union, Poland and other socialist countries not only contain slander but also incite armed action against the socialist system.
James Buckley, the diehard anticommunist appointed director of these radio stations in October 1982, has said that the principal mission of these centers is to foment discontent within the Soviet bloc. These subversive radio stations are officially financed from the U.S. national budget.
Having made a public show of renouncing its control of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, the CIA continues to direct their operation through the International Broadcasting Board set up in 1973. A special committee, organized under the then Presidential national security assistant Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1978, coordinates the activities of these radio stations 125 and the VOA. In March 1977, a special Presidential report on foreign-aimed broadcasting appeared, pointing out the need for concerted action by the VOA, RL and RFE and by similar entities in the NATO countries in large-scale psychological warfare operations.
The subversive mission of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, their hostility to peace and international cooperation has turned these stations into veritable founts of slander and misinformation. Their very existence is a challenge to the letter and spirit of the Helsinki accords and to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter: The Soviet Union has stated repeatedly that these psywar weapons should cease functioning. Nevertheless, the U.S. government continues to use RL and RFE to poison the international climate. Let us take a look at recent developments in Poland. Radio Free Europe has long begun preparing counterrevolutionary forays against the socialist system in Poland. On March 15, 1971, The New York Times published an article by David Binder about the instigative role this station played during the December 1970 riots by antisocial elements in Gdansk. RFE, Binder wrote, "undoubtedly contributed to the spread of anti-Government riots beyond the Gdansk area and to the subsequent change of leadership in Warsaw.''^^1^^
Speaking before the House International Relations Committee on August 18, 1981, Zygmunt Michajlowski, director of the RFE Polish Department, declared that the events in Poland had _-_-_
~^^1^^ The New York Times, March 15, 1971, p. 10. 126
126 been prepared by the local dissenters aided by Radio Free Europe. After December 13, 1981, when martial law was introduced in Poland, the Voice of America increased its Polish broadcasts from 2.5 to five hours daily, while the 150 staff members of the RFE Polish service began to work around the clock, preparing and broadcasting instructions and slogans for the counterrevolutionary underground. The station's Polish broadcasts became extremely aggressive, focusing on inflammatory instigation against the government and its external alliances and calling on Poles to boycott their jobs.This is usually disguised as information on what is allegedly happening in Poland. But the programs do not reflect actual events; instead, they actually instruct the antisocialist forces on how they should act. Take the guidelines set out in detail in a pamphlet signed by the so-called Solidarity Resistance Forces. RFE has broadcast its full text many times. However, no one in Poland had ever seen these pamphlets before.they were quoted by RFE. They were dictated over the radio from Munich.
By contaminating the airwaves with poisonous information, the subversive radio centers of the imperialist powers build up world tensions, try to disrupt normal international relations and cooperation and promote discord and hostility among nations.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Pulling TogetherThey say Winston Churchill once remarked there were three neutral powers in Europe--- 127 Sweden, Switzerland and the BBC. This is as far from the truth as the claim that the BBC is the independent radio station in the world. In its ultimate objectives---defending the interests of Western monopoly capital, promoting anticommunism, opposing the new economic and information order, advertising for transnational corporations---it differs little from its U.S. counterparts. As to its claims to independence, even its official status provides for certain forms of control on the part of the ruling quarters.
The BBC External Services, nicknamed Bush House, depend on the government even more. Unlike the domestic service, financed from the license fees the British pay for the right to listen to and watch BBC programs, Bush House is supported directly by government allocations. It is the government---or, to be precise, its intelligence branch---which decides on the languages and length of broadcasts and on the key propaganda campaigns. For example, the planning of the BBC's external broadcasts is the prerogative of the Foreign Office foreign information bureau. Permission from the Foreign Office is required to broadcast any news item related to foreign policy that could conceivably be called important.
The BBC External Services are currently broadcasting in English and 38 foreign languages for nearly 800 hours a week---much more than the domestic broadcasting time. With its long experience at external broadcasting, the BBC is among the most sophisticated and skillful centers in the system of imperialist propaganda. Each day, this radio corporation presents biased 128 coverage of world events and of developments in former British colonies and broadcasts inventions about progressive regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The British external propaganda system includes three other major components: the Central Information Bureau, the British Council and the Foreign Office department of foreign information, the latter officially supposed to prepare reference materials for British embassies and missions abroad.
Prior to 1977, The Guardian and the Observer report, the Foreign Office maintained for 30 years a secret research department with staff detailed to serve with British embassies in different countries. Its main task was to fight national liberation movements and the spread of communist ideology. Through dummy proprietors, the department controlled the publishing company which specialized in propaganda literature glorifying British imperialism. The production of these books and their distribution in developing countries were financed partly by British intelligence. The rest of the costs were borne by the department which also supplied doctored information to leading journalists and paid fees for propaganda articles written on this basis and published in the world press.
After the operations of the department were publicly exposed, it was reorganized into the Foreign Information Department. The change, however, was in name only, not in the type or methods of work. The new department retained all the leading officials of the former one and assumed even broader propaganda functions. As __PRINTERS_P_129_COMMENT__ 9-848 129 before, each week, some 70 prominent British journalists receive a manila envelope mailed by the Foreign Office and marked "For Your Information." The envelope usually contains various statistical and other materials on this or that country. On the whole, the information appears plausible enough, but most of its items are selected so as to present a distorted picture of the action taken by the foreign government in question. Most of the papers in the envelope bear a Foreign Office stamp warning that this is a general background document not to be considered or quoted as expressing the government's views. Sometimes there is no indication at all of the source of the document. Foreign Office spokesmen assert that this "background material" is prepared primarily for British embassies.
But these envelopes are also mailed to trusted journalists and local pro-Western newspapers in Asian, African and Latin American' countries. Even a cursory glance at the list of these bulletins proves their obviously heightened interest in the domestic situation in the socialist countries. For example, at least 46 of the 67 bulletins issued by the department in 1980 were completely subordinated to the task of misrepresenting steps taken by the Soviet Union and its allies. In 1981, at least 51 of the 77 bulletins issued were fully devoted to socialist countries; the rest also touched on the subject of communism in one way or another.
The Central Information Bureau (GIB) plays an important role in coordinating the work of all British government propaganda agencies. Its chief job is to distribute official materials issued by 130 various government offices and services and, especially, to promote their use in the press and on the radio. This information is also sent to foreign countries. The GIB also publishes the Commonwealth Today magazine in ten languages.
Still, Britain's best-known propaganda organization is the so-called British Council, established as early as 1934, in colonial times. Originally, it was supposed to enlist the cooperation of prominent public figures, artists, authors, etc., in Britain's relations with foreign countries. As the scope of the Council's work expanded, the government took over the task of providing it with financial resources, equipment and staff. The Council's budget runs into many millions of pounds. It has a staff of 5,000 and maintains 130 British cultural centers and libraries, in 80 countries.
Compared to similar services in other leading capitalist countries, especially the United States, the British Council produces rather limited amounts of printed propaganda. Instead, it concentrates on cultural and educational work; first arid foremost, on the organization of exchanges. British teachers recommended by the Council work in 70 universities and 50 colleges in various countries. It is also in charge of British exhibitions abroad and of an extensive network of English language classes.
Significantly, the faster the British colonial empire disintegrated, the more active the British Council became. Today, former British colonies are where the Council spends most of its resources and maintains most of its foreign centers and personnel. The Council directs its __PRINTERS_P_131_COMMENT__ 9* 131 propaganda effort not at the masses but at the elite, at the intellectuals who usually shape public opinion in newly independent nations.
The Foreign Office has authorized the British Council to coordinate the foreign-oriented work of private organizations in the fields of education, science, culture and English language courses for foreign students in British universities (there are currently some 100,000 such students in Britain). These organizations' resources virtually double the overall amount spent in Britain on external propaganda.
To sum up, the British external propaganda machine stands, in terms of the character and scope of its work, side by side with the U.S. propaganda services, on the right wing of the front against the socialist countries, the national liberation movement, progress and peace.
In the F.R.G. propaganda is directed by the Federal Press and Information Agency. Ten Federal ministries, above all the Foreign Ministry, all the provincial governments, as well as private organizations work to create a favorable image of the F.R.G. abroad. There are 244 West German research centers studying Asia, Africa and Latin America. According to Frankfurter Rundschau, the F.R.G. has been spending over five billion deutsche marks annually on external propaganda in recent years.
Foremost among the many West German ideological centers operating at home and abroad is the Goethe Institute, founded in 1932. Officially, its goal was to spread the German language and German culture for better understanding between Germans and other nations. In 132 actual fact, from its inception the Goethe Institute was active in the propaganda of Nazi expansionism. Today it preaches revanchist, nationalist and neocolonialist ideas.
The Institute has over 120 branch offices in 60 countries where some 20,000 television films produced by it were shown in 1979. A German language course compiled by the Institute as a series of propaganda topics is broadcast by 198 foreign radio stations.
West German propaganda is perhaps the most skillful in concealing its true aims. A study of the German language and German culture is the cover used to ideologically brainwash the elite and the upper sections of the intellectuals.
French external propaganda aimed at Africa and Asia focuses on ensuring a French `` cultural'' (or ``intellectual'') presence. France has concluded agreements, conventions and protocols on cultural, scientific and technological cooperation with 75 countries. Millions of African school and college students use French textbooks and manuals. In France, there exist various cultural, academic and political associations and societies among salary earners, intellectuals, the military and youth. These organizations disseminate both cultural and political propaganda and are represented abroad by the so-called France Houses. The agencies cooperating vigorously in this effort are government services, including the Ministry of Culture and the Foreign Ministry, the latter with its Directorate of Cultural, Scientific and Technological Ties, and private organizations like Alliance francaise, Alliance universale, and the like.
133French-language radio broadcasts are beamed to foreign countries almost 24 hours a day. Besides, taped radio programs (6,000 hours) and television shows (4,400 hours) are exported to 70 countries. Almost 20 per cent of all the books produced in France are sold abroad; these foreign sales have quadrupled over the past 15 years. French motion pictures are also exported on a large scale. As ``patron'' of French-speaking developing countries, France trains thousands of students from these nations at its colleges and universities. Scores of newspapers and periodicals covering developments in newly independent countries are published in France. Some 75 ideological, cultural and linguistic centers are working on ``Francophone'' issues---that is, they try to prove the necessity and inevitability of "historical community" among nations speaking the French language or united by a Romance culture.
The thousands of French advisers working for governments, the mass media, educational establishments and similar agencies in African and other French-speaking countries provide important leverage for exerting influence on developing countries, including ideological and propaganda influence.
The government of Japan pays increasing attention to the ideological manipulation of people in Asian developing countries; its allocations for the purpose have grown sixfold over the past decade. The money is used to extoll in the media the domestic and foreign policy of the Japanese government, justify militarism, Japan's economic expansionism and the Japanese-U.S. 134 military alliance.
Not only major Western powers but also other, smaller capitalist countries---for example Sweden---conduct propaganda aimed at developing countries. Although their staff, budgets and scale of operations are smaller, they publish and distribute a great amount of literature, broadcast subversive programs to newly independent countries, bribe journalists at home and abroad and promote their countries' films. Especially active is the South African intelligence service. Until recently, practically nothing was known about its propaganda campaigns in the U.S., West European and even African press to distort the African image and whitewash apartheid.
However, a South African political figure has disclosed that for many years the Ministry of Information has had at its disposal a huge fund to finance and bribe newspapers, special committees, advertising and film distribution companies, news agencies, travel agencies, and individual tourists---all this in order to publicize apartheid as "prosperous and humane." Money from this fund went to found the Citizen, a ``loyal'' South African newspaper, and to attempt the purchase of the Washington Star in the United States, a whole group of newspapers in Britain, Paris Match and L 'Express in France, and a conservative weekly in Norway. The South African Ministry of Information has contacted Axel Ca'sar Springer; since 1970, South African money has been paid for over 50 supplements to such newspapers as Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Welt. The South African 135 Ministry of Information even recruits scholars to take part in its operations: a "South Africa Freedom Fund" was established for this purpose. This fund financed the publication in the United States of a ``scholarly'' book entitled The Mass Media in Black Africa.
[136] __ALPHA_LVL1__ LIES MASS-PRODUCEDToday imperialism cannot expect to succeed if it openly proclaims its goals. It therefore has to create an entire system of ideological myths to camouflage its true intentions and to lull nations into a false sense of security. We believe that some of these myths deserve to be examined in detail.
Anticommunism and anti-Sovietism as its main element remain the basis of imperialist ideological subversion in developing countries. The dogma and ideology of anticommunism are lies through and through because they ascribe to communism totally fictitious purposes and methods. Even bourgeois scholars admit this. For example, sociologists from Harvard University reviewed the reports on the U.S.S.R. published in The New York Times over the 30 postwar years. The conclusion: 87 per cent of the stories are downright lies, while 13 percent distort, to varying degrees, actual facts.
Such is the background against which one should view the much-vaunted imperialist propaganda myth about the "Soviet threat" to other countries and about "Soviet interference" in various parts of the globe. As the first socialist state in history was taking its first steps, Lenin wrote in his pamphlet "The Achievements and Difficulties of the Soviet Government": 137 ``Some foolish people are shouting about red militarism. These are political crooks who pretend that they believe this absurdity and throw charges of this kind right and left, exercising their lawyers' skill in concocting plausible arguments and in throwing dust in the eyes of the masses.''^^1^^
As before, the anti-Soviet experts of today try to explain away all the socio-political changes, no matter where they occur, by the primitive propaganda cliche of "Soviet interference.''
When the Iranian people rose against the Shah's regime, U.S. intelligence orchestrated a press campaign in Iran. The articles published maintained, without citing any proof, that the Iranian-Soviet frontier was open to admit into Iran the Soviet troops allegedly massed along the border. One newspaper even reported that there was a "Soviet spy network" in Iran. The CIA distributed 100,000 copies of the book Conspiracy in Iran by Robert Moss, in which he set forth inventions about the policy of the Soviet Union vis-a-vis Iran. Other articles and books were also printed and distributed; the one thing they did not contain was objective coverage of the clear and unambiguous position of the Soviet Union which had repeatedly reiterated its complete noninterference in the Iranian internal affairs.
Simultaneously with the anticommunist and anti-Soviet campaign conducted in the Iranian _-_-_
^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Achievements and Difficulties of the Soviet Government," Collected Works, Vol. 29, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1980, p. 66.
138 press by Western intelligence, the "communist threat" theme was stressed repeatedly by the mass media in the United States and its NATO allies. For example, The Washington Post charged that it was, of all things, Radio Moscow who was behind the spread of anti-American feelings in Iran. Le Figaro of France hastily reported on "hundreds of Soviet agents" and "thousands of Moscow-trained provocateurs" supposedly active in Iran. But then, as soon as the Shah's regime was overthrown, Western propaganda switched to stories about the " Soviet threat" to the new Iranian government and started harping again on the "concentration of Soviet troops" along the Iranian border. The Pentagon used this to camouflage the actual concentration of its naval and air forces in the Persian Gulf. It also launched a vigorous search fpr sites to deploy U.S. military bases in the region. The White House imposed economic and other sanctions against the Iranian people.The Western military-industrial complex profits from and encourages this anti-Soviet propaganda. If one takes the peak of any mass media campaign in the NATO countries, one can trace its sources by leafing through the back issues of leading bourgeois newspapers and periodicals. It turns out that, as a rule, these sources are either the publishing outlets of the Western defense ministries or the media with close links to the arms manufacturing corporations. For example, the late 1979 North Atlantic Council decision on the deployment in Western Europe of the new U.S. nuclear missiles was preceded by a concerted effort to scare world public 139 opinion into believing that a "Soviet threat" really existed.
There is hardly any single type of Soviet military equipment which the monopoly press has not brandished as allegedly superior to that of NATO, especially at the time of decision on budgetary allocations for defense.
As though on orders from on high, the leading press organs of the NATO countries suddenly begin to publish scare stories about some "bacteriological weapons accident in the Urals," about "chemical weapons used by the Soviets in Afghanistan," "toxic agents used by the Vietnamese in Kampuchea," "Warsaw Pact preparations for chemical warfare," and the like.
The motive behind all these inventions is that despite the fact that the United States has signed the international convention banning the development, manufacture and accumulation of bacteriological and toxin armaments, it has begun to develop a new generation of these weapons. Newsweek reports that 1.3 billion dollars will be spent on these projects over the next five years. Also, according to an interview of General Bernard Rogers, of the United States, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, the Pentagon intends to proceed with the manufacture of the so-called binary weapons which combine toxic and nerve gas elements. There have also been reports to the effect that the United States not only tries to force its NATO allies to accept toxic and bacteriological agents as means of warfare but has even delivered such weapons to some countries. Former President 140 Carter, for example, has admitted that such deliveries were made to the Iranian regime of the Shah. This was a forced admission, made after the rout of a counterrevolutionary gang near the Afghan city of Herat, when the Afghan People's Revolutionary Army captured U.S.-- manufactured chemical weapons.
The impression is that, out of fear that the transfer of U.S. chemical weapons to the mercenaries invading Afghanistan from Pakistan would, sooner or later, come into the open, the U.S. administration hastened to launch a press campaign against the Soviet Union and Vietnam.
Imperialism resorts to libelous assertions about the so-called Soviet threat to justify its own interference in the internal affairs of African and Asian countries. The record shows that these inventions are used especially frequently when national liberation movements win new victories.
Many other well-known myths propagated by bourgeois ideology are anticommunist too. For example, the newspapers and periodicals distributed in developing countries, as well as television and radio programs beamed at them, keep using the formula "the rich North versus the poor South." The ``poor'' are Asia, Africa and Latin America. The "rich," according to bourgeois ideologists, are developed capitalist countries, as well as the Soviet Union and several other socialist nations. The intimation is that capitalist and socialist countries are alike.
As to the motives behind this claim and its purposes, bourgeois theorists maintain that 141 ``rich" countries can be identified by a common denominator---the level of their industrial development and national income. They also assert that both capitalist and developed socialist nations are equally responsible for the backwardness of newly independent states. Deliberately, nothing is said about the fact that the socialist countries have never exploited the wealth or the labor of other nations, the way the colonial powers used to do in the past and the transnational corporations do to this day.
By equating capitalist and socialist countries, by presenting capitalism and socialism as merely two versions of the same "industrial society," bourgeois propaganda is trying to kill two birds with one stone: shirk the historical responsibility for the backwardness of developing countries and convince these states that there is nothing in socialism worth fighting for---in other words, ideologically disarm these nations in their struggle for social progress.
There is also an obvious propaganda thrust to the economic materials offered by the Western media to their audiences in developing countries. For example, Newsweek explains the considerable economic progress nations in Southeast Asia have attained due to, among other things, the increased role of the state sector in their economies, their growing cooperation with the socialist community and their joint efforts to strengthen their hand on the world market, mostly by their large exports to the United States and Japan.
The same purpose is served by the muchpublicized tales of the paradise waiting in the 142 West for migrant workers. Take "Private Enterprise," a film by Peter Smith promoted by the British film industry in Asian and African countries. Produced for obvious propaganda reasons, the film is about a young immigrant from India who lives in Birmingham and works at a small factory. The boy dreams of starting a business of his own and works very hard to achieve this. In the end, the newly made businessman becomes the owner of the factory.
This and many other similar films produced by Western television and motion picture companies contain the same familiar message---they all extoll the Western way of life and build up the myth of "ethnic and social harmony" under capitalism.
It is a fact that in some countries people still believe this is true. In this connection, Jeune Afrique once wrote that in the home countries of migrant workers there was a veritable legend about a promised land for immigrants. Those who return from the West wearing a good suit and carrying a transistor radio usually avoid speaking about the ordeal they had to endure. Meanwhile, the actual facts are far from the myths promoted by Western propaganda. For example, this is how Turkish migrant workers described their plight abroad in Ak$am, an Istanbul newspaper: "There were 100 of us who agreed to leave for West Germany. They promised that all of us would be given the jobs we were trained for. But once there, we were all given manual jobs. They forced us to work ten hours a day, and at the end of each week we were paid one-sixth of what we had been 143 promised. We lived in dirty barracks. The rent ate up one-third of our wages, although the contract said the housing was supposed to be free." Nonwhite migrant workers are arrested on the least, or even on no pretext---such is the opinion of the Paris-based Afrique-Asie.
Not only various categories of people like the migrant workers mentioned above but also whole nations fall victim to bourgeois propaganda campaigns. For example, recently imperialism mounted ideological attacks against Angola. The United States, South Africa and the Portuguese reactionaries formed an unholy alliance against this country. They orchestrated a virulent propaganda campaign to support imperialist-financed factionalist puppet organizations---FNLA, led by Holden Roberto, a paid agent of the CIA, and UNITA under Jonas Savimbi, who used to be an informer with Salazar's military intelligence.
The mass media of the F.R.G., Britain, France and other NATO countries joined in this antiAngolan campaign. Typical of this ideological interference in the affairs of the Angolan people were stories published in the Western press (especially in the London-based Daily Telegraph and Financial Times and in many American newspapers and periodicals) and American television commercials advertising a recruitment drive for mercenaries to fight on the side of FNLA and UNITA. The bourgeois press frequently wrote in glowing terms about the breathtaking fees paid to these soldiers of fortune, covered departures of new mercenary groups for Angola and described their "easy victories" 144 over Angolan patriots. The Cuban journalist Raul Valdes Vivo had good reason to note that this was yet another political myth promoted by bourgeois, propaganda via the mass mediapresenting the mercenaries as a victorious force in the struggle against "natives led astray.'"
In May 1978, world public opinion learned much about CIA interference in Angola and about the deplorable role the Western press played in the Angolan events from a book entitled In Search of the Enemy and written by Colonel John Stockwell, formerly chief of the CIA Angolan task force. Stockwell, who broke with the CIA, confirmed that a large part of the 32 million dollars his group received for the Angolan operation was spent on fees to U.S. and West European journalists for the fabrication of deliberate lies to be reported in the press, including the African press.
The CIA, Stockwell writes,, believed that the propaganda campaign over the Angolan civil war was as important as the hostilities themselves. To direct this psychological warfare effort, the CIA dispatched 83 operatives specializing in cultivating relations with the press to its Kinshasa, Luanda and Pretoria stations. Certain U.S. corporations provided sizable financial support for these operations. For example, Gulf Oil earmarked 125 million dollars to be used in Angola. Simultaneously, CIA propagandists worked frantically, Stockwell recalls, to push slanderous anti-Soviet and anti-Cuban stories into the Kinshasa press---the newspapers Elima and Salongo---and into the world press. The socalled White Paper, which grossly distorted the __PRINTERS_P_145_COMMENT__ 10-848 145 situation in Angola, was written by the CIA and distributed at the United Nations and in the press.
Ideological subversion against Angola still goes on. Pressure on Angola from the imperialist-controlled press, publishing and motion picture industries and television continues unabated. Attempts are being made to isolate the republic from other African countries and picture it as dominated by foreign influences. All kinds of inventions are reported about Angolans and their leaders in order to plunge the country into instability and confusion. Today, Angola is one of the many developing countries subjected to imperialist ideological pressure.
Any part of the globe where national liberation is on the rise immediately becomes the target of imperialist psychological warfare. For example, as soon as the people of Nicaragua overthrew the Somoza regime, the reactionary press in the West started a barrage of attacks and slander against the Provisional Government of National Reconstruction and the Sandinista Liberation Front. The Voice of America, the BBC and several bourgeois newspapers simultaneously reported that over 3,000 former members of Somoza's National Guard were executed together with their families in Managua. This libelous story, the Nicaraguan newspaper Barricada stressed, was prepared by Western experts in psychological warfare. The campaign was exposed as fraudulent only after scores of foreign journalists who were in Nicaragua at the time gave their first-hand accounts of 146 what was going on there.
In Asia, India has been repeatedly subjected to imperialist ideological subversion. In the spring of 1979, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) published a report in the world press predicting that within the next six years Asia would be hit by unprecedented famine and that this would be the fault of India. AID asserted that India's substantial grain purchases were about to force the United States to discontinue its food deliveries to other Asian countries, thus precipitating famine.
It is perfectly clear which U.S. agency had a hand in the preparation of this AID report: it was the CIA economic forecast service which has long been paying close attention to developing countries' efforts to ease their food shortages. For example, several years ago a classified CIA report on the food problem found its way into the press. The Indian weekly New Age wrote that in this report the CIA practically suggested to the U.S. government that it should use food deliveries to keep a stranglehold on the world. This shows that the AID propaganda blast was obviously engineered by the CIA.
As to India, named in the report as the culprit responsible for the allegedly imminent total famine in Asia, the United States has long tried to use the food problem in this country to its own advantage. Playing on the food shortages there, Washington attempted to bring political pressure to bear on India by manipulating the U.S. food deliveries under the so-called Program 480. But when the Indian government launched its long-term program to ensure self-sufficiency 147 in terms of food, the United States decided to sabotage this Indian agricultural effort. The CIA, which was to play the central part in this scheme, began to finance, through the Asia Foundation, the Ford Foundation and similar agencies, a noisy propaganda campaign to discredit the agrarian policy of the Indian government.
Why then are there still people in many countries who swallow the bait of imperialist propaganda and believe patent lies? One of the more important reasons is that bourgeois propaganda resorts to a wealth of psywar techniques, often very well camouflaged. Let us consider several examples.
U.S. psychologists, sociologists and journalists have developed and are using widely the "red herring" technique of distracting attention from the real issue and pointing it to less important things. For example, the VOA painstakingly avoids topics like the exploitation by Western monopolies of the natural and human resources of developing countries or the support by the imperialist powers of unpopular and racist regimes. At the same time, this radio station may for several days running report on an American gift of 700 books to the Ghanaian Directorate of Libraries---books extolling the American way of life.
The BBC often uses the trick of providing a biased selection and interpretation of quotations from recognized authorities. In several programs beamed to India, the BBC did this to present Jawaharlal Nehru as a "starry-eyed idealist" and his principles of positive neutrality in foreign affairs as "pipe dreams" totally divorced 148 from reality.
Subversive radio stations of the Voice of Free Asia type base their programs on the "method of reflected information." Stories prepared by the CIA or other Western intelligence services and related to the internal affairs of this or that country are published in the ostensibly neutral newspapers and periodicals (controlled, in fact, by these services) in third countries; this enables the Western mass media to quote them as `` independent'' sources.
Western psywar experts often deliberately leak classified information to the press---from the CIA, the Pentagon, the U.S. National Security Council, the British SIS and so on. "Incontrovertible evidence" is cited to prove the growth of "Soviet military might"; there are reports of "communist conspiracies" in various parts of the globe, of "war preparations" in socialist countries. "Classified space intelligence data" about military construction projects in various countries, "confidential conversations between diplomats" and similar stories are quoted.
Concealing the information source is another favorite trick. References are made to " confidential," "well-informed," "unidentified," " reliable," and similar sources. The American Daily World has recently described this technique: Fred, a correspondent or columnist, is sitting at his desk. His phone rings. It is a call from a White House public relations official (President Nixon once said that 6,000 public relations experts had worked in executive agencies during his administration). "Hello, Fred," he says. ``I've 149 got great stuff, and since you did me a favor once, I want you to handle it. Can you drop by right away? " Of course, Fred wastes no time. Once there, he is told that the sensational story is his on one condition: he must not reveal the source.
Fred agrees: a scoop will make him look good in his editor's eyes. Virtually all the journalists working for the monopoly press agree to this condition. Fred is happy and so is his editor. But the White House is happier still: it has ensured the publication of a story for which it bears absolutely no responsibility. This crude technique enables a whole army of public relations officials to remain anonymous while spreading lies and launching trial balloons to sound out political trends---all this with complete impunity.
Western propaganda works especially hard to condition its audience to stereotype images. There are ``positive'' cliches like the "welfare state," the "free Western world," "land of opportunity" and the like. Other cliches are used in relation to the socialist countries: "the Iron Curtain," "totalitarian regimes," "closed society," the "Soviet threat," the "Red peril," and many others like these.
Promotion of apolitical thinking is among the more frequently used methods of Western propaganda. The aim is to direct attention away from acute social problems to things like sex, violence, consumerism, etc. This technique distorts the perception of social developments and neutralizes the types of social action particularly dangerous to bourgeois society. For 150 example, in one single day Western news agencies offered to the Indian press three times as many stories describing the fall from her horse of Princess Anne of Great Britain as reports on the events which occurred during the week in neighboring Sri Lanka.
We have listed only some of the techniques used by the Western mass media to further their ideological expansionism in developing countries. Each year the arsenal of these methods and myths invented for Western propaganda campaigns is expanding and growing more sophisticated.
[151] __ALPHA_LVL1__ AGAINST COMMUNICATION IMPERIALISM __ALPHA_LVL2__ One-Way StreetThe drive to make the international information exchanges truly equal and mutually beneficial, to prevent the use of information channels for building up tensions and hostility among nations is emerging as one of the more urgent issues of today's international relations.
In recent years, peoples newly liberated from colonial oppression have been increasingly active in the struggle against imperialist domination of the mass media and their use as a political weapon. They justly see this as a real threat to their sovereignty and to their social, political and cultural independence.
Relegated for many years to the status of a backwater and suffering from the unequal distribution of the mass media infrastructure preserved deliberately by the West, developing countries have lately begun to resist resolutely the sway of Western monopolies in the international mass media, a phenomenon described as "communication imperialism.''
Essentially, this term means that Western capitalist countries exploit the low level of the mass media in the developing world and conduct an ideological expansionist drive there. They impose their own distorted interpretation of world events on Asian, African and Latin American countries.
152The term is "communication imperialism" precisely because the information and culture communicated from the West to developing countries are aimed at preserving the political, economic and cultural positions of imperialism in today's world. Western information policy is aimed at forcing the capitalist system and bourgeois ideology on other nations. It slanders socialism and attempts to force nations to follow the diktat of imperialist foreign policy.
This policy has become especially vigorous and therefore especially dangerous now that advances in communication technology make it possible to manipulate public opinion and mass consciousness in other countries more effectively. Today, exchanges of both written and visual information within and among nations are assuming unprecedented proportions.
The increased danger of public consciousness manipulation by information coming from industrialized capitalist countries poses new challenges before developing nations. It is no accident that many newly independent countries are greatly alarmed by the possibility of future direct television broadcasts via satellites. This concern is rooted in the current situation, when a handful of communication conglomerates from rich capitalist countries already dominate the international flow of information, films, periodicals and television programs.
Manipulation of consciousness and cultural infiltration are becoming increasingly important as imperialist foreign policy weapons. The techniques employed are acquiring greater 153 efficiency due to the use of sophisticated technologies developed under military-oriented space programs. Besides, capitalist expertise in advertising and marketing commercial goods is also applied to sell, on the global scale, Western ideas, tastes, views, and beliefs.
Communication shapes social phenomena and thus influences the organization of work, the types of technologies used, the curricula in educational establishments, the way spare time is spent---in other words, all the major social parameters.
This largely explains the intensification of the international struggle between those who want to perpetuate the current state of affairs and those working to end the sway of alien ideologies and cultures, uphold and strengthen their own national sovereignty in this field, and use the mass media in the interests of national development. During his February 1982 tour of Africa, Pope John Paul II said: "It is important to affirm that the sovereignty of each country should be safeguarded by proper use of the means of communication, for they can become instruments of ideological pressure.''^^1^^
Leaders of developing countries have stressed repeatedly that the incessant and ever-swelling flow of biased information runs counter to their nations' basic tasks and requirements and presents a distorted image of these countries to the world. Hence the increasingly frequent statements by developing countries' leaders to the effect that the current situation in the field _-_-_
~^^1^^ Le Monde, 18 fevrier, 1982, p. 12. 154
154 of information is among the more important aspects of the discrimination to which their nations are subjected and which keeps their economies backward.The news monopoly of the Western media pays them political and commercial returns. Anthony Smith, Director of the British Film Institute, wrote in his book The Geopolitics of Information that "capitalism was (and is) an information system as well as financial and productive. A communications network which grew up in the 19th century was an outcome of the imperial system ... the information network was a fundamental support of international capitalism itself ... it was, that is, both the cause and the result of capitalism.''^^1^^
The fact that he who controls communications wields great power became particularly obvious in the postwar years, when U.S. government-subsidized companies were the first to develop and then to monopolize satellite communications.
America's leading business interests and government experts in the field were aware of the advantages control over global communications offered for the expansion of foreign trade and export markets. According to Business Week, Washington realized "the postwar importance of freer communications as a stimulant to the interchange of goods and ideas... Reduced costs of messages will energize our trade, support our _-_-_
^^1^^ Christopher A. Nascimento, The World Communication Environment, Publications Division, Ministry of Information, Georgetown, Guyana, 1981, p. 60.
155 propaganda, bolster business for all the lines.''^^1^^Financed by big business, permeated with commercial considerations and disseminated by the mass media, this information is designed to support the operation of capitalist enterprises abroad and facilitate the implantation of values favoring private property and consumerism---the main support base of free enterprise. An analysis of the evolution of the Western mass media in the postwar years leads one to conclude that after World War II, communications technology was developed, first and foremost, in the interests of monopoly capital. Many Western experts believe that in the near future, communications will outstrip transport and most industries in terms of capital investment; actually, this process is already under way in several developed countries.
In 1972 Fortune magazine listed for the first time in its directory of the 500 largest manufacturing corporations several leading information cultural corporations of the United States. CBS, ABC, MCA and Columbia Pictures turned .up alongside the old communications conglomerates---like RCA, Westinghouse and General Electric---in the select group of America's super-manufacturing companies.^^2^^ They pay handsome dividends to the business interests operating in the field of communications. Professor Turnstall, a British sociologist, says in his book Mass Media---American that in 1979 alone the United States gained 1.5 to 2 billion dollars in _-_-_
~^^1^^ Herbert I. Schiller, op. cit., p. 28.
~^^2^^ Ibid., pp. 103-04.
156 profit from the exports of films, phonograph records, tapes and cassettes, television programs, information distributed by AP and UPI, and advertising.The output of cultural and information products is largely governed by the same market demands which determine the production of goods and services. At the same time, cultural and information products are something much greater than the usual consumer goods because they are an expression of capitalist ideology. The great flow of information built up and financed by monopolist corporations does much to maintain at home and spread abroad the Western system of values.
In order to secure stable markets and the highest possible returns, transnational corporations strive to establish, at any cost, their worldwide domination in the field of culture and information. The uncontrolled, ``free'' operation of the Western mass media in Asia, Africa and Latin America affects negatively the development of these regions and stands in the way of the efforts taken by many countries there to preserve their distinctive cultural indentities.
Developing countries are squeezed cruelly in the information vise of the major Western news agencies which flood them with a torrent of biased news. The four giant agencies---UPI, AP, Reuters and France-Presse---transmit over 45 million words to 110 countries daily. The amount of information they direct from the capitalist West to Asia, Africa and Latin America is 100 times greater than the flow of news returning from there to the West. UNESCO 157 Director General Amadou Mahtar M'Bow has noted that a few powerful transnational corporations dominate the information market to an extent that borders on cultural aggression.
Viewed under this angle, the concept of communication imperialism offers the best explanation of the sum total of the processes which sacrifice the interests of developing countries to the requirements of the Western world.
Western powers use the much-vaunted notion of the "free flow of information" to infiltrate developing countries and control their mass media.
Speaking at a 1978 session of the International Organization of Journalists (IOJ) Presidium, IOJ Vice-President Ernesto Vera exposed the true aims of the "free flow of information": they, he said, were to make bourgeois culture and bourgeois values dominant throughout the world---a fact freely admitted by the presidents of various corporations and by U.S. government spokesmen. The economically backward countries suffering from the colonization of their information by the biggest imperialist powers are not only forced to fight this situation; their own culture and national dignity actually face the threat of distortion and dismemberment.
The bourgeois concept of the "free flow of information" means, there fore, uncontrolled spread of quite definite propaganda products which uphold the interests of capitalist countries. The major aims of imperialist propaganda which have crystallized in the course of the "free flow of information" to Asian, African and Latin American nations, could be described as follows:
158Ideologically---to implant bourgeois ideology in developing countries, to offset the ideas of scientific socialism by the propaganda of anticommunism and anti-Sovietism;
Politically---to undermine the prestige of the socialist countries, to isolate from them newly independent capitalist-oriented states and, if possible and through the use of psywar methods, socialist-oriented ones too, to encourage suppression of the indigenous progressive parties, political and civic organizations by pro-Western regimes;
Economically---to advertise private enterprise and justify developing countries' continued dependence on the imperialist powers; to present the activities of transnational corporations in a favorable light and ensure good conditions for the sales of Western products on developing markets;
Militarily---to fragment the united front of those fighting for detente and against imperialist military blocs; to foment mistrust and suspicion among individual nations and groups of nations in order to spur up the arms race and increase the exports of armaments and military equipment to developing countries.
The "free flow of information" theory is an argument advanced to defend the existing system of unequal international exchange of information. It legitimizes the efforts of several Western countries to perpetuate their domination of the world information market and impose their values on the rest of the international community.
The historical background related to the 159 emergence of the "free flow" theory and to the publicity it received confirms that this concept was developed in detail over the several years directly preceding and immediately following World War II. Those who hold that the Cold War era began in 1947 lose sight of an earlier period, when U.S. imperialism was preparing its worldwide offensive. That was when the "free flow" notion was first formulated.
As early as 1946, Assistant Secretary of State William Benton declared that the United States intended to do everything in its power to help break down the artificial barriers to the expansion of private American news agencies, magazines, motion pictures and "other media of communications" throughout the world.
In this connection one might recall Lenin's words to the effect that "in capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion." This freedom, he wrote, "is a deception while "the best printing-presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists, and while capitalist rule over the press remains." .Lenin pointed out that "freedom of the press" was an especially blatant and cynical hoax in America.^^1^^
The "free flow of information" theory was in fact an attempt to justify the United States' information and propaganda offensive which provided ideological support to its aggressive _-_-_
^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "First Congress of the Communist International," Collected Works, Vol. 28, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, pp. 460-61.
160 policy and claims to world domination. Actually, the "free flow" policy was one of the harbingers of imperialist expansion.The fact that the proclamation of the "free flow" concept coincided in time with efforts to establish U.S. imperial rule is no accident either. The interrelationship of these two phenomena was formalized in Washington's official policies. John Foster Dulles, a well-known Cold Warrior, once remarked: "If I were to be granted one point of foreign policy and no other, I would make it the free flow of information.''^^1^^
Contrary to the contention that the "free flow of information" benefits each participant, this policy serves to consolidate the power of the great Western information monopolies and aggravates the dependence of developing countries. The formula of an uncontrolled, "free flow of information" remains a convenient smokescreen for communication imperialism under which freedom for some means spiritual slavery for others, especially for those still unable to raise their voices high enough to be heard.
UNESCO Director General Amadou Mahtar M'Bow was quite right to point out that " freedom is perverted if there is a one-way communication.''^^2^^
The reason is that we are dealing not with freedom, not with information but with a deluge of malicious slander, designed by the sponsors and architects of psychological warfare to flood _-_-_
~^^1^^ Herbert I. Schiller, op. cit., p. 30.
^^2^^ Christopher A. Nascimento, op. cit., p. 33.
161 sovereign nations with subversive imperialist propaganda.Today, most countries oppose uncontrolled, one-way information infiltration by the imperialist "oligarchy of the word"---in other words, economic, cultural and ideological imperialist expansion.
``The encounter between the First World's dictatorship over the flow of information and interpretation of world events and Third World efforts to reverse and balance that dominion, is neither free nor open.''^^1^^ This point is made by Christopher Nascimento, Guyana's Minister of Information, in his book The World Communication Environment.
The struggle of developing countries to overcome their economic backwardness, for genuine national independence and social progress encounters vigorous resistance on the part of foreign capital and the external political forces bent on preserving their control over the national communications systems in these countries.
Those advocating an unchecked, "free flow" of the cultural and information products of Western corporations are, at the same time, ardent opponents of developing countries' national sovereignty. Directors of transnational corporations react to it painfully and with hostility; they do all they can to either erode or dominate it. But one should remember that in the field of culture and communication, national sovereignty is the last line of defense. As soon _-_-_
~^^1^^ Ibid., pp. 63-64. 162
162 as the barrier of national sovereignty breaks down, nothing can save the country from a rapid takeover of the equipment, communication structures and the entire content of the national mass media by a handful of private monopolies.``Free flow" champions are especially virulent in their attacks against developing countries' communication systems, charging that, controlled by the governments, they cannot be truly "free.''
It is true that most mass media in developing countries are owned and financed by their governments. That is not surprising: given the existing situation, the only alternative would be foreign control over these communications.
Take the example of Guyana. When its press was controlled by the British and the only local newspaper belonged to Lord Thompson, he fought against any attempt to found other national papers, maintaining that one (his own) was quite enough for Guyana. However, as soon as the government of Guyana acquired this newspaper, the British press raised a hue and cry over the allegedly nonexistent freedom of the press in that country.
The arguments advanced by the "free flow" supporters who claim that the ``free'' Western press is not controlled by the governments can always be exploded by pointing out that there is another means of control which is just as effective---by making the press dependent on serving the interests of the industrial and finance capital of the monopolies and transnational corporations and by making it follow the demands of the military-political complex.
163When President Urho Kekkonen of Finland spoke before a communications symposium in May 1973, he said: "In the world of communications, it can be observed how problems of freedom of speech within one State are identical to those in the world community formed by different States. At an international level are to be found the ideals of free communication and their actual distorted execution for the rich on the one hand and the poor on the other. Globally the flow of information between States---not least the material pumped out by television---is to a very great extent a one-way, unbalanced traffic, and in no way possesses the depth and range which the principles of freedom of speech require.''^^1^^
Ignoring the actual requirements and needs of developing countries, information monopolies conduct ingenious anticommunist and antiSoviet propaganda in Asia, Africa and Latin America; they work hard to implant in their audiences a distorted perception of the essence of key international issues.
Because the massive flow of biased information from the West had inundated the rest of the world, overwhelming and destroying developing countries' national communication systems, in the late 1960s and early 1970s world public opinion began to grow critical of the "free flow" of information. Voices were raised increasingly often in defense of cultural sovereignty and cultural autonomy, against outside interference in the cultures of other countries, _-_-_
~^^1^^ Herbert I. Schiller, op. cit., p. 44. 164
164 against the policy of communication imperialism.No doubt the decisive factor in this process was the change in the nature of the international community itself: after the war, over 100 new states emerged and consolidated their positions all over the world. The preservation of their national and cultural sovereignty became one of the chief concerns of these countries. No wonder that developing nations began to oppose the "free flow" concept and its practical implementation more and more vigorously, striving to restrict this ``freedom'' which in actual fact perpetuated inequality.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Information and International LawToday it is becoming increasingly clear that information exchanges among -individuals and nations are becoming an important element of international relations. It is therefore logical for the press, governments and international organizations to turn more frequently to issues concerning the global situation in the field of information and the struggle of developing countries for a new, more just international information order.
The vast potential of today's mass media should be used primarily to improve the moral and political climate in the world, and enhance understanding and cooperation among nations so as to accelerate social progress and prevent a new war.
Progressive development and use of the mass 165 media for peace and international cooperation require that their operation be regulated in conformity with the principles and norms of today's international law. States are entitled to restrict access to their territories of information which contains ideas condemned by the international community. They should also be responsible for ensuring that the international operation of their national mass media conform to the generally accepted principles of international law.
Taken in the context of relations between states with different social systems, this approach to the problem means renunciation of the use of the mass media for opposing some nations to others, for fomenting hostility among them and for interfering in one another's internal affairs. In other words, the goal is to ensure compliance of the international information activities with the principles underlying intergovernmental relations, international law and such universal acts as the UN Charter or the Helsinki Final Act.
Naturally, this does not rule out differences of position and opinion, inevitable in ideological struggle. Honest competition of ideas which compares and contrasts different philosophies is an objective process.
The Soviet position in this matter is perfectly forthright: the U.S.S.R. opposes war propaganda, the use of psychological warfare methods for interference in other nations' internal affairs, slander and misinformation. It is in favor of truthful and objective coverage of international events in the interests of peace, 166 understanding and cooperation among nations.
The attainment of these objectives should be guided by such universally accepted international legal principles as respect for national sovereignty, noninterference in the internal affairs of one another, and mutually beneficial cooperation. The efforts to ensure compliance with these principles in international relations are the common traits of socialist and developing foreign policies.
All this means that it is quite timely and perfectly justified for the socialist and many developing countries to raise the issue of agreeing on general rules and principles governing the use of the mass media in international relations in a way which would not hamper but contribute to the cause of peace and progress. Pursuing this course unswervingly, the Soviet Union and other socialist countries advocate the elaboration and adoption of international norms and principles which would put information activities at the service of neighborly international relations.
On the initiative of the socialist countries, several international legal acts have already been adopted within the United Nations family, condemning the propaganda of war, racism, colonialism and neocolonialism and providing for the use of the mass media to enhance understanding and cooperation.
As early as between the two world wars, mass public pressure led several international (including intergovernmental) socio-political and scientific organizations to formalize this precept in their decisions. In 1933 the League of 167 Nations Legal Sub-Committee of the Committee for Moral Disarmament drew up a draft convention against aggression. In Paragraph 2 of Article 1 the draft envisaged the adoption by the signatory states of legislation against direct and public propaganda aimed at involving states in being the first to commit, in violation of their international obligations, acts of aggression. Besides, under the draft convention states were to act against the dissemination of false data or trumped-up, falsified or fraudulent documents ascribed to third persons whenever this dissemination violated international relations and was perpetrated with malicious intent. The draft stressed the inadmissibility of insulting a foreign state by ascribing to it action in bad faith or patently imprecise facts, and thus fomenting public hostility or contempt directed at it. This draft was greatly influenced by the Soviet proposal on the definition of aggression and, in its major provisions, raised actively the issue of fighting against the propaganda of aggression.
On September 23, 1936 a convention on the use of radio broadcasting in the interests of peace was signed in Geneva. Officially it entered into force on April 2, 1938. Under this convention, states undertook to see to it that their radio broadcasting stations do not urge war with any of the signatory states or acts conducive to war.
In 1937, at the Fourth Congress of the International Association of Penal Law in Paris, the wish was expressed that national legislation ban the propaganda of aggressive war.
168Thus even before the last war authoritative international organizations recognized, in various ways, that under international law the propaganda of war, like any other preparation for aggression, was a crime to be combated by national criminal legislation.
In 1945 the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg recognized that the "ideological preparations" for war---the propaganda of warconstituted a .grave crime against humanity. Thus the International Military Tribunal not only gave a legal shape to the notion that war propaganda was a crime but also established a specific precedent by convicting the criminals. Proceeding from Article 6, Paragraph A of its Charter, the International Military Tribunal charged the defendants, aside from other crimes against peace, with using every means of war preparations, including its "ideological preparation"---war propaganda.
In the postwar years, when the United States and its allies launched preparations and propaganda of a new war, the Soviet Union submitted to the Second Session of the UN General Assembly a proposal on banning war propaganda. The proposal envisaged:
---Condemning any form of propaganda conducted in any country with a view or capable of giving rise to or enhancing a threat to the peace, a breach of the peace or an act of aggression;
---Suggesting that the Governments of all the member States of the Organization take appropriate steps under their legislation in order to:
promote, by using all the means of communication and propaganda at their disposal, 169 friendly relations among States, proceeding from the purposes and principles of the UN Charter; and ~
encourage the dissemination of all information expressing the unquestionable striving of all nations for peace.
This important decision of the UN General Assembly is in conformity with the vital interests of all nations because it aids in the strengthening of peace and international cooperation.
In accordance with this decision, the Soviet Union and other socialist countries adopted laws in defense of peace. This provision was incorporated in the U.S.S.R. Penal Code and later, in the U.S.S.R. Constitution as Article 28.
In recent years, the international community has been increasingly striving to put an end to the propaganda of hostility among nations, especially war propaganda. For example, the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination condemned all propaganda based on the notions or theory of racial superiority.
In 1966 the International Covenants on Human Rights entered into force. They enriched considerably the provisions of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Specifically, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights combined well-known provisions on freedom to receive and disseminate information with certain reasonable limitations proceeding from considerations of "national security, public order, public health or morals" (Article 19). Article 20 lays down the types of 170 propaganda to be banned by law: propaganda for war, and advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitute incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.
The Final Act of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe has emerged as a highly important political document of recent decades and as a unique source of international law regulating international relations in various spheres, including the exchange of information.
The Soviet Union is working steadily to ensure full compliance with all the provisions of the Helsinki Final Act, including those concerning information. The Act stipulates that international cooperation in the cultural, information and other spheres is to further the strengthening of peace and understanding among nations and the spiritual enrichment of the human personality, and that this cooperation is to be implemented in full compliance with the principles governing relations among the member parties--- i.e., the principles of sovereign equality, equal rights, respect for the social system of and noninterference in the affairs of one another.
The Final Act of the European Conference maintains that information should serve the lofty ideals of peace and international understanding and the enrichment of the human personality. Proceeding from these principles, the member states of the conference agreed to aid in a broader and freer dissemination of all types of information (oral, printed, filmed, broadcast over the radio and television) serving these goals.
171The Final Act pays special attention to the journalists, who, because of-the nature of their profession, play an important part in the spiritual intercourse among nations. Conference participants have spoken in favor of cooperation among journalists' organizations and contacts among journalists in the interests of better international understanding.
Some Western delegations at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe raised the issue of granting a special status and privileges, including immunity under national legislation, to foreign journalists. These claims were rejected as unfounded. Instead, the member states incorporated a section entitled " Improvement of Working Conditions for Journalists" in the Final Act. This section includes an accord on favorable treatment of journalists' visas, freer permission of trips around the host country, freer direct access to representatives of organizations and official agencies, journalists' right to import the technical equipment necessary for the performance of their professional duties, etc.
The Soviet Union has taken specific steps in this direction, in full accordance with the decisions of the European Conference.
The accords on these issues finalized by the European Conference have demonstrated the possibility of agreement on the fundamentals of cooperation among countries with different social systems even in this field, when this happens in conditions of detente and is accompanied by observance of the principles of sovereignty, equality and noninterference. The 172 Soviet Union and other socialist countries implement these accords in an exemplary fashion.
The experience accumulated in the field of cooperation among various countries in the regulation of international contacts in this important sphere confirms the need for international relations in question to be firmly based on legal principles aimed at preserving peace and security, strengthening understanding among nations, fighting against the arms race, and eradicating the ideology of militarism, colonialism and racism.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ The War Against UNESCOInternational public opinion is paying increasingly great attention to important issues of information exchanges. So is UNESCO, an authoritative intergovernmental organization.
The position of UNESCO vis-a-vis the questions of international information exchanges has undergone a change. In its initial years, when UNESCO was subjected to considerable Western influence, attempts were made to turn it into a tool of publicizing and disseminating on the international scene the American "free flow of information" concept. Under pressure from U.S. delegates, UNESCO treated this notion as one of its main concerns from the very beginning. At the first session of the UNESCO General Conference, held in Paris in November and December 1946, the U.S. delegation exerted vigorous efforts to ensure UNESCO's cooperation with the Subcommission on Freedom of 173 Information of the Commission on Human Rights in preparing the United Nations report on obstacles to the free flow of information and ideas.
Subsequently, as UNESCO membership increased, the attitude of the organization to the "free flow" doctrine began to change perceptibly. However, UNESCO first began to discuss the international aspects of the imbalance in the information exchanges between developed and developing nations only in the late 1960s (the Ljubljana symposium of 1968 and the experts' conference in Montreal in 1969), with comprehensive debates starting in the early 1970s.
At the 16th session of the UNESCO General Conference (Paris, 1970), the delegation of the Byelorussian S.S.R. submitted a draft resolution on the Inadmissibility of the Use of the Mass Media for the Propaganda of War, Racism and Hatred Among Nations. The U.S.S.R., Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Mongolia, the Ukrainian S.S.R., the Congo People's Republic, Guinea, Libya, Mauritania and several other countries became cosponsors of the draft. Essentially, this resolution started the process in the course of which UNESCO began to switch its principal attention to the content of information and its role as a factor of international relations.
In its Declaration of Guiding Principles on the Use of Satellite Broadcasting for the Free Flow of Information, adopted in October 1972, "UNESCO acknowledged that '...it is necessary that States, taking into account the principle of freedom of information, reach or promote prior agreements concerning direct satellite 174 broadcasting to the population of countries other than the country of origin of the transmission.'
``The UN General Assembly supported this view in November 1972, by a vote of 102 to 1---the United States casting the single dissenting vote.''^^1^^
The 18th General Conference of UNESCO, held in the autumn of 1974, approved the regular program for 1977-1982. The document noted that the free flow of information in its traditional definition should be complemented by a more balanced and objective flow from country to country, as well as within and between regions.
In 1978 UNESCO adopted the Declaration on Fundamental Principles Concerning the Contribution of the Mass Media to Strengthening Peace and International Understanding, to the Promotion of Human Rights and to Countering Racialism, Apartheid and Incitement to War. The initiative of adopting this document belongs to the Soviet Union. The Declaration oriented the mass media unequivocally toward serving peace, friendship and national independence. Under the Declaration, the mass media are to "contribute to eliminate ignorance and misunderstanding between peoples, to make nationals of a country sensitive to the needs and desires of others, to ensure the respect of the rights and dignity of all nations, all peoples and all individuals." The mass media "have an essential part to play in the education of young people in a spirit of peace, justice, freedom, mutual _-_-_
~^^1^^ Herbert I. Schiller, op. cit., pp. 40-41.
175 respect and understanding.''^^1^^Notably, the Declaration also addresses jour - alists themselves and calls on them to observe its underlying principles. Article VIII says, among other things, that "professional organizations, and people who participate in the professional training of journalists and other agents of mass media and who assist them in performing their functions in a responsible manner should attach special importance to the principles of this Declaration when drawing up and ensuring application of their codes of ethics." Under the Declaration, journalists and all other agents of the mass media "must have freedom to report and the fullest possible facilities of access to information"; they must also act "with due respect for the legislative and administrative provisions and the other obligations of Member States.''
The Declaration states that colonialism, racism and apartheid are gross and blatant violations of human rights which the mass media should combat by helping, among other things, to give "expression to oppressed peoples who struggle against colonialism, neo-colonialism, foreign occupation and all forms of racial discrimination and oppression and who are unable _-_-_
^^1^^ Declaration on Fundamental Principles Concerning the Contribution of the Mass Media to Strengthening Peace and International Understanding, to the Promotion of Human Rights and to Countering Racialism, Apartheid and Incitement of War, adopted by acclamation on 22 November 1978 at the Twentieth Session of the General Conference of UNESCO held in Paris, UNESCO, 1979, articles III, IV.
176 to make their voices heard within their own territories" (Article II).For the first time an international legal act is quite clear on the need "to correct the inequalities in the flow of information to and from developing countries." There is also a provision urging assistance to the mass media of developing countries to enable them to gain strength and expand (Article VI).
This UNESCO declaration has therefore emerged as an effective document aimed at making information and propaganda conform to the principles of peaceful coexistence and national independence. The attainment of this goal is facilitated by the position held by the Soviet Union, other socialist and most developing countries who want international information activities to proceed from the principles of equality and respect for sovereignty, who want external propaganda conducted by the UN member countries to be used above all for the promotion of understanding among them.
The efforts of the advocates of the Declaration---primarily, socialist and developing nations---were supported by statements from journalists and respected international nongovernmental organizations. An important contribution to the preparation of the Declaration was made by a special international panel of public figures and experts in the field of the mass media, led by Nobel and Lenin peace prizes winner Sean MacBride.
This unique "code of serving peace" for journalists was unanimously approved by the entire __PRINTERS_P_177_COMMENT__ 12-848 177 UNESCO membership and supported by international public opinion. However, its implementation encounters stubborn resistance on the part of those who see international information as a weapon for fighting positive change on the international scene.
Western powers opposed the elaboration of the Declaration and tried to emasculate it by reducing its content to a mere proclamation of allegedly unrestricted "freedom of the press." It was only the danger of isolation, the united front of the socialist community and most developing countries which forced the West to withdraw its objections. The Declaration was approved by acclamation.
However, having signed the Declaration, Western powers did not change their information policies.
After the failure of the Western---above all, American---attempts to emasculate or distort the Declaration and to frustrate its adoption, the monopolist press launched blatantly hostile attacks against UNESCO.
The New York Times dismissed the Declaration, adopted by 146 states, as a travesty of the very notion of communication among men. The newspaper was explicit in this regard: there could be no freedom of speech or balanced information, it maintained, if advocates of racism, apartheid and war did not enjoy freedom of the press too.
Such statements of the Western "big press" prove that the socialist and many developing countries have taken a timely step by raising the issue of using the mass media in 178 international affairs in conformity with common rules and principles, so that they would, in the words of the UNESCO Declaration, contribute to the strengthening of "peace and international understanding, to the promotion of human rights and to countering racialism, apartheid and incitement to war.''
Today the discussion of restructuring international information relations is becoming increasingly acute. The West gave a hostile reception to the important initiatives undertaken by UNESCO in this field. According to the Christian Science Monitor, U.S. Congress even threatened to stop the payment of the U.S. financial contributions to the UNESCO budget. The Western press declared a veritable information war on this organization.
War is war---no holds are barred. Both tactical and strategic weapons, poison and smokescreens are being used. The only consolation is that it is a war of words.
The sole fault of UNESCO, an organization respected all over the world for its efforts to improve cooperation, is that, in accordance with its Charter and in response to the insistent demands of most of its member states, it has started to discuss the issue of international information exchanges. This made UNESCO the target of vicious propaganda attacks and campaigns launched by the biggest Western press, radio and television oligarchies. Their unique position on the world information market could be the envy of any transnational corporation, of the richest oil cartel.
Indeed, the Associated Press, UPI, Reuters __PRINTERS_P_179_COMMENT__ 12* 179 and France-Presse control two-thirds of all the news reported worldwide by the press, radio and television. The sway of Western information monopolies in the production of television programs and in the distribution of motion pictures and of the printed word is even more impressive.
Information is not oil, uranium or grain. Why then have the attempts of developing countries, supported by UNESCO, to ensure a more equitable redistribution of information led Western information centers to resist them with the fury displayed in the response to an oil price hike or, say, the nationalization of the Suez Canal?
The reason is that today, information is both politics and economics (as an export item, information returns some 30 billion dollars annually to U.S. monopolies). It is also power. According to Director General M'Bow of UNESCO, information is a field which involves serious and contradicting interests. He maintains that the mass media are increasingly turning into power, and he who controls the media often holds the key to power. That is why this power lures some people and causes concern in others.
If we recall the old adage that war is too serious a matter to be left to generals, we can say that today the organization of international information exchanges involves such an important and intricate set of national and international problems that this issue cannot be left to multinational tycoons but should be the subject of serious and thorough regulation by governments under international law. In the opinion 180 of Mr. M'Bow, the growing concentration of the mass media is responsible for the clash between the current use of the mass media and their generally recognized mission---aiding a balanced and free dialogue.
In their efforts to change the existing inequality and end their essentially colonial dependence on the Western mass media, developing countries have advanced the initiative of establishing a new world information and communication order.
UNESCO responded favorably to this just demand of the developing world. The socialist countries also supported it. At the 21st Session of the UNESCO General Conference held in Belgrade in the fall of 1980, it was decided to set up an International Program for Development of Communication (IPDC). The aim is to provide specific assistance to developing countries in the establishment and improvement of national information systems, to perfect the mass media infrastructure and bridge the gap existing between different countries in this field.
These steps, directed at ending the monopoly of the Western sources of information and at freeing the "Third World" from the imperialist "spiritual guardianship," were what set off the virulent attacks against UNESCO in the Western press.
``The stakes are very high," Sarah Goddard Power, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Human Rights and Social Affairs, exclaims dramatically. The stakes she refers to are, above all, interest rates---in other words, the fabulous 181 profits reaped by the manufacturers of computers and other electronic devices, by television and motion picture companies, by airlines, banks and other financial agencies dealing in information, and by the giant advertising industry.
``Trade and jobs are at stake," Ms. Power continues. "Either we will design, produce, market and distribute the most advanced products and services spun off by the communications revolution (and, in so doing, reinforce our economic as well as political, social, and cultural advantages) or we will increasingly find ourselves in the position of consumer and debtor to those who do so.
``...Restrictions on the free flow of images, sounds and symbols across national borders would have profound implications for the US economy and for our democratic society," Ms. Power warns. "Such restrictions would seriously handicap AP (Associated Press), UPI (United Press International) and other news services, as well as IBM and the hundreds of other US-based multinational corporations engaged in the gathering, processing and dissemination of data across national frontiers. As I said before, this is not 'small potatoes.' The information industry is now the second largest export enterprise in the United States, and made approximately 75 billion dollars in foreign sales last year.''^^1^^
So the "free flow" of information means, first, one-way traffic and second, guaranteed profits for the United States. For this reason _-_-_
~^^1^^ Intermedia, March 1981, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 5, 6. 182
182 alone the United States does not intend to allow any obstacles to be raised in its path.But let us look beyond the dollars and cents, Ms. Power adds. Given the communications revolution, "it is clear that we face far-reaching political and social change in much of.the world, particularly in the developing countries of the Third World.... The question of how the world adapts to the communications revolution ... has now emerged as a major point of contention in East-West and North-South relationships.''
Clearly, the West is seriously alarmed at the prospect of the changes inherent in a new information order. The first, almost instinctive response of Western leaders to the challenge of the communications revolution---and of any revolution---could be expressed in two words--- "no way!" A barrage of threats was let loose against UNESCO and the entire international community---threats of sanctions, almost a blockade (this form of dialogue with the world is a favorite with U.S. Presidents), an end of U.S. contributions to the UNESCO budget and even U.S. withdrawal from the organization.
However, as it became increasingly clear that the objectively inevitable problems in the field of information would not fade away by themselves, the West began to search for a solution which would combine pressure with promises of bribes. The International Herald Tribune suggested a "compromise for UNESCO": since the developing world had something against the four Western mass media pillars, why not create a fifth one? The West would provide the 183 money, the equipment and the experts, and all UNESCO would have to do was to invent a name for it.
At one of the UNESCO General Conference sessions, the delegations of the United States and some other Western countries declared they were ready to consider assistance to those developing countries which agreed with the American assessment of the role and mission of the mass media. In 1979, a panel of experts from 30 countries met in Washington and discussed the establishment of a consortium of sorts controlled by private capital. This body, the United States maintained, was to decide to which country and on what terms financial and technical assistance in this field should be extended.
The same principle----Western money in exchange for continued control over the production and dissemination of information---formed the basis of the statement made by the U.S. delegate at the first meeting of the IPDC Governing Board in Paris. There are obvious political strings attached to Western agreement to provide material assistance to developing countries; there is also the demand that private---that is, monopoly---capital should be invited to take part in the new UNESCO program.
In other words, the goal is to entrust the improvement of international information exchanges to the very monopolies who bear most of the responsibility for the existing inequality in this field. A representative of a developing country who took part in the Governing Board meeting in Paris remarked that this would be 184 tantamount to using a guillotine as a cure for dandruff.
The West not only dangles these dubious carrots but also brandishes a stick. "UNESCO has what could be its last chance to convince impatient Western governments," Rosemary Righter, a well-known advocate of the "free flow" doctrine, wrote menacingly in The Times. L'Express predicts a "Shipwreck of UNESCO" in one of its cover titles. The Talloires Declaration, adopted at a meeting of the biggest Western news agencies in France in May 1981, sounds like a real declaration of war. The New York Times wrote that the representatives of the Western world's major information organizations committed themselves to combat the attempts by UNESCO to establish a so-called new international information order.^^1^^
The authors of the Talloires Declaration called it "Voices of Freedom." They were-the old familiar voices of Western news agencies, U.S. propaganda services and research centers like Tufts University, repeatedly exposed as collaborators with the CIA.
``There can be no international code of journalist ethics," those who signed the Talloires Declaration proclaim. A different opinion would have been out of character: ethics is obviously useless ballast when navigating the "free flow of information." Members of the IPDC Governing Board had occasion to realize that when reading a report on their Paris meeting in The International Herald Tribune. The paper alleged that _-_-_
~^^1^^ See Moscow News, No. 28, 1981.
185 their aim was not a more equitable information order but more money wheedled out of the West. Representatives of Iraq and Cuba, Tunisia and India, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia who spoke in Paris described this article as downright slander, as an attempt to cause a rift among the meeting's participants and obstruct the first steps in the implementation of -this important UNESCO program.Here is one more example of the kind of ethics and objectivity displayed by the Western press. Le Monde quoted Joseph Mehan, chief of the service for informing Americans about UNESCO activities, who analyzed over 400 news items on the subject supplied by AP and UPI: "The right of the American people to information was and is being violated in the most inconceivable manner. A curious American who might like to learn about UNESCO's role in organizing international programs or only about the extremely complex problem of information, would be absolutely unable to get a clear concept from the revolting `coverage' of these subjects by the American media. It is ironic that the American press, which harps so much on the protection of freedom of the press and free dissemination of information, restricts and distorts this information.''
All this points to the intense rivalry within UNESCO between those who strive to use the mass media in the interests of peace and progress and the imperialist war propagandists.
In spite of the Western attempts to discredit UNESCO, its prestige is growing. It exerts a positive influence on the advancement of 186 culture, science and information This is borne out by its efforts aimed at establishing a new international information order which would serve the lofty cause of peace and detente.
An intergovernmental conference held under UNESCO auspices in Paris in April 1980 adopted a document which stressed the growing role of communication in the promotion of political; economic, social, scientific, educational and cultural progress, of better understanding, durable international peace, national sovereignty and distinctive national cultures. The term ``communication'' here comprises information itself and channels for its dissemination---- television, radio, the press, documentary films and the publishing industry.
Under the recommendations adopted in Paris, the 21st Session of the UNESCO General Conference held in Belgrade in 1980 adopted an important practical decision---to establish, within the UNESCO framework, an International Program for Development of Communication (IPDC) which would mobilize various UNESCO budgetary resources and voluntary contributions from governments and international organisations for assisting developing countries in the creation of their own mass media systems.
One of the foremost tasks of the new UNESCO program is to change the abnormal, humiliating situation and to ensure freer, broader and more balanced dissemination of information and equitable participation by developing countries in international information exchanges. This can be facilitated best by concrete assistance to developing countries' efforts to create national 187 information and communication systems.
A resolution adopted at the session stated that the international program was to help expand cooperation and assistance in developing communication infrastructures, reduce the gap existing between different countries in this field, and was to become part of the effort to establish a new, more equitable and effective world order in the sphere of information and communication.
In January 1982, the Governing Board of the program held a regular meeting in Mexico.
The Mexican city of Acapulco which hosted the Board meeting offered a striking illustration of the diverse and complex communication problems facing developing countries. This famous resort is connected by direct flights with many big cities in the United States, while the villages around Acapulco often lack all communication with one another and with Mexico City, the country's capital. The barefoot boys hawking souvenirs on the streets speak English when addressing American tourists, but most of them are illiterate in their native language. According to L. P. Bertran and E. F. Cardona, the Latin American researchers who have conducted a thorough analysis of the forms the United States' massive ideological and cultural infiltration in their region takes, the national mass media in most Latin American countries are controlled by the United States financially, technologically and politically to such an extent that they can well be described as foreign information services.
The Mexican newspaper Excelsior has 188 reported that UPI, AP, Reuters and France-Presse supply 80 per cent of all foreign news items published by the 16 largest newspapers of Latin America. The situation is similar in many other developing countries.
However, when the IPDC Board began specific discussion of the 54 assistance projects proposed by developing countries, it turned out that Western powers, fully responsible for the existing situation, had no intention of helping change it. The delegates of the United States, the F.R.G., the Netherlands, Japan and several other capitalist nations evaded the question of assistance to the IPDC and tried to use UNESCO as a smokescreen for their ideological expansionism in Third World countries. Moreover, they tied their vague promises of possible assistance to extremely tough political conditions, essentially aimed at imposing Western models of information systems on developing countries, establishing branches of transnational corporations there and ensuring freer access for private monopoly capital to these regions. In fact, the West tried to turn the IPDC into a sort of Marshall Plan for the developing world in the field of information, into a tool of neocolonialist enslavement.
Most Council members firmly rebuffed these schemes because they were in glaring contradiction to the purposes of the IPDC and the principles of UNESCO. This kind of assistance, Mr. M'Bow stressed, was more in keeping with the intentions of the donors than with the wishes of the recipients, and preserved inequality. In this case, he added, we might end 189 up too far from the ideas which guided us in the establishment of the Program.
Speaking at a press conference, the UNESCO Director General accused the Western press of deliberate attempts to present a distorted picture of the essence and purposes of UNESCO activities in the field of communication. He maintained that the establishment of a new information order would contribute to the solution of the current global problems mankind would have to tackle to strengthen peace and international understanding.
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Toward a New Information OrderIn their efforts to safeguard themselves from information enslavement by the former colonial powers, independent developing countries demand decolonization of information and the establishment in this field---as in economic relations with the West---of a new, more equitable international order. They argue that, despite the political independence they have gained, many major forms of Western colonial domination remain---some in an altered shape, others unchanged. This means that for newly independent former colonies, drawing up a policy in the field of culture and communications aimed at promoting national independence and better living conditions for working people becomes a task of paramount importance.
Many developing countries' leaders hold that imperialism does not confine its efforts to a search for political and economic domination; it 190 is also active in the social and cultural spheres working to subjugate developing nations ideologically. Hence the importance these countries attach to the need to develop national cultures, preserve national traditions and eradicate the havoc wrought over the colonial period.
In the shaping and implementation of communications policy too, the struggle against foreign domination is the main factor. The forces of domination and those who challenge it confront each other at the national and international level. All the major problems of communications today are linked, in one way or another, with this increasingly intense struggle.
``A First World information disctatorship is no longer tenable," Christopher Nascimento, Guyana's Minister of Information, writes in his book. "Change must come, however painful it may be. In fact, the change has begun. We must strive to hasten the process.''^^1^^
``Developing nations," he continues, "can and should, however, plan their communication structures and policies in terms relevant to their development needs, and developed nations should stop trying to push their own communication concepts down the throats of other, different nations.''^^2^^
Against this background, developing countries are justified in raising the question of resisting the sway of bourgeois news agencies, radio and television companies, of setting up their own information services and training their own _-_-_
^^1^^ Christopher A. Nascimento, op. cit., p. 67.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 58.
191 journalists. They demand the elaboration of just and democratic norms of international information activities. The basis should be recognition of the sovereignty and equality of nations and the use of information to strengthen peace and enhance social progress and national independence.It is quite logical that this process gave rise to the slogan of a "new information order." An international symposium held in Tunisia in March 1976 stated that nonaligned countries depended on developed nations in information exchanges and elaborated several practical proposals to ensure a gradual transition to a "new world information order.''
Developing countries offered the most detailed exposition of their views on this matter at the Fifth summit conference of nonaligned countries in Colombo in 1976. They noted that the establishment of a new information order was as urgent as the need for a new international economic order.
The Political Declaration adopted at the conference noted with alarm the existence of a great and growing gap between the mass media of developed and. nonaligned states and stressed that it was a legacy of the colonial past. This leads to relations of dependence and domination, when most countries are passive recipients of biased, incomplete and distorted information. Fuller identification and assertion of their national and cultural distinctive features call for the elimination of this grave imbalance and for urgent measures to step up the efforts in this new field of cooperation.
192According to the Colombo Conference, the emancipation and development of national information media is an integral part of the common struggle for political, economic and social independence for a large majority of nations who are entitled to inform and be informed objectively and correctly. Independent development of information sources is as important as self-sufficient technological development because dependence in the field of information is an obstacle to political and economic progress.
Nonaligned countries intend to work toward these goals through their own efforts, through more vigorous cooperation on a bilateral, regional arid inter-regional basis, and by coordinating their activities at the United Nations and other international forums. A new international information order may emerge as a sort of closing stage of the entire decolonization process which does not end with the attainment of political liberation or economic emancipation. Economic decolonization has raised the issue of communication independence, just as political liberation once put economic emancipation on the agenda. A new information order implies decolonization of information exchanges and the establishment of cultural sovereignty---the "liberation of minds" without which complete decolonization is impossible.
In recent years, developing countries have taken many practical steps to restructure international relations in the sphere of information. This restructuring is aimed at creating a system of mass communications which would conform to the social and economic conditions and needs __PRINTERS_P_193_COMMENT__ 13-848 193 of each developing country, combining efficiency, commercial viability and easy access.
One element of the struggle for a new international information order is the drive to establish a news agencies pool of nonaligned countries and regional news agencies associations in Latin America, Africa and Asia. In accordance with a decision taken at a conference of nonaligned information ministers and news agencies directors in Delhi in July 1976, representatives of news agencies from 14 countries were appointed to the pool's coordinating committee. The 84 heads of state who gathered in Colombo a month later, in August 1976, reaffirmed the decisions taken in Delhi and approved the charter of the pool, thus formalizing its establishment.
The activities of the News Agencies Pool of Nonaligned Countries are to provide an effective alternative to the massive propaganda conducted by the capitalist world against developing countries.
Despite the serious technical and political difficulties the pool encounters, its influence continues to grow. Today it comprises agencies of more than 70 countries.
The creation of this pool and of the Caribbean, Pan-African, Asian and Arab news agencies was an important and promising step, but the forms this cooperation takes and, above all, its material and technological infrastructure call for considerable improvement.
Mass media theorists and workers, as well as civic activists and statesmen in many countries discuss the question of what the new international information order should be like. The 194 obvious reason is that the importance of the mass media in the shaping of national arid international public opinion, their impact on world developments are growing steadily.
Problems related to communications are becoming increasingly important in the overall struggle for the establishment or change of any social system. Information and the entire communication process are becoming central to social management. Therefore, the development of national communications policies can be viewed as a key element in both international and domestic politics.
The concept of a new international information order, which is taking its first steps today, is aimed above all at changing the existing situation in which developing countries are reduced to the status of consumers of information. Raising before the international community the question of ensuring assistance to them in creating their own mass media and the appropriate material and technical infrastructure, in training the necessary personnel, developing countries strive to balance the flow of information from developed to developing countries by an equal flow in the opposite direction.
Developing countries want the information they receive to take into account their internal socio-political and national interests, respect their unique national cultures, further their political progress and contribute to the improvement of their state structures. As to the information collected by foreign news agencies in developing countries, it should objectively reflect internal developments in them and rule __PRINTERS_P_195_COMMENT__ 13* 195 out any prejudiced or biased coverage.
Therefore, the essence of the "new international information order" concept is the struggle for national sovereignty in the sphere of information and culture, against colonialism and its holdovers, against spiritual imperialist domination. These goals entail efforts to defend and "promote national mass media systems and to strengthen their material infrastructure. However, the task of eradicating "spiritual colonialism" cannot be reduced merely to the transfer of the latest foreign technology to developing countries.
This task can only be implemented if developing countries create their own information infrastructures, if the entire system of international information exchanges is restructured on a just, democratic basis, with due regard to the legitimate interests of Asian, African and Latin American peoples and universally accepted principles of international law.
As the struggle for a new international information order advances, information monopolies try to maneuver and adapt to the changing situation. This is clear from the way in which imperialism reacts to developing countries' efforts to ``decolonize'' information. The West responded with undisguised hostility to the organization of the News Agencies Pool of NonaJigned Countries. Having failed to prevent its formation, Western monopolies switched to different tactics again: now they are trying 'to gain control over developing countries' mass media and to prevent them from cooperating with the press of the socialist nations.
It is no accident that in several capitalist 196 countries, primarily in the United States, such concepts of the "new international information order" have been advanced which are actually aimed at ensuring still greater access for transnational corporations to Asia, Africa and Latin America. For example, these doctrines' authors maintain that before developing countries are able to use the latest technologies and set up competitive news agencies, they will have to open their doors even wider to the flow of information from the West. Clearly, such ``order'' is an attempt at political and legal justification of monopoly interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states.
Essentially, the goal of such concepts is to put assistance to Asian, African and Latin American countries under control of Western banks--- the very transnational corporations whose policies developing countries know only too well. Simultaneously, the West is doing all it can to impede developing countries' drive to `` decolonize'' information. With this end in view, attempts are being undertaken to ensure scientific and technological dependence of developing countries by offering to assist them through the transfer of technology and equipment, sometimes even on quite easy terms. In actual fact, the intention is to tie developing countries to Western communications systems. Transfer of technology will not alleviate but aggravate developing countries' dependence on the transnational corporations who produce this technology and on the giant news agencies who have monopolized the dissemination of information.
By itself, acquisition of sophisticated 197 technologies does nothing to solve the urgent problems of mass media development. A UNESCO Secretariat document stresses that large-scale imports of technology from Europe, North America and Japan to developing countries can create more problems than they might solve. The paper points to another important aspect of technological assistance: aid is often used as a way of promoting the sales of technologies and equipment on the markets of develop^g countries.
This assistance should not be viewed merely as transfer of technology from developed to developing countries or as duplication of communication models and patterns. Developing countries need models of their own which would meet their real needs and take into account their national traditions. Besides, transfer of technology cannot be handled exclusively by banks or other commercial organizations. It should be extended according to the principles of international law elaborated by the United Nations.
Nor can one let the restructuring of international information relations proceed uncontrolled. This raises the issue of planning the development of communications. Scientific planning can contribute to the improvement and development of information systems and to a balanced saturation of each region with communications.
The interrelation between information and the development level of a country (whether economic, social, educational, cultural or other) is obvious. National mass media systems can make an effective contribution to the spread of 198 knowledge and ideas, encourage the creative efforts of the masses, enhance the effectiveness of social undertakings and aid in the conduct of domestic'and foreign policies.
To developing countries, information is a tool of development as indispensable as natural resources. Without an effective communications system planned, organized and geared to local conditions one cannot expect any tangible results in economic or cultural development.
Regulating international relations in the field of communication enables national mass media to advance and enrich national cultures, at the same time making their wealth available to other nations.. A restructuring of international information relations implies the creation of an efficient, competitive and accessible mass communication system geared to the socio-economic conditions and requirements of each developing country.
Effective operation of the mass media in developing countries should promote political, economic, social and cultural progress and ensure the fullest possible use of education, science and culture in the interests of the people. In this hard but necessary work, developing countries can gain much from applying the experience of the socialist countries.
The national liberation movement in Asia, Africa and Latin America has won important victories in recent decades. Throughout their struggle, these nations have enjoyed the support and solidarity of the socialist countries. The socialist community upheld vigorously developing countries' legitimate demand of 199 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1984/NIOPW263/20100211/263.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2010.02.11) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ restructuring international economic relations on a just and democratic basis.
Today, time has come to eradicate "spiritual colonialism" which uses the billions of Asians, Africans and Latin Americans as targets of its massive ideological expansionism. The struggle against this evil is as difficult as the drive to attain political and economic independence. Here, too, the socialist community is aiding its friends in Asia, Africa and Latin America both morally and materially.
Imperialism and bourgeois propaganda try to gloss over the essential difference between the operation of socialist and capitalist mass media. Such artificial constructs are often used to try and isolate developing countries from the socialist community, their ally in the anti-- imperialist struggle. This weakens the positions of developing countries and impedes the attainment of their goals. That is why the growing realization that joint action of the socialist and developing countries is the foremost guarantee of success in the struggle against " communication imperialism" is particularly important.
The Soviet Union and the rest of the socialist community understand and support the striving of Asian, African and Latin American peoples to create their own information media, protect themselves against imperialist ideological expansionism, and put an end to "spiritual colonialism.''
Cooperation between the socialist community and newly independent countries in the field of mass information is progressing. The socialist nations extend considerable assistance 200 to developing countries in their efforts to build a material and technical infrastructure for their national mass media. Experts from the socialist community come to these countries to help in the installation and breaking in of communication facilities and equipment, in the development of national communications patterns, in planning radio and television programs, etc. All this assistance is often extended on preferential terms and even in the form of grants.
Soviet experts take part in the construction and maintenance of satellite tracking stations, television studios, radio stations, factories producing and assembling television sets and transistor radios, and printing shops. The U.S.S.R. also aids in the creation and development of information organs and in the training of personnel. Soviet higher and secondary education establishments and research centers train experts from developing countries in the fields of journalism, printing, film, radio and television maintenance, broadcasting and radio relay communication; about 1,000 have graduated in recent years and about as many are being trained now. Annually, the Soviet Union spends over five million roubles to train these experts. Soviet assistance is never linked to political conditions.
The socialist countries' practical expertise in creating and perfecting, over a historically short period, highly sophisticated mass media systems offers great opportunities to the developing world.
Having rebuilt the life of the country on the basis of socialism, Soviet power gave genuine 201 democratic rights and freedoms to the people. It both proclaimed and implemented freedom of the press.
The new Soviet Constitution adopted in October 1977 stated, for the first time, that exercise of political freedoms was ensured not only by putting public buildings, streets and squares at the disposal of the working people but also by "broad dissemination of information, and by the opportunity to use the press, television, and radio." Thus, this right which Soviet citizens have long exercised, is now formalized constitutionally.
However, all this does not at all mean that the mass media in-the Soviet Union are free from social responsibility, that they can act in defiance of social interests. The Soviet Union has banned the propaganda of war, racial and ethnic hatred, immorality and violence, as well as slander of the Soviet social and state system. Such actions cannot hide behind the slogan of "freedom of speech" since they are detrimental to the interests of the people and contradict the principles under which the Soviet Constitution guarantees freedom of the press, television and radio.
The building of developed socialist society is impossible without the implementation of a cultural revolution which brings culture, politics, science and technology to the masses, without the education of an intelligentsia, of skilled experts in all branches of the economy. The cultural revolution launched by the Leninist Communist Party put an end to the age-old backwardness of the oppressed masses. The 202 achievements of the Soviet cultural revolution can be seen from the example of Uzbekistan, a constituent republic of the U.S.S.R. Before the Revolution, the literacy rate there was only two per cent. Early in this century Vestnik Vospitaniya, (Bulletin of Education), a periodical devoted to educational problems, estimated that it would take Central Asia---an outlying colonial region in czarist Russia---4,600 years to achieve universal literacy. Soviet power wiped out illiteracy there by 1940. Today, there are 9,500 schools with 3,800,000 students in Uzbekistan.
Before the Revolution, there was not a single higher education establishment in Turkestan. Today, the Uzbek S.S.R. alone has 43 such institutions and 206 specialized secondary schools. The Uzbek S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, established in 1943, is now an academic center of nationwide importance, uniting almost 32,000 scientists and teachers.
Over the years of the building of socialism in Uzbekistan, the scope of journalist activity has expanded greatly, and its conditions have improved and the rapidly developing Uzbek mass media have acquired a sophisticated technical infrastructure. Today, the Uzbek S.S.R. has 273 newspapers with a total circulation of over ten million copies. Aside from the Uzbek-- language papers, there are also newspapers in Russian, Kazakh, Tadjik and Tatar.
The Uzbek S.S.R. is the biggest per capita publisher of newspapers and periodicals and the best-developed source of television and radio programs in Asia. In the five years from 1975 to 203 1979 Uzbek publishers produced almost 200 million copies of books and brochures.
The socialist countries see cooperation with developing states as an important component of the emergent new international information order. Socialism counters the expansionism of bourgeois policy in the sphere of mass international information with the concept of information and cultural exchanges which aid in the establishment of an atmosphere of peace and international cooperation, in bringing nations and their cultures closer together, in overcoming prejudice and distrust. This position is reflected in the Helsinki Final Act with its provision, incorporated at the insistence of the socialist countries, that the forms international cooperation takes---specifically, information exchanges---depend on the overall political situation, and that only durable peace and security make it possible to develop information and cultural exchanges.
At their January 1983 conference in Prague, the Warsaw Theaty countries said "they strongly denounce the use of such media as the press, radio and television which are a powerful tool for influencing human minds and shaping public opinion, to propagate biased and downright slanderous news misrepresenting the situation in certain countries and their policies;, and fostering hostility and enmity.''
The Western attitude to the concept of a new international information order shows extreme feluctance to accept a legal framework in this field. Without such a framework, the West could continue its ideological expansion 204 and interfere with impunity in the internal affairs of other countries. That is why imperialism resists so stubbornly a restructuring of international relations in the field of information on the basis of international legal principles---sovereign equality, renunciation of the use or threat of force, noninterference in the internal affairs of others and international cooperation. These principles are upheld unswervingly by the Soviet Union, the rest of the socialist community and most developing countries.
Anticommunism and ideological subversion aimed against the socialist countries are an integral part of "communication imperialism." It would be an illusion to maintain that an end could be put to imperialist expansionism in Asia, Africa and Latin America in the field of communication while imperialism continued its ideological warfare against the socialist countries and kept interfering in the affairs of others. This leads us to conclude that the socialist countries and developing states should act together, in a concerted way, against "communication imperialism" to achieve recognition that all countries are sovereign and equal, and ensure a restructuring of relations in this field on the basis of peaceful coexistence.
__*__As never before, information interconnects and binds together politics and culture, the economy and science, health care and education, technological and social progress, international 205 relations and various other spheres of human activity. International understanding depends to a great degree on whether information is accurate or false, well-meaning or malicious, serving all mankind or the selfish interests of certain groups among the exploiter classes.
News enters our home without knocking on the door. We can no longer live a single day without absorbing information. It is therefore very important for the press, radio and television to provide objective coverage and not falsify events, to help bring nations closer together and not separate them from one another. In other words, we are not indifferent to how and when we learn about world developments, to whether they are described truthfully or misrepresented.
Unfortunately, the Western mass media's addiction to anticommunist myths and crudely biased coverage of the political, economic and cultural problems of developing countries manifest themselves daily and sow the seeds of distrust and conflict among nations.
The "free flow of information" doctrine seeks to conceal the imperialist nature of this policy. The underlying principles of this concept include so-called pluralism---mass media coverage of events from different viewpoints---and the financial ``independence'' of the medi/i, allegedly ensured by advertising fees.
This view of an information order is obviously an illusion, shattered each day by the realities of capitalism. Any talk of ``pluralism'' is belied by the increasing concentration of the mass media in the hands of transnational 206 corporations.
As to advertising, even bourgeois researchers have long considered it a form of institutionalized bribery. In the United States and many other capitalist countries, advertising fees bring in much greater returns than the sales of the periodicals themselves. However, this does not mean that these publications are "independent." The moment this or that newspaper or periodical publishes something which contradicts the basic interests of the powerful advertisers, the flood of fees turns into a trickle or even dries up completely, threatening the very survival of the newspaper or periodical in question.
Let us go up the "free flow" and look at its sources. Two centuries ago---on January 29, 1780, to be precise---The Bengal Gazette, the first newspaper in the colonial world, was launched in India. Published by an Englishman, it was read mostly by his countrymen---East India Company clerks, businessmen and British colonial army officers. The newspaper featured advertisements, Calcutta news, articles by local authors and reprints from British newspapersnothing which could be interpreted as harmful for the policy of annexation and unrestrained plunder. Nevertheless, the paper's owner began to run afoul of the authorities as early as November. The Governor-General of India issued a decree banning the circulation of The Bengal Gazette by post, since it had carried a number of articles aimed, according to the decree, at besmirching life in the colony and disturbing peace in it. Soon, the owner was sent to jail for a year for refusing to submit the paper to censorship. 207 But he did not give in and continued his journalist activities behind bars. In March 1782, having resorted to every form of pressure available, the Governor General closed The Bengal Gazette.
This was the first conflict with the first colonial newspaper, the first sieve and dam to filter and then cut off the free flow of information, the first attempt to muzzle a press organ.
This revealing and symbolic pattern has been repeated a thousand times over in the two centuries that have elapsed. It represents the genetic code of today's communication imperialism, of the lies, hypocrisy, and double-dealing used to brazenly defend its interests, of its unscrupulous manipulation of public opinion.
The bourgeoisie's irresistible desire to impose on others its ideology, its political, economic and cultural domination has remained unchanged throughout the centuries.
In their struggle against truth, imperialism and reactionary regimes resort to a broad range of means---from undisguised bribery of journalists to discrimination of democratic newsmen and to assassination. The sad and sometimes even tragic fate of bourgeois journalists who had the courage to get to the bottom of this or that imperialist crime is a familiar story.
Information today is a powerful tool, and it is very important that it should not be used as a weapon, even in ideological warfare, but should serve peace.
The demands for a "new world information order" are the result of radical realignment of 208 forces on the world scene. Communication imperialism is the main obstacle on the way to this order. Therefore, progressive forces should create a viable alternative to this imperialism and fight against the imperialist thrust in the field of information.
In their opposition to communication imperialism, developing countries make use of the fruits borne by detente, by the policy of peaceful coexistence of countries with different social systems.
A new world information order should comprise obligations by states to ensure a situation in which their national mass media would aid in the preservation and strengthening of universal peace, in efforts to secure for each nation a right to free and independent development, in the elimination of all forms of oppression and inequality, and in the promotion of better relations among nations. In turn, efforts aimed at improving the international climate include, together with the drive toward peace and disarmament, the elimination of all forms of discrimination of peoples and a restructuring of international economic relations on a just basis, with the new world information order an inalienable part of the latter.
International cooperation in the mass media field can be effective only if it reflects the interests and requirements of all.the participants on a just and equitable basis. To this end, it should proceed from the totality of general principles of international relations and take into account traditional forms of communication in different countries.
__PRINTERS_P_209_COMMENT__ 14-848 209Cooperation based on these principles is possible. This is borne out by the way the socialist community cooperates with developing countries in the communication and other fields. The Soviet Union and other socialist nations do their utmost to support developing countries' efforts to decolonize information.
The socialist nations view the real needs of developing countries with understanding and have been generously assisting them materially and morally in the creation of genuinely independent national mass media. Joint action by the socialist countries, developing states and all democratic forces to make information exchanges equitable can turn these exchanges into a powerful factor for more durable peace, better understanding, and a healthy political atmosphere throughout the world.
[210] __ALPHA_LVL1__ DOCUMENTSThe General Assembly,
Recalling its resolutions 34/181 and 34/182 of 18 December 1979, 35/201 of 16 December 1980 and 36/149 A of 16 December 1981,
Recalling relevant provisions of the Mexico City Declaration on Cultural Policies,//4// adopted by the World Conference on Cultural Policies, held at Mexico City from 26 July to 6 August 1982,
Recalling the relevant provisions of the Final Declaration of the Sixth Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries, held at Havana from 3 to 9 September 1979,//5// which stressed that co-operation in the field of information is an integral part of the struggle for the creation of a new world information order, of the Declaration of the Conference of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of Non-Aligned Countries, held at New Delhi from 9 to 13 February 1981,//6// and of the Fifth and Sixth Meetings of the __FIX__ These footnotes are *continuous* ... so split this into a separate .tx file and change type.
~//4// See A/37/453, annex, paras. 40-42.
~//5// See A/36/542, annex, sect. I, paras. 280-299.
~//6// See A/36/116 and Corr. 1, annex. 213 Intergovernmental Council of Ministers of Information of NonAligned Countries, held at Georgetown in May 1981 and Valleta, in June 1982, respectively,
Recalling the relevant resolutions adopted by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity at its eighteenth ordinary session, held at Nairobi from 24 to 27 June 1987,//7//
Recalling article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,//8// which provides that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression and that this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers and article 29, which stipulates that these rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations,
Recalling the relevant pro visions j>f the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-- operation in Europe, signed at Helsinki on 1 August 1975,
Recalling also the relevant provisions of the Declaration on the Preparation of Societies for Life in Peace,//9//
~//7// See A/36/534, annex II.
~//8// Resolution 217 A (III).
~//9// Resolution 33/73.
214Recalling resolutions 4/19 and 4/21 adopted by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization at its twenty-first session, held at Belgrade in 1980,l °
Considering that the publication of the final report of the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems//1// * is a valuable contribution to the study of information and communication problems and that its recommendations also constitute valuable encouragement for the continuing examination, analysis and study of information and communication problems,
Considering that international co-operation in the field of communication development should take place on the basis of equality, justice, mutual advantage and the principles of international law,
Conscious that the development of communication infrastructures, including national and regional capacity for indigenous message production and dissemination, is one of the important factors for genuine participation by a large majority of developing countries in international exchanges,
~//10// A/35/362/Add. 1, annexes I and II.
~//11// Published in 1980 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization under the title "Many Voices, One World.''
215Recognizing the central role of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in the field of communication and information within its mandate, as well as the progress accomplished by the Organization in that field,
1. Takes note with satisfaction of the report of the Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on the implementation of the International Programme for the Development of Communication and the Establishment of a New World Information and Communication Order;//1//~//2//
2. Underlines the importance of efforts for the implementation of the principles enunciated in the Declaration on Fundamental Principles concerning the Contribution of the Mass Media to Strengthening Peace and International Understanding, to the Promotion of Human Rights and to Countering Racialism, Apartheid and Incitement to War;//13//
3. Calls upon all Member States and all organizations of the United Nations system, international, governmental and non-governmental organizations and professional organizations in the field of communication, to exert every effort to make better known through all means at their disposal the issues underlying the demand for
~//12// A/37/453, and Corr. 1, annex.
1 ^
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Records of the General Conference, Twentieth Session, vol. I, Resolutions, pp. 100-104.
216the development of communication capacities in developing countries as a step towards the establishment of a new world information and communication order;
4. Considers that the International Programme for the Development of Communication represents a significant step towards the establishment of a new information and communication order and welcomes the decisions adopted by the Intergovernmental Council of the Programme at its second session, held at Acapulco, Mexico, from 18 to 25 January 1982;
5.Notes with satisfaction the co-operation existing between the United Nations, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and all other organizations of the United Nations system, particularly the International Telecommunication Union, in the implementation of the Programme//1//,
6. Expresses its appreciation to all Member States that have made or pledged a contribution towards the implementation of the Programme;
7. Calls upon Member States---developed and developing countries alike---and organizations and bodies of the United Nations system, as well as other intergovernmental organizations and concerned public and private enterprises--- to respond to the appeals of the Director-- General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and make contributions to the Programme, since the 217 availability of additional resources is essential for its implementation;
8. Considers that the proposed Global Satellite Project for the Dissemination and Exchange of Information planned by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, in co-operation with INTELSAT and INTERSPUTNIK and supported by the Programme, is a positive step towards reducing the existing imbalance in global information flow;
9. Calls upon Member States to respond positively to resolution 4/22 concerning the reduction of telecommunication tariffs for news exchange, adopted by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization at its twenty-first session;
10. Invites the Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to continue his efforts in the field of communication and information and to submit to the General Assembly at its thirtyeighth session a comprehensive report on the implementation of the Programme, on the activities related to the establishment of a new world information and communication order and, in co-operation with the .International Telecommunication Union, on the impact of the current technological developments and practices and their application in the communication and information sector, especially in the developing countries, bearing in mind, inter alia, the forthcoming relevant meetings 218 of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on the subject.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ BThe General Assembly,
Recalling its resolutions 3535 (XXX) of 17 December 1975, 31/139 of 16 December 1976, 33/115 A to C of 18 December 1978, 34/181 and 34/182 of 18 December 1979, 35/201 of 16 December 1980 and 36/149 B of 16 December 1981 on questions relating to information,
Recalling article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,//14// which provides that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression and that this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers, and article 29, which stipulates that these rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations,
Recalling also articles 19 and 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,//15//
Recalling the relevant provisions of the Final Declaration of the Sixth Conference of Heads of
~//14// Resolution 217 A (III).
~//15// Resolution 2200 A (XXI), annex.
219State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries, held at Havana from 3 to 9 September 1979,16 which stressed that co-operation in the field of information is an integral part of the struggle for the creation of a new world information order, of the Declaration of Conference of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of Non-Aligned Countries, held at New Delhi from 9 to 13 February
1981, and of the Fifth and Sixth Meetings of the Intergovernmental Council of Ministers of Information of Non-Aligned Countries, held at Georgetown in May 1981 and Valleta in June 1982, respectively,
Recalling its resolutions 3201 (S-VI) and 3202 (S-VI) of 1 May 1974, containing the Declaration and the Programme of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, 3281 (XXIX) of 12 December 1974, containing the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, and 3362 (S-VII) of 16 September 1975 on development and international economic co-operation,
Recalling the Declaration on Fundamental Principles concerning the Contribution of the Mass Media to Strengthening Peace and International Understanding, to the Promotion of Human Rights and to Countering Racialism, Apartheid and Incitement to War,//17// adopted on 28 November 1978 by the General
~//16// See A/34/542, annex, sect. I, paras. 280-299.
^ United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Records of the General Conference, Twentieth Session, vol. I, Resolutions, pp. 100-104.
220 Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, as well as the relevant resolutions on information and mass communications adopted by the General Conference at its nineteenth, twentieth and twentyfirst and twenty-second sessions,Recalling the relevant provisions of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, signed at Helsinki on 1 August 1975,
Recalling also the relevant provisions of the Declaration on the Preparation of Societies for Life in Peace,//18//
Recalling the relevant recommendations and provisions of the Declarations adopted by the World Congress on Books, held in London from 7 to 11 June 1982, and by the World Conference on Cultural Policies, held at Mexico City from 26 July to 6 August 1982,
Conscious of the need for all to collaborate in the establishment of a new world information and communication order based, inter alia, on the free circulation and wider and better balanced dissemination of information, guaranteeing the diversity of the sources of information and free access to information, and, in particular, the urgent need to change the dependent status of the developing countries in the
~//18// Resolution 33/73.
221field of information and communications, and intended also to strengthen peace and international understanding,
Reaffirming that the establishment of a new world information and communication order is linked to the new international economic order and is an integral part of the international development process,
Emphasizing the important role that public information plays in promoting understanding of and support for the establishment of the new international economic order and international co-operation for development,
Emphasizing the role that public information plays in promoting support for universal disarmament and in increasing awareness of the relationship between disarmament and development among as broad a public as possible,
Reaffirming the primary role which the General Assembly is to play in elaborating, co-- ordinating and harmonizing United Nations policies and activities in the field of information and recognizing the central and important role of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in the field of information and communications,
Emphasizing the complementarity of the activities in the field of information and communication and the need to strengthen co-- operation and co-ordination between the organs, 222 organizations and bodies of the United Nations system that deal with different aspects of information and communication,
Emphasizing its full support for the International Programme for the Development-of Communications, which constitutes an.important step in the development of the infrastructures of communications in the developing countries,
Expressing its satisfaction with the work of the Committee on Information as reflected in its report to the General Assembly at its thirtyseventh session,//19//
Expressing its appreciation to the Joint United Nations Information Committee for its efforts towards improving co-ordination of the public information activities of the various organizations of the United Nations system,
Taking note with satisfaction of the report of the Secretary-General on questions relating to information,//2// °
Also taking note with satisfaction of the report of the Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,//2// J
Official Records of the General Assembly, Thirty - Seventh Session, Supplement No. 21 (A/37/21 and Corr. 1).
~//20// A/37/446.
~//21// A/37/453 and Corr. 1.
2231. Approves the report of the Committee on Information and all its recommendations and urges their full implementation;
2. Reaffirms the mandate given to the Committee on Information by the General Assembly in its resolution 34/182, namely:
(a) To continue to examine United Nations public information policies and activities, in the light of the evolution of international relations, particularly during the past two decades, and of the imperatives of the establishment of the new international economic order and of a new world information and communication order;
(6) To evaluate and follow up the efforts made and the progress achieved by the United Nations system in the field of information and communications;
(c) To promote the establishment of a new, more just and more effective world information and communication order, intended to strengthen peace and international understanding and based on the free circulation and wider and better balanced dissemination of information, and to make recommendations thereon to the General Assembly;
3. Requests the Committee on,Information, keeping in mind its mandate, the essential tasks of which are to continue to examine the policies and activities of the Department of Public Information, to continue to promote the estab-
224lishment of a new, more just and effective world information and communication order and to continue to seek the co-operation and active participation of all organizations of the United Nations system, particularly the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the International Telecommunication Union, while avoiding any overlapping of activities on this subject;
4. Affirms its strong support for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and for its efforts to promote the establishment of a new world information and communication order;
5. Reiterates again its appeal to Member States, to the information and communication media, both public and private, as well as to non-governmental organizations, to disseminate more widely objective and better balanced information about the activities of the United Nations and, inter alia, about the efforts of the developing countries towards their economic, social and cultural progress and about the efforts of the international community to achieve international social justice and economic development, international peace and security and the progressive elimination of international inequities and tensions; such dissemination being aimed at achieving a more comprehensive and realistic image of the activities and potential of the United Nations system in all its purposes and endeavours;
6. Calls upon all organs, organizations and 225 bodies of the United Nations system to develop, in a concerted manner, integrated and coherent public information programmes to promote understanding of and support for the activities of the system in all its fields, in particular in the economic, social, development and cultural fields;
7. Requests that the Joint United Nations Information Committee, as the essential instrument for interagency co-ordination and cooperation in the field of public information, be strengthened and made more effective and that its secretariat elaborate new methods of work and longer-term indicative planning and joint action, especially in the promotion of a new world information and communication order;
8. Requests the Committee on Information and the Joint United Nations Information Committee to take action in accordance with paragraphs 15 and 16 of the recommendations of the Committee on Information//22// for its consideration at its substantive session in 1983;
9. Reaffirms the importance of the rapidly increasing role of United Nations public information programmes in fostering public understanding and support of United Nations activities and requests the Secretary-General to continue to review the current activities of the
~//22// Official Records of the General Assembly, ThirtySeventh Session, Supplement No. 21 (A/37/21 and Corr. 1), sect. IV, para. 91.
226Department of Public Information with a view to ensuring a better and more efficient use of its available resources;
10. Requests the Secretary-General to ensure that future reports of the Department of Public Information of the Secretariat to the Committee on Information and to the General Assembly should contain information as set out in paragraph 42 of the recommendations of the Committee ;2 2
11. Reiterates the recommendation contained in its resolution 35/201 that additional resources for the Department of Public Information should be commensurate with the increase in the activities of the United Nations which the Department is called upon to cover for the purpose of public information, and that the Secretary-General should provide such resources to the Department to this end where needed;
12. Requests the Secretary-General to ensure that the activities of the Department of Public Information, as the focal point of the public information tasks of the United Nations, should be strengthened, keeping in view the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and along the lines established in the pertinent resolutions of the General Assembly and the recommendations of the Committee on Information,
~//2//^ Official Records of the General Assembly, ThirtySeventh Session, Supplement No. 21 (A/37/21 and Corr. 1), sect. IV, para. 91.
__PRINTERS_P_227_COMMENT__ 15* 227 to ensure a more coherent coverage of, and a better knowledge about, the United Nations and its work, especially in its priority areas, such as those stated in section III, paragraph, 1, of Assembly resolution 35/201, including international peace and security, disarmament, peacekeeping and peacemaking operations, decolonization, the promotion of human rights, the struggle against apartheid and racial discrimination, economic, social and development issues, the integration of women in the struggle for peace and development, the establishment of the new international economic order and of a new world information and communication order, the work of the United Nations Council for Namibia and programmes on women and youth;13. Requests the Secretary-General, in view of the vital role that information plays in the development process, to ensure that the Department of Public Information co-operates more closely with the United Nations development agencies and programmes, in particular the United Nations Development Programme, both at Headquarters and in the field, in order to pool their resources, avoid duplication and_ foster effectively the process of development;
14. Requests the Secretary-General to ensure that the World Disarmament Campaign gives full consideration to the role of mass media as the most effective way to promote in world public opinion a climate of understanding, confidence and co-operation conducive to peace and disarmament and the enhancement of human rights 228 and development and further requests the Secretary-General to ensure that, within the World Disarmament Campaign, the Department of Public Information fulfils the role assigned to it by the General Assembly by utilizing its expertise and resources in public information to ensure its maximum effectiveness;
15. Requests the Secretary-General to ensure that, within existing resources, competent organs of the Secretariat prepare a documented factual summary account of the coverage by widely representative world media, reviewing developments affecting the Palestinian people from June to December 1982;
16. Requests the Secretary-General to ensure that the Department of Public Information organizes as soon as possible, in close co-- operation with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, a round table on a new world information and communication order, with the wide participation of major news media editors and with representation from all regions;
17. Requests the Secretary-General to continue and intensify his efforts to redress the existing imbalance in the staff of the Department of Public Information, and, until equitable geographical distribution is achieved, to take urgent steps to increase the representation of the group of developing countries, particularly at senior and policy-making levels, by a policy of recruiting among their nationals, taking into 229 account also the interests of other underrepresented groups of countries, in accordance with Article 101, paragraph 3, of the Charter of the United Nations and General Assembly resolutions 33/143 of 20 December 1978, 35/201 and 36/149 B;
18. Requests the Secretary-General to take the necessary measures to implement the existing plan regarding programming in the Portuguese language and to submit to the next session of the Committee on Information specific proposals, including estimates of costs and benefits, for a separate plan to enable the African Unit to undertake programming at a meaningful level in French and major languages of the region other than those already in use;
19. Notes that a separate Caribbean Unit has been established and has begun functioning and requests the Secretary-General to report on measures needed for its possible expansion so that it may offer effective programming in French and in the other languages of the subregion;
20. Requests the Secretary-General to submit to the Committee on Information at its next session a new, extensive and detailed report on the acquisition of a United Nations communications satellite, which should study the oifferent alternatives and analyse and evaluate the current administration costs in relation to telephone, telex, radio, video, document processing, the holding of conferences, travel by interpreters, and so on, and, while projecting seven-- 230 year operational goals, compare them with the cost of its own satellite, taking into account all potential uses of such a satellite by the United Nations system and also presenting feasible financing and self-maintenance alternatives, and in this regard requests that the Committee on Information should, at its next session, also take into account the basic report on communications to be produced by the Joint Inspection Unit;
21. Requests the Secretary-General further to strengthen co-operation by the Department of Public Information with the Pool of NonAligned News Agencies, as well as with the regional news agencies of developing countries, and furthermore requests that the practice of coverage by the agencies of the Pool, in co-- operation with the Department of Public Information, of important conferences and events within the United Nations system should be continued and strengthened;
22. Requests the Secretary-General to publish the UN Chronicle in all the official languages of the United Nations and, within existing financial resources, to take the measures necessary to ensure that the UN Chronicle be further improved to present a wide and more comprehensive coverage of United Nations activities and that it be published in an attractive and appropriate format to ensure its wide, timely and effective circulation;
23. Requests the Secretary-General to 231 strengthen the capacity and enhance the role of the United Nations information centres through, in particular, the implementation of the provisions of paragraph 22 of the recommendations of the Committee on Information;//22//
24. Requests the Secretary-General to initiate practical efforts toward a balance in the use of all the official languages of the United Nations in the radio broadcasting programme covering United Nations conferences held away from United Nations Headquarters;
25. Requests the Secretary-General to proceed, without prejudice to any future plan concerning the regionalization of the Radio and Visual Services Division, to maintain and enhance the functions of the Middle East and Arabic Unit in the Radio Service as the producer of television and radio programmes for the Arabic-speaking countries and to consider enlarging it through the redeployment of existing resources;
26. Reaffirms the importance of Development Forum as the only interagency publication of the United Nations system which concentrates on development issues, requests the Secretary-General to continue to support its publication from the regular budget while intensifying his efforts to secure a sound and independent
22 Official Records of the General Assembly, ThirtySeventh Session, Supplement No. 21 (A/37/21 and Corr. 1), sect. IV, para. 91.
232 financial basis for its continued publication and calls upon all the specialized agencies and other organizations of the United Nations system to contribute to this system-wide publication;27. Requests the Secretary-General to report further to the Committee on Information at its next session on the viability of a world wide United Nations short-wave network, its regional segments and its pertinent frequencies, as well as on the alternative solution of continuing to rent broadcast time on existing national short-wave transmitters;
28. Requests the Secretary-General to continue the co-operation between the Department of Public Information and the Union of National Radio and Television Organizations of Africa, as well as with radio stations which are members of that Union, in order to broadcast United Nations radio programmes on those radio stations, and further requests the Secretary-General to co-operate with the national radio broadcasting organizations in Africa for the establishment of a pilot project for wider broadcasting of United Nations radio programmes;
29. Requests the Secretary-General to report to the Committee on Information at its substantive session in 1983, on the implementation of all the recommendations contained in the Committee's report;//22//
~//22// Official Records of the General Assembly, ThirtySeventh Session, Supplement No. 21 (A/37/21 and Corr. 1), sect. IV, para. 91.
__PRINTERS_P_233_COMMENT__ 16-848 23330. Requests the Secretary-General to report to the General Assembly at its thirty-eighth session on the implementation of the present resolution and, in particular, on the implementation of all the recommendations contained in the report of the Committee on Information;//22//
31. Requests the Committee on Information to report to the General Assembly at its thirtyeighth session;
32. Decides to include in the provisional agenda of its thirty-eighth session the item entitled "Questions Relating to Information''.
~//22// Official Records of the General Assembly, ThirtySeventh Session, Supplement No. 21 (A/37/21 and Corr. 1), sect. IV, para. 91.
[234] __ALPHA_LVL2__ UNESCO DECLARATION ON FUNDAMENTALThe General Conference,
Recalling that by virtue of its Constitution the purpose of Unesco is to 'contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms' (Art. I, 1), and that to realize this purpose the Organization will strive 'to promote the free flow of ideas by word and image' (Art. 1, 2),
Further recalling that under the Constitution the Member States of Unesco, 'believing in full and equal opportunities for education for all, in the unrestricted pursuit of objective truth, and in the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, are agreed and determined to develop and to increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other's lives' (sixth preambular paragraph),
Recalling the purpose and principles of the United Nations, as specified in its Charter,
235Recalling the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948 and particularly Article 19 thereof, which provides that ' everyone has the right to freedom, of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers'; and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1966, Article 19 of which proclaims the same principles and Article 20 of which condemns incitement to war, the advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred and any form of discrimination, hostility or violence,
Recalling Article 4 of the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1965, and the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in -1973, whereby the States acceding to these Conventions undertook to adopt immediate and positive measures designed to eradicate all incitement to, or acts of, racial discrimination, and agreed to prevent any encouragement of the crime of apartheid and similar segregationist policies or their manifestations,
Recalling the Declaration on the Promotion among Youth of the Ideals of Peace, Mutual 236 Respect and Understanding between Peoples, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1965,
Recalling the declarations and resolutions adopted by the various organs of the United Nations concerning the establisment of a new international economic order and the role Unesco is called upon to play in this respect,
Recalling the Declaration of the Principles of International Cultural Co-operation, adopted by the General Conference of Unesco in 1966,
Recalling Resolution 59(1) of the General Assembly of the United Nations, adopted in 1946 and declaring:
'Freedom of information is a fundamental human right and is the touchstone of all the freedoms to which the United Nations is consecrated;
Freedom of information requires as an indispensable element the willingness and capacity to employ its privileges without abuse. It requires as a basic discipline the moral obligation to seek the facts without prejudice and to spread knowledge without malicious intent;
Recalling Resolution 110 (II) of the General Assembly of the United Nations, adopted in 1947, condemning all forms of propaganda which are designed or likely provoke or encourage any threat to the peace, breach of the 237 peace, or act of aggression,
Recalling resolution 127 (II), also adopted by the General Assembly in 1947, which invites Member States to take measures, within the limits of constitutional procedures, to combat the diffusion of false or distorted reports likely to injure friendly relations between States, as well as the other resolutions of the General Assembly concerning the mass media and their contribution to strengthening peace, trust and friendly relations among States,
Recalling resolution 9.12 adopted by the General Conference of Unesco in 1968, reiterating Unesco's objective to help to eradicate colonialism and racialism, and resolution 12.1 adopted by the General Conference in 1976, which proclaims that colonialism, neo-- colonialism and racialism in all its forms and manifestations are incompatible with the fundamental aims of Unesco,
Recalling resolution 4.301 adopted in 1970 by the General Conference of Unesco on the contribution of the information media to furthering international understanding and cooperation in the interests of peace and human welfare, and to countering propaganda on behalf of war, racialism, apartheid and hatred among nations, and aware of the fundamental contribution that mass media can make to the realizations of the objectives,
Recalling the Declaration on Race and Racial 238 Prejudice adopted by the General Conference of Unesco at its twentieth session,
Conscious of the complexity of the problems of information in modern society, of the diversity of solutions which have been offered to them, as evidenced in particular by the consideration given to them within Unesco, and of the legitimate desire of all parties concerned that their aspirations, points of view and cultural identity be taken into due consideration,
Conscious of the aspirations of the developing countries for the establishment of a new, more just and more effective world information and communication order,
Proclaims on this twenty-eighth day of November 1978 this Declaration on Fundamental Principles concerning the Contribution of the Mass Media to Strengthening Peace and International Understanding, to the Promotion of Human Rights and to Countering Racialism, Apartheid and Incitement to War.
Article I
The strengthening of peace and international understanding, the promotion of human rights and the countering of racialism, apartheid and incitement to war demand a free flow and a wider and better balanced dissemination of information. To this end, the mass media have a leading contribution to make. This contribution will be the more effective to the extent that 239 the information reflects the different aspects of the subject dealt with.
Article II
1. The exercise of freedom of opinion, expression and information, recognized as an integral part of human rights and fundamental freedoms, is a vital factor in the strengthening of peace and international understanding.
2. Access by the public to information should be guaranteed by the diversity of the sources and means of information available to it, thus enabling each individual to check the accuracy of facts and to appraise events objectively. To this end, journalists must have freedom to report and the fullest possible facilities of access to information. Similarly, it is important that the mass media be responsive to concerns of peoples and individuals, thus promoting the participation of the public in the elaboration of information.
3. With a view to the strengthening of peace and international understanding, to promoting human rights and to countering racialism, apartheid and incitement to war, the mass media throughout the world, by reason of their role, contribute to promoting human rights, in particular by giving expression to oppressed peoples who struggle against colonialism, neo-- colonialism, foreign occupation and all forms of racial discrimination and oppression and who are unable to make their voices heard within their own territories.
2404. If the mass media are to be in position to promote the principles of the Declaration in their activities, it is essential that journalists and other agents of the mass media, in their own country or abroad, be assured of protection guaranteeing them the best conditions for the exercise of their profession.
Article HI
1. The mass media have an important contribution to make to the strengthening of peace and international understanding and in countering racialism, apartheid and incitement to war.
2. In countering aggressive war, racialism, apartheid and other violations of human rights which are inter alia spawned by prejudice and ignorance, the mass media, by disseminating information on the aims, aspirations, cultures and needs of all peoples, contribute to eliminate ignorance and misunderstanding between peoples, to make nationals of a country sensitive to the needs and desires of others, to ensure the respect of the rights and dignity of all nations, all peoples and all individuals without distinction of race, sex, language, religion or nationality and to draw attention to the great evils which afflict humanity, such as poverty, malnutrition and diseases, thereby promoting the formulation by States of the policies best able to promote the reduction of international tension and the peaceful and equitable settlement of international disputes.
241Article IV
The mass media have an essential part to play in the education of young people in a spirit of peace, justice, freedom, mutual respect and understanding, in order to promote human rights, equality of rights as between all human beings and all nations, and economic and social progress. Equally, they have important role to play in making known the views and aspirations of the younger generation.
Article V
In order to respect freedom of opinion, expression and information and in order that information may reflect all points of view, it is important that the points of view presented by those who consider that the information published or disseminated about them has seriously prejudiced their effort to strengthen peace and international understanding, to promote human rights or to counter racialism, apartheid and incitement to war be disseminated.
Article VI
For the establishment of a new equilibrium and greater reciprocity in the flow of information, which will be conducive to the institution of a just and lasting peace and to the economic and political independence of the developing countries, it is necessary to correct the inequalities in the flow of information to and from developing countries, and between those 242 countries. To this end, it-is essential that their mass media should have conditions and resources enabling them to gain strength and expand, and to co-operate both among themselves and with the mass media in developed countries.
Article VII
By disseminating more widely all of the information concerning the universally accepted objectives and principles which are the bases of the resolutions adopted by the different organs of the United Nations, the mass media contribute effectively to the strengthening of peace and international understanding, to the promotion of human rights, and to the establishment of a more just and equitable international economic order.
Article VIII
Professional organizations, and people who participate in the professional training of journalists and other agents of the mass media and who assist them in performing their functions in a responsible manner should attach special importance to the principles of this Declaration when drawing up and ensuring application of their codes of ethics.
Article IX
In the spirit of this Declaration, it is for the international community to contribute to the creation of the conditions for a free flow and 243 wider and more balanced dissemination of information and of the conditions for the protection, in the exercise of their functions, of journalists and other agents of the mass media. Unesco is well placed to make a valuable contribution in this respect.
Article X
1. With due respect for constitutional provisions designed to guarantee freedom of information and for the applicable international instruments and agreements, it is indispensable to create and maintain throughout the world the conditions which make it possible for the organizations and persons professionally involved in the dissemination of information to achieve the objectives of this Declaration.
2. It is important that a free flow and wider and better balanced dissemination of information be encouraged.
3. To this end, it is necessary that States facilitate the procurement by the mass media in the developing countries of adequate conditions and resources enabling them to gain strength and expand, and that they support co-operation by the latter both among themselves and with the mass media in developed countries.
4. Similarly, on a basis of equality of rights, mutual advantage and respect for the diversity of the cultures which go to make up the common heritage of mankind, it is essential that bilateral and multilateral exchanges of information among all States, and in particular between those which have different economic 244 and social systems, be encouraged and developed.
Article XI
For this declaration to be fully effective it is necessary, with due respect for the legislative and administrative provisions and the other obligations of Member States, to guarantee the existence of favourable conditions for the operation of the mass media, in conformity with the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and with the corresponding principles proclaimed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1966.
[245] __ALPHA_LVL2__ NINTH IOJ CONGRESSOrientation Document
The 9th Congress of the International Organization of Journalists, held in Moscow from October 19 to October 22, 1981, was attended by representatives of 96 organizations of journalists from 89 countries and from a number of regional and international organizations and institutions. The Congress thus became the largest and most representative meeting of journalists ever held.
Taking part in the Congress were delegates who, as professional journalists, are of different political affiliation, ideology and religious conviction. This conforms to the diversity of democratic journalism within the IOJ and to the diversity of the political and social concerns of our time.
This further accentuated the strong impression produced by the unity of will of all participants manifested during the Congress in their determination to take part, with full responsibility, in shaping the future development of humanity in view of the present dangerous international situation. This position was reflected in the Appeal of the Congress to Journalists of the Whole World, urging them to do everything to defend peace, to make use of all available ways and means to achieve this aim. This conforms to the principal ethical calling of journalists, 246 namely, to act as intermediaries for understanding among peoples and to work for the welfare of their own and of all nations.
Participants in the 9th Congress note that in the period since the 8th Congress (Helsinki, 1976) the influence and role of the International Organization of Journalists has been substantially enhanced.
The 9th Congress admitted new member organizations from Mexico, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Western Sahara, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Canada, Brazil, Kampuchea, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Granada, Malta, Greece, the Arab Republic of Yemen, Poland, Zimbabwe, Guatemala and Sierra Leone. Unions of journalists from Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, Finland and India agreed to be associated in the IOJ.
In the 35th year of its existence, the International Organization of Journalists has become the largest international association of journalists, grouping more than 180,000 colleagues from over 120 countries. The unity of democratic journalists, determined champions of peace, associated in the IOJ, is a great achievement and an important factor in international politics. It is our duty to expend all efforts and strength to defend, consolidate and further develop this unity.
With great pride the IOJ can state that it has always stood on the side of those who fought for peace and the progress of nations and has always been present whenever real answers were given to questions of importance to the whole of mankind and wherever a vigorous struggle was waged for their solution. The IOJ draws strength and 247 influence from its complete identity with the just demands and aspirations of nations.
Journalists associated in the IOJ have interests identical to those of the working people of their own and other countries. They.know of no higher duty than to serve their people and contribute to the maintenance of life on this planet, enabling man to live in a manner worthy of human beings.
In its activities the IOJ represents and preserves the legacy of all journalists whose activities contributed to the welfare of their nations. It safeguards the legacy of all great publicists whose undiminished merit is that they forged close links between the peoples and social progress, who throughout the struggles of their time remained true to noble, humanistic ideals, often at the cost of their lives.
Having experienced the horrors of World War II, the founders of the IOJ from the time of its inception in 1946 took over the legacy and obligations arising from the joint struggle against war, fascism and imperialist oppression, taking a solemn pledge to maintain peace and consolidate friendship among nations, to support international understanding by providing free, true and honest information to the public. They committed themselves to combat the promotion of war psychosis and war propaganda, fascist propaganda, national or racial hatred and the fomenting of international tension by using lies and slander of any kind. This was and remains the highest principle of the IOJ as embodied in Article 1 of its Statute. The 9th Congress reiterates the responsibility of every journalist to 248 promote this vitally important task corresponding to the interests and.expectations of all nations.
The Congress unanimously agreed that today, more than at any time in the past, much depends on the full use of the great potential of our or: ganization, of every opportunity available to journalists for a positive world development. The progressive democratic journalists of the world associated in the IOJ put on record their determined protest against efforts to impede the process of detente. They are determined to put the enemies of peace in the deck and to expose even more resolutely those preparing for a new world conflagration while hiding behind appealing phrases and cliches about love for peace and human rights, those who claim large parts of the globe to be their "regions of vital importance" so that they may continue the shameless exploitation of the national wealth of these countries and violate their national, political, economic and cultural independence. At the same time they are the ones who unabashedly call the movement for national and social liberation terrorist activities. The duty of democratic journalists is to use honest words to expose this unprincipled deception of the public, to come forward with sympathy and understanding in support of aspirations for the progress of nations which are oppressed nationally and socially.
With great concern the Congress notes the gradual poisoning of the international climate and seriously warns against further dissemination of the infamous lie of a "Soviet threat". The lie of a non-existent threat should be nailed as a pretext to escalate the arms race to the very __PRINTERS_P_249_COMMENT__ 17-848 249 bring of a nuclear holocaust, to destroy the achievements of detente and peaceful cooperation attained especially in Europe since the Helsinki Conference.
Journalists can make a substantial contribution to detente and mutual understanding if instead of emphasizing differences they stress what unites us, if they consider the wonder and excitement of peaceful life and cooperation among people of different ideology, nationality and colour of skin more important than the sensation and terror of confrontation.
The Congress demands a just and comprehensive settlement of the Middle East problem and the unconditional withdrawal of the Israeli aggressors from all occupied Arab territories; it fully supports the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and their struggle under the leadership of the PLO, their sole authentic representative; it supports their right to self-determination, the return to their homeland, and the creation of an independent and sovereign state.
The Congress denounces Israeli action aimed at exterminating Palestinian journalists and fighters.
The Congress condemns the strategic alliance recently proclaimed between American imperialism and Israel, regarding it a great danger for security and peace in the Arab region and the world as a whole.
The Congress condemns the continuing aggressive acts of Israel against Lebanon and Syria and urges support for Syria's firm stand and preservation of the unity of Lebanon as a people and a territotial entity. The Congress also 250 condemns the criminal attack on the Iraqi nuclear research centre.
The Congress denounces the repressive acts of the Egyptian regime against Egyptian journalists and condemns attemps by American imperialism to convert Egypt into its military base in order to strike against Arab and African regions and to wage aggression against the Libyan Jamahiria; this, in fact, would mean the implementation of the separate Camp David agreements which are nothing but an attempt to liquidate the Palestinian pe*ople.
The Congress strongly condemns the separate Camp David agreements and all plots by Zionism, a twin of racialism, which pose a threat to security and peace.
The Congress also calls for an end to the war between Iraq and Iran and for negotiations to settle this dispute peacefully; the Congress supports all efforts in this direction.
We express our support for and solidarity with the liberation struggle being waged by the people of the Democratic Arab Republic of the Sahara under the leadership of the POLISARIO Front and urge a solution to the problem of Western Sahara on the basis of the relevant UNO and OAU decisions.
The Cyprus problem continues to constitute a serious threat to peace and security in the sensitive area of the Eastern Mediterranean and the world in general. The IOJ Congress considers that an early, peaceful and just solution to this problem, on the basis of the relevant U.N. resolutions, will safeguard the independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, demilitarization and __PRINTERS_P_251_COMMENT__ 17* 251 alignment of the Republic of Cyprus.
We reiterate our solidarity and support to the just struggle of the people of South Africa, led by the ANC, and the people of Namibia, led by SWAPO. We vigorously condemn the repeated acts of aggression by the South African racist regime against the sovereign territories of Angola and Mozambique, the illegal occupation of Namibia, and the inhuman policy of apartheid.
We condemn the dangerous imperialist conspiracy aimed at establishing a pact in the South Atlantic, to include the Republic of South Africa and other countries, whose purpose is to expand NATO.
We support the efforts of Asian, Arab and African nations to transform the Indian Ocean and neighbouring countries into a zone of peace. We likewise support efforts to make Europe a zone free of nuclear weapons. '•
The Congress expresses its hope for the successful conclusion of the Madrid follow-up meeting to the Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe and emphasizes the need to convene a world disarmament conference.
The policy of American imperialist forces is to try and turn back the wheel of history on the American continent and to transform the latter into a platform for its aggressive aims.
The dangerous efforts to exterminate the heroic struggle of the people of El Salvador and Guatemala, by giving military aid to repressive regimes as well as by open threats to intervene in Nicaragua, has made Central America one of the most sensitive areas in the world.
We emphasize once more our support for 252 struggle of the peoples of Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada against aggressive imperialist objectives and we pledge our solidarity with the struggle of the masses in El Salvador and Guatemala, with the young Republic of Belize, with Puerto Rican patriots, with the democratic and progressive journalists persecuted in Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina, and with the struggle of all Latin American people who have begun to take their destiny in their own hands.
We pledge our firm solidarity with the peoples of Vietnam, Kampuchea, Laos and Afghanistan in their endeavours to develop their countries in peace and free of foreign interference, and we denounce the repeated attempts by U.S. imperialism and Chinese expansionism to revive barbaric regimes condemned by history, and the use of aggression and intervention.
We support the desire of the people of Korea for the peaceful re-unification of their country, without foreign interference, and for the withdrawal of all foreign military forces from the southern part of the country.
The Congress hails all representatives of mass media of the socialist community countries whose foreign policy orientation is enduringly and principally directed to the process of international detente, the substantial reduction of armaments and for the implementation of the most important right of all people of the world--- the right to live in peace.
The Congress hails journalists from the developing countries who are fighting for their genuine national, economic and political liberation, for the right to be the owners of their own 253 land and wealth, for mass media of a truly national character, free of the power of monopolies and transnational imperialist agencies.
The Congress hails all progressive democratic journalists from capitalist countries struggling to achieve the great aims of mankind, for the social liberation of their peoples.
During the last five years, the IOJ has issued some 300 resolutions, communiques and appeals, pledging full solidarity with all progressive forces of the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe..
*
We express our solidarity with all progressive and democratic journalists in all regions of the world who suffer in jails and are persecuted and oppressed by imperialism and reaction for fulfilling their journalistic duties and upholding their democratic convictions. We are proud of our colleagues who despite persecution, imprisonment and torture have remained faithful to the just cause of their people and their mission as journalists.
The Congress notes that in the period since the 8th Congress the IOJ supported with still greater emphasis and in an uncompromising manner the idea of international solidarity of journalists. A concrete expression of this attitude was the support and assistance given to journalists of countries fighting for freedom and independence.
The Congress highly commends the work of the International Forum in Defence of Progressive and Democratic Journalists, held in Varna (Bulgaria) in October 1981. We call on all unions and journalists to regularly supply 254 information on this subject, to vigorously oppose repressive measures taken against colleagues, and to give these colleagues all assistance in their work for peace, democracy and social progress.
The IOJ has always fought against violations of the rights and freedoms of journalists whose activities uphold the lofty principles of democratic journalism. This has been reflected, among others, in various publications of the International Organization of Journalists.
In this context the Congress highly appreciates the growing activity of the IOJ and the member organizations, the IOJ training centres and all other journalistics training institutions which cooperate with the IOJ in the education and qualification of journalists from the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the Congress thanks all its member unions which give active assistance and solidarity in this regard.
In the 35 years of the lOJ's existence, all mass media have undergone rapid development. The revolution in science and technology opened up unforeseen opportunities for activity in all regions of the world. This trend is continuing. Thus, the responsibility of journalists to the international community of nations is further increased. Journalists must prevent the utilization of this new technology to dismember the culture of nations and ethnical groups, to provoke national or religious hatred, or to violate the sovereignty of states. The climate of international relations is very much influenced, either in a positive or negative sense, by the actions of mass media. In the face of this situation, the 9th 255 Congress emphasizes the highly topical nature of the following passage written into our Statute, outlining some of the tasks of the IOJ:
``The protection of the people's rights to receive free and honest information. The struggle against falsehood, calumnies and the systematic' misinformation of the people by the press, as well as against every form of journalistic activity in the service of individuals or particular groups of society whose interests are contrary to those of the working masses.''
Concentration and monopolization in the field of production and dissemination of information of all kinds continues ever more rapidly. This trend is characterized by the creation of mass media monopolies in private hands which control regional and local markets. The purchase or domination of the mass media by the military-industrial monopolies is a growing trend in a number of countries and represents a particularly grave danger.
Changes in the mass media also have a considerable impact on the journalistic profession. Working conditions have changed, the profile of the profession has changed, demands placed on every individual in the profession have increased. In countries where most of the mass media are privately owned, the material existence of thousands of journalists and tens of thousands of technical employees is under threat. Technical development has far-reaching consequences for professional existence, for the education and onthe-job training of journalists, for ethical education and the development and upbringing of new journalists. In accordance with its strength and 256 possibilities, the IOJ supports its member unions in resolving these important tasks.
We can start from the premise that the process of concentration and monopolization together with the introduction of sophisticated technological procedures results in the introduction of hundreds of thousands of technical personnel in mass media, being directly exposed to the effects of this development.
The Congress points out that the IOJ and its member unions gave considerable attention to the establishment of a new international information order, in keeping with the breadth and importance of the movement of countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The IOJ believes that all-round support for the setting up of a new international information order must be linked with the establishment of a new international economic order. Only by fighting the multinational corporations, who are pursuing a policy of super-exploitation of the developing countries, re-colonizing them by imposing techniques and technologies under insufferable conditions, acquiring their raw materials for almost nothing and thus gaining extra profits, will it be possible to create a genuine information order enabling these countries to pursue their own policy in information and national culture.
The 9th Congress also urges the governments of the developing countries, in the spirit of the appeal launched during the colloquy in Bamako (Mali) in October 1980, to give all necessary means and support to the national press to enable it to play its responsible role.
257The 9th Congress of the IOJ notes with satisfaction that the period between the 8th Congress (Helsinki, 1976) and the 9th Congress (Moscow, 1981) was characterized by a further growth in the worldwide impact of our organization built on democratic principles. The work of member unions and groups was strengthened and consolidated. The leading bodies of the IOJ worked systematically and persistently to implement the lOJ's tasks, as did the General Secretariat, in keeping with the conclusions of the 8th Congress of the IOJ.
The Congress notes with satisfaction that democratic journalists are becoming increasingly aware of the significance of their unity and organization. In a number of countries it has become possible to establish new, democratic unions of journalists. In other countries individual groups are now associated on the national level.
Regional organizations of journalists, which concluded agreements of friendship and cooperation with the IOJ---the Federation of Latin American Journalists (FELAP), the Federation of Arab Journalists (FAJ), and the Union of African Journalists (UJA), were consolidated and have become an important factor in decolonization and in efforts to achieve social progress on all continents. The IOJ is opposed to all attempts by reactionary circles to split and dominate these national and regional organizations. The body of experience at the national, regional and international level constitutes a fund which is increasingly beneficial in all our activities and which must serve all member unions.
258Cooperation was consolidated with scientific associations and with specialized organizations of journalists, such as the International Association of the Sports Press (AIPS), the International Federation of Journalists and Writers on Tourism (FIJET), the International Association for Mass Communication Research (IAMCR), and others. This cooperation should be extended still more.
The IOJ attaches great importance to cooperation with the UNO and UNESCO, in line with the lOJ's status in both organizations. The IOJ gives particular support to UNESCO in its efforts to establish a new international information order in accordance with the principles adopted by the non-aligned countries. The IOJ denounces the campaign waged against UNESCO by certain Western media organizations.
The IOJ appreciates the tradition of meetings among international and regional organizations of journalists organized in Paris 1978 and Mexico 1980. The same applies to the traditional European meetings of journalists held elsewhere. In this context, the IOJ again declares its readiness to seek in the future the establishment of beneficial relations with the International Federation of Journalists, the International Union of the Catholic Press, and with other organizations in the interest of promoting understanding among nations and the professional and ethical mission of journalism in society.
The IOJ has always considered itself an integral part of the world peace movement, and it is linked to the World Peace Council and its activities.
The IOJ will continue to actively cooperate 259 with a number of leading international nongovernmental organizations, especially with the World Federation of Trade Unions, the Women's International Democratic Federation, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the International Union of Students, and the AfroAsian People's Solidarity Organization. The IOJ will take part in the most important campaigns of these organizations, will plan joint actions with them, support their initiatory steps and promote their activities in the interest of coop-' eration in the struggle for peace and friendship among nations.
In their future activities the leading bodies of the IOJ and its member unions will base their work on:
---the IOJ Statute whose validity has remained unimpaired over the past 35 years, -the UNESCO Declaration of 1978, which sets out the fundamental principles of the contribution of mass media to the strengthening of peace and international understanding, to the promotion of human rights and to countering racialism, apartheid and incitement to war,
---the Mexico Declaration of 1980, in which the IOJ together with other international and regional organizations of journalists outlined its stand on cardinal issues of our times,
---experience acquired by all its member organizations in implementing the IOJ's principles and goals and in expanding its activities.
The 9th Congress draws attention to the fact that new conditions have been created enabling 260 and requiring the expansion of cooperation among journalists, which must be promoted in the interests of the responsibility of journalists to their peoples; the Congress affirms the determination of the IOJ to make an effective contribution in the 1980s to:
---strengthening peace and mutual understanding among nations, against the feverish arms race and for the prevention of a thermonuclear holocaust, as well as for the continuation of the policy of detente, removal of hotbeds of tension and for a peaceful settlement of outstanding issues,
---educating all generations, especially the young generation, in the spirit of peace, humanistic and democratic ideas as well as progressive ideas in the context of the legacy of progressive journalists,
---respecting the dignity and rights of all nations and nationalities and supporting efforts to assure their growth and welfare, democracy and statehood, independence and self-- determination, freedom and social progress,
---struggle against flagrant violations of human rights by racialism, apartheid, Zionism and all other forms 'of racial discrimination, to struggle against all forms of colonialism and neo-colonialism and for the establishment of new, just international economic relations,
---supporting democratic journalists persecuted by imperialism and other forms of reactionary oppression because of their progressive and democratic convictions,
---struggle for free, truthful and honest information about public opinion,
261---supporting the development of national systems of mass media as an important factor in political, social and economic progress and consolidation of independence,
---supporting the training and on-the-job training of journalists and the setting up of suitable national education and training centres for journalists,
---supporting the struggle of colleagues whose professional existence is threatened as a result of the anti-democratic introduction of new techniques and methods in mass media, and who are striving to secure their social rights and to expand the opportunities for their professional development.
The Congress approves the work undertaken to date by the IOJ commissions and working committees. It authorizes them to specify in greater detail their activities in keeping with the resolutions of the congress and to follow up this activity in an efficient manner.
In view of the far-reaching aims of the IOJ, the Congress considers it necessary for the leading bodies to assess all possibilities permitting the General Secretariat to undertake necessary measures as regards the following:
---to expand, improve and adapt the forms of organization and activities of the IOJ to present-day conditions,
---to be flexible and efficient in keeping with all relevant decisions of previous Congresses and other governing bodies of the IOJ and the new, great requirements and objectives set out in the decisions of the IOJ 9th Congress, including further improvements in
262methods of work and the structure of the IOJ General Secretariat, as well as its departments and facilities; in systematic consolidation of cooperation with all member organizations and members, based on mutual trust; in establishing systematic guidance of and support to the regional secretariats and the IOJ information centres in all important areas of the world in closest possible cooperation with member organizations or regional organizations of journalists working in the given regions,
---to improve further the press bodies and publishing activities of the IOJ, to increase their volume and efficiency,
---to prepare in the coming period, to a much greater extent than heretofore, and in all parts of the world study trips and gatherings of journalists which would deal with topics of greatest interest to journalists and their readers, listeners and viewers; these undertakings should have high scientific level, be topical, linked to practical issues, be flexible and efficient,
---to make use of all opportunities for the development of greater activity in the education of young journalists; to organize to this end international seminars in conjunction with member unions, to establish international awards, foundations, grants,
---to render active assistance in the organization of training courses, further training and specialization of journalists in the IOJ training centres and cooperating facilities under regional and national unions of journalists,
263or other institutions,
---to undertake further, specific steps leading to the setting up of a research institute, based on international cooperation and serving member organizations, to analyze all tendencies of development in mass media,
---to achieve progress together with interested partners of journalist and other organizations in the protection of journalists, especially in carrying out their work within the frame of so-called,dangerous missions, and to achieve an international agreement in this respect.
The 9th Congress of the International Organization of Journalists states with deep satisfaction that the challenging tasks assumed during the last Congress were implemented.
The Congress congratulates the Executive Committee, the Presidium, the IOJ Commissions and the General Secretariat on their work. Thanks are due also to all member organizations for their creative contribution to the implementation of joint tasks.
The Congress expresses its conviction that in the coming period of activities the IOJ will unite all progressive and democratic journalists.
[264] __ALPHA_LVL0__ The End. [END]
A.Grachev, N.YErmoshkin
ANEW
INFORMATION
ORDER
SYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE!
"However, one might say that a world war has already started---a psychological wa*r. That is, so far only psychological. But then?"
Politics and culture, the economy and science rely today, as never before, on their mutual information links. Whether nations would treat one another with understanding or hostility depends to a • great extent on whether information is truthful or misleading, helpful or malicious, serves all mankind or only the vested interests of selfish groups within the exploiter classes.
Today, information is also a powerful tool for changing the world around us anH it is very important as a means of '
warfare---but shou
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A NEW
INFORMATION
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PSYCHOLOGICAL
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"The world is facing the danger of war. After the two world wars mankind has lived through in the 20th century, the threat of a third such
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