Just three days before the first military attacks in Afghanistan, the London-based magazine The Economist published an article that openly acknowledged an American war that was already underway and laying the groundwork for the shooting war: the propaganda war. “That word has come to have a derogatory meaning, of the dissemination of untruths. In this case, America's task is (in truth) to disseminate truths, about its motives, about its intentions, about its current and past actions in Israel and Iraq, about its views of Islam. For all that, however, this part of the war promises to be no easier to win than the many other elements of the effort.” It is that article, along with my previous book about U.S. propaganda, which prompted this collection of writings about America’s information and propaganda war that is well underway in the post-September 11th environment. The Economist stated quite accurately that the propaganda war “is needed to sustain the immediate battle but also to win the peace.” Where I part company is with how the United States government is going about its approach to winning the peace.

Propaganda campaigns generally seed the soil for successful military operations and are often used to make a person conform to one line of thinking about a military operation, or in this case, a war on terrorism. We do not generally view propaganda as a euphemism for critical thinking; in fact, propaganda, as viewed in the context of mass persuasion that benefits the manufacturer and sender, often begins where critical thinking ends. This is why as a propaganda scholar and university professor in the United States, I wanted to provide a brief critical portrait of America’s information war. This book is neither comprehensive nor objective; it is written in the spirit of service and caution. Jacques Ellul, author of the classical text Propaganda, wrote that “to warn a political system of the menace hanging over it does not imply an attack on it, but it is the greatest service one can render the system.” Forty years ago, Ellul wrote in the book’s preface that “in the world today, there are three great propaganda blocs: the U.S.S.R., China, and the United States.” Were one to continue his analysis, today there are only two.

As luck would have it, I was able to interview Konrad Kellen, the translator of Ellul’s book from the French into the English and author of the introduction to the American edition of Propaganda. Kellen, a former RAND scholar who is now in his 80s and living in Los Angeles, reminded me that Ellul’s greatest contribution to the literature on propaganda was his proposition that propaganda is most effective when it is least noticeable. What the American people don’t know, he said, is that “American propaganda here is more hidden.” In a controlled society, propaganda is obvious and reluctantly tolerated for fear of the negative consequences. In an open society like the United States, the hidden and integrated nature of the propaganda beast convinces people that they are not being propagandized. This is why the concept of propaganda in the United States is so problematic and painted in strictly a negative light. Propaganda is supposed to be something that Hitler mastered and that his filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl made into a perverse art form. It is not supposed to be part of an open society. But indeed, as I learned from my conversation with Kellen, what is more propagandistic than the American message our President reinforces among us that we are do-gooders for the world trying to overcome evil. Kellen said that President Bush, for all his post-9/11 popularity, has “mastered the art of saying nothing” and that it’s these “platitudes of emptiness” that reinforce mistaken ideas, propaganda notions, about how to fight the war on terrorism. Most people want to be smart about everything and have a need to inform themselves, but what happens is that we get a lot of information in the service of misinformation and ignorance. It is controlled information, not designed for people to develop the ability to think for themselves. The world is not divided into neat and tidy categories of white-hats and black hats, do-gooders and evildoers, unless you want to believe the world that Spider-Man inhabits. American propaganda is the sugar pill that makes the bitter truth go down. To paraphrase Spider-Man, “It is our gift. It is our curse.”

In these pages, the reader will find that I am often critical of the government and media institutional elements of opinion control and concomitant chilling effects on free speech after 9/11. This does not mean that I am either anti-American or unpatriotic in my feelings about my country of birth and its people. I am a fundamentalist in the context that what is more fundamentally American than loving it enough to criticize it when you think it can do better. To quote Senator J. William Fulbright, one of America’s great statesmen and originator of the Fulbright academic fellowships: “To criticize one’s country is to do it a service and pay it a compliment.” This book is a compliment to the democratic spirit I love and treasure about the United States and American historical traditions of democratic debate. My aim, as an American-born global citizen, is to encourage that same democratic spirit and development worldwide.