Rusted Sky

It's rather odd I didn't pick up on this before. I've known about Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose - Father used to listen to Tokyo Rose in the Pacific - but didn't realize that the same propaganda techniques used in WW2 were being used by our own media today.

Information Warfare: Japanese Propaganda and American Mass Media

But recently, the troops have been passing around an interesting discovery. Namely, that the Japanese psychological warfare effort during World War II included radio broadcasts that could be picked up by American troops. Popular music was played, but the commentary (by one of several English speaking Japanese women) always hammered away on the same points;

1 Your President (Franklin D Roosevelt) is lying to you.
2 This war is illegal.
3 You cannot win the war.

The troops are perplexed and somewhat amused that their own media is now sending out this message. Fighting the enemy in Iraq is simple, compared to figuring out what news editors are thinking back home.

It's understandable that the propagandists in Japan and Germany tried hard to convince American soldiers that their President was lying, the war was illegal, and that they couldn't win.

What's not so understandable is why our own media would present the same message. I find it difficult to believe when faced with the examples of what's happened in Islamic countries, when seeing the excesses of Al Quaeda and other Islamic groups slaughtering people, that they can rationally believe that the West is at fault. I'm aware of the current leftward leanings of the media - but are they really so blind that they don't see that Western civilization is at stake? The world is far too small these days to believe that distance and the oceans will protect us, and we're so interconnected these days via the internet that someone in Dayton, OH can access jihadi material easily... and if of an Islamist bent can end up looking for ways to join the struggle, either overseas or here at home. (Imagine, if you will, the German American Bund being allowed to freely recruit for soldiers or saboteurs here in the US for Germany in WW2, with the newspapers actively talking it up and praising the work they did.)

The war against radical Islam isn't a matter so much of physical warfare now. Asymmetrical warfare can be pretty hard on the locals, and Al Quaeda's not gathering many friends in the ME. It is much more akin to pest control/eradication than the setpiece warfare we anticipated with the USSR and China. I don't think, after the fall of Saddam, we're going to see another setpiece battle between nations, which is rather comforting... kind of nice to know we're not going to do the MAD thing again for a while.

Now it's more a matter of ideological infection control, and it's necessary to both eradicate the ideology where found and prevent it from sporing off and gaining converts elsewhere. The best way (IMHO) to do this is to deny any victory at all to the Islamists. You don't glorify them, you don't call them 'freedom fighters', you don't have a carbomb going off and killing five people have the headlines and very good progress on the fight against the folks setting carbombs get ignored. You want to deny the enemy good press.

Which is why it's funny that the Western media is acting as a propaganda outlet for the enemy, which would destroy them if they could...

The world is smaller now than it was in 1945. The media won't be protected by distance, and they're knocking down the soldiers and morale of the countries that would protect them from a future they really, really don't want.

J.