Two years ago a group of Asian non-government organizations held a conference in Malaysia concerning the right to self-determination in East Timor. The conference lasted for 10 minutes before it was broken up by a group closely associated with the Malaysian government, who had bowed to pressure from Suharto to not allow the conference.
The East Timorese have been fighting for their independence since they were invaded by Indonesia in 1975. An estimated 200,000 East Timor citizens have been killed or disappeared, roughly 1/3 of the population.
East Timor is one of the significant sites of 20th century genocide and Suharto has been a prime recipient of investment funds from the Deutche Bank.
Meanwhile, my country, the US, has spent billions of dollars over the last thirty years helping to militarize the Suharto regime, to ensure a stable capitalist ally in Southeast Asia, one receptive to American investment.
And this was part of a larger project to capture the hearts and minds of the people of Asia-Pacific and Europe. The epicentre of the project was Berlin. Old cold-war relationships rise to the surface again and again, particularly during times of economic crisis.
When we attacked targets in Sudan and Afghanistan, your government stood in fundamental support of our revenge.
While the US seeks to maintain the present capitalist global order with „whole-sale State terror“, Osama bin Laden appears to hope to de-stabilize that order with „corporate-retail terror“, allowing for a new order to arise. Osama views the United States and its agencies such as the FBI, the NSA, the NSC, the CIA, the think tanks and corporate affiliates of the military industrial complex as the world’s largest terrorist network. Martin Luther King also saw the FBI as a domestic terrorist organization. Recently the FBI has begun to move its expertise outside the U.S.
But State sponsorship and propagation of terror is nothing new. As a concept and method, it found a place at the very heart of the European enlightenment. The rise of the nation-state and modernity are inextricably linked with the propagation of terror, as the French Revolution, the colonial era demonstrates.
It is clear to us which vision of world order Germany has chosen to support. We acknowledge that you too have bitten into the fruit of the garden of earthly delights.
Now, to step back in time for a moment, it was during the Vietnam War, that the U.S. intelligence establishment decided it was time to reinforce our military expenditures abroad by undertaking what we call the 3-As, accessing, assessing and addressing the information requirements of friendly governments.
In short, it was time to move with our allies into the information age. Out of this analysis was born the CII, or the Cultural Intelligence Initiative, and one little known project under that initiative, the National Peace-time Propaganda Project (NPPP).
Originally it was overseen by the Defense Program Review Committee, and subsequently under the 40 Committee of the National Security Council, which is also responsible for intelligence activities in other regions of the world, particularly Central and South America.
I first came into contact with The Network in 1989, soon after my arrival in S.E. Asia. Over the last eight years, my research has brought me into contact with artists and ideologues at work in this region. And out of our joint observations, we have begun to develop a theory of Performative Propaganda & Indoctrination which we affectionately call PIM, (the Performative Indoctrination Model). I would now like to describe the model to you.
But first, I should introduce the work of two of my colleagues: Lee Weng Choy and Lan Gen Bah. I invited them to contribute to this presentation from a distance, as they are presently in Southeast Asia, and they agreed to send video segments. However, they insisted that I include in this talk the following disclaimer, and I quote:
At advanced stages, the propagandist functions like William Burrough’s „hombre invisible“, „ the one who sees others first, and by seeing first remains invisible to them. And propaganda functions like a purloined letter, which, by being placed out in the open remains unnoticed. In order to remain effective in the field, we must be that „hombre invisible“ and our work must be a „purloined letter“. (UNQUOTE)
Recently, Lee and Lan have begun to research new collaborative forms of doctrinal dissemination, which they ironically refer to as „The Method,“ after Stanislavski.
The Method is a unique hybrid of art, agitprop and theory, which appropriates elements of Dada, Futurism, early Soviet agitprop, Italian fascist agitprop, fluxus, the theatre of Brecht, Grotowski and Squat, Fanon, the works of Guy Debord, the Situationist International, Hans Haacke and the spectacles of Goebbels and Speer.
In the Americas, we have drawn on the work of Judy Chicago, Nam June Paik, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal.
In Asia we have appropriated from pre-colonial rituals and performances, including Bangsawan, Wayang Kulit, Philippine Sinakulo, Marxist Sinakulo and the work of many Asian artists and ideologues, such as Aung San Suu Kyi, PETA, the work of Fifth Passage, Ho Chi Minh, Pauline Hanson, Mao Zedong, Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP.
My own work, which deals with the mutability of identity and belief has also found its way into The Method. And of course the early work of Lee Weng Choy and Lan Gen Bah themselves.
Lan’s agitations, which are generally introduced into the mass media of target societies, hearken back to the aesthetics of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward.
While Lan tends towards grand spectacles, Lee excavates the rhizomic tendrils of representation and identity formation in the target society.
The Method is also influenced by the propaganda projects of the colonial powers, first developed by orientalist scholars and structuralist anthropologists of the 19th and early 20th century, and retooled after World War II by the United States.
Lee & Lan have combined this western propaganda tradition with a strongly paternalistic model deployed by Singapore, Indonesia, China —a model which can be traced back to the Deva Raja cults of the 10th century Khmer and Sailendra empires, and China’s imperial court.
We have found that by utilizing a virtually osmotic transmission of multiple, subtle layers of data, we can place the „Subject-Population“ into states of irresolvable paradox, reminiscent of Bateson’s double-bind. In attempting to resolve the paradoxical bind in which it finds itself, the Subject-Population unwittingly becomes collaborator in its own indoctrination.
[PAUSE]
The Method is Populace Specific, Event-Specific, Site-Specific and highly self-reflexive. To borrow a term from the digital world, the Method can be seen as a kind of „rapid prototyping“ of the socio-political context, and, when possible, it follows months or years of grass-roots research in that context.
Let me give you an example… a rural intervention in Indonesia, might have a cyclical structure, with communications aligned to padi field water-rights. Such an approach obviously would not work in a post-industrial society such as urban Singapore, Berlin, New York or Jakarta.
In these societies of the advanced spectacle, we have found that people cannot be convinced by the manipulation of traditional structures alone, but are susceptible to the exploitation of the inherent conflicts between the interests of civil society and those of the State apparatus, or those between hegemonic and marginalized groups—this latter method is particularly appropriate in Germany today, with tensions remaining between East and West Germany.
The Method is engineered to introduce into the target society a „readymade“ system of spectacles, beliefs, myths, ideologies, rituals and—only when absolutely necessary—engineered crises.
The Method is a cultural Trojan Horse, creating the semblance of a strong center, around which may cohere what we call „cultural entities,“ that is, traditional modes of production, class, ethnic and sex-role demarcations.
Now, I use the word „readymade“ quite intentionally, as we have found Duchamp’s concepts essential to our research. In particular his „Standard Stoppages“ has led one of the researchers in our Theoretical Structures Task Force (TSTF) to Poincare’s theory of convention and measurements, which she is applying to phenomena profiles of emergent social systems, i.e.. societies at the edge of chaotic transformation or dissolution.
She has found that the „Standard Stoppages“—which articulates the performance of intentional randomness in a four dimensional field—offers us a template for evaluating behavioral patterns, observed in societies under severe stress.
Although structuralism is now under critical attack in the post-modern era, we have also found it useful to build on the volume of work done by the structuralist anthropologists and bureaucrats of the late colonial era (Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, Malinowsky, Boas, and Mead) **for it was they who developed principles of observation that effectively reduce cultural complexities to basic social structures and their transformations in time.
From our observations, we conclude that the stated or unstated purpose of all propaganda is to eliminate or reduce discontinuity in the social field, to produce a seamlessly continuous present, and to transform the chaos of daily social relations into a coherent ideological field.
We have identified five distinct, stages of a successful propaganda project in a post-colonial society.
MANIFESTATION
Just prior to a change of government or social order, or to a paradigm shift in a field of knowledge, such as art, propaganda must present a clear ideological alternative to the status quo. Manifest Propaganda: the Manifesto, the tract, the pamphlet and caricature are the initial means of this transmission.
Although we usually think of manifestos as underground publications, passed hand to hand, or distributed randomly by anonymous agents, the manifesto is first and foremost performative.
Manifestos are performed from the pulpit, the prison, the speaker’s box, the street corner, the pub, the art gallery, or posted on the internet as in the case of Commandante Marcos or the Unabomber.
The Manifesto represents that moment when a propaganda project intrudes the daily consciousness of the people; literally the moment when the project becomes manifest against the ground of daily reality.
The manifesto interpellates…calls out the populace…. and evokes stimulus recognition in an ever expanding circle of people, shifting them from passive reception to active participation.
HYBRIDIZATION
The second stage of indoctrination, Hybridization. is intended to open the possibility for a new performative order in the minds and hearts of the populace.
The beliefs first presented in manifesto form enter the language of the street and are consolidated, hybridizing into the performance of daily life.
ESSENTIALIZATION/MYTHIFICATION
During Essentialization or Mythification, the new ideology is grafted to the perennial beliefs and prejudices of the hegemonic group, obtaining a mythic justification and sense of destiny from these historical associations.
The colonial „sciences“ of eugenics, developed in 18th-19th century Europe and America was originally used to justify slavery in the United States and colonial policies in Europe. Many of the same beliefs were adopted by the Nazis here to justify their racial, ethnic and cultural cleansing.
For the Martinique writer, **AimŽ CŽsaire, fascism was an inevitable product of the colonial era, it was the final colonialism turned by whites against white. Not having the **far flung colonial empire of some of its neighbors, Germany applied the program of colonisation to its European neighbors and turned against the „oriental within“, the Gypsies, Jews and others.
For **CŽsaire this act of white colonising white in the midst of Europe was the final proof of the barbarism of the white colonial culture. The humanism spawned by the Enlightenment walked hand in hand with exploitation, imperialism and terror. **CŽsaire said, Yes, it would be worthwhile to study … the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of 20th century (Europe) that … he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent, and that what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself , the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied colonialist procedures to Europe which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the blacks of Africa.
**Lan Gen Bah sent the following message and asked that it be incorporated into this talk: The cold-war division between the Soviet-Block and „the West“ continued the colonial period into the late 20th century, allowing white culture, whether Slavic or Aryan or Anglo Saxon or Gaul to divide and imperialise the third world, as the struggles in South America, Nicaragua, Cuba, Vietnam and Afghanistan demonstrate. Colour continues to be the foremost emblem of domination.
Now, under Essentialisation, any suffering inflicted upon the masses, or perpetrated by the majority or hegemonic population on minorities during the insurgency and consolidation period, are legitimized as simply the latest chapter in a long narrative of „the people“ and their struggle to survive and build a nation.
In the US the battles over eugenics resurfaced recently. In a review of Murray and Hernstein’s The Bell Curve, Richard Lynn, an influential proponent of eugenics, stated:
…the black underclass is growing in numbers, partly as a result of high fertility and partly through immigration….One of the major divisions will be between those who are sufficiently intelligent to work and an underclass lacking the requisite intelligence. The underclass will turn more and more to crime because it has little to lose….There is one thing the underclass is good at, and that is producing children. These children tend to inherit their parents’ poor intelligence and adopt their sociopathic lifestyle, reproducing the cycle of deprivation from generation to generation. [Lynn, 1994]
Lynn is voicing a view which has been in place for at least two centuries now in the United States, Europe and Australia. It is the colonial view brought forward into the late 20th century.
Essentialized ideology becomes bound up with real-politic and with the mythic heroic struggles of victory and defeat in the society. The insurgent ideology must be rooted in the cultural institutions of the family, law, government, religion, science, art and daily life.
**(REMOVE REFERENCE TO PAULINE HANSON AND ONE NATION)
Academics are generally brought in at this point by the new ruling class to rewrite history, re-write ethnicity and class relations, linguistically essentializing or grounding the new power relations.
The insurgent ideology must at this point be transformed into essential ground and disappear from view to retain its potency. This brings us to the stage of Enculturation or Cultural Propaganda.
ENCULTURATION
Propaganda at this stage, is no longer directional, issuing centrifugally from the centers of power, but is multi-directional, spreading rhizomically through the grass-roots, as the performance of power becomes indistinguishable from the performance of daily life.
Propaganda merges with the culture that has spawned it and which it in turn has spawned. The populace begins to discipline itself. The teeth masticate the tongue.
New structures of class, ethnicity and political ideology, drafted by academics during the Essentialization phase, are now transmitted to the next generation through the media and the educational system.
**But education is part of a larger modernist social initiative, which comes under the broader heading of social engineering. It is in their shared modernist ideals for an engineered social context that education, politics and art find each other as strange bedfellows in the 20th century.
The concept of art as social engineering was **theorized in 1917 by Alexei Gastev, a leading artist in the Proletarian Culture group and was later adopted by Stalin.
Gastev believed in the artist as an engineer of material structures and of the human psyche as well. The architect- social engineer channeled the populace with the construction of offices and flats in accordance with constructivist principles. The artist-engineer developed systems to control ethnic and ideological diversity, and redirected the libidinal impulses of civil society with public spectacles, art and film. And most important, the artist-engineers designed and constructed the party.
The party functioned in the body politic as the capillaries; neither heart, nor head but those endings where the blood of government doctrine, ideology, policy and sentiment was carried to the outermost appendages of the body-politic.
In the words of the Constructivist Group in 1921: „The collective art of the present day is the construction of life.“ Shortly after WW II, the U.S. military-industrial complex realised that it required an advance-information processing apparatus, to create the conditions necessary for the smooth, uninterrupted increase of global capital. Now you might think I am referring to the World Bank and the IMF. I could be, but first we must turn to the activities of the cultural avant-garde, those who have laid the cultural foundation that makes the work of the IMF possible. Social engineering on a global scale.
I’m referring to the CIA…the Central Intelligence Agency, which Lee and Lan view as the apotheosis of the enlightenment ideal of individual ‘agency’ transposed to the state.
And, indeed, the CIA has been in the forefront of American artistic development since the 1950’s when the agency formed a propaganda alliance with major museums and American industrialists and colonial capitalists, such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Getty and others.
The expropriation and display of 3rd World cultural artifacts in American museums, went hand-in-hand with the extraction of raw materials from 3rd world geographies to fuel American factories, and required the establishment of well-equipped security forces in those countries to maintain a stable environment for American investments.
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