During the Kosovo conflict in 1999, military intervention by the US and NATO was precipitated by the use of outright lies and deceptions. The conflict was “ostensibly about preventing “genocide” on the scale of the Holocaust. This was the Big Lie […]
Serbian Orthodox Church Samodrezha from the 14th century destroyed by Kosovo Muslim Albanians after June 1999
During the Kosovo conflict in 1999, military intervention by the US and NATO was precipitated by the use of outright lies and deceptions. The conflict was “ostensibly about preventing “genocide” on the scale of the Holocaust. This was the Big Lie. This was the Noble Lie. In fact, the conflict was about secession and separatism and the creation of a US-sponsored Greater Albania. Why was the Noble Lie needed? A deception was needed because US policy was supporting an illegal land grab, a forceful take-over of territory from a sovereign nation, Yugoslavia.
Why and how could such lies and deceptions occur in a so-called democracy? How do you explain it? The Noble Lie goes back to at least Plato in Western history.
In The Republic, Part III, Plato, described “the noble lie” which rulers told their citizens. For Plato, it was the elites who could tell “the noble lie”, to maintain societal stability and to ensure a contented and satisfied population. In Plato’s ideal Republic, or city-state, there were three hierarchical classes: The Guardians, the Soldiers, and the Workers. The Rulers were selectetd from the Guardians class, the “philosophers”. Next were the Auxiliaries class, or Soldiers. The third class was made up of Workers, the laborers, craftsmen, and the farmers.
For Plato, a “noble lie” or a “noble myth” was needed to maintain the hierarchical structure, to maintain the moral order, and to keep the society functioning in a productive manner.
Plato begins by stating that the “truth” should be valued, but that “lies” are sometimes necessary or required. He restricts their use to special persons only who represent the community, society, or the state or government:
“Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying , a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals have no business with them.”
For Plato, ideally, only the government could tell the “noble lie”, not private individuals. The government could tell the “noble lie” if it was “for the public good”:
“Then if anyone at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good. But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind; and although the rulers have this privilege, for a private man to lie to them in return is to be deemed a more heinous fault.”
What is an example of a “noble lie” in Plato’s Republic?:
“How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately spoke—just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that be possible, and at any rate the rest of the city?”
Plato then relates the “fiction” or “tale” or “necessary falsehoods” of how mankind is divided into gold, silver, brass, and iron, a hierarchical system that mirrored classes in society. For Plato, this “noble lie”, or metaphor, is necessary because “the fostering of such a belief will make them care more for the city and for one another.” A noble lie will make the citizens of the polis, of The Republic, more civic-minded and patriotic and will ensure communal bonding and cohesiveness and a sense of community. In short, the metaphor is necessary to rationalize and to justify the rigid hierarchy. Ultimately, the noble lie fosters the public good.
The noble lie is similar to Reinhold Niebuhr’s “necessary illusion”, a fiction that an individual needed to function effectively and productively in a modern society. For Niebuhr, “rationality belongs to the cool observers”, experts and elites who are detached and learned on a particular issue. “Democracy”, for Niebuhr, “is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.” The elites and the experts have to decide the difficult and complex issues.
What role does the noble lie have in democracy? Walter Lippmann, in Public Opinion (1922), argued that a “governing class”, similar to Plato’s “guardian class”, must emerge in a democracy that would give order and direction out of the “chaos of local opinions.” For Lippmann, “a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality” must inform democratic society. This was a specialized class of “elites” made up of experts, specialists and bureaucrats. Today, this specialized class of elites includes members of think tanks, professors, analysts, “senior diplomats”, and commentators. These were “intellectual elites” who would, in essence, tell the crowd, the herd, the mob, in a democracy, what to think, and how to think. Intellectual elites are needed because in a democracy there is no such thing as an “omnicompetent citizen”. Citizens in a democracy are ignorant. They only have knowledge on some issues, but not on others. This is why elites and experts are necessary to walk people through the complexities and ambiguities of the issues.
The people in a democracy do not act or think rationally, and therefore, cannot know the public good, what is best for themselves or for others, or for their nation. As Alexander Hamilton noted: “Your people, sir, is nothing but a great beast”. For Hamilton, the masses in a democracy do not know what is in their best interest or what is in the national interest: “The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. ” The people do not know what is the “public good”. In other words, no single individual could ever know everything about the many issues in a democracy. What they do know is shallow in depth, primitive, crude, and unsophisticated. For this reason, the intellectual elites are needed to aid and to assist the primitive, unsophisticated, and ignorant individual in a democracy.
What guides the masses, the people, in a democracy? According to Lippmann, it is images, images we have in our heads: “We are all captives of the picture in our head—our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.” The image, not the actual reality, is everything. Manipulate the image and you change the perception of reality.
Lippmann explained that when telling the people “truths” in a democracy, there is a necessary degradation that occurs. Intellectual elites are needed to explain the issues to the crude and primitive and unsophisticated masses: “When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.”
This is the dominant “narrative” or paradigm in “manufacturing consent” in a democracy. Indeed, this is the way it actually works in practice.
Lippmann’s theoretical groundwork was taken a step further by Edward L. Bernays, regarded as a pioneer in public relations in the US. For Bernays, “manufacturing consent” or “engineering consent” was crucial in a democracy: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”
Bernays described how there was an “engineering of consent” in the US by intellectual elites: “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.” For Bernays, this manipulation is necessary in democracy. Indeed, it is fundamental to American democracy.
These “enlightened” elites control the “public mind” or the “group mind”: “It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
The ultimate object is to control the masses in a democracy, to manipulate them through the noble lie to do what they otherwise would not do: “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?”
Bernays argued that the organized manipulation of the masses by elites was fundamental to a democracy. Democracy is juxtaposed to totalitarianism. Joseph Goebbels and Nazi propaganda are always cited as if they are unique to Nazism and to totalitarianism. What is suppressed, however, is the fact that Joseph Goebbels derives many of his propaganda techniques from Bermays and Lippmann. The techniques of Nazi propaganda were based on American democratic models of engineering and manufacturing consent. Bernays’ seminal book Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) was a source for much of Goebbels’ Nazi propaganda techniques. Bernays himself admitted this in his book Biography of an Idea: “Goebbels, said [Karl von] Weigand, was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany.” Remarkably, Bernays regarded this as vindication of the effectiveness and soundness of his techniques. His techniques continue to be the guides on how consent is manufactured and engineered in the US.
To understand how and why we were manipulated and lied to on Kosovo, Bosnia, Krajina, and Iraq in 2003, you have to know about how public opinion is “manufactured” and “engineered” in a democracy.
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Mirė vienas didžiausių pasaulyje tarptautinių karo nusikaltėlių JAV senatorius Džonas Makeinas. Jis , kaip ir kitas JAV karo nusikaltėlių gaujos sėbras Zbignevas Bzežinskis, darė karo nusikaltimus visame pasaulyje, žudė civilius gyventojus, moteris, vaikus, senelius Vietname, Irake, Jugoslavijoje, Libijoje, Sirijoje, Jemene, Somalyje, Nigerijoje, Gruzijoje, Ukrainoje, kišosi į visų pasaulio šalių vidaus reikalus, dalyvavo vykdant spalvotas revoliucijas visose Rusijos pasienyje esančiose buvusiose tarybinėse valstybėse, Vidurio ir Rytų Europoje, Pabaltijo respublikose, Šiaurės Afrikoje, Artimuosiuose ir Vidurio Rytuose, rėmė nusikalstamus fašistinius režimus, nacionalistines chuntas, islamo teroristines organizacijas minėtose šalyse, yra tiesiogiai atsakingas už jo remtų partijų – konservatorių, liberalų, socdemų, nacistų, nacionalistų, fašistų, islamo teroristų ...
There was a time when Russophobia served as an effective form of population control – used by the American ruling class in particular to command the general US population into patriotic loyalty. Not any longer. Now, Russophobia is a sign of weakness, of desperate implosion among the US ruling class from their own rotten, internal decay.This propaganda technique worked adequately well during the Cold War decades when the former Soviet Union could be easily demonized as «godless communism» and an «evil empire». Such stereotypes, no matter how false, could be sustained largely because of the monopoly control of Western media ...
Since putschists usurping power in Ukraine launched war without mercy in April 2014 against freedom fighters in Donbass rejecting fascist rule, Washington provided political and military support.Under Obama, National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) funding included hundreds of millions of dollars to Kiev for weapons and other material support, along with training by US special forces.Trump may increase support for escalated aggression. A Pentagon and State Department proposal calls for supplying Javelin missiles, possibly along with anti-aircraft weapons.Claiming these and other US-supplied weapons are only for defense, not offense, ignores where they’ll be deployed – along the contact line, separating armed ...
Government propaganda and NGO misinformation have coloured the story of the war on Syria from its inception. Stepping in to set the record straight, Dr. Tim Anderson explores the real beginnings of the conflict, the players behind it, and their agenda in his new book, “The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change and Resistance.”The Dirty War on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. In seeking ‘regime change’ the big powers sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies of ‘Islamists’, demonising the Syrian Government and constantly accusing it of atrocities. In ...
Congratulations to the city of Kaunas, Lithuania, once known also as Kovno (in Yiddish Kóvne) on its selection as Europe’s “Capital of European Culture” in 2022, sharing the title with Esch-sur-Alzette in Luxembourg.The city’s leaders now have a splendid opportunity to take the moral high road in dealing with a number of ghosts from the present and the past. To start with the present, will the city’s officials now act rapidly to avoid a public perception disaster by moving this year’s neo-Nazi parade away from the city center during the February 16th Independence Day celebrations? Previous years’ marches have on occasion glorified actual Kaunas Holocaust collaborators, causing deep pain to Survivors ...
Ridvan Haqifi (left) and Lavdrim Muhaxheri (right), two ISIS Kosovo Albanian commanders. | Photo: ISIS propaganda videoAlbert Berisha, a former Kosovar jihadist who travelled to fight in Syria, appeared before a Pristina court on Monday to recount his version of the story and maintain his innocence.Berisha, who graduated in political sciences from the University of Pristina and holds a Masters degree from the University of Tirana, was arrested in 2014 and is charged with participating in terrorist organisations. This crime is punishable with a minimum of five years in prison.Berisha said he went to Syria from October 6 to 20, ...
The negotiations on Brexit are attracting a lot of attention. In particular, the possible erosion of the rights of around three million EU-27 citizens living in Britain is a major cause for concern.The European Parliament resolution adopted on 3 October states that “the withdrawal agreement must incorporate the full set of rights citizens currently enjoy, such that there is no material change in their position”.The main author of this text, Mr Guy Verhofstadt, the EP Brexit Coordinator, argues that such an approach – not to lower the level of citizens’ rights – is “the goal of democracy”. But why was ...
Donald Trump, influential billionaire and a candidate for the president of United States, back in the 1999, as a guest of the famous host Larry King on CNN, spoke about that time ongoing topic of the bombing of Serbia.Asked by Larry King, what does he think and what would he do if he was in Clinton’s place, Trump criticized the decision to bomb Serbia.“So, I would do something different and I know it will sound ghastly to everybody. But, look at the chaos which we created in Kosovo. I think, we can say that we lost only few people. Of ...
There is nothing extraordinary in the science in Serbia. It would not deserve particular attention of the European scientific community, if it were not for the fact that the case of Serbia turns out extraordinary, indeed.Let us start with an extraordinary question: would it be possible a state in contemporary Europe to sucumbe to a fashist rule (or communist or any other totalitarian government)? The answer is extraordinary too - yes. The case in point is Serbia.The trick is marked by Kosovo (see, e.g. P. Grujić, Kosovo Knot, 2014). When this southern province of Serbia, Kosovo and Metohia (Kosovo in ...
When an intelligence agency arranges to disseminated fake news it is called “disinformation” and it is a subset of what is referred to as covert action, basically secret operations run in a foreign country to influence opinion or to disrupt the functioning of a government or group that is considered to be hostile.During the Cold War, disinformation operations were run by many of the leading players in both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and in the opposition Warsaw Pact. Sometimes the activity and the sponsorship were clearly visible, as when Radio Free Europe and Radio Moscow would exchange barbs about ...
For over 65 years, since the establishment of the State of Israel at the behest of the then American Zionist lobby, its successor has ensured that billions of US dollars in aid, grants, loans, guarantees, tax exemptions and ‘deals’ are funneled to the Israeli Treasury Secretary in order to give the satellite state an unprecedented economic and military advantage over any other country in the Middle East or Europe. All paid for by an unwitting American taxpayer.The total amount is sufficiently mind-boggling that it is impossible to quantify. The current monies and ‘aid’ that flow openly from the US to ...
On August 9 [2020], presidential elections were held in Belarus with five candidates bidding to be head of state. According to the Central Election Commission, the incumbent president, Alexander Lukashenko, won in the first round with over 80% of the votes. Mass protests began in Belarus right after the announcement of the preliminary election results. People went to the streets, expressing their dissatisfaction with the results of the elections that they believe were unfair. Mass protests turned into riots and there were clashes between rioters and the police. Many people were detained and injured, and two protestors died.Representatives of the ...
Later this month, Barack Obama will become the first sitting US president to visit the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima by the American military on August 6, 1945, and the destruction three days later of the Japanese city of Nagasaki, rank among the greatest war crimes of the 20th century.One would think that after 71 years, the United States would finally be prepared to acknowledge that the incineration of two defenseless Japanese cities, causing some 200,000 deaths, was a militarily unnecessary act.Nothing of the sort will happen. Obama “will not revisit the decision ...
Islam in the BalkansIt is the truth that the Balkan Peninsula is a mosaic of different and in some cases antagonistic religious communities with the Christian Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Islam as the principal religious denominations followed by different types of Protestants, followers of Judaism, Armenian Christian Orthodox, etc. The small Muslim communities existed at the Balkans even before the Ottoman conquest of the Peninsula which started in the mid-14th century but it was not until the mid-17th century that substantial Muslim population emerged firstly in Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Bulgaria.In a course of time, the Balkan Muslims became in ...
The US media has done it again. In a breaking news story on Fox News on Friday, September 28, 2007, Fox reporter Catherine Herridge used the term “former Yugoslavia” twice in the Fox story “Terrorist 007”. The term Yugoslavia was used deliberately to conceal the fact that the Al Qaeda terrorist known as Terrorist 007, or Irhabi 007 in Arabic, Younes Tsouli, had ties to Bosnia and to Bosnian Muslims who planned terrorist attacks.Fox News sought to conceal this Al Qaeda connection to Bosnia by using the term “former Yugoslavia” in place of “Bosnia”. This was deliberate and planned. Someone ...
The DEBKA website, close to Israeli military intelligence, knows well all the behind the curtain details of regional politics. A few days ago it reported about basically new turns of the way the events unfold in Syria. According to it, the Syrian extremists received a load of heavy weapons for the first time since the war started. The senders are the groups from Kosovo and the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina linked to Al Qaeda. The package includes Kornet and Fagot anti-tank systems delivered by the Soviet Union to former Yugoslavia in the past. The weapons ended up in the ...
Joe Biden is an American president and politician with extensive experience. He has been a long year member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In his political career so far, he has not had a good opinion about Russia, and the same was with other Slavic states in Eastern Europe, which have cultivated close relations with Russia.After the collapse of the USSR, his most significant engagement was in the Balkans. During the 1990, he often visited the Balkans. In his biography, Biden describes himself as a leading figure in defining the US policy in the Balkans, as he helped ...
The UK Parliament just confirmed what the alternative media has been saying for years.Specifically, a new report from the bipartisan House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee – based on interviews with all of the key British decision-makers, review of documents, and on-the-ground investigations in Africa – found that the Libyan war was based on lies, that it destroyed the country, and that it spread terrorism far and wide.The War Based On Bogus Intelligence … Like the Iraq WarInitially, the report finds that the threat to civilians from Libyan government forces was dramatically overstated:Former French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, who introduced ...
The leak of a secret BND dossier on Hachim Thaci which reports that the newly-elected Kosovan President had links to a contract killer and was involved in the trafficking of people, arms and drugs is more confirmation that Western politicians have chosen to support Thaci in the knowledge of his criminal past.Wikileaks has leaked a secret German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) dossier on Hachim Thaci that dates back to 2005, after the former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) leader had served the first of his two terms in office as Kosovan Prime Minister.The dossier reports that Thaci, who has recently been elected president of Kosovo, was one of the leaders of organized ...
As the Second World War advanced from its early stages, the United States was assessing which sections of the earth it would hold conquest over. American planners had to remain patient, however. A seemingly endless string of conquests for the Nazis had astonished the world – particularly those in the US – and led to Adolf Hitler being crowned as “the new Napoleon”.In the summer of 1942, under Hitler’s domineering command of the military, the Germans controlled vast swathes of Europe – from Warsaw to Oslo to Paris, and eastwards onto Athens, Kiev and Sevastopol. It was one major victory ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
The noble lie is similar to Reinhold Niebuhr’s “necessary illusion”, a fiction that an individual needed to function effectively and productively in a modern society. For Niebuhr, “rationality belongs to the cool observers”, experts and elites who are detached and learned on a particular issue. “Democracy”, for Niebuhr, “is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.” The elites and the experts have to decide the difficult and complex issues.
