
Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
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Cry for the truth about Gaddafi
This is a story about Libya, believe it or not, the tragedy of a nation that fell victim to propaganda. My Masters Dissertation was on broadcast policy. This is a surprise because of all the specialism in journalism, broadcast is the one I had the least interest in. There were trendier interests at the time, courses such as “communications revolution” and “communications technology”. Remember the petal of the communications flower was just opening, we were running Netscape on 386s and 486s and there was a lot of MS DOS around.
We talked about DTH and the rapidly shrinking aperture of the satellite dish with wonder. There were also other things happening in media culture such as the emergence of “reality’ TV, which spawned a fresh wave of celebrities, providing tabloid fodder. Journalists had also gone to the field in Gulf War 1 and the concept of “embedded” journalists was the earnest point of discussion. Yet, I spent months on a dissertation on broadcasting, an area I had very little interest in. I haven’t read that paper in 27 years. And I was true African.
I have a theory that African intellectuals always go macro; they take a not too-deep look at a big thing, while a lot of their Western counterparts delve deep into a small area. Yet, my ideas about media and society were formed in that dissertation season, a profoundly formative period and I wish I had read more and discussed more with my lecturers.
I was very impressed by the thinking of John Reith who in 1927 became the BBC’s founding Director-General. Lord Reith is given the credit for formulating the BBC’s mission, to inform, educate and entertain.
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I found the Reithian idea of content as “improving”, as intended at raising the mind of the majority quite appealing, in a benign and earnest way. State-owned media delivering education, including formal classes, was not a novel idea, of course. We grew up with KICD delivering lessons on the radio. But State-owned public service media as a benign, large-scale project to engineer and improve society was naively appealing. It made even more sense because the Reithian model presumes that publicly-owned media is totally independent of government and operates for the public good. But the BBC and Reith were in the 1930s also involved in what came to be known as public diplomacy, and later, “soft power”; the exercising of getting people do what you want through “attraction rather than coercion or payment”. It is Ok, you can go ahead and call it propaganda, I won’t tell Mum.
I took Dr (later Prof) Phil Taylor’s War and Media course which tapped into his extensive knowledge and expertise on the history of propaganda. Prof Taylor was much in demand by world militaries because of his expertise in international and strategic communications. He was, I think, Psychological Operations favourite. Money plays a very important part in espionage. I was watching the other day a Netflix documentary on a CIA operation to set the stage for the military invasion of Afghanistan. One of the things that the group took with them to Afghanistan, on top of lots of weapons, was three million dollars in cash. But it is not money or guns that I would fear. It is the application of information to programme human beings like a computer. One of Prof Taylor’s books is Munitions of the Mind: A history of Propaganda.
I remember reading a quote from 1966 or thereabout from some official in the Information ministry about the role of regulation in broadcast media and he said something to the effect that just like you need a military to protect a nation from aggression, you need regulation to protect the minds of the public from being bombarded by bad actors. Given the context of that comment, a propaganda fight between the Soviet Union and the West during the Cold War that was taking place even in our own country, one can see why bureaucrats thought that the people could not choose for themselves and needed protection.
Which brings me to the point of this article. Muammar Gaddafi, the once dashing revolutionary from North Africa, was in 2011 cornered cowering in a culvert and subsequently killed as he fled from Sirte, his home town. His motorcade came under fire from Nato aircraft, scattering the vehicles and clearing the way for opposition fighters to capture Gaddafi. He was put in a pickup, hurt but alive and who exactly shot him remains a matter of some debate. Nato released a statement on its attack of his motorcade.
At the time of the strike, a spokesman said, “Nato did not know that Gaddafi was in the convoy. These armed vehicles were leaving Sirte at high speed and were attempting to force their way around the outskirts of the city. The vehicles were carrying a substantial amount of weapons and ammunition, posing a significant threat to the local civilian population. The convoy was engaged by a Nato aircraft to reduce the threat.” As Africa mourns the 8,000 dead of Derna, swept away by floods, in a once-proud nation now a ruined derelict, let us also cry for the truth about Gaddafi and the Libya he had created and why he had to die. And the fact that we were just programmed like robots.