Propaganda: 24

Is there any propaganda more important than on the subject of torture? If by using propaganda, you can convince people that torture is acceptable, then you have probably gone about as far as you can in stripping off the thin veneer of civilization of most societies. When you can dismantle common decency at the same time as common sense, you have the ultimate mastery of propaganda.

If your interest is the effectiveness/or lack thereof of torture, you may just want to bail out here because I am not going to go into that long and well known debate. The rest of this blog entry simply is about the propaganda that promoted acceptance of torture in the USA.

There is a TV show called 24 that has done more to promote the use of torture than any other single source. It has been referred to by presidential hopefuls during debates, by Supreme Court Justice Scalia, by Fox news commentators to support torture in real life, and probably others. I do not know if it is what inspired Michael Ignatieff to temporarily lose his mind about torture, but it is reported to have inspired actual techniques used on US prisoners. And I would guess due to its popularity and long run on TV that it has significantly boosted the public approval of torture in America.

The reason I am calling 24 propaganda, is that it is a fictionalized account of a hero who uses torture to save America from terrorists. The hero is made to look intelligent, brave, and patriotic. Those characters in the show who oppose the hero's use of torture are made to look weak, cowardly, traitorous and stupid. Because this type of propaganda is in a medium of pure fantasy, it is extraordinarily easy to make up supportive situations. Not only can you make up any story line you want, you can actually alter the laws of nature, physics, whatever. Basically nothing stands in the way of the propagandist except the requirement to make it look exciting and real to the public, an easy task for a TV production studio with a big budget.

The reason I first became interested in 24 was when I read in a review that Ford Motor Company, in supplying vehicles to the show had insisted that the Ford vehicles not be used by the bad guys. I found this to be such a shocking development that I tuned in to see the show itself. If you believe as I do, that people absorb unquestioningly stuff they see on TV, then the implications are enormous. You can tell a terrorist by the type of vehicle they drive! In the future, how would I ever be able to drive my Toyota Matrix across the border to the USA?

Fortunately, the reality of producing a dramatic show trumped the stupidity of the Ford demand. It seems that in the show, to produce drama and suspense, sometimes you were not supposed to know who the terrorist was until the last minute. After all, why would Jack Bauer be torturing people to tell him who the terrorists were if he could just check to see if they were driving a Ford truck? The demand was dropped.

I guess people are really smart in some ways, but stupid in others. In the old cowboy westerns you could put any kind of unrealistic nonsense in the show, but never could the cowboy fire seven shots before reloading, or the audience would erupt in boos and hisses.

Same for the TV show 24. The glorification of torture is absorbed unquestioningly by the audience, but put the good guys in Fords and bad guys in Toyotas, and they would be howling in disbelief.