I was going to save this for my entry on Communism in Prague (to appear later in the week) but developments in my own fair land have prompted me to talk about it a bit earlier.
Tony and friends have decided to issue a reassuring pamphlet about what to do if ever the evil bad men decide to do bad things to us. They say that this is so people are prepared in the event of a terrorist attack. You’re supposed to stockpile tins of food and water and things. Apart from the inevitable panic buying that this is going to cause, exactly how much do you think a few tins of tuna and bottles of Evian would have helped the thousands of people in the World Trade Centre when two jumbo jets slammed into it? Or when the IRA decided to give Manchester city centre the biggest facelift it had had since World War 2? Quite.
Rather, this is a subtle form of propaganda: it puts the public in an “us versus them” kind of mindset – we’re obviously prepared for an attack from “them”, so “they” (whoever the government decide they are next) must be bad men. The advice it presents will be, by and large, useless. A tin of spiced ham isn’t going to help you should someone decide to drop a bomb on your house (although I suppose if you threw it hard enough you could catch someone a nasty blow to the head) – but telling people to prepare for the fact that someone might drop a bomb on your house – even with all the caveats of ‘no specific threat’ and that – is a very nice way to get people to thinking that the government obviously do know about some outside threat and that, whatever it is, it can’t be good. And whilst the words “Destruction”, “Mass” and “Weapons of” haven’t been spoken out loud, the implication is clear: you need a device capable of some pretty serious devastation to cause the kind of infrastructure failure which would mean people couldn’t buy food or get water.
All of which brings me back to Prague Week – and here’s a curious thing. During the period of Communist rule in Eastern Europe, the government needed the people to believe in them – many people were having a bit of a hard time of it under Communism, and this didn’t bode especially well for those in power, especially as they were quite keen to stay in power, democracy or not: if they didn’t have the hearts and minds of the people, the risk of a people’s revolution was always a possibility.
Therefore, support for the ruling state was galvanised by the use of (amongst other things) secret police, show trials of people accused of actions against the state, erosion of civil liberties (individuals must make sacrifices for the greater good, and that) and – and this is the good bit – spread of propaganda concerning the West, including their intention to use weapons of mass destruction against the USSR. Ringing any bells yet?
Now, okay, we haven’t got secret police yet – or, at least, if we have, no-one’s found out about them (me? paranoid?) – but as I walked round the Museum of Communism last week, I couldn’t help but have an eery feeling of deja vu: replace the borgeois capitalist West with the evil terrorist Middle East, the secret police with the US Patriot Act, and the people’s hero factory workers with the people on the cover of Forbes, and it all starts to look just a little familiar.
Of course, I could just be being manipulated into thinking this by the enemy propaganda – it’s just what the terrorists would want me to believe…