A R C H I V E S
Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| A PR Blunder for Uncle Sam |
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| jaihoon |
| 01/30/03 at 02:46:44 |
| A PR Blunder for Uncle Sam (Can imperial America change? By Dr. Abdul Qader Tash, Arab News Opinion 24 January 2003 ) At last! The American government has announced that it is canceling the public relations campaign aimed at improving the image of American policy in the Islamic world. The cancellation of course has come in the wake of the failed media program that accompanied the campaign. Some justified the failure as being due to the sheer weakness and simple-mindedness of the message. This may be true but it is not enough justification. The mistake does not lie in the weakness of the campaign but in something else entirely. The problem lies in American policy itself and not in the advertising campaign. What is required is for the political course to be corrected; no change in advertising techniques is necessary. However strong and moving an advertising campaign may be, it will not succeed in improving the image; if the situation is bad, then the media will reflect that reality, not create it. The media “can fool some of the people some of the time but cannot fool all the people all the time.” If the challenge is to correct the course that American policy has taken, the question becomes: Is that even possible? Is there any hope of changing that policy? The question is hard and the answer is even harder — for the stubborn American political mind is ‘imperial’ and expansionist and difficult to change. The American political class was raised on the policy of imperialism. This imperial mentality was linked in the 19th century to the internationalization of industrial capital, and the economic and geographic expansion that rests on control of others’ lands and the export of technology and American social codes and mores to its colonies. Americans have deceived the world by portraying themselves as upholders of human rights, justice and freedom and believe that America is not an invading colonizing country. The truth of the matter is that colonialism is not merely a question of occupying land and military invasion — it is also the mental tendency to control and expand power. It is a mental invasion and the imposition of ideas and power over the market. Americans have excelled at this throughout their history of political, economic and media presence. The imperialist tendency is old and rooted in the American political mind. It is what drove former US Senator William Fulbright to say: “Aren’t they exciting? The words of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge — they wanted American to have an empire simply because a big and powerful country such as America must have an empire.” The struggle in America today is between two tendencies — an imperial one that occupies the minds of professional politicians and a popular humane tendency that mocks expansion and warns of the dangers of the US appointing itself “the world’s policeman.” The struggle is between the political mind and the popular conscience. The president and founder of an American organization working for peace, William Baker, says: “Who gave America the right to decide the fate of other nations and to fight a war under the pretenses of liberating Iraq and its people through bombs and missiles, to kill their children and bring destruction down upon them?” Yes, it is difficult, as Baker says, to Americanize the world’s ideas and systems of government or their customs and traditions. |
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