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With much of the Anglo-Saxon media in the hands of the guardians of approved truths, the new imperialism, and the fact of faraway people, is reported and debated on the strict premise that the United States and British governments are opposed to violence as a means of resolving international disputes, and of course to terrorism. The issue invariably is how best ‘we’ can deal with the problem of ‘them’.

The most salient truths remain taboos. In Britain, the first taboo is that British imperialism was not benign. Blaire’s pretensions in erecting a screen for present imperial actions also provides retrospective justification for the past. John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World (Verso, 2002), 135.

Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes, in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing hi in both his private and his public life, It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every area of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude. The myth has such motive forced that once accepted, it controls the whole of the individual, who becomes immune to any other influence. This explains the totalitarian attitude that the individual adopts—wherever a myth has been successfully created—and that simply reflects the totalitarian action of propaganda on him. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, trans Konrad Kellen & Jean Learner (Vintage, 1965), 11.

Christians often claim they can separate material devices from propaganda techniques—i.e., break the system. For instance, they think they can use press and radio without using the psychological principles or techniques that these media demand….The only answer I can give to these timid souls is that such restraint would lead to a total lack of effectiveness. If a church wants to use propaganda in order to be effective, just as all the others, it must se the entire system with all its resources; it cannot pick what it likes, for such distinctions would destroy the very effectiveness for which the church would make propaganda in the first place. Propaganda is a total system that one must accept or reject in its entirety. If the church accepts it, two important consequences follow. First of all, Christianity disseminated by such means is not Christianity….Secondly, when the church uses propaganda, the church succeeds just as all other organisations. It reaches the masses, influences collective opinions, leads sociological movements, and even makes many people accept what seems to be Christianity. But in doing that the church becomes a false church. It acquires power and influence that are of this world, and through them integrated itself into this world. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, trans Konrad Kellen & Jean Learner (Vintage, 1965), 229-230.