a "screaming" comes across the sky

[pynchonoid]

[...] 
*Advertising The Bomb* 

Paper Bullets: An Interview with Herbert A. Friedman 
byJohn Peffer

Cabinet Magazine, Issue 12 Fall 2003/ Winter 2004
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/pefferFriedman.php


Nickels, paper bullets, falling leaves, and bullshit
bombs. These are some 
of the nicknames given to war propaganda delivered by
air in the form 
of printed flyers. One of the earliest recorded uses
of such propaganda 
was in China in 1232, when kites were used to airlift
notes into an enemy 
prison, inciting inmates to riot. During the American
War of 
Independence, wind-blown leaflets were used to
undermine the morale 
of British soldiers in Boston, and during the US Civil
War messages 
promising money in exchange for arms and horses were
floated behind 
Confederate lines with kites. Balloons carrying packs
of leaflets, in 

limited use already during the Civil War, were
equipped with timed fuses 
and employed extensively during both World Wars. In
the 1960s, China 
and Taiwan were involved in a major propaganda balloon
exchange 
over the Taiwan Strait, and leaflets are ballooned and
fired across the 
DMZ in Korea on a daily basis. But it was during the
World Wars that the 
modern form of aerial propaganda bombardment began to
take shape as 
a critical tool of armed conflict. Bags, boxes, bombs,
and missiles packed 
with paper messages were flown or shot into enemy
territory by both the 
Allies and the Axis. The "Monroe Bomb" used in World
War II was a 
paperboard cylinder adapted from a cluster-type bomb
to contain several 
thousand leaflets. It was an early precursor of the
fiberglass M-129 
bomb, used in Vietnam and still today, which splits
apart in mid-air over 
target areas.

The United States Army's 4th Psychological Operations
(PSYOP) Group 
at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, has been responsible
for designing the 
propaganda flyers dropped by air during the recent
invasions of 
Afghanistan and Iraq. Coincident with the growing
emphasis on the use 
of "Special Operations" soldiers and their increased
public visibility in 
the press, the numbers of paper bombs produced during
these operations 
have also risen dramatically. During the entire first
Gulf War, the Army 
dropped over 29 million leaflets, of over 100
different types. Using tons 
of paper, the Army littered the Kuwait and Iraq
landscapes with images 
favorable to the United States. In contrast, more than
150 million such 
flyers have already (by early July 2003) been designed
at Fort Bragg 
and spread over Afghanistan and Iraq. In some ways,
PSYOP resembles 
an advertising agency for US military objectives. They
conduct 
marketing studies and "focus groups"-often composed of
exiles and 
enemy prisoners of war from the target country-and
carry out post-
production analyses of the efficacy of their
campaigns. Attention is 
devoted to clarity of message, given the unique
cultural preferences of 
the intended recipients. Leaflets used in Afghanistan
use green text to 
indicate peaceful intentions, and red lettering to
indicate danger or 
aggression. The image of the Afghan nation in outline,
or the national 
flag, are included to signal allegiance with
collective local interests. 
As with the texts, written in Pashto or Dari using
Arabic characters, the 
images in the Afghan flyers read from right to left.
In Iraq some flyers 
have contained plain Arabic text framed, like a formal
greeting card, 
by a decorative border. In both conflicts, the
denotation of meaning 
has been dominated by the detonation of propaganda
bombs littering 
the landscape from above.

The following interview was adapted from email
correspondence 
between John Peffer and Sergeant Major (ret.) Herbert
A. Friedman, 
a PSYOP historian and specialist, between 23 June and
29 July 2003.

Read Interview:
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/pefferFriedman.php
[...] 


....from:
NEWSgrist
where spin is art
http://newsgrist.net 
{bi-weekly news digest}

 

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