Billions, Blunders and Baloney

Billions, Blunders and Baloney, Eugene W. Castle, Devin-Adair Co., 1955

This book is a pretty scathing chronicle of how the American government wastes billions of dollars every year trying to improve America's image overseas.

Published in the middle of the Cold War, the book spends most of its time looking at American and Soviet propaganda. In the major European capitals, the United States Information Agency (USIA), by itself, occupies rich, lavish buildings in the rich part of town. The actual Embassy is in a separate, equally lavish building. The USIA workers associate only with other Americans, and live in separate housing, making little or no attempt to get to know the average middle-class individual. They justify their overpaid existence by endlessly telling the elite of that country why America is so wonderful. Soviet propaganda, on the other hand, is handled by one person, or a couple of people, inside the Soviet Embassy. Alternatively, natives of that country can be counted on to talk to the common worker in their own language, spreading the advantages of Communism.

Having lived through two world wars, most people have developed a pretty sensitive built-in propaganda detector; anything that even smells like propaganda is avoided like the plague. This is something that America doesn't seem to understand. Millions of dollars are spent each year on educational/propaganda films extolling the virtues of America. A reason why Hollywood films are so popular around the world is that they are practcially guaranteed to be propaganda-free. Give this "job" to Hollywood. America wastes millions more publishing slick magazines, sometimes in local languages, extolling the virtues of America. Magazines like Time, Newsweek and The Saturday Evening Post reach a lot more people and do a much better job at showing what America is all about. The USIA also puts out a daily 6000 word news cable for local media. Consisting of several single-spaced typed pages, usually it is little more than stories about some American bureaucrat paying a visit. News agencies like the Associated Press and United Press International do a much better job. The author advocates that all American foreign information services, spread over several independent agencies, each with their own personnel overseas, be combined into one agency and become part of the State Department.

(Fast forward to 2005, and consider the Bush Administration's attempts to change the mind of the Muslim world. Convincing the average Muslim that America does not hate them has been treated as a public relations problem. There were TV commercials showing happy American Muslims, slick magazines for young people written in Arabic, and a pro-American version of the Al-Jazeera TV channel. Having lived through less-than-democratic governments, is it possible that the average Muslim has also developed a built-in propaganda detector? Is it also possible that the average Muslim compares American PR about religious tolerance with daily TV pictures from Iraq and Palestine? Which will be considered more important? Have things changed at all in the US Government in the last 50 years?)

This is an eye-opener of a book. While reading, mentally delete the words "Soviet propaganda" and insert "Islamic fundamentalism." It's very interesting, and very much worth reading.