After reading about Propaganda and war, today I would like to sum up the lecture we had on last Wednesday on War and Spin.

I decided to take the reverse route of reading first , understanding the word propaganda in terms of public relations and then see if we the ordinary civilians could decipher the word propaganda correctly in the class.

Well I can say we sure were successful. I think Iraq war farce was on everybody’s mind and we had that example at the back of our minds when we discussed propaganda. Iraq the mother of all Lies!!!! has taught us all an important lesson once again....NEVER trust a political leader. They manipulate and they spin and most of all politics has given a BAD name to PR.

As I was reading the strategy used in propaganda it appeared to me that Bush sat down with a good book on Propaganda and followed every word. (Should we stop the authors of such books to write?? So we can avoid other wars???)

Hill & Knowlton, then the world's largest PR firm, served as mastermind for the Kuwaiti campaign. Its activities alone would have constituted the largest foreign-funded campaign ever aimed at manipulating American public opinion. . Did this agency forget the Code of Ethics? So when Bush picked up a good book on Spin, Hill & Knowlton put down or may be hid the best book ‘Code and Ethics for PR professionals.’

A conservative estimate of the likely overall cost of the war and its aftermath is carefully projected in Joseph Stiglitz' and Linda Bilmes' 2008 book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. Amy Goodman interviewed Stiglitz and Bilmes on February 29, 2008. You may read the transcript as well as watch and/or listen to this interview at http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/29/exclusive

_the_three_trillion_dollar_war.

How many hospitals, schools and vocational training centres could have been made with this huge amount of money?

On second thoughts (frivolous of course) propaganda cannot be so bad because an agency calls itself Propaganda PR!!!!!!!!!!!

Books ref.

1. PR power by Barry Amanda

2. PR A Social History of Spin by Ewen Stuart