How Presidents Use the Term "Democracy" as a Marketing Tool

[Clara T]

How Presidents Use the Term "Democracy" as a Marketing Tool

By Lawrence S. Wittner

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Unfortunately, however, “democracy” has also been abused throughout American history. In the nineteenth century, land-hungry politicians, slaveholders, and businessmen defended the U.S. conquest of new territory by claiming that it would extend the area of democracy and freedom. In the twentieth century, President Woodrow Wilson grandly proclaimed that U.S. participation in World War I would “make the world safe for democracy.” A few decades later, Washington officials again sanctified U.S. policy by invoking democracy, for they declared repeatedly that the U.S. role in the Cold War was designed to defend the “Free World.” Indeed, it would be hard to find a U.S. war or expansionist enterprise that was not accompanied by enthusiastic rhetoric about supporting democracy.

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A good example of “democracy” as a marketing device is its employment in selling the U.S. program of military and economic aid to Greece in 1947. This program had arisen out of the U.S. government’s fear that the Soviet Union, then at loggerheads with the United States, stood on the verge of breaking through the Western defense line to the oil-rich Middle East. To plan President Truman’s address to the nation on the new policy, Francis Russell, the director of the State Department’s Office of Public Affairs, met on February 27 with the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee. The meeting records indicate that, when Russell asked if the speech should emphasize the conflict with the Soviet Union, he was told that it should avoid “specifically mentioning Russia.” Then perhaps, said Russell, the administration “should couch it in terms of new policy of this government to go to the assistance of free governments everywhere.” This proposal was greeted enthusiastically, for it would be useful to “relate military aid to principle of supporting democracy.” Or, as one participant put it, the “only thing that can sell public” would be to emphasize the threat to democracy. Ultimately, then, the president’s March 12, 1947 address, which became known as the Truman Doctrine, did not mention the conflict between two rival nations, the United States and the Soviet Union, but instead emphasized “alternative ways of life,” in which the United States was defending the “free” one.

This approach not only misrepresented the motives of U.S. government officials, but the realities in the two nations targeted for the military and economic aid. Joseph Jones, who drafted the president’s address, recalled: “That the Greek government was corrupt, reactionary, inefficient, and indulged in extremist practices was well known and incontestable; that Turkey . . . had not achieved full democratic self-government was also patent.” According to the minutes of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee meeting, participants agreed that the Greek government was a rotten one, though “not basically fascist.”

Thus, President Bush’s recent contention that his war in Iraq is designed to further the cause of “democracy” is not out of line with the statements of past U.S. government officials, who have not been very scrupulous about how they have packaged their policies. Nor is it out of line with the behavior of other governments, always eager to put the most attractive face on their ventures.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11199.htm

Dr. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

[Tom Joad]

1. It's called "manufacturing consent". The purpose of much of US

foreign policy, through both Democratic and Republican administrations, is to limit democracy, sometimes to support the worst dictators. The problem, limiting democracy does not sell well. so they use the idea we are supporting democracy as a marketing tool.

Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon sold the Vietnam War that way. Over 2 million dead.

Read Noam Chomsky.