The State Department has a released an e-journal entitled, Today’s Nuclear Equation.
In addition to a digital copy of the “Duck and Cover” video, the e-journal contains a weird smattering of Administration propaganda (including articles from POTUS, DeSutter, Rademaker and Sanders) tarted up with articles by “experts” that toe the Administration line.
My favorite article is by a husband-wife team.
Tons of laughs.
“He has taught marketing at the University of Southern California and California State University at Los Angeles. And he has taught English as a Second Language at the Institute for Intercultural Learning in Seattle and the University of San Francisco.”
Good thing he wasn’t teaching to native English speakers…
Odd that the husband in the “husband-wife team” is a professor of consumer behavior; that skill seems especially well-suited to the positioning of propaganda.
Speaking of “husband-wife” teams, is Rademaker married?
“Just when we thought that the end of the Cold War also meant the end of nighttime terrors about nuclear annihilation, that evil atomic specter, rising out of a terrible mushroom-shaped cloud, has reappeared.”
Apart from the painful mixed metaphor, I’m amazed that any U.S. agency would refer to the “evil atomic specter” and the “terrible mushroom-shaped cloud”—it seems far less reserved (“nobody wants to use nukes but we gotta have (lots of) them anyway”).
History has shown that imagery can get out of the hands of the people who invoke it. Spencer Weart’s wonderful book, Nuclear fear: A history of images, documents this quite well. The human mind—even the public mind—is not so asleep as to realize that nuclear weapons cannot be “evil” (an, along the lines of Iran, “unnecessary”) in one context and “a vital part of our national defense” in another.
Jeffry: The State Department e-journal you found on the Internet is named “U.S. Foreign Policy Agenda.” It is published by a part of what used to be the U.S. Information Agency that was folded into the State Department in 1999. As such, the journal is aimed at overseas audiences, not American citizens. This restriction comes under the Smith-Mundt Act which bars this portion of the State Department from propagandizing Americans. So, if you were to call IIP and ask for the URL, the staff could not give it to you. However, if you find it via an Internet search as you did, that’s a different story – the USG can’t stop you from having it.
Does this make Smith-Mundt obsolete, or not? This is a problem the bureau has been wrestling with since the advent of the Internet.
In these days of the Bush Administration dishing out unattributed television “documentaries” to local stations, I am thankful that the source of this journal is – at least – clearly identified whether I agree with its contents or authors or not.
Interesting.
How does that square with the e-mail that I received announcing the publication?