DISINFORMATION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000201370005-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 18
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 21, 2008
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: August 28, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
PROGRAM The Rudy Maxa Show STATION WRC Radio
r
August 28, 1984 9:05 A.M.
Washington, D.C.
RUDY MAXA: My first guest is Jim Guirard, and he has a
-- well, a bee in his bonnet is making too light of it. But it
clearly is a particular interest of his. It's the use of words
in the arena of foreign policy. He thinks we let a lot of people
off too lightly by using polite terms when we should be using a
little more harsh and critical terms. We'll talk with him about
that, and we'll talk about disinformation and rhetoric and how it
impacts on us in our foreign policy.
MAXA: Jim Guirard is my guest, and we're going to ask
you to join us. We're going to have a little fun with words.
It's a serious issue to some. In the world of propaganda and
disinformation, words are the primary weapons.
You mentioned just this morning on Good Morning America
there was a piece on Soviet disinformation, Jim?
GUIRARD: Right. The lead item on Good Morning America
today was one on Soviet disinformation; in particular, what they
call active measures, their plans and policies and cleverly
contrived forgeries and planted stories, and so forth, which
comprise a great deal of what people normally talk about as
disinformation.
Now, my subject is just a little bit different. It has
to do with the particular words and phrases and labels.
MAXA: And your thesis is that those words, labels and
phrases are not chosen by accident.
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GUIRARD: Well, some of them are chosen quite by
accident. Others are not. And it's a mixture of things it gets
very difficult to put your finger on. It's hard to tell, for
instance, why it is that in a world which despises colonialism --
I'11 give you this example -- which despises colonialism, for
good reason, why don't we have the sense to call Soviet and Cuban
colonies colonies.
GUIRARD: We call them satellites, primarily. But so is
the space shuttle. Right outside this station there are a couple
of big dishes sitting out on your front lawn which receive
messages via satellite. You talk to your parents on holidays via
satellite. So the word satellite is in itself so inadequate to
the situation that it is disinformational. It causes people to
forget or not to realize that the Soviet Union has 25 or 30
colonies of various description. But we never call them that.
And one of the consequences of this is that it allows
things to happen which just wouldn't otherwise. It faciliates
things that other people say, leaders say which they could not
otherwise.
For instance, about three or four months ago the chief
of state of Greece, one of our NATO allies, Mr. Papandreou, made
a speech to his political party in Athens in which he said that
the Soviet Union is not an imperialist nation, like the United
States is. Now, how could he say such a thing as that? A couple
of reasons.
Number one, we don't call their colonies colonies. We
don't call their imperialism imperialism. We call it adventure
or adventurism. And we'll get into that in a little while. And
since they have no colonies, because we don't call them that,
they have no empire. And so the man is at liberty, he's facili-
tated by our choice of words, or our failure to apply the correct
label, to say what he did. And that that an impact all across
his nation. It has an impact all across the world among people
who are listening to this leader, a responsible man, saying such
a thing, which is in itself disinformational, and which is
facilitated by the habit of language that we exercise in not
applying the correct labels to that system.
MAXA: Why do we use softer terms, satellites instead of
colonies, adventurism instead of imperialism, or incursion? Why
do we use those words? Because the people who are doing the
speaking were brought up in pinstripped diplomatic circumstances
and they just natural gravitate to the more neutral words?
GUIRARD: That's part of it. Some of these words -- and
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it's very difficult to know which ones they are, historically,
unless you just go back and do a tremendous lot of research.
Some of them were planted there by the propagandists for our
adversaries, our enemies. Others come about in the manner you
suggest.
It happens that we are a good and forgiving and trusting
people. And when we see something occur out in the world, a
happening, a circumstance, an action, we tend not to want to put
the most harsh and biting label on it that there is. We want to
look at it and, in our wishful thinking, hope that it's something
else. And that's as it ought to be. We don't want to be
strident and vicious about everything we see and prejudge it as
being the worst of all possible worlds.
The problem arises, however, in the fact that...
[Confusion of voices]
GUIRARD: But in our situation, habit of language then
takes hold. And after you say the word two or three or four,
five or ten or a hundred times and find out later, a year or two
later, that you should have applied the harsh label to it, the
softer one is already in your vocabulary and in your mind and
among your peers, and so forth, and it's then part of the
language and very difficult to root out.
There is an interesting quote that I use sometimes by a
man who studied the psychology of language and wrote about it
many years.ago. His name was Ludwig Wittgenstein. And he wrote
a book called .The Psychology of Language, in which he -- he was
describing a situation among the people with whom he had grown up
in which they had a mind-set. The book he wrote was Philoso-
phical Investigations -- I'm sorry -- and it was about the
psychology of language.
MAXA: I wasn't about to quarrel with you. I haven't
heard of Ludwig, myself.
GUIRARD: And he was describing a situation among the
people with whom he had grown up in which they had a misim-
pression, a mind-set about something that they could not shake.
And the quote he uses -- he described it as follows: "A picture
held us captive, and we could not get outside of it, for it lay
in our language, and language seemed to repeat it to us in-
exorably." It was like a physical boxing, that the language held
them into a perception that they knew was wrong, but they
couldn't shake because it kept repeating itself in the automatic
way in which we talk and think.
MAXA: In the piece you wrote here you've got a great
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quote from Senator Daniel Moynihan of New York. He said, "The
most brutal totalitarian regimes in the world call themselves
liberation movements."
GUIRARD: That's right.
MAXA: "It's perfectly predictable that they should
misuse words to conceal their real nature. But must we aid them
in that effort by repeating those words?"
GUIRARD: A lot of that repetition is inadvertent. It's
done in good faith and without thinking, in part because people
do not realize the importance, and the crucial importance, of
semantics.
It just so happens that words are the little buggers by
which the mind operates. And if you get these words wrong and
have so many of them that are inherently disinformational, then
you can't build the concepts and the thoughts that lead you in
the direction of truth.
Most of us have read George Orwell's great work 1984.
One of the major subplots of that work is what the Big Brother,
the totalitarian state, the dictatorship does to control the
thinking of its people. Big Brother, not wanting the people to
think negative thoughts about the dictatorship, simply changes
the language, literally removes from the dictionaries and from
the libraries and from the books and from newspapers the words
and phrases and labels by which people can construct negative
thoughts about the state.
Now, that is a deliberate action on their part which
George Orwell observed of Stalin and of such people, and tried to
warn us about in that book 1984. But still, people don't tune in
on it. They say, "Oh, what difference could one word make?"
MAXA: Give us some examples of words that...
GUIRARD: Well, I gave you one a while ago about
colonialism.
Another one, one of my pet peeves, is the fact that we
call Soviet imperialism, in a world that despises imperialism, we
call it adventure. Even the President of the United States went
before the British Parliament a couple of years ago and com-
plained about Soviet adventure, or adventurism, in Afghanistan.
Well, I don't know about you, but most of my heroes are
adventurers: Marco Polo, Daniel Boone, Neil Armstrong, The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, etcetera.
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The U.S. Navy, up until about two years ago, had a
billboard sign all over the country saying, "Join the Navy. It's
not a job, it's an adventure." It's a word that's so positive
that we try to attract our young people into the military service
by its use.
And so, as a result, in a world which despises colonia-
lism, they very cleverly and wisely call us imperialists. And in
a world that loves adventure, we call them adventurers. Very
counterproductive sort of thing.
MAXA: Another example.
GUIRARD: Another example,one that is very current in
today's politics -- it remains an element in the presidential
election. Almost a year ago, the little island of Grenada was
liberated. That's the word I like to use. But here again, even
in this Administration, with this President, who is very con-
scious of rhetoric and semantics, and so forth, more than any
other, I guess, since Jack Kennedy, perhaps, he went around in
circles, and this Administration and this body politic is still
going around in circles in a debate over the word invasion versus
the word rescue. The word rescue being more favored, you know,
by the Administration.
GUIRARD: The fact is, both of those words are true.
There was an invasion. There was a rescue of the American
students there. But the politically significant word, the
geopolitically significant word was neither of those. It's the
word liberation.
The Grenadans were very immediately saying liberation:
"Thank God for the Americans. They liberated us." But we have
gotten so...
MAXA: And your point, of course, if the Soviets had
done that to Grenada, they would be crowing liberation.
GUIRARD: Well, the thing that happens, Rudy, is at the
end of World War II we owned that word, very, very powerful word
in the languages of the world. We liberated, we had liberated
Europe from Hitler. But in the succeeding 40 years, or there-
abouts, the Soviets and the Cubans and the Vietnamese have taken
that word and have caused it to mean, for all practical purposes,
the imposition of their kind of dictatorship on what was formerly
a colony, to the point where the word doesn't even come to mind
in this country anymore, even with the President.
And that's kind of the Ludwig Wittgenstein thing. You
know, inexorably, some other concept comes to mind, and the
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In Central America, where, in my opinion, Castro is the
villain, causing the strife and warfare and, in his words,
liberation, attempts at liberation -- it's an attempt, I think,
of his to colonize Nicaragua and El Salvador, and on down the
line. And the thing that facilitates his doing that, and
dividing the American body politic, is the fact that in our
universities, in our churches, in the press, in the State
Department, and across the board, we've got into the habit, too
many people have, of thinking and writing and speaking about
Fidel Castro in such terms as liberation movement, progressive
front -- he's supposed to be the leader of the, quote, pro-
gressive forces in Central America -- people's democracy, social
justice, etcetera.
The problem is, that's not what he's all about. There's
nothing progressive about the man. No freedom of the press, no
freedom of religion, no freedom of emigration. You can't even
get off the island if you want to. It's a prison in itself. No
freedom of property or privacy or information or judicial due
process, artistic expression. Nothing that a liberal or a
progressive would say is important to him.
MAXA: So you prefer to see Cuba referred to as the
totalitarian regime of the dictator Fidel Castro.
GUIRARD: Sure. And the word totalitarian is a little
bit too long. It's an interesting thing about particular words.
You get one that's too long and too hard to remember and say, and
people don't use it.
GUIRARD: And I like to think of Castro as a leader of
the Gestapo left. There's nothing progressive about him.
MAXA: Strongman Fidel Castro.
GUIRARD: Well, strongman is not really a correct word
either, because Lincoln was a strongman. George Washington was a
strongman. Ronald Reagan is a strongman.
MAXA: That's not our idea of...
GUIRARD: He's a dictator. Why not use the proper word?
Poland is an interesting example having to do with the
word dictator. And I'll contrast Poland to Chile, for instance,
as a double standard. This is one other problem.
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In Chile there is a military dictator. His name is
General Pinochet. And he's called a military dictator. Read the
papers. That's what he's called. Fine. That's great.
In Poland there's another military dictator, General
Jaruzelski. But very seldom is he called a military dictator.
Typically, he is referred to as a martial-law leader.
GUIRARD: Think about that word, martial. Most people
don't know what the word martial means. They don't stop to
think. Is it martial music, a la John Philip Sousa? Or are you
talking about Marshal Dillon on the Wild West show, or what?
Followed by two very positive laws: law -- we're a
nation of laws -- leader. That's a very positive word. Reagan
claims to be a leader, in contrast to his opposition. Both of
these are very significant words.
MAXA: We'll be right back. We're talking about words
and their power.
MAXA: We're talking with Jim Guirard and we're talking
about labels and words and loaded words and not so loaded words
and how we refer to American foreign policy moves and foreign
foreign policy moves. It's Mr. Guirard's contention that we are
letting a lot of people off the hook by using too-nice words.
He has a list he handed me during the break of white-hat
labels and black-hat labels. White-hat labels like liberation
movements, progressive fronts, people's democracies, forces of
socialism. Black-hat labels like imperialist, colonialis,
fascist, racist, forces of reaction.
We invite you to join us in this conversation....
You were saying also during the break that it's not so
much the individual use of one word now and then, but the
cumulative effect that paints a picture that is not an accurate
photograph.
GUIRARD: Exactly. And in my conversations with people
about this, in trying to heighten their awareness of the problem,
oftentimes I get a response, "What difference does one word
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make? Whether we call it liberation or invasion, you know, big
deal."
And the thing -- my response is that it is not in any
one of these particular words, or any two or three of them. It
is in the cumulative effect of 20 or 30 or 50 or 100, and it sets
up a pattern of thinking.
And this is the thing that Senator Moynihan, four or
five years ago -- you read his quote a while ago -- was com-
plaining about. He says, you know, "But must we aid them in
calling themselves liberation movements and progressive fronts?"
And he says, "Worse" -- his final statement in that paragraph
was, "Worse, do we begin to influence our own perceptions by
using them?" by using those words.
And I like to describe the total impact, to describe it
as a kind of erosion. It's kind of like soil erosion. If you
lose a quarter of an inch or a tenth of an inch off your topsoil
this year, your crop still comes up next year. But in the
cumulative effect, if you lose that same tenth of an inch over 40
years in a row, pretty soon your crop will not grow. And in this
situation, the public mind is warped out into shape into be-
lieving, by these labels, facilitated by these labels, that we're
the bad guys in the world; and somehow, the forces of socialism
are the good guys in the world.
And one of the things that permits this to happen is the
tendency on our part to think of the left, the ultra-left
(communism) and the ultra-right (fascism), as being different,
essentially inherently different from each other, when in fact
they are just, for all practical purposes, clones, one of the
other. They're not extremes on a spectrum. They are -- they
stomp on human beings the same way. But the notion that Hitler
and Stalin were different creatures is entirely an erroneous one.
Just because one is left and one is right in our language doesn't
mean that that's a matter of fact.
Both of them were socialists. You can't be a totali-
tarian without being a socialist. This is something that people
don't really realize. If the word total within totalitarian
means anything, then the dictator must own the economy, or he
must control it to a degree that is tantamount to ownership.
So, Hitler was a socialist. He called his National
Socialism. Mussolini was a socialist. Before he created the
label fascism, which is one of the ultimate black-hat labels in
the world today -- if you're a fascist you're without redeeming
qualities and can never be redeemed. Now, before he created that
ism called fascism to suit his own purposes, he was Italy's
leading socialist. And in his own writings for ten years before
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that, he was a self-pronounced, self-declared Marxist.
But the words left and right give us the impression that
these so-called extremes on the political spectrum are different.
They're not.
WOMAN: ...There are a few words I'd like to ask this
gentleman about....
Mr. Guirard, how about incursion and invasion, the way
those two are sort of interposed?
GUIRARD: Both of those are, you know, on the negative
side of the listing. Incursion or invasion or intrusion are all
synonyms for things we should not do. And the example I gave a
while ago about Grenada. The word invasion was seen as a very
negative interpretation of what happened there; whereas the word
liberation was the proper one.
WOMAN: Incursion sounds to me like a less lethal word.
So it seems to be used by people who are talking about the left,
like in Russia, when there is an incursion. But I would call it
an invasion.
GUIRARD: Well, they would always tend to apply it to
their activities, the less sharp-edged, the less critical word.
And often we tend to do the same thing. In the fashion I
described a while ago to Rudy, we tend to put a softer label on
things because we don't want to be bellicose and stridently
rhetorical, and so forth. And when it turns out to be an
invasion rather than a soft-hearted incursion of some kind, then
it's too late. We've adopted the word and we're stuck with it
then.
WOMAN: Unfortunately, that happens.
And you know another word -- it's not a word, actually.
It's used now in schools a great deal, LRC. It's become ab-
breviated. It's a learning resource center. And that's a
euphemism for a library, isn't it?
GUIRARD: Yes, that's correct. The word game goes on,
you know, in many, many different ways.
MAXA: That's word inflation.
GUIRARD: That's right.
And, of course, in our commercial world, we're very
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conscious of the uses and misuses of words, to the point where
the Congress has haad to pass truth-in-labeling and truth-in-
advertising laws to keep people within bounds, so they do not
misrepresent and give the public disinformational words about the
products and services they're trying to sell.
But in the foreign affairs area, we forget that it is
such a powerful thing, and the field is left almost wide open to
our enemies, our adversaries, which -- there again, choose which
word you like. I tend to like the word enemies, because they
certainly consider us their enemy. No question about it.
WOMAN: And I also a lot of meaning is lost in trans-
lation, too. Because sometimes the English language is so broad,
there are so many words that can be used the same thing, that
when you try to translate things, it's rather difficult. And
sometimes it comes a narrow meeting rather...
GUIRARD: I'll give you an example about the translat-
ability of words from one to the other. In Nicaragua right now
we have the group that the United States has been supporting
called the Contras, the counterrevolution, which means counter-
revolution in the normal sense. And they, themselves, and we,
those of us supporting them in this country, have been trying to
call them freedom fighters, rather than Contras, which in the
English language works out very well. You have a double f, an
alliteration there, freedom fighters. It works out very well.
But in the Spanish language, where it's most relevant,
you try to say freedom fighters, translate that directly, and you
have a very difficult time. People disagree on how to say it and
it's a long phrase [Spanish expression], and it just doesn't come
out. It's kind of like totalitarianism, about twice as long as
the word totalitarian, and the word just doesn't work too well.
My suggestion, in terms of the Contras, where that word
means, is almost like the first half of the word counterrevolu-
tion, is to reverse the psychology of that label by speaking
instead of the revolutionary Contras. Just put the word in front
of the one, and it becomes then -- they become the revolutionary
counter -- what? -- counter-Communists. And you change the whole
psychology of the world Contras by putting the modifier in front
of it.
They are conducting a revolution. It's the new revolu-
tion in Nicaragua. But nobody calls the word revolution.
MAXA: My guest this hour is Jim Guirard. He's a local,
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Washington-based attorney and a government affairs consultant,
and he has -- shall we call this a hobby, a passion? -- an
interest in watching semantics and the use of words, particularly
in the foreign affairs arena. And he says we are too polite in
the words that we use of our enemies. And he doesn't mind using
the word enemies, as opposed to adversaries.
WOMAN: I have a word particularly, Mr. Guirard, that
you use that irritates me every time I heard it because it seems
clumsy and cumbesome and unnecessary, and that's disinformation.
I don't understand the use of that at all. There are so many
good words in the English language that can be used in its place
and say precisely the same thing that are shorter. And dis-
information says nothing to me. If I heard someone use it, I
stop listening.
MAXA: What would you prefer, like propaganda?
WOMAN: I like propaganda, or just plain lying. There
are endless words.
And you give me the impression that you think that
language is a static thing, and language is not a static thing.
It develops and continues to increase its size all the time, and
it should. It can't be dead and we can't just keep saying the
same old trite things.
GUIRARD: You're absolutely right. In fact, if you look
in the dictionary you will not find the word disinformation. The
reason it came into our language was the fact the Soviets created
a department, a bureau of disinformation. At least their word,
when we translate it into the English, becomes the word dis-
information.
And one of the things that I try to get people to think
about -- and you're right on the track on this -- that we need to
practice some semantic engineering to get away from words that
don't suit our purposes, that don't -- they're too long, too
cumbersome, or that distract us from the truth.
I like to say that, for instance, we need a new word --
we need one, at your suggestion, for disinformation, and we ought
to try to come up with one. We need a new word, too, for the
concept of a defunct, corrupted revolution. There's only one
word for revolution we have, which covers everything from our
kind of revolution, which was pointed at individual civil
liberties and human dignity, to Castro's kind of revolution,
which is pointed specifically at the imposition of a dictator-
ship. Now we need, in my impression, a new word, a different
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word to cover the ground of a corrupt, defunct revolution which
no longer deserves to be called by that honorable name. And that
requires semantic engineering.
WOMAN: There's one other word that I hesitate and I'm
reluctant to see used overly in diplomacy, and that is enemies.
Because in my lifetime, I have seen three of our major enemies
become our closest working partners. And it seems to always go
in that pattern, cyclically.
GUIRARD: Well, I don't think that you could say, really
-- I hear what you're saying. I don't think that you could say
Nazi Germany has become our friend. The thing of it is, that
wasa repressive dictatorship where a certain nation, which is
different from what it was under Hitler, is now our friend, or a
certain nation, Japan, is now a friend, when they were previously
our enemies. But the entire character of that nation and the
government which controls it are like night and day. It's 180
degrees off from what it was.
WOMAN: They are no longer our enemies.
GUIRARD: No, the current government is not. But that
doesn't make it any less true that Naziism and Hitler were indeed
our enemies, just as Communism is today. And one of the things
that helps define that word, whether you're talking about enemies
or adversaries, how does that government consider us? Do they
consider us their deadly enemy? And in fact, they do today.
WOMAN: That may be.
GUIRARD: One of the things I might mention here in
terms of words and the psychology of them and how to change them
and how to do a better job of it: Earlier this year, a pre-
sidential commission, in part in response to representations and
work I did before that commission, has recommended the creation
of a National Security Council task force, a White House task
force on disinformational semantics -- here I go using the word
again -- in foreign policy affairs to try to define the problem,
come up with potential solutions to it, both in the public and
the private sectors, and to make the people aware of what is
going on -- people particularly in the universities, in the
churches, in the press, in the State Department -- so that they,
in their workaday routines, knowing that it is a problem, will
tend to come up with solutions of their own.
MAN: Mr. Guirard, it's just such a pleasure to discover
you. And I constantly wonder why there aren't more people like
you being more vocal than they are.
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I'm in the process of having a manuscript finally edited
which deals with exactly the same problem you're talking about,
only I deal with it in terms of this misuse of words causing
miseducation among the population. So that topics that are
really important are handled so clumsily that nobody every
focuses on what the real problem is.
And my particular thing this morning -- it's almost as
if there was a little ESP going here, because I was constructing
a monologue dealing with abortion this morning when you came
along with his program. And I was thinking, to use abortion as
an example, what they're talking about -- pro-abortionists and
pro-lifers are both wrong. Because of the semantic situation, we
don't focus on the real issue, is whether a law dealing with
abortion is worthwhile or not. In my opinion, I don't think that
the government has any right to be in this business at all. This
is entirely a personal problem. But everybody agrees that
abortion is wrong. I mean that's a foregone conclusion.
GUIRARD: I'd be delighted for you to get in touch with
me. One of the things I try to do is to search out people who
have been thinking about this general subject. You find many
individuals who are concerned about it, as you obviously are, and
are writing about it.
MAN: I've spent a whole life on this. My thesis and my
work is that we don't recognize violence, that we take what we
construe to be non-violence to be not a threatening thing, when
in fact we are reactive people and we react to force and control.
And until we identify that as the cause of the way that we act or
react, that we're not going to be able to solve the problem.
Having heard you speak, I want very, very much to get in
touch with you. I'm without an automobile today, but Rudy has my
address. And if he'd give it to you, I'd appreciate your getting
in touch with me.
MAXA: How do you feel about giving your phone number
GUIRARD: Oh, that's fine. No problem at all.
MAXA: Why don't we give you Jim's number and cut out
the middleman?
GUIRARD: I'd like to give a very simple quote from a
great parliamentarian and legislator of the last century,
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Benjamin Disraeli, a Britisn Prime Minister, who was very much
conscious of this problem and the opportunities it presented and
the dangers it presented. His little quote is as follows: He
says, "Few ideas are correct ones. And none can ascertain which
they are. It is with words we govern men."
And Stalin knew this very well. One of his biographers,
Professor Robert Tucker, quotes Stalin as having believed -- and
I'll give you this little quote, and then we'll get on to our
next caller. He said about Stalin, "Of all monopolies enjoyed by
the state, none would be so crucial as its monopoly on the
definition of words. The ultimate weapon of political control
would be the dictionary."
MAXA: Stalin would have loved all-talk radio.
MAN: I have two questions for Mr. Guirard. First, I
want to know if he can tell me why the news media refers to the
PLO as guerrillas instead of terrorists. And next, if'he thinnks
that instead of calling the Palestine Liberation Organization, if
we started to call them the Palestinian Terrorist Organization,
the PTO, that it would have any significant impact on the Middle
East war.
GUIRARD: Sure, it could in the long run have an impact.
Of course, one of the things you have is that the PLO, the
Palestinian Liberation Organization, you know, christened itself.
They put a euphemism on their organization which is repeated by
everyone and which gets into language. It's just like the Soviet
Union and its colonies call themselves people's democracies, the
same psychology.
And how you get out of this thing is a complicated
matter. The problem that I see is that nobody is really putting
much intellectual brain power into figuring out ways of how to do
it, how to disconnect the PLO from the label liberation, and even
from the word guerrillas. They are a terrorist organization.
And the thing that I'm trying to do is to raise the consciousness
of people about this problem and get a lot of bright people in
the universities, in the churches, in the press, in the State
Department and the body politic to thinking about these things
and coming up with strategies to solve the problem that you so
correctly identify.
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MAN: My comment is this. I also happen to be writing a
manuscript on this general subject, and I think this whole
business of semantic infiltration relates to a larger process,
which I call threat deception. And I think the media has played
a major role in this, whereby the process whereby the major
threat to the United States is portrayed as coming from the right
side of the political spectrum rather than the left side, whereby
the Republic of South Africa, Argentina, Chile become the major
threats that the United States are made aware of through their
media, whereas the Soviet Union and Cuba and the proxy states are
portrayed in a much more euphemistic light.
MAXA: Are you asking for a reaction?
GUIRARD: Well, that's exactly like. Over the last
--well, since World War II, the psychology of language has
pointed us into the direction that it's a conflict between the
forces of socialism -- ipso facto white hat -- versus the forces
of facism, repression, reaction, etcetera.
The Communists try to persuade mankind that it's a
two-dimensional choice: either those bad guys or us good guys.
And the language of left and right in this spectrum, this
so-called political spectrum leads us in that direction, when
actually it's a multi-dimenstional choice. The thing that we
ought to get people to realize, that it's either one of those bad
guys, either the Nazis or the Communists, both of whom are
basically mirrors, reflections of each other, or the civil
libertarian options, with freedom of the press and religion and
emigration and judicial due process, and all the things that any
good conservative or any good liberal would tend to accept and
agree with.
MAN: I think one of the points that's very often missed
is the role that this process of threat deception plays in the
Soviet strategic thinking. I do.n't think we've ever confronted
an adversary in our history, and certainly not in our lifetimes,
where state policy is such that it actually calculates an attempt
to portray, to force on a target population the notion that there
is no threat from the source of the threat.
Would you comment on that?
GUIRARD: Well, you're right. It's an attempt to put,
as I said a while ago, the white had on themselves, to the point
that they are perceived as just the opposite of what they are.
Senator Moynihan, again, has talked about that. The
U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, in its recommenda-
tion for the White House task force I mentioned a while ago,
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calls it an attempt to portray themselves as the antithesis of
what they really are.
MAN: That's absolutely right.
GUIRARD: And their propagandists and their whole system
takes a position that they should not have an armed military
conflict where there would be at least a 50-50 chance of their
being defeated, maybe greater. And so, therefore, their inten-
tion is in the long run -- they have a different view of time and
of history than we do -- is to just pick ups apart piece-by-piece
and to do primarily, in great part, by removing from our body
politic our own attitudes of self-esteem and attitudes of
propriety and justice in the world and what we stand for. And if
they cause such disunity among our people, in terms of percep-
tions, then they'll have us.
Three of four months ago Jim Schlesinger, former
Secretary of Defense and head of CIA and three or other agencies,
was complaining about the lack of bipartisanship in our politics
today. And one of the things he says goes, I think, to language
and the thing we're talking about. He said bipartisanship cannot
be restored unless there is an agreed perception of a common
enemy or threat.
MAN: Absolutely.
GUIRARD: And absent that agreed perception, there can
be no consensus.
And so if they can -- if the Soviets and their pro-
paganda and their disinformation can keep us from ever arriving
at a consensus in this country, or in a consensus with our NATO
allies, then divided we fall.
MAN: Just let me cite one personal vignette on how far
this thing went back in the '70s. The military's concession to
the contract then was eliminating from all -- I was an intel-
ligence officer back then. We were forbidden in any training
exercise to make any reference to the North Vietnamese, the
Soviet Union, the Cubans. Instead we had to substitute euphem-
isms. We could not cite actual existing Soviet military equip-
ment, such as the JS -- the Stalin 3 battle tank. We had to
substitute a word called the taboo for that.
GUIRARD: Yeah. It's an effort on our part to soften the
words and believe -- it's just wishful thinking -- that they will
respond by suddenly becoming nice guys.
MAN: Mr. Guirard, I wanted to make a comment. An
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example, I think, is really important. You've got Ferdinand
Marcos out in the Philippines, who says he's pro-American. But
essentially, what he has is a dictatorship. But for as long as
he continues to say that he is a pro-American, and we can
maintain military bases in that area, it doesn't make any
difference what he does, because the language will be rephrased
so that it looks as though he's doing a good thing. And I think
it's really...
MAXA: In all honesty, Jim, you've got to say this cuts
both ways. I mean there is some -- there are some padded words,
if you would, certainly applied to rightist regimes also.
GUIRARD: That's right. No, this is part of the whole
mix of problem.
Now, whether you would call Marcos, to the same degree,
a military dictator as Pinochet in Chile or Jaruzelski in Poland
remains open to debate. He's an authoritarian head of state who
will not give up power and who does not have free, open multi-
party elections.
MAN: That's true. But if you were a Qaddafi or Idi
Amin, then there would be no question as to his good or evil or
traits. It would be clear-cut and defined as the media or State
Department or whoever is in charge of deciding what the policy is
going to be toward his organization, toward his government, they
would just lambaste him.
GUIRARD: I might mention, since we're talking about
Marcos and authoritarian heads of state like that, in the long
historical trend, we find a number of examples where countries
headed by such people are now multiparty, civil libertarian,
pluralist democracies.
MAN: What does that mean?
GUIRARD: Well, that they have the capacity to grow and
to change into the kinds of systems that we like to call our-
selves. Where the Communist system is such a bureaucracy and is
so firmly entrenched, that that never happens.
I'll give you some examples. In Greece today, for
instance. The colonels were in control for a number of years.
It's now a multiparty, civil libertarian democracy headed by a
man who I don't particularly approve of, but the people chose
him. And they may kick him out two or three years from now when
their elections come up.
Spain, which was headed by Franco, is now a pluralist
democracy. Portual, same thing. Venezuela, same thing.
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MAN: I'm wondering, though, is there ever any time
when, after observing the doings of such people as a Marcos or
Idi Amin or someone like that, that the government will change
its attitude? An example, the Shah. We were great supporters of
the Shah, and then there was a great falling away, simply because
it seemed to be no longer a supportable position.
GUIRARD: That's a very difficult position that we find
ourselves in. We face these situations, like in the case of the
Shah, for instance. The time at which he fell from power was at
the very time that he was trying to liberalize and to correct
some of his faults. And he was still a very faulty person. But
in the end, he gets replaced by an even more repressive regime.
MAN: But is it possible for us to pass judgment on
their social structure?
GUIRARD: Well, the thing we like to try to do is to
encourage pluralism and the true choice of the people. All these
dictatorships, ultra-right and ultra-left, usually talk in such
terms as people, you know, the people's will, and so forth. And
we ought to try and take them at their word. And among those
that are trying to be cooperative with us, try to influence them
in a positive sense. And those that declare themselves to be our
enemies, we have to take a different attitude toward them, by
their own definitions.
MAXA: We're talking with Jim Guirard. He's a Washing-
ton attorney and a goverment affairs consultant, and he has a
particular interest in the use of words and semantics as applies
to foreign affairs.
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