George Rebane

Autocracies have always seen artists as another source of directed content for its mass media organs.  Stalin and Hitler took the use of such state resources to their definitive heights.  The communists in the USSR and the Nazis in Germany actually had committees that evaluated and proscribed/passed on the prose, poetry, paintings, and compositions that issued from their ‘creative’ communities.  That was for a start, and then the state began commissioning art to support its propaganda objectives and programs.

And as students of history, we know that our government was also the unabashed producer of propaganda during WW2.  It hired and commissioned film companies, graphic artists, performers, and writers to get the message out that all should put their shoulder to the wheel, sacrifice, and perform altruistically for the duration of the conflict.  But that was during a time of global emergency when national survival was in doubt.

Last week the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) got caught with its finger in the public propaganda pie attempting to set up channels and protocols for communicating specifications for works that would support the new hard left direction of the country.  Yosi Sergant, NEA’s (now demoted) Director of Communications, apologized when their cover to a conference call was blown by those pesky conservative news media types.  Before being quickly reassigned, he promised to do a much better job in the future of camouflaging such missives to their artist and media producer cohorts.

What surprises me is why the ever-liberal NEA feels the need to shift into higher gear in the promotion of collective causes.  The plausible explanation is that the order to do so was back-channeled to it from the White House, since Buffy Wicks, deputy director of Obama’s Office of Public Engagement (love both of those warm and fuzzy names), was in on the now infamous conference call.  In America we have always had the freedoms to push whatever message we wanted into the public mind, all that was needed was money or the sponsorship of a like-minded mass media outlet looking for content.

In case we forget, schools are also a mass media outlet.  An as an example of the ready alternatives for propagandizing young minds, the recent nationwide showing of ‘The Story of Stuff’ is a poster child.  This blatantly left-wing video has now enjoyed a stealthy showing in the nation’s schools for over a year before it came to light.  The normal curriculum in schools is already so ‘progressive’ that sliding in this little piece of film making didn’t cause a ripple in the young minds so exposed.  Again, it came to light serendipitously and was reported by those dastards on the right.

The point though is that ‘The Story of Stuff’ was funded and produced by the Tide Foundation which is a hard left organization with intimate ties to Apollo Group and ACORN.  These are organizations that our federal government has now proudly brought into its intimate fold of drafting and executing policy.  Through their private and public funding sources, conducive propaganda can be produced without ever invoking the services of a visible pubic agency like the NEA.  So the question stands – what enhanced agenda requires that we now harness this additional bureaucracy to start producing state-sponsored propaganda?