American Propaganda - Controlling Public Opinion in Puerto Rico

American Propaganda:

Controlling public opinion in Puerto Rico

An Essay by John Rivera-Resto,

MFA in Visual Arts Program, College of Vermont, 2001.

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"Rule is the normal exercise of authority, and is always based on public opinion, today as a thousand years ago, amongst the English as amongst the bushmen. Never has anyone ruled on this earth by basing his rule essentially on any other thing than public opinion."

José Ortega y Gasset

The Revolt of the Masses

American Propaganda:

Controlling public opinion in Puerto Rico

Introduction

Public opinion is the key to maintaining control; maintaining control is the key to power. An approving or at least acquiescent public opinion is the foundation of all government. Public opinion ultimately is as decisive in a totalitarian state or empire as in a democracy.

Abraham Lincoln, in the Lincoln-Douglas debate, put it this way: "With public sentiment on its side, everything succeeds; with public sentiment against it, nothing succeeds." But if public opinion is so powerful -we may ask ourselves, how does a dictatorial regime maintain arbitrary rule? The answer is simple: by manipulating public opinion. And, how is public opinion manipulated? -Through censorship and propaganda.

Part One of this essay will provide basic examples and definitions of general interest, and deal specifically with the issue of the manipulation of public opinion through the universal use of propaganda and how propagandist have employed art to achieve their aims. Part Two explains how American propaganda has been utilized in maintaining control of the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico.

However, at this point of the reading, before you the reader proceed any further, I will take a pause to make a statement that is relevant to my arguments; that being that -"I am a Puerto Rican citizen." What's more, I am an artist who happens to be a Puerto Rican citizen born in the United States.

And furthermore, like the vast majority of the American people, I have a problem with duplicity, particularly when all its shades of insincerity, deceitfulness, deception and dishonesty are veiled under the American democratic creed and mantel of freedom, liberty, equality, and justice for all.

Why am I unveiling myself before you having thus barely completed the road to this introduction? I will tell you. I grew up in the American colony of Puerto Rico under a "democratic" colonial regime that has for over a century maintained a repressive and dictatorial control over the lives of millions of people, treating them as second class citizens with one hand, wielding on the other the bible of democratic freedoms while all the time preaching the high and noble ideals of universal liberty and human rights.

The fact that this colonial control has lasted so long is a direct result of an effective and systematic use of psychological propaganda, which has been able to maintain a good level of favorable public opinion in Puerto Rico towards the United States, and has kept the people of the United States in complete ignorance of the things being done in their name.

It has taken me twenty years since I relocated to my birthplace in the U.S. mainland -and a lot of reading and research- to clear the cow-webs that were blinding me to the reality of my former state of being while living another twenty years under a torrent of propaganda in a tropical "island paradise". A lifetime. To say that I have a bias against U.S. policies in Puerto Rico would be an understatement.

However, it is because I have a bias, that I will endeavour at this point to clarify that my bias is informed and based on personal (and collective) experience, and that I will take pains to be as precise and as accurate as public sources of information allow in the exposition of my reasoning.

Through this essay I will present facts and arguments that will, for lack of a better word, inform or enlighten the reader about the paradoxical nature of the U.S.-Puerto Rican relationship; how the United States has maintained political and commercial hegemony over the citizens of Puerto Rico; and how it controls Puerto Rican (and American) public opinion through the use of overt and covert propaganda means.

And in completion, considering the fact that I am an artist, that is (allow me to elaborate), a practising painter who is conscious of the truism that art and artist have always been a part and tool of political propaganda, I would like to explore and find examples of what set of skills not commonly associated with art making an artist must develop to be successful in the psycho-political field.

I will seek these examples among my own experience during my years in Puerto Rico. It is my belief that knowing propaganda techniques will enable the artist who has an interest in civic affairs to better focus the force of his creative skill in order to achieve maximum effectiveness.

You the reader may wonder (if you share some degree of culture) -why would an artist want to abandon the lofty abode of those who search universal aesthetic enlightenment, risking the safety of that unperturbed no-man's land of critical neutrality, to forcefully enter the treacherous trenches of politicized terrain?

Let me provide you with one answer. Having experienced foreign political manipulation and the pressing social problems it creates, I feel a compelling need to call attention to this state of affairs by reporting what I have witnessed. In plain words, I want to select moments from my experience; through my art, I want to call your attention to something.

Calling attention is what propaganda art does best. In selecting an image, the artist provides its audience with an instance in which the historical meaning and political surround of the reported information can be read in a single glance. In doing so the artist is not only engaged with the audience to simply report, but to persuade.

To persuade others is to influence public opinion. Therefore, images like a painting or a photograph, such as Guérnica by Spanish artist Pablo Ruíz Picasso, or the film still of a woman holding a wounded child