"The great masses will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small lie."
If your government wants to start a war with some other country then it's going to need
to convince you people that it's a great idea.
After all, if you're going to send somebody's kids off to die in some foreign land then
you need a pretty good reason.
Either that or they'll try and convince you badly and then they'll just ignore you anyway.
Anyway here are five of the many techniques that they've developed over the years for
taking people to war.
"The latest weapons coupled with the amazing skill of the American soldiers stand ready."
First up you need an enemy - and you've got to think really big with this one.
It's not good enough to just pick a dictator doing awful things to their own people.
That will start just the one war and you need to think way more long term than that.
You need to attack an idea.
Once you've got your enemy, you need to convince everyone that they're in danger.
Like in the Cold War, when the US kept on telling everyone that those Soviets threatened
the American way of life and the very idea of freedom.
"How's your sense of humour now?
Here's target no.
1 for the reds and who's in the bullseye?
You are."
And you need to do that because you can't beat a good bit of rampant patriotism if you
want to go and shoot at things.
During The Cold War we saw the emergence of the domino effect, if one country falls, more
will follow, right up until the world's under the control of those left-wing monsters.
And that fear was used as a pretext to get involved in all sorts.
The Korean war, The Vietnam War, US backed operations against Cuba in the Bay of Pigs
invasion, the funding of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and a load more.
All of them justified by anti-Communist sentiment.
"The gentlemen from America may call that peace but I have another word for it.
I call it war.
I call it American plans to enslave the world.
That was the voice of the Kremlin or rather one of its voices.
There are lots of them around the world speaking in every language."
But after the Berlin wall came down, the Soviets just weren't that much of a menace anymore
and so a new enemy was needed, a better enemy, and so they made one up.
First of all they had to really work to convince people that al qaeda was a dangerous unified
force and the US leadership had to create that impression.
When Condoleeza Rice said: "The organization that did 9/11 - that al Qaeda - I don't think
really exists, but it's still dangerous because it's more atomized - small groups of terrorists
who one day will probably get lucky."
When she said that she revealed a hell of a lot.
The threat that we'd all been led to believe was a terrifyingly organised terrorist supergroup,
was in fact just a disparate bunch who shared a similar ideology and might one day "get
lucky".
But of course that doesn't sound as scary.
And as an added bonus when your enemy's an idea you can use it as a reason for eating
away at people's freedoms at home as well - like the blacklistings under the red scares
of McCarthyism or the NSA and GCHQ being able access to your entire online life just in
case you might turn out to be a terrorist.
But let's not pretend the terrorist enemy is one that only the west uses.
In 1999 when Russia invaded Chechnya they did so on the premise that it was an "anti-terrorist
operation".
Militants based in Chechnya has invaded neighbouring Dagastan and Russia responded by routing them.
Then a series of bombs took place in Russia in response which prompted a brutal campaign
as Russia set about re-establishing its control over the regions separatists.
During the conflict the capital of Grozny was virtually destroyed and as many as 50,000
civilians were killed.
And since 2004 Russia has been propping up Ramzan Kadyrov as their puppet - a man who,
it's alleged has sanctioned torture, kidnappings and murder of his opponents and has implemented
a vicious version of Sharia law.
Six people have been arrested and charged with the bombings in Russia but many people
see the second Russian-Chechnya conflict as a war to continue centuries of Russian oppression
of the region and not an attempt to free it from the grip of the enemy terrorists.
Then you need an incident.
Something to really kick start that pro-war sentiment and that's something that the project
for the new american century, a US based neo-conservative think tank, knew all about.
It included Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and more and they reported
on the need to increase defence spending and build ties with democratic allies to promote
the ideas of freedom abroad.
They repeatedly called for regime change in Iraq and the need to promote American hegemony.
But these were all long term goals that the report itself acknowledged wouldn't be achieved
quickly unless there was a major incident.
Their report said:
"The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to
be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."
That was published just a year before 9/11, perhaps the perfect excuse to start a war.
And those neo-cons got their wishes quicker than they could have possibly imagined.
Defence spending has risen from just under one hundred billion dollars to close to 600
billion dollars and as for getting rid of Saddam Hussein, well, you know what happened
in Iraq.
"Throughout all our wars they were there."
And if you don't have an incident, you can just make one up, like the Gulf of Tonkin
incident.
There were two alleged attacks at the beginning of August 1964.
In the first the USS Maddox was supposedly attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats.
In the second it was the Maddox and the Turner Joy.
The incident led to President Johnson deciding on retaliatory attacks and eventually to all
out war.
But in the first "attack" the Maddox is now thought to have fired first, causing the North
Vietnamese to fight back.
And the second, well in 2003 the former Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, admitted that
it never even happened.
Now we all know that the neo-cons eventually got their wish of regime change in Iraq after
the invasion in 2003.
But even after 9/11, that catastrophic, catalyzing event that they needed, it was going to be
difficult to convince people that it was a really good idea because after all, the people
who were actually on the planes were mainly Saudis, so why invade Iraq?
That's where the secrecy of the intelligence agencies comes in handy.
The neo-cons with a little help from our lot over here worked out they could tell the world
that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed within forty five minutes.
It was a line that politicians and the media were all too happy to repeat over and over
again without ever actually showing any evidence.
"Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator.
Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tonnes
of chemical weapons agents.
Iraq has made several attempts to buy high strength aluminium tubes used to enrich uranium
for a nuclear weapon.
We know where they are they're in the area around Tekrit and Baghdad and east, west,
south and north somewhat.
I think it is important that if people actually have evidence they produce it.
It is wrong, frankly, for people to make allegations on the basis of so-called anonymous sources
when the facts are to the facts that we've stated.
He has weapons of mass destruction, the world's deadliest weapons which pose a direct threat
to the United States our citizens and our friends and allies."
And of course, there wasn't any evidence because there wasn't any WMDs and the inquiry into
the war in Iraq, led by Lord Butler, found that: "There were ways in which people were
misled or misled themselves at all stages."
But the public, he said, were the people who were misled the most.
The neo-cons got their war and corporations got their lucrative oil deals.
Iraq got more than a decade of bloodshed and sectarian violence that's still continuing
today.
And Iraq leads us nicely onto number four...
There's a quote that's often attributed to Vladimir Lenin, "a lie told often enough becomes
the truth."
William James, the father of modern psychology, said something similar.
But whoever said it, modern politicians have definitely learnt from it.
The Iraq example is possibly the most infamous but there was a much more subtle attempt more
recently.
Republican hawk Senator John McCain was pushing for US military intervention in Syria.
He called the deal with Syria to destroy its chemical weapons "an act of provocative weakness"
and he kept insisting that only force would be enough to make sure Assad complied.
One thing that he kept repeating was that President Assad had slaughtered more than
100,000 people.
Now, it is true that more than 100,000 people have been killed in the Syrian war but current
estimates suggest around 52,000 of those are either government soldiers or pro-Assad militias
and around 46,000 are civilians.
For McCain's statements to be true, that would have to be an awful act of self-flagellation
by Assad and the opposition would have to have killed very few civilians, which we know
is not true.
McCain was either genuinely misinformed or it's possible it was an outright lie but either
way, if you're pushing for a war, it's pretty important to get these things right.
But again, this isn't just the US and us Brits.
In the Russian-Georgian conflict over South Ossetia the Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili
constantly served up lies to manipulate public opinion.
He used the by now familiar lie that Russia was using WMDs, that his capital Tblisi was
about to be occupied and so on.
But perhaps his biggest lie was to try and cover up his involvement in causing the crisis.
Georgian forces launched an artillery assault on the South Ossetian capital, which killed
civilians and Russian peacekeepers.
Georgia claimed there had been a large Russian presence in South Ossetia prior to their offensive,
but an EU report found absolutely no evidence to back up that claim.
Of course, these days it seems, you don't actually have to go to the bother of declaring
war at all.
There's the US drone campaigns, the majority in Pakistan and Yemen.
A human rights watch report from October 2013 estimated that 2,200 people had been killed
in Pakistan in the last decade and at least 400 of them are civilians.
And Pakistan are an ally!
The raid by US special forces on Osama bin Laden's complex in Pakistan, was seen as a
violation of their national sovereignty and was done without permission.
Or what about Israel's incursions into Syria.
They haven't declared war but have carried out numerous airstrikes on Syrian government
targets.
According to a former Syrian intelligence agent Afaq Ahmad, now exiled in France, Israel
knows that Assad has lost the ability to respond.
And so they can get away with unannounced attacks even if there's been no direct provocation.
So there you go those are just five things to look out for when your government starts
campaigning for yet another war which it probably will do again, depressingly.
Why not suggest some more in the comments, share this video anyway you can and if you
haven't done already, subscribe to the channel.
See you soon.