The Hannibal Directive and mainstream media’s organised forgetting
By Les MacDonald
Jan 4, 2025
Aeschylus (525-456BC) was, as current circumstances in the Middle East and in Ukraine amply demonstrate, entirely accurate when he observed that “In war, truth is the first casualty.” At no time in history, including his own, is that observation more accurate than it is today in the digital age. Mark Twain famously noted that “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” Today the truth would not have even risen from its sleep before the lie had travelled around the world.
Modern states described by Max Weber as “a state in which power and authority are centralised and exercised by an independent administration organisation over a clearly defined territory”, have since their development between the 15th to the 18th Centuries, perfected the art of controlling their populations by their growing control of information. That applies particularly to the Western form of the democratic state, where overt force largely had to be replaced by propaganda a century ago. Propaganda is, as Chomsky has pointed out, the manufacture of consent by the substitution of a parallel universe for facts and reality. Indeed, the origins of modern propaganda lie in the efforts of the British and US governments prior to, and during, the First World War resulting in the creation of the Orwellian named Ministry of Information in the UK and in the US in the Committee on Public Information.
Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, then took over the techniques developed during that war and built them into the modern public relations industry which is a vast industry with the specific aim of manufacturing consent by the population by manipulating their inner-most desires, prejudices and drives. The most extensive users of that industry have been governments intent on shaping reality to suit their political purposes. That has been so successful in the democratic West that Governments have rarely had to revert to military violence to effectively control their populations.
All of this is background to the almost complete success of Israel in shaping the attitudes of Western populations. Their efforts were accompanied by the extensive supportive activities of the governments of those nations, to eliminate the understanding by their populations of the genocide currently being committed by Israel in Gaza, and increasingly in the West Bank. Much of that success has been the ability to eliminate context and causes. But a considerable amount is also due to the manipulation of pre-existing racism within western populations to demonise an “alien” group, whilst cleansing the image of the favoured “white” group doing the cleansing.
A perfect example of the success of this strategy is the Western media’s elimination of vital facts regarding the events of October 7th last year and the creation of “alternative” facts that fit the narrative being marketed to those populations. None of what is said here can take away the horror of what happened to innocent civilians, much like the horror of what has happened to vastly more Palestinian civilians over the last 80 years. But if we are to understand events and make sense of what is happening, we must have facts on which to base our judgements. But the elimination of those facts is the purpose of the western mainstream media in these matters.
Virtually nothing has been reported by the media, with the exception of an Israeli newspaper Haaretz and Al Jazeera, about the Israeli military Hannibal Directive, which has been a closely guarded secret of the IDF military for decades. This states that “Once it had been declared by a field officer, Israeli forces were to open fire on enemy forces carrying away an IDF prisoner. Vehicles suspected of removing such a prisoner from the battlefield could thus be attacked, even at the risk of harming, or even killing, the abductee himself.” The object of this directive is to attempt to eliminate the possibility of an enemy obtaining hostages to be used as a bargaining tool. The essential reason is that Israel currently holds nearly 10,000 Palestinian hostages and do not wish to engage in hostage trading with HAMAS.
The effect of the implementation of this directive on the events of October 7th last year was that a substantial number of those killed in that event were Israeli civilians and soldiers deliberately killed by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). The problem in that revelation is that it directly contradicts the Israeli government and western media narrative spelt out over the last seventy-five years that the Israeli military is the most moral military in the world. Of course, that narrative has never accorded with the facts or reality but has been very successfully propagandised to cover the regular daily IDF killing of civilian men, women and children in Gaza and the West Bank in a long running ethnic cleansing operation over many decades.
The foregoing demonstrates that context is essential to understand reality. Context is stripped away by our “free” media to ensure we do not understand what we are involved in supporting as a nation!
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Les MacDonald is the CEO of NSW Meals on Wheels. Prior to this, he held executive positions in both the Commonwealth and NSW governments. He was previously Executive Director Uniting Care Ageing. Les has an extensive leadership history including board positions in public hospitals, health insurance, the maritime industry, public transport, cancer medicine and the Council for the Arts amongst others.
https://johnmenadue.com/the-hannibal-directive-and-mainstream-medias-organised-forgetting/
