Over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley reviews Mark Thompson’s White War, about Italy’s entry into the First World War and how wrong its campaign to conquer the socalled Italian parts of the Austrian-Hungarian empire went. Quoting a bit from the start of Robert’s review, let’s see if you can spot the similarities between how Italy got roped into that war and how a more recent war was started against the will of the majority of the population of the participating countries:
The control by the war-party of the Italian intellectual class, and accordingly its control over the media, meant that it was possible for the Italian government to wage an aggressive war with the genuinely unenthusiastic support of the bulk of the country. World War I was unpopular in Italy, but control of the media was able to substantially obscure this fact.
Thompson and Farley both draw parallels with the American neocons and their lock on the serious media during the runup to the War on Iraq, but I’m more reminded of the British media, possibly because I was more aware of it myself. Sections of the media — The Independent, The Mirror — were against the war, but on the whole both the newspapers and tv newsshows were, if not pro-war, tending towards taking the arguments for war much more seriously than the millions of ordinary people opposing it. Opponents had much less access to the media than the government and other supporters of the war, were often typecast as loons or naifs, while even the most ludicrious arguments the government put forward (the 45 minutes claim e.g.) were treated with undue respect.