The struggle for Australian values in an age of deceit.

IN THE LONG HISTORY of warfare, from the ancient world to our own, there is one weapon whose ability to affect outcomes has always been notorious. Today, technological innovation has made it more powerful than ever. The weapon is propaganda. It affects the attitudes of all societies to warfare but has become especially influential in democracies, where public attitudes to particular wars can determine their outcome.

There has now been enough analysis to make it clear that the war in Vietnam was not lost on the battlefields of the Mekong but in the court of public opinion in the United States. This gave international communism a considerable victory. Similarly, the military force of radical Islam, no matter how murderous it becomes, cannot itself produce a premature American withdrawal from Iraq. The only force that can do that is American public opinion. Should that occur, it would, of course, be a considerable victory for the world's jihadists.

The most powerful single device in the propaganda arsenal is the atrocity story. It can generate support for wars but can also end popular support. In 1914, stories of how German soldiers were bayoneting babies on their march through Belgium were important in persuading Britons to engage in the First World War. In 1969, the revelation that American soldiers in Vietnam had committed the My Lai massacre was the turning point in the erosion of public support.

This year has seen an escalation in these stories, especially from the Middle East. Israel's incursion into Lebanon in July and August gave it a devastating propaganda defeat thanks to the efforts of Hezbollah's media managers and friendly journalists. Israeli air strikes on Hezbollah rocket launch sites were portrayed in the Western media as causing dozens of civilian deaths, principally of women and children. Internet bloggers have since revealed that many of the photographs and much of the television footage was fraudulent, with live civilians posing as dead, and the bodies of children who died elsewhere paraded around bomb sites for photo opportunities. Teddy bears and Mickey Mouse dolls were carefully placed on top of collapsed buildings to imply children had died there, when none had. The same actors posed at several different sites pretending to be dispossessed Palestinians. Photographs of Beirut showed the whole downtown area affected, whereas only the Hezbollah Beirut headquarters was actually bombed. Reuters news agency later admitted what several bloggers had pointed out: its photographer had added additional smoke to a long shot of the city using the clone tool in Photoshop. Meanwhile, the French public television network France 2 now openly compares the Israelis to the Nazis.

Within Australia, atrocity stories have been critical to the success of the propaganda campaign that has infected the writing of history for the past thirty years. Tasmania was allegedly the site of a "conscious policy of genocide"; the whole colonial frontier was "a line of blood"; South Pacific Islanders were supposedly kidnapped from their villages and transported to Queensland to be bought and sold as slaves.

The most notorious recent historical atrocity story in Australia is that of the stolen generations. According to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, between 30,000 and 100,000 Aboriginal children were ripped from the arms of loving parents in order to "breed out the colour". The commission's report claims this genocidal policy continued into the 1970s and 1980s, that is, it was operative under the Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke governments, all of whom appointed ministers sympathetic to the Aboriginal cause but who were apparently oblivious to the genocide they were administering.

In the international academic journals of genocide studies, Australia sits alongside Nazi Germany as one of the usual suspects. In our schools, we now teach the story of the stolen generations to little children. In New South Wales, the curriculum for the primary school subject Human Society and its Environment, which is mandatory for eight and nine-year-olds, says they must learn about "Australian human rights issues, past and present, including the impact of the stolen generations".