People who are only just beginning to research what’s wrong with the world often hold an assumption that mainstream news reporters are just knowingly propagandizing people all the time. That they sit around scheming up ways to deceive their audiences into supporting war, oligarchy and oppression for the benefit of their plutocratic masters.

Once you’ve learned a bit more you realize it’s not quite happening that way. Most mainstream news reporters are not really witting propagandists–those are to be found more in plutocrat-funded think tanks and other narrative management firms, and in the opaque government agencies which feed news media outlets information designed to advance their interests. The predominant reason mainstream news reporters say things that aren’t true is because in order to be hired by mainstream news outlets, you need to jack your mind into a power-serving worldview that is not based in truth.

If you ever wondered why most US/UK media coverage of Russia is garbage, take a look at this job advert from @nytimes. Pretty clear that any applicants who would like to cover Russia objectively & fairly won’t be considered.

And that’s partially why things are as they are… pic.twitter.com/M7IXdnSafW

— Bryan MacDonald (@27khv) November 20, 2020

A recent job listing for a New York Times Russia Correspondent which was flagged by Russia-based journalist Bryan MacDonald illustrates this dynamic perfectly. The listing reads as follows:

Vladimir Putin’s Russia remains one of the biggest stories in the world.

It sends out hit squads armed with nerve agents against its enemies, most recently the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony in the West to tarnish its democratic systems, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out in his villa.

If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news: We will have an opening for a new correspondent as Andy Higgins takes over as our next Eastern Europe Bureau Chief early next year.

Does this sound like the sort of job someone with a less than hostile attitude toward the Russian government would apply to?  Is it a job listing that indicates it might welcome someone who sees mainstream Russia hysteria as cartoonish hyperbole designed to advance the longstanding geostrategic interests of western power structures against a government which has long resisted bowing to the dictates of those power structures? Someone who voices skepticism about the plot hole–riddled establishment narratives of Russian election meddling and Novichok assassinations? Someone who, as Moon of Alabama notes, might point out that Putin is in fact at work in the Kremlin right now and not “hiding out” in a “villa”?

Of course not. In order to get a job at the New York Times, you need to demonstrate that you subscribe to the mainstream oligarchic imperialist worldview which forms the entirety of western mass media output. You need to demonstrate that you have been properly indoctrinated, and that you can be guided into toeing the imperial line with simple attaboys and tisk-tisks from your superiors rather than being explicitly told to knowingly lie.

Because if they did tell you to knowingly lie to the public to advance the interests of the powerful, that would be propaganda. And propaganda is what what happens in evil backwards countries like Russia.

New on MoA:
How ‘Western’ Media Select Their Foreign Correspondentshttps://t.co/xHgBZFBTZd pic.twitter.com/fQzdvfA1On

— Moon of Alabama (@MoonofA) November 20, 2020

Mainstream establishment orthodoxy is essentially a religion, as fake and power-serving as any other, and if you want to work in mainstream politics or media you need to demonstrate that you are a member of that religion.

That’s all you’re ever seeing when you notice blue-checkmarked reporters tweeting in promotion of imperialist interests and status quo politics. They are not laboring under the delusion that they are saying anything new or insightful that a hundred other people aren’t saying at the exact same time; they are signaling. They are letting current and prospective peers and employers know, “I am a believer. I am a member of the faith.” This way they are ensured the continued advancement of their careers in mainstream news media.

This is why you have labels for anyone expressing skepticism of establishment narratives like “conspiracy theorist”, “useful idiot”, “Russian asset” or “Assadist”; the powerful people who understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world need labels to separate the faithful from the heathens. It means the same thing as “heretic”.

The fast and easy way to get rich and famous has always been to promote the interests of the powerful. This is as true in every other sector as it is in media. For this reason, those who pour their energy into criticizing existing power structures and shining a bright light on their dynamics aren’t likely to be living in fancy mansions or going to ritzy parties any time soon, while those who do the opposite actually will. And yet when someone sets up a Substack or a Patreon account to make criticizing the powerful their life’s work, it is they who will get called money-grubbing grifters by the propagandized.

The faces you see thrust onto screens by the plutocratic media are not spouting falsehoods while being aware of their deception, any more than any preacher is knowingly lying when they say you’ll burn for eternity if you don’t accept the gospel. Most of them believe everything they are saying, because they have been propagandized into becoming good acolytes and proselytizers of the faith.

The most propagandized people on earth are those who are responsible for promulgating propaganda.

caitlinjohnstone.com

Aaron MATÉ

In his first public comments on the OPCW’s Syria cover-up scandal, Noam Chomsky criticizes the chemical watchdog for suppressing, under US pressure, evidence that undermined the pretext for the US-led bombing of Syria in April 2018. The censorship recently extended to the UN Security Council, where the US, UK, and France blocked former OPCW Director General José Bustani from testifying in support of the inspectors whose findings were kept from the public.

“What happened certainly arouses very severe suspicions… The United States and its allies want the evidence provided by some of the top inspectors to be banned,” Chomsky says. “We won’t discuss it, we won’t see if they’re right or wrong, we’ll just ban it. Well it tells a reasonable person something: they want to ensure that it’s not discussed, meaning they have no confidence in their own conclusions, meaning the US bombing of Syria was undertaken on false presences. Whether their report is correct or not, I have no judgment. But what we do know is the United States and its allies don’t want it discussed… And the OPCW is capitulating to this, which is pretty shocking.”

Guest: Noam Chomsky, linguist, author and political dissident.

This is an excerpt of a longer interview with Noam Chomsky. Watch it in full here. 

TRANSCRIPT

AARON MATÉ: Another issue that speaks to the U.S. trying to silence defiance on the world stage has to do with this scandal unfolding at the OPCW. Last week at the UN Security Council, the US and its allies voted to block José Bustani — the OPCW’s first Director General — from speaking. He had come to testify in support of two OPCW inspectors who challenged the cover-up of their investigation in Syria. They found evidence that pointed to this attack — this alleged attack in Douma in April 2018 — being staged on the ground, and not carried out by the Syrian government. Their findings would have undermined the rationale for the US-led bombing of Syria under Trump that same month. [But] their evidence was censored.

So Bustani came to speak in support of them but the US and their allies blocked him from speaking. You’ve previously signed a petition in support of these inspectors. Just with the few moments we have I’m wondering your thoughts on why this story is important and why you think these inspectors should be heard

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well what happened certainly arouses very severe suspicions. The OPCW came out with a report blaming Syria for a chemical attack. Reporters like Robert Fisk and others thought it was pretty shady at the time, but didn’t know.

Then came the bombshell. Some of their leading investigators – top ones — came out and said that their own analyses undermined the OPCW reports and that they were being silenced. Okay, that asks the question. Then comes a long series of efforts to silence them up to what you just described.

The United States and its allies want the evidence provided by some of the top inspectors to be banned. We won’t discuss it, we won’t see if they’re right or wrong, we’ll just ban it.

Well it tells a reasonable person something: they want to ensure that it’s not discussed, meaning they have no confidence in their own conclusions, meaning the US bombing of Syria was undertaken on false presences. Okay, that’s got to be covered up.

Whether their report is correct or not, I have no judgment. But what we do know is the United States and its allies don’t want it discussed. They don’t want the evidence discovered by the some of their top inspectors to be looked at. And the OPCW is capitulating to this, which is pretty shocking, because they’ve been trusted on other things. If they’re going to capitulate on this why should they be trusted on anything else?

AARON MATÉ: And the irony too of them blocking José Bustani who, 18 years ago, was ousted [at the OPCW] under pressure from the Bush administration because he stood in the way of the Iraq war.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Exactly. Some more power plays. [Mike] Pompeo has carried it to new heights than what he just carried off at the Security Council. But it’s not new — you’re right, it goes far back in U.S. policy.

thegrayzone.com

Chomsky’s contribution to that 1988 book was to describe the selling of specifically the wars in Vietnam and in adjoining Indochinese nations, according to that book’s main author, Herman’s, theory. That theory was called the “Propaganda model of communication”. It’s the book’s theory, or “model,” of manufacturing consent for wars. According to their book, the practitioners of this model are the public relations or PR profession that sell, to the domestic American public, invasions and military occupations of foreign lands. This is a specialized field of PR. 

Herman’s theory (or “model”) of political PR (commonly called “propaganda”) for the invasion and control of foreign countries, had, itself, actually already been presented 66 years earlier in almost full form in Walter Lippmann’s 1922 introduction of that concept, “the manufacture of consent,” but Lippmann focused there more broadly, on the selling of all types of governmental polices, and not only on the selling of invasions and military occupations of foreign lands. Lippmann had introduced this broader concept of “the manufacture of consent,” in his 1922 book Public Opinion. 

Chomsky’s theoretical contribution to the concept — that is, to the theory (manufacture of consent) — was nil, and even Herman’s additions to Lippmann’s theory (Herman’s model of it, that is, for selling wars) were only minor, and certainly not as deep as Lippmann’s broader theory is. Lippmann's analysis of the subject was the foundation of Herman’s “Propaganda Model.” Herman’s “model” of Lippmann’s theory was merely the application of “the manufacture of consent” to specifically the selling of foreign invasions and military occupations. 

In any case, as Edward Herman’s biographer said, “Ed was the primary author. Ed developed the Propaganda Model and wrote the chapters before the Indochina wars, and Noam wrote the Indochina chapters.” This would mean that Chomsky wrote pages 169-296 (127 pages) of the 330-page work. He applied there Herman’s model, to analysis of the media-coverage of the wars in three countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. 

Chomsky was the co-author who also gave the public speeches and most of the interviews on the book, because he was its famous author. Chomsky was therefore constantly generating new sales and income for both of the authors. He was the book’s main salesman. And this was Chomsky’s main contribution, outside of linguistics. Of course, his speeches and interviews about mainly-Herman’s book also helped considerably to increase Chomsky’s fame beyond his narrow technical field of linguistics.

Chomsky’s chief non-linguistic contribution to the world has thus been his marketing Herman’s model of the sales-promotions (the propaganda) for wars; and that model, in turn, was based upon Lippmann’s theory of the manufacture of consent. Here is how he marketed it:

In a 2002 interview, Chomsky said:

The term "manufacturing consent" is not mine, I took it from Walter Lippmann, the leading public intellectual and leading media figure of the twentieth century, who thought it was a great idea. He said we should manufacture consent, that's the way democracies should work. There should be a small group of powerful people, and the rest of the population should be spectators, and you should force them to consent by controlling, regimenting their minds.

That’s not true. Lippmann instead had said the manufacture of consent happens, and throughout history has happened, in each and every nation, of every type. He didn’t say it “should” happen, but that it always does happen. He said a very different thing than what Chomsky said that Lippmann had said. What Lippmann had said is also far less heinous than Chomsky’s smear of Lippmann made it appear to be. It wasn’t heinous at all.

Here is the key part of Lippmann’s actual presentation on the matter:

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough.

The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.

Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify.

Nowhere in all of Lippmann’s published writings did he ever say anything like:

We should manufacture consent, that's the way democracies should work. There should be a small group of powerful people, and the rest of the population should be spectators, and you should force them to consent by controlling, regimenting their minds.

Elsewhere, Chomsky asserted, which likewise was misrepresenting Lippmann’s views:

He [Lippmann] said this is useful and necessary because the common interests, the concerns of all people, elude the public. The public isn’t up to dealing with them, and they [“the concerns of all people”] have to be the domain of what he called a specialized class. 

Notice that that’s the opposite of the standard view about democracy. There’s a version of this expressed by the very respected moralist and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. … His view was that rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man …, “necessary illusions” [are needed]. …

It’s not the case as the naive might think, that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy, rather as this whole line of thinker observes, it’s the essence of democracy.

Lippmann’s view was instead that it’s not “the essence of” any type of government, but that it is an unfortunate part of every type of government. Instead of being portrayed as “the essence of democracy,” it was portrayed as something that’s in every sort of government.

The closest that Lippmann had said, to Chomsky’s version of it, was:

In the absence of institutions and education by which the environment is so successfully reported that the realities of public life stand out sharply against self-centered opinion, the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality. This class is irresponsible, for it acts upon information that is not common property.

Lippmann there essentially defined what he had otherwise called “the sinister meaning of the word [propaganda]” as being the “irresponsible” type of it. Lippmann was not saying that this is what should be — much less that it’s the way any country ought to function. He was even, on the contrary, warning against it. Lippmann went on to say “The democratic theory by failing to admit that self-centered opinions are not sufficient to procure good government, is involved in perpetual conflict between theory and practice.” His warning was prophetically important. He was pointing out the difference between the way things are (lacking some democratic regulations — democratic governance — that are needed in order to serve and protect individuals), and the way things must become, if the future isn’t to go the wrong way (as it has done, and still is doing). In any “non-sinister meaning” of the word “propaganda,” “the environment is so successfully reported [by practitioners of the propaganda professions] that the realities of public life stand out sharply against self-centered opinion.” Only to the extent that PR is entirely truthful, informing the public in such a way that “the realities of public life stand out sharply against self-centered opinion” and not at all deceiving or misleading people, can it even possibly avoid being “sinister.” And whenever it is “sinister,” it is “irresponsible.” He was clear. Lippmann was (especially as seen now, in historical retrospect) both true and wise. The misrepresentation of him by Chomsky presents Lippmann instead as having been sinister.

Misrepresentations such as those described above, are common in Chomsky’s public statements. In the above examples, the topic happened to be one (“Manufacturing Consent”) regarding which Chomsky had gained a significant portion of his fame as being a supposed expert and authority. He supposedly understood this subject, and was supposedly an expert speaker about it, who wouldn’t distort and lie about the matter, such as he routinely does. (The examples cited here are not anomalous, they are typical.)

In 2005, the trade-newspaper for college and university professors, the Chronicle of Higher Education, headlined “Chomsky as the world's top public intellectual”. It reported that in the first-ever poll taken by Britain’s Prospect magazine, Chomsky “has been voted the world's leading public intellectual from a list of 100 prominent thinkers compiled by the British magazine.” Prospect also “holds the annual Think Tank Awards, which celebrate and reward the work of think tanks on a national and global scale. The awards are supported by Shell” and by other international corporations. Each one of them has a PR department, lobbyists, and other members of what Chomsky said that Lippmann had said was the “specialized class” “that's the way democracies should work,” “because the common interests, the concerns of all people, elude the public. The public isn’t up to dealing with them.” Perhaps academics, and the owners of international corporations, want the public to think that that’s the way things are — that the aristocracy (who control the corporations and endow the colleges, etc.) aren’t the cause and source and boss of the propaganda-business, and that instead the public’s own stupidity and gullibility are the cause and source of that business. That’s blame-the-victim thinking. However, that view of the matter came actually from Chomsky, not at all from Lippmann. So, perhaps people who are gullible enough to be reading magazines such as Prospect, or the Chronicle, believe Chomsky is a wise man, but people who understand the propaganda-business, know better. They hire and promote organizations such as Prospect magazine and individuals such as Chomsky, to “force them [the public] to consent by controlling, regimenting their minds” (via such PR agencies and professors) so as to blame the public, instead of to blame the people who actually hire the people who manipulate the public: the aristocracy. How exquisite a deception is this? Is Chomsky really so skilled an example of this “specialized class,” of persons who possess “that rationality,” which “belongs to the cool observer,” and not to “the naive” masses? Perhaps Chomsky has deceived himself to think so. Obviously, his many admirers think so and view him as being a paradigm of these ‘truths’ — but they’re lies. Chomsky’s ‘paraphrases' of Lippmann are not statements of Lippmann’s actually expressed views, which are, if anything, the exact opposite. Chomsky’s statements about the person who was actually the originator of the concept of the manufacture of consent were a fraudulent caricature of Lippmann, as if Chomsky had greatly improved upon Lippmann’s original presentation of the “manufacture of consent.” Consequently, Chomsky misrepresented both the person, and that person’s concept and intention.

There are many, many, other examples of Chomsky’s deceptions. For one, his championing of America’s invasion of Syria is, itself, terrific propaganda for the manufacturers of US weapons such as Lockheed Martin, and for America’s and its allies’ international oil and gas giants, and it’s propaganda for criminal US invasions and military occupations of sovereign foreign lands. Until recently, America’s invasion and occupation of Syria were relying mainly upon the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda to train and lead ‘our moderate rebels’ there to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government by one that would be selected by the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia and are the key foreign ally of America’s aristocracy — the Sauds are the people who, by selling their oil only in dollars, prop up the value of the US dollar no matter how big the US Government’s debts are and trade-deficits are. But more recently, the US military has been relying instead upon Syria’s separatist Kurds to take over in northeast Syria. Either way, it’s America’s invasion and occupation of the sovereign nation of Syria — an extreme violation of a nation’s sovereignty over its own territory. However, Chomsky and many other leading scholars and intellectuals (and war-industry-funded think-tanksters) encourage this international aggression by the US Government. Here’s a specific example of that, from Chomsky:

On 23 April 2018 was published in the New York Review of Books, “A Call to Defend Rojava: An Open Letter”. Chomsky was one of its signers. His name there added prestige and ‘authority’ to the proposal. Rojava is the projected name for a breakaway Kurdish region to be taken from the existing nation of Syria, by the US and its anti-Syrian allies, and to be ruled then by the US-established “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) of the most-ethnocentric Kurds. That “Open Letter” was urging continued US military arming and training of Kurdish fighters, the SDF, to achieve this goal of a Kurdistan for Kurds, which would be like the existing Israel for Jews — that is, everyone else in the given territory would be second-class citizens; they’d be ruled by Kurds there, like in Israel by Jews. Rojava would be an apartheid state, like Judaic Israel is, and White South Africa was. This letter, signed by Chomsky, demanded that the US “continue military support for the SDF,” and the letter asserted that “the Kurdish-led forces had established an oasis, unique in Syria, of local self-government, women’s rights, and secular rule.” That’s false. Secular rule and women’s rights wouldn’t be “unique in Syria,” but instead the same as under Syria’s present Government. The two links in that demand within the letter, are links that are in the letter itself, and both links are to articles that were written by neoconservatives — proponents of American conquest of foreign lands. Syria’s Government already provides, and has long-established (not only in its customs but in its laws), both women’s rights and secular rule. However, a Western (US-allied, in this case Jordanian) poll of Syrian women found that four fifths of women said that “the social norms in Syria truly impede women’s success.” The same percentage might be found in Kurdish areas of Syria. The “social norms” in Syria were not established by the Government but by tribal and religious traditions that go back for centuries, and even for millennia. Syria’s Constitution, however, asserts that “The state shall provide women with all opportunities enabling them to effectively and fully contribute to the political, economic, social and cultural life, and the state shall work on removing the restrictions that prevent their development and participation in building society.” It also says: “Citizens shall be equal in rights and duties without discrimination among them on grounds of sex, origin, language, religion or creed.” Although some Syrians (including some Kurdish ones) want Islamic (Sharia) law, and most of the fighters who have been backed by the US Government to overthrow Syria’s Government are of that religious type (jihadists — fighters based on religious reasons and favoring religion-based laws), Syria is the most secular of all Arabic countries; and even the polling in Syria by Western polling organizations has shown consistently that the secular Bashar al-Assad would easily win any free and fair election there. Furthermore, Table 26 of the July 2015 Orb International poll of Syrians asked Syrians for “the reason that explains the presence of ISIL?” (“ISIL" is synonymous with ISIS and Daesh.) And 82% of Syrians said “ISIL is US foreign manufacture.” That was the highest percentage for any explanation. In Table 20, the other options were also shown, and the closest ones were 59% for “widespread sectarian politics in the Arab countries and in Turkey,” and then 55% for “ISIL is some Arab regimes manufacture” — presumably referring in that case to the Sauds, especially since Turkey wasn’t included in that particular option (it’s not Arab) and yet 55% is nearly as high as the 59% (which did include Turkey — along with “the Arab countries” — as being a cause for ISIL’s being in Syria). So, Syrians apparently know the truth about that matter, even if Americans (such as Chomsky) don’t. The US Government is the main source of their war, and “sectarian politics in the Arab countries and in Turkey” also contributed to it. In other words: the US Government has taken advantage of those local “sectarian politics” in order to conquer Syria. The US is even more unpopular among Syrians than is the Saud family, and this is the reason why the US Government was trying to get the Sauds to run Syria. The US Government has a bad reputation in almost every Muslim-majority land, but especially in Syria and in Iran (neither of which that US Pew poll even sampled), both of which the US Government hopes to conquer.

In a 26 September 2018 interview with The Intercept, Chomsky said of “the Kurdish areas — Rojava” that “They have the one part of Syria which is succeeded in sustaining a functioning society with many decent elements. And the idea that they should be subjected to an attack by their bitter enemies the Turks, or by the murderous Assad regime I think anything should be done to try to prevent that.” Chomsky there certainly disrespects Syrian national sovereignty, and despises the non-sectarian President of that country, who shares the view (which repeated polling in Syria has shown to be the view of the vast majority of Syrians), that Syria is and must remain a secular and multi-ethnic country. The goal of breaking Syria up into ethnic enclaves has circulated ever since at least the 1950s within the CIA, RAND Corporation, and Israel. However, Obama’s goal was instead to have the royal Saud family control Syria. But that plan had already failed even before Trump became the US President.

As to the reality regarding the Kurds versus the Government, it’s tragic. Bashar al-Assad and Syria’s highly secular ruling Baath Party (which existed long before the Assad family rose to its leadership) have faced only bad options there. Propagandists of the sinister type (such as Chomsky) take advantage of that fact. The northwest Syrian city of Afrin is the best example of this reality. On 7 June 2018, Britain’s pro-US-empire (or “neoconservative”) Guardian newspaper headlined “‘Nothing is ours anymore’: Kurds forced out of Afrin after Turkish assault: Many who fled the violence January say their homes have been given to Arabs”. The article was true, except that it ignored the key fact, that the Arabs whom Syria’s Government had transferred into the Kurdish-rebel-run city of Afrin and who now were taking it over, were jihadists who had been defeated by the Government, around the city of Ghouta, and the Government chose to offer those jihadists this relocation to Afrin in preference to the Government’s killing everyone in the pro-Sharia-law enclaves around Ghouta simply in order to destroy those jihadists there. (Syria’s Government wanted to minimize civilian casualties, and so offered jihadists this alternative, which would free non-combatant Ghoutans from their captors instead of killing them, but there was this inevitable down-side to doing that.) So, the Government was now letting the fundamentalist-Sunnis who rejected Syria’s Government, fight in Afrin against the tribalist Kurds there who controlled that area and rejected Syria’s Government. Unfortunately, tragically, the non-tribalist Kurds likewise became dispossessed there. Wikipedia has a brief but broadly accurate description of the background of this tragedy.

Propagandists take advantage of such tragedies, in order to deceive the public. Chomsky, a co-author of Manufacturing Consent, is an example of that — in this case manufacturing consent for US imperialism. What he has been saying about Syria is propagandizing for America’s invasion and occupation of that country. The means by which this immensely destructive invasion and occupation are done are not merely US troops training and arming the fighters, but are especially the fighters themselves, first mainly jihadists, but more recently and increasingly ethnocentric Kurds. The results of this ‘civil war’ have been horrific. “Gallup measured negative emotions in 138 countries in 2013 by asking people whether they experienced a lot of stress, sadness, anger, physical pain, and worry the previous day, … [and found that Syria] is the only country in the world whose Negative Experience Index score exceeds its Positive Experience Index score.”Iraq was found to be almost as bad — still, even ten years after the US regime’s destruction of that country, in 2003, by an invasion based on lies.

An extraordinary journalist at a mainstream ‘news’-medium, William Arkin, quit NBC and MSNBC on January 2^nd, and the star columnist at the online site that’s called “Medium,” Caitlin Johnstone, headlined then “Reporter Quits NBC Citing Network’s Support For Endless War”. She linked to Arkin’s email resigning from those networks. It had mentioned such unmentionables as “I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue … in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria?” But it’s not only the directly mega-corporate ‘news’-media that shape the ‘news’ this way. Johnstone aptly noted: 

A journalist with NBC has resigned from the network with a statement which highlights the immense resistance that ostensibly liberal mass media outlets have to antiwar narratives, skepticism of US military agendas, and any movement in the opposite direction of [from] endless military expansionism. … Another way to say it would be that plutocrat-controlled and government-enmeshed media networks hire reporters to protect the warmongering oligarchic status quo upon which media-controlling plutocrats have built their respective kingdoms, and foster an environment which elevates those who promote establishment-friendly narratives while marginalizing and pressuring anyone who doesn’t. 

The enormous success of that manufacturing of consent for our nation’s military, has been proven conclusively, by Gallup’s constant polling of Americans on our degrees of respect, or disrespect, for the nation’s various institutions. Each and every year, the one institution that Americans respect by far the most is the military. The American institution that’s the worst of all (an engine of misery even within the United States), is also the most respected of all. That’s how enormously successful the manufacturing of consent is, in America. Can such a country be a democracy at all, or only a dictatorship? Does it resemble 1984’s “Big Brother,” and perpetual war for perpetual ‘peace’?

On 18 March 2011, a blogger at Huffington Post, David A. Love, headlined “A State of Perpetual War”, and opened:

In the George Orwell classic 1984, there is a state of perpetual war between the nations of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. The enemy in the conflict is ambiguous, and the battlefield exists in an elusive and distant land. The enemy could be Eurasia one day, and Eastasia the next, but that location is really insignificant. … Before, it was the Cold War, and now it is the War on Terror. And the boogeyman du jour is Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism rather than Communism. And it doesn’t seem to matter whether the government is controlled by Democrats or Republicans.

And now, the ‘enemies’ are, yet again, Russia, and China, and North Korea, and Iran — but always anything, in order to keep the tax-money flowing to firms like Lockheed Martin, in order to provide the muscle, for firms like ExxonMobil, to be able to extract resources more profitably, from around the world.

What Chomsky is doing is in accord with the theory for selling foreign invasions and military occupations, as was set forth in his co-authored 1988 book. Chomsky has been practicing what he has become famous for condemning. (Instead of training and arming Vietnamese and other fighters, the US now is training and arming jihadist and ethnocentric fighters, such as ones led by Al Qaeda and by separatist Kurds.) And few, if any, of Chomsky’s admirers have even noticed this. His admirers have been oblivious.

Readers who may wish to explore more deeply the current and very sinister ways in which the US Government is manufacturing consent, will see an especially potent example of that, here.

Andrew Smolski is a writer and sociologist

John Halle and Noam Chomsky recently published at Halle’s blog their defense of “lesser evil voting”, “AN EIGHT POINT BRIEF FOR LEV (LESSER EVIL VOTING)”. In it they make an argument that by electing Clinton (i.e. by voting for her in swing states) this allows for the continuing growth of the left and reduces the amount of harm that will be caused over the next four years. I do not doubt their desire for radical change, nor do I doubt that they make these arguments because they find them morally justifiable in consideration of the consequences of our actions. Yet, it is dubious whether we can consider Clinton an LEV, just as much as it is dubious whether electing Clinton would enable the growth of the Left. I am not arguing from what they call a “politics of moral witness”, but argue in the same analytic vein that they have placed their brief. That is, is Clinton on topics such as climate change, trade, and militarism actually an LEV in comparison to Trump? Taking their criteria of consequences over rhetoric, there seems at best a “dimes worth of difference” on these topics.

For instance, on climate change they state that Trump “denies the existence of global warming, calls for increasing use of fossil fuels, dismantling of environmental regulations and refuses assistance to India and other developing nations as called for in the Paris agreement, the combination of which could, in four years, take us to a catastrophic tipping point.” What is left unsaid is that Clinton only rhetorically accepts the existence of climate change, that under her tenure at the State Department she pushed for privatization of PEMEX, for more fracking, and has continuously stated she would continue policies beneficial to fossil fuel companies. Further, and known most likely to both Halle and Chomsky, the Paris agreement dropped the more direct language on reparations for ecological debt that were part of the Lima draft agreement, for the less direct language about transferring knowledge and research to aid in reducing effects. Nor has it mattered whether a Democrat or a Republican is in power in terms of global CO2 emissions, which rise in either case, as production is moved around the world-system in accordance with the trade agreements pushed by both parties. Thus, the consequences for the planet are identical whomever is elected. Halle and Chomsky would be hard pressed to dispute that fact.

Together with climate change, the issue of trade agreements is highly pertinent, seeing as the ramping up of production is a major reason why companies want these agreements. It is clear that Clinton has only rhetorically changed her position on TPP, just as Bill did with NAFTA. Those trade agreements are principle mechanisms causing migration, such as in Mexico, where NAFTA destroyed the livelihood of farmers. Further, they increase resentment in the working class, typically alienated due to the weakening of the labor movement, who see their jobs go overseas and their wages slashed. This increases ethnic/racial tensions as the working class is pitted against itself in an ever more brutal competition for declining employment and livelihood, a negative feedback loop breeding racists and reversing the strides made during and post-Civil Rights Movement. The worse of it all, these agreements are entrenching even more the power of corporations, who will now be able to sue nation-states based on the fact that regulations harm profit. This is clearly a grotesque attack on environmental regulations, one much more likely to do damage than rhetorical denials.

On militarism, we have a candidate, Clinton, with a clear record, from Serbia to Libya, from Honduras to Paraguay, of supporting coups, militarization of authoritarian regimes, breaking international law, and genuinely following the neoconservative playbook in trying to make the 21^st Century another century of American hegemony and empire. Militarism is highly destructive on the environment, and the US military is one the principal consumers of fossil fuels, on top of dispersing environmentally destructive materials around the world (agent orange, depleted uranium, etc.). When Halle and Chomsky write, “Trump has also pledged to increase military spending while cutting taxes on the rich, hence shredding what remains of the social welfare “safety net” despite pretenses”, this could just as easily apply to Hillary, a candidate who has already stated she would like to expand Plan Colombia-style policy in the Western Hemisphere. Further, we know Hillary supported the destruction of welfare, the repeal of Glass-Stegall, and has pushed for privatizing social security (Bill supported this at the 2012 convention with the Simpson-Bowles budget).

If we focus on domestic racial and ethnic relations, clearly Trump’s rhetoric has emboldened white supremacists and reactionary nationalists. Yet once more, how likely is it that an oligarch whose companies use undocumented labor and maquiladoras is actually going to build a wall or change trade deals? Obviously Trump doesn’t mind lying and saying whatever just to say it, that is basically his entire campaign. It was Obama who has been the deporter-in-Chief, and it is Clinton’s State Department supporting a coup in Honduras that increased the migration of children. The ban on Muslims Trump supports is possible because of the Islamophobia that Clinton herself is a part of stoking, along with the surveillance apparatus that was extended under the Obama Administration. And the Democrats have not used their executive power to curtail police abuses, but only continued to do what they do well, which is the theatre of nothing.

Thus, we seem to have words versus action. Halle and Chomsky say we are supposed to be concerned with action and consequences, yet tell us to vote against words and strategically support the action and consequences as the LEV. It is to take the unknown and make it a bogey, when we know the known is already a bogey. Or stated differently, Trump is a wild card and we really have no clue in many instances what he will do. We know it will be reprehensible, but so will Clinton’s actions. Even on the topic of nuclear weapons, with the Obama Administration recent updating of the arsenal, it is safe to assume that both Clinton and Trump consider them an option (MAD still being official policy, a lunatic with a finger on the gun). Thus, there is no “high probability” of either candidate being worse than the other. In this election there is no LEV, not even slightly.

What we are deciding is to vote for the cause or the effect. Hillary and neoliberalism/neoconservativism in general are the cause of the Trump-style authoritarian populism that now haunts the US. There is little evidence that Hillary is a lesser evil, that her presidency will cause less harm. Actually, it seems we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t with no less damneder a situation on the horizon. Hillary’s presidency would solidify much of neoliberalism and imperialism, and continue to buttress the corrupt, rotten formal institutions of our society. In my opinion, their conclusion is a fool’s bargain: “by dismissing a “lesser evil” electoral logic and thereby increasing the potential for Clinton’s defeat the left will undermine what should be at the core of what it claims to be attempting to achieve.” In an electoral season where people are itching for principle, they call for pragmatism, a pragmatism that has only ever seen in my lifetime the ideological spectrum swing to the right, where now we have a Republican in Democrat’s clothing against a Republican in demagogue robes.

At least we agree, the real work is never this quadrennial circus. That begs the question, why participate in it at all? Green Panther Party anyone?

There are a number of ways to evaluate the doctrine. One obvious question to ask is: What happened when the Russian threat disappeared in 1989? Answer: everything continued much as before.

The U.S. immediately invaded Panama, killing probably thousands of people and installing a client regime. This was routine practice in U.S.-dominated domains — but in this case not quite as routine. For first time, a major foreign policy act was not justified by an alleged Russian threat.

Instead, a series of fraudulent pretexts for the invasion were concocted that collapse instantly on examination. The media chimed in enthusiastically, lauding the magnificent achievement of defeating Panama, unconcerned that the pretexts were ludicrous, that the act itself was a radical violation of international law, and that it was bitterly condemned elsewhere, most harshly in Latin America. Also ignored was the U.S. veto of a unanimous Security Council resolution condemning crimes by U.S. troops during the invasion, with Britain alone abstaining.

All routine. And all forgotten (which is also routine).

From El Salvador to the Russian Border

The administration of George H.W. Bush issued a new national security policy and defense budget in reaction to the collapse of the global enemy. It was pretty much the same as before, although with new pretexts. It was, it turned out, necessary to maintain a military establishment almost as great as the rest of the world combined and far more advanced in technological sophistication — but not for defense against the now-nonexistent Soviet Union. Rather, the excuse now was the growing “technological sophistication” of Third World powers. Disciplined intellectuals understood that it would have been improper to collapse in ridicule, so they maintained a proper silence.

The U.S., the new programs insisted, must maintain its “defense industrial base.” The phrase is a euphemism, referring to high-tech industry generally, which relies heavily on extensive state intervention for research and development, often under Pentagon cover, in what economists continue to call the U.S. “free-market economy.”

One of the most interesting provisions of the new plans had to do with the Middle East. There, it was declared, Washington must maintain intervention forces targeting a crucial region where the major problems “could not have been laid at the Kremlin’s door.” Contrary to 50 years of deceit, it was quietly conceded that the main concern was not the Russians, but rather what is called “radical nationalism,” meaning independent nationalism not under U.S. control.

All of this has evident bearing on the standard version, but it passed unnoticed — or perhaps, therefore it passed unnoticed.

Other important events took place immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ending the Cold War. One was in El Salvador, the leading recipient of U.S. military aid — apart from Israel-Egypt, a separate category — and with one of the worst human rights records anywhere. That is a familiar and very close correlation.

The Salvadoran high command ordered the Atlacatl Brigade to invade the Jesuit University and murder six leading Latin American intellectuals, all Jesuit priests, including the rector, Fr. Ignacio Ellacuría, and any witnesses, meaning their housekeeper and her daughter.

The Brigade had just returned from advanced counterinsurgency training at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and had already left a bloody trail of thousands of the usual victims in the course of the U.S.-run state terror campaign in El Salvador, one part of a broader terror and torture campaign throughout the region.

All routine. Ignored and virtually forgotten in the United States and by its allies, again routine. But it tells us a lot about the factors that drive policy, if we care to look at the real world.

Another important event took place in Europe. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to allow the unification of Germany and its membership in NATO, a hostile military alliance. In the light of recent history, this was a most astonishing concession. There was a quid pro quo. President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker agreed that NATO would not expand “one inch to the East,” meaning into East Germany. Instantly, they expanded NATO to East Germany.

Gorbachev was naturally outraged, but when he complained, he was instructed by Washington that this had only been a verbal promise, a gentleman’s agreement, hence without force. If he was naïve enough to accept the word of American leaders, it was his problem.

All of this, too, was routine, as was the silent acceptance and approval of the expansion of NATO in the U.S. and the West generally. President Bill Clinton then expanded NATO further, right up to Russia’s borders. Today, the world faces a serious crisis that is in no small measure a result of these policies.

The Appeal of Plundering the Poor

Another source of evidence is the declassified historical record. It contains revealing accounts of the actual motives of state policy. The story is rich and complex, but a few persistent themes play a dominant role. One was articulated clearly at a western hemispheric conference called by the U.S. in Mexico in February 1945 where Washington imposed “An Economic Charter of the Americas” designed to eliminate economic nationalism “in all its forms.” There was one unspoken condition. Economic nationalism would be fine for the U.S. whose economy relies heavily on massive state intervention.

The elimination of economic nationalism for others stood in sharp conflict with the Latin American stand of that moment, which State Department officials described as “the philosophy of the New Nationalism [that] embraces policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses.” As U.S. policy analysts added, “Latin Americans are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of that country.”

That, of course, will not do. Washington understands that the “first beneficiaries” should be U.S. investors, while Latin America fulfills its service function. It should not, as both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations would make clear, undergo “excessive industrial development” that might infringe on U.S. interests. Thus Brazil could produce low-quality steel that U.S. corporations did not want to bother with, but it would be “excessive,” were it to compete with U.S. firms.

Similar concerns resonate throughout the post-World War II period. The global system that was to be dominated by the U.S. was threatened by what internal documents call “radical and nationalistic regimes” that respond to popular pressures for independent development. That was the concern that motivated the overthrow of the parliamentary governments of Iran and Guatemala in 1953 and 1954, as well as numerous others.

In the case of Iran, a major concern was the potential impact of Iranian independence on Egypt, then in turmoil over British colonial practice. In Guatemala, apart from the crime of the new democracy in empowering the peasant majority and infringing on possessions of the United Fruit Company — already offensive enough — Washington’s concern was labor unrest and popular mobilization in neighboring U.S.-backed dictatorships.

In both cases the consequences reach to the present. Literally not a day has passed since 1953 when the U.S. has not been torturing the people of Iran. Guatemala remains one of the world’s worst horror chambers. To this day, Mayans are fleeing from the effects of near-genocidal government military campaigns in the highlands backed by President Ronald Reagan and his top officials. As the country director of Oxfam, a Guatemalan doctor, reported recently,

“There is a dramatic deterioration of the political, social, and economic context. Attacks against Human Rights defenders have increased 300% during the last year. There is a clear evidence of a very well organized strategy by the private sector and Army. Both have captured the government in order to keep the status quo and to impose the extraction economic model, pushing away dramatically indigenous peoples from their own land, due to the mining industry, African Palm and sugar cane plantations. In addition the social movement defending their land and rights has been criminalized, many leaders are in jail, and many others have been killed.”

Nothing is known about this in the United States and the very obvious cause of it remains suppressed.

In the 1950s, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles explained quite clearly the dilemma that the U.S. faced. They complained that the Communists had an unfair advantage. They were able to “appeal directly to the masses” and “get control of mass movements, something we have no capacity to duplicate. The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich.”

That causes problems. The U.S. somehow finds it difficult to appeal to the poor with its doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.

The Cuban Example

A clear illustration of the general pattern was Cuba, when it finally gained independence in 1959. Within months, military attacks on the island began. Shortly after, the Eisenhower administration made a secret decision to overthrow the government. John F. Kennedy then became president. He intended to devote more attention to Latin America and so, on taking office, he created a study group to develop policies headed by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, who summarized its conclusions for the incoming president.

As Schlesinger explained, threatening in an independent Cuba was “the Castro idea of taking matters into one’s own hands.” It was an idea that unfortunately appealed to the mass of the population in Latin America where “the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes, and the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living.” Again, Washington’s usual dilemma.

As the CIA explained, “The extensive influence of ‘Castroism’ is not a function of Cuban power… Castro’s shadow looms large because social and economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation for radical change,” for which his Cuba provides a model. Kennedy feared that Russian aid might make Cuba a “showcase” for development, giving the Soviets the upper hand throughout Latin America.

The State Department Policy Planning Council warned that “the primary danger we face in Castro is… in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries… The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the U.S., a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half” — that is, since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, when the U.S. declared its intention of dominating the hemisphere.

The immediate goal at the time was to conquer Cuba, but that could not be achieved because of the power of the British enemy. Still, that grand strategist John Quincy Adams, the intellectual father of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, informed his colleagues that over time Cuba would fall into our hands by “the laws of political gravitation,” as an apple falls from the tree. In brief, U.S. power would increase and Britain’s would decline.

In 1898, Adams’s prognosis was realized. The U.S. invaded Cuba in the guise of liberating it. In fact, it prevented the island’s liberation from Spain and turned it into a “virtual colony” to quote historians Ernest May and Philip Zelikow. Cuba remained so until January 1959, when it gained independence. Since that time it has been subjected to major U.S. terrorist wars, primarily during the Kennedy years, and economic strangulation. Not because of the Russians.

The pretense all along was that we were defending ourselves from the Russian threat — an absurd explanation that generally went unchallenged. A simple test of the thesis is what happened when any conceivable Russian threat disappeared. U.S. policy toward Cuba became even harsher, spearheaded by liberal Democrats, including Bill Clinton, who outflanked Bush from the right in the 1992 election. On the face of it, these events should have considerable bearing on the validity of the doctrinal framework for discussion of foreign policy and the factors that drive it. Once again, however, the impact was slight.

The Virus of Nationalism

To borrow Henry Kissinger’s terminology, independent nationalism is a “virus” that might “spread contagion.” Kissinger was referring to Salvador Allende’s Chile. The virus was the idea that there might be a parliamentary path towards some kind of socialist democracy. The way to deal with such a threat is to destroy the virus and to inoculate those who might be infected, typically by imposing murderous national security states. That was achieved in the case of Chile, but it is important to recognize that the thinking holds worldwide.

It was, for example, the reasoning behind the decision to oppose Vietnamese nationalism in the early 1950s and support France’s effort to reconquer its former colony. It was feared that independent Vietnamese nationalism might be a virus that would spread contagion to the surrounding regions, including resource-rich Indonesia.

That might even have led Japan — called the “superdomino” by Asia scholar John Dower — to become the industrial and commercial center of an independent new order of the kind imperial Japan had so recently fought to establish.

That, in turn, would have meant that the U.S. had lost the Pacific war, not an option to be considered in 1950. The remedy was clear — and largely achieved. Vietnam was virtually destroyed and ringed by military dictatorships that kept the “virus” from spreading contagion.

In retrospect, Kennedy-Johnson National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy reflected that Washington should have ended the Vietnam War in 1965, when the Suharto dictatorship was installed in Indonesia, with enormous massacres that the CIA compared to the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. These were, however, greeted with unconstrained euphoria in the U.S. and the West generally because the “staggering bloodbath,” as the press cheerfully described it, ended any threat of contagion and opened Indonesia’s rich resources to western exploitation. After that, the war to destroy Vietnam was superfluous, as Bundy recognized in retrospect.

The same was true in Latin America in the same years: one virus after another was viciously attacked and either destroyed or weakened to the point of bare survival. From the early 1960s, a plague of repression was imposed on the continent that had no precedent in the violent history of the hemisphere, extending to Central America in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, a matter that there should be no need to review.

Much the same was true in the Middle East. The unique U.S. relations with Israel were established in their current form in 1967, when Israel delivered a smashing blow to Egypt, the center of secular Arab nationalism. By doing so, it protected U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, then engaged in military conflict with Egypt in Yemen.

Saudi Arabia, of course, is the most extreme radical fundamentalist Islamic state, and also a missionary state, expending huge sums to establish its Wahhabi-Salafi doctrines beyond its borders. It is worth remembering that the U.S., like England before it, has tended to support radical fundamentalist Islam in opposition to secular nationalism, which has usually been perceived as posing more of a threat of independence and contagion.

The Value of Secrecy

There is much more to say, but the historical record demonstrates very clearly that the standard doctrine has little merit. Security in the normal sense is not a prominent factor in policy formation.

To repeat, in the normal sense. But in evaluating the standard doctrine we have to ask what is actually meant by “security”: security for whom?

One answer is: security for state power. There are many illustrations. Take a current one. In May, the U.S. agreed to support a U.N. Security Council resolution calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes in Syria, but with a proviso: there could be no inquiry into possible war crimes by Israel.

Or by Washington, though it was really unnecessary to add that last condition. The U.S. is uniquely self-immunized from the international legal system. In fact, there is even congressional legislation authorizing the president to use armed force to “rescue” any American brought to the Hague for trial — the “Netherlands Invasion Act,” as it is sometimes called in Europe. That once again illustrates the importance of protecting the security of state power.

But protecting it from whom? There is, in fact, a strong case to be made that a prime concern of government is the security of state power from the population. As those who have spent time rummaging through archives should be aware, government secrecy is rarely motivated by a genuine for security, but it definitely does serve to keep the population in the dark.

And for good reasons, which were lucidly explained by the prominent liberal scholar and government adviser Samuel Huntington, the professor of the science of government at Harvard University. In his words: “The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.”

He wrote that in 1981, when the Cold War was again heating up, and he explained further that “you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine.”

These simple truths are rarely acknowledged, but they provide insight into state power and policy, with reverberations to the present moment.

State power has to be protected from its domestic enemy; in sharp contrast, the population is not secure from state power. A striking current illustration is the radical attack on the Constitution by the Obama administration’s massive surveillance program. It is, of course, justified by “national security.” That is routine for virtually all actions of all states and so carries little information.

When the NSA’s surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden’s revelations, high officials claimed that it had prevented 54 terrorist acts. On inquiry, that was whittled down to a dozen. A high-level government panel then discovered that there was actually only one case: someone had sent $8,500 to Somalia. That was the total yield of the huge assault on the Constitution and, of course, on others throughout the world.

Britain’s attitude is interesting. In 2007, the British government called on Washington’s colossal spy agency “to analyze and retain any British citizens’ mobile phone and fax numbers, emails, and IP addresses swept up by its dragnet,” the Guardian reported. That is a useful indication of the relative significance, in government eyes, of the privacy of its own citizens and of Washington’s demands.

Another concern is security for private power. One current illustration is the huge trade agreements now being negotiated, the Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic pacts. These are being negotiated in secret — but not completely in secret. They are not secret from the hundreds of corporate lawyers who are drawing up the detailed provisions. It is not hard to guess what the results will be, and the few leaks about them suggest that the expectations are accurate. Like NAFTA and other such pacts, these are not free trade agreements. In fact, they are not even trade agreements, but primarily investor rights agreements.

Again, secrecy is critically important to protect the primary domestic constituency of the governments involved, the corporate sector.

The Final Century of Human Civilization?

There are other examples too numerous to mention, facts that are well-established and would be taught in elementary schools in free societies.

There is, in other words, ample evidence that securing state power from the domestic population and securing concentrated private power are driving forces in policy formation. Of course, it is not quite that simple. There are interesting cases, some quite current, where these commitments conflict, but consider this a good first approximation and radically opposed to the received standard doctrine.

Let us turn to another question: What about the security of the population? It is easy to demonstrate that this is a marginal concern of policy planners. Take two prominent current examples, global warming and nuclear weapons. As any literate person is doubtless aware, these are dire threats to the security of the population. Turning to state policy, we find that it is committed to accelerating each of those threats — in the interests of the primary concerns, protection of state power and of the concentrated private power that largely determines state policy.

Consider global warming. There is now much exuberance in the United States about “100 years of energy independence” as we become “the Saudi Arabia of the next century” — perhaps the final century of human civilization if current policies persist.

That illustrates very clearly the nature of the concern for security, certainly not for the population. It also illustrates the moral calculus of contemporary Anglo-American state capitalism: the fate of our grandchildren counts as nothing when compared with the imperative of higher profits tomorrow.

These conclusions are fortified by a closer look at the propaganda system. There is a huge public relations campaign in the U.S., organized quite openly by Big Energy and the business world, to try to convince the public that global warming is either unreal or not a result of human activity. And it has had some impact. The U.S. ranks lower than other countries in public concern about global warming and the results are stratified: among Republicans, the party more fully dedicated to the interests of wealth and corporate power, it ranks far lower than the global norm.

The current issue of the premier journal of media criticism, the Columbia Journalism Review, has an interesting article on this subject, attributing this outcome to the media doctrine of “fair and balanced.” In other words, if a journal publishes an opinion piece reflecting the conclusions of 97% of scientists, it must also run a counter-piece expressing the viewpoint of the energy corporations.

That indeed is what happens, but there certainly is no “fair and balanced” doctrine. Thus, if a journal runs an opinion piece denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin for the criminal act of taking over the Crimea, it surely does not have to run a piece pointing out that, while the act is indeed criminal, Russia has a far stronger case today than the U.S. did more than a century ago in taking over southeastern Cuba, including the country’s major port — and rejecting the Cuban demand since independence to have it returned. And the same is true of many other cases. The actual media doctrine is “fair and balanced” when the concerns of concentrated private power are involved, but surely not elsewhere.

On the issue of nuclear weapons, the record is similarly interesting — and frightening. It reveals very clearly that, from the earliest days, the security of the population was a non-issue, and remains so. There is no time here to run through the shocking record, but there is little doubt that it strongly supports the lament of General Lee Butler, the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, which was armed with nuclear weapons.

In his words, we have so far survived the nuclear age “by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.” And we can hardly count on continued divine intervention as policymakers play roulette with the fate of the species in pursuit of the driving factors in policy formation.

As we are all surely aware, we now face the most ominous decisions in human history. There are many problems that must be addressed, but two are overwhelming in their significance: environmental destruction and nuclear war. For the first time in history, we face the possibility of destroying the prospects for decent existence — and not in the distant future. For this reason alone, it is imperative to sweep away the ideological clouds and face honestly and realistically the question of how policy decisions are made, and what we can do to alter them before it is too late.

4thmedia.org

Kathleen Wells: I’m speaking with Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and renowned political activist and writer. He has written over 100 books on linguistics, human rights, economics, and politics. Thank you, Professor Chomsky, for taking the time to speak with me this afternoon.  

Noam Chomsky: Very pleased to be with you. 

KW: Speak to me about the relation between the United States and Israel. Specifically, address, as you have previously stated, how every crime, violation of international law, that Israel commits is done through the direct participation and authorization of the United States.

NC: That’s a … as a descriptive statement, that is pretty close to accurate. I mean "all" is a very strong word but it is certainly generally true. And, in fact, the United States has overwhelmingly vetoed Security Council resolutions condemning Israeli crimes and atrocities, prevented the Security Council from calling on Israel to terminate aggression, and so on and so forth. The descriptive comment is not really controversial. There are interesting questions about why it’s true. There were also interesting questions about the sources of support for this position in the United States, which helps us explain why it is true. 

The history is reasonably clear. This was not the case up until 1967. In fact, before 1967, the relationships were not very different from relationships among other powers. There was sympathy and support for Israel, which has many, many sources, including the Christian Zionism, which is a very powerful force that precedes and is numerically far stronger than Jewish Zionism. But for somebody like, say, Harry Truman, raised in a deeply Christian tradition, it was just taken for granted that the Bible instructs us that God gave the land of Palestine to the Jews. So it is kind of like in his bones. And that’s true for a very large part of the American population, much more so than — far more than any other country.  So that is one factor, and there are other factors. 

But the major change in relationships took place in 1967. Just take a look at USA aid to Israel. You can tell that right off. And in many other respects, it’s true, too. Similarly, the attitude towards Israel on the part of the intellectual community — you know, media, commentary, journals, and so on — that changed very sharply in 1967, from either lack of interest or sometimes even disdain, to almost passionate support. So what happened in 1967? 

Well, in 1967, Israel destroyed the source of secular Arab nationalism — Nasser's Egypt — which was considered a major threat and enemy by the West. It is worth remembering that there was a serious conflict at that time between the forces of radical Islamic fundamentalism, centered in Saudi Arabia — where all the oil is — and secular Arab nationalism, centered in Nasser's Egypt; in fact, the two countries were at war. They were fighting a kind of a proxy war in Yemen at that time. The United States and Britain were supporting the radical Islamic fundamentalism; in fact, they’ve rather consistently done that – supporting Saudi Arabia.  And Nasserite secular nationalism was considered a serious threat, because it was recognized that it might seek to take control of the immense resources of the region and use them for regional interest, rather than allow them to be centrally controlled and exploited by the United States and its allies. So that was a major issue.

Well, Israel effectively destroyed Nasserite secular nationalism and the whole Arab nationalist movement that was centered in it. That was considered a major contribution to U.S. geopolitical strategy and also to its Saudi Arabian ally. And, in fact, that's when attitudes toward Israel changed sharply and the U.S. support for Israel — material, diplomatic, and other — also increased sharply.  In 1970, there was another turning point. In 1970, the Jordanian army (Jordan was a strong, close U.S. ally) – the Jordanian dictatorship was essentially massacring Palestinians during what's the month that's called Black September.

And the U.S. was in favor of that; it supported that. It looked as though Syria might intervene to support the Palestinians against the attack by the Hashemite dictatorship. The U.S. didn't want that to happen. It regarded it as a threat to its Jordanian ally and also a broader threat, ultimately, to Saudi Arabia, the jewel in the crown. 

While the U.S. was mired in Southeast Asia at the time — it was right at the time, a little after the Cambodia invasion and everything was blowing up — the U.S. couldn't do a thing about it. So, it asked Israel to mobilize its very substantial military forces and threaten Syria so that Syria would withdraw. Well, Israel did it. Syria withdrew. That was another gift to U.S. power and, in fact, U.S. aid to Israel shot up very sharply — maybe quadrupled or something like that — right at that time. Now at that time, that was the time when the so-called Nixon Doctrine was formulated.

A part of the Nixon Doctrine was that the U.S., of course, has to control Middle-East oil resources — that goes much farther back — but it will do so through local, regional allies, what were called “cops on the beat” by Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense. So there will be local cops on the beat, which will protect the Arab dictatorships from their own populations or any external threat. And then, of course, “police headquarters” is in Washington. Well, the local cops on the beat at the time were Iran, then under the Shah, a U.S. ally; Turkey; to an extent, Pakistan; and Israel was added to that group. It was another cop on the beat. It was one of the local gendarmes that was sometimes called the periphery strategy: non-Arab states protecting the Arab dictatorships from any threat, primarily the threat of what was called radical nationalism — independent nationalism — meaning taking over the armed resources for their own purposes.

Well, that structure remained through the 1970s. In 1979, Iran was lost because of the overthrow of the Shah and pretty soon the Khomeini dictatorship — clerical dictatorship — and the U.S. once tried to overthrow that and supported Iraq's invasion of Iran, and so on. But, anyway, that “cop” [Iran] was lost and Israel's position became even stronger in the structure that remained. Furthermore, by that time, Israel was performing secondary services to the United States elsewhere in the world. It's worth recalling that especially through the '80s Congress, under public pressure, was imposing constraints on Reagan's support for vicious and brutal dictatorships. The governments around the world — say Guatemala — the U.S. could not provide direct aid to Guatemala, because — which was massacring people in some areas in a genocidal fashion up in the highlands — Congress blocked it.  Congress was also passing sanctions against aid to South-Africa, which the Reagan administration was strongly supporting South Africa and continued to do so right through the 1980s.

This was under the framework of the war on terror that Reagan had declared. The African National Congress — Mandela’s ANC — was designated as one of the more notorious terrorist groups in the world as late as 1988. [So] that it [could] support South-African apartheid and the Guatemalan murderous dictatorship and other murderous regimes, Reagan needed a kind of network of terrorist states to help out, to evade the congressional and other limitations, and he turned to, at that time, Taiwan, but, in particular, Israel. Britain helped out. And that was another major service. And so it continued.   

KW: I want to come up to today, because I only have 30 minutes.   

NC: So, it basically continues. I mean, if we go right up till this moment … simply ask, where are the strongest sources of support for Israeli actions?  Well, pick the newspapers. By far the most rabid pro-Israel newspaper in the country is the Wall Street Journal. That's the journal of the business community, and it reflects the support of the business world for Israel, which is quite strong. There's a lot of high-tech investment in Israel. [Our] military industry is very close to Israeli military industry. There's a whole network of interactions. Intel, for example, is building its next facility for construct development of the next generation of chips in Israel. But, altogether, the relations are very tight, very intimate, quite natural. And it's not surprising that the main business journal in the country would be supporting Israeli expansion and power. Take a look at the two political parties. Most Jewish money goes to Democrats and most Jews vote Democratic. But the Republican Party is much more strongly supportive of Israeli power and atrocities than the Democrats are. Then again, I think that reflects their closer relations to the business world and to the military system.  There is, of course, also a Jewish lobby – an Israeli lobby — AIPAC, which is a very influential lobby. And so there are many… and there's Christian Zionism, which is a huge element. Well, you know, all of these combined to provide a background for U.S. support for Israel, and they're facing virtually no opposition. Who's calling for support of the Palestinians?  

KW: Exactly, and so when you hear statements being made that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and yet you see the occupation and the blockade on Gaza, the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, what shall one think about this fact?

NC: First, let's ask about being the only democracy in the region. First of all, it’s not true. There were free elections in Palestine in January 2006. There were free elections in Palestine, carefully monitored, recognized to be free. The victor was Hamas, okay, centered in the Gaza Strip. Israel and the United States instantly, within days, undertook perfectly public policies to try to punish the Palestinians for voting the wrong way in a free election. I mean, it couldn’t have been… you couldn't see a more dramatic illustration of hatred and contempt for democracy unless it comes out the right way.    

A year later, July 2007, the U.S. and Israel, together with the Palestinian authority, tried to carry out a military coup to overthrow the elected government. Well, it failed. Hamas won and drove Fatah out of the Gaza Strip. Now, here, that's described as a demonstration of Hamas terror or something. What they did was preempt and block a U.S.-backed military coup to overthrow the democratically elected government.   

KW: What do you say to the fact that Hamas is listed on the United States State Department terrorist list? So they're characterized as terrorist?  

NC: Yeah, they are. Because they do things we don't like. The terrorist list has been a historic joke, in fact, a sick joke. So take a look at the history of the terrorist list. Up until 1982, Iraq — Saddam Hussein's Iraq — was on the terrorist list. 

In 1982, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the terrorist list. Why? Because they were moving to support Iraq, and, in fact, the Reagan administration and, in fact, the first Bush administration strongly supported Iraq right through its worst – Saddam, right through his worst atrocities. In fact, they tried to … they succeeded, in fact, in preventing even criticism of condemnation of the worst atrocities, like the Halabja massacre — and others. So they removed Iraq from the terrorist list because they wanted to support one of the worst monsters and terrorists in the region, namely Saddam Hussein.

And since there was an empty position on the terrorist list, they had to fill it, so they added Cuba. Cuba's probably the target of more terrorism than any country in the world, back from the Kennedy years. Right? In fact, just at that time, there had been a rash of major terrorist acts against Cuba. So Cuba was added to the terrorist list to replace Saddam Hussein, who was removed because the U.S. wanted to support him.  Now, you take a look through the terrorist list, yeah, that's the way it is. So, for example, Hezbollah is on the terrorist list. Well, you know, probably it's carried out terrorist acts, but by the standards of the U.S. and Israel, they're barely visible. The main reason why Hezbollah is on the terrorist list is because it resisted Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon and, in fact, drove Israel out of Southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation — that's called terrorism. In fact, Lebanon has a national holiday, May 25th, which is called Liberation Day. That's the national holiday in Lebanon commemorating, celebrating the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in year 2000, and largely under Hezbollah attack.  

KW: How would you characterize Hezbollah and Hamas?

NC: Hezbollah happens to be the major political grouping in Lebanon. It's the Hezbollah-based coalition, handily won the last election in the year 2009. Now you know it's not a perfect election, but it's one of the … by the standards of U.S.-backed dictatorships it was an amazing election, and they won it. They didn't happen to win the largest number of representatives because of the way the confessional system works, but they won the popular vote by about the same amount that Obama had won.   So they're the main political grouping in the country. They largely — almost completely — control southern Lebanon. They're a national Lebanese organization. They've … they're charged with some terrorist acts outside of Lebanon, maybe correctly. But again, if the charges … we take all the charges and weigh them against U.S./Israeli violence, aggression, and terror, they don't even count. But that's basically what they are.  As far as Israel's concerned, Hezbollah‘s position is they don't recognize Israel. 

They don't … they… but they say their position is, well, they'll accept any agreement with Israel that the Palestinians accept; we're a Lebanese organization. What about Hamas? Hamas is a … its background is it's an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization, which would be a major competitor in Egypt's elections, if Egypt permitted democratic elections, which it won't.  The Egyptian dictatorship — which the U.S. strongly backs, Obama personally strongly backs — doesn't permit anything remotely like elections and is very brutal and harsh. But they don't … they hate the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas is an offshoot. In its early days, Israel supported Hamas as a weapon against the secular PLO. Later, when Hamas really crystallized, became a significant organization, Israel turned against them, and it became bitterly opposed to them in January 2006, as the U.S. did, when they won a free election.

That was intolerable and they had to be overthrown. Hamas's position is that as a political party it does not recognize Israel, but that doesn't mean much: the Democratic Party doesn't recognize countries either. It says that their position is that they’re willing to accept a two-state settlement in accordance with the international consensus, which the U.S. and Israel have blocked for 35 years. So they say, "Yes, we'll accept that, but we don't want to recognize Israel." Well, okay, that's their position. Are they a nice organization? No. I wouldn't … I certainly wouldn't want to live under their clerical rule.

But compared with organizations and states that the United States strongly supports, they don't stand out as particularly harsh, say Egypt, for example.   

KW: So respond to those who defend Israel's policy and state that Israel is surrounded by enemies. Their Arab neighbors — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, Ahmadinejad in Iran — they pose a threat to Israel. They want to see Israel's destruction, and they feel like these Arab countries are an imminent threat to Israel. Give me your thoughts on those who defend Israel's policies.   

NC: Well, the truth of the matter is that Israel and the United States, which act in tandem, are a tremendous threat mainly to the Palestinians. In fact, while we're discussing the potential threat to Israel that might exist, the United States and Israel are crushing and destroying the Palestinians. That's the live reality.  Now what about the threat? Well, yeah, there's a potential threat, and Israel and the United States are substantially responsible for it. I mean, if the U.S. and Israel would accept the overwhelming international consensus on a political settlement, that would very sharply reduce the threat.  But Israel and the U.S. prefer Israeli expansion to diplomatic settlement and, therefore, are blocking that settlement — they're alone. I mean, Europe, the non-aligned countries — the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic States, which includes Iran — have all accepted the international consensus on the two-state settlement. I mean, there are details to be worked out, but the basic structure is clear. For 35 years, the U.S. and Israel have been blocking it. There are a few rare and temporary exceptions, but that's basically the story. I don't have time to run through all the details here.   

KW: But what's the rationale?  

NC: The rationale‘s very simple.   

KW: Exactly. 

NC: They prefer expansion to security. That's been explicitly true since 1971. I think the most fateful decision that Israel and the U.S. made in this regard was in February 1971 when President Sadat of Egypt offered Israel a full peace settlement — full peace settlement; no conditions — nothing for the Palestinians, in return for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, and, in fact, he cared only about Sinai.  Jordan made the same proposal a year later with regard to the West Bank.  Israel had to decide, at that point, whether to accept security — which would certainly have followed from the withdrawal from the conflict of the major Arab military forces, primarily Egypt, secondly Jordan — whether to accept security or to insist on expansion.  Now expansion at that time was mostly into the Sinai. Israel was developing plans for substantial expansion into the Egyptian Sinai, including a major city, Yamit, supposedly a million people, a lot of settlements, and so on. And that was a very clear choice: do we choose expansion or security? They chose expansion.  The crucial question is what would the United States do? Well, there was an internal bureaucratic battle in the U.S., and Henry Kissinger won out. He was in favor of what he called “stalemate.” A stalemate meant no negotiations, just force.

So the U.S. and Israel proceeded with expansion. Sadat, for the next… he made gesture after… move after move for the next year or two to try to convince the U.S. to accept the political settlement. It was disregarded. He kept threatening war if Israel continued to develop the northeast Sinai.  It was dismissed. Then came the October 1973 war, which was a very close thing for Israel, the worst moment in its history. Well, at that point, Kissinger and the Israeli leaders recognized they can't simply dismiss Egypt, and they moved slowly toward the Camp David Settlement in 1978, which pretty much accepted what Sadat had offered in 1971 — a diplomatic catastrophe. Meanwhile, Israel has continued its expansion, by then mostly into the West Bank, and the U.S. was supporting it all the way, and so it continues.  So, sure, if Israel continues to settle in the occupied territories — illegally, incidentally, as Israel recognized in 1967 (it's all illegal; they recognized it) — it's undermining the possibilities for the viable existence of any small Palestinian entity. And as long as the United States and Israel continue with that, yes, there will be insecurity.   

Read the rest of the interview on Race Talk.

Kathleen Wells is a political correspondent for Race-Talk. A native of Los Angeles with degrees in political science and law from UCLA and UC Berkeley, respectively, she writes/blogs on law and politics.

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