Propaganda: Disinformation and the Gulf War

VITAL SPEECHES OF THE DAY:
A MESSAGE FROM NOAM CHOMSKY
The following is a extremely vital speech made by Noam Chomsky, the 60+ year-old MIT professor,
well-known linguist, and U.S. foreign and domestic policy critic. This speech, made on March 17,
1991 in Kentfield, CA was originally supposed to touch on the issue of the Gulf War, but as you will
see, his message permeates much more.
As you read this, you'll notice that Chomsky cites few sources for his views. Most of the sources
can be found in his books if you wish to investigate them. This here is meant to assist people in
waking up. For scrutinizing Chomsky's conclusions, you'll find them heavily footnoted in his
books (ie. NECESSARY ILLUSIONS, Thought Control in Democratic Societies). Any good
public library--especially college ones--are bound to have many of his books.
The topic that was announced, "Disinformation and the Gulf War," is actually a bit narrower than
what I would like to talk about. I will get to that in a moment. But I'd like to suggest a somewhat
broader context for looking at that particular issue. The context actually has to do with what kind of
a world and what kind of a society we want to live in, and in particular in what sense of democracy
do we want this to be a democratic society. In opening that question for a little bit of discussion, let
me begin by counter-posing two different conceptions of democracy. One conception of democracy
has it that a democratic society is one in which the public has the means to participate in some
meaningful way in the management of their own affairs and the means of information are open and
free. If you look up democracy in the dictionary you'll get a definition something like that.
An alternative conception of democracy is that the public must be barred from managing their own
affairs and the means of information must be kept narrowly and rigidly controlled. That may sound
like an odd conception of democracy, but it's important to understand that it is the prevailing
conception. In fact, it has long been, not just in operation, but even in theory. There's a long history
that goes back to the earliest modern democratic revolutions in seventeenth century England which
largely expresses this point of view. I'm just going to keep to the modern period and say a few
words about how that notion of democracy develops and why and how the problem of media and
disinformation enters within that context.
EARLY HISTORY OF PROPAGANDA
Let's begin with the first modern government propaganda operation. That was under the Woodrow
Wilson Administration. Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1916 on the platform "Peace
Without Victory." That was right in the middle of the First World War. The population was
extremely pacifistic and saw no reason to become involved in a European war. The Wilson
Administration was actually committed to war and had to do something about it. They established a
government propaganda commission, called the Creel Commission, which succeeded, within six
months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted
to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world.
"...there's a logic behind it. There's even a kind of compelling moral principle behind it. The
compelling moral principle is that the mass of the public is just too stupid to be able to
understand things."
That was a major achievement, and it led to a further achievement. Right at that time and after the
war the same techniques were used to whip up a hysterical Red Scare, as it was called, which
succeeded pretty much in destroying unions and eliminating such dangerous problems as freedom 
of the press and freedom of political thought. There was very strong support from the media, from
the business establishment, which in fact organized--pushed much of this work-- and it was in
general a great success.
Among those who participated actively and enthusiastically were the progressive intellectuals,
people of the John Dewey circle, who took great pride, as you can see from their own writings at
the time, in having shown that what they called the "more intelligent members of the community" --
namely themselves-- were able to drive a reluctant population into a war by terrifying them and
eliciting jingoist fanaticism. The means that were used were extensive. For example, there was a
good deal of fabrication of atrocities by the Huns; Belgian babies with their arms torn off, all sorts
of awful things that you still read in history books. They were all invented by the British
propaganda ministry, whose own commitment at the time, as they put it in their secret deliberations,
was "to control the thought of all the world." But more crucially they wanted to control the thought
of the more intelligent members of the community in the U.S., who would then disseminate the
propaganda that they were concocting and convert the pacifistic country to wartime hysteria. That
worked. It worked very well. And it taught a lesson: State propaganda, when supported by the
educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson
learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day.
SPECTATOR DEMOCRACY
Another group that was impressed by these successes were liberal Democratic theorists and leading
media figures, like, for example, Walter Lippmann, who was the dean of American journalists, a
major foreign and domestic policy critic and also a major theorist of liberal democracy. If you take
a look at his collected essays, you'll see that they're subtitled something like "A Progressive Theory
of Liberal Democratic Thought." Lippmann was involved in these propaganda commissions and
recognized their achievements. He argued that what he called a "revolution in the art of
democracy," could be used to manufacture consent, that is, to bring about agreement on the part of
the public for things that they didn't want by the new techniques of propaganda. He also thought
that this was a good idea, in fact necessary. It was necessary because, as he put it, "the common
interests elude public opinion entirely" and can only be understood and managed by a specialized
class of responsible men who are smart enough to figure things out.
This theory asserts that only a small elite, the intellectual community that the Deweyites were
talking about, can understand the common interests, what all of us care about, and that these things
"elude the general public." This is a view that goes back hundreds of years. It's also a typical
Leninist view. In fact, it has very close resemblance to the Leninist conception that a vanguard of
revolutionary intellectuals take state power, using popular revolutions as the force that brings them
to state power, and then drive the stupid masses towards a future that they're too dumb and
incompetent to envision themselves.
"This point of view has been developed by lots of other people. In fact, it's pretty
conventional...the guru of George Kennan and the Kennedy intellectuals and others, put it
that "rationality is a very narrowly restricted skill." Only a small number of people have it.
Most people are guided by just emotion and impulse."
The liberal democratic theory and Marxism-Leninism are very close in their common ideological
assumptions. I think that's one reason why people have found it so easy over the years to drift from
one position to another without any particular sense of change. It's just a matter of assessing where
power is. Maybe there will be a popular revolution, and that will put us into state power; or maybe
there won't be, in which case we'll just work for the people with real power: the business
community. But we'll do the same thing: We'll drive the stupid masses towards a world that they're
too dumb to understand for themselves. 
Lippmann backed this up by a pretty elaborated theory of progressive democracy. He argued that in
a properly-functioning democracy there are classes of citizens. There is first of all the class of
citizens who have to take some active role in running general affairs. That's the specialized class.
They are the people who analyze, execute, make decisions, and run things in the political,
economic, and ideological systems. That's a small percentage of the population. Naturally, anyone
who puts these ideas forth is always part of that small group, and they're talking about what to do
about those others.
Those others, who are out of the small group, the big majority of the population, they are what
Lippmann called "the bewildered herd." We have to protect ourselves from the trampling and rage
of the bewildered herd.
Now there are two functions in a democracy: The specialized class, the responsible men, carry out
the executive function, which means they do the thinking and planning and understand the common
interests. Then, there is the bewildered herd, and they have a function in democracy too. Their
function in a democracy, he said, is to be spectators, not participants in action. But they have more
of a function than that, because it's a democracy. Occasionally they are allowed to lend their weight
to one or another member of the specialized class. In other words, they're allowed to say, "We want
you to be our leader" or "We want you to be our leader." That's because it's a democracy and not a
totalitarian state. That's called an election. But once they've lent their weight to one or another
member of the specialized class they're supposed to sink back and become spectators of action, but
not participants. That's a properly functioning democracy.
And there's a logic behind it. There's even a kind of compelling moral principle behind it. The
compelling moral principle is that the mass of the public is just too stupid to be able to understand
things. If they try to participate in managing their own affairs, they're just going to cause trouble.
Therefore it would be immoral and improper to permit them to do this. We have to tame the
bewildered herd, not allow the bewildered herd to rage and trample and destroy things. It's pretty
much the same logic that says that it would be improper to let a three-year-old run across the street.
You don't give a three-year-old that kind of freedom because the three-year-old doesn't know how
to handle that freedom. Correspondingly, you don't allow the bewildered herd to become
participants in action. They'll just cause trouble.
So we need something to tame the bewildered herd, and that something is this new revolution in the
art of democracy: the manufacture of consent. The media, the schools, and popular culture have to
be divided. For the political class and the decision makers have to give them some tolerable sense of
reality, although they also have to instill the proper beliefs.
Just remember, there is an unstated premise here. The unstate premise --and even the responsible
men have to disguise this from themselves-- has to do with the question of how they get into the
position where they have the authority to make decisions.
The way they do that, of course, is by serving people with real power. The people with real power
are the ones who own the society, which is a pretty narrow group. If the specialized class can come
along and say, I can serve your interests, then they'll be part of the executive group.
You've got to keep that quiet. That means they have to have instilled in them the beliefs and
doctrines that will serve the interests of private power. Unless they can master that skill, they're not
part of the specialized class. So we have one kind of educational system directed to responsible
men, the specialized class. They have to be deeply indoctrinated in the values and interests of
private power and the state-corporate nexus that represents it. If they can get through that, then they
can be part of the specialized class.
The rest of the bewildered herd just has to be basically distracted. Turn their attention to something 
else. Keep them out of trouble. Make sure that they remain at most spectators of action,
occasionally lending their weight to one or another of the real leaders, who they may select among.
This point of view has been developed by lots of other people. In fact, it's pretty conventional. For
example, a leading contemporary theologian and foreign policy critic Reinhold Niebuhr, sometimes
called "the theologian of the establishment," the guru of George Kennan and the Kennedy
intellectuals and others, put it that "rationality is a very narrowly restricted skill." Only a small
number of people have it. Most people are guided by just emotion and impulse.
Those of us who have rationality have to create necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications to keep the naive simpletons more or less on course. This became a substantial part of contemporary political science.
In the 1920's and early 1930's, Harold Lasswell, the founder of the modern field of communications
and one of the leading American political scientists, explained that we should not succumb to
"democratic dogmatisms" about men being the best judges of their own interests. Because their not.
We're the best judges of the public interests. Therefore, just out of ordinary morality, we have to
make sure that they don't have the opportunity to act on the basis of their misjudgments.
In what is nowadays called a totalitarian state, then a military state, it's easy. You just hold a
bludgeon over their heads, and if they get out of line you smash them over the head. But as society
has become more free and democratic, you lose that capacity. Therefore you have to turn to the
techniques of propaganda. The logic is clear. Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to
a totalitarian state. That's wise and good because, again, the common interests elude the bewildered
herd. They can't figure them out.
PUBLIC RELATIONS
The U.S. pioneered the public relations industry. It's commitment was "to control the public mind,"
as it's leaders put it. They learned a lot from the successes of the Creel Commission and the
successes in creating the Red Scare and its aftermath. The public relations industry underwent a
huge expansion at the time. It succeeded for some time in creating almost total subordination of the
public to business rule through the 1920's. This was so extreme that Congressional committees
began to investigate it as we moved into the 1930's. That's where a lot of our information comes
from.
Public relations is a huge industry. They're spending by now something on the order of a billion
dollars a year. All along its commitment was to controlling the public mind. In the 1930's, the big
problems arose again, as they had during the First World War.
"We're now talking about the business community, which spends lots and lots of money,
attention, and thought into how to deal with these problems through the public relations
industry and other organizations, like the National Association of Manufacturers and the
Business Roundtable, and so on. They immediately set to work to try to find a way to counter
these democratic deviations."
There was a huge depression and substantial labor organizing. In fact, in 1935 labor won its first
major legislative victory, namely the right to organize, with the Wagner Act. That raised two
serious problems. For one thing, democracy was misfunctioning. The bewildered herd was actually
winning legislative victories, and it's not supposed to work that way. The other problem was that it
was becoming possible for people to organize. People have to be atomized and segregated and
alone. They're not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators
of action. They might actually be participants if many people with limited resources could get
together to enter the political arena. 
That's really threatening. A major response was taken on the part of business to ensure that this
would be the last legislative victory for labor and that it would be the beginning of the end of this
democratic deviation of popular organization.
It worked. That was the last legislative victory for labor. From that point on--although the number
of people in the unions increased for a while during the Second World War, after which it started
dropping--the capacity to act through the unions began to steadily drop. It wasn't by accident. We're
now talking about the business community, which spends lots and lots of money, attention, and
thought into how to deal with these problems through the public relations industry and other
organizations, like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable, and so
on. They immediately set to work to try to find a way to counter these democratic deviations.
The first trial was one year later, in 1936. There was a major strike, the Bethlehem Steel strike in
western Pennsylvania and Johnstown, in the Mohawk Valley. Business tried out a new technique of
labor destruction, which worked very well. Not through goon squads and breaking knees. That
wasn't working very well any more; but through the more subtle and effective means of
propaganda.
The idea was to figure out ways to turn the public against the strikers, to present the strikers as
disruptive, harmful to the public and against the common interests. The common interests are those
of "us," the businessman, the worker, the housewife. That's all "us." We want to be together and
have things like harmony and Americanism and working together. Then there's those bad strikers
out there who are disruptive and causing trouble and breaking harmony and violating Americanism.
We've got to stop them so we can all live together.
The corporate executive and the guy who cleans the floors all have the same interests. We can all
work together and work for Americanism in harmony, liking each other. That was essentially the
message. A huge amount of effort was put into presenting it. This is, after all, the business
community, so they control the media and have massive resources.
And it worked, very effectively. In fact, it was later called the "Mohawk Valley formula" and
applied over and over again to break strikes. They were called "scientific methos of strikebreaking," and worked very effectively by mobilizing community opinion in favor of vapid, empty
concepts like Americanism. Who can be against that? Or, to bring it up to date, "Support our
troops." Who can be against that? Or yellow ribbons. Who can be against that? Anything that's
totally vacuous.
"A major response was taken on the part of business to ensure that this would be the last
legislative victory for labor and that it would be the beginning of the end of this democratic
deviation of popular organization."
In fact, what does it mean if somebody asks you, Do you support the people in Iowa? Can you say,
Yes, I support them, or No, I don't support them? It's not even a question. It doesn't mean anything.
That's the point. The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't
mean anything. They mean as much as whether you support the people in Iowa.
Of course, there was an issue. The issue was, Do you support our policy? But you don't want people
to think about the issue. That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan
that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for, because nobody knows what it
means, because it doesn't mean anything, but its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a
question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to
talk about.
So you have people arguing about support for the troops? Of course I don't not support them. Then
you've won. That's like Americanism and harmony. We're all together, empty slogans, let's join in, 
let's make sure we don't have these bad people around to disrupt our harmony with their talk about
class struggle, rights and that sort of business.
That's all very effective. It runs right up to today. And of course it is carefully thought out. The
people in the public relations industry aren't there for the fun of it. They're doing work. They're
trying to instill the right values. In fact, they have a conception of what democracy ought to be: It
ought to be a system in which the specialized class is trained to work in the service of the masters,
the people who own the society.
The rest of the population ought to be deprived of any form of organization, because organization
just causes trouble. They ought to be sitting alone in front of the TV and having drilled into their
heads the message, which says, the only value in life is to have more commodities or live like that
rich middle class family you're watching and to have nice values like harmony and Americanism.
That's all there is in life.
You may think in your own head that there's got to be something more in life than this, but since
you're watching the tube alone you assume, I must be crazy, because that's all that's going on over
there. And since there is no organization permitted --that's absolutely crucial-- you never have a
way of finding out whether you are crazy, and you just assume it, because it's the natural thing to
assume.
You've got to keep them pretty scared, because unless they're properly scared and frightened of all
kinds of devils that are going to destroy them from outside or inside or somewhere, they may start
to think, which is very dangerous, because they're not competent to think. Therefore it's important
to distract them and marginalize them.
That's one conception of democracy. In fact, going back to the business community, the last legal
victory for labor really was 1935, the Wagner Act. After the war came, the unions declined as did a
very rich working class culture that was associated with the unions. That was destroyed.
We moved to a business-run society at a remarkable level. This is the only state-capitalist industrial
society which doesn't have even the normal social contract that you find in comparable societies.
Outside of South Africa, I guess, this is the only industrial society that doesn't have national health
care. There's no general commitment to even minimal standards of survival for the parts of the
population who can't follow those rules and gain things for themselves individually.
Unions are virtually nonexistent. Other forms of popular structure are virtually nonexistent. There
are no political parties or organizations. It's a long way towards the ideal, at least structurally. The
media are a corporate monopoly. They have the same point of view. The two parties are two
factions of the business party. Most of the population doesn't even bother voting because it looks
meaningless. They're marginalized and properly distracted. At least that's the goal.
The leading figure in the public relations industry, Edward Bernays, actually came out of the Creel
Commission. He was part of it, learned his lessons there and went on to develop what's called the
"engineering of consent," which he described as "the essence of democracy." The people who are
able to engineer consent are the ones who have the resources and the power to do it --the business
community-- and that's who you work for.
ENGINEERING OPINION
It is also necessary to whip up the population in support of foreign adventures. Usually the
population is pacifist, just like they were during the First World War. The public sees no reason to
get involved in foreign adventures, killing, and torture. So you have to whip them up. And to whip
them up you have to frighten them. 
Bernays himself had an important achievement in this respect. he was the person who ran the public
relations campaign for the United Fruit Company in 1954, when the U.S. moved in to overthrow the
capitalist-democratic government of Guatemala and installed a murderous death-squad society,
which remains that way to the present day with constant infusions of U.S. aid to prevent the
democratic deviations that might take place there.
It's necessary to constantly ram through domestic programs which the public is opposed to, because
there is no reason for the public to be in favor of domestic programs that are harmful to them. This,
too, takes extensive propaganda.
We've seen a lot of this in the last ten years. The Reagan programs were overwhelmingly
unpopular. Even the people who voted for Reagan, by about three to two, hoped that his policies
would not be enacted. If you take particular programs, like armaments, cutting back on social
spending, etc., almost every one of them was overwhelmingly opposed by the public.
But as long as people are marginalized and distracted and have no way to organize or articulate
their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments, people who said that they prefer
social spending to military spending, who gave that answer on polls, as people overwhelmingly did,
assumed that they were the only people with that crazy idea in their heads. They never heard it from
anywhere else.
Nobody's supposed to think that. Therefore, if you do think it and you answer it in a poll, you just
assume that you're sort of weird. Since there's no way to get together with other people who share or
reinforce that view and help your articulate it, you feel like an oddity, and oddball. So you just stay
on the side and you don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the
Superbowl.
To a certain extent, then, that ideal was achieved, but never completely. There are institutions which
it has as yet been impossible to destroy. The churches, for example, still exist. A large part of the
dissident activity in the U.S. comes out of the churches, for the simple reason that they're there. So
when you go to a European country and give a political talk, it may very likely be in the union hall.
Here that won't happen, because unions first of all barely exist, and if they do exist they're not
political organizations. But the churches do exist, and therefore you often give a talk in a church.
Central American solidarity work mostly grew out of the churches, mainly because they exist.
The bewildered herd never gets properly tamed, so this is a constant battle. In the 1930's they arose
again and were put down. In the 1960's there was another wave of dissidence.
There was a name for that. It was called by the specialized class "the crisis of democracy."
Democracy was regarded as entering into a crisis in the 1960's. The crisis was that large segments
of the population were becoming organized and active and trying to participate in the political
arena. Here we come back to these two conceptions of democracy. By the dictionary definition,
that's an advance in democracy. By the prevailing definition, that's a problem, a crisis that has to be
overcome.
The population has to be driven back to the apathy, obedience and passivity that is their proper
state. We therefore have to do something to overcome the crisis. Efforts were made to achieve that.
It hasn't worked. The crisis of democracy is still alive and well, fortunately, but not very effective in
changing policy; but it is effective in changing opinion, contrary to what a lot of people believe.
Great efforts were made after the 1960's to try to reverse and overcome this malady. One aspect of
the malady actually got a technical name. It was called the "Vietnam Syndrome." The Vietnam
Syndrome, a term that began to come up around 1970, has actually been defined on occasion. The
Reaganite intellectual Norman Podhoretz defined it as "the sickly inhibitions against the use of
military force." 
There were these sickly inhibitions against violence on the part of a large part of the public. People
just didn't understand why we should go around torturing people and killing people and carpet
bombing them. It's very dangerous for a population to be overcome by these sickly inhibitions, as
Goebbels understood, because then there's a limit on foreign adventures.
It's necessary, as the Washington Post put it the other day, rather proudly, to "instill in people
respect for the martial virtues." That's important. If you want to have a violent society that uses
force around the world to achieve the ends of its own domestic elite, it's necessary to have a proper
appreciation of the martial virtues and none of these sickly inhibitions about using violence. So
that's the Vietnam Syndrome. It's necessary to overcome that one.
REPRESENTATION AS REALITY
It's also necessary to completely falsify history. That's another way to overcome these sickly
inhibitions, to make it look as if when we attack and destroy somebody we're really protecting and
defending ourselves against major aggressors and monsters and so on. There has been a huge effort
since the Vietnam War to reconstruct the history of that. Too many people began to understand
what was really going on. Including plenty of soldiers and a lot of young people who were involved
with the peace movement and others. That was bad. It was necessary to rearrange those bad
thoughts and to restore some form of sanity, namely, a recognition that whatever we do is noble and
right. If we're bombing South Vietnam, that's because we're defending South Vietnam against
somebody, namely the South Vietnamese, since nobody else was there.
It's what the Kennedy intellectuals called "defense against internal aggression in South Vietnam."
That was the phrase that Adlai Stevenson used. It was necessary to make that the official and well
understood picture. That's worked pretty well. When you have total control over the media and the
educational system and scholarship is conforminist, you can get that across.
One indication of it was revealed in a study done at the University of Massachusetts on attitudes
towards the Gulf crisis --a study of beliefs and attitudes in television watching. One of the questions
asked in that study was, "How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were
during the Vietnam War?" The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000.
The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million.
The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: "What would we think about
German political culture if when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust they
estimated about 300,00? What would that tell us about German political culture?" They leave the
question unanswered, but you can pursue it. What does it tell us about our culture? It tells us quite a
bit.
It is necessary to overcome the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force and other
democratic deviations. On this particular case it worked. This is true on every topic. Pick the topic
you like: the Middle East, international terrorism, Central America, whatever it is --the picture of
the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality.
The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies. It's all been a marvellous success
from this point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom,
which is extremely interesting. It's not like a totalitarian state, where it's done by force. These
achievements are under conditions of freedom. If we want to understand our own society, we'll have
to think about these facts. They are important facts, important for those who care about what kind of
society we live in.
DISSIDENT CULTURE
Despite all of this, the dissident culture survived. It's grown quite a lot since the 1960's. In the 
1960's the dissident culture first of all was extremely slow.
By the 1970's that had changed considerably. Major popular movements had developed: The
environmental movement and others. In the 1980's there was an even greater expansion to the
solidarity movements, which is something very new and important in the history of at least
American, and maybe even world dissidence.
These were movements that not only protested but actually involved themselves, often intimately,
in the lives of suffering people elsewhere. They learned a great deal from it and had quite a
civilizing effect on mainstream America.
All of this made a very large difference. Anyone who has been involved in this kind of activity for
many years must be aware of this. I know myself that the kind of talks I give today in the most
reactionary parts of the country --central Georgia, eastern Kentucky, etc. --are talks of the kind that
I couldn't have given at the peak of the peace movement to the most active peace movement
audience. Now you can give them anywhere. People may agree or not agree, but at least they
understand what you're talking about and there's some sort of common ground that you can pursue.
These are all signs of a civilizing effect, despite all the propaganda, despite all the efforts to control
thought and manufacture consent. Nevertheless, people are acquiring an ability and a willingness to
think things through. Skepticism about power has grown, and attitudes have changed on many
many issues. It's kind of slow, even glacial, but perceptible and important. Whether it's fast enough
to make a significant difference in what happens in the world is another question.
Just take one familiar example of it: The famous gender gap. In the 1960's attitudes of men and
women were approximately the same on such matters as the "martial virtues" and the sickly
inhibitions against the use of military force. Nobody, neither men nor women, were suffering from
those sickly inhibitions in the early 1960's. The responses were the same. Everybody thought that
the use of violence to suppress people out there was just right.
Over the years it's changed. The sickly inhibitions have increased all across the board. But
meanwhile a gap has been growing, and by now it's a very substantial gap. According to polls, it's
something like 25%. What has happened? What has happened is that there is some form of at least
semi-organized popular movement that women are involved in --the feminist movement.
Organization has its effects. It means that you discover that you're not alone. Others have the same
thoughts that you do. You can reinforce your thoughts and learn more about what you think and
believe.
These are very informal movements, not like membership organizations, just a mood that involves
interactions among people. It has a very noticeable effect. That's the danger of democracy: If
organizations can develop, if people are no longer just glued to the tube, you may have all these
funny thoughts arising in their heads, like sickly inhibitions against the use of military force. That
has to be overcome, but it hasn't been overcome.
PARADE OF ENEMIES
Instead of talking about the last war, let me talk about the next war, because sometimes it's useful to
be prepared instead of just reacting. There is a very characteristic development going on in the U.S.
now. It's not the first country in the world that's done this. There are growing domestic social and
economic problems, in fact, maybe catastrophes. Nobody in power has any intention of doing
anything about them. If you look at the domestic programs of the administrations of the past ten
years --I include here the democratic opposition-- there's really no serious proposal about what to do
about the severe problems of health, education, homelessness, joblessness, crime, soaring criminal
population, jails, deterioration in the inner cities--the whole raft of problems. You all know about 
them, and they're all getting worse.
Just in the two years that George Bush has been in office [as of 1991] three million more children
crossed the poverty line, the debt is zooming, educational standards are declining, real wages are
now back to the level of about the late 1950s for most of the population, and nobody's doing
anything about it.
In such circumstances you've got to divert the bewildered herd, because if they start noticing this
they may not like it, since they're the ones suffering from it. Just having them watch the Superbowl
and the sitcoms may not be enough. You have to whip them up into fear of enemies.
In the 1930s Hitler whipped them up into fear of the Jews and Gypsies. You had to crush them to
defend yourselves. We have our ways, too. Over the last ten years, every year or two, some major
monster is constructed that we have to defend ourselves against.
There used to be one that was always available: The Russians. You could always defend yourself
against the Russians. But they're losing their attractiveness as an enemy, and it's getting harder and
harder to use that one, so some new ones have to be conjured up.
In fact, people have quite unfairly criticized George Bush for being unable to express or articulate
what's really driving us now. That's very unfair. Prior to the mid 1980s, when you were asleep you
would just play the record: The Russians are coming. But he lost that one and he's got to make up
new ones, just like the Reaganite public relations apparatus did in the 1980s. So it was international
terrorists and narco-traffickers and crazed Arabs and Saddam Hussein, the new Hitler, is going to
conquer the world. They've got to keep coming up one after another. You frighten the population,
terrorize them, intimidated them so that they're too afraid to travel and cower in fear. Then you have
a magnificent victory over Grenada, Panama, or some other defenseless Third World army that you
can pulverize before you even bother to look at them--which is just what happened. That gives
relief. We were saved at the last minute.
That's one of the ways in which you can keep the bewildered herd from paying attention to what's
really going on around them, keep them diverted and controlled. The next one that's coming along,
most likely, will be Cuba. That's going to require a continuation of the illegal economic warfare,
probably a continuation of the extraordinary international terrorism.
The most major international terrorism organized yet has been the Kennedy administration’s
Operation Mongoose, then the things that followed along, against Cuba. There's been nothing
remotely comparable to it except perhaps the war against Nicaragua, if you call that terrorism.
The World Court classified it as something more like aggression. There's always an ideological
offensive that builds up a chimerical monster, then campaigns to have it crushed. You can't go in if
they can fight back. That's much too dangerous. But if you can assure that they will be crushed,
maybe we'll knock that one off and heave another sigh of relief.
This has been going on for quite a while. In May 1986, the memoirs of the released Cuban prisoner,
Armando Vallardares, came out. They quickly became a media sensation. I'll give you a couple of
quotes. The media described his revelations as
"the definitive account of the vast system of torture and prison by which Castro punishes
and obliterates political opposition. It was an inspiring and unforgettable account of the
bestial prisons, inhuman torture, [and] record of state violence under yet another of this
century's mass murderers, who we learn, at last, from this book has created a new despotism
that has institutionalized torture as a mechanism of social control in the hell that was the
Cuba that Valladares lived in." 
That's the Washington Post and New York Times in repeated reviews. Castro was described as
"a dictatorial goon. His atrocities were revealed in this book so conclusively that only the
most light-headed and cold-blooded Western intellectual will come to the tyrant's defense."-
-Washington Post
Remember, this is the account of what happened to one man. Let's say it's all true. Let's raise no
questions about what happened to the one man who says he was tortured. At a White House
ceremony marking Human Rights Day, he was singled out by Ronald Reagan for his courage in
enduring the horrors and sadism of this bloody Cuban tyrant. He was then appointed the U.S.
representative at the UN Human Rights Commission, where he has been able to perform signal
services defending the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments against charges that they conduct
atrocities so massive that they make anything he suffered look pretty minor. That's the way things
stand.
Part
SELECTIVE PERCEPTION
That was May 1986. It was interesting, and it tells you something about the manufacture of consent.
The same month, the surviving members of the Human Rights Group of El Salvador --the leaders
had been killed-- were arrested and tortured, including Herbert Anaya, who was the director. They
were sent to a prison --La Esperanza (hope) Prison. While they were in prison they continued their
human rights work. They were lawyers, [and] they continued taking affidavits. There were 432
prisoners in that prison. They got signed affidavits from 430 of them in which they described, under
oath, the torture that they had received: Electrical torture and other atrocities, including, in one case,
torture by a North American U.S. major in uniform, who is described in some detail.
This is an unusually explicit and comprehensive testimony, probably unique in its detail about
what's going on in a torture chamber. This 160-page report of the prisoners' sworn testimony was
sneaked out of prison, along with a videotape which was taken showing people testifying in prison
about their torture. It was distributed by the Marin County Interfaith Task Force.
The national press refused to cover it. The TV stations refused to run it. There was an article in the
local Marin County Newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, and I think that's all. No one else
would touch it. This was at a time when there were more than a few "light-headed and cold-blooded
Western intellectuals" who were singing the praises of Jose Napolean Duarte and of Ronald
Reagan.
Anaya was not the subject of any tributes. He didn't get on Human Rights Day. He wasn't appointed
to anything. He was released in a prisoner exchange and then assassinated, apparently by the U.S.-
backed security forces. Very little information about that ever appeared. The media never asked
whether exposure of the atrocities--instead of sitting on them and silencing them--might have saved
his life.
This tells you something about the way a well-functioning system of consent manufacturing works.
In comparison with the revelations of Herbert Anaya in El Salvador, Valladare's memoirs are not
even a pea next to the mountain. But you've got your job to do. That takes us towards the next war.
I expect we're going to hear more and more of this, until the next operation takes place.
A few remarks about the last one. Let's finally turn to that. Let me begin with this University of
Massachusetts study that I mentioned before. It has some interesting conclusions. In the study
people were asked whether they thought that the U.S. should intervene with force to reverse illegal
occupation or serious human rights abuses. By about two to one, people in the U.S. thought we
should. We should use force in the case of illegal occupation of land and severe human rights 
abuses.
If the U.S. was to follow that advice, we would bomb El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia,
Damascus, Tel Aviv, Capetown, Turkey, Washington, and whole list of other states. These are all
cases of illegal occupation and aggression and severe human rights abuses. If you know the facts
about that range of examples, which we don't have the time to run through, you'll know very well
that Saddam Hussein's aggression and atrocities fall well within the range; [But] they're not the
most extreme. Why doesn't anybody come to that conclusion?
The reason is that nobody knows. In a well-functioning propaganda system, nobody would know
what I'm talking about when I list that range of examples. If you bother to look, you find that those
examples are quite appropriate.
Take one that was ominously close to being perceived right through this period. In February, right
in the middle of the bombing campaign, the government of Lebanon requested Israel to observe UN
Security Resolution 425, which called on it to withdraw immediately and unconditionally from
Lebanon. That resolution dates from March 1978. There have since been two subsequent
resolutions calling for immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon. Of course it
doesn't observe them because the U.S. backs it in maintaining that occupation.
Meanwhile southern Lebanon is terrorized. There are big torture chambers with horrifying things
going on. It's used as a base for attacking other parts of Lebanon. In the course of these thirteen
years Lebanon was invaded, the city of Beirut was bombed, about 20,000 people were killed, about
80% of them civilians; hospitals were destroyed, and more terror, looting, and robbery was
inflicted. All fine; the U.S. backed it. That's one case.
You didn't see anything in the [U.S.] media about it or any discussion about whether Israel and the
U.S. should observe UN Security Council Resolution 425 or any of the other resolutions, nor did
anyone call for the bombing of Tel Aviv, although by the principles upheld by two-thirds of the
population, we should. After all, that’s illegal occupation and severe human rights abuses. That's
just one case. There are much worse ones. The Indonesian invasion of East Timor knocked off
about 200,000 people. They all look minor by that one. That was strongly backed by the U.S. and is
still going on with major U.S. diplomatic and military support. We can go on and on.
THE GULF WAR
That tells you how a well-functioning propaganda system works. People can believe that when we
use force against Iraq and Kuwait it's because we really observe the principle that illegal occupation
and human rights abuses should be met by force. They don't see what it would mean if those
principles were applied to U.S. behavior. That's a success of propaganda of quite a spectacular type.
Let's take a look at another case. If you look closely at the coverage of the war [against Iraq] since
August [1990], you'll notice that there a couple of striking voices missing. For example, there is an
Iraqi democratic opposition, in fact, a very courageous and quite substantial Iraqi democratic
opposition. They of course function in exile because they couldn't survive in Iraq. They are in
Europe primarily. They are bankers, engineers, architects--people like that. They are articulate, they
have voices, and they speak.
Last February [1990], when Saddam Hussein was still George Bush's favorite friend and trading
partner, they actually came to Washington, according to Iraqi democratic opposition sources, with a
plea for some kind of support for a demand of theirs calling for a parliamentary democracy in Iraq.
They were totally rebuffed, because the U.S. had no interest in it. There was no reaction to this in
the public record. 
Since August [1990] it became a little harder to ignore their existence. In August we suddenly
turned against Saddam Hussein after having favored him for many years. Here was an Iraqi
democratic opposition [that] ought to have some thoughts about the matter. They would be happy to
see Saddam Hussein drawn and quartered. He killed their brothers, tortured their sisters, and drove
them out of the country. They have been fighting against his tyranny throughout the whole time that
Ronald Reagan and George Bush were cherishing him. What about their voices?
Take a look at the national media and see how much you can find about the Iraqi democratic
opposition from August [1990] through March [1991]. You can't find a word. It's not that they're
inarticulate. They have statements, proposals, calls and demands. If you look at them, you find that
they're indistinguishable from those of the American peace movement. They're against Saddam
Hussein and they're against the war against Iraq. They don't want their country destroyed. What
they want is a peaceful resolution, and they knew perfectly well that it was achievable.
That's the wrong view and therefore they're out. We don't hear a word about the Iraqi democratic
opposition. If you want to find out about them, pick up the German press, or the British press. They
don't say much about them, but they're less controlled than we are and they say something.
This is a spectacular achievement of propaganda. First, that the voices of the Iraqi democrats are
completely excluded, and second, that nobody notices it. That's interesting too. It takes a really
deeply indoctrinated population not to notice that we're not hearing the voices of the Iraqi
democratic opposition and not asking the question Why and finding out the obvious answer:
Because the Iraqi democrats have their own thoughts, They agree with the international peace
movement and therefore they're out.
Let's take the question of the reasons for the war. Reasons were offered for the war. The reasons
are: Aggressors cannot be rewarded and aggression must be reversed by the quick resort to
violence. That was the reason for the war. There was basically no other reason advanced.
Can that possibly be the reason for the war? Does the U.S. uphold those principles, that aggressors
cannot be rewarded and that aggression must be reversed by a quick resort to violence? I won't
insult your intelligence by running through the facts, but the fact is those arguments could be
refuted in two minutes by a literate teenager. However, they never were refuted.
Take a look at the media, the liberal commentators and critics, the people who testified in Congress
and see whether anybody questioned the assumption that the U.S. stands up to those principles. Has
the U.S. opposed its own aggression in Panama and insisted on bombing Washington to reverse it?
When the South African occupation of Namibia was declared illegal in 1969, did the U.S. impose
sanctions on food and medicine? Did it go to war? Did it bomb Capetown? No, it carried out twenty
years of "quiet diplomacy."
It wasn't very pretty during those years. In the years of the Reagan-Bush administration alone, about
a million-and-a-half people were killed by South Africa just in the surrounding countries. Forget
what was happening in South Africa and Namibia. Somehow that didn't sear our sensitive souls. We
continued with "quiet diplomacy" and ended up with ample reward for the aggressors. They were
given a major port in Namibia and plenty of advantages that took into account their security
concerns.
Where is this principle that we uphold? Again, it's child's play to demonstrate that those couldn't
possibly have been the reasons for going to war, because we don't uphold these principles. But
nobody did it --that's what's important. And nobody bothered to point out the conclusion that
follows: No reason was given for going to war; none. No reason was given for going to war that
could not be refuted by a literate teenager in about two minutes. That again is the hallmark of a
totalitarian culture. It ought to frighten us, that we are so deeply totalitarian that we can be driven to 
war without any reason being given for it and without anybody noticing it or caring. It's a striking
fact.
Right before the bombing started, in mid-January, a major Washington Post-ABC poll revealed
something interesting. People were asked, "If Iraq would agree to withdraw from Kuwait in return
for Security Council consideration of the problem of Arab-Israeli conflict, would you be in favor of
that?" About two-thirds of the population was in favor of that. So was the whole world, including
the Iraqi democratic opposition. So it was reported that two-thirds of the American population were
in favor of that.
Presumably, the people who were in favor of that thought they were the only ones in the world to
think so. Certainly nobody in the press had said that it would be a good idea. The orders from
Washington have been, we're supposed to be against "linkage," that is, diplomacy, and therefore
everybody goose-stepped on command and everybody was against diplomacy.
Try to find commentary in the press--you can find a column by Alex Cockburn in the Los Angeles
Times [also writes in The Nation and England's New Statesman], who argued that it would be a
good idea.
The people who were answering that question thought, I'm alone, but that's what I think. Suppose
they knew that they weren't alone, that other people thought it, like the Iraqi democratic opposition.
Suppose that they knew that this was not hypothetical, that in fact Iraq had made exactly such an
offer.
It had been released by high U.S. officials just eight to ten days earlier. On January 2, these officials
had released an Iraqi offer to withdraw totally from Kuwait in return for consideration by the
Security Council of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the problem of weapons of mass destruction.
The U.S. had been refusing to negotiate this issue since well before the invasion of Kuwait.
Suppose that people had known that the offer was actually on the table and that it was widely
supported and that in fact it's exactly the kind of thing that any rational person would do if they
were interested in peace, as we do in other cases, in rare cases that we do want to reverse
aggression.
Suppose that it had been known. You can make your own guesses, but I would assume that the two
thirds of the population would probably have risen to 98% of the population. Here you have the
great successes of propaganda. Probably not one person who answered the poll knew any of the
things I've just mentioned. The people thought they were alone. Therefore it was possible to
proceed with the war policy without opposition.
There was a good deal of discussion about whether sanctions would work. You have the head of the
CIA come up and you discuss whether sanctions would work. However, there was no discussion of
a much more obvious question: Had sanctions already worked?
The answer is yes, apparently they had--probably by late August, very likely by late December. It
was very hard to think up any other reason for the Iraqi offers of withdrawal, which were
authenticated or in some cases released by high U.S. officials, who described them as serious and
negotiable.
So the real question is: Had sanctions already worked? Was there a way out? Was there a way
out right now in terms quite acceptable to the general population, the world at large and the
Iraqi democratic opposition?
These questions were not discussed, and it's crucial for a well-functioning propaganda system that
they not be discussed. That enables the Chairman of the Republican National Committee to 
say...that if any Democrat had been in office, Kuwait would not be liberated today. He can say that
and no Democrat would get up and say that if he were President it would have been liberated not
only today but six months ago, because there were opportunities then that he would have pursued
and Kuwait would have been liberated without killing tens of thousands of people and without
causing an environmental catastrophe.
No Democrat would say that because no Democrat took that position. Henry Gonzalez and Barbara
Boxer took that position, but the number of people who took it is so marginal that it's virtually
nonexistent. Given the fact that no Democratic politician would say that, Clayton Yeutter is free to
make his statements.
When Scud missiles hit Israel, nobody in the press applauded. Again, that's an interesting fact about
a well-functioning propaganda system. We might ask, why not? After all, Saddam Hussein's
arguments were as good as George Bush's arguments.
What were they, after all? Let's just take Lebanon. Saddam Hussein says that he can't stand
annexation. He can't stand aggression. Israel has been occupying southern Lebanon for thirteen
years in violation of Security Council resolutions that it refuses to abide by. In the course of that
period it attacked all of Lebanon, still [1991] bombs most of Lebanon at will. he can't stand it.
He might have read the Amnesty International report on Israeli atrocities in the West Bank. His
heart is bleeding. he can't stand it. Sanctions can't work because the U.S. vetoes them. Negotiations
can't work because the U.S. blocks them. What's left but force? He's been waiting for years.
Thirteen years in the case of the West Bank.
You've heard that argument before. The only difference between that argument and the one you
heard is that Saddam Hussein could truly say sanctions and negotiations can't work because the U.S.
blocks them; but George Bush couldn't say that, because sanctions apparently had worked, and
there was every reason to believe that negotiations could work--except that he adamantly refused to
pursue them, saying explicitly, there will be no negotiations right through.
Did you find anybody in the press who pointed that out? No. It's a triviality. It's something that,
again, a literate teenager could figure out in a minute. But nobody pointed it out, no commentator,
no editorial writer. That, again, is the sign of a very well-run totalitarian culture. It shows that the
manufacture of consent is working.
Last comment about this. We could give many examples, you could make them up as you go along.
Take the idea that Saddam Hussein is a monster about to conquer the world--widely believed, in the
U.S., and not unrealistically. It was drilled into people's heads over and over again: He's about to
take everything. We've got to stop him now.
How did he get that powerful? This is a small, Third World country without an industrial base. For
eight years Iraq had been fighting Iran. That's post-revolutionary Iran. It had decimated its officer
corps and most of its military force.
Iraq had a little bit of support in that war. It was backed by the Soviet Union, the U.S., Europe, the
major Arab countries, and the Arab oil producers.
It couldn't defeat Iran. But all of a sudden it's ready to conquer the world. Did you find anybody
who pointed that out?
The fact of the matter is, this was a Third World country with a peasant army. It is now being
conceded that there was a ton of disinformation about the fortifications, the chemical weapons, etc.
But did you find anybody who pointed it out? Virtually nobody.
That's typical. Notice that this was done one year after exactly the same thing was done with 
Manuel Noriega. Manuel Noriega is a minor thug by comparison with George Bush's friend
Saddam Hussein or George Bush himself, for that matter. In comparison with them, Manuel
Noriega is a pretty minor thug. Bad, but not a world class thug of the kind we like. He was turned
into a creature larger than life. He was going to destroy us, leading the narco-traffickers. We had to
quickly move in and smash him, killing a couple hundred or maybe thousand people, restoring to
power the tiny, maybe eight percent white oligarchy, and putting U.S. military officers in control at
every level of the political system.
We had to do all those things because, after all, we had to save ourselves or we were going to
be destroyed by this monster. One year later the same thing was done by Saddam Hussein. Did
anybody point it out? Did anybody point out what had happened and why? You'll have to look
pretty far for that.
Notice that this is not all that different from what the Creel Commission did in 1916-17, when
within six months it had turned a pacifistic population into raving hysterics who wanted to destroy
everything German to save ourselves from Huns who were tearing the arms off Belgian babes. The
techniques are maybe more sophisticated, with television and lots of money going into it, but it's
pretty traditional.
I think the issue, to come back to my original comment, is not simply disinformation and the Gulf
crisis. The issue is much broader. It's whether we want to live in a free society or whether we want
to live under what amounts to a form of self-imposed totalitarianism, with the bewildered herd
marginalized, directed elsewhere, terrified, screaming patriotic slogans, fearing for their lives and
admiring with awe the leader who saved them from destruction while the educated masses goosestep on command, 
repeat the slogans they're supposed to repeat, the society deteriorates at home,
we end up serving as a mercenary enforcer state, hoping that others are going to pay us to smash up
the world.
Those are the choices. That's the choice that you have to face. The answer to those questions is very
much in the hands of people exactly like you and me. 
category:Pre Second Cold War