The Daily Grasshopper

There's an editorial in the Boston Sunday Globe about the guy I mentioned the other day who was arrested in New York for "trespassing" in a mall (he was wearing a "Give Peace a Chance" T-shirt). Here's how the Globe editorial concludes:

"With the country apparently headed for a new period of divisiveness, citizens have to win back a forum for the free expression of ideas."

The "forum" the Globe's editors refer to here is public areas, such as malls, where people can no longer engage in basic First Amendment-sanctioned activities: "speeches, gatherings, leafleting, picketing, and the signing of petitions." You can read the entire editorial here:

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/068/editorials/MALL_PALL+.shtml

There is another important forum for the "free expression of ideas," one with which the Globe's editors ought to be much more familiar: the daily newspaper. This forum, too, needs to be "won back" - as I've been trying to point out for many weeks now. There is a limit as to what can be "freely expressed," even in such "liberal" newspapers as the Boston Globe and the New York Times. This fact is not lost on some of the people who write for these papers, either. Check out this shocking confession from Thomas Oliphant, a sort of left-leaning centrist, who writes a regular column in the Globe. He's a "Washington observer" kind of columnist, writing about Beltway goings-on. Here's what he had to say about newspapers as a "forum for the free expression of ideas" in his column (from the op-ed page, so called because it appears "opposite the editorials"):

"North Korea is light years ahead of Iraq in its nuclear ambitions, and no less dangerous as a rogue state with aggression-minded, brutal leadership. America cannot answer the question of why it would put the more advanced nuclear threat on the back-burner for now and attack the country with no known vestiges of a program. The real reason - that Iraq is the chosen priority for reasons that have nothing to do with unconventional weapons - is too impolitic to state publicly."

Isn't that incredible? Here we are, literally poised on the edge of what could turn out to be a global catastrophe, and there is a reporter admitting that the media won't talk about the real motives behind our planned invasion of Iraq ("reasons that have nothing to do with unconventional weapons") because that would seem "impolitic." There is a word for this, and it's plain and simple: complicity. The people who are supposed to be asking tough questions of people in power are more concerned with how "politic" they appear than with getting to the bottom of what's going on.

You can read Oliphant's article here:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/068/oped/How_Bush_fudges_the_N_arms_issue+.shtml

Fortunately, there are many journalists who, unlike Oliphant and his colleagues at the Globe, don't concern themselves with appearing "impolitic." Like the reporters and editors at the San Francisco Chronicle who wrote last week about the fact that Dick Cheney's old friends at Halliburton have already nailed down their first (of many, no doubt) post-invasion Iraq contract:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0308-05.htm

For those who don't like to link (the article is permanently archived at the Common Dreams site):

The Houston company is a respected name in petroleum industry construction and one of a few companies capable of large-scale oil field reconstruction. But its ties to Cheney arouse suspicions among those who believe that a primary motive for a U.S. war in Iraq is oil.

'I certainly don't think this comes as much of a surprise," said Michael Renner, a researcher at WorldWatch Institute, commenting on the Halliburton contract, 'There are lots of business opportunities embedded in this war. It represents the larger oil and energy issues at stake.'

The White House wouldn't comment on how the contract might fuel such suspicions. 'I deal with the reality of situations,' said spokesman Ken Lisaius. "The president has made it abundantly clear about the threat that Saddam Hussein poses to us and our friends. We stand by to help rebuild a liberated Iraq.'"

The "oil and energy" issues are the ones that Globe columnist Oliphant alludes to as the "reasons" we are invading, which, of course, are too "impolitic" to be stated publicly. But the Globe likes to think of itself as a "forum for the free expression of ideas," which is why, for several months now, the back page of the Boston Sunday Globe's "Ideas" section has been reserved for the "Thinking Big" feature - a full page devoted to opposing viewpoints on an individual topic. In yesterday's paper, the subject was "The propaganda wars." The subhead for the title reads: "In the psychological struggle, nations wield their weapons of mass persuasion."

What I found interesting about the two articles, one by Harper's Magazine publisher John MacArthur and the other by author and history professor Allan Winkler, is their common assumption. Both MacArthur and Winkler agree that propaganda plays an important role in mobilizing U.S. opinion for war. MacArthur worries about the effects of propaganda in a supposedly democratic society: it "breeds contempt for the old-fashioned notion that politicians required the informed consent of the people before they go to war." Winkler is much more sanguine about the practice: "The government's effort to orchestrate public opinion today faces daunting challenges, but challenges that cannot be ignored."

You should read the articles in their entirety. MacArthur's features an informative chronicle of the lies told by both Bush administrations in the run-up to their Persian Gulf wars. Winkler introduces readers to George Creel, and the "Committee on Public Information," whose job was every bit as Orwellian as the name implies. Unfortunately, the articles aren't on the Globe website, so I can't give you links to them.

But, again, notice that despite the fact that this is a forum for debating opposing viewpoints, nowhere is the idea raised that propaganda doesn't play a role in shaping how we think. That's taken for granted by both MacArthur and Winkler. I think this is pretty significant. If you were to go into the street right now, and ask 100 average Americans if they're being subjected to government propaganda whose objective is to "orchestrate public opinion," how many would say 'Yes'? My guess is that it would be very few. This is the land of the free, right? No propaganda required. We do whatever we want to do.

Well, I'll agree that this isn't Soviet Russia. There's no "Pravda" newspaper in the U.S., telling people what the "party line" is. But both sides concur - there is a lot of propaganda out there. Where is it coming from? It's coming from the mainstream media - the people who take the Bush administration's lies (and the Clinton administration's lies before them) at face value, for fear of being seen as "impolitic." As MacArthur points out:

"The media are partly to blame; they have been so slow in refuting administration doubletalk that Karl Rove can count on a fairly long interval between propaganda declaration and contradiction or bet that the contradiction will be so muted as to be insignificant."

It was not for nothing that I chose to call my very first essay "They're Lying to Us Again" (http://www.netway.com/~pkeaney/010303intro.html). In a democracy, the role of the media is to hold leaders accountable - to investigate the truth behind what they say, the reality behind the rhetoric. After the president's State of the Union address, I lamented the fact that the following day the New York Times offered a word-for-word transcript of the speech, but no analysis or investigation to show how much of it bore any resemblance to reality. The press has literally abandoned the field. It gets extreme when you start talking about FOX News and talk radio shows. Not only are these people not questioning the powerful, they're lining right up with them and bashing anyone who dares to ask questions.

MacArthur concludes his piece with an excerpt from a quote from Herman Goering, Hitler's second in command, that has been making the rounds on the Internet ever since Sept. 11, 2001. I've included the whole quote, from Goering's testimony at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal:

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

And it apparently works just as well in 2003 as it did in 1939.