11

How Mythologies Are Manufactured

In his unpublished preface to Animal Farm, George Orwell made astute observations about how censorship of “unpopular ideas” can occur even where there is broad freedom of speech. Orwell is today famous for his critique of the way thought is controlled by force in totalitarian dystopias. His useful discussion of free societies is less known. In such societies, he says, censorship is not coerced by the state. Yet it nevertheless exists, and is effective at silencing those who dissent from “prevailing orthodoxy.” Explaining how it works, Orwell cited the internalization of the values of subordination and conformity, and the control of the press by “wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics.”[1]

Orwell was perceptive about how a democratic society could nevertheless produce intellectual conformity and stifle unpopular views. The press can be free in the sense that the government does not interfere with it. But if those who own the press choose not to elevate certain viewpoints, those viewpoints stand little chance of reaching the public. Those kinds of choices are made every day, and we can rationally expect information to reflect the biases and interests of those who own the media. Philosopher John Dewey identified a similar mechanism. Speaking of “our un-free press,” he observed the “necessary effect of the present economic system upon the whole system of publicity; upon the judgment of what news is, upon the selection and elimination of matter that is published, upon the treatment of news in both editorial and news columns.” We should ask “how far genuine intellectual freedom and social responsibility are possible on any large scale under the existing economic regime.”[2] (Not far, he thought.)

The United States is a remarkably free country when it comes to what it is legally permissible to say. Nevertheless, the mechanisms described by Orwell still operate, and shape what is actually heard and read. The major media corporations are not uniform in the views they present, nor do they reflexively endorse all state policies, but they do reliably reflect the assumptions and viewpoints of U.S. elites. They contain spirited criticism and debate, but only in line with a system of presuppositions and principles. These constitute a powerful elite consensus, which the individual actors have internalized mostly without conscious awareness.

One such unstated assumption, ubiquitous in U.S. political discourse, is the view that the United States has an inherent right to dominate the rest of the world. In fact, leading liberal commentator Matthew Yglesias calls this an “uncontroversial premise,” and says that outside of a few fringe “left-wing intellectuals,” the U.S. right to rule is considered axiomatic. “The United States has been the number one power in the world throughout my entire lifetime,” he says, and “the notion that this state of affairs is desirable and ought to persist is one of the least controversial things you could say in American politics today.” Yglesias himself accepts the premise, seeing no need to argue for it because it is so uncontroversial. He might have added that not only does no “elected official” challenge the view, but it is hardly ever challenged in the U.S. media. Even when there are debates over the wisdom of U.S. uses of force, rarely is any question raised of whether the U.S. has the right to use force.[3]

Take Iraq. Once the invasion of Iraq began to produce an out-of-control bloodbath, there was plenty of criticism of the war in the U.S. media. But as Anthony DiMaggio documents in a useful study of media coverage of the “war on terror,” criticisms from mainstream liberal commentators focused on whether the war was being waged effectively, not whether the war was legitimate in the first place. Bob Herbert of The New York Times described the war as “mismanaged,” “not sustainable,” and “unwinnable,” with “no coherent strategy.” The editors of the Los Angeles Times criticized a “terribly botched occupation,” the botching rather than the occupation being the problem. Paul Begala, the Democratic strategist, said Bush “didn’t have enough troops” in the country. DiMaggio observes that these seemingly “anti-war” criticisms are in fact pro-war criticisms, because they highlight “military errors that, if corrected, might contribute to a more smoothly functioning occupation and war effort.” But, DiMaggio asks, “if the war is imperial and immoral, designed to secure control over oil rather than promote democracy, then why attack the administration for not effectively fighting it? Why complain that the war is ‘unwinnable’ or ‘mismanaged’ when Americans should not be trying to ‘win’ or ‘manage’ a repressive imperial war in the first place?”[4]

It is permissible to suggest that the United States has made mistakes in attempting to achieve its goals, but there is no debate about the goals. So, for example, The New York Times, in an editorial assessing the Vietnam War after its conclusion, defined the scope of the debate. “There are those Americans,” the Times wrote, “who believe the war…could have been waged differently,” while others believe that “a viable non-Communist south Vietnam was always a myth.” The “ongoing quarrel,” they say, has not been resolved. The hawks said we could have won. The doves said we couldn’t. A debate on these grounds can be had.[5]

The words “misguided,” “tragic,” and “error” recur in commentary. But what of another possible position: one that asserts that the United States had no legal or moral right to intervene in Vietnam to begin with. The U.S. did not “hope that the people of South Vietnam would be able to decide on their own form of government,” but prevented democracy from breaking out. It had no right to support France’s attempt to reconquer the country, or to violate the 1954 Geneva Accord and oppose the reunification of Vietnam through elections. The question “Could we have won?” is debated in the press, while the correct ones—“Did we have the right to try?” “Were we engaged in criminal aggression?” and “When will there be war crimes trials for those who waged an illegal war of aggression?”—are not. These questions are excluded from the debate, for which the Times sets the ground rules.

Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, gives expression to the dominant view in Foreign Policy, writing that the “one constant” in our history is that “presidents frequently make oversights, miscalculations, and even egregious mistakes in handling national security.” Oversights. Miscalculations. Mistakes. The ends are not questioned. Only the means of achieving them, which might be reckless. One can go through the history of U.S. wars and see similarly narrow disputes over tactics that presume the legitimacy of U.S. global power. The spectrum runs from those who argue the war is being waged successfully to those who regard it as mismanaged. (This is the same spectrum of debate that exists in Russia around the war in Ukraine. There is harsh criticism of Putin for not prosecuting the war effectively, but not for waging it in the first place.) It is wrong to think that debates over whether a war is winnable or a blunder are actually debates about the war itself. After all, even Hitler’s generals could have criticized his war for its mistakes; that is, its failure to achieve the desired objectives. They could have done so with no less fanatical a commitment to Nazism than the Führer himself. In the German case, we recognize that strategic criticisms are not criticisms of the underlying objective; in fact, they are premised upon support of it. Yet in the United States, much passes for criticism of our foreign policy that is in fact mere strategic criticism, accepting the bipartisan consensus that the United States is constitutionally incapable of committing crimes.[6]

The kind of liberal “dovishness”—questioning tactics but not goals—could be found in the press as the U.S.-backed Contras were terrorizing Nicaragua in the 1980s. The Washington Post, for example, criticized support for the Contras on tactical grounds. The fact that Nicaragua was a Soviet-style menace requiring confrontation was “a given.” Echoing the Reagan administration, the paper’s editorial board considered the Sandinistas “a serious menace—to civil peace and democracy in Nicaragua and to the stability and security of the region,” and agreed that we must “contain…the Sandinistas’ aggressive thrust.” But they felt that the “contra force is not a useful instrument to bring to bear.” It was not the “best available way” to undermine the Nicaraguan government. The legitimacy of our use of force was simply not up for discussion.[7]

The Afghanistan war gave rise to the same kinds of concerns among liberal critics. MSNBC is considered a liberal network, supportive of the Democratic Party. Rachel Maddow, for a long time its leading host (and a self-described “national security liberal”), was plenty critical of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. But on tactical grounds. Maddow concluded that “if you believe that our actions, our American actions in 2010 cannot make it more likely…that there’s a real government in Afghanistan, then asking Americans to die in Afghanistan is wrong.” In other words, the moral considerations center on the likelihood of our success, not the rights of Afghans.[8]

When U.S. wars are over, there is virtually no national self-examination, except over whether the wars were blunders. As we have seen, popular narratives about the Vietnam War are exemplified by Ken Burns’s description that it was “begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation.” As the carnage escalated in Iraq, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times wrote that “Iraqis are paying a horrendous price for the good intentions of well-meaning conservatives who wanted to liberate them.”[9]

As U.S. media critics Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi observe, the media’s retrospective characterization of the United States’ uses of force is that they were “unpleasant, imperfect, mistaken, but ultimately incidental by-products of a noble and righteous empire that, above all, meant well.” They show that once our wars become unpopular, “a cottage industry of punditry and pseudo-history emerges,” pushing the ideas that “it was an accident, they were mistaken, they had bad intelligence, they were driven by concerns for freedom and democracy.” Johnson and Shirazi liken the situation to a lawyer trying to get a client convicted of manslaughter instead of first-degree murder, which is necessary because in U.S. mythology, enemy states are “Bond villains” who do evil things, while we are innocent do-gooders.[10]

Many crucial issues and questions are simply not raised. Afghanistan and Iraq have all but disappeared from view. When we read that the United States has conducted a drone strike in Iraq, we are not told that the Iraqi government vigorously objected to the violation of its sovereignty, and there is no debate on the matter. Countries suffering from the long-term effects of our “interventions,” from Haiti to Laos, are covered superficially or not at all. The “unpeople” of the world might as well not exist.[11]

TERRORISM: ANATOMY OF A PROPAGANDA CONCEPT

In City of God, St. Augustine recounts the story of Alexander the Great meeting a pirate. Alexander confronted the pirate, asking him why he felt entitled to “hostile possession of the sea.” The pirate responded with “bold pride”: “What do you mean by seizing the whole earth? Because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor.” Identical behavior can get one labeled a pirate or a great emperor.

For an obvious example of unstated ideological assumptions in U.S. political discourse, we can look at uses of the word “terrorism.” Terrorism is defined by the Department of Defense as “the unlawful use of violence or threat of violence, often motivated by religious, political, or other ideological beliefs, to instill fear and coerce governments or societies in pursuit of goals that are usually political.” This definition is unusable, however, because it is immediately obvious that it would render the United States a terrorist state. George W. Bush, who unlawfully used violence, motivated by ideological beliefs, to coerce societies in pursuit of political goals, would indisputably be one of the world’s leading terrorists. Likewise the respected statesman Henry Kissinger and the Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama.

There are other official definitions.[12] None of them are ever actually used in U.S. political discourse, because each of them leads to the same conclusion: respected American political figures are terrorists. Lyndon Johnson was a terrorist. Richard Nixon was certainly a terrorist when he launched the “Christmas bombings” (Operation Linebacker II) in 1972, dispatching two hundred B-52 bombers to drop twenty thousand tons of bombs on North Vietnam. The bombings were intended to force the North Vietnamese to come back to the negotiating table, even though they had only left after the Nixon administration scuttled its own prior offer.[13] The bombings destroyed the Bạch Mai hospital, killing dozens of staff, and leaving “medical and pharmaceutical books…strewn all over a mass of torn iron, fractured concrete beams and broken walls.” “They’re going to be so god damned surprised,” Richard Nixon had said as he launched the attack.[14]

Even a cursory examination of how the word “terrorism” is actually used in the United States reveals, therefore, that there is an implicit premise: terrorism is, by definition, something done to us or our allies. It cannot be done by us or our allies. The idea of terrorism by the U.S. is doctrinally inadmissible, regardless of the facts.

The United States currently designates Cuba, for instance, as one of a small number of “state sponsors of terror.” In fact, the U.S. is responsible for decades of terrorism against Cuba. (Cuba was briefly removed from the list by Barack Obama, then added back on under Donald Trump. Joe Biden has so far kept Cuba on the list, despite the fact that the groundless terror list designation “creates additional obstacles to delivering humanitarian aid at a time when the country is grappling with shortages of basic goods and medical supplies.”) The United States also refuses to extradite those who have terrorized other countries, including accused criminals from Haiti and Cuba. Under the Bush-era principle that countries “harboring” terrorists may be violently attacked, the Haitian and Cuban governments could legitimately begin bombing Washington.[15]

The Washington Post accused Vladimir Putin of “aerial terrorism” over missile attacks on Ukraine, describing it as “terror bombing.” When Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists downed a civilian airliner (recklessly, but seemingly not deliberately), Hillary Clinton was quick to call it an act of “terrorism.” But we can note what is not terrorism: the U.S. “shock and awe” bombing campaign in Iraq, or the U.S. downing of an Iranian civilian airliner (also reckless but seemingly not deliberate), or the Dresden-like decimation of Gaza.[16] “Terrorism” never includes a bombardier on a B-52 mission over Indochina wiping out entire villages, nor the higher authorities who authorize the attack.

Flicking through the history of the last half century, we find example after example. Attacks by Palestinians on Israeli civilians are reported in the U.S. press as “terrorist attacks.” Attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers? These are simply “cases of settler violence.” When the Nicaraguan Contras were directed by their CIA and Pentagon commanders to attack civilian targets, New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, at the liberal end of mainstream commentary, argued that we should not be too quick to dismiss the justifications for terrorist attacks: a “sensible policy” must “meet the test of cost-benefit analysis,” measuring “the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end.” It is understood that U.S. elites have the right to conduct the analysis and pursue the project if it passes their tests.[17]

In 1986, disabled American Leon Klinghoffer was murdered by Palestinian Liberation Front members on the hijacked cruise ship Achille Lauro. The murder “seemed to set a standard for remorselessness among terrorists,” senior New York Times correspondent John Burns wrote, capturing the general horror at a despicable crime. Yet no such standard is set by many similar cases, such as when British reporters found “the flattened remains of a wheelchair” in the remnants of the Jenin refugee camp after Ariel Sharon’s spring 2002 offensive. “It had been utterly crushed, ironed flat as if in a cartoon,” they reported: “In the middle of the debris lay a broken white flag” held by a disabled Palestinian, Kemal Zughayer, who “was shot dead as he tried to wheel himself up the road. The Israeli tanks must have driven over the body, because when [a friend] found it, one leg and both arms were missing, and the face, he said, had been ripped in two.” Another act of un-terror, which does not enter the annals of terrorism along with Leon Klinghoffer. His murder was not under the command of a “monster,” but rather a “man of peace,” as Ariel Sharon was called by George W. Bush.[18]

The word has no place in honest discourse. And yet we find it used casually over and over. “We must recognize,” communications scholar Michael Stohl observes, “that by convention” the use of force by great powers is “normally described as coercive diplomacy and not as a form of terrorism,” though it commonly involves “the threat and often the use of violence for what would be described as terroristic purposes were it not great powers who were pursuing the very same tactic.” Only one qualification must be added: the term “great powers” must be restricted to favored states; in the “conventions” under discussion, Russia is granted no such rhetorical license.[19]

The unprincipled use of the term “terrorism” is just one example of how violence done by official enemies is evaluated differently than comparable acts of violence done by the United States and its allies. The media has an implicit hierarchy of victims, in which some are considered worthier of attention than others. Newsday editor Anthony Marro admitted in the context of the Iraq War that “we pay more attention to Americans’ deaths” than the deaths of Iraqis. Once the Ukraine war started, reporters were remarkably open in treating its victims as more human than those of other conflicts. A CBS correspondent described the horror of seeing conflict unfold in “a relatively civilized, relatively European” place where you “wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”[20]

Coverage also varies according to who was doing the killing and where the United States itself stood in the conflict. In the 1980s, the killing of Polish priest Jerzy Popiełuszko by communists created a flurry of U.S. media attention. The murder of Salvadoran priest Óscar Romero, an opponent of U.S. support for the dictatorship, attracted far less. These kinds of paired examples reveal a systematic pattern of bias.[21]

Since 1986, the media watchdog agency Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has carefully monitored the U.S. press for examples of such bias. Their case studies offer conclusive evidence that Washington’s foreign policy consensus is reflected in mainstream media coverage. A few of their findings:

There is plenty of evidence of how nationalistic biases and reliance on government sources warp U.S. media coverage of foreign conflicts. Take, for instance, The New York Times’s coverage of China, a U.S. competitor. “Chinese aggression” is treated as an established fact in the U.S. press,[31] with “U.S. aggression” considered impossible. In a story entitled “China Sends Spy Balloons over Military Sites Worldwide, U.S. Officials Say,” we read that “American intelligence agencies have assessed that China’s spy balloon program is part of a global surveillance effort that is designed to collect information on the military capabilities of countries around the world.” The article quotes an expert claiming China has “violated the sovereignty of countries across five continents” with its spying program.

But for an honest press, there would be an obvious and important context to discuss, namely: What spying programs does the United States carry out against China? After all, in order to evaluate whether China’s behavior is especially nefarious, we have to know whether it is behavior we claim the right to engage in ourselves. As foreign policy scholar Van Jackson explains, U.S. espionage in China has been far more serious than the Chinese balloon that floated briefly over the United States before being shot down. In fact, in 2010, the Chinese leadership “discovered that the CIA had extremely high-level human intelligence plants in the party apparatus, including in security and intelligence ministries.” It saw this U.S. infiltration “as an extreme threat to regime security,” which led to a “huge acceleration in Chinese assertiveness.” Jackson finds it strange that “nobody in American foreign policy talks about the fact that China stumbled on to the CIA having infiltrated them at the highest levels. Talk about surveillance, we’re worried about a balloon!”[32]

The selection of topics is also critical. Some are simply not covered and therefore go undiscussed. For instance, the media’s coverage of the war in Ukraine has been extensive, with endless sympathetic profiles of Ukrainian fighters and civilian victims appearing in The New York Times. There is no comparable coverage of Yemeni victims of Saudi aggression, Kurdish victims of Turkish aggression, or Iraqi victims of U.S. aggression. Palestinian victims of Israeli violence receive vastly less coverage than Israeli victims of Palestinian violence. The value of a life is not determined objectively (with all persons treated equally) but in accordance with the priorities of U.S. foreign policy.[33]

THE LANGUAGE OF PROPAGANDA

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell wrote of how “defense of the indefensible” becomes possible through euphemism. The bombardment of vulnerable villages may be called “pacification.” Robbing peasants of their land and driving them away might be called “transfer of population.” Misdeeds are cloaked in vague, pleasant phrases, a practice that is “needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” To make any sense of political discourse, therefore, we must continually translate it into plain English. The choice of terminology distorts the framework of thought, so that it is difficult to understand what is happening or talk about matters of human significance in a coherent way.[34]

One could draw up a glossary of propaganda, decoding Orwellian expressions found in U.S. political discourse. Foreign policy in particular is a domain where horrors are concealed beneath anodyne terminology. We have already seen how the word “terrorism” is used opportunistically rather than in accordance with a neutral definition. Sometimes words are used to soften our actions (“detained” for imprisoned, “enhanced interrogation” for torture, “lethal aid” for cluster bombs, etc.). A “deterrence posture” refers to the way in which violent annihilation is threatened. Words like “equilibrium” and “stability” are used as euphemisms for the maintenance of American power positions. “We were determined to seek stability,” one scholar wrote, through “our efforts to destabilize a freely elected Marxist government in Chile.” The inconsistency disappears when we realize that “stability” means “support for U.S. interests.”[35]

Notice that Russia has “oligarchs,” while the same class of people in the United States are described as “businessmen.” We can similarly be on guard for selective uses of the term “dictator.” The phrase “security” does not refer to the security of the population; rather to the security of the “principal architects of policy”—in Adam Smith’s day, “merchants and manufacturers,” in ours, megacorporations and great financial institutions, nourished by the states they largely dominate. When Western states and intellectuals use the term “international community,” they are referring to themselves. For example, NATO’s bombing of Serbia was undertaken by the “international community” according to consistent Western rhetoric, although those who did not have their heads buried in the sand knew that it was opposed by most of the world, often quite vocally. Those who do not support the actions of wealth and power are not part of “the global community.”[36]

In a highly unequal society, bias toward the interests of the American domestic elite is not the product of a conscious conspiracy. Rather, as Edward Herman explained, it “is built into the structure of the system, and flows naturally and easily from the assorted ownership, sponsor, governmental and other interest group pressures that set limits within which media personnel can operate, and from the nature of the sources on which the media depend for their steady flow of news.” Journalists do not conspire to censor themselves. They are usually perfectly sincere and committed to their work. They may believe what they say, but if they held different beliefs, they wouldn’t be in their positions.[37]

Those who step outside the limits will swiftly find out how discourse is kept within certain narrow confines. Phil Donahue despite robust ratings, was fired from his job as an MSNBC host in 2003 because he questioned the Iraq invasion. Network executives felt he would present a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” Chris Hedges recounts that at The New York Times, after he issued “warnings in public forums about the chaos and bloodbath” the Iraq invasion would trigger, he was formally reprimanded, while another reporter who supported the invasion was not.[38]

“I think the press was muzzled and I think the press self-muzzled,” said CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. She admitted that “certainly television—and perhaps to a certain extent my station—was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News,” and there was “a climate of fear and self-censorship in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did.” New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller was frank about the lack of interest in asking difficult questions of the government. “We were very deferential,” she says, because “it’s frightening to stand up there…on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country’s about to go to war…. No one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.”[39]

CBS’s Dan Rather was similarly honest in admitting that he was incapable of producing coverage untainted by nationalism.

Look, I’m an American. I never tried to kid anybody that I’m some internationalist or something. And when my country is at war, I want my country to win, whatever the definition of “win” may be. Now, I can’t and don’t argue that that is coverage without a prejudice. About that I am prejudiced.[40]

Some have forcefully defended their work. Judith Miller, who produced the most infamous New York Times articles that repeated false government claims in the lead-up to the Iraq War, says that the role of a Times journalist is to uncritically repeat government propaganda: “My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself…. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.” Readers are, presumably, supposed to become “independent intelligence analysts” themselves if they hope to discover the truth.[41]

There has nevertheless been some self-reflection among journalists since the debacle of the Iraq War, focusing in particular on the question of whether reporters should repeat the claims of anonymous government sources. But over a decade later, anonymous sources were still in heavy use, with the phrase “intelligence and military officials said” appearing in newspapers as a synonym for “is true.” Cable news guests often have direct ties to the military-industrial complex. Opinions remain confined within a narrow range; the same mechanisms that silenced Phil Donahue in 2003 continue to operate.[42]

Propaganda is to a democracy as the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. In his “First Principles of Government,” David Hume observed that the rulers must ultimately rely on controlling thought: “It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.” If rulers are to remain in power, they must keep public opinion on their side. In a dictatorship, opinion can partly be controlled by throwing dissidents in jail. In a relatively free and democratic society, thought control operates differently.[43]

The U.S. press has helped the state manufacture new enemies. In case after case, we see the U.S. media reinforcing and spreading the basic doctrines of U.S. foreign policy, portraying our aggression and terror as self-defense and dedication to inspiring visions. Our current adversaries are portrayed as diabolical and bent on our destruction. Our prior wrongdoing is consigned to the memory hole or recast as another “noble mistake.” As Harold Pinter argued in his Nobel Literature Prize address: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.” It’s as if, he said, “it never happened,” and “even while it was happening it wasn’t happening.” The U.S., he says, “has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.”[44]

We have so much information and yet we know so little. The internet has allowed for the rise of alternative channels of information and somewhat shaken the monopoly of corporate media, but the platforms through which information is spread are still operated in the interest of corporate profit. As a result, it is still the case that the general public doesn’t know much about what’s happening in the world, and doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know. A genuinely democratic media, operated in the interest of the public, could change this, and there are proposals for how one could be built. Until then, consumers of media should remember that their lack of knowledge is an important part of what allows the powerful to maintain their position.[45]