or the sake of clarity and convenience, this book divides Media and Politics into separate chapters—but the point of the book is that they are inseparable.
Nothing better illustrates that point than the story of a little book called Counter-Revolutionary Violence.
In 1973, Claude McCaleb, publisher of Warner Modular books, decided that Watergate was merely a symptom of America’s overall deterioration, so he planned to publish a series of books exploring his idea. One of the books in the series was an ornery little book called Counter-Revolutionary Violence—written by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman: “Their thesis was that the United States, in attempting to suppress revolutionary movements in underdeveloped countries, had become the leading source of violence against native people.” (The Media Monopoly—Ben H. Bagdikian)
When William Sarnoff, the president of all Warner books…
Let us pause momentarily for station identification: Warner Modular books (which was preparing to publish the Little Book) was a subsidiary of Warner Publications (which was a subsidiary of Warner Communications) (which owned factories in West Germany and Brazil and had “considerable interests” in books, movies, broadcasting, video games, and Richard Nixon).
When William Sarnoff, the president of all Warner books, learned that a company under his spiritual guidance was preparing to advertise, print, and publish the Chomsky-Herman book, he brutally chewed out Mr. McCaleb, canceled the ads, ordered the destruction of the catalogues announcing the book, halted the printing, and destroyed any books that had been printed.
Freedom of speech doesn’t have a chance against Politics, Media, & Money.
When you hear the report of the day’s news,
When Chomsky explains what the media leaves out, suddenly the news-of-the-day makes perfect sense. Sometimes the media leaves out specific things (we’ll get to those later), but even more insidious (because it affects the way we see everything), they leave out entire concepts, without which our world makes no sense. One of the concepts that has been pretended out of existence by our media is the reality that the We stern “Democracies” (America included) are still divided into the Royalty and the Peasants, the Rulers and the Ruled…
In place of that reality, they feed us…
There is a body of folklore that reaches all the way back through our history, about America being a country where people are not separated into social and economic classes, a place where everyone is truly free and equal. (If you believe that, there’s a big white house in Washington, DC we’d like to sell you.) Once we had kings; before that we may have had packleaders. The layers of social classes included peasants, merchants, landed gentry, nobles, aristocracy and royalty. Today we have presidents, prime ministers, dictators, managers, officers, owners. Only the names have changed. No matter what you call it, the world is still divided into Us and Them.
What should we call today's rulers? Think about that for a moment while we give America credit for the good place that it thought about becoming…
In the U.S. since the ‘60s, the trend has been a shrinking middle class, wealth concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, and a general decrease in economic prosperity and quality of life for the vast majority. Those who drop from the middle class are forced to tighten their belts drastically, but for the growing underclass of people who are no longer participants in the economic system, it means a brutal struggle for day-to-day survival.
It is no longer possible to pretend we are a classless society. Holding on to such symbols is choosing to be blind.
So what do we call today’s rulers? They may not be genealogical heirs to yesterday’s aristocracy (though in many cases they are), but they are certainly the historical heirs of the aristocracies. And they intend to rule.
To many, the phrase “ruling class” would sound too much like Marxism or, God forbid, communism. Whatever you call them, today’s rulers get very nervous when you shine a flashlight on them. They know the power of the media. Some people prefer to think there are no rulers and to put the question out of their minds. But if it has crossed your mind that perhaps all Americans are not equal -- not before the law and certainly not in terms of the benefits we receive from the government -- then you have already recognized that there are ranks in society.
They are investment bankers, boards of directors, government officeholders. The center of world power is in America, but it is the aristocracy of the modern world. The insiders operate mostly in secret while orchestrating distracting movements on the stage of politics. They are extremely powerful and extremely skilled at what they do.
But they are not all-powerful. They are only human.
In the dictatorships of the third world, the rulers can do practically whatever they please. But inside the U.S. there is still a large measure of personal freedom. The rulers are a tiny minority. What they fear most is that the sleeping giant, the public—the people—will wake up and take control of what Orwell called “the space between the ears” and actually use the power it doesn’t know it has. That’s why the rulers put so much effort and money into propaganda.
They know if the public ever gets hip to their game, they are finished.
As large and overwhelming as the system of control is, it is created by human beings and is not omnipotent. It grows naturally from the logic of history, from the time when aristocracies dominated, and from the state/business partnerships of colonialism.
And from greed.
Welfare for the Rich
The Hoax Of The Free Market System
In America “The Free Market System” is treated as a sacred principle. All economic problems are said to be cured by the functioning of the “free market” which, through natural competition, will cause the best products and the best prices to prevail for the betterment of all. The free market always makes the best choices and will fashion the most perfect society. But a closer look at how the economic system functions, who pays the taxes and how tax money is spent, who gets subsidized and who doesn’t, reveals that the free market system is only a theory—it does not exist in reality.
In its place, a complex system of tax laws, government manipulation of public money, regulations, and various other magic tricks insure that certain businesses will thrive regardless of whether the free market will support them or not.
In other words, the free-market system is a hoax.
The U.S. economy, to put it bluntly, is rigged.
The idea of the free market is fine for economics textbooks and for hyping the masses, but real planners have not taken it seriously for a long time. That’s why the government subsidizes certain industries. But it is not done openly. The subsidies, often massive, are disguised in various ways, mostly through “defense” programs, which take half of every tax dollar; also through subtleties in the tax structure that channel the tax money where the masters want it to go.
Welfare for the Rich—How It Works
During his first year in office, Clinton spoke to workers at the Boeing Company, telling the “cheering throng” that Boeing “is a model for companies across America” and the prime example of the “new vision of American relations with Asia,” where “China alone now buys one of every six of [Boeing’s] planes.” At the same time Clinton announced a decision to sell Cray supercomputers to China in violation of congressional legislation. [NCZM]
The examples Clinton used to celebrate the success of the free market system are laughable. The aircraft and computer industries were founded (and still rely) on huge taxpayer subsidies—Welfare for the Rich. Boeing and Cray supercomputers would be lucky to survive if it weren’t for enormous government subsidies. Agriculture is also protected and subsidized. High technology industries have been funded through the Pentagon’s generous Welfare System since the late 1940s.
Since World War Two, there has been a program of suburbanizing America that, says Chomsky, The Federal Highway Acts of 1944, 1956, and 1968, funneled billions of taxpayer dollars into a national highway system that was the brainchild of Alfred Sloan, chairman of GM. It made the American economy dependent on gasoline-powered transportation and gave the oil industry a virtual energy monopoly. This dependency would lead eventually to events like the Gulf War, in which hundreds of thousands of lraquis were killed to ensure U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil.
“Under the cover of defense, established the modern motor and air transport industries as core elements of the economy, with a cost to the public that goes far beyond the tens of billions of taxpayer dollars used in this massive government social engineering project.…” [NCZM]
The Federal Highway Acts of 1944, 1956, and 1968, funneled billions of taxpayer dollars into a national highway system that was the brainchild of Alfred Sloan, chairman of GM. It made the American economy dependent on gasoline-powered transportation and gave the oil industry a virtual energy monopoly. This dependency would lead eventually to events like the Gulf War, in which hundreds of thousands of lraquis were killed to ensure U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil.
The suburbanization of America was not the result of free market forces producing the most competitive products. It was engineered by the corporations that run our country. For example, between 1936 and 1949, National City Lines, a holding company sponsored and funded by General Motors, Firestone Rubber Company and Standard Oil of California, bought out more than 100 electric surface transit systems in 45 cities including New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles and dismantled them: They were replaced with GM buses. In 1949, GM and its partners were convicted in Federal District Court in Chicago of criminal conspiracy for this project and fined $5,000—not even a slap on the hubcap for General Motors!—but the effect was irreversible. The GM busses stayed and the electric street cars were history. (To get the full measure of the brutal irony of that slippery maneuver, virtually every GM auto show of the last 20 has featured electric cars—”the wave of the future.”)
Arms sales to oil producing countries are a device used to sustain Boeing, a publicly-subsidized privately-run corporation that Clinton called the “model of the free market vision.”
The word “subsidy,” tacked on to the name of a large corporation, is a euphemism for Welfare for the Rich.
These “government subsidies” maintain the system by which profits from oil production go to the U.S. and Britain, not to the people of the oil-producing region. Referring to the April 1977 efforts to sell Iran advanced armaments, The New York Times said that “one of the principal reasons behind the Pentagon pressure for the offer to Iran was to keep the Boeing production line open.”
When Secretary of State James Baker and President George Bush intervened in a secret meeting in October 1989 to ensure Saddam Hussein another $1 billion in loan guarantees (though the Treasury and Commerce departments had said that Iraq was not creditworthy), it was for the same purpose. Gassing of Kurds and torture of dissidents were non-issues. The State Department insisted that the additional billion for Saddam was justified because Iraq was “very important to U.S. interests in the Middle East,” was “influential in the peace process,” and “a key to maintaining stability in the region, offering great trade opportunities for U.S. companies.”
“Apart from maintaining a particular form of ‘stability’ in the interests of the world rulers, the Pentagon must continue to provide lavishly for Newt Gingrich and his rich constituents by means of a taxpayer subsidy to advanced industry. Nothing has changed in this regard since the early post-war period, when the business world recognized that the aircraft industry, established by public funds and wartime profiteering, ‘cannot satisfactorily exist in a pure, uncompetitive, unsubsidized, “free enterprise” economy’ [Fortune] and that ‘the government is their only possible savior’ [Business Week].2
Uncle Newt’s Double-Standard
Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” is a program designed to take advantage of the double-standard of the “free market”: public subsidy for the rich—free market discipline for the poor. Uncle Newt’s agenda seeks cuts in social spending, including education, low income housing, rent subsidies (what they sneeringly call “entitlements”), denying aid to children of “minor mothers” and those on welfare —while increasing Welfare for the Rich.
“The principles are clear and explicit. Free markets are fine for the third world and its growing counterpart at home. Mothers with dependent children can be sternly lectured on the need for self-reliance, but not dependent executives and investors, please. For them, the welfare state must flourish.” 3[my emphasis]
Welfare for the Rich comes in an endless variety of forms, including “entitlements” like capital gains cuts, investment subsidies, increased tax exemptions for estates, reduced health and safety regulations, larger allowances for depreciation and, of course, the Mother of All Entitlements, “increased military expenditures”—already the largest item on the budget by far.
“National Defense” says Chomsky, “is a sick joke. The U.S. faces no threats, and already spends more on ‘defense’ than the entire world combined.”4
“The United States developed its own economy behind very high protectionist walls with enormous state intervention and it maintains it that way. The Pentagon system, for example, is itself a huge government program arranged for a taxpayer subsidy to advanced industry. I can’t imagine anything more radically opposed to the free market.” [INT]
If the U.S. faces no threats Yet spends more on “defense” than the entire world combined What, you may wonder, does the pentagon spend all that friggin’ money on?
Colonialism—THEN and NOW
The structure of power that operates in the world today is a direct descendant of historical colonialism The systems that control us today are merely refined versions of the control systems that forced colonial natives into submission 500 years ago. Or, to be more precise—since the ruling elite never do their own dirty work—the systems that control us today, are the systems that manipulated, conned, or coerced the powerless citizens of one country to force the powerless citizens of another country into submission, colonialism, and slavery.
Economist Adam Smith, the patron saint of the free market ideology, wrote in 1776 that “the discovery of America and that of the passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope are the two greatest and most important events in the history of mankind… ”
Smith honestly believed that the “new set of exchanges”— of ideas, of culture, of trade, of human energy and ingenuity—would benefit both the Old World and the New.
It didn’t take him long to realize that he was very wrong:
“The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have been beneficial to all ruinous and destructive to several of those unfortunate countries. To the natives… both of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned.”
What was it that gave the Europeans the better end of the deal? “Superiority of force,” said Smith, with which “they were able to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries.”
Who was calling whom “savages”?
But those were the bad old days.
In those days, even the good guys were rotten.
People weren’t civilized like we are now, right?
FOREIGN POLICY: Friendly Dictators & Client States
In 1979, Chomsky and Edward Herman wrote a book called The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, which describes the military take-overs of 18 Latin American countries between 1960 and 1978. The book presents enough evidence to convince anyone with the guts to read it that the U.S. government was a major player in every one of those military take-overs.
Chomsky and Herman define “Client states:”
“The basic fact is that the United States has organized under its sponsorship and protection a neo-colonial system of client states ruled mainly by terror; and serving the interests of a small local and foreign business and military elite. The fundamental belief, or ideological pretense, is that the United States is dedicated to furthering the cause of democracy and human rights throughout the world, though it may occasionally err in the pursuit of this objective.”[WC]
The REAL NEW World Order—How It Started
The present world system crystallized after World War II when the United States found itself in a position of unprecedented power. The U.S. had escaped the widespread devastation of the war that had destroyed much of Europe, and the stimulus of the war had tripled American production. The U.S., naturally, left no scheme untried in its attempt to capitalize on its newfound power.
In 1948 George Kennan, a State Department planner, wrote Policy Planning Study 23, explaining the rationale behind the system of military “client states” that the U.S. has maintained since World War II.
The document said “we have about: 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only about 6 percent of its population… In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationship; that will permit us to maintain this disparity… To do so we will have to dispense with sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives… We should cease to talk about vague and… unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization.”
In a 1950 briefing of U.S. ambassadors to Latin American countries, Kennan warned the diplomats that they must guard against the spreading of the dangerous idea “that governments are responsible for the well being of their people.” In order to combat this idea, Kennan said, “we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government… It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal one if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists.”
Anyone who had the dangerous idea that governments were responsible for their people was considered a Communist by U.S. top guns.
The REAL Objective Of The New World Order
It was simple, really: America had only 6 percent of the world’s population—but 50 percent of the world’s wealth If it wanted to keep it’s advantage—or better yet increase it!—America had to force the rest of the world to accept its dominance. Of course, keeping the edge in wealth would be increasingly difficult as countries rebuilt after the war and undeveloped countries began to industrialize.
Clearly, the only way it could be “maintained” was the same way that colonialism was “established” in the first place…
(Is the news beginning to make a bit more sense now?)
Torture
Brute force comes in many versions, one of the ugliest of which is torture. For the past 300 years (if you don’t count blacks or women), torture had pretty much gone out of fashion in the West. Fashions change: A 1975 Amnesty International “Report on Torture” listed 26 countries that used torture “on an administrative basis” or as “an essential mode of governance.”
Maybe it was just a coincidence, but except for their penchant for torture, the only thing that all 26 countries had in common was U.S. military aid, police training, and/or military personnel. Torture was (and is) not only tolerated by American “interests,” the U.S. government trains and equips people to do it.
It trains them very well…
After the U.S.-assisted military coup in Chile in 1973, Amnesty International went in to survey the damage. Amnesty’s Report stated that “Many people were tortured to death by means of endless whipping as well as beating with fists, feet and rifle butts. Prisoners were beaten on all parts of the body, including the head and the sexual organs. The bodies of prisoners were found in the Rio Mapocho, sometimes disfigured beyond recognition.”
What exactly are these “American interests” we keep hearing about?
It’s simple: American interests are not my interests or your interests. American interests are American corporations that “own” the resources of other people’s countries.
… if you ask, “How can you own the resources of another people’s country? What gives you that right?”
… and if you realize that there can be only one answer: “Brute force.”
… suddenly the news begins to make a little more sense.
American “corporate interests,” backed by American military power, serving the interests of American investors, who “own” another country’s resources…? To the natives of those countries, many with indigenous ancestors going back thousands of years, ownership of their land and resources by foreigners has questionable legitimacy (to say the least). When foreign ownership results in near slave-labor, oppressive working conditions, and the most wretched poverty, it cannot endure peacefully. Resistance is inevitable… and expected… and countered with the most brutal and repressive measures.
should be directed toward their own countries and not toward the colonial masters,
they may try to institute reforms. They may call them “land reforms” or “nationalization of industries,”
but regardless of what the people believe or how righteous their claims are,
the U.S. calls them “communists” or “ultranationalists” or “extremists”
—bad names for bad people. Bad people deserve bad things.
Therefore, under that wonderfully convenient value system, the United States is justified in using the most extreme violence… to “restore democracy”…
… because “Communism” is the great evil of the world. Communism, we are told, is the opposite of democracy, the opposite of freedom.
But whose freedom?
The freedom of the majority of the country itself?
Or the freedom of a few American investors?
Do they have consciences? Do they ever ask themselves… Why do so many people have to die to protect “our way of life”?
This aspect of American foreign policy—our widespread slaughter of and indifference to indigenous peoples—is not the sort of thing the media is likely to brag about.
“These are not just academic exercises. We’re not talking about the media on Mars or in the 18th Century. There are real human beings who are suffering and being tortured and starving because of policies we are involved in because we as citizens of a democratic society are involved in and directly responsible for the actions of our government. What the media are doing is ensuring that we don't act on our responsibilities.”[MCF]
If you’re offended, well… Nobody ever said that Chomsky was comforting. Chomsky tells the truth.
HISTORY: One Or Two Things They Don’t Tell You
Chomsky’s version of history is different from the official history that appears in school textbooks or in The New York Times. The facts are the same in their broad strokes. But the interpretation of those facts is fundamentally different and there are many other facts that you would never read in The Times.
For example: what does New York Times reporter Leslie Gelb mean when she speaks of President Johnson’s “swift, decisive and successful takeover and re-democratization of the Dominican Republic in 1965”?
In school you may have been taught that you were supposed to know your lessons already so you’d better not ask questions and reveal your ignorance.
But would it be too much to ask for something a little more specific about what “re-democratization” means?
Especially following the word “takeover.”
What exactly went on there? In Chomsky’ Turning the Tide, he gives a closer look than what appeared in the mainstream press. These facts can be verified if you are willing to go beyond the news that is pushed in your face every day. Information is available in many books and magazines besides the mass-market ones. Facts also slip through mainstream channels, but you have to read a variety of them and then put all the facts together to see the patterns the media insiders will most assuredly not point to you.
For Example:
During the Kennedy administration, the Dominican Republic was owned by its president, Trujillo, and a handful of companies. Trujillo’s., share was an estimated 65-85 percent of the country’s economy, a larger share than his allies who were growing weary of him…so they sent some bad people to murder him. Crude dude that he was, he was an embarrassment to the lofty rhetoric of the Kennedy administration…so Kennedy sent the CIA to murder him. It took awhile, and nobody’s sure who pulled it off, but somebody managed to kill the greedy man.
In 1962, in the country’s first free elections, Juan Bosch was elected president. Bosch introduced a democratic constitution and legal system, attacked corruption, defended civil liberties, urged police restraint, slashed the salaries of high officials and refused the customary perks of office. Bosch’s reforms went a long way toward helping his people.
Unfortunately, that angered U.S. “interests.” After Bosch had been in office for seven months, the military overthrew him. The U.S. decided (as the American Ambassador put it) to “let him go.” After going through the motions of objecting to the overthrow of a democratically elected government, the U.S. gave full support to the military regime. American interests, which had been temporarily threatened by democracy, were once again in safe hands.
Making The World Safe For Democracy
Corruption returned, the economy declined, and before you could say “American interests,” the country was as impoverished and corrupt as it had been before Bosch’s reforms. However, nobody had anticipated the fact that the people of The Dominican Republic, having had a taste of democracy, weren’t going to let it go that easily. The people stood up for their rights, overthrew the brutal military-regime and moved toward restoring Bosch to power—and democracy to their country. It was almost a wonderful story. Almost.
The U.S. sent 23,000 American soldiers to help the corrupt military regime beat down the people of the Dominican Republic. Once again, the democratically elected government of the Dominican Republic was overthrown, the threat to U.S. business interests was removed, and the world was once again safe for greed.
The result, says Chomsky, was “the usual one: death squads, torture, repression, an increase in poverty and malnutrition for the mass of the population, slave labor conditions, vast emigration, and outstanding opportunities for U.S. investors, whose control over the economy reached new heights.”[TT]
And newspapers throughout the country lauded President Johnson for sending 23,000 troops “to seek peace.”
That (in case you were wondering) was not an isolated incident. It is typical of U.S. policy throughout the third world…
Guatemala
Jacobo Arbenz was elected president of Guatemala in 1951. His land reforms increased productivity, provided food and cash to the peasants, and involved them in the political system for the first time in 400 years. Unfortunately, Arbenz was too honorable to suit his American counterparts.
He tried to expropriate unused lands held by the United Fruit Company so that he could give the land to landless peasants. Arbenz, who was trying hard not to screw anybody, offered payment to United Fruit based on its fraudulent tax valuation. Eisenhower’s Under-Secretary of State, who was too “smart” to be fooled, said that Guatemala was playing “the communist game” by allowing civil rights to communists. Under the pretext of stopping a communist takeover, the good old CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala and restored military rule.
“Land reform was repealed, its beneficiaries dispossessed, peasant cooperatives were dissolved, the literacy program was halted, the economy collapsed, the labor unions were destroyed and the killings began.” [TT]
The killings, encouraged, sponsored, and paid for by the U.S., continued for years. The Guatemalan Conference of Bishops said that “never in our history have such extremes been reached, with the assassinations now falling into the category of genocide.”
Chomsky on Nicaragua
A French priest and trainer of nurses in the north of Nicaragua testified to the World Court about a handicapped person murdered “for the fun of it,” of women raped, of a body found with the eyes gouged out, and a girl of 15 who had been forced into prostitution at a Contra camp in Honduras. He testified that the Contras created an atmosphere of terror through kidnapping, rape, murder and torture.
The Boston Globe did a 100-word story on this testimony.
The New York Times didn’t report it.
“What the U.S.-run Contra forces did in Nicaragua or what our terrorist proxies do in El Salvador or Guatemala isn’t only ordinary killing. A major element is brutal, sadistic torture -- beating infants against rocks, hanging women by their feet with their breasts cut off and the skin of their faces peeled back so they will bleed to death, chopping people’s heads off and putting them on stakes. The point is to crush independent nationalism and popular forces that might bring about meaningful democracy.” [WU.S.]
Chomsky on Noriega
“Noriega’s career fits a standard pattern. Typically, the thugs and gangsters whom the U.S. backs reach a point in their careers when they become too independent and too grasping, outliving their usefulness. Instead of just robbing the poor and safeguarding the business climate, they begin to interfere with Washington’s natural allies, the local business elite and oligarchy, or even U.S. interests directly. At that point, Washington begins to vacillate; we hear of human rights violations that were cheerfully ignored in the past, and sometimes the U.S. government acts to remove them, even to attempt to assassinate them, as in the case of Trujillo. By 1986-7, the only question was when and how Noriega should be removed…”[DD]
Chomsky on The Middle East and “Terrorism”
Under the “New World Order” (which is exactly the same as the “Old World Order”) it is necessary to ensure that the wealth of the oil reserves goes to the West, not to the Middle Eastern countries that produce the oil—and certainly not to the people who live in those countries.
This “arrangement”—like every situation in which “outside interests” manage to make enormous profits off of the resources of the indigenous people while the people themselves live in dire poverty—is virtually guaranteed to create perpetual unrest.
Since the Russian Revolution of 1917, the standard justification for virtually all U.S. policies was the threat of Communist expansion. Having lost that scapegoat now the government is trying to come up with a new scenario. Says Chomsky, “In reality, the ‘threat to our interests’ in the Middle East as elsewhere, had always been indigenous nationalism, a fact stressed in internal documents and sometimes publicly.”
The Arab-Israeli conflict adds its own special problems. Israel, for its part, instigates and promotes conflict between the U.S. and Iran, the U.S. and Iraq, the U.S. and Syria—the U.S. and virtually every Arab, Muslim, or Middle Eastern country. Chomsky: “The propaganda campaign about ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ has its farcical elements -- even putting aside the fact that U.S. culture compares with Iran in its religious fundamentalism. The most extreme Islamic fundamentalist state in the world is the loyal U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, or to be more precise, the family dictatorship that serves as the ‘Arab facade’ behind which the U.S. effectively controls the Arabian peninsula.”
Islamic fundamentalism is only a problem when it gets “out of control,” and becomes radical “nationalism,” or “ultra nationalism.”
A tough question…
If atrocities, brutal murders, and other crimes against humanity were being committed or sponsored by agencies of your government…
…would you want to know?
“To ask serious questions about the nature and behavior of one’s own society is often difficult and unpleasant; difficult because the answers are generally concealed, and unpleasant because the answers are often not only ugly… but also painful. To understand the truth about these matters is to be led to action that may not be easy to undertake and that may even carry a significant personal cost. In contrast, the easy way is to succumb to the demands of the powerful, to avoid searching questions, and to accept the doctrine that is hammered home incessantly by the propaganda system. This is, no doubt, the main reason for the easy victory of dominant ideologies, for the general tendency to remain silent or to keep fairly close to official doctrine with regard to the behavior of one's own state and its allies… while lining up to condemn the real or alleged crimes of its enemies.” [TNCW]
Question Everything…
Not long before he was murdered, Martin Luther King, Jr. made a statement that struck many people as shocking:
“The greatest purveyor of violence is our own country.”
Dr. King said it; Chomsky proves it. In book after book, Chomsky carefully documents dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of unbelievable atrocities directly attributable to the U.S.—and paid for by your tax money.
America’s brutal “foreign policy” is an insult to every person who still has any semblance of conscience. It makes a mockery of everything the U.S. purports to stand for… and, in the process, it has nearly succeeded in destroying the once-powerful U.S. economy.
Coming home to roost
Postwar America was the model for economic growth in an industrial society that was envied and emulated the world over. The American middle class grew throughout the ‘50s and into the ‘60s and this looked like the model for how capitalism could work, lifting the majority up with the prosperity it generated. At the same time just south of the Rio Grande, Mexico was the model of a third world nation. It had a small wealthy class, a huge class that lived in dire poverty and almost no middle class. The promise of postwar America was that the free market system would generate so much prosperity that it would pull the lower economic classes up with it, or that the wealth of the rich would ‘trickle down.’ But this is not what happened. Instead the U.S. economic class structure is looking more and more like that of the third world.
(Chomsky elaborates on this important subject in the interview immediately following this chapter.)
[Chomsky Interview, Spin, Aug. ’93]
3“The Clinton Vision: An Update,” Z magazine, 1994
4“Rollback Part 1” a report on the ‘94 elections,” by N.C. in Z magazine, Jan. 1995