Copyright © 1991, 1997 by Noam Chomsky

A Seven Stories Press First Edition,published in association with Open Media.

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All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, ortransmitted in any form, by any means, includingmechanical, electric, photocopying, recording orotherwise, without the prior written permissionof the publisher.

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Chomsky, Noam.Media control: the spectacular achievements of

propaganda / Noam Chomsky.p. cm. —(The Open Media Pamphlet Series)ISBN 1-888363-49-51. Propaganda. 2. Propaganda—United States. 3.

Mass media—Political aspects. 4. Mass media andpublic opinion. I. Title. II. Series.HM263.C447 1997303.375—dc21 96-53580

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The role of the mediain contemporary politics forces us to ask whatkind of a world and what kind of a society wewant to live in, and in particular in what senseof democracy do we want this to be a democ-ratic society? Let me begin by counter-posingtwo different conceptions of democracy. Oneconception of democracy has it that a democ-ratic society is one in which the public has themeans to participate in some meaningful wayin the management of their own affairs and themeans of information are open and free. If youlook up democracy in the dictionary you'll geta definition something like that.

An alternative conception of democracy isthat the public must be barred from managingof their own affairs and the means of informa-tion must be kept narrowly and rigidly con-trolled. That may sound like an odd conceptionof democracy, but it's important to understandthat it is the prevailing conception. In fact, ithas long been, not just in operation, but evenin theory. There's a long history that goes backto the earliest modern democratic revolutionsin seventeenth century England which largelyexpresses this point of view. I'm just going tokeep to the modern period and say a few wordsabout how that notion of democracy developsand why and how the problem of media and dis-information enters within that context.

EARLY HISTORY OF PROPAGANDA

Let's begin with the first modern governmentpropaganda operation. That was under theWoodrow Wilson Administration. WoodrowWilson was elected President in 1916 on theplatform "Peace Without Victory." That wasright in the middle of the World War I. The pop-ulation was extremely pacifistic and saw no rea-son to become involved in a European war. TheWilson administration was actually committedto war and had to do something about it. Theyestablished a government propaganda com-mission, called the Creel Commission whichsucceeded, within six months, in turning apacifist population into a hysterical, war-mon-gering population which wanted to destroyeverything German, tear the Germans limbfrom limb, go to war and save the world. Thatwas a major achievement, and it led to a furtherachievement. Right at that time and after thewar the same techniques were used to whip upa hysterical Red Scare, as it was called, whichsucceeded pretty much in destroying unionsand eliminating such dangerous problems asfreedom of the press and freedom of political

thought. There was very strong support fromthe media, from the business establishment,which in fact organized, pushed much of thiswork, and it was, in general, a great success.

Among those who participated actively andenthusiastically in Wilson's war were the pro-gressive intellectuals, people of the JohnDewey circle, who took great pride, as you cansee from their own writings at the time, in hav-ing shown that what they called the "moreintelligent members of the community,"namely, themselves, were able to drive areluctant population into a war by terrifyingthem and eliciting jingoist fanaticism. Themeans that were used were extensive. Forexample, there was a good deal of fabricationof atrocities by the Huns, Belgian babies withtheir arms torn off, all sorts of awful things thatyou still read in history books. Much of it wasinvented by the British propaganda ministry,whose own commitment at the time, as theyput it in their secret deliberations, was "todirect the thought of most of the world." Butmore crucially they wanted to control thethought of the more intelligent members of thecommunity in the United States, who wouldthen disseminate the propaganda that theywere concocting and convert the pacifistic

country to wartime hysteria. That worked. Itworked very well. And it taught a lesson: Statepropaganda, when supported by the educatedclasses and when no deviation is permittedfrom it, can have a big effect. It was a lessonlearned by Hitler and many others, and it hasbeen pursued to this day.

SPECTATOR DEMOCRACY

Another group that was impressed by thesesuccesses was liberal democratic theorists andleading media figures, like, for example, Wal-ter Lippmann, who was the dean of Americanjournalists, a major foreign and domestic pol-icy critic and also a major theorist of liberaldemocracy. If you take a look at his collectedessays, you'll see that they're subtitled some-thing like "A Progressive Theory of LiberalDemocratic Thought." Lippmann wasinvolved in these propaganda commissions andrecognized their achievements. He argued thatwhat he called a "revolution in the art ofdemocracy," could be used to "manufactureconsent, " that is, to bring about agreement onthe part of the public for things that they did-n't want by the new techniques of propaganda.He also thought that this was a good idea, infact, necessary. It was necessary because, as heput it, "the common interests elude publicopinion entirely" and can only be understoodand managed by a "specialized class "of"responsible men" who are smart enough tofigure things out. This theory asserts that only

a small elite, the intellectual community thatthe Deweyites were talking about, can under-stand the common interests, what all of uscare about, and that these things "elude thegeneral public." This is a view that goes backhundreds of years. It's also a typical Leninistview. In fact, it has very close resemblance tothe Leninist conception that a vanguard of rev-olutionary intellectuals take state power,using popular revolutions as the force thatbrings them to state power, and then drive thestupid masses toward a future that they're toodumb and incompetent to envision for them-selves. The liberal democratic theory andMarxism-Leninism are very close in theircommon ideological assumptions. I thinkthat's one reason why people have found it soeasy over the years to drift from one positionto another without any particular sense ofchange. It's just a matter of assessing wherepower is. Maybe there will be a popular revo-lution, and that will put us into state power;or maybe there won't be, in which case we'lljust work for the people with real power: thebusiness community. But we'll do the samething. We'll drive the stupid masses toward aworld that they're too dumb to understand forthemselves.

Lippmann backed this up by a pretty elab-orated theory of progressive democracy. Heargued that in a properly functioning democ-racy there are classes of citizens. There is firstof all the class of citizens who have to takesome active role in running general affairs.That's the specialized class. They are the peo-ple who analyze, execute, make decisions, andrun things in the political, economic, and ide-ological systems. That's a small percentage ofthe population. Naturally, anyone who putsthese ideas forth is always part of that smallgroup, and they're talking about what to doabout those others. Those others, who are outof the small group, the big majority of the pop-ulation, they are what Lippmann called "thebewildered herd." We have to protect ourselvesfrom "the trampling and roar of a bewilderedherd". Now there are two "functions" in ademocracy: The specialized class, the respon-sible men, carry out the executive function,which means they do the thinking and plan-ning and understand the common interests.Then, there is the bewildered herd, and theyhave a function in democracy too. Their func-tion in a democracy, he said, is to be "specta-tors," not participants in action. But they havemore of a function than that, because it's a

democracy. Occasionally they are allowed tolend their weight to one or another member ofthe specialized class. In other words, they'reallowed to say, "We want you to be our leader"or "We want you to be our leader." That'sbecause it's a democracy and not a totalitarianstate. That's called an election. But oncethey've lent their weight to one or anothermember of the specialized class they're sup-posed to sink back and become spectators ofaction, but not participants. That's in a prop-erly functioning democracy.

And there's a logic behind it. There's evena kind of compelling moral principle behindit. The compelling moral principle is that themass of the public are just too stupid to beable to understand things. If they try to par-ticipate in managing their own affairs, they'rejust going to cause trouble. Therefore, itwould be immoral and improper to permitthem to do this. We have to tame the bewil-dered herd, not allow the bewildered herd torage and trample and destroy things. It's prettymuch the same logic that says that it wouldbe improper to let a three-year-old run acrossthe street. You don't give a three-year-old thatkind of freedom because the three-year-olddoesn't know how to handle that freedom.

Correspondingly, you don't allow the bewil-dered herd to become participants in action.They'll just cause trouble.

So we need something to tame the bewil-dered herd, and that something is this newrevolution in the art of democracy: the manu-facture of consent. The media, the schools, andpopular culture have to be divided. For thepolitical class and the decision makers theyhave to provide them some tolerable sense ofreality, although they also have to instill theproper beliefs. Just remember, there is anunstated premise here. The unstated premise—and even the responsible men have to dis-guise this from themselves—has to do with thequestion of how they get into the positionwhere they have the authority to make deci-sions. The way they do that, of course, is byserving people with real power. The peoplewith real power are the ones who own the soci-ety, which is a pretty narrow group. If the spe-cialized class can come along and say, I canserve your interests, then they'll be part of theexecutive group. You've got to keep that quiet.That means they have to have instilled in themthe beliefs and doctrines that will serve theinterests of private power. Unless they canmaster that skill, they're not part of the spe-

cialized class. So we have one kind of educa-tional system directed to the responsible men,the specialized class. They have to be deeplyindoctrinated in the values and interests of pri-vate power and the state-corporate nexus thatrepresents it. If they can achieve that, then theycan be part of the specialized class. The rest ofthe bewildered herd basically just have to bedistracted. Turn their attention to somethingelse. Keep them out of trouble. Make sure thatthey remain at most spectators of action, occa-sionally lending their weight to one or anotherof the real leaders, who they may selectamong.

This point of view has been developed bylots of other people. In fact, it's pretty con-ventional. For example, the leading theologianand foreign policy critic Reinhold Niebuhr,sometimes called "the theologian of the estab-lishment, " the guru of George Kennan and theKennedy intellectuals, put it that rationality isa very narrowly restricted skill. Only a smallnumber of people have it. Most people areguided by just emotion and impulse. Those ofus who have rationality have to create "nec-essary illusions" and emotionally potent"oversimpli-fications" to keep the naive sim-pletons more or less on course. This became a

substantial part of contemporary political sci-ence. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Harold Lass-well, the founder of the modern field ofcommunications and one of the leading Amer-ican political scientists, explained that weshould not succumb to "democratic dogma-tisms about men being the best judges of theirown interests." Because they're not. We're thebest judges of the public interests. Therefore,just out of ordinary morality, we have to makesure that they don't have an opportunity to acton the basis of their misjudgments. In what isnowadays called a totalitarian state, or a mil-itary state, it's easy. You just hold a bludgeonover their heads, and if they get out of line yousmash them over the head. But as society hasbecome more free and democratic, you losethat capacity. Therefore you have to turn to thetechniques of propaganda. The logic is clear.Propaganda is to a democracy what the blud-geon is to a totalitarian state. That's wise andgood because, again, the common interestselude the bewildered herd. They can't figurethem out.

PUBLIC RELATIONS

The United States pioneered the public rela-tions industry. Its commitment was "to con-trol the public mind/' as its leaders put it. Theylearned a lot from the successes of the CreelCommission and the successes in creating theRed Scare and its aftermath. The public rela-tions industry underwent a huge expansion atthat time. It succeeded for some time in cre-ating almost total subordination of the publicto business rule through the 1920s. This wasso extreme that Congressional committeesbegan to investigate it as we moved into the1930s. That's where a lot of our informationabout it comes from.

Public relations is a huge industry. They'respending by now something on the order of abillion dollars a year. All along its commitmentwas to controlling the public mind. In the1930s, big problems arose again, as they hadduring the First World War. There was a hugedepression and substantial labor organizing. Infact, in 1935 labor won its first major legisla-tive victory, namely, the right to organize, withthe Wagner Act. That raised two serious prob-

lems. For one thing, democracy was misfunc-tioning. The bewildered herd was actually win-ning legislative victories, and it's not supposedto work that way. The other problem was thatit was becoming possible for people to organize.People have to be atomized and segregated andalone. They're not supposed to organize,because then they might be something beyondspectators of action. They might actually beparticipants if many people with limitedresources could get together to enter the polit-ical arena. That's really threatening, A majorresponse was taken on the part of business toensure that this would be the last legislativevictory for labor and that it would be the begin-ning of the end of this democratic deviation ofpopular organization. It worked. That was thelast legislative victory for labor. From thatpoint on — although the number of people inthe unions increased for a while during theWorld War II, after which it started drop-ping — the capacity to act through the unionsbegan to steadily drop. It wasn't by accident.We're now talking about the business com-munity, which spends lots and lots of money,attention, and thought into how to deal withthese problems through the public relationsindustry and other organizations, like the

National Association of Manufacturers and theBusiness Roundtable, and so on. They imme-diately set to work to try to find a way tocounter these democratic deviations.

The first trial was one year later, in 1937.There was a major strike, the Steel strike inwestern Pennsylvania at Johnstown. Businesstried out a new technique oflabor destruction,which worked very well. Not through goonsquads and breaking knees. That wasn't work-ing very well any more, but through the moresubtle and effective means of propaganda. Theidea was to figure out ways to turn the publicagainst the strikers, to present the strikers asdisruptive, harmful to the public and againstthe common interests. The common interestsare those of "us," the businessman, theworker, the housewife. That's all "us." Wewant to be together and have things like har-mony and Americanism and working together.Then there's those bad strikers out there whoare disruptive and causing trouble and break-ing harmony and violating Americanism.We've got to stop them so we can all livetogether. The corporate executive and the guywho cleans the floors all have the same inter-ests. We can all work together and work forAmericanism in harmony, liking each other.

That was essentially the message. A hugeamount of effort was put into presenting it.This is, after all, the business community, sothey control the media and have massiveresources. And it wrked, very effectively. Itwas later called the "Mohawk Valley formula"and applied over and over again to breakstrikes. They were called "scientific methodsof strike-breaking," and worked very effec-tively by mobilizing community opinion infavor of vapid, empty concepts like American-ism. Who can be against that? Or harmony.Who can be against that? Or, as in the PersianGulf War, "Support our troops." Who can beagainst that? Or yellow ribbons. Who can beagainst that? Anything that's totally vacuous .

In fact, what does it mean if somebodyasks you, Do you support the people in Iowa?Can you say, Yes, I support them, or No, I don'tsupport them? It's not even a question. It does-n't mean anything. That's the point. The pointof public relations slogans like "Support ourtroops" is that they don't mean anything. Theymean as much as whether you support the peo-ple in Iowa. Of course, there was an issue. Theissue was, Do you support our policy? But youdon't want people to think about that issue.That's the whole point of good propaganda.

You want to create a slogna that nobody'sgoing to be against, and everybody's going tobe for. Nobody knows what it means, becauseit doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value isthat it diverts your attention from a questionthat does mean something: Do you support ourpolicy? That's the one you're not allowed totalk about. So you have people arguing aboutsupport for the troops? "Of course I don't notsupport them." Then you've won. That's likeAmericanism and harmony. We're alltogether, empty slogans, let's join in, let'smake sure we don't have these bad peoplearound to disrupt our harmony with their talkabout class struggle, rights and that sort ofbusiness.

That's all very effective. It runs right up totoday. And of course it is carefully thought out.The people in the public relations industryaren't there for the fun of it. They're doingwork. They're trying to instill the right values.In fact, they have a conception of what democ-racy ought to be: It ought to be a system inwhich the specialized class is trained to workin the service of the masters, the people whoown the society. The rest of the populationought to be deprived of any form of organiza-tion, because organization just causes trouble.

They ought to be sitting alone in front of theTV and having drilled into their heads the mes-sage, which says, the only value in life is tohave more commodities or live like that richmiddle class family you're watching and tohave nice values like harmony and American-ism. That's all there is in life. You may thinkin your own head that there's got to be some-thing more in life than this, but since you'rewatching the tube alone you assume, I must becrazy, because that's all that's going on overthere. And since there is no organization per-mitted—that's absolutely crucial—you neverhave a way of finding out whether you arecrazy, and you just assume it, because it's thenatural thing to assume.

So that's the ideal. Great efforts are madein trying to achieve that ideal. Obviously,there is a certain conception behind it. Theconception of democracy is the one that I men-tioned. The bewildered herd is a problem.We've got to prevent their roar and trampling.We've got to distract them. They should bewatching the Superbowl or sitcoms or violentmovies. Every once in a while you call onthem to chant meaningless slogans like "Sup-port our troops." You've got to keep thempretty scared, because unless they're properly

scared and frightened of all kinds of devils thatare going to destroy them from outside orinside or somewhere, they may start to think,which is very dangerous, because they're notcompetent to think. Therefore it's importantto distract them and marginalize them.

That's one conception of democracy. Infact, going back to the business community,the last legal victory for labor really was 1935,the Wagner Act. After the war came, the unionsdeclined as did a very rich working class cul-ture that was associated with the unions. Thatwas destroyed. We moved to a business-runsociety at a remarkable level. This is the onlystate-capitalist industrial society which does-n't have even the normal social contract thatyou find in comparable societies. Outside ofSouth Africa, I guess, this is the only industrialsociety that doesn't have national health care.There's no general commitment to even min-imal standards of survival for the parts of thepopulation who can't follow those rules andgain things for themselves individually.Unions are virtually nonexistent. Other formsof popular structure are virtually nonexistent.There are no political parties or organizations.It's a long way toward the ideal, at least struc-turally. The media are a corporate monopoly.

They have the same point of view. The two par-ties are two factions of the business party. Mostof the population doesn't even bother votingbecause it looks meaningless. They're mar-ginalized and properly distracted. At least that'sthe goal. The leading figure in the public rela-tions industry, Edward Bernays, actually cameout of the Creel Commission. He was part ofit, learned his lessons there and went on todevelop what he called the "engineering of con-sent," which he described as "the essence ofdemocracy." The people who are able to engi-neer consent are the ones who have theresources and the power to do it—the businesscommunity—and that's who you work for.

ENGINEERING OPINION

It is also necessary to whip up the populationin support of foreign adventures. Usually thepopulation is pacifist, just like they were dur-ing the First World War. The public sees no rea-son to get involved in foreign adventures,killing, and torture. So you have to whip themup. And to whip them up you have to frightenthem. Bernays himself had an importantachievement in this respect. He was the per-son who ran the public relations campaign forthe United Fruit Company in 1954, when theUnited States moved in to overthrow the cap-italist-democratic government of Guatemalaand installed a murderous death-squad society,which remains that way to the present daywith constant infusions of U.S. aid to preventin more than empty form democratic devia-tions. It's necessary to constantly ram throughdomestic programs which the public isopposed to, because there is no reason for thepublic to be in favor of domestic programs thatare harmful to them. This, too, takes extensivepropaganda. We've seen a lot of this in the lastten years. The Reagan programs were over-

whelmingly unpopular. Voters in the 1984"Reagan landslide," by about three to two,hoped that his policies would not be enacted.If you take particular programs, like arma-ments, cutting back on social spending, etc.,almost every one of them was overwhelminglyopposed by the public. But as long as people aremarginalized and distracted and have no wayto organize or articulate their sentiments, oreven know that others have these sentiments,people who said that they prefer social spend-ing to military spending, who gave that answeron polls, as people overwhelmingly did,assumed that they were the only people withthat crazy idea in their heads. They never heardit from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed tothink that. Therefore, if you do think it and youanswer it in a poll, you just assume that you'resort of weird. Since there's no way to gettogether with other people who share or rein-force that view and help you articulate it, youfeel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stayon the side and you don't pay any attention towhat's going on. You look at something else,like the Superbowl.

To a certain extent, then, that ideal wasachieved, but never completely. There are insti-tutions which it has as yet been impossible to

destroy. The churches, for example, still exist.A large part of the dissident activity in theUnited States comes out of the churches, forthe simple reason that they're there. So whenyou go to a European country and give a polit-ical talk, it may very likely be in the union hall.Here that won't happen, because unions firstof all barely exist, and if they do exist they'renot political organizations. But the churches doexist, and therefore you often give a talk in achurch. Central American solidarity workmostly grew out of the churches, mainlybecause they exist.

The bewildered herd never gets properlytamed, so this is a constant battle. In the 1930sthey arose again and were put down. In the1960s there was another wave of dissidence.There was a name for that. It was called by thespecialized class "the crisis of democracy."Democracy was regarded as entering into a cri-sis in the 1960s. The crisis was that large seg-ments of the population were becomingorganized and active and trying to participatein the political arena. Here we come back tothese two conceptions of democracy. By thedictionary definition, that's an advance indemocracy. By the prevailing conception that'sa 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 toovercome the crisis. Efforts were made toachieve that. It hasn't worked. The crisis ofdemocracy is still alive and well, fortunately,but not very effective in changing policy. Butit is effective in changing opinion, contrary towhat a lot of people believe. Great efforts weremade after the 1960s to try to reverse and over-come this malady. One aspect of the maladyactually got a technical name. It was called the"Vietnam Syndrome." The Vietnam Syn-drome, a term that began to come up around1970, has actually been defined on occasion.The Reaganite intellectual Norman Podhoretzdefined it as "the sickly inhibitions against theuse of military force." There were these sicklyinhibitions against violence on the part of alarge part of the public. People just didn'tunderstand why we should go around torturingpeople and killing people and carpet bombingthem. It's very dangerous for a population to beovercome by these sickly inhibitions, asGoebbels understood, because then there's alimit on foreign adventures. It's necessary, asthe Washington Post put it rather proudly dur-ing the Gulf War hysteria, to instill in people

respect for "martial value." That's important.If you want to have a violent society that usesforce around the world to achieve the ends ofits own domestic elite, it's necessary to havea proper appreciation of the martial virtues andnone of these sickly inhibitions about usingviolence. So that's the Vietnam Syndrome. It'snecessary to overcome that one.

REPRESENTATION AS REALITY

It's also necessary to completely falsify history.That's another way to overcome these sicklyinhibitions, to make it look as if when weattack and destroy somebody we're really pro-tecting and defending ourselves against majoraggressors and monsters and so on. There hasbeen a huge effort since the Vietnam war toreconstruct the history of that. Too many peo-ple began to understand what was really goingon. Including plenty of soldiers and a lot ofyoung people who were involved with the peacemovement and others. That was bad. It was nec-essary to rearrange those bad thoughts and torestore some form of sanity, namely, a recog-nition that whatever we do is noble and right.If we're bombing South Vietnam, that's becausewe're defending South Vietnam against some-body, namely, the South Vietnamese, sincenobody else was there. It's what the Kennedyintellectuals called defense against "internalaggression" in South Vietnam. That was thephrase used by Adlai Stevenson and others. Itwas necessary to make that the official and wellunderstood picture. That's worked pretty well.

When you have total control over the media andthe educational system and scholarship is con-formist, you can get that across. One indicationof it was revealed in a study done at the Uni-versity of Massachusetts on attitudes towardthe current Gulf crisis—a study of beliefs andattitudes in television watching. One of thequestions asked in that study was, How manyVietnamese casualties would you estimatethat there were during the Vietnam war? Theaverage response on the part of Americans todayis about 100,000. The official figure is about twomillion. The actual figure is probably three tofour million. The people who conducted thestudy raised an appropriate question: Whatwould we think about German political cultureif, when you asked people today how many Jewsdied in the Holocaust, they estimated about300,000? What would that tell us about Germanpolitical culture? They leave the questionunanswered, but you can pursue it. What doesit tell us about our culture? It tells us quite abit. It is necessary to overcome the sickly inhi-bitions against the use of military force andother democratic deviations. In this particularcase it worked. This is true on every topic. Pickthe topic you like: the Middle East, interna-tional terrorism, Central America, whatever it

is—the picture of the world that's presented tothe public has only the remotest relation toreality. The truth of the matter is buried underedifice after edifice of lies upon lies. It's all beena marvelous success from the point of view indeterring the threat of democracy, achievedunder conditions of freedom, which isextremely interesting. It's not like a totalitar-ian state, where it's done by force. Theseachievements are under conditions of freedom.If we want to understand our own society, we'llhave to think about these facts. They are impor-tant facts, important for those who care aboutwhat kind of society they live in.

DISSIDENT CULTURE

Despite all of this, the dissident culture sur-vived. It's grown quite a lot since the 1960s. Inthe 1960s the dissident culture first of all wasextremely slow in developing. There was noprotest against the Indochina war until yearsafter the United States had started bombingSouth Vietnam. When it did grow it was a verynarrow dissident movement, mostly studentsand young people. By the 1970s that hadchanged considerably. Major popular move-ments had developed: the environmentalmovement, the feminist movement, the anti-nuclear movement, and others. In the 1980sthere was an even greater expansion to the sol-idarity movements, which is something verynew and important in the history of at leastAmerican, and maybe even world dissidence.These were movements that not onlyprotested but actually involved themselves,often intimately, in the lives of suffering peo-ple elsewhere. They learned a great deal fromit and had quite a civilizing effect on main-stream America. All of this has made a verylarge difference. Anyone who has beeninvolved in this kind of activity for many years

must be aware of this. I know myself that thekind of talks I give today in the most reac-tionary parts of the country—central Georgia,rural Kentucky, etc.—are talks of the kind thatI couldn't have given at the peak of the peacemovement to the most active peace movementaudience. Now you can give them anywhere.People may agree or not agree, but at least theyunderstand what you're talking about andthere's some sort of common ground that youcan pursue.

These are all signs of the civilizing effect,despite all the propaganda, despite all theefforts to control thought and manufactureconsent. Nevertheless, people are acquiring anability and a willingness to think thingsthrough. Skepticism about power has grown,and attitudes have changed on many, manyissues. It's kind of slow, maybe even glacial,but perceptible and important. Whether it'sfast enough to make a significant difference inwhat happens in the world is another question.Just to take one familiar example of it: Thefamous gender gap. In the 1960s attitudes ofmen and women were approximately thesame on such matters as the "martial virtues"and the sickly inhibitions against the use ofmilitary force. Nobody, neither men nor

women, were suffering from those sicklyinhibitions in the early 1960s. The responseswere the same. Everybody thought that the useof violence to suppress people out there wasjust right. Over the years it's changed. Thesickly inhibitions have increased all across theboard. But meanwhile a gap has been growing,and by now it's a very substantial gap. Accord-ing to polls, it's something like twenty-fivepercent. What has happened? What has hap-pened is that there is some form of at leastsemi-organized popular movement thatwomen are involved in—the feminist move-ment. Organization has its effects. It meansthat you discover that you're not alone. Oth-ers have the same thoughts that you do. Youcan reinforce your thoughts and learn moreabout what you think and believe. These arevery informal movements, not like a mem-bership organizations, just a mood thatinvolves interactions among people. It has avery noticeable effect. That's the danger ofdemocracy: If organizations can develop, ifpeople are no longer just glued to the tube, youmay have all these funny thoughts arising intheir heads, like sickly inhibitions against theuse 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 metalk about the next war, because sometimes it'suseful to be prepared instead of just reacting.There is a very characteristic developmentgoing on in the United States now. It's not thefirst country in the world that's done this.There are growing domestic social and eco-nomic problems, in fact, maybe catastrophes.Nobody in power has any intention of doinganything about them. If you look at thedomestic programs of the administrations ofthe past ten years—I include here the Democ-ratic opposition—there's really no serious pro-posal about what to do about the severeproblems of health, education, homelessness,joblessness, crime, soaring criminal popula-tions, jails, deterioration in the inner cities—the whole raft of problems. You all know aboutthem, and they're all getting worse. Just in thetwo years that George Bush has been in officethree million more children crossed thepoverty line, the debt is zooming, educationalstandards are declining, real wages are nowback to the level of about the late 1950s formuch of the population, and nobody's doing

anything about it. In such circumstancesyou've got to divert the bewildered herd,because if they start noticing this they may notlike it, since they're the ones suffering from it.Just having them watch the Superbowl and thesitcoms may not be enough. You have to whipthem up into fear of enemies. In the 1930sHitler whipped them into fear of the Jews andgypsies. You had to crush them to defend your-selves. We have our ways, too. Over the last tenyears, every year or two, some major monsteris constructed that we have to defend ourselvesagainst. There used to be one that was alwaysreadily available: The Russians. You couldalways defend yourself against the Russians.But they're losing their attractiveness as anenemy, and it's getting harder and harder to usethat one, so some new ones have to be conjuredup. In fact, people have quite unfairly criticizedGeorge Bush for being unable to express orarticulate what's really driving us now. That'svery unfair. Prior to about the mid-1980s, whenyou were asleep you would just play the record:the Russians are coming. But he lost that oneand he's got to make up new ones, just like theReaganite public relations apparatus did in the1980s. So it was international terrorists andnarco-traffickers and crazed Arabs and Saddam

Hussein, the new Hitler, was going to conquerthe world. They've got to keep coming up oneafter another. You frighten the population, ter-rorize them, intimidate them so that they'retoo afraid to travel and cower in fear. Then youhave a magnificent victory over Grenada,Panama, or some other defenseless third-world army that you can pulverize before youever bother to look at them—which is justwhat happened. That gives relief. We weresaved at the last minute. That's one of the waysin which you can keep the bewildered herdfrom paying attention to what's really going onaround them, keep them diverted and con-trolled. The next one that's coming along, mostlikely, will be Cuba. That's going to require acontinuation of the illegal economic warfare,possibly a revival of the extraordinary inter-national terrorism. The most major interna-tional terrorism organized yet has been theKennedy administration's Operation Mon-goose, then the things that followed along,against Cuba. There's been nothing remotelycomparable to it except perhaps the waragainst Nicaragua, if you call that terrorism.The World Court classified it as somethingmore like aggression. There's always an ideo-logical offensive that builds up a chimerical

monster, then campaigns to have it crushed.You can't go in if they can fight back. That'smuch too dangerous. But if you are sure thatthey will be crushed, maybe we'll knock thatone off and heave another sigh of relief.

SELECTIVE PERCEPTION

This has been going on for quite a while. InMay 1986, the memoirs of the released Cubanprisoner, Armando Valladares, came out. Theyquickly became a media sensation. I'll give youa couple of quotes. The media described hisrevelations as "the definitive account of thevast system of torture and prison by which Cas-tro punishes and obliterates political opposi-tion." It was "an inspiring and unforgettableaccount" of the "bestial prisons," inhuman tor-ture, [and] record of state violence [under] yetanother of this century's mass murderers, whowe learn, at last, from this book "has createda new despotism that has institutionalized tor-ture as a mechanism of social control" in "thehell that was the Cuba that [Valladares] livedin." That's the Washington Post and New YorkTimes in repeated reviews. Castro wasdescribed as "a dictatorial goon." His atrocitieswere revealed in this book so conclusively that"only the most light-headed and cold-bloodedWestern intellectual will come to the tyrant'sdefense," said the Washington Post. Remem-ber, this is the account of what happened to oneman. Let's say it's all true. Let's raise no ques-

tions about what happened to the one man whosays he was tortured. At a White House cere-mony marking Human Rights Day, he was sin-gled out by Ronald Reagan for his courage inenduring the horrors and sadism of this bloodyCuban tyrant. He was then appointed the U.S.representative at the U.N. Human RightsCommission, where he has been able to per-form signal services defending the Salvadoranand Guatemalan governments against chargesthat they conduct atrocities so massive thatthey make anything he suffered look prettyminor. That's the way things stand.

That was May 1986. It was interesting, andit tells you something about the manufactureof consent. The same month, the survivingmembers of the Human Rights Group of El Sal-vador—the leaders had been killed—werearrested and tortured, including Herbert Anaya,who was the director. They were sent to aprison—La Esperanza (hope) Prison. While theywere in prison they continued their humanrights work. They were lawyers, they continuedtaking affidavits. There were 432 prisoners inthat prison. They got signed affidavits from 430of them in which they described, under oath,the torture that they had received: electrical tor-ture and other atrocities, including, in one case,

torture by a North American U.S. major in uni-form, who is described in some detail. This isan unusually explicit and comprehensive tes-timony, probably unique in its detail aboutwhat's going on in a torture chamber. This160-page report of the prisoners' sworn testi-mony was sneaked out of prison, along with avideotape which was taken showing people tes-tifying in prison about their torture. It was dis-tributed by the Marin County Interfaith TaskForce. The national press refused to cover it.The TV stations refused to run it. There was anarticle in the local Marin County newspaper,the San Francisco Examiner, and I think that'sall. No one else would touch it. This was a timewhen there was more than a few "light-headedand cold-blooded Western intellectuals" whowere singing the praises of Jose NapoleonDuarte and of Ronald Reagan. Anaya was notthe subject of any tributes. He didn't get onHuman Rights Day. He wasn't appointed toanything. He was released in a prisonerexchange and then assassinated, apparently bythe U.S.-backed security forces. Very little infor-mation about that ever appeared. The medianever asked whether exposure of the atroci-ties—instead of sitting on them and silencingthem—might have saved his life.

This tells you something about the way awell-functioning system of consent manufac-turing works. In comparison with the revela-tions of Herbert Anaya in El Salvador,Valladares's memoirs are not even a pea nextto the mountain. But you've got your job to do.That takes us toward the next war. I expect,we're going to hear more and more of this, untilthe next operation takes place.

A few remarks about the last one. Let'sturn finally to that. Let me begin with this Uni-versity of Massachusetts study that I men-tioned before. It has some interestingconclusions. In the study people were askedwhether they thought that the United Statesshould intervene with force to reverse illegaloccupation or serious human rights abuses. Byabout two to one, people in the United Statesthought we should. We should use force in thecase of illegal occupation of land and severehuman rights abuses. If the United States wasto follow that advice, we would bomb El Sal-vador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Damascus, TelAviv, Capetown, Turkey, Washington, and awhole list of other states. These are all casesof illegal occupation and aggression and severehuman rights abuses. If you know the factsabout that range of examples, you'll know very

well that Saddam Hussein's aggression andatrocities fall well within the range. They'renot the most extreme. Why doesn't anybodycome to that conclusion? The reason is thatnobody knows. In a well-functioning propa-ganda system, nobody would know what I'mtalking about when I list that range of exam-ples. If you bother to look, you find that thoseexamples are quite appropriate.

Take one that was ominously close to beingperceived during the Gulf War. In February,right in the middle of the bombing campaign,the government of Lebanon requested Israel toobserve U.N. Security Council Resolution425, which called on it to withdraw immedi-ately and unconditionally from Lebanon. Thatresolution dates from March 1978. There havesince been two subsequent resolutions callingfor the immediate and unconditional with-drawal of Israel from Lebanon. Of course itdoesn't observe them because the UnitedStates backs it in maintaining that occupation.Meanwhile southern Lebanon is terrorized.There are big torture-chambers with horrifyingthings going on. It's used as a base for attack-ing other parts of Lebanon. Since 1978,Lebanon was invaded, the city of Beirut wasbombed, about 20,000 people were killed, about

80 percent of them civilians, hospitals weredestroyed, and more terror, looting, and robberywas inflicted. All fine, the United Statesbacked it. That's just one case. You didn't seeanything in the media about it or any discus-sion about whether Israel and the United Statesshould observe U.N. Security Council Resolu-tion 425 or any of the other resolutions, nor didanyone call for the bombing of Tel Aviv,although by the principles upheld by two-thirdsof the population, we should. After all, that'sillegal occupation and severe human rightsabuses. That's just one case. There are muchworse ones. The Indonesian invasion of EastTimor knocked off about 200,000 people. Theyall look minor by that one. That was stronglybacked by the United States and is still goingon with major United States diplomatic andmilitary support. We can go on and on.

THE GULF WAR

That tells you how a well-functioning propa-ganda system works. People can believe thatwhen we use force against Iraq and Kuwait it'sbecause we really observe the principle thatillegal occupation and human rights abusesshould be met by force. They don't see what itwould mean if those principles were applied toU.S. behavior. That's a success of propagandaof quite a spectacular type.

Let's take a look at another case. If you lookclosely at the coverage of the war since August(1990), you'll notice that there are a couple ofstriking voices missing. For example, there isan Iraqi democratic opposition, in fact, a verycourageous and quite substantial Iraqi democ-ratic opposition. They, of course, function inexile because they couldn't survive in Iraq.They are in Europe primarily. They arebankers, engineers, architects—people likethat. They are articulate, they have voices, andthey speak. The previous February, when Sad-dam Hussein was still George Bush's favoritefriend and trading partner, they actually cameto Washington, according to Iraqi democraticopposition sources, with a plea for some kind

of support for a demand of theirs calling for aparliamentary democracy in Iraq. They weretotally rebuffed, because the United States hadno interest in it. There was no reaction to thisin the public record.

Since August it became a little harder toignore their existence. In August we suddenlyturned against Saddam Hussein after havingfavored him for many years. Here was an Iraqidemocratic opposition who ought to have somethoughts about the matter. They would behappy to see Saddam Hussein drawn and quar-tered. He killed their brothers, tortured theirsisters, and drove them out of the country.They have been fighting against his tyrannythroughout the whole time that Ronald Reaganand George Bush were cherishing him. Whatabout their voices? Take a look at the nationalmedia and see how much you can find aboutthe Iraqi democratic opposition from Augustthrough March (1991). You can't find a word.It's not that they're inarticulate. They havestatements, proposals, calls and demands. Ifyou look at them, you find that they're indis-tinguishable from those of the American peacemovement. They're against Saddam Husseinand they're against the war against Iraq. Theydon't want their country destroyed. What they

want is a peaceful resolution, and they knewperfectly well that it might have been achiev-able. That's the wrong view and thereforethey're out. We don't hear a word about theIraqi democratic opposition. If you want to findout about them, pick up the German press, orthe British press. They don't say much aboutthem, but they're less controlled than we areand they say something.

This is a spectacular achievement of pro-paganda. First, that the voices of the Iraqidemocrats are completely excluded, and sec-ond, that nobody notices it. That's interesting,too. It takes a really deeply indoctrinated pop-ulation not to notice that we're not hearing thevoices of the Iraqi democratic opposition andnot asking the question, Why? and finding outthe obvious answer: because the Iraqi democ-rats have their own thoughts; they agree withthe international peace movement and there-fore they're out.

Let's take the question of the reasons forthe war. Reasons were offered for the war. Thereasons are: aggressors cannot be rewarded andaggression must be reversed by the quick resortto 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 United States uphold those principles,that aggressors cannot be rewarded and thataggression must be reversed by a quick resortto violence? I won't insult your intelligence byrunning through the facts, but the fact is thosearguments could be refuted in two minutes bya literate teenager. However, they never wererefuted. Take a look at the media, the liberalcommentators and critics, the people whotestified in Congress and see whether anybodyquestioned the assumption that the UnitedStates stands up to those principles. Has theUnited States opposed its own aggression inPanama and insisted on bombing Washingtonto reverse it? When the South African occupa-tion of Namibia was declared illegal in 1969,did the United States impose sanctions on foodand medicine? Did it go to war? Did it bombCapetown? No, it carried out twenty years of"quiet diplomacy." It wasn't very pretty dur-ing those twenty years. In the years of the Rea-gan-Bush administration alone, about 1.5million people were killed by South Africa justin the surrounding countries. Forget what washappening in South Africa and Namibia. Some-how that didn't sear our sensitive souls. Wecontinued with "quite diplomacy" and endedup with ample reward for the aggressors. They

were given the major port in Namibia andplenty of advantages that took into accounttheir security concerns. Where is this princi-ple that we uphold? Again, it's child's play todemonstrate that those couldn't possibly havebeen the reasons for going to war, because wedon't uphold these principles. But nobody didit—that's what's important. And nobody both-ered 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 couldnot be refuted by a literate teenager in abouttwo minutes. That again is the hallmark of atotalitarian culture. It ought to frighten us, thatwe are so deeply totalitarian that we can be dri-ven to war without any reason being given forit and without anybody noticing Lebanon'srequest or caring. It's a very striking fact.

Right before the bombing started, in mid-January, a major Washington Post-ABC pollrevealed something interesting. People wereasked, If Iraq would agree to withdraw fromKuwait in return for Security Council consid-eration of the problem of Arab-Israeli conflict,would you be in favor of that? By about two-to-one, the population was in favor of that. So wasthe whole world, including the Iraqi democra-tic opposition. So it was reported that two-

thirds of the American population were in favorof that. Presumably, the people who were infavor of that thought they were the only onesin the world to think so. Certainly nobody inthe press had said that it would be a good idea.The orders from Washington have been, we'resupposed to be against "linkage," that is,diplomacy, and therefore everybody goose-stepped on command and everybody wasagainst diplomacy. Try to find commentary inthe press—you can find a column by Alex Cock-burn in the Los Angeles Times, who argued thatit would be a good idea. The people who wereanswering that question thought, I'm alone, butthat's what I think. Suppose they knew thatthey weren't alone, that other people thoughtit, like the Iraqi democratic opposition. Supposethat 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 justeight days earlier. On January 2, these officialshad released an Iraqi offer to withdraw totallyfrom Kuwait in return for consideration by theSecurity Council of the Arab-Israeli conflict andthe problem of weapons of mass destruction.The United States had been refusing to negoti-ate this issue since well before the invasion ofKuwait. Suppose that people had known that

the offer was actually on the table and that itwas widely supported and that in fact it'sexactly the kind of thing that any rational per-son would do if they were interested in peace,as we do in other cases, in the rare cases thatwe do want to reverse aggression. Suppose thatit had been known. You can make your ownguesses, but I would assume that the two-thirdswould probably have risen to 98 percent of thepopulation. Here you have the great successesof propaganda. Probably not one person whoanswered the poll knew any of the things I'vejust mentioned. The people thought they werealone. Therefore it was possible to proceed withthe war policy without opposition.

There was a good deal of discussion aboutwhether sanctions would work. You had thehead of the CIA come up and discuss whethersanctions would work. However, there was nodiscussion of a much more obvious question:Had sanctions already worked? The answer isyes, apparently they had—probably by lateAugust, very likely by late December. It wasvery hard to think up any other reason for theIraqi offers of withdrawal, which were authen-ticated or in some cases released by high U.S.officials, who described them as "serious" and"negotiable." So the real question is: Had sanc-

tions already worked? Was there a way out?Was there a way out in terms quite acceptableto the general population, the world at largeand the Iraqi democratic opposition? Thesequestions were not discussed, and it's crucialfor a well-functioning propaganda system thatthey not be discussed. That enables the chair-man of the Republican National Committee tosay that if any Democrat had been in office,Kuwait would not be liberated today. He cansay that and no Democrat would get up and saythat if I were president it would have been lib-erated not only today but six months ago,because there were opportunities then that Iwould have pursued and Kuwait would havebeen liberated without killing tens of thou-sands of people and without causing an envi-ronmental catastrophe. No Democrat wouldsay that because no Democrat took that posi-tion. Henry Gonzalez and Barbara Boxer tookthat position. But the number of people whotook it is so marginal that it's virtually nonex-istent. Given the fact that almost no Democ-ratic politician would say that, ClaytonYeutter is free to make his statements.

When Scud missiles hit Israel, nobody inthe press applauded. Again, that's an interest-ing fact about a well-functioning propaganda

system. We might ask, why not? After all, Sad-dam Hussein's arguments were as good asGeorge Bush's arguments. What were they,after all? Let's just take Lebanon. Saddam Hus-sein says that he can't stand annexation. Hecan't let Israel annex the Syrian Golan Heightsand East Jerusalem, in opposition to the unan-imous agreement of the Security Council. Hecan't stand annexation. He can't stand aggres-sion. Israel has been occupying southernLebanon since 1978 in violation of SecurityCouncil resolutions that it refuses to abide by.In the course of that period it attacked all ofLebanon, still bombs most of Lebanon at will.He can't stand it. He might have read theAmnesty International report on Israeli atroc-ities in the West Bank. His heart is bleeding.He can't stand it. Sanctions can't work becausethe United States vetoes them. Negotiationswon't work because the United States blocksthem. What's left but force? He's been waitingfor years. Thirteen years in the case ofLebanon, 20 years in the case of the West Bank.You've heard that argument before. The onlydifference between that argument and the oneyou heard is that Saddam Hussein could trulysay sanctions and negotiations can't workbecause the United States blocks them. But

George Bush couldn't say that, because sanc-tions apparently had worked, and there wasevery reason to believe that negotiations couldwork—except that he adamantly refused topursue them, saying explicitly, there will be nonegotiations right through. Did you find any-body in the press who pointed that out? No. It'sa triviality. It's something that, again, a liter-ate teenager could figure out in a minute. Butnobody pointed it out, no commentator, no edi-torial writer. That, again, is the sign of a verywell-run totalitarian culture. It shows that themanufacture of consent is working.

Last comment about this. We could givemany examples, you could make them up asyou go along. Take the idea that Saddam Hus-sein is a monster about to conquer the world—widely believed, in the United States, and notunrealistically. It was drilled into people'sheads over and over again: He's about to takeeverything. We've got to stop him now. Howdid he get that powerful? This is a small, third-world country without an industrial base. Foreight years Iraq had been fighting Iran. That'spost-revolutionary Iran, which had decimatedits officer corps and most of its military force.Iraq had a little bit of support in that war. It wasbacked by the Soviet Union, the United States,

Europe, the major Arab countries, and the Araboil producers. It couldn't defeat Iran. But all ofa sudden it's ready to conquer the world. Didyou find anybody who pointed that out? Thefact of the matter is, this was a third-worldcountry with a peasant army. It is now beingconceded that there was a ton of disinforma-tion about the fortifications, the chemicalweapons, etc. But did you find anybody whopointed it out? No. You found virtually nobodywho pointed it out. That's typical. Notice thatthis was done one year after exactly the samething was done with Manuel Noriega. ManuelNoriega is a minor thug by comparison withGeorge Bush's friend Saddam Hussein orGeorge Bush's other friends in Beijing orGeorge Bush himself, for that matter. In com-parison with them, Manuel Noriega is a prettyminor thug. Bad, but not a world-class thug ofthe kind we like. He was turned into a creaturelarger than life. He was going to destroy us,leading the narco-traffickers. We had toquickly move in and smash him, killing a cou-ple hundred or maybe thousand people, restor-ing to power the tiny, maybe eight percentwhite oligarchy, and putting U.S. militaryofficers in control at every level of the politi-cal system. We had to do all those things

because, after all, we had to save ourselves orwe were going to be destroyed by this monster.One year later the same thing was done by Sad-dam Hussein. Did anybody point it out? Didanybody point out what had happened or why?You'll have to look pretty hard for that.

Notice that this is not all that differentfrom what the Creel Commission when itturned a pacifistic population into raving hys-terics who wanted to destroy everything Ger-man to save ourselves from Huns who weretearing the arms off Belgian babies. The tech-niques are maybe more sophisticated, withtelevision and lots of money going into it, butit's pretty traditional.

I think the issue, to come back to my orig-inal comment, is not simply disinformationand the Gulf crisis. The issue is much broader.It's whether we want to live in a free societyor whether we want to live under whatamounts to a form of self-imposed totalitari-anism, with the bewildered herd marginalized,directed elsewhere, terrified, screaming patri-otic slogans, fearing for their lives and admir-ing with awe the leader who saved them fromdestruction, while the educated masses goose-step on command and repeat the slogansthey're supposed to repeat and the society dete-

riorates at home. We end up serving as a mer-cenary enforcer state, hoping that others aregoing to pay us to smash up the world. Thoseare the choices. That's the choice that you haveto face. The answer to those questions is verymuch in the hands of people like you and me.