eBook - ePub
Propaganda and the Public Mind
Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian
This is a test
Share book
- 256 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Propaganda and the Public Mind
Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
Chomsky offers hope for the future and shows how ordinary citizens, working together, have the power to make change.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Propaganda and the Public Mind an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Propaganda and the Public Mind by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Political Propaganda. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
1.
Activist Victories
Boulder, Colorado, May 10, 1998
Your busy speaking schedule has taken you recently to Toronto, Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota; Fort Wayne, Indiana; London, England; and today Boulder, Colorado. Whatâs going on at these events? I know youâve been getting huge crowds.
You can see that the tour is building up in significance and importance, finally reaching the peak in Boulder. You canât do better than this. [Laughs.] Itâs pretty much whatâs been going on for a number of years now. There are very large, enthusiastic, and interested audiences that participate actively. They ask serious questions and want to talk about important issues. Topics that I never would have thought of discussing twenty years ago are now perfectly accessible to anyone. I really never think twice about what Iâm going to say to a particular audience. London is a different scene, but Fort Wayne was organized by the Northeast Indiana Labor Council, a collection of a couple of dozen unions in the industrial heartland. I donât know the Winona area very well, but I imagine itâs mostly farming and small industry. In both cases, you couldnât ask for a more involved, energetic, and thoughtful audience. They want to think hard about whatâs happening in the world and what they can do about it.
Do you have a sense that youâre talking to the choir, or are you reaching the congregation?
These arenât exactly places that are peppered with lefty activists. These are what are called ordinary people.
So, not a lot of Z Magazine subscribers and readers of Common Courage Press books.
You meet a few now and then, but theyâre scattered around. I met one or two people who had been at the Z Media Institute and who were familiar with the magazine, but certainly 99 percent are not.
The Fort Wayne event was singular in one particular respect.
Actually, it was unusual for me. Iâve spoken to labor groups elsewhere, in Canada and overseas, but itâs the first time I can recall being invited by a mainstream labor grouping in the U.S. at a place like that. It is sort of right in the middle of what has been the industrial heartland of the countryâin fact, itâs considered a pretty right-wing area, but it sure didnât have that feel. After the talk there was a reception. They were raising money for the unions, twenty-five dollars a shot, but a lot of people were there. We stayed around for hours and had a great discussion until early in the morning.
In the May 1998 Z Magazine you have an article entitled âDomestic Constituencies,â where you talk about various free trade agreements and proposals. You comment that âit is always enlightening to seek out what is omitted in propaganda campaigns.1 What did your investigations into the particular propaganda effort around the Multilateral Agreement on Investment reveal?
The MAI is a major investment treaty. It has been planned and intensively negotiated now for three years, first at the World Trade Organization (WTO), and when they couldnât ram it through there, it moved over to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. The OECD consists of the twenty-nine rich countries. MAI has been going on there since May 1995. Thereâs been extensive, intimate involvement of the corporate sector. Thereâs a group called the U.S. Council for International Business which is essentially the main lobbying organization for internationally oriented corporations. They actually put out a monograph in January 1996 informing their constituency of the contents of MAI and its importance.2 Congress hasnât been informed. In this same article, I reviewed the mainstream press. Itâs been astonishingly silent. It has yet to make the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal had a report.3 In early April, the Washington Post had its first news article.4 It reported the failure of the OECD to sign it after three years due in large measure to grassroots pressure. Though the matter was kept virtually secret, nevertheless enough pressure developed through nongovernmental organizations, public interest groups, and grassÂroots activists so that they felt they had to back down. It is quite an important victory. It shows that things can be done. Canada is the one country where it did break through into the public arena about a year ago. Thatâs still after two years of intense negotiations. Itâs been on national television and in the mainstream press like the Toronto Globe and Mail and journals like Macleanâs. In Australia it broke through this January and then there was a storm of protest and a lot of discussion. In Europe it was picked up just in the last few months.
But in the U.S., apart from what you might call statistical error, thereâs been essentially nothing. Itâs not that itâs unknown. All media leaders of course know about it. The whole corporate world knows about it. It was almost certainly the main issue behind giving the president whatâs called âfast-trackâ authority to approve trade agreements. There was a lot of furor about fast track, but l couldnât find a single mention of this, although the media must have known that this was a central issue. The Miami Herald did have an article last July on the MAI.5 The fast-track legislation had not yet been introduced in Congress at that point but was being considered. The article pointed out that the U.S. Council for International Business had already approached the White House, asking them to make the MAI a central element of the fast-track negotiations with Congress. Thatâs what they wanted to ram through. It surely was far more important than, say, extending the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to South America. But if there was a mention of it, l couldnât find it. Itâs one of many things that was unreported. There are plenty of others. But, despite the suppression, somehow enough of the public was able to get organized to block it.
Thatâs a very dramatic eventâand it is important. Business Week had a report last February with the headline, âThe Explosive Trade Deal Youâve Never Heard Of.â6 And if you are not reading the literature of the U.S. Council for International Business, you didnât hear of it. It is an explosive trade deal, or would be. Itâs now going to shift to a more secretive framework. Itâll go on, and itâll require even more serious activism to try to expose whatâs happening, to deÂbate it and oppose it if it ought to be opposed, and I think it should. People could decide that for themselves if they had the information.
Why were the negotiations so secretive?
Thereâs a pretty good reason why the information is not being made available. Media and business leaders know perfectly well that the public is going to be strongly opposed. In fact, the public was so strongly opposed to fast track that its supporters couldnât get it through, even though the business world was virtually 100 percent in favor of it, the media were all in favor of it, and the White House was running a big propaganda campaign. Even people in Congress who favored it strongly voted against it because their doors were being rammed down by their constituents. Even without knowing the facts, people have an instinctive and indeed rather healthy reaction of skepticism about these things.
Another thing that wasnât mentioned about fast track and which is worth bearing in mind is that the discussion about it was presented as if it were about free trade. It surely wasnât about free trade. First of all, the agreements that theyâre talking about are not free trade agreements. They are highly protectionist. They donât fall under free tradeâvirtually nothing does. But quite apart from that, even the most ardent free trader would have been against fast track if they happen to believe in democracy, because thatâs what it was about. The question was, âShould the president, the White House, have the right to negotiate trade agreements in secret and then present them to Congress with the privilege of saying âyesâ or ânoâ but not discussing them and without the public ever being informed?â Thatâs a question about democracy. Itâs not a question about trade agreements.
The official White House position was that we have to abide by the principle that the president alone, one person alone, can enter into international trade negotiations. That certainly is no principle. For example, on human rights issues, itâs insisted that Congress have years to tear away at them, cut them back, put in reservations. In fact, thatâs one of the reasons the U.S. has probably the worst record in the industrial world in ratifying human rights conventions. They almost never get ratified. So on human rights thatâs certainly not a principle. On trade it may be a principle, but thatâs because of what theyâre trying to ram through. They know the public wonât like it. The Wall Street Journal conceded that, sort of obliquely. In one of their news articles praising fast track as a no-brainer, something so obvious that anybody sensible would want it, they said that nevertheless the critics had what they called an âultimate weaponâ: that the public is opposed.7 So therefore youâd better keep them out of it. Thatâs the implication.
On the MAI, they were afraid that the âultimate weaponâ might be unsheathed, and indeed it was, astonishingly. A lot of people feel that we canât do anything, that prospects are gloomy. I donât think thatâs true at all. This is a rather dramatic illustration of the opposite. Against tremendous odds, confronting the most concentrated power in the world, the richest, most powerful countries, transnational corporations, international financial institutions, and close to total control of the media. Thatâs a consolidated power of a kind that you canât find in history. Despite that, grassroots activism was able to stop it.
Do you see a possible trend here beginning with the successful UPS strike and the widespread public support for the strikers, then the defeat of fast track, the reversal on MAI, and also the successful Columbus, Ohio, protest against the bombing of Iraq?
The only reservation I have is that 1 donât think itâs new. I think itâs been going on for a long time. Right through the 1980s, for example, popular activism was so strong that the Reagan administration was never able to intervene directly in Central America. They were unable to do anything remotely like what Kennedy and Johnson did in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. Thatâs simply because there was far too much public opposition. So they had to do it indirectly, through clandestine terror.
You can see it in reporting thatâs going on now on the death of Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala. Read that reporting. Thereâs a slight omission. The fact that another leading church figure was murdered in Central America is not big news. Thatâs been happening for a while. But he was killed right as he was about to release a big study done by the church called Never Again, which gave a very detailed analysis of the atrocities carried out in Guatemala.8 Itâs one of the real horror stories of past years. They calculated that about 200,000 people had been killed, over a million and a half refugees, hundreds of thousands of orphans and widows. They attributed about 80 percent of it to the government and the paramilitaries connected to it, only 10 percent to the guerrillas, the rest unknown.
Who is the government? The government was established, armed, trained, and supported by the United States. The U.S. government couldnât move in directly because of popular opposition, so they used mercenaries. The whole international terror networkâTaiwan, Israel, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Argentinian neo-Nazisâwas involved in Central America. The worst atrocities in Guatemala, the church report shows, were under the rule of Rios Montt, who was the favorite of Washington. Reagan was praising him all over the place as a real friend of democracy who was getting a âbum rapâ from the human rights groups, meanwhile killing tens of thousands of people.9
The U.S. was pretty much excluded from the discussion, in some reports wasnât even mentioned at all. But it was behind the scenes. Crucially, it was not directly involved. The place was not being bombed by B-52s. There werenât hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops roaming around. Thatâs because of the brake that was imposed by the popular activism of the 1980s, which was happening all over the country and was not concentrated in urban centers and college campuses. It was taking place in rural areas in the Southwest and Midwest. It was very strong. So thereâs nothing new about this.
Itâs right in front of our eyes. The big popular movementsâthe environmental, feminist, and other movementsâare all developments of the past few decades. And they are achieving a lot. Fast track was very dramatic in this respect. As the White House correctly pointed out, thatâs an option that had been available for presidents all the time. Nobody had ever paid attention, because it was considered right. If the president wants to make important deals in secret and leave Congress and the public out of it, what could be wrong with that? Now people feel thereâs something wrong with it, and thatâs a lot of progress. They not only feel that thereâs something wrong with it, but they feel that strongly enough that they are able to overcome the extraordinarily powerful forces that are trying to ram it through. This is a lot of progress.
One of the chapters in Manufacturing Consent, which you coauthored with Edward Hennan, is entitled âWorthy and Unworthy Victims.â The assassination of Juan Gerardi was covered on page 5 of the New York Times.10 What might have been the coverage if he were a Cuban bishop, for example?
There would have been huge headlines all over the front pages. We need not discuss it. Itâs obvious.
So that construct still holds.
Thatâs just another example. In fact, in that book that Ed and I wrote, one of the chapters that he did compares a hundred religious martyrs in Central America with one Polish priest killed in Eastern Europe.11 The killers in Poland were immediately apprehended, sent to long jail sentences, unlike the hundred religious martyrs in Central America, including Archbishop Oscar Romero and four church women from the United States. Ed did a media review that showed that the coverage of the one Polish priest was more than that of 100 religious martyrs, and quite different in character. In that case, the press demanded that it be traced to the highest level. âThe Kremlin canât escape blame,â and so on. In the case of the archbishop, the nuns, and the laywomen from the United States, as well as lots of other religious martyrs, it was all some local accident. They canât figure out what it is. There was very little coverage and it was relegated to the back pages, with no graphic details. To this day, there has been no serious inquiry here into the death of Archbishop Romero.
When the six Jesuit intellectuals were murdered, it was reported. But ask people what their names were. Ask them to name some dissidents in Eastern Europe. Dissidents in Eastern Europe who suffered, but in the post-Stalin era who suffered nothing like their counterparts in Central America, were heroes. Theyâre well known. Their books are all over the place. Theyâre quoted. They have articles in the New York Review of Books. The Central American intellectuals, who suffered far harsher conditions under our supervision, and in this case...