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CounterPunch
October
7, 2002
America
is Lost in a Hobbesian Swirl of Self-Interest
Brainwashing in the United States
by
ANN PETTIFER
Most summers, I manage to decamp for a few weeks
to the country where I grew up. Much as I try to avoid them,
comparisons between the ancestral place, England, and the adopted
one, the USA, do crop up. This year there was a moment of cultural
transition when, twenty minutes after leaving Birmingham airport,
I stood in the graveyard of a 12th century church which became
my parents' final resting place. A fresh notice had appeared
directing visitors not to adorn memorials or graves with artificial
flowers. They are not a symbol of the resurrection, it said primly.
For a couple of weeks there is much grumbling about Britain:
at times it feels like a colonial backwater even if the conceit
persists, in some quarters, that it plays Greece to America's
Rome. Inefficiency and rather cavalier attitudes to work are
noticeable and I find myself missing the cheerful neighborliness
of Americans. The English are fiercely private. Then there is
the issue of road manners; those of Americans strike the spouse
and me as decidedly superior. Over there the middle finger is
always at the ready and imprecations are needlessly hurled.
However, it only takes a few days of
exposure to British media--radio, television and newspapers like
The Independent and The Guardian--to realize that the country
one has just left is in a propaganda straight-jacket, while the
United Kingdom is not. Yes, there is a yellow press in London,
much of it owned by Rupert Murdoch, which does its damnedest
to manufacture consent. But a paper like The Sun is bought by
folk more interested in tits and tall stories than the right-wingery
urged on its readers. While the Prime Minister, the unctuous
Tony Blair (the satirical magazine Private Eye calls him the
Rev. Blair) is foolishly satisfied with his new role as a gauleiter
in the American imperium, the British media is conducting a no-holds-barred,
rigorous analysis of the people and politics behind George W.
Bush's war fever.
On the eve of the commemoration of September
11, the BBC World Service broadcast an interview--unthinkable
in this country--with Gore Vidal, the brilliant, skeptical chronicler
of US history and politics. Americans, he said, cannot look outside
themselves: "they have no windows on the world, surrounded
as they are by a corporate wall of propaganda." He thinks
one of the falsehoods underpinning the propaganda is the notion
that America is a uniquely virtuous country. To that maudlin
question asked ad nauseam since September 11th, "Why do
they (meaning Muslims, Arabs) hate us?" Vidal replies, reasonably,
that an odious foreign policy in the Middle East is the honest
answer. The self-serving nonsense that the hatred derives from
envy of a democratic, freedom-loving nation is mendacious. (At
the end of the interview, he briskly predicted that all these
quasi-fascist trends in the US will be shaken by the global economic
depression we are now entering.)
If the British press is exercising the
responsibility that we should expect from the Fourth Estate in
a democracy, the mainstream media in the US has slipped into
the role of purveyor of propaganda for Bush's proposed war against
Iraq. Americans naively assume that they will always recognize
propaganda because it will announce itself in Orwellian strategems.
In the collective mind, propaganda is still associated with totalitarian
regimes, with Nazi Germany, Goebbels' "Big Lie" and
frenzied Nuremberg rallies--so says the spouse's godson who has
just published a book on America's development of weapons of
mass destruction in the context of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.
He thinks we urgently need a new vocabulary that would educate
citizens to understand how propaganda works in modern, democratic
societies. Curious about how the word propaganda entered our
lexicon, I checked with the dictionary. Collins places it as
18th century Italian and refers to the Sacra Congregatio Propaganda
Fide: Sacred Congregation for Propagating the Faith. Here the
word conveys a sense of what is to be believed, of proselytizing.
Today in the US, propaganda works more to limit the range of
discussion and to exclude from the public arena arguments or
evidence challenging the prevailing orthodoxy. Former weapons
inspector, Scott Ritter, who knows a thing or two about Saddam
Hussein, has been travelling around the country arguing against
war in Iraq. This former Marine, who reminds us that he is no
pacifist, had this to say: "I think the vast majority of
Americans are just tragically ignorant--not just about Iraq,
but about the rest of the world. They are susceptible to the
kind of propaganda manipulation that's taking place."
Recently, I had a brush with the manipulation
Ritter was talking about. In early September the Nation magazine
published a disturbing article by Jason Vest. This carefully
delineated the link between the right-wing Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Center for Security Policy
(CSP) and the zealous champions of a Likudnik Israel--those Zionist
hawks in the Pentagon, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas
Feith (known to Washington insiders as "the Kosher Nostra").
These men have been itching for war with Iraq and saw their chance
when George W. Bush was appointed President. They hold as an
article of faith, says Vest, "that there is no difference
between US and Israeli national security interests, and that
the only way to assure continued safety and prosperity for both
countries is through hegemony in the Middle East." This
of course would pave the way for Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel
Sharon, to realize his dream of establishing a greater Israel
by ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank--driving
them into a destabilized Jordan. For the Bush administration's
oil men, hegemony offers full control of the Middle East's oil
resources. It is a very wicked plan.
A day or two after I had read the piece,
Kojo Nnamdi, the host of NPR's Public Interest, had open phones
for the hour to talk about US plans for war. I managed to get
a line. As I conveyed the gist of Vest's Nation article, Nnamdi
turned nasty. He railed against the Nation (the oldest political
magazine in the country)--a bunch of left-wingers of the kind
who conspire in dark cellars, he called them. All very Conradian,
Secret Agent stuff. I was hectored for buying into such "conspiracy
theories." It was stunningly clear that he felt it his duty
to keep this sort of information off the air and, should it slip
through, to aggressively discredit it. Israel, after all, has
become the third rail in American politics. Touch it at your
peril. Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland who went
on to be an imaginative and courageous UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights, has had to learn this lesson. When she voiced criticism
of Israel's continued refusal to comply with the 1967 UN resolution
requiring it to withdraw from the Occupied Territories, and called
for Israelis to abide by the Geneva Convention after they committed
human rights abuses in Hebron, pressure from Washington ensured
Robinson was not re-appointed.
Besides accusations of conspiracy, there
is a new tactic for dealing with Israel's critics: charge them
with anti-Semitism. This is the ploy now being used by the President
of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, as a small but growing constituency
for divestment from Israel has appeared on his campus and others
around the country. Summers' shamelessness is best answered by
a fellow Jew, the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. Thomas Laqueur,
reviewing three new books on Levi, calls him "one of the
most resonant witnesses to the greatest human disaster of a disastrous
age." However, Levi did not think the Jewish catastrophe
should be used to justify "what he regarded as Israeli tribalist
and aggressive actions in the name of a sacred history of unique
suffering." Laqueur, (who is also Jewish) writes that the
Israeli invasion (under Ariel Sharon) of Lebanon in 1982 greatly
disturbed Primo Levi, "and on the eve of a trip back to
Auschwitz, Levi signed a petition, together with other Jewish
intellectuals, calling for the withdrawal of Israeli troops and
recognition of the rights of all peoples in the region. 'Everyone
is someone's Jew' he was quoted as saying in an interview 'and
today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.'"
"America is Hobbesian, unilateralist,
realist and driven by self-interest," so wrote Robert Kagan
in The National Policy Review. It is an ugly but accurate description
of George W. Bush's ubermensch America. Before we left England,
the spouse and I made a pilgrimage to an old Quaker community
at Jordans, about thirty miles from Oxford. William Penn is buried
there--he had returned to England after his work in Pennsylvania
was completed. Penn's headstone is simple and identical to all
the others in this tranquil, unadorned Quaker graveyard. The
inscription bears only his name and date of death. Nearly three
hundred years later, one couldn't help but feel that America's
tragedy is that Penn's civilized and tolerant vision of America
has been lost--overtaken by the one Kagan describes.
Ann Pettifer
is a freelance writer and the publisher of Common Sense, the
alternative newspaper at the University of Notre Dame. She can
be reached at awalshe@nd.edu
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October 4,
2002
Ahmad Faruqui
The Anvil
of War and the Ailing American Economy
Norman Madarasz
The
Truth and Violence
of a Symbolic Act
William Hughes
Political
Show Trial for
Marwan Barghouti
Ron Jacobs
The Struggle
Against
Another Oil War
Sen. Robert
Byrd
Bush War
Plan:
Blind and Improvident
Michael Schwalbe
The
Costs of American Privilege
Ralph Nader
Holding
Politicians' Feet to the Fire on Corporate Crime
Robert Buzzanco
Pacifica
Caves in to Zionist Smear Campaign
October 3,
2002
Gary Leupp
Talking
to Your Kids About Fascism
Will Youmans
The New
Anti-Apartheid Movement: The Campaign to Divest from Israel
Deb Reich
Report from a Mad World
Todd Chretien & Sue Sandlin
"It's All About Power on the
Docks"
Kurt Nimmo
Poetry
as Treason
Amiri Baraka
Somebody
Blew Up America
Alexander
Cockburn
October Surprises
October 2,
2002
Carol Wolman,
MD
Is the
President Nuts?
Diagnosing Dubya
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Something
Rotten in Klamath
Linda S. Heard
Might Sharon
Nuke Iraq?
Joanne Mariner
When
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"I Botched It"
Peter P. Mahoney
A Vietnam
Vet Makes the
Case Against War on Iraq
Mark Engler
From the
Quarantine
Agaisnt Greed
Uri Avnery
Manufacturing
Anti-Semites
Jennifer Berkshire
Converging Against Capitalism
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and Jeffrey St. Clair
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by Alexander
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