http://cal.jmu.edu/aleysb/chomsky.htm
by Noam Chomsky
Pointing to the massive amounts of propaganda spewed by
government and institutions around the world, observers have called our era the
age of Orwell. But the fact is that Orwell was a latecomer on the scene. As
early as World War I, American historians offered themselves to President
Woodrow Wilson to carry out a task they called "historical engineering,"
by which they meant designing the facts of history so that they would serve
state policy. In this instance, the
In 1921, the famous American journalist Walter Lippmann
said that the art of democracy requires what he called the "manufacture of
consent." This phrase is an Orwellian euphemism for thought control. The
idea is that in a state such as the
That's the kind of thing that Orwell described in 1984
(not a very good book in my opinion). 1984 is so popular because it's trivial
and it attacks our enemies. If Orwell had dealt with a different problem--
ourselves--his book wouldn't have been so popular. In fact, it probably
wouldn't have been published.
In totalitarian societies where there's a Ministry of
Truth, propaganda doesn't really try to control your thoughts. It just gives
you the party line. It says, "Here's the official doctrine; don't disobey
and you won't get in trouble. What you think is not of great importance to
anyone. If you get out of line we'll do something to you because we have
force." Democratic societies can't work like that, because the state is
much more limited in its capacity to control behavior by force. Since the voice
of the people is allowed to speak out, those in power better control what that
voice says--in other words, control what people think. One of the ways to do this
is to create political debate that appears to embrace many opinions, but
actually stays within very narrow margins. You have to make sure that both
sides in the debate accept certain assumptions--and that those assumptions are
the basis of the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda
system, the debate is permissible.
The Vietnam War is a classic example of America's
propaganda system. In the mainstream media--the New York Times, CBS, and so
on-- there was a lively debate about the war. It was between people called
"doves" and people called "hawks." The hawks said, "If
we keep at it we can win." The doves said, "Even if we keep at it, it
would probably be too costly for use, and besides, maybe we're killing too many
people." Both sides agreed on one thing. We had a right to carry out
aggression against South Vietnam. Doves and hawks alike refused to admit that
aggression was taking place. They both called our military presence in
Southeast Asia the defense of South Vietnam, substituting "defense"
for "aggression" in the standard Orwellian manner. In reality, we
were attacking South Vietnam just as surely as the Soviets later attacked
Afghanistan. Consider the following facts. In 1962 the U.S. Air Force began
direct attacks against the rural population of South Vietnam with heavy bombing
and defoliation . It was part of a program intended to drive millions of people
into detention camps where, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, they
would be "protected" from the guerrillas they were supporting--the
"Viet Cong," the southern branch of the former anti-French resistance
(the Vietminh). This is what our government calls aggression or invasion when
conducted by some official enemy. The Saigon government had no legitimacy and
little popular support, and its leadership was regularly overthrown in
U.S.-backed coups when it was feared they might arrange a settlement with the
Viet Cong. Some 70,000 "Viet Cong" had already been killed in the
U.S.-directed terror campaign before the outright U.S. invasion took place in
1972.
Like the Soviets in Afghanistan, we tried to establish a
government in Saigon to invite us in. We had to overthrow regime after regime
in that effort. Finally we simply invaded outright. That is plain, simple
aggression. But anyone in the U.S. who thought that our policies in Vietnam
were wrong in principle was not admitted to the discussion about the war. The
debate was essentially over tactics.
Even at the peak of opposition to the U.S. war, only a
minuscule portion of the intellectuals opposed the war out of principle--on the
grounds that aggression is wrong. Most intellectuals came to oppose it well
after leading business circles did--on the "pragmatic" grounds that
the costs were too high.
Strikingly omitted from the debate was the view that the
U.S. could have won, but that it would have been wrong to allow such military
aggression to succeed. This was the position of the authentic peace movement
but it was seldom heard in the mainstream media.
If you pick up a book on American history and look at the
Vietnam War, there is no such event as the American attack on South Vietnam.
For the past 22 years, I have searched in vain for even a single reference in
mainstream journalism or scholarship to an "American invasion of South
Vietnam" or American "aggression" in South Vietnam. In America's
doctrinal system, there is no such event. It's out of history, down Orwell's
memory hole.
If the U.S. were a totalitarian state, the Ministry of
Truth would simply have said, "It's right for us to go into Vietnam. Don't
argue with it." People would have recognized that as the propaganda
system, and they would have gone on thinking whatever they wanted. They would
have plainly seen that we were attacking Vietnam, just as we can see the Soviets
are attacking Afghanistan.
People are much freer in the U.S., they are allowed to
express themselves. That's why it's necessary for those in power to control
everyone's thought, to try and make it appear as if the only issues in matters
such as U.S. intervention in Vietnam are tactical: Can we get away with it?
There is no discussion of right or wrong.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. propaganda system did
its job partially but not entirely. Among educated people it worked very well.
Studies show that among the more educated parts of the population, the
government's propaganda about the war is now accepted unquestioningly. One
reason that propaganda often works better on the educated than on the
uneducated is that educated people read more, so they receive more propaganda.
Another is that they have jobs in management, media, and academia and therefore
work in some capacity as agents of the propaganda system--and they believe what
the system expects them to believe. By and large, they're part of the privileged
elite, and share the interests and perceptions of those in power.
On the other hand, the government had problems in
controlling the opinions of the general population. According to some of the
latest polls, over 70 percent of Americans still thought the war was, to quote
the Gallup Poll, "fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake."
Due to the widespread opposition to the Vietnam War, the propaganda system lost
its grip on the beliefs of many Americans. They grew skeptical about what they
were told. In this case there's even a name for the erosion of belief. It's
called the "Vietnam Syndrome," a grave disease in the eyes of
America's elites because people understand too much.
Let me gives on more example of the powerful propaganda
system at work in the U.S.--the congressional vote on contra aid in March 1986.
For three months prior to the vote, the administration was heating up the
political atmosphere, trying to reverse the congressional restrictions on aid
to the terrorist army that's attacking Nicaragua. I was interested in how the
media was going to respond to the administration campaign for the contras. So I
studied two national newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times. In
January, February, and March, I went through every one of their editorials,
opinion pieces, and the columns written by their own columnists. There were 85
pieces. Of these, all were anti-Sandinista. On that issue, no discussion was
tolerable.
There are two striking facts about the Sandinista
government, as compared with our allies in Central America--Honduras,
Guatemala, and El Salvador. One is that the Sandinista government doesn't
slaughter its population. That's a well-recognized fact. Second, Nicaragua is
the only one of those countries in which the government has tried to direct
social services to the poor. This too, is not a matter of debate; it is
conceded on all sides to be true.
On the other hand, our allies in Guatemala and El
Salvador are among the world's worst terrorist states. So far in the 1980s,
they have slaughtered over 150,000 of their own citizens, with U.S. support.
These nations do little for their populations except torture, terrorize, and
kill them. Honduras is a little different. In Honduras, there's a government of
the rich that robs the poor. It doesn't kill on the scale of El Salvador or
Guatemala, but a large part of the population is starving to death.
So in examining the 85 editorials, I also looked for
these two facts about Nicaragua. The fact that the Sandinistas are radically
different from our Central American allies in that they don't slaughter their
population was not mentioned once. That they have carried out social reforms
for the poor was referred to in two phrases, both buried. Two phrases in 85
columns on one crucial issue, zero phrases in 85 columns on another.
That's really remarkable control over thought on a highly
debated issue. After that I went through the editorials on El Salvador and
Nicaragua from 1980 to the present; it's essentially the same story. Nicaragua,
a country under attack by the regional superpower, did on October 15, 1985,
what we did in Hawaii during World War II: instituted a state of siege. There
was a huge uproar in the mainstream American press--editorials, denunciations,
claims that the Sandinistas are totalitarian Stalinist monsters, and so on.
Two days after that, on October 17, El Salvador renewed
its state of siege. Instituted in March 1980 and renewed monthly afterwards, El
Salvador's state of siege was far more harsh than Nicaragua's. It blocked freedom
of movement and virtually all civil rights. It was the framework within which
the U.S.-trained and -organized army has carried out torture and slaughter.
The New York Times considered the Nicaraguan state of
siege a great atrocity. The Salvadoran state of siege, far harsher in its
methods and it application, was never mentioned in 160 New York Times
editorials on Nicaragua and El Salvador, up to now [mid-1986, the time of this
interview].
We are often told the country is a budding democracy, so
it can't possibly be having a state of siege. According to news reports on El
Salvador, Duarte is heading a moderate centrist government under attack by
terrorists of the left and of the right. This is complete nonsense. Every human
rights investigation, even the U.S. government in private, concedes that
terrorism is being carried out by the Salvadoran government itself. The death
squads are the security forces. Duarte is simply a front for terrorists. But
that is seldom said publicly. All this falls under Walter Lippmann's notion of
"the manufacture of consent." Democracy permits the voice of the
people to be heard, and it is the task of the intellectual to ensure that this
voice endorses what leaders perceive to be the right course. Propaganda is to democracy
what violence is to totalitarianism. The techniques have been honed to a high
art in the U.S. and elsewhere, far beyond anything that Orwell dreamed of. The
device of feigned dissent (as practiced by the Vietnam- era "doves,"
who criticized the war on the grounds of effectiveness and not principle) is
one of the more subtle means, though simple lying and suppressing fact and
other crude techniques are also highly effective.
For those who stubbornly seek freedom around the world,
there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and
practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian
societies, much less so in the propaganda system to which we are subjected and
in which all too often we serve as unwilling or unwitting instruments.
[This is an expanded version of an article excerpted from
Propaganda Review (Winter 1987-88). Subscriptions: $20/yr. (4 issues) from
Media Alliance, Fort Mason, Bldg. D, San Francisco, CA 94123. This article was
drawn from an interview conducted by David Barsamian of KGNU-Radio in Boulder,
Colorado (cassettes available for sale; write David Barsamian, 1415 Dellwood,
Boulder, CO 80302), and an essay from Chomsky's book Radical Priorities, edited
by C.P. Otero (1984). Black Rose Books, 3981 Boulevard St. Laurent, Montral H2W
1Y5, Quebec, Canada.]