Noam Chomsky - The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Part 2 HD

you I've been asked to make an announcement to there's a rally in March tomorrow Thursday March 16th the slogan has stopped the US war in El Salvador there's a three o'clock rally in the library mall and a340 March to the Federal Building which is part of a national protest sponsored by all sorts of groups I'm sure there's a leaflet out there to demand an end to the u.s. support for the at for El Salvador's death squad democracy and the support of political negotiated solution to the war through the FMLN peace proposal so that's tomorrow three o'clock I is there somebody standing at the mic why don't we let's just make it mechanicals start over there then go over there and then go up there okay and then we'll go around okay so I can't see ya systems and ideologies behind them however a number of statements which you have made in the past are a great concern to me first and foremost among them is your claim that the Soviet Union is in fact a dungeon and to my way of thinking such a blanket condemnation of an entire society can only be regarded to say the least is inappropriate and moreover I believe that these kinds of statements can become quite destructive in serving to propagate inadequate and outdated notions of the communist enemy and I I just wonder if your if these ideas I've been waiting three years to respond to that statement of yours and I wondered if in the light of the the changes that have that have come about with Glasson austin peay destroyed openness and restructuring argue it's arguable with how significant they are but if you I don't know if you still maintain that strict view on the subject yeah well first of all I didn't say that the society is I said the the state is the government then the you know maybe people living in their homes or not but I said it because I think it's true I mean I think the thing Soviet Union is a dungeon and I also don't think is anything to do with communists or anything to do with socialism as to the changes I think you know there one hopes that they'll work what's happened is that the jailers have decided to relax it a little bit notice that those changes are coming from the top which is good you know better than having no changes but in fact Gorbachev has concentrated more power into his hands than the leadership had in the past and he's using that power and something like the manner of Peter the Great to try to liberalize the society from above which means to cut back the restrictions to open it up a bit and I think that's all to the good I mean I have a feeling that those changes will say they've already set forth lots of you know they they're when you when you introduce changes like that lots of things begin to happen popular forces do begin to develop and you get all kind of conflicts and interesting things happen and it remains to be seen where it will lead so I'm glad to see that the what I as I see it if you want to continue with the metaphor that the jailers have decided to open the cells a little bit and to allow a little more freedom in the society I think that's very good and I hope that other forces get them to continue to do it but as to I mean if we could just discuss whether this is an accurate perception of the society or not I guess you think it isn't I think it is and I'll explain why if you like but to get to your to the point you raised suppose it suppose I think that it is I think I should say it I don't see any reason not to say it if I think it's true I guess my only real question is there's political repression the United States to deter the United States no because the united states a much freer it's affecting I've what I've said about the United States and I'll say it again is in many ways from free society in the world sure there's repression here but it's also by comparative standards a very free society fact I think that's one of the reasons it has such sophisticated thought control as I tried to explain the capacity of the the capacity of the state to coerce in the United States is relatively limited you're quite right that there's plenty of oppression I mentioned the FBI which is the national political police which is dedicated to oppression that's its job it's been doing it ever since it was founded well you know that's inconsistent with the free society but again by comparative standards remember I'm talking about comparative standards the United States is quite a free society the capacity of the state to coerce I think is limited probably more so than any other society I know at least so I don't think that it would be correct to call it a dungeon thank you yeah if you looked to blocked back from where you're standing right now you'd come across a marvelous example of what I've described in various various occasions so if some example of above-ground bunker Neal fashioned other what above-ground bunker neo-fascist architecture called by this Hall if violence fall is the school of communications the comm Arts Building the School of Journalism I imagine there a number of journalism students in the audience tonight I imagine they're in a good number of people who well they they filter in they become middle echelon apparatchik II for the media empire that you've discussed they come out imbued with the ideology of value free objective reporting it's the major ideological offensive against the kind of model that you want to pose as an alternative I wonder if you could talk to the audience here about the ideology of objectivity and value free reporting within this system well there is such an ideology and it's interesting to see how its interpreted objectivity means you take what people in power say and you reported accurately with distorting their quotes and then sort of down at the bottom of the column you know down at the bottom of the column you may say things like what I quoted if you're really an intrepid reporter you say well this may seem to be inconsistent with the spirit of the peace agreement that's you know that's objective reporting if the State Department announces that Nicaragua has called for revolution Without Borders then even if you know it happens to be a lie an objective reporter just reports it because they said it after all it's true that they said it and wouldn't be objected be introducing opinions to say it's a lie I suppose so there is an object ideology of objectivity and I wouldn't just scoff at it incidentally the fact of the matter is that by and large American reporters if you had to you know a bunch of reporters describing something they saw I would tend by and large to trust the American reporter at least as much maybe more than those who come out of other traditions because this treated this business of objectivity is not completely to be scoffed at the effort to try to keep your reporting to the facts and not the introduced opinion is a worthy effort and sometimes it shows up in accurate description and there are some reporters I should say who do it extremely well and have a very good record of it and in fact this even includes reporters who work for the journals that in my view are right at the core of the propaganda system so take say John Kipner of the New York Times I think he can tell when the New York Times when the editors want some story to be reported accurately for their own purposes that's when they send John Kipner to report it because he's been reported accurately and when they don't want it reported accurately anymore they take him off and put him back at the Metro at this that's one test as to what the editors have in mind and they're there and there are times when they want report as stories reported accurately and there are some journalists who really do it on the other hand when they send Tom Friedman out their current chief diplomatic correspondent you know what they want his propaganda you want somebody who's going to say as he just said after he was advance to this August Post that the United States is now you know sort of under the Bush administration planning to support the Central American Peace Accords which were introduced and proposed and advanced by Costa Rica Guatemala Honduras and El Salvador mission there but that's part of the game that's what happens when you send Thomas Friedman to record a story and I presume that the editors understand these things that's incidentally I presume why Thomas Friedman's chief of diplomatic correspondent and John Keefe no reason but you'd have to ask the editors about that the so the the the get back to your point the objectivity it's a good thing it's a good value to be objective in recording and the people who do it honestly do very good journalism but as you're implying that ideology can be used to be a distorting mechanism and quite commonly is is George Bush's hands-off policy just a cover and all the action of the executive branch will be handled covertly or is it an opportunity for the legislative branch and the American people to take back at the reins of power oh I don't well first of all what makes you think George Bush has a hands-off policy okay that's not very good evidence in fact the fact of the matter is Ronald Reagan had a hands-off policy and in fact Ronald Reagan didn't presume probably didn't know what the policies were this isn't it's an interesting fact about the last eight years which again should not be laughed at the fact of the matter is for the last I mean they media had to put on a big pretense about this but everybody knew you know everybody with their eyes open knew and most of the population knew that for the last eight years the country hasn't had a chief executive now that's an important fact and in fact I think that's a step forward in manufacturers consent and in fact it's maybe a sign of the future of political democracy I think the United States made a leap into the future in the last eight years if you sort of retract a little but I think they'll go on and I think other industrial democracies will follow us if you could get to the point where voting is simply the matter a matter of selecting purely symbolic figures then you would have gone a long way towards marginalizing the public and that pretty well happened in the last eight years you know you had somebody who probably didn't know what the policies were his job was to read the lines rich written for him by the rich folk what he's been doing for the last 30 or 40 years he seems to enjoy it and he gets well paid for it and everybody seems happy but to vote for Ronald Reagan is like voting for the Queen of England and that's an advance I don't really mean this as a joke I think that's an advance you know it's progress in marginalizing the public part of marginalizing the public is taking the formal mechanisms of participation which exist and ensuring that they don't lead to a crisis of democracy by being substantive and what better method can you think of than simply reducing them to the selection of symbolic figures I think that happened I think the press has covered it though they doubtless know it but as for George Bush I think you got a return to you know to a sort of more normal situation I don't have any reason to believe that there's any hands-off policy if there will be the same kind of resort to covered activities that there's been in the past when does the government resort to covered activities well typically when the domestic enemy doesn't allow it to carry out the activities in public that's when a government resorts to clandestine activities clandestine activities are difficult complex expensive they carry the danger of being exposed it's much easier and more efficient to carry out violent activities overtly and a government typically our government in particular when it resorts to clandestine activities it's usually because it's afraid of the public those activities are not much of a secret from anybody else there's certainly not a secret from the victims they're not a secret from other from the various mercenary states that we have involved in it like the whole stuff in the iran-contra hearings that wasn't a secret to Nicaragua wasn't a secret to Israel it wasn't a secret to Taiwan or Saudi Arabia Brunei nobody wasn't a secret to anybody out there it wasn't a secret to the whole array of shady businessmen who were in it to make a buck like Richard Secord word hacking and so on fact of the matter is it wasn't even a secret to Congress in the media as I said they knew about the Contra flights they just weren't reporting it they also knew about the arms sales to Iran through Israel and they weren't reporting it they couldn't suppress any of that any longer after a plane was shot down with an American Neri and after the Iranian government revealed the fact that the National Security Adviser was wandering around Tehran giving out Bibles and chocolate cakes at that point you couldn't suppress it any longer so it became public and then comes a cover-up operation but the point is it wasn't really secret to anybody much and I think you can easily document that I mean I was for example writing about it from public sources throughout this whole period but the point is you could keep it secret from the public it was a low enough level so you could keep it secret from the public and that means the domestic enemy didn't get to outrage over it remember that you've got a control enemy territory and that's what covered operations are for if the government happens to be committed to activities too violent or terroristic or subversive or other activities that the domestic public the domestic enemy will not tolerate it'll move to covered actions that's what they're for and there's no reason to believe that the Bush administration will be any different from others in this respect especially you know in fact less reason after all what's Bush's background dr. Chomsky you statement and the reason it's searched an interview regarding the feminist movement that it has had been the most important the actual effects has had on social life the cultural patterns he quoted accurately it's been a lasting important when the impact on everything why is it that not only the left he has trouble with you know in some ways working with the feminist movement but perhaps tolerates to what I feel is an unacceptable degree anti-feminists individuals perspectives within its mix that's one question and the second could you be more specific about what you had in mind well I I don't know it's that's a tough thing because I'd rather not okay but another one I'd like to throw out for you is that you are a world-class linguist and I'm wondering how this kind of blends in or interfaces with your political work yeah well I mean the actually the issues of feminism other at the context of that remark was my expression if I recall correctly was my it was an answer to a question of what happened to the movements of the sixties and there is a propaganda story about this the story is that the movements of the 60s had all this idealism and so on and so forth and all faded and after that anybody everybody's just interested in themselves and all disappeared and I think that's nonsense I think that's propaganda and it's in fact an attempt to make people feel that they ought to give up but the fact of the matter if you look objectively at least as I look it seems to me that the movements of the 60s just expanded and grew in the nineteen seventies and expanded and grew even more in the 80s and they now reach into much wider areas of the society than any ever before groups like this for example would not have been around and certainly wouldn't have listened to a talk like this twenty years ago but now they do all over the country and not just in universities also in you know small towns and churches and so on and so forth I think the movements just expanded that's why the Reagan administration was forced into clandestine activities in fact enemy territory was control but as for defense the reason I mentioned the feminist movement specifically is because that's a product of the 70s and in my view as I said as you quoted accurate I think in terms of its overall impact it's probably the one that had the greatest impact on cultural patterns and relations and structures of authority and so on and so forth of any of any of them and that's the 70s now to get back to your point about the left a large part of the origins of the contemporary feminist movement were in the left and they were in reaction to the sexism inside the left that was a big issue in the late 60s you know big issue in a very emotional and complicated issue and that was one of the roots of the modern feminist movement of course feminist movements go way back and it could be that the Left still tolerates sexism and sexist individuals I'm sure it does I if to the extent that it does that's just something to be overcome not just on the left everywhere else as well I don't see it anything special to do with the left my name is Nancy and I work with the international socialist organization and I just want to start by saying I like I'm sure many many many other people who are here tonight are deeply indebted to your work it's been absolutely essential in helping us cut through the kind of garbage that we're faced with every day when we try to figure out what's going on in the world but I think if I could continue I think there is also a problem in the analysis that I've seen in your works and that you presented tonight in the sense that I think we can tend to lose the forest for the trees that you present so many you know astonishing details about what is wrong with the system and about what is wrong with the media that we can tend to lose sight of what I think the really key question is which is why is this control necessary in the first place and I would submit at least that I think it's because there's antagonism I got a minute and a half I swear to God it's no longer it's because there's antagonistic interest involved they didn't talk about milkmaids and dairy went up whatever was dairymaids and spinsters and Labor's in the 17th century for no reason it was because they were the working class and what we see today in this country I think it's quite frankly let's speak bluntly a ruling class which tries to control a working class population and that's what it's about is holding on to that power if that's the case then it seems like to me the question that we face is how to organize to change that system to challenge capitalism and I think in that effort you do it to service to your listeners and to the people who respect your work when you equate Lenin with Stalinism as blithely as you did tonight I say that and I think it's also important to point out that that is an unquestioned assumptions and also an easy applause getter we saw that you share with the mainstream media and I think if it were actually that simple the coat the horrific kinds of measures that even bourgeois historians described as a counter-revolution under Stalin would not have been necessary if they were all the same to begin with now in short to sum up the situation that you have outlined tonight I think is extremely serious and I think it's important that we all take it seriously what we're talking about is literally the fate of millions of lives around the world particularly in the international politics that you describe that being the case then I think we need a full and a serious and a fair discussion of various different alternatives not just talking about the horrors of capitalism but actually how to change it to end this stuff once and for all well I think you made it ok I think well there's several questions there one is about the discussion of the United States and I think what I said is approximately what you said except I didn't use some of that rhetoric the I you know which I don't particularly helpful today the truth either analytically or to understand or whatever but it's the same picture John Jay had it straight the people who own the country out of government and the people who own the country have basically now are a network of corporations and conglomerates and banks and so on they ought to govern it and the way they do it is by the methods we've described now as far as the Soviet Union is concerned I didn't happen to talk about it tonight but I've written about this topic I haven't just made the charge I've written about it and explained why I think it's true and it doesn't bother me if I happen to agree with the mainstream media on this Trotsky to pick somebody who you remember once he was charged in the 1930s with agreeing with the fascists and his condemnation of the Soviet Union and he pointed out that his critique was to be true didn't wasn't gonna abandon it if somebody else had to happen to say it for different reasons so the question is about the Soviet Union and particularly about Lenin so what was Leninism well in my here we have to look at facts now you know you look at the fact I think here's what you find Lenin was a right wing deviation of the socialist movement and he was so regarded he was regarded as that by the Marxists by the mainstream Marxists we've forgotten who the mainstream Marxist were because they lost and you only remember the guys who won but if you go back to the to that period the mainstream Marxist were people like for example Anton punycode who was head of education for the for the Marxist movement and a serious he's the one one of the people who Lenin later denounced as an infantile leftist but he was one of the leading intellectuals of the actual Marxist movement rosa luxemburg was another mainstream Marxist and there were others and they were very critical in fact Trotsky was one up until 1917 they were all very critical of Leninism because of this what they regarded as this - mystic vanguard ISM the idea that the radical intelligentsia were going to exploit popular movements to seize state power and then to use that state power to whip the population into the society that they chose now that was quite inconsistent with Marxism as this as understood by the mainstream sort of I'd say left Marxists from this point of view Bolshevism was a right wing deviation Trotsky made the same points up till 1917 now when Lenin came back to Russia in April 1917 he took a different line quite a different line than the one he'd had in the past you take a look at Lenin's work it shifted character in April 17th in April 1917 it became kind of libertarian that's when he came out with the April theses and that's when he wrote state and democracy came out it came out a year later but that's when it was written and these were a state and revolution these these were basically libertarian works they were very much more in the main in the mainstream of sort of less a libertarian socialism from sort of you know this range that goes from anarchism over the left Marxism of the panic a closer look Sandburg variety any talk to that Soviets in the need for you know a workers organization and so on in fact came really closer to what the essence of socialism was always understood to be after all the core of socialism was understood to be workers control over production that was the core that's where you begin with then you go on to other things but the beginning is controlled by the workers over production that's where it begins then Lenin took power in October 1917 and what's called a revolution but in my view ought to be called a coup and the then the and things followed that coup or a revolution if you want to call it that one of the things that followed it was the immediate moves to destroy the Soviets and the factory councils those were some of the first moves of Lenin and Trotsky after they took the tracks to be joined at that point after they took state power in fact if you look at what Lenin wrote after that period or did you'll find it's a reversion to the earlier position this sort of left deviation is that a deviation you could ask why in my view it was just opportunistic he knew that in order to gain power he was going to have to go along with the popular currents that were developing which were in fact spontaneous and libertarian and socialist as most popular movements are have been in fact since the 17th century and being an astute politician which he was he sort of went along with that and talked the line that the people wanted to hear it's just like when an American politician goes somewhere and his pollsters tell him say so-and-so and he says it I mean he believes and nothing Lenin was doing the same thing with that polls in any event whatever your interpretation is when he took power he reverted to the former Vanguard ISM and moved at once to eliminate the organs of workers control now that meant he was moving to destroy socialism if socialism has as its core workers control over production the Soviets and the factory councils were instruments of workers control and same you could say they're defective instruments never be worked out better and so on yeah yeah but they were the instruments that had been developed in the course of popular struggle for to implement basically workers control and those were the first things to go by early 1918 this is now it's it's still really before the Civil War sit in Lenin's view was pretty clearly expressed it was the view that both he and Trotsky took the position that what you need is with what Trotsky called a labor army which is submissive to the control of a single leader is it modern you know progress and development and socialism requires that the master the population subordinate themselves to a single leader in a disciplined workforce well that has absolutely nothing to do with socialism in fact the exact opposite of it and it was criticized for that by the in a sense in a spirit of some solidarity because the you know the revolutionary forces were still operative it was credit he was criticized for that by people like it was a Luxembourg and by Pannekoek and Gorter and the other mainstream sort of left Marxists and that and I think they were right it seems to me that and then it just goes on from there I mean Lenin reconstructed these are systems of oppression often more efficiently check KGB and other techniques of control and oppression I think from that point on there was nothing remotely like socialism in the Soviet Union I think it was in fact in my view is a precursor of later forms of totalitarianism now you know you could that's what I think happened and I think that's what you discover if you look at the facts now why is it called socialism well I think there see I think that's complicated we should look at it this to the Soviet Union calls it socialism and you know after they took control of the they did take control pretty soon of most of the international socialist movement because primarily the prestige of having created something sort of socialism instantly just aside remarked Lenin remained despite it all as sort of an orthodox Marxist in many respects and as an orthodox Marxist he didn't believe that it was possible to have socialism in the Soviet Union this was supposed to be up to his death or you know shortly before his death when he was still writing you know speaking lucidly he took kept the view that the Soviet revolution was a holding action they were just gonna hold things in place until the real revolution took place in Germany because the revolution according to Marxist doctrine was going to take place in the most advanced sector of modern cap of modern industrial capitalism you know for all the reasons that you read about in March that's where the revolution had to take place obviously that wasn't the Soviet Union so they couldn't be socialism there it was just some kind of holding action and that presumably gave some sort of justification for eliminating the socialist institutions only it's a real justification but probably that was the internal justification and again in taking that you he was in accord with the mainstream Marxist tradition well after that that comes the view that all of this is socialism and why should the communist parties take that view I think the reason is because they wanted to sort of exploit the moral force of social which was quite real you know it's kind of hard to remember that today but at that time it was very real this was regarded as a you know as prot as a progressive moral force and by associating their own destruction of socialism with the aura of socialism they hope to gain credit in the working classes and other progressive sectors now the West also identified that with socialism and they did it for the opposite reason they wanted to associate socialism with the brutality of the Russian state that undermined socialism so what you had is that the two major world propaganda agencies for their own quite different reasons were claiming that this is socialism that this destruction of socialism is socialism and it's very hard to break out of the control of the world's two major propaganda agencies when they agree they agreed for different reasons but they basically agreed and that's then became doctor and dogma well I think people should ask whether that's true take a look back and see whether the moves that Lenin took and the Trotsky supported him in taking and that they both advocated had anything to do with socialism as it was understood but say in the Marxist tradition or in the left libertarian tradition and I think the answer that you'll discover when you look at that is that they didn't in fact this was a destruction of socialist institutions well you know this may be true or it may be false but if it's true and I think the evidence pretty strongly supports it then I don't see any reason why we shouldn't Express that fact and I certainly don't think that we should be deterred in expressing this fact if other people whose you know fascists whatever happened to condemn the Soviet Union just for the same reasons that Trotsky mentioned in the 1930s getting back to losing the forest for the trees we have part 2 of the book pulping story please pardon part 2 of your book pulping story you promised in question answers might come up with you said you had some further oh the aftermath of that pulping incident yeah is that what you meant yes yeah well that that's kind of a more subtle and complex which is what I didn't talk about it but here's what actually happened we the book was later decided to rewrite and update it and we did and it came out from South End press which was then in existence a small radical press run by cooperative run by couple young people and it was published as the political economy of human rights to volume book that came out in 1979 well South and press wasn't going to pulp it so it exists in fact you can even buy it know what happened at that point you can't pulp the book any longer so how do you react to it well there are two ways of reacting to it the main way is to ignore it there were a lot of things in the book you can read it and see what was there but for example part there was a discussion of it was discussion of u.s. foreign policy in the media basically that's what it was and the extensive case studies of both topics and so on and so forth mostly it was ignored as you'd predict but it wasn't entirely ignored there was one exception and a very interesting exception let me give you the background it explains some of the more subtle ways in which the system works in this one of the things we did in this in in order to put the propaganda model to a test we didn't call it propaganda model then it's the same thing in order to put it to a test we tried to compare sort of paired historical incidents kind of like I was doing in connection with freedom of press issued fine I mean history doesn't create exact controlled experiments but there are enough cases that are similar enough so you can test how the media are going to deal with them when we looked for such cases we particular we looked for atrocity and we divided the atrocities we looked at into three categories what we called constructive blood baths meaning ones that are good for us power and the corporate class or their constructive benign blood baths one where us power and privilege doesn't care very much one or another it's sort of irrelevant and nefarious blood baths those are the ones carried out by official enemies so we had various types of benign constructive in the various blood baths and we gave quite a number of examples of these well our prediction was that the media would welcome the constructive blood baths that they would ignore the benign blood baths and that they would become outraged over the nefarious blood bath and in fact in the case of the nefarious blood bath it would invent all sorts of fantasies and so on and so forth to make them look even worse than they were that was the prediction and we gave a bunch of cases and we showed that I think we tried the show and I think did show that the predictions were correct now there's actually another prediction that comes out of that model which we didn't make but it's implicit if you think about it and that has to do with the way that this exposure will be responded to what you'd predict if you think it through is that our discussion of the constructive blood baths would be ignored because to reveal the fact that the media welcomed huge blood baths as they did would not be very conducive to the interests of power or to the media it would also expose the fraud about the the apparent anger over a nefarious bloodfest it expect the constructive blood bath to be ignored as far as the benign blood baths are concerned you might expect an occasional statement since it's well I mean the fact that the media ignored the benign blood bath doesn't show - you know such terrible things it doesn't least they didn't applaud them and as long as you can exclude the role of the United States and being involved in them not terrible maybe a few odd comments with regard to the nefarious blood best what you'd expect is fury and venom over the fact that the media that the fabrications over bloodbath of the enemy were exposed fraud and that's important and that can be used it can be used in fact to defame the critics see if you show that people are lying about the crimes of official enemies that you can easily distort that into a defense of those crimes right like okay now what happened well let me take two cases which were very close to cases that we were that we discussed were the slaughter and timur from 1975 to 1979 and the slaughter in cambodia from that in the same years 1975 to 79 and we compared those two cases the one in timor we call the benign blood that the United States didn't care much one way or the other so hundreds of thousands of T Marie's get killed it's not very interesting the case in Cambodia was of course in nefarious bloodbath that was the bad guys doing it and we gave a very detailed account of what evidence was available about these two they're in the same area of the world the same years the same timeframe the evidence available was comparable these the slaughters were apparently comparable in scale the one in Timor was considerably greater relative to the population but probably roughly comparable in scale the difference was that in Cambodia it was carried out by the enemy Paul Pott whereas in Timor it was carried out by a friend Indonesia and furthermore it was carried out by Indonesia with American arms which were provided by the Carter Administration which were expand these as the arms flow was expanded by the Carter Administration as the atrocities increased well how did the media deal with this first fact number one we went through this in detail the media dealt with the Timor blood deaths by suppressing there was considerable coverage of Timor believe it or not in 1974 and 75 this was all in the context of the breakup of the Portuguese Empire in as the as Indonesia attacked teamwork and the massacre started with us support coverage began to drop when the massacre hit its peak in 1978 and it was really approaching genocide with it with increasing the u.s. support coverage dropped to zero literally zero that's the way they dealt with the team were massacred what about the Cambodia massacre well within weeks after the Khmer Rouge took power they were already being accused of genocide by the New York Times about a year later they were being accused of carrying out Auto genocide and of having murdered 2 million people in fact even if having boasted of having murdered 2 million people that became the conventional line there then came a huge outcry ranging from The Reader's Digest and TV Guide over to the New York Review of Books and including just about everything in between vast outcry of outrage over the communist monsters who were carrying out this horrifying bloodbath and so on and so forth interestingly in all of it there was tremendous amount of fabrication just plain fabrication of evidence for example that just give you one example take this 2 million boast of 2 million killed you know that that's what everybody's heard you ask people how many people had Pol Pot killed by say 1977 they'll say two million here's where it comes from in that there was a book published by a French priest Tom swap on show us his name who's from Cambodia he wasn't there then but he knew that Cambodia he published a book in French the book was of course not available in English it was in French it was reviewed by a French journalist journalist named Jacques de toros revered in France that review was immediately picked up and translated in the United States appear in the New York Review of Books it's a fastest translation of a review of a French book that's ever appeared but in in the review lecturer said this he said according to Pancho the Khmer Rouge boast of having murdered two million people Auto genocide horrifying and so on he gave a whole bunch of quotes from the book about the horrifying things the Khmer Rouge said and so on and so forth that was immediately picked up by the rest of the media it was all over the place you know newspaper articles oh my god what they're doing and so on and so forth well I was curious at the time because that didn't you know I didn't hadn't seen the evidence about that I just want to know what was going on so I the book was unavailable so I wrote to friends in France and asked them to send it to me and I got the book and I probably was the only person in the United States who would read it although it was being quoted all over the place on the base of this review and I quickly discovered that the whole review was a total fraud whatever was going on in Cambodia that's not what the book said the book didn't say anything about a boast of two million people the quotes that were given in the review either didn't appear in the book or they were you maybe you can sort of figure out what they were from you know there's some wording a little bit like them but they were grossly distorted and some of them didn't even weren't even close from the Khmer Rouge they were quotes from Thai and so on but in fact every factual statement and the in the review was just totally false here's the way the two million figure came upon show in the book says that about 800,000 people were killed in the American war 70 to 75 meaning primarily by American bombing and the word that the United States ran from 70 to 75 that's 800,000 people he then said that according to the American Embassy in Bangkok 1.2 million had died not being killed since the war was over well lectura during the review just added those two numbers together call them the Khmer Rouge killings and then added the boast for a good effect uh well that's that's where that figure comes from anyhow after I read the book I read let her to like come to her and I said who I know and I told him look I don't know what the facts are about Cambodia but the relation between your review and the book is zilch and I think you ought to correct it because your review is being quoted all over the place well he actually published Corrections in the New York Review you know I said yeah it made a couple of mistakes he said well maybe the number killed wasn't 2 million maybe it was just in the thousands he said there's a slight difference you know a factor of a thousand difference but he said really doesn't matter you know it's terrible anyway and with and so on well after his Corrections appeared they were dismissed and people kept repeating the 2 million figure that he invented almost half of which was attributed to the American War notice well that's one example but it's just typical if you read our chapter on this you'll see a level of fabrication which you know is mind-boggling I mean it's just mind-boggling now this had nothing to do with the fact of course there was a massacre in fact as we pointed out the massacre was probably comparable to the in Cambodia which was a huge didn't teamwork which is a huge massacre we also pointed out that of all the evidence available there was one part that was being suppressed systematically by the American press interestingly that part was the information given by State Department intelligence now the State Department Cambodia Watchers you know State Department intelligence they were the only people with any evidence about what was going on in Cambodia and they apparently had pretty good intelligence they claimed to be able to even pick up radio transmissions and all sorts of stuff and they were giving a totally different story they said that what was going on that there was you know big slaughter but they said it was in the tens or hundreds of thousands and it was not mass genocide but it was rather mostly harsh conditions and you know brutality and so on that was the position of the only people who knew anything and that was systematically excluded it was just the wrong picture you know it wasn't bloody enough for the purposes well we went through all of this stuff the suppression of the Timor massacre the vast amount of lying about the Cambodia massacres and we gave that as an example of treatment of paired massacres where they were both treated now here's the one place where the book was not ignored what we said about constructive bloodbath totally ignored what we said about Timor almost totally ignore it to the extent that was mentioned the u.s. role was excluded what we said about Cambodia however that elicited a huge new outrage over the fact that we were defending Paul Pott well we were defending Pol Pot by saying that he was carrying out a slaughter comparable to the major slaughter that the United States was backing in Indonesia and pointing out that in fact that was the picture given by American intelligence of the only people knew anything about it and then talking about the way this was distorted in the interests of the propaganda system but that didn't matter here this said what we were doing was challenging the right to lie in the service of the state and that's a very important right to maintain so therefore the standard view is and you can read this all over the place now is that we argue fits me for some reason or they decide it's me but we were defending Pol Pot and you know sort of apologists for Pol Pot you take back and you'll see that we started we described it as a major massacre was it a lot it's uncertain you know and then just describe the facts as they were and compared them with the media fabrications and you're not allowed to do that and not allowed to expose media fabrications and the reason why that was discussed the one part of the book that isn't virtually nothing about teamwork ever is discussed the reason why that one heart is discussed is because that can be used by further lies to defame and undermine critics so therefore that's done well that's the more subtle way in which the propaganda system works I should say incidentally that some of this stuff is really kind of amusing those of you read this stuff will have seen it William Shawcross wrote a book a little after that in which he claimed the quality of Mercy it's called very favorably reviewed all over the press everybody fell in love with it in the book he claims that there was silence over the Pol Pot atrocities and then he asked a question how could this happen you know it's called Holocaust in the modern conscience well first of all was there silence over the Pol Pot atrocity no there was a vast uproar over the Pol Pot atrocities that started a couple of weeks after it at the time when they were being accused of genocide they had probably killed a couple of thousand people at the most within a year as I said it was being everywhere from TV Guide and The Reader's Digest over the New York Review and then it went on like that a huge amount of huge chorus of protests further worth tons of fabrication but it's it's flattering to say these if it's it's useful it's serviceable to say there was silence why is it serviceable because if he can claim that there was silence then you can raise the profound question of why the West was silent over this Massacre and that means from now on we must be even more diligent in exposing the crimes of official enemies to overcome the fact that we were silent this time so immediately Shawcross has quoted all over the place and every newspaper is saying oh my god you were silent how could we have been silent and so on then Shawcross goes on to explain the silence you take a look at his book he explains the silence first this was in The Washington Post and in his book he says the reason for the silence is the primary reason for the silence is this is the skepticism of the left primarily me so in other words by scepticism I silenced all the us all the Western media and governments it's a lot of power furthermore this and remember what that skepticism was it was a skepticism about documented lies furthermore he then he then then he cites an alleged statement in a footnote he doesn't date it or identify the source there's two good reasons for that one is that the citation is fabricated the other is that the source to the extent that there's a source it's in a book it's in exactly this book which appeared which went to press after the fall of Paul Pott and came out almost a year after the fall fall fall of Paul put's so what he's claiming is that in a book that appeared the winter press after Paul Pott was overthrown and that appeared almost a year after in that book we succeeded retrospective retrospectively in silencing the entire Western media and governments for four years well that's you know not only were we powerful enough to scare the entire West into silence but we even could do it by magic you know now that was quoted that was quoted all over the place with great awe the point is there is no absurdity so extreme that it won't be quoted with respect if it's useful and here it's useful for several purposes one to protect the right to lie in the service of the state to to undermine and defame critics who you can't answer and three to claim that we didn't look hard enough we were silent over this atrocity well there was an atrocity that the West was silent over it's the one we documented team work and they were silent over it because the West was doing it and therefore you're silent over it that's the real a you know question of Holocaust and the modern conscience but nobody will discuss that one well these are all examples of more subtle ways of controlling thought more subtle and complex that's the aftermath I had in mind it's a very interesting story we review it in manufacturing consent who's next who's next I lost track perfect if I can interrupt just momentarily here what would you say one or two more questions why don't we make one more round okay three more questions I would like to mention however as you can imagine a lot of people have handed us each of us announcements I'm just going to make it sort of a blanket statement the point is that there's an enormous amount of community activism taking place in Madison various groups have a lot of activities going on during this week and beyond ongoing work for instance just as an example the sister state project has a book out called friends indeed Noam Chomsky wrote that sister city projects are one of the many ways in which US citizens have opposed a policy of violence and destruction and have acted constructively for peace justice and a better life for the people of Central America about about this book friends indeed which is available incidentally at the two bookstores in the lobby I do urge everybody here tonight to to check out the people who set up displays out in the lobby and to check out the kind of community action that's taking place in Madison it is in fact contrary to a lot of moaning about the apathy of the student population and the community at large a very active solidarity community here in Madison so three more questions and then I think we're up there where are we there okay there there and there and I think people here probably know that Wisconsin and Nicaragua and sister states for 25 years and the Wisconsin Coordinating Council on Nicaragua has led in transforming what was originally a symbolic relationship to vital tool and we've just published the book as we'll just mentioned called friends indeed the story of us Nicaragua Sister Cities which is about that over 100 u.s. nicaragua sister cities that have formed since the revolution one of my question is has to do with that movement and some of your insights on it because I think that recently the popular opposition to the war in Nicaragua has fallen out of the major news media it's been identified I think as a non-issue and that kind of effect of the of the media has a very fragmenting effect on movements for social change and wonderful I think that Sister Cities is one way that we can begin to institutional I think you're you're quite right the coverage of Nicaragua altogether has dropped very significantly and I assume that that's as usual on command the New York Times in fact removed its bureau chief Stephen Kinzer and and if you look at coverage is in fact dropped very fast well I think that's connected with US policy there is a shift in policy after the Reagan period and here you have to look back a little bit back as far as back as 1980s there has been a debate over Nicaragua like over Vietnam the debate is how you strangle and destroy Nicaragua now the Hawks say you do it by terror and violence the Dove say you do it by what are now called kinder gentler methods you do it by economic strangulation you know by maintaining a low-level terrorist force by mobilizing on the border so they can't the mobilize and turn resources to reconstruction from the destruction and so on that's that's the other way and by 1986 about 80 percent of those who are identified as leaders in the polls that means elites basically you know managers executives political figures those guys but 80% of them were opposed to the Contras they thought that the terror upper Sioux by the Reagan administration was just stupid stupid for a number of reasons one is it was stirring up protests at home you know overt violence does have a way of stirring up protests among these unwashed masses who don't like you know murdering children and you know raping women and cutting people's heads off and so on there's all these unreconstructed people and they get annoyed by that kind of stuff so you stir up disruption at home when you have when you direct your terrorist army to attack defenseless targets soft targets as they were called as the US terrorists were doing at that time openly in fact it wasn't a secret so that stirs up too much protest so a dome also it makes the United States look bad internationally I mean the United States there's no vert file asian of the World Court decision then you know it doesn't look good in our international relations and so on and finally it's kind of useless I mean there are much better ways to strangle and destroy a tiny country which for all kinds of obvious historical reasons is totally dependent on its relations with the United States for survival you can just do it in smarter quieter ways now that was the major you know that was the dominant position among elites by already by 1986 now the Reagan administration is not off the spectrum of American opinion but at an extreme it's in an extreme position on the spectrum it's extreme I mean the people around Reagan were people who were deeply committed to violence for its own sake I mean it's as if you kind of like torture in itself rather than using it as an end for some you know as a tool for some other purpose well that's kind of counterproductive and rational people don't do that you use torture when you need it but it's not an end in itself there's no gain in itself to torture inflicting pain and terror and so on and their conclusion sort of a rational conclusion was it's just not useful it's bad it's stirring up protests and so on and so forth so the more rational thing to do is the policy that the Bush administration is now turning to I think that policy is here's what it looks like to me maintain the economic strangulation which incidentally is also unlawful I mean we talked about the or we should talk about the World Court having condemned the Contra attack it also condemned the economic warfare as illegal illegal violation of treaties again this is never recorded but that was the World Court decision the violation of treaties involved the embargo is unlawful it's also a criminal act and the World Court demanded be terminated but the point is you can assume that nobody's going to talk about that so you continue the strangulation keep the Contras keep the interesting that the United States was with all the huge amount of resources that were poured into maintaining a mercenary force inside Nicaragua they were unable to do it that's a pretty remarkable fact there is no guerrilla movement in history that had a fraction of the support that the Contras had it's just unimaginable I mean they were they were getting three supply flights a day just to keep them going they were armed at a level you know they were better on than the Santana star me they were better armed than units of the American army in fact that's actually true they had advanced communication equipment in the field which allowed them to get information from US surveillance flights it's always under surveillance the country right you know high-tech aircraft which could give them information on the actual disposition of the Sandinista forces so that they could attack defenseless targets with impunity and carry out terror there in accordance with them with the orders of the State Department it's not secret incidentally now you know that kind of level of support is just no guerilla army in history that could dream of anything like that with all of that stuff they couldn't keep him in the field the minute the level of support began to drop they all broke for the border the contrast to El Salvador is fantastic if you bother to look at it you know I'll solve it or you had an indigenous guerrilla force no support from outside as far as anybody knows they were their arms were mostly gotten from the Salvadoran army or purchased internationally so they're using American arms like you know they're using m16s and so I just decide remark for the first time now the guerrillas in El Salvador are apparently being aided by Nicaraguans so Elliott Abrams can finally be happy what's happening is that as the Contras broke for the border and went across because you know the game was over they'd figure they began to sell their arms to corrupt Honduran army officials who were selling them off to the Salvadoran guerrillas so for the first time the Salvadoran guerrillas are beginning to show up with Soviet arms ak-47s and so on and so forth and the reason is that those are the arms of the CIA supplied to the Contras yeah so instead of having just m16s like they used to have you know American arms they got from the Salvadoran army they now got Soviet arms sent to them by sent by the CIA to the Contras and now sold off to the Hondurans are selling them off to Salvadoran gorillas so there is finally aid from Nicaragua El Salvador like they've been claiming all along instantly this here's another side remarks I'm sorry but this information comes from a very good source so good in fact that the press totally censored this information comes from the head of contra intelligence who defected in Honduras went to Mexico was widely interviewed in the Mexican press his name is Horatio RC like most of the Contras he hasn't normed the gear you know pseudonym his pseudonym was mercenary mercenary oh you know they don't kid around when they're I mean for the American press they know who they are he was the chief of contra intelligence he was the guy who became chief of intelligence in 1985 replacing a man named ricardo lau who was beginning to be an embarrassment because it was beginning to be pretty obvious that he was involved in terrorist activities throughout Central America including probably the murder of Archbishop Romero who's identified by a chief of Salvadoran intelligence and defected as having been involved in that this guy was getting to be an embarrassment so he disappeared he was probably killed and they needed a new chief of intelligence and this guy came in well he's been chief of intelligence since 1985 he defected last November it's the most important defector yet far more important than you know the defectors would get huge publicity when they come from Nicaragua with all kind of fabricated stories this guy was ignored he had totally the wrong stories you know he was telling about how they were advised you know they were directed he was told for example about how he was illegally in Elgin Air Force Base some Florida or someplace like that we was flown in illegally of course trained in the United States by you know Green Berets and 82nd airborne and so on and so forth he talked about he identified people in the American Embassy by name in Honduras who were posing as a deficiency IA and were you know giving tactical advice and support to the Contras he mentioned their names he described the way the Honduran army the Honduran military is directly involved in contra military activities in Nicaragua both by intelligence and participation and so on he went through all he described how they were how their task was to attack defenseless targets for the purpose of ensuring that Nicaragua cannot carry out social reform describes this and all sorts of stuff which is just useless and he also describes what I just said how the Contras now that they've broken for the borders are selling their arms to the Salvadoran guerrillas well you know all of this stuff is news and in fact important news in fact so and from a very good source so important that as far as I know there's no word about it in the American press you might look and check and see well that was kind of a digression so the Salvadoran coming back the Salvadoran guerrillas have had no support from outside as far as anybody knows they're indigenous to the country they're facing a military force which on paper at least is the most powerful in the region much more powerful on paper than the army of Nicaragua and they're somehow any radical in contrast the Contras who involved all sorts of mercenaries including Nicaraguans Hondurans who are bribed Honduran peasants are bribed with with big bribes by their standards like $500 that's a couple of years in come to join all sorts of things huge amount of support you know a tremendously high level of military equipment and so on they just can't keep him in the country I mean I think he could keep a guerrilla force in the United States with that kind of support I'm not kidding I think you could probably maintain a guerrilla force in the mountains of Kentucky with the kind of force that was that with the with this support that was given to the countries they couldn't keep them there there's a lesson in all of this there's an obvious lesson in this comparison so obvious that nobody in the press is ever going to draw it because it's the wrong lesson you can figure it out so I won't draw it well all right so what is the back to the Bush administration plans I assume that they can maintain a low level terrorist force inside Nicaragua it's inconceivable that they can't do that so probably they'll keep you know that that's why I think it's one of the reasons I think those reports about the illegal contra 4 mil Salvador are probably accurate apart from the fact that the sources were accurate in the past presumably the Bush administration will keep some low level of support for mercenaries and terrorists inside Nicaragua they assume that the level will be so low that the co-operative press will be silent about it as they've been so far and that's important because that means Nicaragua can't be mobilized and it's important to keep them mobilized for one thing because when you mobilize the society is repressive just like the United States during World War two which was virtually totalitarian and if they're repressive you can use that for propaganda so you can get you know the Nieman fellows to cry about repression and so on in the manner that I described so you want to do that you want to keep them repressive you want to keep them mobilized you want to make sure that they can't divert their extremely limited resources to reconstruction from this fantastic damage second thing the United States will try to do if Congress and the press goes along they will do is maintain a contra force on the Honduran border that's what all this humanitarian aid nonsense is about you want to maintain the force on the border and violation of everything as I pointed out and the reason again is you maintain a threat as long as you maintain a military threat you can ensure that the government won't be mobilized okay and that's important because we want them to suffer but of course that's less at a lower level than terror you know the idea is precisely get back your point yeah also you continue the economic warfare and the pressure international lending institutions you intimidate the allies so they won't give made and so on all of this was abetted incidentally by the hurricane the hurricane was a devastating blow close to a billion dollars in damage the united states of course doesn't give him a penny in fact they love it you know they're gloating over it the the other allies the US allies are giving them a pittance like Canada and West Europe are giving them virtually nothing partly because they're intimidated by Big Brother and partly because there are a lot more colonized than they'd like to believe you know they like to believe they're all independent and free thinkers and so on mostly the European intellectuals believe every bit of nonsense they read from the American press the amount of cultural colonization is very high though they don't they're not aware of it so it's so you know they're all upset of that send initiative repression although the repression in El Salvador in Guatemala which is a thousand times worse that doesn't bother them at all so they keep giving them aid so there's that and you know this combination of operations it is assumed will prevent Nicaragua from recovering and after all that's the point the point is to prevent what Tomas poor Tomas pork I had it right on that nose you got to prevent them from constructing a society that works because if they do others are going to emulate it and pretty soon US combination of the region is gonna you Road and besides that kind of rot can spread to other places where people have similar problems and decide to use their resources for their own ends and so on you get real trouble so you got to prevent it from working and the United States certainly has the means to do that short of the Reaganite absurdity of just in you know inflicting pain and terror for its own sake well that's the kinder gentler methods and one part of that has got to be to cut back the coverage you know part of that is the role of the media stop recording it so people forget about it and don't notice it and so on and the idea is the effect will be you're quiet the domestic dissent you'll return the public to apathy and obedience by stopped by not reporting this stuff anymore so I think your point is precisely accurate the role of the media in this system is precisely to keep quiet about what's going on and I expect we will find less coverage I mean you know you'll find coverage when you can you know you can find something you'll call sandanista oppression or when you if there's mass starvation as there may well be because of the hurry that'll be covered and it'll be attributed to sending us the incompetence nor mismanagement or something so that kind of thing will be covered or here's another thing that will be covered the next big move it's already been announced is for the Contras to demand that they've asked for ten million dollars to establish an independent television station in Nicaragua well if if Nicaragua allows what it was called an independent television station that means it's telling the United States you take over our television there is no way in the world in which a small country can compete with the United States and television IMAX is out of the question you know I mean if Nicaragua continues to do what most countries do and have state television if then of course they can be noun status totalitarian notice we don't denounce Israel as being totalitarian because it has only state television but that's the usual dichotomy so the idea is now we demand that Nicaragua having a television station run by the United States with a beginning capital of ten million dollars which bite how many Nicaraguan standards is you don't even have discuss it it's you know it's off the wall I mean the United States already dominates the media in much of the country much of the media the only thing you hear is us radio from powerful radio transmitters in Honduras and Costa Rica and even television if they can if the United States can put a television station right in Managua with all the resources the United States can pour into it and they just you know that's the propaganda agency for all of Nicaragua so that's the next thing and the media will be all excited about this and that'll be the test of freedom you know they're only free if they allow the total communication system to be run by the United States otherwise they're totalitarians that'll be the next line that comes along and there'll be that kind of coverage but no coverage about what's going on that's got a decline precisely so that the American movement will decline and people will go back to the passivity and obedience that becomes them as I said so I think your point is quite accurate and the question as usual is whether the American population is gonna let them get away with it you know that's the device we don't forget it work oh excuse me I'm sorry I'm gonna have to play the heavy certainly one more but we do have we have a time constraint on the theatres that we have to abide by okay colleges for that but we're not at least we're not going to have the third question in the round sorry I talk too long Bravo mr. Chomsky very great this is about the UN I don't get information from the New York Times in the ABC NBC all of the news when I want information I go to the specialized agencies of the UN and there you can find no where did they know that the population of the world was 5 billion that UN got that information information on the radioactivity of the air and so forth they have a vast amount of information they also had information about cesium in milk products which were going to highly populated areas Boston in New York for two years the UN had this information citizens groups badgered the media to bring this information it is never there but at the UN we were able to get that information so what we did is we wrote a proposal which was presented to the General Assembly because we felt that we as parents have a right to vital information about the food and the water in the air and the UN has that information and it just sits there so we wrote this proposal calling for a two-way global information service we presented it to the General Assembly very well in 87 at the international conference on the relationship between disarmament and development it was a very important conference it received very good support the year later we try to present the proposal again this time we had gained the support of the Swedish government the Australian Government and Costa Rica there was a violent violent opposition to the proposal to the point where two ambassadors were told that they would be terminated if they in any way support in any proposal asking for a global information service now in September the UN is meeting again and we're going to try to push the proposal we were shocked by the opposition that this proposal got because after all it's a very modest proposal we're just asking for vital information and we tried to get anyway it's terrible the opposition so we're going to present the proposal again in September do you have any ideas on strategy was that a question or a statement well it wasn't a question so I don't have to answer but let me just say in response to the non question that I actually have a book coming out I like these phrases like manufacturer of consent the necessary illusions and so on they're too good to let drop so I have another book coming out called necessary illusions thanks to Reinhold Niebuhr and in it one of the things it's more of this kind of stuff one of the things that discusses the coverage of the UN and it's extremely interesting it's not that the UN has never covered whenever the UN passes a resolution denouncing the Russians for the invasion of Afghanistan big story you know if the UN condemns the United States for a violation of international law there's no story and the coverage is extremely interesting when you look closely acts for those of you were there this afternoon I mentioned one example the Terrorism thing which is very important but let me take one case which is illustrative of the kind of thing you're talking about at that same UN session in 1987 there was a big series of disarmament resolutions and they were very interesting because they came out right at the time that Ronald Reagan was being hailed in the front pages as a peacemaker that was the summit in Washington December 1987 summit in Washington Reagan the Peace May you know very excited and so on well right at that time the UN passed a series of disarmament resolutions here's what they were there was a resolution opposing militarization of outer space star wars 154 to 1 no abstentions you never get a vote like that in the UN you can guess who the one was a vote against a vote in favor of a opposed to the development of new weapons of mass destruction hyerin i think 135 - to the united states picked up france on that one vote for a comprehensive test-ban which is instantly supported by that 75% of the American population the vote on that was like 140 to 3 something like that France and England we picked up on that one and that's that's the way the resolutions were well they were not reported because that just wouldn't fit with the idea of the United Way and the peacemaker on the only and other things were reported like for example the resolution condemning the Russians in Afghanistan big story on that and there's a lot of coverage of the UN but this is the way it was now this has been going on over the years for many years you go back to the 1940s in the early 1950s and the UN was everybody's darling tremendous coverage of the UN it was marvelous it was magnificent and the reason was that our let's say the correlation is I assume the reason that at that point the United States had an automatic majority in the UN anything the United States proposed the UN voted that just had to do with the relations of power at the time the Russians were obnoxious they kept vetoing things and there were all you take a look back at the discussion at that time leading American scholars you know anthropologists and so on had all kind of deep theories about why the Russians are vetoing everything at the UN the I was a graduate student at the time and you know we said make fun of the three or four of us and who sort of thought this was idiotic made fun of this one of the main proposals which came from people like Margaret Mead and others was that the reason the Russians were so negative and obnoxious at the UN was because they raise their children in swaddling clothes and that makes them negative and then when they get up at the UN they say no no the diaper ology is what we called it anyhow that was the big you know profound theory well over the years the thing has changed you know by now the United States is isolated at the UN the United States vetoes everything we veto way more resolutions anybody else these the votes that just reported are not untypical you know so what happened well it turns out that the UN has lost its moral authority you find articles like New York Times magazine had a big story about why the world is out of step literally you know how come the whole world is against the United States what's wrong with them I mean it's not that we raise our babies wrong you know it's the day the rest of the world is doing something wrong and then comes with profound analysis of why the world is out of step and you know what's the matter with the world culture and so on and so forth and the UN has lost its moral authority the United States doesn't pay dues anymore you know report it and now the UN is a you know as obnoxious because they're not following orders well you know that's that's a dramatic example of how the media fall in line and what you're talking about is another case of it and again as you just the way you're doing the reason you're getting such outrage reaction is that implicitly at least you're exposing all of this and that's no good so therefore the outrage reaction which is just all the more reason to keep doing you've been listening to part two the question-and-answer session of Noam Chomsky's lecture manufacturing consent the political economy of the mass media presented at the Wisconsin Union theater on the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin on the evening of March 15 1989 this lecture was sponsored by the Wisconsin Union directorates distinguished lecture series for the academic year of 1988 through 1989 to find out more about know'm Chomsky and his work please visit the Chomsky archive website at Chomsky dot info part 1 of this presentation the full lecture is available at the PDX justice media productions website at PDX Justice O are G and at the PDX justice channels on the YouTube and Vimeo video hosting websites this program was produced by PDX justice media productions of Portland Oregon to find out more about our work and to access our growing library of free on-demand streaming video and audio programs please visit our website at PDX justice dough our G and write to us with your questions and comments at PDX justice at Riseup net we'd love to hear from you thanks for tuning in and thanks for supporting listener sponsored radio public access cable television net neutrality independent bookstores and all forms of grassroots democratic community media

Channel: pdxjustice Media Productions

Views: 13,843

Rating: 4.9056602 out of 5

Keywords: Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, media, censorship, Warner Communications, Salman Rushdie, pdxjustice, Edward Herman

Id: 5oOjwjgV4G0

Length: 78min 28sec (4708 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 06 2012