Young Noam Chomsky on America (1978)

Thanks several months ago arthur schlesinger had a column in the wash and the Wall Street Journal which was widely reprinted in other newspapers in which he evaluated the new Human Rights orientation in American foreign policy and he said in effect human rights is replacing self-determination as the guiding value in American foreign policy and concluded that Carter's promotion of human rights is a considerable and very serious success I'd like to comment on these remarks as a point of departure in the first place I think Schlesinger is quite right in saying that human rights in a sort of perverse sense that human rights is replacing self-determination as the guiding value in American foreign policy although I'd like to rephrase it slightly it seems to me it would be more accurate to say that to exactly the extent to which self-determination was the guiding value in American foreign policy in the era of Guatemala and the Dominican Republic in Chile and Vietnam and Cuba and Iran and so on to precisely that extent human rights will be the guiding value in the coming period and in this respect I think his assessment is quite accurate he's also quite accurate in saying that the human rights orientation in American foreign policy that is the replacement of our long-standing commitment to self-determination by a an equally effective commitment to human rights has been a considerable success serious success at least in the places where it was intended to be a success that is in the United States and in some of the more servile Western European colonies of the United States however in other parts of the world the reaction has been a little more mixed that is not everyone as an entire agreement a good indication there are many indications one of them appeared in The Washington Post shortly after his article appeared there's a front-page article in the post which looks like this I have it in front of me there are two articles side by side one of them is their headline US aid to Nicaragua and one of them the top one is headlined garbled rights message and the second one is headlined peasants expect little help and by looking at them at their content pair by pair you can line by line sort of I won't do it that detailed you can see just where the human rights emphasis and foreign policy has been effective and where it has been ineffective first comes the garbled rights message story which goes like this it talks about the situation in Nicaragua and it says that Nicaragua has become a proving ground where the Carter Administration is undergoing a trial-and-error test of its ability to translate a concern for human rights into an effective instrument of United States foreign policy but it says that the decisions that have been made concerning Nicaragua seem outwardly confusing and contradictory so much so that they seem to border on the bizarre and then describes what happened first the administration decided to move ahead with the approval of a military assistance program whose practical effects would be to strengthen the forces holding the reins of dictatorship in Nicaragua then it turned around and withheld a sizeable chunk of non-military aid whose purpose was to help ease the poverty in Nicaragua and then comes the following assessment two diplomats and human rights activists such decisions are clues to Washington's foreign policy direction in this instance though even the most astute State Department Watchers were left bewildered about what had happened well you can make up a theory about what had happened that doesn't seem too difficult to understand but even though it eluded the most astute political analysts and the second article that's paired with this describes the people who lacking the advantages of a higher education and so on drew an assessment from such events as these now let me turn to the second article peasants expect little help this starts with a long and horrendous description of the kind that you're familiar with if you follow these things at all carefully about some people who are living in a hideous camp with mass offering from malnutrition and disease and children dying and you know all these usual things and it goes on to describe how five months ago the Nicaraguan National Guard evicted them along with dozens of other peasant families from their seaside village today they live in huts made of rubbish in an empty railroad yard the peasants and their sympathizers have protested their treatment to the Nicaraguan government and to US officials who have expressed an interest in human rights but they expect little assistance from either and then comes a background information which explains why they expect little assistance the pleasant the peasants bein blamed their eviction on the desire of Nicaragua's large land holders to acquire still more acreage in which to grow the high price long fiber cotton that's the country's chief export crop and it goes on to describe how there had been a land reform scheme but it was abortive and it's been reversed on how soldiers came to their village loaded the peasants on trucks dump them in the rail yard left behind all their possessions such as they were they've received no assistance according to this article except the menacing nighttime presence of armed National Guard's troops who occasionally prowl the outskirts of their encampment they have no source of support thousands of peasants have been uprooted from their homes by the National Guard and it goes on to interview peasants who say that they can't fight what the United States gives the dictatorship in weapons and aid and describes how the u.s. donated weapons were used last week to put down a brief revolt left left led by leftist guerrillas in which 35 people were killed on and on like that then comes the conclusion the in Nick where the US presence has continued to dominate the Nicaraguan view of politics not the reality it says here just the view of politics American economic aid is a major factor here the National Guard continues to be supplied as it has been since it was formed in 1933 with US weapons its officers are trained exclusively at US bases further description of how the Nicaraguans take for granted that what happens in that country depends on American whims and finally the last paragraph so far the peasants campaign has not involved much beyond nighttime meetings at which they quietly strum guitars and sing songs they have written to the beat of protest the songs like those of a hundred such struggles that have come and gone in Latin America speak of unity of throwing off the landlords and of an end to suffering in other words it hasn't yet reached the level of what will be called in the American press indiscriminate left-wing terror and so on well comparing these accounts one can see just where and how the human rights offensive is effective it's very effective among American foreign policy analysts and in the press and art impress and so on who can't seem to draw from that garbled rights message any conclusion other than just bewilderment that is how could we possibly give an hour given the fact of our commitment to human rights how can it be that we're increasing arms aid while reducing the kind of aid that might alleviate poverty as I say the peasant seemed to have no particular difficulty drawing some conclusions from that from that conjunction of fact well let me come back now to Arthur Schlesinger as I said there is a sense in which his comment is quite correct about human rights replacing self-determination as our guiding value and there he's correct in another sense though again not an intended sense in suggesting that there's a kind of a correlation of sorts between human rights in some country and American policy towards that country I don't know that the issue has ever been seriously studied and it's not the kind of question that I would expect American political scientists to study just as for example I wouldn't expect Russian political scientists to study the relationship between Russian policy in Eastern Europe and the state of human rights in Eastern Europe and for the same reasons to my knowledge there is only one effort to investigate a possible correlation between the human rights situation and u.s. foreign policy maybe there are others but there's the only one I know namely it's one that I was involved in together with Edie Edie Hermann who's an economist at the University of Pennsylvania and what we did as a sort of a pilot study of this question was to take a number of countries a dozen or so countries with which the United States has close relations and in which it has a very heavy influence those are obviously the cases that you would test and then we took for each of those countries a date at which something significant happened some significant change took place in the nature of that country so for example in Brazil 1964 when the again reformist government was overthrown in a military coup with the u.s. fleet standing offshore in case anything went wrong that is in case the military coup didn't work and so on and in the case of Thailand we also took a point at which a military government was introduced replacing a mild reformist government and so on for a series of in Korea we took the year of the institution of the park dictatorship of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines and so on I mean that's it took each of these cases and asked the following question how do how what was the situated the human rights situation change before and after this event studying things such as torture murders death squads a destruction of unions that sort of thing you know there's this set of measures as far as we'd get evidence and you often can so that's one question and second we asked the question what happened to American aid had an American aid to these countries military and economic aid relate to these events and we discovered that in fact human rights and American foreign policy are very tightly correlated that is there was an astonishingly close correlation of the kind that one rarely finds in the social sciences between an increase in human rights violations and an increase in US aid which is a very close correlation now superficially one would say well I mean presumably apparently American aid is conditioned by a decline and the the human rights situation that is if country wants to get foreign aid what they ought to do is start sending out death squads to murder peasants and carry out torture and so on and so forth at least that's what the rough correlation would state however as you know the social scientists among you are very well aware one has to be very cautious about correlations it could just be that each of these things is correlated with some third thing and in fact that's the case here we also asked the question how did the what is generally called the investment climate change with these events and it turned out that the investment climate changed favorably that is favorably from the point of view of the outside investors as the human rights situation deteriorated and also that American aid increased American support diplomatic military economic support increased as the investment climate improved in fact the few so what we really ought to conclude I suppose is that the United States really has no policy with regard to human rights that is human rights in itself as an independent factor is just not an issue in American foreign policy or in the policy of any other state I don't think that's terribly surprising the rhetoric what's surprising about the United States is the fact that the silly rhetoric that's produced is actually believed by people but as far as the government is concerned human rights is no more an issue than it is in every any other country but there are factors that do relate to American foreign policy for example improvements of the investment climate in a general sense you know there's lots of factors entering into that and that is surely a very significant factor in how American part foreign policy is designed that is it will support countries that throw open their society their resources their land and so on in fact their workforce to the intervention of us-based corporations no doubt American foreign policy is strongly conditioned by that factor there's and in fact improvement of the investment climate is itself correlated with the deterioration of the climate with regard to human rights and for very obvious reasons I mean if you want to turn it say the Dominican Republic into a place which is as described in the ads you know a sort of an economic miracle a paradise for investors and so on and so forth then one of the things you have to do is make sure you do break up peasant unions and destroy labor unions and get rid of annoying leftists and so on and so forth and the best way to do that that's ever been discovered is by introducing a murderous terrorist regime which carries out the kind of violence and destruction that I've described when that is done then the country is available to let the forces of the free market operate and allow the penetration of foreign capital and in fact we do find that that's precisely what happens after the successful American interventions either direct military interventions as in the case of Dominican Republic which was simply invaded or in direct military interventions such as in the case of the Brazilian or Dominica or Guatemalan coos I'm not so indirect in the latter case since American planes were actually bombing Guatemala but still not an outright invasion so what we can if this pilot study turns out to be accurate and I frankly have little doubt that it will if it's ever conducted if there is you know if anybody conducts a serious investigation of this I don't advise you to apply to your nearest foundation incidentally but if a serious investigation were conducted of this topic I have no doubt that it would find that there is a dramatically close correlation between the deterioration in the human rights climate and the increase in u.s. support well so much for the facts concerning the correlation between human rights and American policy what I would like to do is to discuss some of the backgrounds of really two things one the evolution of American foreign policy since the Second World War and secondly the evolution of ideology that is the set of beliefs that are created by the intelligentsia what one might call the state religion that is developed in order to disguise and present the actuality in a form which will help indoctrinate the public into accepting it so I want to describe these two developments during the this period briefly and then return at the end of this these brief remarks to a question of how the human rights emphasis arose why it arose in the particular moment that it did and what its significance is well briefly let me just start with World War two of course one can go back further recall that in World War two it was obvious by the you know by the early 40s that most of the industrial world was going to be destroyed and that the United States would emerge from the ruins essentially unscathed and in fact with its economic situation vastly improved while most of the other in fact virtually every other industrial country was being either heavily battered or literally totally destroyed the United States tripled or quadrupled its its industrial production and in fact even before the war had started the United States was far and away the most the largest industrial society in the world with massive scale and enormous internal resources and so on there is very revealing and intriguing documentary evidence on the planning that took place during the early 1940s as this situation became you know emerged that was developing as the war proceeded the best the best evidence that I know about it and it really is quite remarkable is the series of studies conducted by a group called the war Peace Studies group of the Council on Foreign Relations beginning in 1939 and continuing until 1945 this wasn't involved the the kind of people you'd expect in a high-level planning group the bankers and you know and investment firms and lawyers from the few corporate law firm the law firms that deal with corporate interests and a couple of professors thrown in and representatives of the State Department Planning Group and high-level diplomats in fact virtually everybody in the state department except Cordell Hull the Secretary of State himself was involved in one form or another and they produced a long series of memoranda describing the kind of world that ought to grow out of the chaos that was being created worldwide at that time I'll read you a few excerpts to give you the flavor these memoranda deal I'm quoting now with the requirements of the United States in a world in which it proposes to hold unquestioned power in the early years that is 1939 1940 when it was still thought that the Germans might be able to hold on you know that there might in other words be a German controlled world at the end of the world at the end of the war part of the world so in those years the task was to develop an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States within the non German world including plans to secure the limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by foreign nations that constitutes a threat to the world area essential for the security and economic prosperity of the United States and the Western Hemisphere our touching concern for the economic prosperity of the rest of the Western Hemisphere is there's plenty of evidence for that in the years since we can dismiss that as rhetoric but the rest is by no means rhetoric and given those commitments the planners began to develop the structure and institutions of a of a world system which would in fact be essential for the economic prosperity of the United States and within which the United States might maintain military and economic supremacy they called this area the grand area and they concluded that in order to that an area of the world ficient to meet the needs of the American economy would have to include the entire Western Hemisphere the Far East and the British Empire the British Empire of course would have to be dismantled that as the United States was certainly anti-colonial in the sense of being opposed to the efforts of other countries to create closed areas in which American US penetration of US capital would be limited so they pointed out that the British Empire will never reappear and the u.s. may have to take its place continuing the United States must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms amounting perhaps to a Pax Americana the United States must dominate area strategically necessary for world control namely the areas that I described this is necessary the world must be organized in order to offer the American economy the elbow room needed in order to survive without major readjustment that's a line that runs through consistently and it's sort of a code word for referring to internal changes that might make it unnecessary for the United States to dominate a grand area of this sort for example changes in distribution of income or rational use of resources and all sorts of other things of this terrible nature which have to be prevented so we have to in order to prevent major any kind of adjustments in the distribution of power and wealth within the society it is necessary to create this grand area in which the United States proposes to be the hegemonic power now they went on to say that this grand area is not an entirely satisfactory substitute for a world economy that is to say the optimal system would be a grand area which includes the entire world in other words a world in which the United States proposes to achieve military and economic supremacy and a world which is organized in which we impose our own terms maintaining a mental view towards world settlement a world organized so as to to give us the elbow room to survive without major adjustments and it goes on and on like this and describes in some detail the institutions that would have to be developed for such a grand area in fact institutions which later were constructed now all of this stuff reads rather crude you know rather harshly say and although it's not secret it wasn't exactly put on the front pages and the planners themselves the writers of the memoranda were aware that the description of what they were doing you know is really free internal use they had the following to say formulation of a statement of war aims for propaganda purposes is very different from formulation of one defining the true national interest we're of course true national interest means as conceived by this group of planners with their particular conception of the natural national interest and then they go on to say the following if war aims are stated which seemed to be concerned solely with anglo-american imperialism they will offer little to people in the rest of the world and will be vulnerable to Nazi counter promises the interests of other people's should be stressed not only those of Europe but also of Asia Africa and Latin America this would have a better propaganda effect and shortly after the Atlantic Charter was produced which was suitably vague and idealistic and which of course has ever since then been described by academic scholarship as the real war aims of the United States so the propagandists understood what they were doing they recognized that it was very unlikely that the group that has sometimes been called the secular priesthood I think that's Isaiah Berlin's term in the first place applied in that case to the so-called revolutionary intelligentsia who run the state socialist countries but it can just as well be applied to the intelligence he and the Democratic so-called society it was understood that the secular priesthood would heed the message and would produce only would reproduce only that statement of work war aims which was meant for propaganda purposes dismissing quite completely the actual statement of war aims the formulation that defines the true national interest and in fact if you look at your analyses of the Cold War and post-war history since that time you will find that this conviction on the part of the planners that they wouldn't be exposed by journalism or academic scholarship or whatever is quite was quite accurate in fact the materials that I have just described are virtually never discussed in any analysis of American foreign policy although they do constitute probably the primary document documentary source least the primary one that I know of as to how top-level planners conceived the world that they were going to construct as the war continued and although those plans were carried out with significant though not a hundred percent effectiveness nevertheless the actual plans themselves might just as well not exist as far as scholarship is concerned to my knowledge the first study that even deals with this just appeared a year or two ago it appeared in a journal which called the insurgent sociologist to a massive reading audience as you can imagine and shortly after a book appeared which received equal ovations in the press by two graduate students who had done doctoral dissertations on the subject and I'm sure that it will be returned to the Oblivion that is necessary in order to preserve the appropriate version of the state religion for domestic consumption if people if scholars are supposed to be able to say the things like the one that I mentioned in my first remarks that self-determination has been the guiding value in American foreign policy then it's very well to keep material of this sort repressed and silent well this discussion it fits precisely into the framework of the grand area planning that we find in other high-level planning documents such as those that I've mentioned and in fact it was really simply an application simply an application to a special case of the general program of grand area planning that is developing an international system tremendous if possible Universal international system that would be dominated by the United States and whatever one thinks about the ethics of it I think there's little doubt of its rationality didn't turn out very well but then many rational decisions don't turn out very well we just don't know all the facts but this is a record of very explicit rational planning and a rational Imperial planning there's no concern whatsoever for self-determination not what there was what was concerned for is just what you'd expect in a hegemonic power that's trying to organize the world in a way which will be necessary for world control to use the terminology the planners well perfectly plainly no material of this sort can be permitted to enter the textbooks and academic studies and journals and so on because if it does people may actually get an insight into reality and what could be more dangerous than that so therefore this kind of material has to be completely excluded from scholarship and journalism and take a look I think you'll find that that achievement has been realized quite effectively in contrast when you look at the material from the middle 60s that's pretty safe by that time all the basic decisions had long been made the whole framework of planning had already been laid down nobody either questioned that are discussed that or probably even remembered it and all that was left was the problem of how to conduct make particular tactical decisions tiny tactical decisions within a framework of principles and understanding that had been set long before therefore it's perfectly one can feel quite free to refer to the documentary material dealing with that period confident that nothing will be exposed about how policy is actually designed and in fact you discover that that's the that's how the Pentagon Papers have entered academic studies and our conception of the world as presented by them quite generally I should say that if you look at the debate over American foreign policy in these years you find that it has some very interesting properties until the late 60s when the pressure of the student movement sort of compelled the universities and the journals and so on to at least pay a little bit of attention to some critical scholarship until that time it's quite fair to say I think that American scholarship with regard to Foreign Affairs oscillated you know fell somewhere on a spectrum that was defined between two extremes at the one extreme you have what is sometimes called the Orthodox version as presented by people like Herbert Feist or well essentially Arthur Schlesinger and others like that which essentially gives you might say the government version of events presents the state religion at the other extreme you had the critics who were often called the realists critics people like George Cannon and Hans Morgenthau and if you look at the debate that took place between the Orthodox theorists and the can and the critics you discover something rather interesting about the way in which a system of propaganda and indoctrination functions the Orthodox critics held very much as Schlesinger in that comment that I mentioned that the United States is unique among the nations of of the mater of the world and modern history in there maybe any history in that it it has it really has no foreign policy it's sort of blunders about in the world you know reacting to what other people do guided by kind of an abstract moralism I mean benevolence concern for Wilsonian principles of freedom and self-determination and so on but these are for some reason the United States does is too naive and simplistic to really have any concept of material interests that we just kind of you know basically react or defend ourselves or something of that kind that's the Orthodox view now the critical view the view of the critics of this is very revealing and interesting it's always much more interesting and studying a propaganda system to look at the critics that is the ones who are tolerated the tolerated critics what the critics say is yes it is true that the United States is unique among the nations of history in this lack of policy and commitment to abstract moral principles but this is bad because what we ought to do is have a more committed understanding of the national interests and pursue that and so the debate rages between these two polarized extremes all of whom of course accept the same tacit and fundamental premise that the United States is unique among the nations of past and present history etc etc now as I said the work of the realist critics is the work that certainly gives you the deepest insight into how the system functions and to take a to get an idea what I'd suggest is those are interested to take a look for example at some of the work that was coming out in the early 60s that's an interesting period because that's a moment when the intelligentsia got what they thought was their shot at power Kennedy seemed to be inclined to bring some of the you know the eastern liberal intellectuals into at least rubbing shoulders with people who made big decisions and so on and that led to a feeling of euphoria on the campuses and in intellectual circles and a interesting outpouring of literature which is worth looking at and again well I think maybe the most interesting work is say perhaps that of Hans Morgenthau who's a very interesting figure for one thing because he is a very serious political analyst and furthermore because only a few years after this he in fact he was so close to the limits of what is tolerated as you know legitimate and critical analysis and therefore he's an interesting figure to look at when you and he's also sort of you know the grand figure of American political science and hard-headed political analysis and so on he has a book that came out I think in 1961 or 62 about then called the purpose of America and that's very interesting reading he describes in there what he calls the transcendent purpose of the United States and he says the United States is different from other countries in that other nations other states developed their purpose after they came into existence but in the case of the United States its purpose actually preceded its existence that is the United States came into existence to realize an already existing purpose that's why he calls it a transcendent purpose and that purpose was the search for equality and freedom for ourselves and for the world and he says that American policy since that time has been guided by this transcendent purpose what he calls the national purpose well he's a historian and he then goes on to look at the history of historical record and he says well you know you look at the historical record you find some funny things I mean slavery for instance for a century and you know degradation of ethnic minorities since you find intervention in Central America but he says these were just isolated forays of no significance and then the intervention in the Philippines but again that was just a sort of a random event we forget about that statistical error and so on and then then he goes on to describe these these things and he says well he says many critics who have looked at this historical record have concluded that all of this talk about national purpose and our commitment to wilsonian ideals and so on is just rhetoric intended to disguise what's really going on he says well you know those critics you can sort of understand them but he says they're committing a fundamental error of logic and the error of logic is this I'm quoting they're confusing reality with the abuse of reality now reality you have to get this reality is what is the national purpose as it was intended the abuse of reality is what actually happened and then he says this is really there I'm not making it up if you don't believe me look at it he then goes on to say that they're committing what he calls the error of atheism which has criticized religion on similar grounds and that's a very astute comment in fact we should also draw the further conclusion that in fact the what what he and most of a good deal of academic scholarship is presenting is a kind of religion the state religion that we might call it that is a set of beliefs that you're just supposed to have if you want to be a civilized and you know well behaved person with a good shot at a job and that sort of thing and in fact it is committing the error of atheism to raise you know to to mix up what really happened with the religious doctrine to which we are about what we are to about that to which we are actually committed well enough of that and let me go on to talk about grand area planning and how it developed too long so let me keep an eye on the clock how did it the first thing that had to happen in the early 40s was that we the United States had to make sure that it did in fact control the non German world that it for example succeeded in breaking up the British Empire and this was there was a sort of a mini war a sort of a conflict going on between the United States and Great Britain in the background of the Second World War it rather interesting to follow that I don't have the time to talk about it now but it was a very interesting one and it led the result of it was that the United States using its both its safety and its enormous preponderant power was able to exploit Britain's travail to dismantle the empire and to take over for example traditional British markets in Latin America and most crucially to Gravett moderate with great success displace Britain from some strongholds in the Mideast which was always regarded as extremely important because of the tremendous significance of Saudi Arabian and in fact well the oil of Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula in some way nobody had any doubts at that time in fact years before about the nature of those resources in the early 40s a State Department memorandum described Saudi Arabia as a stupendous source of strategic power one of the greatest material prizes in world history and the United States was going to make absolutely certain that that stupendous strategic resource remained totally under American control and in fact scarce Lindley Dade lease aid was diverted to Saudi Arabia I think a hundred million dollars or so to prevent the British from as the Under Secretary of the Navy once put it to prevent the British from diddling us out of our concession there by you know giving some of their own aid to him so the French also had to be kicked out of that region and that was done by an interesting legalistic device there was a 1928 agreement which divided up the spoils among the French the British and the Americans I just told you how you know the British were pretty well pushed out how about the French well the legal Bureau of the State Department decided that France was an enemy power well it was under German occupation and being an enemy power it no longer had the could no longer claim the rights that it had to the 1928 agreement so the French were properly pushed out and in fact the American share in Middle Eastern oil increased very sharply during this period in there was one country left was important namely er in several but there was one particularly important namely Iran and you remember that in the early 50s rather as in Latin America the situation's developed side by side Iran had a moderate reformist leadership which made the curious move of trying to take over its own oil resources well that ended with a successful CIA coup probably the success of that coup is what emboldened the CIA to carry out the Guatemala coup shortly afterwards and the Shah was reintroduced and you know the human rights situation since that time it's worth remembering that in the United States these successful coos which reinstalled murderous and brutal dictatorships were very highly lauded by the liberal moderate press when they took place for example here's the reaction in the New York Times to the reinstitution of the Shah by the CIA backed coup of 1953 underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism that's a reference to the effort by the Iranians to take over their own oil it is perhaps too much to hope that Iran's experience will prevent the rise of Mossad X the leader of Iran and other countries but that experience may at least strengthen the hands of more reasonable and more far-seeing leaders in short if we intervene by force we send an army to invade another country and throw at its regime that's not intervention in the internal affairs of that country because communism is an international or not an internal affair okay and so what we have to do is see that that country is communist well the State Department the Senate soon did that in a Senate resolution of June 1954 the Senate found strong evidence of intervention by the International communist movement in the state of Guatemala whereby government institutions have been infiltrated by communist age weapons of war have been secretly shipped into that country and the pattern of communist conquest has become manifest the term conquest is particularly interesting because there was a flee nothing going on there except the development of a quite mild reformist government which was for example trying to take over unused lands owned by United Fruit and give them over to peasants and so on but it was enough for the Senate to find strong evidence of communism and a pattern of communist conquest and therefore by the Braeden document doctrine intervention there wasn't really interference not at all this is what Adlai Stevenson was later to call defense against internal aggression in May 1964 he pointed out that the point is the same in Vietnam today as it was in Greece in 1947 that is the United States is defending a free people from internal aggression that's one of the nice additions to the political lexicon that was made by the Liberals of that period and that's true we have defended countries against internal aggression around the world quite a number of times since the 1940s well I won't bother to say any more about the unrolling of this history it had sometimes it sometimes the American attempts to construct the grand the area have succeeded in fact dramatically succeeded Latin America is a case in point as I said the chamber of horrors that's been constructed in Latin America is not at all unrelated to Grand the area planning in fact it's very closely correlated with it not just statistically but for very good reasons and that has to be counted as a dramatic success of American policy whatever the priests of the state religion may say about it sometimes however it failed the grand area planning and in fact one case of quite dramatic failure was Vietnam the Vietnam War though it was a short-term reverse in American grand area planning nevertheless in no sense changed the institutions of American society they emerged totally unchanged which is to say that the basic factors that lay behind the interventionist policies of the last 30 years are going to persist that is to say that the policies also will persist and that means that the passive and obedient citizenry that must support these policies has to be beaten back into the appropriate degree of submission so therefore there is a kind of an ideological crisis and something has to be done about it well that's the task of the intellectuals naturally and they got to do a number of things first of all they have to completely rewrite the history of the war in Vietnam and that is that wasn't very difficult actually because in fact the journals and most of the academic profession and so on had always adhered to the required mythical conception of what happened there that is the description of the United States as intervening out of benevolent motives in order to preserve freedom and democracy in the face of internal aggression and so on so not much rewriting had to be done but it is being done and another thing that had to be done is of course to deny any kind of American guilt that is to show that we didn't do anything that was at all unjustified as a local professor of here at umass pointed out recently anything we did there was just a matter of military necessity which covers quite a range and next we have to show that it's really the victims of what we did on the basis of military necessity who bare the onus of all of this this is really their fault that all this happened to them this looks like a kind of a nun promising propaganda exercise kind of like say the Germans blaming the Jews for the Crematory or something but it's proceeding apace things have actually reached the point where an American president can appear on national television and in the course of in in at a press conference that is and in the course of a discourse on human rights can say as President Carter did that we owe no debt to the Vietnamese because the destruction was mutual and when he made that statement which is a statement in my opinion of true Hitlerian or Stalinist proportions literally I don't use the word loosely there was no response whatsoever in the American national press though there were a lot of eyebrows raised elsewhere about that mutual destruction that's the stage at which things have gotten in this regard it is also necessary to restrict the so-called lessons of the war to the narrowest possible ones and that's proceeding effectively in the scholarly journals for example someone like say Edwin Reischauer the leading Asian scholar at Harvard can explain that the real lesson of the Vietnam War is the tremendous cost incurred by an attempt to control a small Southeast Asian nationalist movement against the wishes of its population that's the lesson that it's too costly to conduct exercises of that kind so next time we got to make sure that we do our cost benefits analysis properly one can conceive for example of the German General Staff as giving the same kind of analysis of the lessons of the Second World War in 1944 I suppose and certainly since and a final at part of this whole system of reconstruction of ideology is to restore the belief in our transcendent purpose and here things have proceeded with an almost mythic quality I think it's really fantastic to watch it develop I don't mean to say that the propagandists actually planned every step but rather that they rose quite magnificently to the opportunity presented to them commenting looking if one could try to get enough perspective to look at this as if from the outside I think it all gives a very remarkable insight into and I'll finish with this into the way in which Democratic propaganda systems operated and in fact it gives some insight I think it's a sharp contrasts between totalitarian and democratic systems of thought control what happens in a totalitarian system in a standardly is the following the state has a position you know there's official doctrine comes out of the center of power and there is a group which we can for which we can use Isaiah Berlin's term let's say this gets secular priesthood who pronounce and produce the doctrines of the state religion they're very clear they're very precise everybody understands them everybody knows where they're coming from in to you and you know internally you know privately you can not only easily identify them but you can also refuse to believe them if you want as long as you're quiet about it whether you voice that opposition or not well and the cost that you may pay by voicing it that depends on just how violent and totalitarian the state actually is but in general the doctrines of the state religion are very easily identified the people who promulgate them are easily identified and everybody else are just supposed to parrot them that's though believing whatever they want internally nobody cares much about that that's roughly the way a totalitarian system of propaganda works a democratic system of thought control works quite differently what happens here and I've given a couple of examples already is that the secular priesthood wants to not only present the official doctrine but in fact to capture the entire spectrum of possible thinking that is it wants to include both those who put forth the official doctrine and those who vigorously attack it as long as that entire spectrum of opinion meets one condition namely there's a tacit presupposition running across the whole spectrum which is in effect the doctrine of the state religion now that's what we saw precise that's what you see precisely in the case of this tremendous debate over foreign policy between the Orthodox and the realism on the one hand you have the Orthodox scholars on the other hand you have their realist opponents if you look carefully you discover that throughout the whole debate the same premise is presupposed namely the unique benevolence of the United States it's lack of the lack of concern of planners for material interests of any social group and so on now that's very effective because in order to see what's going on in a democratic system of thought control you not only have to sort of dismantle the easy job dismantle the system of the government and it's propagandists but you have to take apart the whole spectrum of debate and see what underlies that that is you have to see what's what lies behind the critical rejection of the official position as well as the official position itself and I'm sure that any propagandist would readily concede that it's much more effective to insinuate doctrines by tacit presupposition than it is to beat people over the head with a bludgeon you know it's much more effective way of getting the doctrines to permeate ones thought and in fact the more the battle rages between these polarized extremes the better the propaganda system is served because the more effectively those tacit presuppositions are introduced and and become just part of one's general way of thinking about events and it's really amazing when you look at the American propaganda system at the American ideological institutions I mean the universities and the press and the journals and so on to see how this happens in case after case the debate over foreign policy is one example involving academic scholarship let me give just one single but really quite typical example from the junk from journalism when the war came to an end the Vietnam War in April 75 every newspaper had its assessment you know it's considered assessment of what it was all about and so on and they were very interesting I wrote an article in fact last issue of ramparts I guess it killed it finally which surveyed this and what you found that only the liberal press all I looked at if you found in case after case was the following well I'll exemplify it from the New York Times which is quite typical The Times described the decade of fierce polemics that had raged over the war and talked about how this had torn the country apart and so on and so forth and it said well it's too early to tell who has won in this decade of fierce polemics we have to leave the judgment to Cleo who was cool and measured in her ways and so on this is a time for silence and humility and prayer they said but we must remember this decade of fierce polemics now what was the decade of fierce polemics well if you look you find it was the following it was a decade of Peirce fierce polemics which pitted the Hawks that is those who thought we could win if we kept trying at one extreme and the doves that is those who thought we probably weren't going to get away with it no matter how hard we tried at the other extreme okay though that was the decade of fierce polemics notice again a typical example of the productions of a Democratic propaganda system that is insinuated throughout and tacit in the discussion between these two polar extremes is that the United States has a perfect right to win right the only question is can we get away with it that's what the decade of fierce polemics is about now of course excluded from this debate was for example the entire peace movement which said that the United States has no right to win that aggression is wrong even if it succeeds the kind of movement that took the same view towards American aggression in Vietnam that it took towards Russian aggression in Czechoslovakia where in fact they did get away with it and got away with the very bloodlessly but that didn't make it right so taking the same view towards American aggression in Vietnam which was far more severe by any measure and far less justified by any measure I might add that taking that same view towards American aggression in Vietnam simply excluded you from the spectrum of debate as far as the time sought they didn't have to refute this position in order they even have to mention this position it simply outside the polemics now in fact so committed was the times to doctrinal purity on this issue that they threw open their editorial page two letters practically full-page letters a couple of days later and the letter has covered a whole range of stuff I mean you know including somebody who called for nuclear bombardment in Vietnam but there was one position which was dramatically unrepresented namely there wasn't a single letter pointing out that the time spectrum was rather narrow and happened to exclude a certain opinion now I know that letters were sent I know at least that one letter was sent on that topic and I'm sure that plenty of others were but there have to be limits in a civilized Journal obviously can't go too far now this kind of thing is quite characteristic and in fact there's a lot of talk now about how the press has become a new source of national power opposed to the state and that's very dangerous it has to be beaten back and so on what you find out what you see if you really look carefully is that the press was a almost completely servile Institute of state propaganda it submissiveness to the framework of state propaganda over the years these years is quite fantastic and phenomenal but there was an impression of criticism there was an impression of debate just as in the academic community the impression was and the debate was in fact a debate over tactics there's debate over costs it was a debate over between the people who with pride call themselves pragmatists that is can we get away with it or can't we get away with it that was the debate and the as I said the fear sir that debate the better the propaganda system is served because the premise that we have a right to get away with it is insinuated that's what you discover if you actually look at the record now just recently the trilateral commission which you've heard of had a put out it's you know this Commission made up of major elites and the three major capitalist centers of power Japan Western Europe in the United States in fact a commission which is one of several that are picking up what was left by the war police peace planning studies of twenty five years ago they published a major publication in which they dealt with this issue in a very interesting way it's called the crisis of democracy now out of print they're careful not to reprint it I think they didn't expect to be able to read it but it's very well worth reading if the library has a copy in it they talk about the dangers the great dangers that democracy suffered during the 1960s these dangers arose from the fact that there was popular mass mobilization that various parts of the population began to press for their demands and try to participate in the political process all of which led to a crisis of democracy it led to a decline in that very comfortable system which as one as the American commentator Samuel Huntington says existed in earlier years when Truman could just call upon a few Wall Street lawyers and financiers to work at his policy for him that was the good days of democracy before the crisis but in the 1960s this began to change because of the various popular movements that were developing as various people became politicized and so on the report points out that democracy can only survive if a substantial part of the population is apathetic and passive that is leaves leadership to their betters and in fact the whole description for anyone in those any history reads very much like some of the meeting evil discussions of the commoners and the nobility that is the commoners have to be retained in their low estate you know and leave to the nobility the decisions the important decisions here they put a little differently if the commoners move out of what used to be called the lowest state of frenchmen by medieval chroniclers and try to reassert themselves then democracy suffers right because after all we can't have a democracy with all of this popular participation and so on so therefore something has to be done to restore to overcome this crisis that is to restore the commoners to commoners to their appropriate passivity and in the course of this they discuss what they call this is their term the institutions that are responsible for the indoctrination of the young this one for example and they talk about the difficulty that those institutions face during the 60s because of the pressure of of these rising groups and they say that that has to be restored as well and in fact we are now in a situation where the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young and for that matter they're not so young are being reconstructed and strengthened so that the doctrines of the state religion will be more forcibly implanted and that this crisis of ideology will be overcome and it's within this context I'm have no doubt that one should understand the rhetoric which so impressive Arthur Schlesinger and others about human rights and the American commitment to it you

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

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Length: 56min 56sec (3416 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2017