Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

What distinguishes Noam Chomsky’s political thinking is not any one novel insight or single overarching idea. In fact, Chomsky’s political stance is rooted in concepts that have been understood for centuries. Rather, Chomsky’s great contribution is his mastery of a huge wealth of factual information, and his uncanny skill at unmasking, in case after case, the workings and deceptions of powerful institutions in today’s world. His method involves teaching through examples—not in the abstract—as a means of helping people to learn how to think critically for themselves.

Also, the Reagan military budget had to level off by 1985. It did spurt, pretty much along the lines of Carter administration projections, but then it leveled off at about what it would have been if Carter had stayed in.6 Well, why did that happen? Partly it happened because of fiscal problems arising after four years of catastrophic Reaganite deficit spending, but partly it was just because there was a lot of domestic dissidence. And by now that dissidence is kind of irrepressible, actually. The fact that it doesn’t have a center, and doesn’t have a source, and doesn’t have an organizational structure, that has both strengths and weaknesses. The weaknesses are that people get the sense that they’re alone—because you don’t see things happening down the street. And it’s possible to maintain the illusion that there’s no activism going on, because there’s nothing dramatically visible, like huge demonstrations or something; occasionally there are, but not most of the time. And there’s very little in the way of inter-communication, so all sorts of organizing can be happening in parallel, but it doesn’t feed into itself and move on from there. Those are all weaknesses. On the other hand, the strength is, it’s very hard to crush—because there’s nothing to cut off: if one thing gets eliminated, something else just comes up to take its place.

See, one of the interesting features of the 1980s is that to a large extent the United States had to carry out its foreign interventions through the medium of mercenary states. There’s a whole network of U.S. mercenary states. Israel is the major one, but it also includes Taiwan, South Africa, South Korea, the states that are involved in the World Anti-Communist League and the various military groups that unite the Western Hemisphere, Saudi Arabia to fund it, Panama—Noriega was right in the center of the thing. We caught a glimpse of it in things like the Oliver North trial and the Iran-contra hearings [Oliver North was tried in 1989 for his role in “Irancontra,” the U.S. government’s illegal scheme to fund the Nicaraguan “contra” militias in their war against Nicaragua’s left-wing government by covertly selling weapons to Iran]—they’re international terrorist networks of mercenary states. It’s a new phenomenon in world history, way beyond what anybody has ever dreamt of. Other countries hire terrorists, we hire terrorist states, we’re a big, powerful country.

One of the main players is Israel: they’ve helped the United States penetrate black Africa, they’ve helped support the genocide in Guatemala; when the United States couldn’t directly involve itself with the military dictatorships of the southern cone in South America, Israel did it for us.11 It’s very valuable to have a mercenary state like that around which is militarily advanced and technologically competent.

If you read American secret documents, this is all stated very openly, actually. For example, there’s a now-declassified Robert McNamara [Secretary of Defense]-to-McGeorge Bundy [Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs] intercommunication from 1965 with a detailed discussion of Latin America, in which they talk about how the role of the military in Latin American societies is to overthrow civilian governments if, in the judgment of the military, the governments are not pursuing the “welfare of the nation,” which turns out to be the welfare of American multinational corporations.14 So if you want to overthrow a government, you arm its military, and of course you make it hard for the civilian government to function. And that’s what was done in the Chile case: we armed the military, we tried to cause economic chaos, and the military took over.

Operation MONGOOSE. Right after the Bay of Pigs invasion attempt failed, Kennedy launched a major terrorist operation against Cuba [beginning November 30, 1961]. It was huge—I think it had a $50 million-a-year budget (that’s known); it had about twenty-five hundred employees, about five hundred of them American, about two thousand what they call “assets,” you know, Cuban exiles or one thing or another. It was launched from Florida—and it was totally illegal. I mean, international law we can’t even talk about, but even by domestic law it was illegal, because it was a C.I.A. operation taking place on American territory, which is illegal.21 And it was serious: it involved blowing up hotels, sinking fishing boats, blowing up industrial installations, bombing airplanes. This was a very serious terrorist operation. The part of it that became well known was the assassination attempts—there were eight known assassination attempts on Castro.22 A lot of this stuff came out in the Senate Church Committee hearings in 1975, and other parts were uncovered through some good investigative reporting. It may still be going on today (we usually find out about these things a few years later), but it certainly went on through the 1970s.23

there was that famous interchange between Kennedy and Khrushchev, in which an agreement to end the crisis was reached. Then shortly after that, the Russians tried to take control of their missiles in Cuba, in order to carry through the deal they had made with the United States. See, at that point the Russians didn’t actually control the missiles, the missiles were in the hands of Cubans—and the Cubans didn’t want to give them up, because they were still worried, plausibly, that there would be an American invasion. So there was a stand-off between them early in November—which even included an actual confrontation between Russian and Cuban forces about who was going to have physical control of the missiles. It was a very tense moment, and you didn’t know what was going to happen. Then right in the middle of it, one of the Operation MONGOOSE activities took place. Right at one of the tensest moments of the Missile Crisis, the C.I.A. blew up a factory in Cuba, with about four hundred people killed according to the Cubans. Well, fortunately the Cubans didn’t react—but if something like that had happened to us at the time, Kennedy certainly would have reacted, and we would have had a nuclear war. It came very close. Alright, there’s a terrorist operation which might have set off a nuclear war. That wasn’t even reported in the United States when the information was released about a year ago, it was considered so insignificant.

There’s a point here to be made about government secrecy, actually: government secrecy is not for security reasons, overwhelmingly—it’s just to prevent the population here from knowing what’s going on. I mean, a lot of secret internal documents get declassified after thirty years or so, and if you look over the entire long record of them, there’s virtually nothing in there that ever had any security-related concern.

Look, every government has a need to frighten its population, and one way of doing that is to shroud its workings in mystery. The idea that a government has to be shrouded in mystery is something that goes back to Herodotus [ancient Greek historian]. You read Herodotus, and he describes how the Medes and others won their freedom by struggle, and then they lost their freedom when the institution of royalty was invented to create a cloak of mystery around power.30 See, the idea behind royalty was that there’s this other species of individuals who are beyond the norm and who the people are not supposed to understand. That’s the standard way you cloak and protect power: you make it look mysterious and secret, above the ordinary person—otherwise why should anybody accept it? Well, they’re willing to accept it out of fear that some great enemies are about to destroy them, and because of that they’ll cede their authority to the Lord, or the King, or the President or something, just to protect themselves. That’s the way governments work—that’s the way any system of power works—and the secrecy system is part of it.

Testing the “Propaganda Model” WOMAN: Could you give us kind of a thumbnail sketch of how you’ve used that tool? Well, essentially in Manufacturing Consent what we were doing was contrasting two models: how the media ought to function, and how they do function. The former model is the more or less conventional one: it’s what the New York Times recently referred to in a book review as the “traditional Jeffersonian role of the media as a counter-weight to government”—in other words, a cantankerous, obstinate, ubiquitous press, which must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the right of the people to know, and to help the population assert meaningful control over the political process.36 That’s the standard conception of the media in the United States, and it’s what most of the people in the media themselves take for granted. The alternative conception is that the media will present a picture of the world which defends and inculcates the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate the domestic economy, and who therefore also largely control the government. According to this “Propaganda Model,” the media serve their societal purpose by things like the way they select topics, distribute their concerns, frame issues, filter information, focus their analyses, through emphasis, tone, and a whole range of other techniques like that.

In fact, even if you could prove it at the level of physics, it would always remain irrelevant within the mainstream institutions. And the reason for that is that the “Propaganda Model” is in fact valid, and it predicts that it will be irrelevant—and in fact, not even be understandable within the elite culture—no matter how well it’s proven. And that’s because what it reveals undermines very effective and useful ideological institutions, so it’s dysfunctional to them, and will be excluded.

After all, what are the media? Who are they? Are they “us”? Take C.B.S., or the New York Times—who are they? They’re among the major corporations in the country, they’re not “us.” They are no more “us” than General Motors is “us.” The question is: are the media like a sample of public opinion? Is it that the public has a certain range of beliefs and the media are just a sample of it? If that were the case, the media would be very democratic in fact. MAN: The only poll that I’ve seen about journalists is that they are basically narcissistic and left of center. Look, what people call “left of center” doesn’t mean anything—it means they’re conventional liberals, and conventional liberals are very state-oriented, and usually dedicated to private power.

So just take a look at something like the nuclear freeze movement. The nuclear freeze had virtually no support in the media, no support among politicians, and certainly no support by business—but nevertheless, 75 percent of the American population supported it.48 Well, that’s certainly not reflected in editorial opinion or in opinion pieces in the media. Or take what’s certainly the most discussed media issue of the 1980s, Nicaragua. I’ve done a lot of analysis of opinion pieces in the national media, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, and it’s uniform—well over 99 percent of them are anti-Sandinista, and think the Sandinista Party government has to be eliminated; the only issue is how you do it: do you do it by attacking them with contra forces, or by some other means? Well, that does not reflect public opinion. I mean, most of the public thought we should just get out of Nicaragua and leave them alone—they didn’t even know which side we were on, but thought we had no business there, so let’s get away. That certainly wasn’t reflected.

I once asked another editor I know at the Boston Globe why their coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is so awful—and it is. He just laughed and said, “How many Arab advertisers do you think we have?” That was the end of that conversation.

one of the things that Edward Herman and I did in Manufacturing Consent was to just look at the sources that reporters go to. In a part that I wrote, I happened to be discussing Central America, so I went through fifty articles by Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times beginning in October 1987, and just asked: whose opinions did he try to get? Well, it turns out that in fifty articles he did not talk to one person in Nicaragua who was pro-Sandinista. Now, there’s got to be somebody—you know, Ortega’s mother, somebody’s got to be pro-Sandinista. Nope, in fact, everybody he quotes is anti-Sandinista. [Daniel Ortega was the Sandinista President.] Well, there are polls, which the Times won’t report, and they show that all of the opposition parties in Nicaragua combined had the support of only 9 percent of the population. But they have 100 percent of Stephen Kinzer—everyone he’s found supports the opposition parties, 9 percent of the population. That’s in fifty articles.56

And if you look still closer at the scholarship on “containment,” it’s even more intriguing. For example, in another book Gaddis discusses the American military intervention in the Soviet Union right after the Bolshevik Revolution—when we tried to overthrow the new Bolshevik government by force—and he says that was defensive and that was containment: our invasion of the Russian land mass. And remember, I’m not talking about some right-wing historian; this is the major, most respected, liberal diplomatic historian, the dean of the field: he says the military intervention by 13 Western nations in the Soviet Union in 1918 was a “defensive” act. And why was it defensive? Well, there’s a sense in which he’s right. He says it was “defensive” because the Bolsheviks had declared a challenge to the existing order throughout the West, they had offered a challenge to Western capitalism—and naturally we had to defend ourselves. And the only way we could defend ourselves was by sending troops to Russia, so that’s a “defensive” invasion, that’s “defense.”

the terms of political discourse are designed so as to prevent thought. One of the main ones is this notion of “defense.” So look at the diplomatic record of any country you want—Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Libya, pick your favorite horror-story—you’ll find that everything they ever did was “defensive”; I’m sure if we had records from Genghis Khan we would find that what he was doing was “defensive” too. And here in the United States you cannot challenge that—no matter how absurd it gets.

MAN: How about Suharto [Indonesian dictator]—he’s called a “moderate” too. Suharto, yeah—that’s the most extreme case I’ve ever seen, in fact, I’m glad you mention it. This is a really astonishing one, actually. For example, there was an article in the Christian Science Monitor a couple years ago about the great business opportunities in Indonesia, and it said: after the Indonesian government stopped a Communist revolt in 1965, the West was very eager to do business with Indonesia’s “new moderate leader, Suharto.”22 Well, who’s Indonesia’s “new moderate leader, Suharto”? Suharto is the guy who, no doubt with the backing of the United States, carried out a military coup in 1965 after which the Indonesian army slaughtered about 500,000 people within four months. Nobody knows the exact numbers—I mean, they gave 500,000, pick your number; it was mostly landless peasants.23 Well, that was very much welcomed in the West, the American media just loved it. For instance, James Reston, the New York Times’s liberal columnist, had a column I remember called, “A Gleam of Light in Asia”—things are really looking up. U.S. News and World Report had a story called, “Hope Where There Once Was None.”

The economy simply is not growing; I mean, the Gross National Product goes up, but it goes up in a way which does not constitute economic growth for a poor urban population. And with the decline of the traditional manufacturing industries in recent years, it’s getting worse, not better. As capital becomes more fluid and it becomes easier for corporations to move production to the Third World, why should they pay higher wages in Detroit when they can pay lower wages in Northern Mexico or the Philippines? And the result is, there’s even more pressure on the poorer part of the population here. And what’s in effect happened is they’ve been closed off into inner-city slums—where then all sorts of other pressures begin to attack them: drugs, gentrification, police repression, cutbacks in limited welfare programs, and so on. And all of these things contribute to creating a very authentic sense of hopelessness, and also to real anti-social behavior: crime. And the crime is mostly poor people preying on one another, the statistics show that very clearly—because the rich are locked away behind their barricades.29

But the point is, if things ever really come to a crunch in the United States, this massive part of the population—I think it’s something like a third of the adult population by now—could be the basis for some kind of a fascist movement, readily. For example, if the country sinks deeply into a recession, a depoliticized population could very easily be mobilized into thinking it’s somebody else’s fault: “Why are our lives collapsing? There have to be bad guys out there doing something for things to be going so badly”—and the bad guys can be Jews, or homosexuals, or blacks, or Communists, whatever you pick. If you can whip people into irrational frenzies like that, they can be extremely dangerous: that’s what 1930s Fascism came from, and something like that could very easily happen here.

when you read off a teleprompter—I’ve done it actually—it’s a very odd experience: it’s like the words go into your eyes and out your mouth, and they don’t pass through your mind in between. And when Reagan does it, they have it set up so there are two or three of them around, so his head can keep moving and it appears as though he’s looking around at the audience, but really he’s just switching from one teleprompter to another. Well, if you can get people to vote for something like that, you’ve basically done it—you’ve removed them from decision-making.

the imperial family in England plays a real role in depoliticizing the place, and Reagan reminded me a bit of that.41 For instance, every session of Parliament in England opens with the Queen reading a message written by the ruling political party, and everybody pretends to take it seriously. But in another part of your brain, you don’t ask, “Did the Queen believe what she was saying?” or, “Did she understand what she was saying?” or “Will she remember what she was saying?” or, “Did she lie to the Parliament?” Those are just not relevant questions—because the Queen’s job is to be royalty, and to be revered, and to be admired, and to be the model woman that everybody’s supposed to be like. It’s kind of like playing a game in the political system, even though people there do in fact take it seriously in a sense—like they care if the Princess Diana is having a spat with Something-Or-Other, they think about it, and they talk about it, and so on. But of course, at some other level of their intelligence, they know that it has nothing to do with life.

The reality is that under capitalist conditions—meaning maximization of short-term gain—you’re ultimately going to destroy the environment: the only question is when. Now, for a long time, it’s been possible to pretend that the environment is an infinite source and an infinite sink. Neither is true obviously, and we’re now sort of approaching the point where you can’t keep playing the game too much longer. It may not be very far off. Well, dealing with that problem is going to require large-scale social changes of an almost unimaginable kind. For one thing, it’s going to certainly require large-scale social planning, and that means participatory social planning if it’s going to be at all meaningful.

American planners back in the late 1940s were very well aware of this difference when they sort of organized the post-war world—so while they helped Japan to reindustrialize, they also insisted on controlling its energy resources: the Japanese were not allowed to develop their own petrochemical industry, or to obtain their own independent access to petroleum resources. And the reason for that is explained in now-declassified U.S. internal documents: as George Kennan [State Department official and diplomat], who was one of the major planners of the post-war world, pointed out, if we control Japan’s energy resources, we will have veto power over Japan—if they ever get out of line, we’ll just choke off their energy supply.49 Now, whether or not that plan would still work you don’t know, because the world is changing in unpredictable ways. But for the moment, the United States is still overwhelmingly powerful in world affairs—that’s why we can get away with so much.

the interest of the general population is to preserve human life; the interest of corporations is to make profits—those are fundamentally different interests. MAN: In an industrial society, though, one might argue that people need to have jobs. Sure, but having jobs doesn’t require destroying the environment which makes life possible. I mean, if you have participatory social planning, and people are trying to work things out in terms of their own interests, they are going to want to balance opportunities to work with quality of work, with type of energy available, with conditions of personal interaction, with the need to make sure your children survive, and so on and so forth. But those are all considerations that simply don’t arise for corporate executives, they just are not a part of the agenda.

In our society, real power does not happen to lie in the political system, it lies in the private economy: that’s where the decisions are made about what’s produced, how much is produced, what’s consumed, where investment takes place, who has jobs, who controls the resources, and so on and so forth. And as long as that remains the case, changes inside the political system can make some difference—I don’t want to say it’s zero—but the differences are going to be very slight.

If nationalization of industry puts production into the hands of a state bureaucracy or some sort of Leninist-style vanguard party, then you’d just have another system of exploitation, in my view. On the other hand, if nationalization of industry was based on actual popular control over industry—workers’ control over factories, community control, with the groups maybe federated together and so on—then that would be a different story. That would be a very different story, in fact. That would be extending the democratic system to economic power, and unless that happens, political power is always going to remain a very limited phenomenon.

The internal documentary record in the United States goes way back, and it says the same thing over and over again. Here’s virtually a quote: the main commitment of the United States, internationally in the Third World, must be to prevent the rise of nationalist regimes which are responsive to pressures from the masses of the population for improvement in low living standards and diversification of production; the reason is, we have to maintain a climate that is conducive to investment, and to ensure conditions which allow for adequate repatriation of profits to the West. Language like that is repeated year after year in top-level U.S. planning documents, like National Security Council reports on Latin America and so on—and that’s exactly what we do around the world.52 So the nationalism we oppose doesn’t need to be left-wing—we’re just as much opposed to right-wing nationalism. I mean, when there’s a right-wing military coup which seeks to turn some Third World country on a course of independent development, the United States will also try to destroy that government—we opposed Perón in Argentina, for example.53 So despite what you always hear, U.S. interventionism has nothing to do with resisting the spread of “Communism,” it’s independence we’ve always been opposed to everywhere—and for quite a good reason. If a country begins to pay attention to its own population, it’s not going to be paying adequate attention to the overriding needs of U.S. investors. Well, those are ...

the countries that have developed economically are those which were not colonized by the West; every country that was colonized by the West is a total wreck. I mean, Japan was the one country that managed to resist European colonization, and it’s the one part of the traditional Third World that developed.

the general population here does not gain very much from holding on to our imperial system—in fact, it may gain nothing from it. If you take a look at imperial systems over history, it’s not at all clear that they are profitable enterprises in the final analysis. This has been studied in the case of the British Empire, and while you only get kind of qualitative answers, it looks as if the British Empire may have cost as much to maintain as the profits that came from it. And probably something like that is true for the U.S.-dominated system too. So take Central America: there are profits from our controlling Central America, but it’s very doubtful that they come anywhere near the probably ten billion dollars a year in tax money that’s required to maintain U.S. domination there.58

any state, any state, has a primary enemy: its own population. If politics begins to break out inside your own country and the population starts getting active, all kinds of horrible things can happen—so you have to keep the population quiescent and obedient and passive.

“fascism” doesn’t mean gas chambers, it means a special form of economic arrangement with state coordination of unions and corporations and a big role for big business. And this point about everyone being fascist was made by mainstream Veblenite-type economists [i.e. after the American economist Veblen] right at the time, actually—they said, everybody’s fascist, the only question is what form the fascism takes: it takes different forms depending on the country’s cultural patterns.6

that’s what the Pentagon system is about: it’s a system for ensuring a particular form of domination and control. And that system has worked for the purposes for which it was designed—not to give people better lives, but to “make the economy healthy,” in the standard sense of the phrase: namely, ensuring corporate profits.

It’s not that the people in the corporations are bad people, it’s that the institutional necessity of the system is to maintain corporate domination and profit-making. I mean, if the Chairman of General Motors suddenly decided to start producing the best quality cars at the cheapest prices, he wouldn’t be Chairman any longer—there’d be a shift on the stock market and they’d throw him out in five minutes. And that generalizes to the system as a whole.

Actually, on the first anniversary of the bombing, the B.B.C. [British Broadcasting Corporation] did a retrospective on the story in which they reviewed all the background and went to European intelligence agencies for assistance: their conclusion was that all of the European intelligence agencies—including those from the most conservative governments—say they see no plausibility to the idea that there was a Libyan connection to the disco bombing.28 The whole thing was a lie. Nevertheless, it continues to be repeated in the U.S. press.29

Take the United States, which has been by far the leader in vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions since the 1970s: if we don’t like what the U.N. is doing, the U.N. can go down the tubes—we just ignore them, and that ends the matter.39

What’s the tyranny of the majority? It’s what’s known as “democracy” elsewhere, but when we happen to be in the minority, it becomes “the tyranny of the majority.” And starting around 1970, the United States began vetoing everything that came up: resolutions on South Africa, on Israel, on disarmament—you pick it, the United States was vetoing it. And the Soviet Union was voting right along with the mainstream.

It’s the same with the World Court [the popular name for the International Court of Justice, the judicial organ of the U.N.]. When the World Court issued an explicit decision against the United States in June 1986 ordering—ordering—the United States to terminate what it called “unlawful use of force” and illegal economic warfare against Nicaragua, we just said to heck with it, we ignored them. The week after, Congress increased U.S. aid to the contras by another hundred million dollars.43 Again, the commentary across the board in the U.S.—the New York Times, the Washington Post, big international law experts—was unanimous: the World Court has discredited itself by passing this judgment, so obviously we don’t have to pay any attention to it.

The General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the banning of all weapons in outer space, Star Wars—it went through 154 to 1, the U.S. was the 1. They passed a resolution against the development of new weapons of mass destruction; it was 135 to 1. They passed one calling for a nuclear test freeze; it was 137 to 3, the United States picked up England and France on that one. And so it went. Do you think any of that made the newspapers in the United States? No, because that’s just the wrong story.49 The story is “Reagan the Peacemaker,” not “The United States is alone in the world, isolated in the world in attempting to maintain the arms race”—that’s not the story.

Or you know, after you get shot, after you’re killed, like Martin Luther King, then you can become a hero—but not while you’re alive. Remember, despite all of the mythology today, Martin Luther King was strongly opposed while he was alive: the Kennedy administration really disliked him, they tried to block him in every possible way.

if by “intellectual” you mean people who are using their minds, then it’s all over the society. If by “intellectual” you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts, and framing ideas for people in power, and telling everyone what they should believe, and so on, well, yeah, that’s different. Those people are called “intellectuals”—but they’re really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population should be anti-intellectual in that respect, I think that’s a healthy reaction.

Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can’t get involved in them in a very serious way—so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. You’re trained to be obedient; you don’t have an interesting job; there’s no work around for you that’s creative; in the cultural environment you’re a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they’re in the hands of the rich folk. So what’s left? Well, one thing that’s left is sports—so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that’s also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that’s part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by the dominant institutions. And spectator sports also have other useful functions too. For one thing, they’re a great way to build up chauvinism—you start by developing these totally irrational loyalties early in life, and they translate very nicely to other areas. I mean, I remember very well in high school having a sudden kind of Erlebnis, you know, a sudden insight, and asking myself, why do I care if my high school football team wins? I don’t know anybody on the team.

In fact, it’s interesting that the media themselves even recognized the unanimity. So for example, the New York Times had an article by Elaine Sciolino surveying the U.S. reaction, and the headline was, “Americans United in Joy, But Divided Over Policy.”6 And the division over policy turns out to be the question: who gets credit for having achieved this magnificent result? See, that’s where you get a liberal/conservative split: “did the contras help or hurt?” Is it better to do it the way it’s done in El Salvador—leave women hanging from trees with their skin flayed off and bleeding to death, leave thousands of corpses beheaded by the roadside so that everybody else will get the point—or should you do what Senator Alan Cranston suggested in 1986, to pick a dove: let them “fester in their own juices,” through economic strangulation and other means?

Look, anyone can see, a ten-year-old could see, that an election carried out under conditions where a monstrous superpower is saying, “Vote for our candidate or starve to death,” is obviously not free. I mean, if some unimaginable superpower were to threaten us, saying, “We’re going to reduce you to the level of Ethiopia unless you vote for our candidate,” and then people here voted for their candidate, you’d have to be some kind of crazy Nazi or something to say that it was a free election. But in the United States, everyone says it—we’re all “United in Joy.”

Furthermore, it was also assumed automatically, across the board, that Chamorro was the democratic candidate—and nobody ever gave you a reason why she was the democratic candidate. I mean, what are her democratic credentials? That’s not anything you even have to argue in the United States: Washington says she’s the democratic candidate, and American business says she’s the democratic candidate, so that settles it—for American intellectuals, there are no further questions to ask.

Every fact I told you you can find on the front pages of the New York Times. It’s just that when you hear the White House announce, “We’re going to continue with the embargo unless Chamorro wins,” you have to be able to think enough so you conclude, well, these people are voting with a gun to their heads.13 If you can’t think that far, it doesn’t matter what the newspapers say.

It’s very hard to live with cognitive dissonance: only a real cynic can believe one thing and say another. So whether it’s a totalitarian system or a free system, the people who are most useful to the system of power are the ones who actually believe what they say, and they’re the ones who will typically make it through. So take Tom Wicker at the New York Times: when you talk to him about this kind of stuff, he gets very irate and says, “Nobody tells me what to write.” And that’s perfectly true, nobody tells him what to write—but if he didn’t already know what to write, he wouldn’t be a columnist for the New York Times.

the result of all of this is that it’s a very effective system of ideological control—much more effective than Soviet totalitarianism ever was. In fact, if you look at the entire range of media in the Soviet Union that people were actually exposed to, they had much more dissidence in the 1980s than we do, overtly, and people were in fact reading a much broader range of press, listening to foreign broadcasts, and so on—which is pretty much unheard of in the U.S.16 Or just to give one other example, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there was even a newscaster [Vladimir Danchev] who made broadcasts over Moscow radio for five successive nights back in 1983, denouncing the Russian invasion of Afghanistan—he actually called it an “invasion”—and calling on the Afghans to resist, before he was finally taken off the air.17 That’s unimaginable in the United States. I mean, can you imagine Dan Rather or anybody else getting on the radio and denouncing the U.S. “invasion” of South Vietnam, and calling on the Vietnamese to resist?

In 1988 LeMoyne had written a story which talked about two people in El Salvador who he claimed were tortured by left-wing guerrillas trying to undermine the elections; it was one part of a whole effort in the American press at the time to maintain support for the U.S. client regime in El Salvador despite its atrocities.19 Well, a freelance journalist in Central America, Chris Norton, saw LeMoyne’s article and was surprised by it, because the atrocities LeMoyne described were supposed to have taken place in an area of the country reporters couldn’t get to, because it was under military occupation. Norton wanted to figure out just how LeMoyne knew about these people being tortured, so he went up as close to that region as he could, and he talked to the mayor, and to the priest, and to people in the community—and he discovered that one of the alleged victims didn’t exist, and the other was perfectly fine. He then went back to San Salvador and did some more checking—and he discovered that LeMoyne had simply taken the story straight from a San Salvadoran newspaper, where it had been attributed to an army officer. It was in fact just straight army disinformation of a standard sort, which LeMoyne then reported in the New York Times as if he knew something about it. Then the State Department picked it up from the New York Times and distributed it to Congress to show that the Salvadoran guerrillas were undermining the election. Well, Norton uncovered this, then another freelance j...

MAN: But how do you explain Watergate, then? Those reporters weren’t very sympathetic to power—they toppled a President. And just ask yourself why he was toppled—he was toppled because he had made a very bad mistake: he had antagonized people with power. See, one of the serious illusions we live under in the United States, which is a major part of the whole system of indoctrination, is the idea that the government is the power—and the government’s not the power, the government is one segment of power. Real power is in the hands of the people who own the society; the state-managers are usually just servants. And Watergate is actually a perfect illustration of the point—because right at the time of Watergate, history actually ran a controlled experiment for us. The Watergate exposures, it turns out, came at exactly the same time as the COINTELPRO exposures—I don’t know if you know what I mean. MAN: COINTELPRO? See, you probably don’t—but that already makes my point, because the COINTELPRO exposures were a thousand times more significant than Watergate. Remember what Watergate was, after all: Watergate was a matter of a bunch of guys from the Republican National Committee breaking into a Democratic Party office for essentially unknown reasons and doing no damage. Okay, that’s petty burglary, it’s not a big deal. Well, at the exact same time that Watergate was discovered, there were exposures in the courts and through the Freedom of Information Act of massive F.B.I. operations...