After the Cataclysm by Noam Chomsky

Author:Noam Chomsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, Politics
ISBN: 978-1-60846-438-8
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2014-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

7

Final Comments

We have explored some of the ways in which the propaganda systems of the West, primarily that of the United States, have faced the major tasks noted in chapter 1 of this volume. Not surprisingly, inquiry reveals a highly selective culling of facts and much outright lying. Some areas of the world are almost entirely blacked out, where disclosure of major abuses would disturb both pliable clients and the U.S. economic, military and political interests that find this pliability advantageous. As we have described throughout the two volumes, the first principle of the Free Press is the averting of the eyes from benign or constructive terror, along with a general avoidance of invidious language and a sympathetic understanding for the difficult problems faced by the terrorizing elites backed by the United States. In sharp contrast, countries that ordinarily evoke minimal Western interest are thrust into the limelight when “enemy” terror and the evils of Communism can be revealed, and other useful lessons drawn. Thus the second principle of the Free Press is the intense and dedicated search for nefarious terror, which can be brought into focus without giving offense to any important groups and which contributes to domestic ideological mobilization.

Further devices used in handling nefarious terror, as we have described, include the stripping away of historical context, fabrication, and myth creation. Useful myths, once successfully instituted, are virtually immune to correction. In focusing on refugees fleeing from Indochina and the prevailing harsh conditions there, the Western media employ a third principle of the Free Press, namely, “agent transference.” That is, the critical role of the United States in maintaining internecine conflict from 1954, and its more direct shattering of the Indochinese societies and their economic foundations, is acknowledged only occasionally and as an afterthought. The only “agents” to whom responsibility is indignantly attributed for the suffering in Indochina are the new regimes that came into power in a presumably normal environment in 1975. Death and suffering from malnutrition and disease in societies brought to ruin by U.S. intervention are displayed as proof of the evil nature of Communism. Meanwhile, in the U.S. sphere of influence working conditions of extraordinary severity, massive dispossession of the peasantry, child labor, near slavery, starvation in the midst of rapid economic “growth,” and similar concomitants of development in accord with the Free World model are, if noted at all, dismissed as an unfortunate element of the process of modernization. And the hundreds of thousands of refugees from Latin American subfascism, or the plight of the victims of Indonesian aggression in East Timor or other benign and constructive terror in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, and the causes of their plight, are studiously ignored, in recognition of the friendly client status of the official terrorists and the absence of any useful lessons to be drawn from their depredations.

There are further and more general aims to be served by the extensive effort to dispel what the Wall Street Journal calls the “simple-minded myth” that Indochina’s suffering is somehow related to U.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.