>Carrol:
>>experience. Chomsky has since he began to write on Vietnam consistently
>>identified one fundamental feature of ideology in the U.S.: The United
>>States _never_ intends evil, and that arguments that suggest as much are
> >simply not legitimate arguments. Note: _No_ one is apt to admit to
>
>This is complete nonsense. First off, you sound like Shrub with your talk
>of "evil."
What Chomsky says is that, even in the mainstream media it is acceptable to criticize _means_ employed by the US government, but it is unacceptable to even accurately describe, much less criticize, _objectives and prerogatives_ of the US government. It is obligatory in the mainstream media to assume that the US government always has "good intentions" such as upholding freedom and democracy.
***** One who attributes the best intentions to the U.S. government, while perhaps deploring failure and ineptitude, requires no evidence for this stance, as when we ask why "success has continued to elude us" in the Middle East and Central America, why "a nation of such vast wealth, power and good intentions [cannot] accomplish its purposes more promptly and more effectively" (Landrum Bolling).22 Standards are radically different when we observe that "good intentions" are not properties of states, and that the United States, like every other state past and present, pursues policies that reflect the interests of those who control the state by virtue of their domestic power, truisms that are hardly expressible in the mainstream, surprising as this fact may be....As a matter of course, the media and intellectual journals either praise the U.S. government for dedicating itself to the struggle for democracy in Nicaragua or criticize it for the means it has employed to pursue this laudable objective, offering no evidence that this is indeed the goal of policy. A challenge to the underlying patriotic assumption is virtually unthinkable within the mainstream and, if permitted expression, would be dismissed as a variety of ideological fanaticism, an absurdity, even if backed by overwhelming evidence -- not a difficult task in this case.
<http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/ni/ni-c01-s03.html> *****
Peter K. also wrote:
>One of the
>main points I got from Chomsky was the seemingly-obvious fact
>the for whatever reason the culture has a large amount of distraction
>so that the masses won't think about politics let alone foreign policy.
To the contrary, Chomsky suggests that the masses tend to have a more accurate grasp of history than the educated elite -- hence the latter's incessant efforts to distort history.
***** To overcome the Vietnam syndrome, it was necessary to present the United States as the aggrieved party and the Vietnamese as the aggressors -- a difficult task, it might be thought by those unfamiliar with the measures available for controlling the public mind, or at least those elements of it that count. By the late stages of the war, the general population was out of control, with a large majority regarding the war as "fundamentally wrong and immoral" and not "a mistake," as polls reveal up to the present. Educated elites, in contrast, posed no serious problem. Contrary to the retrospective necessary illusion fostered by those who now declare themselves "early opponents of the war," in reality there was only the most scattered opposition to the war among these circles, apart from concern over the prospects for success and the rising costs. Even the harshest critics of the war within the mainstream rarely went beyond agonizing over good intentions gone awry, reaching even that level of dissent well after corporate America had determined that the enterprise was proving too costly and should be liquidated, a fact that I have documented elsewhere.
The mechanisms by which a more satisfactory version of history was established have also been reviewed elsewhere,23 but a few words are in order as to their remarkable success. By 1977 President Carter was able to explain in a news conference that Americans have no need "to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability" and do not "owe a debt," because our intentions were "to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese" (by destroying their country and massacring the population), and because "the destruction was mutual" -- a pronouncement that, to my knowledge, passed without comment, apparently being considered quite reasonable.24 Such balanced judgments are, incidentally, not limited to soulful advocates of human rights. They are produced regularly, evoking no comment. To take a recent case, after the U.S. warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner over Iranian territorial waters, the Boston Globe ran a column by political scientist Jerry Hough of Duke University and the Brookings Institute in which he explained:
If the disaster in the downing of the Iranian airliner leads this country to move away from its obsession with symbolic nuclear-arms control and to concentrate on the problems of war-fighting, command-and-control of the military and limitations on conventional weapons (certainly including the fleet), then 290 people will not have died in vain
-- an assessment that differs slightly from the media barrage after the downing of KAL 007. A few months later, the Vincennes returned to its home port to "a boisterous flag-waving welcome...complete with balloons and a Navy band playing upbeat songs" while the ship's "loudspeaker blared the theme from the movie `Chariots of Fire' and nearby Navy ships saluted with gunfire." Navy officials did not want the ship "to sneak into port," a public affairs officer said.25 So much for the 290 Iranians.
<http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/ni/ni-c02-s05.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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