>Doug, I've seen you make this point before, but I don't really know what you
>think Chomsky isn't acknowledging about "the active desire not to know."
We've been through this a million times before, but I'll say it briefly one more time. It's not enough to get "facts" out there. Many Americans just don't want to hear or know about the nasty things our government does. On some factual level they might actually "know" - but that knowledge is compartmentalized. They want to believe in the deep, fundamental goodness of the USA and avoid information to the contrary. Analagously, they're quick to believe that all America's "enemies" are one in the same, whether it was the Bolsheviks through the 20th century (a catch-all term that included labor militants, immigrants, and queers) or the "terrorists" of the 21st (Saddam = al Qaeda).
It's not just the evildoings of the government - it's doings in general. The other day, Eugene Coyle posted an overheard conversation to PEN-L that went something like this:
Interlocutor 1: "A friend of a friend is a contractor who got killed in Iraq."
Interlocutor 2: "Oh, I haven't been following that."
Interlocutor 3: "How's your Christmas shopping going?"
And it's not like the press hasn't been reporting this stuff. Coverage of the war in Iraq has been pretty decent by the standards of the U.S. press.
Yoshie's partly right about the absence of institutional memory, but that brings up a serious chicken-egg problem - how do you revive or create the institutions of memory with such a pervasive will to ignorance?
Doug