>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.
Yes, people can believe what they want with or without the facts, but having the facts out there would make it a much less comfortable environment for their delusions. Consider Chomsky's depiction of a free press in 1985 minus the institutional filters that preserve that image of the bright, shiny, happy but sometimes misguided USA:
"We would turn on the radio in the morning and hear the account of a Guatemalan army operation in the Quiche province - one supplied and backed by the US and its Israeli client - in which the army entered a town, collected its population in a central town building, took all the men and beheaded them, raped the women and then killed them, and took the children to the nearby river and killed them by bashing their heads against the rocks. ...We would turn on the radio in the afternoon and listen to a Portuguese priest in Timor telling how the Indonesian army, enjoying a constant and crucial US military and diplomatic support, forced villagers to stab, chop and beat to death people supporting the resistance, including members of their own families. And in the evening we would listen to some of the victims who escaped the latest bombing attack on villages or fleeing civilians in El Salvador - and attack coordinated by US military aircraft operating from their Honduran Panamanian sanctuaries." - Chomsky's Politics, Milan Rai pg. 56
If information about these type of events were as much a part of public knowledge as the saddam-in-a-hole and the Shock&Awe coverage, people still might ignore our foreign policy crimes but I don't think they could do it on the scale that they do now. A significant point is that they aren't getting the chance to actively ignore the dirty side of world politics, most of the ignoring is done for them ahead of time in the newsroom. And if there are people who make excuses even when the evidence is available to them 24/7, what can you really do? Beat a conscience into them? If not out even out of moral concern, I still think a substantial amount of the public would want to know why their taxes have to go quietly beating innocent people with the big stick while at the same time so many Americans are struggling in a crappy labor market or scraping by for state college tuition hikes. If the information was really out there people could see that the "national interest" isn't necessarily their own, they aren't getting a whole lot out of the US's global status quo (not that I think this is a premise to really push, arguing for a nationalistic social contract is still nationalism, and nationalism blows). The profaned system Chomsky described is today still a major hurdle. Yeah, you can hear that things are going badly in Iraq, but can you really read or see regular pundits in the mainstream making the case that this is primarily about control over maintaining hegemony on oil resources and having a friendly client state in the middle east? If the national press was dedicated to bringing out all honest and reasonable perspectives, that view shouldn't be nearly as unintelligible to the public as it is. This kind of open analysis of world events won't happen in a concentrated, capitalist media system, so yes primarily we need alternative institutions to provide the perspectives, but I think it is still very worthwhile to criticize the major media to out their culpability in letting atrocities go unnoticed. The situation has improved with the internet and the burst of post-Seattle organizing, but the major media still functions as the primary disseminator of topics and perspectives that reach the public. As long as most people remain unaware of the history and specific distortions of these institutions, getting the grassroots confrontation of global economic/political problems is going to be equivalent to fumbling in the dark. That's why I think works like Manufacturing Consent are really important, even today. Otherwise the public's general skepticism of the media can get fed into anything like Ann Coulter-type angst towards the NY Times. And along with the will to ignorance, consider how much moral concern gets misdirected by the scope of what gets discussed. When I was in high school, late 1990s, and we discussed the Vietnam era it was pretty much impossible to see the war outside of the liberal "the war was misguided and too costly" position and the conservative "we had to take a stand on communism" position. The perspective that the war was an invasion to maintain a puppet government and put down a popular uprising was impossible to see from the scope of the textbooks and lecture even though this is the kind of analysis you would end up with if you really wanted to make sense of the facts. I couldn't imagine making an argument in that kind of setting like Chomsky does about how Vietnam is very much analogous to the widely condemned Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And that the truth can't get out at this level has a significant inoculating effect on what people think the US is responsible for. Those with some humane inclinations in the class were pretty much stuck with the information they had and argued along the standard liberal positions in the classroom discussion. I think if they had to confront the bigger picture of criminality of US actions and the evidence supporting that case, some might try reframe it into a benevolent picture but most would finally understand what is usually dismissed as an extreme view because it doesn't fit the context of what's considered. It's this kind of deprivation from the facts that let people keep a straight face when they say the way to end poverty is through austerity, that US foreign policy is guided by human rights concerns and respect for freedom. Really having the facts out would result in tremendous shift in what's publicly comprehensible about international affairs. And right now there is a push to narrow what little of the scope has been widened, recall that alert about making post-colonial studies more accountable with Stanley Kurtz telling Congress we need to be "fair and balanced" in Mideast studies and have people read cultural-essentialist garbage by Sam Huntington and Bernard Lewis. The last thing the US needs revive orientalism in the college curriculum. So I recognize how many people will just stick to their happy-go-lucky picture of the US no matter what, but I don't see how it rivals the damage done by the institutional bias. I am interested in good criticism of Chomsky's focuses, I think there is a tendency to just defer to his views as being right on no matter what, but I see what's wrong with his harping on the facts.
Arash