By Jack A. Smith
Our local paper, The Kingston (N.Y.) Freeman, in an article March 19 quoting community residents about President Bush's announcement that he was about to start a new war, extracted these weighty words of wisdom from one women anxious for the bombing to begin:
"I would give [Saddam Hussein] 24 hours, not 48, because of what he did to the World Trade Center. He took ours, now let's go get his." "Ours," of course, are the 3,000 Americans lost in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "His," are the many, many more thousands of innocent Iraqis who as you read these words are the targets of George Bush's bully-boy bombing of Baghdad and other cities in this ancient culture along the Tigris and the Euphrates.
According to opinion polls, 40% of the American people actually believe President Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 episode. It's infuriating, of course, since there has never been any evidence to connect Iraq to the terror attack, just innuendos from an insincere, smirking president seeking to justify seizure of strategic territory and oil wells in the Middle East.
But it is too easy and superficial to blame the stupidity of the American people. They are the manipulated products of their society and their rulers. Such misinformation is much more a tribute to the effectiveness of social conditioning and the process of dumbing down -- compounded immeasurably by White House and mass media propaganda -- than the ignorance of the people.
The United States may be the "information society" par excellence, but much of the social and political information that reaches the multitudes from our free press and democratic state is false. The government/media task of spreading such misinformation and promoting the ideological precepts of those who rule America is supplemented (with occasional exceptions) by those other pillars of American society -- the institutions of commerce, advertising, religion, entertainment and education.
In most cases, from the time an infant in the United States is able to be propped up to watch television and absorb its "buy now" commands, that child undergoes a process of ideological molding and training in conformity, hyper-nationalism, and class unconsciousness that intensifies through elementary school, high school and college (when affordable). The end product is the transformation of multi-millions of individuals into red, white and blue consumers, financially distressed advocates of tax cuts for the richest 1% of the population, and newspaper readers so outraged because Iraq attacked the United States that they would like to strangle the propaganda-demonized Saddam Hussein with their bare hands.
Stopping a war is tough enough, but it must be done. Stopping the social, economic and political causes of war is far tougher still, but that, too, must be done. --- This article appears in the March 25, 2003, issue of the Mid-Hudson Activist Newsletter, published by the Mid-Hudson National People's Campaign/IAC in New Paltz, N.Y., and sent via jacdon at earthlink.net.