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Title: Force and Opinion Author: Noam Chomsky Date: 1991 Language: en Topics: force, philosophy Source: Retrieved on 8th June 2021 from https://chomsky.info/199107__/ Notes: From Z Magazine, July-August, 1991
In his study of the Scottish intellectual tradition, George Davie
identifies its central theme as a recognition of the fundamental role of
“natural beliefs or principles of common sense, such as the belief in an
independent external world, the belief in causality, the belief in ideal
standards, and the belief in the self of conscience as separate from the
rest of one.” These principles are sometimes considered to have a
regulative character; though never fully justified, they provide the
foundations for thought and conception. Some held that they contain “an
irreducible element of mystery,” Davie points out, while others hoped to
provide a rational foundation for them. On that issue, the jury is still
out.
We can trace such ideas to 17^(th) century thinkers who reacted to the
skeptical crisis of the times by recognizing that there are no
absolutely certain grounds for knowledge, but that we do, nevertheless,
have ways to gain a reliable understanding of the world and to improve
that understanding and apply it — essentially the standpoint of the
working scientist today. Similarly, in normal life a reasonable person
relies on the natural beliefs of common sense while recognizing that
they may be parochial or misguided, and hoping to refine or alter them
as understanding progresses.
Davie credits David Hume with providing this particular cast to Scottish
philosophy, and more generally, having taught philosophy the proper
questions to ask. One puzzle that Hume posed is particularly pertinent
today. In considering the First Principles of Government, Hume found
“nothing more surprising” than “to see the easiness with which the many
are governed by the few; and to observe the implicit submission with
which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their
rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is brought about, we
shall find, that as Force is always on the side of the governed, the
governors have nothing to support them but opinion. ‘Tis therefore, on
opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the
most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free
and most popular.”
Hume was an astute observer, and his paradox of government is much to
the point. His insight explains why elites are so dedicated to
indoctrination and thought control, a major and largely neglected theme
of modern history. “The public must be put in its place,” Walter
Lippmann wrote, so that we may “live free of the trampling and the roar
of a bewildered herd,” whose “function” is to be “interested spectators
of action,” not participants. And if the state lacks the force to coerce
and the voice of the people can be heard, it is necessary to ensure that
that voice says the right thing, as respected intellectuals have been
advising for many years.
Hume’s observation raises a number of questions. One dubious feature is
the idea that force is on the side of the governed. Reality is more
grim. A good part of human history supports the contrary thesis put
forth a century earlier by advocates of the rule of Parliament against
the King, but more significantly against the people: that “the power of
the Sword is, and ever hath been, the Foundation of all Titles to
Government.” Force also has more subtle modes, including an array of
costs well short of overt violence that attach to refusal to submit.
Nevertheless, Hume’s paradox is real. Even despotic rule is commonly
founded on a measure of consent, and the abdication of rights is the
hallmark of more free societies — a fact that calls for analysis.
The harsher side of the truth is highlighted by the fate of the popular
movements of the past decade. In the Soviet satellites, the governors
had ruled by force, not opinion. When force was withdrawn, the fragile
tyrannies quickly collapsed, for the most part with little bloodshed.
These remarkable successes have elicited some euphoria about the power
of “love, tolerance, nonviolence, the human spirit, and forgiveness,”
Vaclav Havel’s explanation for the failure of the police and military to
crush the Czech uprising. The thought is comforting, but illusory, as
even the most cursory look at history reveals. The crucial factor is not
some novel form of love and nonviolence; no new ground was broken here.
Rather, it was the withdrawal of Soviet force, and the collapse of the
structures of coercion based upon it. Those who believe otherwise may
turn for guidance to the ghost of Archbishop Romero and countless others
who have tried to confront unyielding terror with the human spirit.
The recent events of Eastern and Central Europe are a sharp departure
from the historical norm. Throughout modern history, popular forces
motivated by radical democratic ideals have sought to combat autocratic
rule. Sometimes they have been able to expand the realms of freedom and
justice before being brought to heel. Often they are simply crushed. But
it is hard to think of another case when established power simply
withdrew in the face of a popular challenge. No less remarkable is the
behavior of the reigning superpower, which not only did not bar these
developments by force as in the past, but even encouraged them,
alongside of significant internal changes.
The historical norm is illustrated by the dramatically contrasting case
of Central America, where any popular effort to overthrow the brutal
tyrannies of the oligarchy and the military is met with murderous force,
supported or directly organized by the ruler of the hemisphere. Ten
years ago, there were signs of hope for an end to the dark ages of
terror and misery, with the rise of self-help groups, unions, peasant
associations, Christian base communities, and other popular
organizations that might have led the way to democracy and social
reform. This prospect elicited a stern response by the United States and
its clients, generally supported by its European allies, with a campaign
of slaughter, torture, and general barbarism that left societies
“affected by terror and panic,” “collective intimidation and generalized
fear” and “internalized acceptance of the terror,” in the words of a
Church-based Salvadoran human rights organization. Early efforts in
Nicaragua to direct resources to the poor majority impelled Washington
to economic and ideological warfare, and outright terror, to punish
these transgressions by destroying the economy and social life.
Enlightened Western opinion regards such consequences as a success
insofar as the challenge to power and privilege is rebuffed and the
targets are properly chosen: killing prominent priests in public view is
not clever, but rural activists and union leaders are fair game — and of
course peasants, Indians, students, and other low-life generally.
Shortly after the murder of the Jesuit priests in El Salvador in
November 1989, the wires carried a story by AP correspondent Douglas
Grant Mine entitled “Second Salvador Massacre, but of Common Folk,”
reporting how soldiers entered a working class neighborhood, captured
six men, lined them up against a wall and murdered them, adding a
14-year-old boy for good measure. They “were not priests or human rights
campaigners,” Mine wrote, “so their deaths have gone largely unnoticed”
— as did his story, which was buried.
“The same week the Jesuits were killed,” Central America correspondent
Alan Nairn writes, “at least 28 other civilians were murdered in similar
fashion. Among them were the head of the water works union, the leader
of the organization of university women, nine members of an Indian
farming cooperative, ten university students,…. Moreover, serious
investigation of the Salvadoran murders leads directly to Washington’s
doorstep.” All “absolutely appropriate,” hence unworthy of mention or
concern. So the story continues, week after grisly week.
The comparison between the Soviet and U.S. domains is a commonplace
outside of culturally deprived sectors of the West, as illustrated in
earlier Z articles. Guatemalan journalist Julio Godoy, who fled when his
newspaper, La Epoca, was blown up by state terrorists (an operation that
aroused no interest in the United States; it was not reported, though
well-known), writes that Eastern Europeans are, “in a way, luckier than
Central Americans”: “while the Moscow-imposed government in Prague would
degrade and humiliate reformers, the Washington-made government in
Guatemala would kill them. It still does, in a virtual genocide that has
taken more than 150,000 victims… [in what Amnesty International calls] a
‘government program of political murder’.” That, he suggested, is “the
main explanation for the fearless character of the students’ recent
uprising in Prague: the Czechoslovak Army doesn’t shoot to kill…. In
Guatemala, not to mention El Salvador, random terror is used to keep
unions and peasant associations from seeking their own way” — and to
ensure that the press conforms, or disappears, so that Western liberals
need not fret over censorship in the “fledgling democracies” they
applaud.
Godoy quotes a European diplomat who says, “as long as the Americans
don’t change their attitude towards the region, there’s no space here
for the truth or for hope.” Surely no space for nonviolence and love.
One will search far to find such truisms in U.S. commentary, or the West
in general, which much prefers largely meaningless (though
self-flattering) comparisons between Eastern and Western Europe. Nor is
the hideous catastrophe of capitalism in the past years a major theme of
contemporary discourse, a catastrophe that is dramatic in Latin America
and other domains of the industrial West, in the “internal Third World”
of the United States, and the “exported slums” of Europe. Nor are we
likely to find much attention to the fact, hard to ignore, that the
economic success stories typically involve coordination of the state and
financial-industrial conglomerates, another sign of the collapse of
capitalism in the past 60 years. It is only the Third World that is to
be subjected to the destructive forces of free market capitalism, so
that it can be more efficiently robbed and exploited by the powerful.
Central America represents the historical norm, not Eastern Europe.
Hume’s observation requires this correction. Recognizing that, it
remains true, and important, that government is typically founded on
modes of submission short of force, even where force is available as a
last resort.
In the contemporary period, Hume’s insight has been revived and
elaborated, but with a crucial innovation: control of thought is more
important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic
and military states. The logic is straightforward. A despotic state can
control its domestic enemy by force, but as the state loses this weapon,
other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from
interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business. These
prominent features of modern political and intellectual culture merit a
closer look.
The problem of “putting the public in its place” came to the fore with
what one historian calls “the first great outburst of democratic thought
in history,” the English revolution of the 17^(th) century. This
awakening of the general populace raised the problem of how to contain
the threat.
The libertarian ideas of the radical democrats were considered
outrageous by respectable people. They favored universal education,
guaranteed health care, and democratization of the law, which one
described as a fox, with poor men the geese: “he pulls off their
feathers and feeds upon them.” They developed a kind of “liberation
theology” which, as one critic ominously observed, preached “seditious
doctrine to the people” and aimed “to raise the rascal multitude…against
all men of best quality in the kingdom, to draw them into associations
and combinations with one another…against all lords, gentry, ministers,
lawyers, rich and peaceable men” (historian Clement Walker).
Particularly frightening were the itinerant workers and preachers
calling for freedom and democracy, the agitators stirring up the rascal
multitude, and the printers putting out pamphlets questioning authority
and its mysteries. “There can be no form of government without its
proper mysteries,” Walker warned, mysteries that must be “concealed”
from the common folk: “Ignorance, and admiration arising from ignorance,
are the parents of civil devotion and obedience,” a thought echoed by
Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. The radical democrats had “cast all the
mysteries and secrets of government…before the vulgar (like pearls
before swine),” he continued, and have “made the people thereby so
curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to
submit to a civil rule.” It is dangerous, another commentator ominously
observed, to “have a people know their own strength.” The rabble did not
want to be ruled by King or Parliament, but “by countrymen like
ourselves, that know our wants.” Their pamphlets explained further that
“It will never be a good world while knights and gentlemen make us laws,
that are chosen for fear and do but oppress us, and do not know the
people’s sores.”
These ideas naturally appalled the men of best quality. They were
willing to grant the people rights, but within reason, and on the
principle that “when we mention the people, we do not mean the confused
promiscuous body of the people.” After the democrats had been defeated,
John Locke commented that “day-labourers and tradesmen, the spinsters
and dairymaids” must be told what to believe: “The greatest part cannot
know and therefore they must believe.”
Like John Milton and other civil libertarians of the period, Locke held
a sharply limited conception of freedom of expression. His Fundamental
Constitution of Carolina barred those who “speak anything in their
religious assembly irreverently or seditiously of the government or
governors, or of state matters.” The constitution guaranteed freedom for
“speculative opinions in religion,” but not for political opinions.
“Locke would not even have permitted people to discuss public affairs,”
Leonard Levy observes. The constitution provided further that “all
manner of comments and expositions on any part of these constitutions,
or on any part of the common or statute laws of Carolines, are
absolutely prohibited.” In drafting reasons for Parliament to terminate
censorship in 1694, Locke offered no defense of freedom of expression or
thought, but only considerations of expediency and harm to commercial
interests. With the threat of democracy overcome and the libertarian
rabble dispersed, censorship was permitted to lapse in England, because
the “opinion-formers…censored themselves. Nothing got into print which
frightened the men of property,” Christopher Hill comments. In a
well-functioning state capitalist democracy like the United States, what
might frighten the men of property is generally kept far from the public
eye — sometimes, with quite astonishing success.
Such ideas have ample resonance until today, including Locke’s stern
doctrine that the common people should be denied the right even to
discuss public affairs. This doctrine remains a basic principle of
modern democratic states, now implemented by a variety of means to
protect the operations of the state from public scrutiny: classification
of documents on the largely fraudulent pretext of national security,
clandestine operations, and other measures to bar the rascal multitude
from the political arena. Such devices typically gain new force under
the regime of statist reactionaries of the Reagan-Thatcher variety. The
same ideas frame the essential professional task and responsibility of
the intellectual community: to shape the perceived historical record and
the picture of the contemporary world in the interests of the powerful,
thus ensuring that the public keeps to its place and function, properly
bewildered.
In the 1650s, supporters of Parliament and the army against the people
easily proved that the rabble could not be trusted. This was shown by
their lingering monarchist sentiments and their reluctance to place
their affairs in the hands of the gentry and the army, who were “truly
the people,” though the people in their foolishness did not agree. The
mass of the people are a “giddy multitude,” “beasts in men’s shapes.” It
is proper to suppress them, just as it is proper “to save the life of a
lunatique or distracted person even against his will.” If the people are
so “depraved and corrupt” as to “confer places of power and trust upon
wicked and undeserving men, they forfeit their power in this behalf unto
those that are good, though but a few.”
The good and few may be the gentry or industrialists, or the vanguard
Party and the Central Committee, or the intellectuals who qualify as
“experts” because they articulate the consensus of the powerful (to
paraphrase one of Henry Kissinger’s insights). They manage the business
empires, ideological institutions, and political structures, or serve
them at various levels. Their task is to shepherd the bewildered herd
and keep the giddy multitude in a state of implicit submission, and thus
to bar the dread prospect of freedom and self-determination.
Similar ideas have been forged as the Spanish explorers set about what
Tzvetan Todorov calls “the greatest genocide in human history” after
they “discovered America” 500 years ago. They justified their acts of
terror and oppression on the grounds that the natives are not “capable
of governing themselves any more than madmen or even wild beasts and
animals, seeing that their food is not any more agreeable and scarcely
better than that of wild beasts” and their stupidity “is much greater
than that of children and madmen in other countries” (professor and
theologian Francisco de Vitoria, “one of the pinnacles of Spanish
humanism in the sixteenth century”). Therefore, intervention is
legitimate “in order to exercise the rights of guardianship,” Todorov
comments, summarizing de Vitoria’s basic thought.
When English savages took over the task a few years later, they
naturally adopted the same pose while taming the wolves in the guise of
men, as George Washington described the objects that stood in the way of
the advance of civilization and had to be eliminated for their own good.
The English colonists had already handled the Celtic “wild men” the same
way, for example, when Lord Cumberland, known as “the butcher,” laid
waste to the Scottish highlands before moving on to pursue his craft in
North America.
One hundred and fifty years later, their descendants had purged North
America of this native blight, reducing the lunatics from 10 million to
200,000 according to some recent estimates, and they turned their eyes
elsewhere, to civilize the wild beasts in the Philippines. The Indian
fighters to whom President McKinley assigned the task of
“Christianizing” and “uplifting” these unfortunate creatures rid the
liberated islands of hundreds of thousands of them, accelerating their
ascent to heaven. They too were rescuing “misguided creatures” from
their depravity by “slaughtering the natives in English fashion,” as the
New York described their painful responsibility, adding that we must
take “what muddy glory lies in the wholesale killing til they have
learned to respect our arms,” then moving on to “the more difficult task
of getting them to respect our intentions.”
This is pretty much the course of history, as the plague of European
civilization devastated much of the world.
On the home front, the continuing problem was formulated plainly by the
17^(th) century political thinker Marchamont Nedham. The proposals of
the radical democrats, he wrote, would result in “ignorant Persons,
neither of Learning nor Fortune, being put in Authority.” Given their
freedom, the “self-opinionated multitude” would elect “the lowest of the
People” who would occupy themselves with “Milking and Gelding the Purses
of the Rich,” taking “the ready Road to all licentiousness, mischief,
mere Anarchy and Confusion.” These sentiments are the common coin of
modern political and intellectual discourse; increasingly so as popular
struggles did succeed, over the centuries, in realizing the proposals of
the radical democrats, so that ever more sophisticated means had to be
devised to reduce their substantive content.
Such problems regularly arise in periods of turmoil and social conflict.
After the American revolution, rebellious and independent farmers had to
be taught by force that the ideals expressed in the pamphlets of 1776
were not to be taken seriously. The common people were not to be
represented by countrymen like themselves, that know the people’s sores,
but by gentry, merchants, lawyers, and others who hold or serve private
power. Jefferson and Madison believed that power should be in the hands
of the “natural aristocracy,” Edmund Morgan comments, “men like
themselves” who would defend property rights against Hamilton’s “paper
aristocracy” and from the poor; they “regarded slaves, paupers, and
destitute laborers as an ever-present danger to liberty as well as
property.” The reigning doctrine, expressed by the Founding Fathers, is
that “the people who own the country ought to govern it” (John Jay). The
rise of corporations in the 19^(th) century, and the legal structures
devised to grant them dominance over private and public life,
established the victory of the Federalist opponents of popular democracy
in a new and powerful form.
Not infrequently, revolutionary struggles pit aspirants to power against
one another though united in opposition to radical democratic tendencies
among the common people. Lenin and Trotsky, shortly after seizing state
power in 1917, moved to dismantle organs of popular control, including
factory councils and Soviets, thus proceeding to deter and overcome
socialist tendencies. An orthodox Marxist, Lenin did not regard
socialism as a viable option in this backward and underdeveloped
country; until his last days, it remained for him an “elementary truth
of Marxism, that the victory of socialism requires the joint efforts of
workers in a number of advanced countries,” Germany in particular. In
what has always seemed to me his greatest work, George Orwell described
a similar process in Spain, where the Fascists, Communists, and liberal
democracies were united in opposition to the libertarian revolution that
swept over much of the country, turning to the conflict over the spoils
only when popular forces were safely suppressed. There are many
examples, often influenced by great power violence.
This is particularly true in the Third World. A persistent concern of
Western elites is that popular organizations might lay the basis for
meaningful democracy and social reform, threatening the prerogatives of
the privileged. Those who seek “to raise the rascal multitude” and “draw
them into associations and combinations with one another” against “the
men of best quality” must, therefore, be repressed or eliminated. It
comes as no surprise that Archbishop Romero should be assassinated
shortly after urging President Carter to withhold military aid from the
governing junta, which, he warned, will use it to “sharpen injustice and
repression against the people’s organizations” struggling “for respect
for their most basic human rights.”
The threat of popular organization to privilege is real enough in
itself. Worse still, “the rot may spread,” in the terminology of
political elites; there may be a demonstration effect of independent
development in a form that attends to the people’s sores. Internal
documents and even the public record reveal that a driving concern of
U.S. planners has been the fear that the “virus” might spread,
“infecting” regions beyond.
This concern breaks no new ground. European statesmen had feared that
the American revolution might “lend new strength to the apostles of
sedition” (Metternich), and might spread “the contagion and the invasion
of vicious principles” such as “the pernicious doctrines of
republicanism and popular selfrule,” one of the Czar’s diplomats warned.
A century later, the cast of characters was reversed. Woodrow Wilson’s
Secretary of State Robert Lansing feared that if the Bolshevik disease
were to spread, it would leave the “ignorant and incapable mass of
humanity dominant in the earth”; the Bolsheviks, he continued, were
appealing “to the proletariat of all countries, to the ignorant and
mentally deficient, who by their numbers are urged to become masters, …a
very real danger in view of the process of social unrest throughout the
world.” Again it is democracy that is the awesome threat. When soldiers
and workers councils made a brief appearance in Germany, Wilson feared
that they would inspire dangerous thoughts among “the American negro
[soldiers] returning from abroad.” Already, he had heard, negro
laundresses were demanding more than the going wage, saying that “money
is as much mine as it is yours.” Businessmen might have to adjust to
having workers on their boards of directors, he feared, among other
disasters, if the Bolshevik virus were not exterminated.
With these dire consequences in mind, the Western invasion of the Soviet
Union was justified on defensive grounds, against “the Revolution’s
challenge…to the very survival of the capitalist order” (John Lewis
Gaddis). And it was only natural that the defense of the United States
should extend from invasion of the Soviet Union to Wilson’s Red Scare at
home. As Lansing explained, force must be used to prevent “the leaders
of Bolshevism and anarchy” from proceeding to “organize or preach
against government in the United States”; the government must not permit
“these fanatics to enjoy the liberty which they now seek to destroy.”
The repression launched by the Wilson administration successfully
undermined democratic politics, unions, freedom of the press, and
independent thought, in the interests of corporate power and the state
authorities who represented its interests, all with the general approval
of the media and elites generally, all in self-defense against the
“ignorant and mentally deficient” majority. Much the same story was
re-enacted after World War II, again under the pretext of a Soviet
threat, in reality, to restore submission to the rulers.
When political life and independent thought revived in the 1960s, the
problem arose again, and the reaction was the same. The Trilateral
Commission, bringing together liberal elites from Europe, Japan, and the
United States, warned of an impending “crisis of democracy” as segments
of the public sought to enter the political arena. This “excess of
democracy” was posing a threat to the unhampered rule of privileged
elites — what is called “democracy” in political theology. The problem
was the usual one: the rabble were trying to manage their own affairs,
gaining control over their communities and pressing their political
demands. There were organizing efforts among young people, ethnic
minorities, women, social activists, and others, encouraged by the
struggles of benighted masses elsewhere for freedom and independence.
More “moderation in democracy” would be required, the Commission
concluded, perhaps a return to the days when “Truman had been able to
govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of
Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” as the American rapporteur commented.
The fears expressed by the men of best quality in the 17^(th) century
have become a major theme of intellectual discourse, corporate practice,
and the academic social sciences. They were expressed by the influential
moralist and foreign affairs adviser Reinhold Niebuhr, who was revered
by George Kennan, the Kennedy intellectuals, and many others. He wrote
that “rationality belongs to the cool observers” while the common person
follows not reason but faith. The cool observers, he explained, must
recognize “the stupidity of the average man,” and must provide the
“necessary illusion” and the “emotionally potent oversimplifications”
that will keep the naive simpletons on course. As in 1650, it remains
necessary to protect the “lunatic or distracted person,” the ignorant
rabble, from their own “depraved and corrupt” judgments, just as one
does not allow a child to cross the street without supervision.
In accordance with the prevailing conceptions, there is no infringement
of democracy if a few corporations control the information system: in
fact, that is the essence of democracy. The leading figure of the public
relations industry, Edward Bernays, explained that “the very essence of
the democratic process” is “the freedom to persuade and suggest,” what
he calls “the engineering of consent.” If the freedom to persuade
happens to be concentrated in a few hands, we must recognize that such
is the nature of a free society.
Bernays expressed the basic point in a public relations manual of 1928:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and
opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society… It
is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda
continuously and systematically.” Given its enormous and decisive power,
the highly class conscious business community of the United States has
been able to put these lessons to effective use. Bernays’ advocacy of
propaganda is cited by Thomas McCann, head of public relations for the
United Fruit Company, for which Bernays provided signal service in
preparing the ground for the overthrow of Guatemalan democracy in 1954,
a major triumph of business propaganda with the willing compliance of
the media.
The intelligent minorities have long understood this to be their
function. Walter Lippmann described a “revolution” in “the practice of
democracy” as “the manufacture of consent” has become “a self-conscious
art and a regular organ of popular government.” This is a natural
development when public opinion cannot be trusted: “In the absence of
institutions and education by which the environment is so successfully
reported that the realities of public life stand out very sharply
against self-centered opinion, the common interests very largely elude
public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class
whose personal interests reach beyond the locality,” and are thus able
to perceive “the realities.” These are the men of best quality, who
alone are capable of social and economic management.
It follows that two political roles must be clearly distinguished,
Lippmann goes on to explain. First, there is the role assigned to the
specialized class, the “insiders,” the “responsible men,” who have
access to information and understanding. Ideally, they should have a
special education for public office, and should master the criteria for
solving the problems of society: “In the degree to which these criteria
can be made exact and objective, political decision,” which is their
domain, “is actually brought into relation with the interests of men.”
The “public men” are, furthermore, to “lead opinion” and take the
responsibility for “the formation of a sound public opinion.” “They
initiate, they administer, they settle,” and should be protected from
“ignorant and meddlesome outsiders,” the general public, who are
incapable of dealing “with the substance of the problem.” The criteria
we apply to government are success in satisfying material and cultural
wants, not whether “it vibrates to the self-centered opinions that
happen to be floating in men’s minds.” Having mastered the criteria for
political decision, the specialized class, protected from public
meddling, will serve the public interest — what is called “the national
interest” in the webs of mystification spun by the academic social
sciences and political commentary.
The second role is “the task of the public,” which is much more limited.
It is not for the public, Lippmann observes, to “pass judgment on the
intrinsic merits” of an issue or to offer analysis or solutions, but
merely, on occasion, to place “its force at the disposal” of one or
another group of “responsible men.” The public “does not reason,
investigate, invent, persuade, bargain, or settle.” Rather, “the public
acts only by aligning itself as the partisan of someone in a position to
act executively,” once he has given the matter at hand sober and
disinterested thought. It is for this reason that “the public must be
put in its place.” The bewildered herd, trampling and roaring, “has its
function”: to be “the interested spectators of action,” not
participants. Participation is the duty of “the responsible man.”
These ideas, described by Lippmann’s editors as a progressive “political
philosophy for liberal democracy,” have an unmistakeable resemblance to
the Leninist concept of a vanguard party that leads the masses to a
better life that they cannot conceive or construct on their own. In
fact, the transition from one position to the other, from Leninist
enthusiasm to “celebration of America,” has proven quite an easy one
over the years. This is not surprising, since the doctrines are similar
at their root. The critical difference lies in an assessment of the
prospects for power: through exploitation of mass popular struggle, or
service to the current masters.
There is, clearly enough, an unspoken assumption behind the proposals of
Lippmann and others: the specialized class are offered the opportunity
to manage public affairs by virtue of their subordination to those with
real power — in our societies, dominant business interests — a crucial
fact that is ignored in the self-praise of the elect.
Lippmann’s thinking on these matters dates from shortly after World War
I, when the liberal intellectual community was much impressed with its
success in serving as “the faithful and helpful interpreters of what
seems to be one of the greatest enterprises ever undertaken by an
American president” (New Republic). The enterprise was Woodrow Wilson’s
interpretation of his electoral mandate for “peace without victory” as
the occasion for pursuing victory without peace, with the assistance of
the liberal intellectuals, who later praised themselves for having
“impose[d] their will upon a reluctant or indifferent majority,” with
the aid of propaganda fabrications about Hun atrocities and other such
devices. They were serving, often unwittingly, as instruments of the
British Ministry of Information, which secretly defined its task as “to
direct the thought of most of the world.”
Fifteen years later, the influential political scientist Harold Lasswell
explained in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences that when elites
lack the requisite force to compel obedience, social managers must turn
to “a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda.” He
added the conventional justification: we must recognize the “ignorance
and stupidity [of] …the masses” and not succumb to “democratic
dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests.” They
are not, and we must control them, for their own good. The same
principle guides the business community. Others have developed similar
ideas, and put them into practice in the ideological institutions: the
schools, the universities, the popular media, the elite journals, and so
on. A challenge to these ideas arouses trepidation, sometimes fury, as
when students of the 1960s, instead of simply bowing to authority, began
to ask too many questions and to explore beyond the bounds established
for them. The pretense of manning the ramparts against the onslaught of
the barbarians, now a popular pose, is scarcely more than comical fraud.
The doctrines of Lippmann, Lasswell, and others are entirely natural in
any society in which power is narrowly concentrated but formal
mechanisms exist by which ordinary people may, in theory, play some role
in shaping their own affairs — a threat that plainly must be barred.
The techniques of manufacture of consent are most finely honed in the
United States, a more advanced business-run society than its allies and
one that is in important ways more free than elsewhere, so that the
ignorant and stupid masses are more dangerous. But the same concerns
arise in Europe, as in the past, heightened by the fact that the
European varieties of state capitalism have not yet progressed as far as
the United States in eliminating labor unions and other impediments to
rule by men (and occasionally women) of best quality, thus restricting
politics to factions of the business party. The basic problem,
recognized throughout, is that as the state loses the capacity to
control the population by force, privileged sectors must find other
methods to ensure that the rascal multitude is removed from the public
arena. And the insignificant nations must be subjected to the same
practices as the insignificant people. Liberal doves hold that others
should be free and independent, but not free to choose in ways that we
regard as unwise or contrary to our interests, a close counterpart to
the prevailing conception of democracy at home as a form of population
control.
A properly functioning system of indoctrination has a variety of tasks,
some rather delicate. One of its targets is the stupid and ignorant
masses. They must be kept that way, diverted with emotionally potent
oversimplifications, marginalized, and isolated. Ideally, each person
should be alone in front of the TV screen watching sports, soap operas,
or comedies, deprived of organizational structures that permit
individuals lacking resources to discover what they think and believe in
interaction with others, to formulate their own concerns and programs,
and to act to realize them. They can then be permitted, even encouraged,
to ratify the decisions of their betters in periodic elections. The
rascal multitude are the proper targets of the mass media and a public
education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills,
including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.
For submissiveness to become a reliable trait, it must be entrenched in
every realm. The public are to be observers, not participants, consumers
of ideology as well as products. Eduardo Galeano writes that “the
majority must resign itself to the consumption of fantasy. Illusions of
wealth are sold to the poor, illusions of freedom to the oppressed,
dreams of victory to the defeated and of power to the weak.” Nothing
less will do.
The problem of indoctrination is a bit different for those expected to
take part in serious decision-making and control: the business, state,
and cultural managers, and articulate sectors generally. They must
internalize the values of the system and share the necessary illusions
that permit it to function in the interests of concentrated power and
privilege or at least be cynical enough to pretend that they do, an art
that not many can master. But they must also have a certain grasp of the
realities of the world, or they will be unable to perform their tasks
effectively. The elite media and educational systems must steer a course
through these dilemmas, not an easy task, one plagued by internal
contradictions. It is intriguing to see how it is faced, but that is
beyond the scope of these remarks.
For the home front, a variety of techniques of manufacture of consent
are required, geared to the intended audience and its ranking on the
scale of significance. For those at the lowest rank, and for the
insignificant peoples abroad, another device is available, what a
leading turn-of-the-century American sociologist, Franklin Henry
Giddings, called “consent without consent”: “if in later years, [the
colonized] see and admit that the disputed relation was for the highest
interest, it may be reasonably held that authority has been imposed with
the consent of the governed,” as when a parent disciplines an
uncomprehending child. Giddings was referring to the “misguided
creatures” that we were reluctantly slaughtering in the Philippines, for
their own good. But the lesson holds more generally.
As noted, the Bolshevik overtones are apparent throughout. The systems
have crucial differences, but also striking similarities. Lippmann’s
“specialized class” and Bernays’ “intelligent minority,” which are to
manage the public and their affairs according to liberal democratic
theory, correspond to the Leninist vanguard of revolutionary
intellectuals. The “manufacture of consent” advocated by Lippmann,
Bernays, Niebuhr, Lasswell and others is the Agitprop of their Leninist
counterparts. Following a script outlined by Bakunin over a century ago,
the secular priesthood in both of the major systems of hierarchy and
coercion regard the masses as stupid and incompetent, a bewildered herd
who must be driven to a better world — one that we, the intelligent
minority, will construct for them, either taking state power ourselves
in the Leninist model, or serving the owners and managers of the state
capitalist systems if it is impossible to exploit popular revolution to
capture the commanding heights.
Much as Bakunin had predicted long before, the Leninist “Red
bureaucracy” moved at once to dismantle organs of popular control,
particularly, any institutional structures that might provide working
people with some influence over their affairs as producers or citizens.
Not surprisingly, the immediate destruction of the incipient socialist
tendencies that arose during the ferment of popular struggle in 1917 has
been depicted by the world’s two great propaganda systems as a victory
for socialism. For the Bolsheviks, the goal of the farce was to extract
what advantage they could from the moral prestige of socialism; for the
West, the purpose was to defame socialism and entrench the system of
ownership and management control over all aspects of economic,
political, and social life. The collapse of the Leninist system cannot
properly be called a victory for socialism, any more than the collapse
of Hitler and Mussolini could be described in these terms; but as in
those earlier cases, it does eliminate a barrier to the realization of
the libertarian socialist ideals of the popular movements that were
crushed in Russia in 1917, Germany shortly after, Spain in 1936, and
elsewhere, often with the Leninist vanguard leading the way in taming
the rascal multitude with their libertarian socialist and radical
democratic aspirations.
Hume posed his paradox for both despotic and more free societies. The
latter case is by far the more important. As the social world becomes
more free and diverse, the task of inducing submission becomes more
complex and the problem of unraveling the mechanisms of indoctrination,
more challenging. But intellectual interest aside, the case of free
societies has greater significance for us, because here we are talking
about ourselves and can act upon what we learn. It is for just this
reason that the dominant culture will always seek to externalize human
concerns, directing them to the inadequacies and abuses of others. When
U.S. plans go awry in some corner of the Third World, we devote our
attention to the defects and special problems of these cultures and
their social disorders — not our own. Fame, fortune, and respect await
those who reveal the crimes of official enemies: those who undertake the
vastly more important task of raising a mirror to their own societies
can expect quite different treatment. George Orwell is famous for Animal
Farm and 1984, which focus on the official enemy. Had he addressed the
more interesting and significant question of thought control in
relatively free and democratic societies, it would not have been
appreciated, and instead of wide acclaim, he would have faced silent
dismissal or obloquy. Let us nevertheless turn to the more important and
unacceptable questions.
Keeping to governments that are more free and popular, why do the
governed submit when force is on their side? First, we have to look at a
prior question: to what extent is force on the side of the governed?
Here some care is necessary. Societies are considered free and
democratic insofar as the power of the state to coerce is limited. The
United States is unusual in this respect: Perhaps more than anywhere
else in the world, the citizen is free from state coercion, at least,
the citizen who is relatively privileged and of the right color, a
substantial part of the population.
But it is a mere truism that the state represents only one segment of
the nexus of power. Control over investment, production, commerce,
finance, conditions of work, and other crucial aspects of social policy
lies in private hands. Unwillingness to adapt to this structure of
authority and domination carries costs, ranging from state force to the
costs of privation and struggle; even an individual of independent mind
can hardly fail to compare these to the benefits, however meager, that
accrue to submission. Meaningful choices are thus narrowly limited.
Similar factors limit the range of ideas and opinion in obvious ways.
Articulate expression is shaped by the same private powers that control
the economy. It is largely dominated by major corporations that sell
audiences to advertisers and naturally reflect the interests of the
owners and their market. The ability to articulate and communicate one’s
views, concerns, and interests — or even to discover them — is thus
narrowly constrained as well.
Denial of these truisms about effective power is at the heart of the
structure of necessary illusion. Thus, a media critic, reviewing a book
on the press in the New York Times, refers without argument to the
“traditional Jeffersonian role” of the press “as counterbalance to
government power.” The phrase encapsulates three crucial assumptions,
one historical, one descriptive, one ideological. The historical claim
is that Jefferson was a committed advocate of freedom of the press,
which is false. The second is that the press in fact functions as a
counterbalance to government rather than as a faithful servant,
presented here as doctrine, thus evading any need to face the massive
array of detailed documentation that refutes this dogma. The ideological
principle is that Jeffersonian libertarianism (considered abstractly,
apart from its realization in practice) would demand that the press be a
counterbalance to government power. That is incorrect. The libertarian
conception is that the press should be independent, hence a
counterbalance to centralized power of any form. In Jefferson’s day, the
powers that loomed large were the state, the church, and feudal
structures. Shortly after, new forms of centralized power emerged in the
world of corporate capitalism. A Jeffersonian would hold, then, that the
press should be a counterbalance to state or corporate power, and
critically to the state-corporate nexus. But to raise this point carries
us into forbidden ground.
Apart from the general constraints on choice and articulate opinion
inherent in the concentration of private power, it also set narrow
limits on the actions of government. The United States has again been
unusual in this respect among the industrial democracies, though
convergence toward the U.S. pattern is evident elsewhere. The United
States is near the limit in its safeguards for freedom from state
coercion, and, also in the poverty of its political life. There is
essentially one political party, the business party, with two factions.
Shifting coalitions of investors account for a large part of political
history. Unions, or other popular organizations that might offer a way
for the general public to play some role in influencing programs and
policy choices, scarcely function apart from the narrowest realm. The
ideological system is bounded by the consensus of the privileged.
Elections are largely a ritual form. In congressional elections,
virtually all incumbents are returned to office, a reflection of the
vacuity of the political system and the choices it offers. There is
scarcely a pretense that substantive issues are at stake in the
presidential campaigns. Articulated programs are hardly more than a
device to garner votes, and candidates adjust their messages to their
audiences as public relations tacticians advise. Political commentators
ponder such questions as whether Reagan will remember his lines, or
whether Mondale looks too gloomy, or whether Dukakis can duck the slime
flung at him by George Bush’s speech writers. In the 1984 elections, the
two political factions virtually exchanged traditional policies, the
Republicans presenting themselves as the party of Keynesian growth and
state intervention in the economy, the Democrats as the advocates of
fiscal conservatism; few even noticed. Half the population does not
bother to push the buttons, and those who take the trouble often
consciously vote against their own interest.
The public is granted an opportunity to ratify decisions made elsewhere,
in accord with the prescriptions of Lippmann and other democratic
theorists. It may select among personalities put forth in a game of
symbolic politics that only the most naive take very seriously. When
they do, they are mocked by sophisticates. Criticism of President Bush’s
call for “revenue enhancement” after having won the election by the firm
and eloquent promise not to raise taxes is a “political cheap shot,”
Harvard political scientist and media specialist Marty Linsky comments
under the heading “Campaign pledges — made to be broken.” When Bush won
the election by leading the public in the “read my lips — no new taxes”
chant, he was merely expressing his “world view,” making “a statement of
his hopes.” Those who thought he was promising no new taxes do not
understand that “elections and governing are different ball games,
played with different objectives and rules.” “The purpose of elections
is to win,” Linsky correctly observes, expressing the cynicism of the
sophisticated; and “the purpose of governing is to do the best for the
country,” he adds, parroting the necessary illusions that respectability
demands.
Even when issues arise in the political system, the concentration of
effective power limits the threat. The question is largely academic in
the United States because of the subordination of the political and
ideological system to business interests, but in democracies to the
south, where conflicting ideas and approaches reach the political arena,
the situation is different. As is again familiar, government policies
that private power finds unwelcome will lead to capital flight,
disinvestment, and social decline until business confidence is restored
with the abandonment of the threat to privilege; these facts of life
exert a decisive influence on the political system (with military force
in reserve if matters get out of hand, supported or applied by the North
American enforcer). To put the basic point crassly, unless the rich and
powerful are satisfied, everyone will suffer, because they control the
basic social levers, determining what will be produced and consumed, and
what crumbs will filter down to their subjects. For the homeless in the
streets, then, the primary objective is to ensure that the rich live
happily in their mansions. This crucial factor, along with simple
control over resources, severely limits the force on the side of the
governed and diminishes Hume’s paradox in a well-functioning capitalist
democracy in which the general public is scattered and isolated.
Understanding of these basic conditions — tacit or explicit — has long
served as a guide for policy. Once popular organizations are dispersed
or crushed and decision-making power is firmly in the hands of owners
and managers, democratic forms are quite acceptable, even preferable as
a device of legitimation of elite rule in a business-run “democracy.”
The pattern was followed by U.S. planners in reconstructing the
industrial societies after World War II, and is standard in the Third
World, though assuring stability of the desired kind is far more
difficult there, except by state terror. Once a functioning social order
is firmly established, an individual who must find a (relatively
isolated) place within it in order to survive will tend to think its
thoughts, adopt its assumptions about the inevitability of certain forms
of authority, and in general, adapt to its ends. The costs of an
alternative path or a challenge to power are high, the resources are
lacking, and the prospects limited. These factors operate in slave and
feudal societies — where their efficacy has duly impressed
counterinsurgency theorists. In free societies, they manifest themselves
in other ways. If their power to shape behavior begins to erode, other
means must be sought to tame the rascal multitude.
When force is on the side of the masters, they may rely on relatively
crude means of manufacture of consent and need not overly concern
themselves with the minds of the herd. Nevertheless, even a violent
terror state faces Hume’s problem. The modalities of state terrorism
that the United States has devised for its clients have commonly
included at least a gesture towards “winning hearts and minds,” though
experts warn against undue sentimentality on this score, arguing that
“all the dilemmas are practical and as neutral in an ethical sense as
the laws of physics.” Nazi Germany shared these concerns, as Albert
Speer discusses in his autobiography, and the same is true of Stalinist
Russia. Discussing this case, Alexander Gerschenkron observes that
“Whatever the strength of the army and the ubiquitousness of the secret
police which such a government may have at its disposal, it would be
naive to believe that those instruments of physical oppression can
suffice. Such a government can maintain itself in power only if it
succeeds in making people believe that it performs an important social
function which could not be discharged in its absence. Industrialization
provided such a function for the Soviet government…, [which] did what no
government relying on the consent of the governed could have done… But,
paradoxical as it may sound, these policies at the same time have
secured some broad acquiescence on the part of the people. If all the
forces of the population can be kept engaged in the processes of
industrialization and if this industrialization can be justified by the
promise of happiness and abundance for future generations and — much
more importantly — by the menace of military aggression from beyond the
borders, the dictatorial government will find its power broadly
unchallenged.”
The thesis gains support from the rapid collapse of the Soviet system
when its incapacity to move to a more advanced stage of industrial and
technological development became evident.
It is important to be aware of the profound commitment of Western
opinion to the repression of freedom and democracy, by violence if
necessary. To understand our own cultural world, we must recognize that
advocacy of terror is clear, explicit, and principled, across the
political spectrum. It is superfluous to invoke the thoughts of Jeane
Kirkpatrick, George Will, and the like. But little changes as we move to
“the establishment left,” to borrow the term used by Foreign Policy
editor Charles William Maynes in an ode to the American crusade “to
spread the cause of democracy.”
Consider political commentator Michael Kinsley, who represents “the
left” in mainstream commentary and television debate. When the State
Department publicly confirmed U.S. support for terrorist attacks on
agricultural cooperatives in Nicaragua, Kinsley wrote that we should not
be too quick to condemn this official policy. Such international
terrorist operations doubtless cause “vast civilian suffering,” he
conceded. But if they succeed “to undermine morale and confidence in the
government,” then they may be “perfectly legitimate.” The policy is
“sensible” if “cost-benefit analysis” shows that “the amount of blood
and misery that will be poured in” yields “democracy,” in the
conventional sense already discussed.
As a spokesperson for the establishment left, Kinsley insists that
terror must meet the pragmatic criterion; violence should not be
employed for its own sake, merely because we find it amusing. This more
humane conception would readily be accepted by Saddam Hussein, Abu
Nidal, and the Hizbollah kidnappers, who, presumably, also consider
terror pointless unless it is of value for their ends. These facts help
us situate enlightened Western opinion on the international spectrum.
Such reasoned discussion of the justification for terror is not at all
unusual, which is why it elicits no reaction in respectable circles just
as there is no word of comment among its left-liberal contributors and
readers when the New Republic, long considered the beacon of American
liberalism, advocates military aid to “Latin-style fascists…regardless
of how many are murdered” because “there are higher American priorities
than Salvadoran human rights.”
Appreciation of the “salutary efficacy” of terror, to borrow John Quincy
Adams’s phrase, has been a standard feature of enlightened Western
thought. It provides the basic framework for the propaganda campaign
concerning international terrorism in the 1980s. Naturally, terrorism
directed against us and our friends is bitterly denounced as a reversion
to barbarism. But far more extreme terrorism that we and our agents
conduct is considered constructive, or at worst insignificant, if it
meets the pragmatic criterion. Even the vast campaign of international
terrorism launched against Cuba by the Kennedy administration, far
exceeding anything attributed to official enemies, does not exist in
respected academic discourse or the mainstream media. In his standard
and much respected scholarly study of international terrorism, Walter
Laqueur depicts Cuba as a sponsor of the crime with innuendos but
scarcely a pretense of evidence, while the campaign of international
terrorism against Cuba merits literally not a word; in fact, Cuba is
classed among those societies “free from terror.”
The guiding principle is clear and straightforward: their terror is
terror, and the flimsiest evidence suffices to denounce it and to exact
retribution upon civilian bystanders who happen to be in the way; our
terror, even if far more extreme, is merely statecraft, and therefore
does not enter into the discussion of the plague of the modern age. The
practice is understandable on the principles already discussed.
Huge massacres are treated by much the same criteria: theirs are crimes,
ours statecraft or understandable error. In a study of U.S. power and
ideology a decade ago, Edward Herman and I reviewed numerous examples of
two kinds of atrocities, “benign and constructive bloodbaths” that are
acceptable or even advantageous to dominant interests, and “nefarious
blood-baths” perpetrated by official enemies. The reaction follows the
same pattern as the treatment of terrorism. The former are ignored,
denied, or sometimes even welcomed; the latter elicit great outrage and
often large-scale deceit and fabrication, if the available evidence is
felt to be inadequate for doctrinal requirements.
Such devices as mass starvation have always been considered entirely
legitimate, if they meet the pragmatic criterion. As director of the
humanitarian program providing food to starving Europeans after World
War II, Herbert Hoover advised President Wilson that he was “maintaining
a thin line of food” to guarantee the rule of anti-Bolshevik elements.
In response to rumors of “a serious outbreak on May Day” in Austria,
Hoover issued a public warning that any such action would jeopardize the
city’s sparse food supply. Food was withheld from Hungary under the
Communist Bela Kun government, with a promise that it would be supplied
if he were removed in favor of a government acceptable to the U.S. The
economic blockade, along with Rumanian military pressure, forced Kun to
relinquish power and flee to Moscow. Backed by French and British
forces, the Rumanian military joined with Hungarian
counter-revolutionaries to administer a dose of White terror and install
a right-wing dictatorship under Admiral Horthy, who collaborated with
Hitler in the next stage of slaying the Bolshevik beast. The threat of
starvation was also used to buy the critical Italian elections of 1948
and to help impose the rule of U.S. clients in Nicaragua in l990, among
other noteworthy examples.
A review of the debate over Central America during the past decade
reveals the decisive role of the pragmatic criterion. Guatemala was
never an issue, because mass slaughter and repression appeared to be
effective. Early on, the Church was something of a problem, but, as
Kenneth Freed comments in the Los Angeles Times, when “14 priests and
hundreds of church workers were killed in a military campaign to destroy
church support for social gains such as higher wages and an end to the
exploitation of Indians,” the church was intimidated and “virtually fell
silent.” “The physical intimidation ceased,” the pragmatic criterion
having been satisfied. Terror increased again as the U.S. nurtured what
it likes to call “democracy.” “The victims,” a European diplomat
observes, “are almost always people whose views or activities are aimed
at helping others to free themselves of restraints placed by those who
hold political or economic power,” such as “a doctor who tries to
improve the health of babies” and is therefore “seen as attacking the
established order.” The security forces of the “fledgling democracy,”
and the death squads associated with them, appeared to have the
situation reasonably well in hand, so there was no reason for undue
concern in the United States, and there has been virtually none.
Throughout this grim decade of savagery and oppression, liberal
humanists have presented themselves as critical of the terror states
maintained by U.S. violence in Central America. But that is only a
facade, as we see from the demand, virtually unanimous in respectable
circles, that Nicaragua must be restored to “the Central American mode”
of the death squad regimes, and that the U.S. and its murderous clients
must impose the “regional standards” of El Salvador and Guatemala on the
errant Sandinistas.
Returning to Hume’s principles of government, it is clear that they must
be refined. True, when force is lacking and the standard penalties do
not suffice, it is necessary to resort to the manufacture of consent.
The populations of the Western democracies — or at least, those in a
position to defend themselves — are off limits. Others are legitimate
objects of repression, and in the Third World, large-scale terror is
appropriate, though the liberal conscience adds the qualification that
it must be efficacious. The statesman, as distinct from the ideological
fanatic, will understand that the means of violence should be employed
in a measured and considered way, just sufficient to achieve the desired
ends.
The pragmatic criterion dictates that violence is in order only when the
rascal multitude cannot be controlled in other ways. Often, there are
other ways. Another RAND corporation counterinsurgency specialist was
impressed by “the relative docility of poorer peasants and the firm
authority of landlords in the more ‘feudal’ areas… [where] the landlord
can exercise considerable influence over his tenant’s behavior and
readily discourage conduct inconsistent with his own interests.” It is
only when the docility is shaken, perhaps by meddlesome priests, that
firmer measures are required.
One option short of outright violence is legal repression. In Costa
Rica, the United States was willing to tolerate social democracy. The
primary reason for the benign neglect was that labor was suppressed and
the rights of investors offered every protection. The founder of Costa
Rican democracy, Jose Figueres, was an avid partisan of U.S.
corporations and the CIA, and was regarded by the State Department as
“the best advertising agency that the United Fruit Company could find in
Latin America.” But the leading figure of Central American democracy
fell out of favor in the 1980s, and had to be censored completely out of
the Free Press, because of his critical attitude towards the U.S. war
against Nicaragua and Washington’s moves to restore Costa Rica as well
to the preferred “Central American mode.” Even the effusive editorial
and lengthy obituary in the New York Times lauding this “fighter for
democracy” when he died in June 1990 were careful to avoid these
inconvenient deviations.
In earlier years, when he was better behaved, Figueres recognized that
the Costa Rican Communist Party, particularly strong among plantation
workers, was posing an unacceptable challenge. He therefore arrested its
leaders, declared the party illegal, and repressed its members. The
policy was maintained through the 1960s, while efforts to establish any
working class party were banned by the state authorities. Figueres
explained these actions with candor: it was “a sign of weakness. I admit
it, when one is relatively weak before the force of the enemy, it is
necessary to have the valor to recognise it.” These moves were accepted
in the West as consistent with the liberal concept of democracy, and
indeed, were virtually a precondition for U.S. toleration of “the Costa
Rican exception.”
Sometimes, however, legal repression is not enough; the popular enemy is
too powerful. The alarm bells are sure to ring if they threaten the
control of the political system by the business-landowner elite and
military elements properly respectful of U.S. interests. Signs of such
deviation call for stronger measures, as in Central America through the
past decade. The broader framework was sketched by Father Ignacio
Martin-Baro, one of the Jesuit priests assassinated in November 1989 and
a noted Salvadoran social psychologist, in a talk he delivered in
California on “The Psychological Consequences of Political Terrorism,” a
few months before he was murdered. He stressed several relevant points.
First, the most significant form of terrorism, by a large measure, is
state terrorism, that is, “terrorizing the whole population through
systematic actions carried out by the forces of the state.” Second, such
terrorism is an essential part of a “government-imposed socio-political
project” designed for the needs of the privileged. To implement it, the
whole population must be “terrorized by an internalized fear.” Third,
the sociopolitical project and the state terrorism that helps implement
it are not specific to El Salvador, but are common features of the Third
World domains of the United States. The reasons are deeply rooted in
Western culture, institutions, and policy planning, and fully in accord
with the values of enlightened opinion. But terror is constrained by the
pragmatic criterion. Thus, Martin-Baro observes, the “massive campaign
of political terrorism” in El Salvador declined when “there was less
need for extraordinary events, because people were so terrorized,
paralyzed.”
In a paper on mass media and public opinion in El Salvador which he was
to deliver at an International Congress in December 1989, the month
after he was assassinated, Martin-Baro wrote that the U.S.
counterinsurgency project “emphasized merely the formal dimensions of
democracy,” and that the mass media must be understood as a mechanism of
“psychological warfare.” The small independent journals in El Salvador,
mainstream and pro-business but still too undisciplined for the rulers,
had been taken care of by the security forces a decade earlier in the
usual efficacious manner — kidnapping, assassination, and physical
destruction, events considered here too insignificant even to report. As
for public opinion, Martin-Baro’s unread paper reports a study showing
that among workers, the lower-middle class, and the poor, less than 20
percent feel free to express their opinions in public, a figure that
rose to 40 percent for the rich — another tribute to the salutary
efficacy of terror, and another result that “all Americans can be proud
of,” to borrow George Schultz’s words of self-praise for our
achievements in El Salvador.
When Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned after the Fascist takeover of Italy,
the government summed up its case by saying: “We must stop this brain
from functioning for twenty years.” Our current favorites leave less to
chance: the brains must be stopped from functioning forever, and we
agree that their thoughts about such matters as state terrorism had best
not be heard.
The results of U.S. military training are evident in abundance in the
documentation by human rights groups and the Salvadoran Church. They are
graphically described by Rev. Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working
in El Salvador, in the Jesuit journal America. He reports the story of a
peasant woman, who returned home one day to find her mother, sister, and
three children sitting around a table, the decapitated head of each
person placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands
arranged on top “as if each body was stroking its own head.” The
assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it hard to keep
the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they nailed the hands onto
it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood was tastefully displayed in
the center of the table.
Rev. Santiago writes that macabre scenes of the kind he recounts are
designed by the armed forces for the purpose of intimidation. “People
are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador — they are
decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the
landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury
Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths.
Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs
are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not
enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the
flesh falls from their bones while parents are forced to watch.” “The
aesthetics of terror in El Salvador is religious.” The intention is to
ensure that the individual is totally subordinated to the interests of
the Fatherland, which is why the death squads are sometimes called the
“Army of National Salvation” by the governing ARENA party, whose members
(including President Cristiani) take a blood oath to the
“leader-for-life,” Roberto d’Aubuisson.
It has been a constant lament of U.S. government officials that the
Latin American countries are insufficiently repressive, too open, too
committed to civil liberties, unwilling to impose sufficient constraints
on travel and dissemination of information, and in general reluctant to
adhere to U.S. social and political standards, thus tolerating
conditions in which dissidence can flourish and can reach a popular
audience.
At home, even tiny groups may be subject to severe repression if their
potential outreach is perceived to be too great. During the campaign
waged by the national political police against The Black Panthers —
including assassination, instigation of ghetto riots, and a variety of
other means — the FBI estimated the “hard core members” of the targeted
organization at only 800, but added ominously that “a recent poll
indicates that approximately 25 per cent of the black population has a
great respect for the [Black Panther Party], including 43 per cent of
blacks under 21 years of age.” The repressive agencies of the state
proceeded with a campaign of violence and disruption to ensure that the
Panthers did not succeed in organizing as a substantial social or
political force — with great success, as the organization was decimated
and the remnants proceeded to self-destruct. FBI operations in the same
years targeting the entire New Left were motivated by similar concerns.
The same internal intelligence document warns that “the movement of
rebellious youth known as the ‘New Left,’ involving and influencing a
substantial number of college students, is having a serious impact on
contemporary society with a potential for serious domestic strife.” The
New Left has “revolutionary aims” and an “identification with
Marxism-Leninism.” It has attempted “to infiltrate and radicalize
labor,” and after failing “to subvert and control the mass media,” has
established “a large network of underground publications which serve the
dual purpose of an internal communication network and an external
propaganda organ.” It thus poses a threat to “the civilian sector of our
society,” which must be contained by the state security apparatus.
We can learn a good deal by attention to the range of choices. Keeping
just to Latin America, consider the efforts to eliminate the Allende
regime in Chile. There were two parallel operations. Track II, the hard
line, aimed at a military coup. This was concealed from Ambassador
Edward Korry, a Kennedy liberal, whose task was to implement Track I,
the soft line; in Korry’s words, to “do all within our power to condemn
Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty, a policy
designed for a long time to come to accelerate the hard features of a
Communist society in Chile.” The soft line was an extension of the
long-term CIA effort to control Chilean democracy. One indication of its
level is that in the 1964 election, the CIA spent twice as much per
Chilean voter to block Allende as the total spent per voter by both
parties in the U.S. elections of the same year. Similarly in the case of
Cuba, the Eisenhower administration planned a direct attack while
Vice-President Nixon, keeping to the soft line in a secret discussion of
June 1960, expressed his concern that according to a CIA briefing,
“Cuba’s economic situation had not deteriorated significantly since the
overthrow of Batista,” then urging specific measures to place “greater
economic pressure on Cuba.”
To take another informative case, in 1949 the CIA identified “two areas
of instability” in Latin America: Bolivia and Guatemala. The Eisenhower
administration pursued the hard line to overthrow capitalist democracy
in Guatemala but chose the soft line with regard to a Bolivian
revolution that had the support of the Communist Party and radical tin
miners, had led to expropriation, and had even moved towards “criminal
agitation of the Indians of the farms and mines” and a pro-peace
conference, a right-wing Archbishop warned. The White House concluded
that the best plan was to support the least radical elements, expecting
that U.S. pressures, including domination of the tin market, would serve
to control unwanted developments. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
urged that this would be the best way to contain the “Communist
infection in South America.” Following standard policy guidelines, the
U.S. took control over the Bolivian military, equipping it with modern
armaments and sending hundreds of officers to the “school of coups” in
Panama and elsewhere. Bolivia was soon subject to U.S. influence and
control. By 1953, the National Security Council noted improvement in
“the climate for private investment,” including “an agreement permitting
a private American firm to exploit two petroleum areas.”
A military coup took place in 1964. A 1980 coup was carried out with the
assistance of Klaus Barbie, who had been sent to Bolivia when he could
no longer be protected in France, where he had been working under U.S.
control to repress the anti-fascist resistance, as he had done under the
Nazis. According to a recent UNICEF study, one out of three Bolivian
infants dies in the first year of life, so that Bolivia has the slowest
rate of population growth in Latin America along with the highest birth
rate. The FAO estimates that the average Bolivian consumes 78 percent of
daily minimum calorie and protein requirements and that more than half
of Bolivian children suffer from malnutrition. Of the economically
active population, 25 percent are unemployed and another 40 percent work
in the “informal sector” (e.g., smuggling and drugs). The situation in
Guatemala we have already reviewed.
Several points merit attention. First, the consequences of the hard line
in Guatemala and the soft line in Bolivia were similar. Second, both
policy decisions were successful in their major aim: containing the
“Communist virus,” the threat of “ultranationalism.” Third, both
policies are evidently regarded as quite proper, as we can see in the
case of Bolivia by the complete lack of interest in what has happened
since (apart from possible costs to the U.S. through the drug racket);
and with regard to Guatemala, by the successful intervention under
Kennedy to block a democratic election, the direct U.S. participation in
murderous counterinsurgency campaigns under Lyndon Johnson, the
continuing supply of arms to Guatemala through the late 1970s (contrary
to illusory claims) and the reliance on our Israeli mercenary state to
fill any gaps when congressional restrictions finally took effect, the
enthusiastic U.S. support for atrocities that go well beyond even the
astonishing Guatemalan norm in the 1980s, and the applause for the
“fledgling democracy” that the ruling military now tolerates as a means
to extort money from Congress. We may say that these are “messy
episodes” and “blundering” (which in fact succeeded in its major aims),
but nothing more (Stephen Kinzer). Fourth, the soft line and the hard
line were adopted by the same people, at the same time, revealing that
the issues are tactical, involving no departure from shared principle.
All of this provides insight into the nature of policy, and the
political culture in which it is formed.
Hume’s paradox of government arises only if we suppose that a crucial
element of essential human nature is what Bakunin called “an instinct
for freedom.” It is the failure to act upon this instinct that Hume
found surprising. The same failure inspired Rousseau’s classic lament
that people are born free but are everywhere in chains, seduced by the
illusions of the civil society that is created by the rich to guarantee
their plunder. Some may adopt this assumption as one of the “natural
beliefs” that guide their conduct and their thought. There have been
efforts to ground the instinct for freedom in a substantive theory of
human nature. They are not without interest, but they surely come
nowhere near establishing the case. Like other tenets of common sense,
this belief remains a regulative principle that we adopt, or reject, on
faith. Which choice we make can have large-scale effects for ourselves
and others.
Those who adopt the common sense principle that freedom is our natural
right and essential need will agree with Bertrand Russell that anarchism
is “the ultimate ideal to which society should approximate.” Structures
of hierarchy and domination are fundamentally illegitimate. They can be
defended only on grounds of contingent need, an argument that rarely
stands up to analysis. As Russell went on to observe 70 years ago, “the
old bonds of authority” have little intrinsic merit. Reasons are needed
for people to abandon their rights, “and the reasons offered are
counterfeit reasons, convincing only to those who have a selfish
interest in being convinced.” “The condition of revolt,” he went on,
“exists in women towards men, in oppressed nations towards their
oppressors, and above all in labour towards capital. It is a state full
of danger, as all past history shows, yet also full of hope.”
Russell traced the habit of submission in part to coercive educational
practices. His views are reminiscent of 17^(th) and 18^(th) century
thinkers who held that the mind is not to be filled with knowledge “from
without, like a vessel,” but “to be kindled and awaked.” “The growth of
knowledge [resembles] the growth of Fruit; however external causes may
in some degree cooperate, it is the internal vigour, and virtue of the
tree, that must ripen the juices to their just maturity.” Similar
conceptions underlie Enlightenment thought on political and intellectual
freedom, and on alienated labor, which turns the worker into an
instrument for other ends instead of a human being fulfilling inner
needs — a fundamental principle of classical liberal thought, though
long forgotten, because of its revolutionary implications. These ideas
and values retain their power and their pertinence, though they are very
remote from realization, anywhere. As long as this is so, the
libertarian revolutions of the 18^(th) century remain far from
consummated, a vision for the future.
One might take this natural belief to be confirmed by the fact that
despite all efforts to contain them, the rabble continue to fight for
their fundamental human rights. And over time, some libertarian ideals
have been partially realized or have even become common coin. Many of
the outrageous ideas of the 17^(th) century radical democrats, for
example, seem tame enough today, though other early insights remain
beyond our current moral and intellectual reach.
The struggle for freedom of speech is an interesting case, and a crucial
one, since it lies at the heart of a whole array of freedoms and rights.
A central question of the modern era is when, if ever, the state may act
to interdict the content of communications. As noted earlier, even those
regarded as leading libertarians have adopted restrictive and qualified
views on this matter. One critical element is seditious libel, the idea
that the state can be criminally assaulted by speech, “the hallmark of
closed societies throughout the world,” legal historian Harry Kalven
observes. A society that tolerates laws against seditious libel is not
free, whatever its other virtues. In late 17^(th) century England, men
were castrated, disemboweled, quartered, and beheaded for the crime.
Through the 18^(th) century, there was a general consensus that
established authority could be maintained only by silencing subversive
discussion, and “any threat, whether real or imagined, to the good
reputation of the government” must be barred by force (Leonard Levy).
“Private men are not judges of their superiors… [for] This wou’d
confound all government,” one editor wrote. Truth was no defense: true
charges are even more criminal than false ones, because they tend even
more to bring authority into disrepute.
Treatment of dissident opinion, incidentally, follows a similar model in
our more libertarian era. False and ridiculous charges are no real
problem: it is the unconscionable critics who reveal unwanted truths
from whom society must be protected.
The doctrine of seditious libel was also upheld in the American
colonies. The intolerance of dissent during the revolutionary period is
notorious. The leading American libertarian, Thomas Jefferson, agreed
that punishment was proper for “a traitor in thought, but not in deed,”
and authorized internment of political suspects. He and the other
Founders agreed that “traitorous or disrespectful words” against the
authority of the national state or any of its component states was
criminal. “During the Revolution,” Leonard Levy observes, “Jefferson,
like Washington, the Adamses, and Paine, believed that there could be no
toleration for serious differences of political opinion on the issue of
independence, no acceptable alternative to complete submission to the
patriot cause. Everywhere there was unlimited liberty to praise it, none
to criticize it.” At the outset of the Revolution, the Continental
Congress urged the states to enact legislation to prevent the people
from being “deceived and drawn into erroneous opinion.” It was not until
the Jeffersonians were themselves subjected to repressive measures in
the late 1790s that they developed a body of more libertarian thought
for self-protection — reversing course, however, when they gained power
themselves.
Until World War I, there was only a slender basis for freedom of speech
in the United States, and it was not until 1964 that the law of
seditious libel was struck down by the Supreme Court. In 1969, the Court
finally protected speech apart from “incitement to imminent lawless
action.” Two centuries after the revolution, the Court at last adopted
the position that had been advocated in 1776 by Jeremy Bentham, who
argued that a free government must permit “malcontents” to “communicate
their sentiments, concert their plans, and practice every mode of
opposition short of actual revolt, before the executive power can be
legally justified in disturbing them.” The 1969 Supreme Court decision
formulated a libertarian standard which, I believe, is unique in the
world. In Canada, for example, people are still imprisoned for
promulgating “false news,” recognized as a crime in 1275 to protect the
King.
In Europe, the situation is still more primitive. France is a striking
case, because of the dramatic contrast between the self-congratulatory
rhetoric and repressive practice so common as to pass unnoticed. England
has only limited protection for freedom of speech, and even tolerates
such a disgrace as a law of blasphemy. The reaction to the Salman
Rushdie affair, most dramatically on the part of self-styled
“conservatives,” was particularly noteworthy. Rushdie was charged with
seditious libel and blasphemy in the courts, but the High Court ruled
that the law of blasphemy extended only to Christianity, not Islam, and
that only verbal attack “against Her Majesty or Her Majesty’s Government
or some other institution of the state” counts as seditious libel. Thus
the Court upheld a fundamental doctrine of the Ayatollah Khomeini,
Stalin, Goebbels, and other opponents of freedom, while recognizing that
English law protects only domestic power from criticism. Doubtless many
would agree with Conor Cruise O’Brien, who, when Minister for Posts and
Telegraphs in Ireland, amended the Broadcasting Authority Act to permit
the Authority to refuse to broadcast any matter that, in the judgment of
the minister, “would tend to undermine the authority of the state.”
We should also bear in mind that the right to freedom of speech in the
United States was not established by the First Amendment to the
Constitution, but only through dedicated efforts over a long period by
the labor movement, the civil rights and anti-war movements of the
1960s, and other popular forces. James Madison pointed out that a
“parchment barrier” will never suffice to prevent tyranny. Rights are
not established by words, but won and sustained by struggle.
It is also worth recalling that victories for freedom of speech are
often won in defense of the most depraved and horrendous views. The 1969
Supreme Court decision was in defense of the Ku Klux Klan from
prosecution after a meeting with hooded figures, guns, and a burning
cross, calling for “burning the nigger” and “sending the Jews back to
Israel.” With regard to freedom of expression there are basically two
positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it
in favor of Stalinist/Fascist standards.
Whether the instinct for freedom is real or not, we do not know. If it
is, history teaches that it can be dulled, but has yet to be killed. The
courage and dedication of people struggling for freedom, their
willingness to confront extreme state terror and violence, is often
remarkable. There has been a slow growth of consciousness over many
years and goals have been achieved that were considered utopian or
scarcely contemplated in earlier eras. An inveterate optimist can point
to this record and express the hope that with a new decade, and soon a
new century, humanity may be able to overcome some of its social
maladies; others might draw a different lesson from recent history. It
is hard to see rational grounds for affirming one or the other
perspective. As in the case of many of the natural beliefs that guide
our lives, we can do no better than to choose according to our intuition
and hopes.
The consequences of such a choice are not obscure. By denying the
instinct for freedom, we will only prove that humans are a lethal
mutation, an evolutionary dead end: by nurturing it, if it is real, we
may find ways to deal with dreadful human tragedies and problems that
are awesome in scale.