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Representation As Reality

It is also necessary to completely falsify history. That’s another way to overcome these sickly inhibitions, to make it look as if when we attack and destroy somebody we’re ally protecting and defending ourselves against major aggressors and monsters and so on. There has been a huge effort since the Vietnam war to reconstruct the history of that. Too many people began to understand what was really going on. Including plenty of soldiers and a lot of young people who were involved with the peace movement and others. That was bad. It was necessary to rearrange those bad thoughts and to restore some form of sanity, namely, a recognition that whatever we do is noble and right. If we’re bombing South Vietnam, that’s because we’re defending South Vietnam against somebody, namely the South Vietnamese, since nobody else was there. It’s what the Kennedy intellectuals called defense against “internal aggression” in South Vietnam. That was the phrase used by Aldai Stevenson and others. It was necessary to make that the official and well understood picture. that’s worked pretty well. When you have total control over the media and the educational system and scholarship is conformist, you can get that across. One indication of it was revealed in a study done at the University of Massachusetts on the Gulf crisis- a study of beliefs and attitudes in television watching. One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam War? The average response on the part of the Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raises the question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture? They leave the question unanswered, but you can pursue it. What does it tell us about our culture? It tells us quiet a bit. It is necessary to overcome the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force and other democratic deviations. In this particular case it worked. This is true on every topic. Pick the topic you like: the Middle East, international terrorism, Central America, whatever it is- the picture of the world that’s presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies. It’s all been a marvelous success from the point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom, which is extremely interesting. It’s not like a totalitarian state, where it’s done by force. These achievements are under conditions of freedom. If we want to understand our own society, we’ll have to think about these facts. They are important facts, important for those who care about what kind of society they live in.

Dissident Culture

Despite all of this, the dissident culture survived. It’s grown quiet a lot since the 1960’s. In the 1960s the dissident culture first of all was extremely slow in developing. There was no protest against the Indochina war until years after the United States had started bombing South Vietnam. When it did grow it was a very narrow dissident movement, mostly students and young people. By the 1970s that had changed considerably. Major popular movements had developed: the environmental movement, the feminist movement, the anti-nuclear movement, and others. In the 1980s there was an even greater expansion to solidarity movements, which is something very new and important in the history of at least American, and maybe even world dissidence. These were movements that not only protested but actually involved themselves, often intimately, in the lives of suffering people elsewhere. They learned a great deal from it and had quite a civilizing effect on mainstream America. All of this has made a very large difference. Anyone who has been involved in this kind of activity for many years must e aware of this. I know myself that the kind of talks I give today in the most reactionary parts of the country- central Georgia, rural Kentucky, ect. - are talks of the kid that I couldn’t have given at the peak of the peace movement to the most active peace movement audience. Now you can give them anywhere. People may agree or not agree, but at least they understand what you’re talking about and there’s some sort of common ground that you can purse.

These are all signs of the civilizing effect, despite all the propaganda, despite all the efforts to control thought and manufacture consent. Nevertheless, people are acquiring an ability and willingness to think things through. Skepticism about power has grown, and attitudes have changed on many, many issues. It’s kind of slow, maybe even glacial, but perceptible and important. Whether it’s fast enough to make a significant difference in what happens in the world is another question. Just to take one familiar example of it: The famous gender gap. In the 1960s attitudes of men and women were approximately the same on such matters as the “martial values” and the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force. Nobody, neither men nor women, were suffering from those sickly inhibitions in the early 1960s. the responses were the same. Everybody thought the use of violence to suppress people out there was just right. Over the years it’s changed. The sickly inhibitions have increased all across the board. But meanwhile a gap has been growing, and by now it’s a very substantial gap. According to polls, it’s something like twenty-five percent. What has happened? What as happened is that there is some form of at least semi-organized popular movement that women are involved in- the feminist movement. Organization has its effects. It means that you discover that you’re not alone. You can reinforce your thoughts and learn more about what you think and believe. These are very informal movements, not like a membership organizations, just a mood that involves interactions among people. It has a very noticeable effect. that’s the danger of democracy: If organizations can develop, if people are no longer just glued to the tube, you may have all these funny thoughts arising in their heads, like sickly inhibitions against the use of military force. That has to be overcome, bit it hasn’t been overcome .