THE DEMOCRACY ILLUSION:

Andrew Marr Of 'The Independent' Interviews Noam Chomsky
source Znet

Where Egos Dare! The Somnambulist
Herman
East Timor
Indonesia
Clichés
Vietnam
The Editor
What is politics
Gulf War
COINTELPRO
Henry Adams
Deceiving the deceivers

Z Magazine

Most of us believe we live in a basically free society. This is true to such an extent that the preceding sentence will strike many people as simply bizarre: what possible motive could anyone have for stating such a thing? We might also like to mention that it is quite nice to breathe air! Everyone agrees it is nice to breathe air but this is hardly a promising topic for discussion. The evidence for our freedom is there for all to see: there are no thought police, we are not dragged from our beds in the middle of the night. The vast array of newspapers and periodicals available to us are proof that we have access to a wide spectrum of ideas. And from amongst this vast array, we can find barely one word to suggest that we are not basically free - agreement seems unanimous: the idea that we might not be free is a non issue. Indeed, as we all know, our 'free press' is all about the defense, not the attainment, of freedom - a vigil maintained by those notoriously dogged news-hounds sniffing out all facts, all instances of deception and sleaze. If anything, the press "watchdog" sometimes (Vietnam, Watergate, the Gulf War) seems to go too far, threatening to throw an anarchistic spanner in the works of Liberty.

Saatchi

Advertising supremo Maurice Saatchi summed up what many people take for granted when he wrote recently that we live in a "democracy of information.. now nothing is hidden. Now we know everything." Reassuringly Saatchi asserted that we are free even to know "the precise ingredients of a packet of cornflakes.11 Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT says that though this seems for all the world like rational common sense, it is actually an illusion that dissolves to nothing under close scrutiny. We are free, but only to know certain facts, only to think certain ideas - power ensures that costly facts and costly ideas are removed to the margins of social discourse and beyond. Nobody, least of all Chomsky, expects anyone to take this simply on trust - we need to examine the arguments, weigh the evidence. This is not as straight-forward as it might seem: Chomsky's assertion that costly facts and ideas are ignored by the mainstream has, itself, been ignored by the mainstream such that most of us are unaware of it. Two reasons spring to mind: either Chomsky is talking nonsense, or he is correct.

Mainstream

Actually, Chomsky is not totally ignored, he makes it onto mainstream television a couple of times a decade. On the rare occasions when an appearance is granted, we are able to make a judgment between Chomsky as purveyor of absurdities and Chomsky as victim of his own theory of thought control. Such an opportunity came our way recently when Chomsky was interviewed by Andrew Marr of The independent. This encounter was particularly significant as Chomsky was here facing a mainstream journalist convinced that we have a more or less free press. Chomsky was very much preaching to the unconverted and so we had a chance to see how his radical critique held up against what to most people is simple common sense.

Where Egos Dare! The Somnambulist

The arena was BBC2's 'The Big Ideal, on February 14, 1996 at 11:15, one of a series of thirty-minute interviews.It had all the makings of a classic brawl: Chomsky, the grizzled street-fighting linguist, who learned his trade in and around New York' s anarchist book stores and newsstands. Marr - The Independent's much-vaunted "Columnist of the year" and chief political correspondent - every inch 'the kid', right down to his baby-face complexion and unruly carrot top. The fight was generally clean, Chomsky leading with hard facts and countering with bitter irony, "If you believed something different you wouldn't be sitting where you are", and willing to rough it up in the clinches: "If you're interested in facts I'll tell you what they are and I'll even give you sources... Sorry ... Sorry ... May I continue? ... 11 etc.

Marr

Marr's preparation for the contest appears to have been relaxed to the point of somnolent. Here, after all, was a respected journalist squaring up to Chomsky, a notoriously tenacious intellectual opponent (one prominent British intellectual warned a colleague against getting into a dispute with Chomsky, describing him as "a terrible and relentless opponent". A New York Times Book Reviewer wrote that "Reading Chomsky.... one repeatedly has the impression of attending to one of the more powerful thinkers who ever lived"). What was amazing, then, was the fact that, while knowing enough about Chomsky's arguments to debate them, Marr did not know enough to be aware of Chomsky's countless refutations of exactly the objections he planned to raise. Either Marr had not read Chomsky's political works, or he had read them half-asleep, and, as one reviewer wrote "Not to have read [Chomskyl ... is to court genuine ignorance" - publicly so on TV.

Herman

The interview centered around Edward Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model of media control. The introduction was indicative of much that was to come. An ominous clip of Big Brother from a film of Orwell's 1984 set the ball rolling. "The idea that Orwell's warning" about thought control and propaganda "is still relevant may seem bizarre," Marr's voice-over intoned, thus immediately revealing his flawed understanding. Moments later Marr asked his audience to consider whether it were possible that the media is "designed to limit how you imagine the world?" Chomsky's whole point - as is well-known to all who have troubled to read his books - is that thought control in democratic societies does not happen through totalitarian, Big Brother-style mechanisms but is the result of a filtering process empowered by economic and political power operating in a free market system - there is no design, no conspiracy. Through a complex and subtle process, certain ideas, certain ways of looking at the world, are promoted and come to find their way into our heads. This is a sort of negative thought control - we are controlled as much by what is not there, as by what is. It is not that we are prevented from choosing business-unfriendly facts and ideas, we just never encounter them and so assume they do not exist. Children are not forced to choose from a wide range of careers within the one corporate system, they are not deliberately brainwashed into believing that this is freedom. They are convinced that they are making a free choice because society functions in such a way that they are unaware of alternatives. Moreover they are unaware that they are unaware, so that the options confronting them seem to be "just how life is". As Chomsky has pointed out many times, this is way beyond Orwell who wrote about crude, Soviet-style propaganda and whose understanding of the possibilities of non-conspiratorial, democratic thought control was limited in the extreme.

East Timor

Continuing his introduction, Marr proceeded to cite the Indonesian genocide in East Timor as an example of Chomsky's propaganda system in action, claiming that Timor was ignored "because we were selling arms to the aggressors." Unfortunately for Marr, this interpretation is itself a prime example of the propaganda system in action. In reality, Chomsky (and others like Herman, Pilger, Curtis, Zinn) argues that the slaughter in Timor has gone unreported for two decades for far more deep-seated reasons. Firstly, Indonesian dictator Suharto is a Western client originally installed by the United States, which supplied arms, intelligence and other assistance during the Indonesian massacre of some 600,000 "communists" under Suharto beginning in 1965. In return, Suharto has consistently maintained a "good investment climate" for foreign companies operating in Indonesia, meaning: low-wage labor, forcible suppression of unions, extra-judicial killings, torture, death squads, minimal environmental protection and the general militaristic control of the economy to suit the elite at home and abroad. East Timor had gained independence from Portugal in 1975 and was looking to re-main independent. This, however, Chomsky argues, was not then, and is not now, permitted in the post-war world. To seek to remove Third World resources out from under Western control was to be immediately branded part of the communist menace - the standard cover for an attack designed to reassert Western control and to prevent any "demonstration effect" of successful nationalist development on other Third World victims of Western 'development'.

Indonesia

There were other reasons: Indonesia was a major Western ally that it was deemed important to 'keep sweet' following the partial failure of the war in Vietnam (an attempt at independent nationalist development which, while not completely destroyed, was sufficiently wrecked to suppress the threat of any demonstration effect). other motivations include vast reserves of oil and gas in the Timor Gap (Timorese wealth which is currently being divided up between Indonesia and Australia) and, yes, the United States made a tidy profit from supplying 90% of the arms used for the "annihilation of a simple mountain people" in East Timor.The silence over the genocide in Timor was not just about pressure from the arms lobby (a rather absurd conspiracy theory). It was part of a much deeper silence surrounding the Western program to install and support Third World dictators to guarantee cheap access to local resources and so maintain the flow of profits from South to North. Democracy is not an option for the Third World (it is not that they have a love of Hitlerian tyrants decked out in Western-style uniforms), if by democracy we mean local control of resources for the benefit of the majority of local people. Journalists who try to elucidate the controlling Western role in this "political economy of brutality", or who even attempt to draw attention to specific cases involving Western clients (Indonesia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Israel, Nicaragua, etc.) can forget a career in the mainstream. This framework of understanding - exactly contradicting the usual media line of the West as benevolent supporter of global democracy, peace and human rights - is not discussible, not even thinkable, in the mainstream: hence Marr's necessary, albeit unconscious, misrepresentation of the facts.

Clichés

Marr began his discussion with Chomsky by suggesting that we live in "an age of relative media diversity, in the age of the Internet". Relative to what? one might ask. In 'Manufacturing Consent (The Political Economy of the Mass Media)' - the book in which Herman and Chomsky first present the propaganda model Herman and Chomsky point out that there was once far greater diversity in the media than is currently the case. A prime example is that which arose out of the vibrant working class culture of the thirties and forties and allowed genuine representation of working class interests. In fact there has been a dramatic narrowing of control by corporate interests over recent years. At time of writing around twenty-three corporations own and control 50% of the US media business (newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, book publishers). As for UK media diversity, historian Mark Curtis reports that, "the basic facts about the motivations and effects of British and Western foreign policy cannot be expressed in mainstream media and academic circles". Globally, John Pilger reports that 90 percent of the world's agency news is controlled by four Western news agencies. The move away from genuine media diversity (as opposed to differences in name and appearance) is partly the result of changes in technology which make the launching of, say, a newspaper ever more expensive and thus increasingly the preserve of the wealthy. It is also the result of an increase in dependence on advertising such that business-friendly media generate more advertising revenue, are able to invest more in a glossier product, promotions, lower copy price, etc., so tilting media evolution towards unnatural selection favoring corporate interests. As Chomsky pointed out in the interview, the Daily Herald, a socialist newspaper, failed in Britain despite having twice the readership of The Times, the Financial Times and The Guardian put together. The problem was that, despite having 8.1 percent of national daily circulation, the Herald had only 3.5 percent of net advertising revenue. The Herald, for obvious reasons, was not sufficiently business-friendly and so was pushed out of the market by media that were.

Vietnam

But take the Vietnam war, Marr continued - here was a case of huge opposition to the war which was fully visible in the press. What would we have heard without a propaganda system? Pretty much what we heard about the Soviet assault on Afghanistan, Chomsky replied: namely, that the United States was not defending but attacking Vietnam in support of a corrupt and murderous South Vietnamese client dictatorship by use of massive bombing of civilians and outright invasion. "What I don't get," Marr continued, is that all of this "suggests - I'm a journalist people like me, are self-censoring". Chomsky argued that this is not so: journalists are a product of a state- and corporate-run filter system operative throughout politics, culture and education. Children are trained to defer to experts, to repeat what they are told by learned authorities, and to suppress their own doubts and independent conclusions. As children and adults rise up the educational and career ladder they are selected for obedience and subservience (such as the willingness, for example, to put aside reservations and do as they are told for the sake of career advancement). Winners are intelligent and free-thinking, but only within certain parameters. These parameters will generally not be recognized by those who 'succeed' but will seem to be "all there is"; a conclusion bolstered by the perennial human tendency to believe what it is convenient to believe. As Chomsky has said elsewhere:

The Editor

"In order to progress you have to say certain things; what the copy editor wants, what the top editor is giving back to you. You can try saying it and not believing it, but that's not going to work, people just aren't that dishonest, you can't live with that, it's a very rare person who can do that. So you start saying it and pretty soon you're believing it because you're saying it, and pretty soon you're inside the system. Furthermore, there are plenty of rewards if you stay inside. For people who play the game by the rules in a rich society like this, there are ample rewards. You're well off, you're privileged, you're rich, you have prestige, you have a share of power if you want." At this point the interview became almost psychotherapeutic, with Marr being confronted with his own conformity, his own passage through the filter system to "columnist of the year", where one of his jobs is to take seriously, and to persuade us to take seriously, the idea that the choice between Tories and 'New' Labor makes for a meaningful democracy. Marr's job is to present the parliamentary storms within the propaganda tea cup as world-shaking. The reality, as John Dewey said, is that "so long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance".

What is politics

What we call politics is really a shadow play conducted by corporate power. Parliament is the buffer between the popular desire for democracy and the reality of corporate rule. People, after all, are unlikely to resist that rule so long as politicians (and journalists) succeed in persuading us that it is not there; that in fact it is we who are in control. The mass media plays a crucial role in supporting the democracy illusion by pretending that the arguments presented to us - together with the parties we are allowed to choose from - constitute a free and fair spectrum of choices, which are our choices, and not what is left after state and corporate power have filtered out choices that threaten to interfere. One of the choices deemed unfit for public consumption is the idea that the mass media is a propaganda system. But, Marr beseeched, there are "a lot of disputatious, stroppy, difficult people in journalism, and I have to say I think I know some of them." Chomsky replied that he also knows some of "the better" journalists and they know it's all a sham and play the system "like a violin", looking for occasional windows of opportunity to get things through. Chomsky accepted that Marr was sincere in his beliefs but then "If you believed something different you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."

Gulf War

"Politics Funnier Than Words Can Express ..." Marr referred Chomsky to the Gulf War, pointing out that he was "very, very well aware of the anti-gulf war dissidents - the 'no blood for oil' campaign." "That's not the dissident position", Chomsky interrupted. "No blood for oil, isn't the dissidents... !I Marr replied incredulously. As with East Timor, Marr had again unwittingly demonstrated how the propaganda system operates: here, by presenting a false version of the actual dissident view which is ignored, goes unreported and is thus unknown. Chomsky pointed out that the real dissident argument was that a peaceful, negotiated settlement to the Gulf crisis was possible even from August 1991 and increasingly so as allied forces threatened to wreck havoc on Iraq. It is not simply that sanctions might eventually have worked, they might already have done their job. The real problem was that, far from seeking a peaceful resolution, the Bush administration was fearful that Iraq might pull out before an attack could be launched. Thus all peace initiatives were powerfully suppressed and simply did not appear in the mainstream US media - this was true even for high-ranking US officials like Richard Helm who tried to get media coverage. The US State Department, itself, Chomsky argued, considered the problem negotiable but the press would not cover it.

Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark has gone so far as to suggest that the US was actively seeking confrontation, and had lured Iraq to invade Kuwait by encouraging the latter to overproduce oil. This caused oil prices to fall, so seriously damaging the Iraqi economy seeking to recover from the eight-year long war with Iran - much to Saddam's ire. Simultaneously, the US assured Saddam that it had "no position on Arab-Arab conflicts." Clark suggests that, as an independent nationalist obstacle to Western control of oil, Iraq was targeted for destruction. Hence the insistence of "no negotiations" - itself a breech of the United Nations Charter. Clark argues that: "It was not Iraq but powerful forces in the United States that wanted a new war in the Middle East: the Pentagon, to maintain its tremendous budget; the military-industrial complex, with its dependence on Middle East arms sales and domestic military contracts; the oil companies, which wanted more control over the price of crude oil and greater profits; and the Bush ad-ministration, which saw in the Soviet Union's disintegration its chance to establish a permanent military presence in the Middle east, securing the region and achieving vast geopolitical power into the next century through control of its oil resources." Having invaded Kuwait, Clark argues that Iraq was not at all intent on staying. He quotes a democratic staff member for intelligence oversight: "The Iraqis apparently believed that having invaded Kuwait, they would get everyone's attention, negotiate improvements to their economic situation, and pull out... [A] diplomatic solution satisfactory to the interests of the United States may well have been possible since the earliest days of the invasion." This is a sample of the real dissident position; not the "No blood for oil" argument. The media did inform us that many people objected to killing for oil but it never got near the idea that the war might have been part of a plan to devastate an obstacle to Western profits, or that peaceful withdrawal was a genuine possibility, and a genuine fear of our leaders.

COINTELPRO

Marr chose not to respond and moved on to Watergate, assumed to be the classic example of how the free press can humble the powers that be. After all, Marr said, "This brought down a president." Chomsky, however, argued that Watergate is a perfect example of just how servile the press is to power. Watergate was, he has said elsewhere, "small potatoes" compared to what the state secret police - the FBI - had long been doing to socialist, black and women's movements under the COINTELPRO program. "Sorry, you'll have to explain that," Marr chipped in. Exactly! Chomsky replied, he had to explain the meaning of COINTELPRO, whereas Marr assuredly knew all about Watergate - point made. What Marr did not know about was a vast campaign of political subversion that went all the way from bugging, theft and sabotage, to political assassination organized by the FBI under four administrations. By comparison, the Republican Watergate shenanigans were a trivial sideshow. The reason the latter became headline news was, as Chomsky explained, that one half of US political power started to mess with the other half, and that is not allowed - hence the fall of Nixon and widespread press coverage. Watergate showed, not that the US has a free press, but that powerful interests in the US are capable of defending themselves against attack. By contrast, when minority movements without power are attacked there is no way through the propaganda system and the facts go unreported. Thus, once again in a way completely contrary to the common understanding, Chomsky argued that: "There couldn't be a more dramatic example of the subordination of educated opinion to power here in England as well as in the United States." "It still seems to me," Marr proposed gamely, that "on a range of issues there is serious dissent," Gingrich, for example, has been "savagely lampooned". Again, Marr managed to miss the point. It is fine to lampoon Gingrich, just as it is fine to lampoon Major and Blair. The point is that this type of dissent is restricted within parameters so narrow that all serious dissent is excluded and so real power is unthreatened.

Henry Adams explained how it works in a letter to a friend: "We are here plunged in politics funnier than words can express. Very great issues are involved... But the amusing thing is that no one talks about real interests. By common consent they agree to let these alone. We are afraid to discuss them. Instead of this the press is engaged in a most amusing dispute whether Mr. Cleveland had an illegitimate child and did or did not live with more than one mistress.,  As discussed, it is the job of politicians to act as a buffer between populace and power, to distract us from real issues, lf rom real obstacles to democracy. If necessary, a politician like Nixon can be sacrificed and the myth promulgated that the one 'bad apple' has been purged from an essentially good 'barrel'. Politicians are representatives, not of the people to be sure, but of corporations. They are functionaries who have to abide by the basic rules or are out. But what about NAFTA? Marr countered, "We were well aware of the [counter-] arguments" presented by unions, environmentalists and so on. "That's flatly false," Chomsky responded. The two bickered for a few moments: "We were", "You weren't", "We were". Chomsky pointed out that the crucial dissident responses, the widespread and profound objections to NAFTA, were suppressed and replaced by "Mexico bashing" and the concern about losing jobs. The real issues: that the treaty was organized and signed in secret in a way that largely circumvented democratic procedures - whereby unions were supposed to be allowed to comment on the treaty, and so on - were ignored. Instead, a barrage of media publicity railed against union strong-arm tactics in pressuring politicians, while the massive pressure applied by corporate lobbyists went unnoticed. The corporate solidarity in favor of NAFTA was such that genuine discussion of the issues was nowhere to be found in the mainstream.

Henry Adams

But what about "sleaze?" Marr asked. Apparently many of the politicians he is acquainted with are "deeply irritated" indeed "furious" about media intrusions into their private lives, and we hear no end of tales about sexual misdemeanors and corruption. Sure, Chomsky said, but that's of marginal importance. Corporate power is in favor of "law and order" (on its terms) and is certainly opposed to corruption, which acts as a drain on profits and interferes with the control of society. In India fully one-third of the economy is "black", a fact that is not at all popular with transnational's. Also, as Henry Adams indicated, sex scandals, corruption and sleaze all serve the important function of keeping us stupid by diverting us from what really matters. While we are focusing on royal love lives, or what politicians like to wear in bed, we are assuredly not focusing on the real, systemic issues which should be central to everyone concerned with democracy: such as the fact that, quite regardless of the personalities and behavior of individual politicians, modern democracies are hopelessly compromised by the immense influence of large corporations, which have the power to manipulate governments and economies simply by threat of capital flight and other measures. In the age of GATT, IMF, the World Bank, and the global economy more generally, any government seeking to seriously interfere with corporate profits would very quickly find its economy pulled out from under its feet. Indicatively, the IMF recently agreed to lend up to $13 billion dollars to Yeltsin's regime, paid in installments, which may be canceled if the Russian government fails to deliver on agreed economic targets. The message for voters in the forthcoming presidential election is clear: do as we want, or the money dries up - as would surely be the case were the Communists to return to power and attempt to serve national rather than international interests. This is economic blackmail on a grand-scale, though the implications for democracy in Russia (and our respect for it) are not discussed in the mainstream here. 'New' labor can be seen as a response to the same basic pressure. As in Russia, a genuinely socialist government in Britain would have no chance of survival against corporate (including corporate media) pressure and so our real choice is limited to the left and right wing of the one Business Party. This is democracy - corporate-style. By way of a strangely inappropriate concluding question - one which supports Chom8ky's contention that "within the mainstream it is barely even possible to hear the arguments" - Marr asked Chomsky: "What would a press be like, do you think, without a propaganda model [sic)? What would we be reading in the papers that we don't read now?" Chomsky reminded Marr that he had just given dozens of examples - examples, moreover, that had been chosen by Marr. Chomsky could have chosen different ones which might have made his task easier. Finally, how much hope is there in the Internet? As Chomsky suggested, the struggle taking place for the independence of the Internet is nothing new. First of all it is essentially an elite operation (most of the people in the world have no access to a phone let alone a computer). More importantly, a similar battle already took place in the 1920s over radio which, initially, was viewed as a public resource. There were no limits on the number of stations, no reason why the airwaves should belong to anyone in particular. Nevertheless radio fell under corporate control and, today, with the exception of a few marginal voices, there is little dissent.

Deceiving the deceivers

Barring a toothy grin from Marr and a wry smile from Chomsky, the interview was over. It was a rare and illuminating event. Chomsky was interviewed by Peter Jay on TV in the 70s, and by Bill Moyers in the 180s, but never have we seen Chomsky discuss the propaganda model in such detail with a mainstream journalist. The public response to these appearances is interesting. The Moyers interview generated 1,000 letters from readers (more than the program had received for almost any other interview). When Chomsky appeared on TV Ontario in 1985, the phone-in number registered 31,321 calls - a station record. John Pilger - who regularly applies the propaganda model in his reporting - reports that when his Timor documentary "Death of a Nation" was shown on Channel Four, British Telecom registered 4,000 calls a minute to the number displayed at the end of the program. The public enthusiasm for this type of analysis is clear; the enthusiasm of the corporate media less so. With Marr's 'The Big Ideal we had a chance to see the ideas that have been dismissed by the mainstream as "the most absolute rubbish" (Tom Wolfe), as "that stuff to me looks like it's from Neptune" (Jeff Greenfield), pitted against one of the media's finest. The result was fascinating. We saw that journalists like Marr are intelligent, lucid and rational, but only within parameters that preclude a deeper understanding of what is really happening in the world. We saw how the illusion of media diversity is maintained by presenting superficial and trivialized versions of the true dissident position. Above all, perhaps, we saw how journalists are intellectual herd animals who instinctively seek safety among the tried but rarely tested clichés of the mainstream: Watergate proves we have an antiestablishment free press, media-coverage virtually ended the Vietnam war, and so on. Normally this tactic succeeds in eliciting eager nods of agreement, or a humble shrug of 'I suppose you're right'. When confronted by a Chomsky, however, the facade of great expertise and intellectuality that is the stock-in-trade of the journalist, and which is normally so intimidating to the average viewer/reader, is quickly demolished. Interestingly, the reaction of the viewer to the spectacle of this intellectual debagging is not surprise but relief: 'I was right all along, and I thought it was just me!' To listen to, and take seriously, mainstream journalists like Marr - who is undoubtedly an honest and sincere individual - is to be stifled and bemused by a necessarily superficial, misleading and confusing version of reality that cannot make sense because it cannot address the real issues. Marr is not a liar and he is not a crude propagandist, he is the unwitting result of a system that selects for the ability to talk intelligently and convincingly about anything and everything, so long as it is not genuinely costly to power. The crucial factor is that individuals be able to do this sincerely, and with the firm conviction that they are telling the uncompromised, freely-expressed truth. This, in the end, is the real genius of the modern system of thought control: it is very subtle, invisible and its greatest victims are often not the deceived but the deceivers themselves.    

See Transcript for interview only