Excerpts from "Now There's Only Vision"

 

"If people become organized enough to act together, there is no particular limit to what you can achieve."

Noam Chomsky

 

To illustrate the very essence of capitalism, Noam Chomsky goes back to 1831 in Jamaica. It was the time when a Great Slave Revolt took place. It lasted for ten days. The ground for it was built by frequent smaller rebellions starting from 1760. The consciousness of Jamaican rebels was attuned to the abolitionist movement in London. The slaves uprising put a strain on the British, who arrived at the conclusion to end slavery in their colonies. In 1833 Slavery Abolition Act was established by the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It arose from the belief that slavery was not profitable any more, as it was no loger possible to keep a tight hand on Jamaican slaves.
The most interesting thing about abolition was how the leaders of the United Kingdom changed the slave economy to “free“ economy. Chomsky recalls that they wanted to abolish slavery, but only on the surface. The British decided they will make people think that slavery is gone, without removing the system behind it. The words to name the system changed, but the slave economy was never meant to be dismantled. Parliamentary debates in England in that period showed that the reigning were consciously talking about the concept of “destroying“ slavery but only for show. To interchange the name “slavery“ with the other suggesting change, while perserving the philosophy of slave system. “They were saying: look, we’ve got to keep it the way it is, the masters have to become the owners, the slaves have to become the happy workers — somehow we’ve got to work it all out.“ So the question the Parliament had to answer was how to force people to work for their previous masters, when people will be “freed“ from slavery. Two decisions were made. One was to use state force to make it impossible for the ex-slaves to leave the land and survive on their own. Second idea was to design brand new wants for the “freed“ people so they will start to desire unnecessery, expensive trinkets possible to be bought only by working for wages offered by the British plantators. “That pattern has been repeated over and over again through the whole entire history of capitalism.“

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Chomsky explains that throughout the history of mankind, power was always protected by making it “look mysterious and secret, above the oridinary person – otherwise why should anybody accept it?“

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Some numbers and statistics may seem to be high, but the “miracle“ means “great for investors and murderous for the population.“

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What educated people are not learned is the independence of thinking. Instead, obedience and conformity are the main lessons repeated in schools. The system of American education is formed “to provide an ideological service.“ The possibility to deliver ideology is, according to Chomsky, also the reason for why the schools are supported. Mass education was part of the process of preparing submissive and degraded pupils to become future obedient labor force by making them “stupid and passive.“ Education was a way of preventing people from taking control. Schools inhibited democratic tendencies of the nation.

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“In the academic departments: nobody there is going to tell you what’s really going on in the world.“ Analogical situation takes place in the press, which is divided to press directed for masses and for elites.

 Intellectuals are a class used by the system as a tool of indoctrination. They are called intellectuals, but Chomsky sees them as no more than “a kind of secular priesthood.“ Their mission is to maintain the mainstream doctrinal ideology in rotation. Intellectuals are paid for “imposing thoughts, and framing ideas for people in power, and telling everyone what they should believe.“ Chomsky claims that political science departments in the United States do not allow radical scholars to speak their mind about the contemporary times. One of the top political science professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Noam Chomsky worked, was told by the chairman of his department: “You can write all of your radical stuff up to the New Deal, but if you try and do it for the the post-New Deal period, you’re never going to get tenure in this department.“

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The reaction of business community to granting some rights to the U.S. workers in the mid-1930s was hysterical. Elites decided to start a counterattack, which could flourish after the II World War, in the early 1950s. Numerous campaigns involving billions of dollars were designed to win “an everlasting battle for the minds of men,“ as one of the leading corporate managers put it. The campaigns comprised of business-made movies or education programs, implemented even in churches and at universities. Some of the movies engaged the biggest names in the industry, such as Marlon Brando. One of the typical examples is “On the Waterfront“ (1954) directed by Elia Kazan, starring Brando, playing young bold man, who stands against union leader, throws him into the ocean and wins in the struggle for his rights. In such movies, unions were depicted as the source of all evil, comprised of the outcasts whose only purpose was to destroy lives of decent people. “Tens of million of dollars were put into making films like that, all of them with the same message. The message is, Unions are the enemy of the working men.“ Despite ideological deformations, “On the Waterfront“ seem to remain unexposed up to this day. The movie on IMDb, one of the most popular source of information about movies in English, was rated as high as 8,3 points on 10 possible (November 2015). To show the power of propaganda, it is enough to note that pro- union movies of much greater artistic value, were depreciated at that time. For instance, “Salt of the Earth“ (1954) by Herbert Biberman was “showed only in a few small theaters around.“62 The movie figured on the Hollywood blacklist, which was XX- century practice of denying employment to all the U.S. movie creators, whose political views or associations were not consistent with the ones required. Bieberman was one of numerous entertainment proffessionals on the list. Blacklist was neither explicit nor verifiable, but it contributed to destroying the careers of enlisted artists. In such a way, propaganda, including Hollywood, has done something hard to imagine. It managed to show the most effective source of defense against exploitation by the prosperous few as the most dangerous enemy of the restless many.

 

According to Chomsky, “about one-third of the material in schools was produced by the business communities.“ The propaganda was used as a tool to hide the connection between government and corporate sector. Business, which is responsible for decision making, was meant to stay invisible.

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“There have been fifty years of propaganda which suppresses the fact that the government reflects powerful, private interests, and they’re the real source of power.“ The propaganda’s task was to direct people’s attention to the government and to ensure people that government is responsible for the situation in the country. The mechanism was to stimulate anti-government feelings, which strenghtened the idea that government is empowered to manage the United States. People “have been taught for fifty years now by intense propaganda, everything from the entertainment media to school books, that all there is around is the government. If there’s anything going wrong, it’s the government’s fault. The government is somehow something that’s independent of external powers. So if your life is falling apart, blame the government,“ not the corporate sector.

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To elicit fanaticism, American intellectuals together with British propaganda ministry fabricated sophisticated atrocities, such as “Belgian babies with their arms torn off, all sorts of awful things that you still read in history books.“66 They had to frighten the public and take away their sense of safety to make them agree to enter the war. Keeping the society in fear has the same effect as diverting people. The government creates sham monsters so that people can concentrate on defending themselves against them. At first, the monster was Russians, then international terrorists and Arabs. Indicating the major monster allows to destroy the smaller ones. People will not pay attention to the actual millitary offensives if they are informed about the huge danger, which is really able to move imagination of the masses.

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“You frighten the population, terrorize them, intimidate them. (...) Then you have a magnificent victory over Grenada, Panama or some other defenseless third-world army. (...) That gives relief. We were saved at the last minute.“

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“Remember, any state, any state, has a primary enemy: its own population. If politics begins to break out inside your own country and the population starts getting active, all kinds of horrible things can happen— so you have to keep the population quiescent and obedient and passive. And international conflict is one of the best ways of doing it: if there’s a big enemy around, people will abandon their rights, because you’ve got to survive. So the arms race is functional in that respect—it creates global tension and a mood of fear.“

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Propaganda language is created, often consciously, to prevent people from thinking and understanding. The author of “Chronicles of Dissent“ states that terms such as “the free world“ or “free enterprise“, which were designed in the 1940s to replace dangerous usage of the word “capitalism“, are another examples of nothing more than rough propaganda.

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Chomsky describes how deceitfully the language can be used in service of imperialist ambitions of Washington. The United States is never attacking other countries. America is defending against the others. The attack on South Vietnam was always called  “defense“ against “internal aggression“. Chomsky writes that he thoroughly studied thirty years of publications in the major American media and he has “never“ found “one phrase even suggesting that we were not defending South Vietnam,“ apart from few mentions in marginal newspapers. Such rhetorics figures also in the scholary literature, for instance in major historical books written by John Lewis Gaddis, where giving the proper names to the facts from Indochina war is “unstatable.“ One study proved that the American society had not been able to estimate the number of victims of Vietnam war. Americans answer was about 100,000. The offical figure is about 2,000,000.

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“What would we think about German political culture of, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? (...) 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.“

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It is a way of whitewashing negative undertakings and presenting them in positive light. Language in the service of propaganda helps in covering inconvenient facts with a foggy courtain of newspeak.

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To explain reality by the means of lies, to condition people in a way behavior psychological laws can, are the tasks of this language. Regardless of the fact that the “commissars“ of indoctrination are often unaware of taking part in the process, the language of propaganda is designed to fulfil one task: to stupify people, prevent understanding and undermine independent thought. “You look at any other term of political discourse, and you’re going to find the same thing: the terms of political discourse are designed so as to prevent thought.“

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Chomsky states that indoctrination is hidden implicitly in every aspect of culture. TV programs, music and film, newspapers and books show people “the correct“ set of values, simply by continually exposing and concentrating on them. At the same time, there is a whole spectrum of “incorrect“ set of values or behaviors, which are marked as pejorative by critique, distorting their picture or not being mentioned by the mainstream culture at all. Such is the case of “anarchism“ in the predominant circulation. The term is identified with chaos, violence and aggression. In such form, it can easily elicit social disapproval. Stereotypes can become a useful tool of propaganda.

“The media function in significant ways as a doctrinal system.“ According to Chomsky, the media are a part of an interconnected net comprised of the government, corporations, and the universities. Information presented by the media are often presented after consultation with university scholars or corporate experts, foundations or institutes. “They will give you the preferred version of what is happening. These outside institutions are very similar to the media.“ The media sell audiences to the most wealthy markets, that is other corporations.

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Information are presented in a selective way. This method is sometimes called “brainwashing under freedom.“

“So what the media do, in effect, is to take the set of assumptions which express the basic ideas of the propaganda system (...) and then present a range of debate within that framework – so the debate only enhances the strength of the assumptions, ingraining them in people’s minds as the entire possible spectrum of opinion that there is.“

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One of the methods of the consent industry was distracting the audiences from important events, which have an impact on people’s lives, and making them focus on a red herring. “The more you can put into sitcoms and advertising, and the less you put into giving them news, the better it is.“

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The society “basically just have to be distracted.“ The public’s attention needs to be directed to anything but serious political or social issues. Hollywood, entertainment, sports, sex scandals, soap operas and the majority of American newspapers all serve the same purpose: to divert mass audience. People “should be watching the Superbowl or sitcoms or violent movies.“

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In Lippmann’s theory the population is divided on the specialized class, which can have an active, decision-making role in running general affairs, and the rest of the society, honoured with a title: the by-standing “herd“. To become a part of the executive group, one has to start serving the interests of private power. The process of joining the membership of the specialized class involves accepting and internalizing the values of business class. To support this division, people need to believe that rationality is a skill available only to few. The majority are unable to be rational, the only thing they dispose of are emotions and impulses.

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Consent is manufactured for the needs of advertisers, who often belong to the corporate class. Depending of who the advertisers are, the appropriate optics is chosen by the editors. Noam Chomsky presents this phenomenon on the example of the majority and minority, the conflict between Israel, which has a military and financial support of the United States, and Palestine. Because the Jews are in the majority of the advertisers, and there are no Arab advertisers, who sponsor newspapers‘ editions, the conflict will be shown to Jews‘ advantage, despite the possible abuse of facts, biasing or creating prejudice and damaging effects for the minority. The example shows that it is not the facts which matter the most, but the money of the wealthier group, which often enable to show oppressors as victims. The wealthy (Israel) not only have the priority over the poor (Arabs). Their money allows them to have a voice, to speak whatever they want regardless of what is true and what is not. Money of the priviledged allow to silence the other side, to deprive them of the right to speak, to show the version of the history from the subjective perspective of the rich.

“I once asked another editor I know at the Boston Globe why their coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is so awful—and it is. He just laughed and said, How many Arab advertisers do you think we have? That was the end of that conversation.“

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Conventional beliefs spread by mainstream media are “self-verifying.“ The more one- sided perspective is showed in the media, the more trustworthy the perspective becomes. Conventional beliefs do not require verification and do not need to be supported by additional proofs. The media presume that nobody doubts in mainstream agenda. At the same time, unorthodox opinions depend upon higher level of evidence.

“Like, if you report an atrocity carried out by guerrillas, all you need is one hearsay witness. You talk about torture carried out by an American military officer, you’re going to need videotapes. And the same is true on every issue.”

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The major media in the U.S. do not allow any dissident voices to speak their mind. Noam Chomsky, as a dissident, have not had an access to the major American media over the years. He states that he is excluded from the public debate only in the United States and the old Soviet Empire.

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Elites do not want to comply with democratic standards. “An instructive body of thought have been developed to justify elite resistance to democracy.“ The history shows that elites have been often successful in protecting their interests at the expense of ideas standing behind democracy and the commonwealth of other people. Democracy is just an utopian conception, which has no equivalent in reality in the United States. There have always been minorities who wanted to supervise democracy and bend its rules to their exclusive needs. To maintain their influence, elites have had to think of their ways to change democracy into an empty word without making it too obvious for the society. They have been calling the system democratic, but in fact the theory have not been implemented into practice.

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Ideological taint of terms in the United States is a means of maintaining political and economic influences. It is also a way of gaining approval of the American society for controvelsial actions and destroying ambiguity of political events. It is a way of whitewashing negative undertakings and presenting them in positive light. Language in the service of propaganda helps in covering inconvenient facts with a foggy courtain of newspeak. To explain reality by the means of lies, to condition people in a way behavior psychological laws can, are the tasks of this language. Regardless of the fact that the “commissars“ of indoctrination are often unaware of taking part in the process, the language of propaganda is designed to fulfil one task: to stupify people, prevent understanding and undermine independent thought.

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The people in power who have an impact on molding the system try to keep the society disempowered. The population can observe, but should not participate. People are let to be “spectators,“ but they are banned from intervening. The public must not manage their own affairs. The society is allowed to have it’s own mind, but only if it expresses consent.

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"Imagine yourself working in some public relations office where your job is to help corporations make sure that the annoying public does not get in the way of policy-making. Here’s a brilliant thought (...): let’s make elections completely symbolic activities. The population can keep voting, we’ll give them all the business, they’ll have electoral campaigns, all the hoopla, two candidates, eight candidates—but the people they’re voting for will then just be expected to read off a teleprompter and they won’t be expected to know anything except what somebody tells them, and maybe not even that. (...) Well, if you can get people to vote for something like that, you’ve basically done it—you’ve removed them from decision- making."

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Non-informing the society at all about important matters takes place under the cover of safety. It is an old way of depriving people of freedom. The institution of royalty has the same role as non-informing people of decisive issues. It’s existence had to be justified somehow, so the idea that only chosen people are able to understand difficult mechanisms of reigning the country was fabricated. Chomsky explains that throughout the history of mankind, power was always protected by making it “look mysterious and secret, above the oridinary person – otherwise why should anybody accept it?“

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Manufactured opinions are a way of force, but not physical, because they force people to think or behave appropriately to corporate class‘ expectations. 

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Noam Chomsky thinks that the doctrine of power is captured in first Chief Justice of Supreme Court, John Jay: “The people who own the country ought to govern it.“ This record protects the rights given to private corporations. John Dewey, twentieth century liberal and opponent of Walter Lippmann, enumerates that big business governs the country through control of “the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communications, the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.“ Corporations control national and foreign economy and doctrinal systems. It‘s maxime is: “Everything for ourselves, nothing for other people.“

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In the United States, “to an unusual extent, the sociopolitical order was consciously designed.“ Constitution legalized social injustice. It differenciated people between better and worse, and agreed to treat better men in favorable way.

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Noam Chomsky believes that the theories constructed to justify private tyrannies are based on concepts that form the base for fascism. 

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