Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (24 page)

A Lithuania Hypothetical

M
AN
: Dr. Chomsky, I just want to ask a question on this topic: Daniel Ortega [Nicaraguan President, Sandinista Party] was in power for how long? a decade?

Yes.

M
AN
: And yet he lost the election
.

Why “And yet”?

M
AN
: Well, he had control of that country for ten years
.

What does it mean, “He had control of it”?

M
AN
: He controlled the press
.

He did not. In fact, Nicaragua is the only country I know of in history that allowed a major opposition press [
La Prensa
] to operate while it was being attacked—a press which was calling for the overthrow of the government by violence, which was identifying with the foreign-run mercenary army attacking the country, and which was funded, partly openly and partly covertly (though everybody knew), by the foreign power attacking the country [i.e. the U.S.]. That’s never happened before in history—the United States would never tolerate anything like that for one second. Furthermore, and quite apart from that, large parts of Nicaragua were flooded, and in fact dominated, by U.S. propaganda. Remember, there are large areas of Nicaragua where what people know is what they hear over the radio, and the United States ran major radio and television stations in Honduras and Costa Rica which dominated the information flow in large sectors of the Nicaraguan countryside.
  ⁹

In fact, the level of freedom of the press in Nicaragua in the last ten years just broke new libertarian standards: there’s never been anything even remotely comparable to it in history. Try to find a case.

M
AN
: But given ten years in power, it seemed rather remarkable that Ortega wasn’t able to hold on to that mandate
.

Really? Well let me ask you how remarkable it is. Suppose the Soviet Union were to play the game the way we do. Lithuania just declared independence, right [in March 1990]? Let’s suppose that the Soviet Union were capable of doing what we did in Nicaragua. So: it would organize a terrorist army to attack Lithuania; it would train it to attack “soft targets,” civilian targets; it would try to kill large numbers of health workers, teachers, farmers, and so on.
  ¹⁰
Meanwhile, it would impose an embargo—suppose it were able to do this—and block trade, block export and import, it would pressure international institutions to stop providing any assistance.
  ¹¹
Of course, to make the analogy accurate, we’d have to assume that Lithuania begins at a level much lower than what it actually is.

Okay, now suppose that after ten years of this, Lithuania has been reduced to the level of Ethiopia, alright? And suppose that then there’s an election, and Moscow says: “Look, we’re going to continue this, all of it, unless you vote for the Communist Party.” And now suppose that the Lithuanians
do
vote for the Communist Party. Would you find that remarkable?

M
AN
: I don’t think Nicaragua was reduced to the level of Ethiopia
.

Oh yeah, they were. They were reduced to the level of—well, maybe Haiti.
  ¹²
But just answer my question: would you find that remarkable?

M
AN
: Under those circumstances, I guess I wouldn’t
.

Okay, but then why do you find it remarkable when it happened in Nicaragua?

M
AN
: Well, I don’t have access to all the facts you do
.

You have every fact I told you—every fact I told you, you knew. Every fact I told you, you can find on the front pages of the
New York Times
. It’s just that when you hear the White House announce, “We’re going to continue with the embargo unless Chamorro wins,” you have to be able to think enough so you conclude, well, these people are voting with a gun to their heads.
  ¹³
If you can’t think that far, it doesn’t matter what the newspapers say. And the beauty of a really well-indoctrinated intellectual class is they
can’t
think that far. They can think that far
easily
in the case of Lithuania, but they can’t think that far in the case of the United States, even though the actual situation is the hypothetical one that I described. So often the information is
there
, in a sense—it’s just that it’s
not
there, because people are so indoctrinated that they simply don’t see it.

Perpetuating Brainwashing Under Freedom

M
AN
: Why is it that across the board in the media you cant find examples of people using their brains?

You can find them, but typically they’re not in the mainstream press.

M
AN
: Why is that?

Because if they have the capacity to think freely and understand these types of things, they’re going to be kept out by a very complicated filtering system—which actually starts in kindergarten, I think. In fact, the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on—because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions. I mean, it would be highly dysfunctional to have people in the media who could ask questions like this. So by the time you’ve made it to Bureau Chief or Editor, or you’ve become a bigshot at C.B.S. or something, the chances are that you’ve just got all this stuff in your bones—you’ve internalized values that make it clear to you that there are certain things you just don’t say, and in fact, you don’t even think about them anymore.

This was actually discussed years ago in an interesting essay by George Orwell, which happens to be the introduction to
Animal Farm. Animal Farm
is a satire on Soviet totalitarianism, obviously, and it’s a very famous book, everybody reads it. But what people
don’t
usually read is its introduction, which talks about censorship in England—and the main reason people don’t read it is because it was censored, nicely; it simply wasn’t published with the book. It was finally rediscovered about thirty years later and somebody somewhere published it, and now it’s available in some modern editions. But in this essay Orwell said, look, this book is obviously about Stalinist Russia, however it’s not all that different in England. And then he described how things work in England. He said: in England there isn’t any commissar around who beats you over the head if you say the wrong thing, but nevertheless the results are not all that different. And then he had a two-line description of how the press works in England, which is pretty accurate, in fact. One of the reasons why the results are similar, he said, is because the press is owned by wealthy men who have strong interests in not having certain things said. The other, which he said is equally pertinent, is that if you’re a well-educated person in England—you went to the right prep schools, then to Oxford, and now you’re a bigshot somewhere—you have simply learned that there are certain things that it is not proper to say.
  ¹⁴

And that’s a large part of education, in fact: just internalizing the understanding that there are certain things it is not proper to say, and it is not proper to think, And if you don’t learn that, typically you’ll be weeded out of the institutions somewhere along the line. Well, those two factors are very important ones, and there are others, but they go a long way towards explaining the uniformity of ideology in the intellectual culture here.
  ¹⁵

Now, of course, it’s not a hundred percent—so you’ll get a few people filtering through who will do things differently. Like I say, in this “United in Joy” business, I was able to find two people in the United States who were not “United in Joy,” and were able to say so in the mainstream press. But if the system is really working well, it’s not going to do things which undermine itself. In fact, it’s a bit like asking, “How come
Pravda
under Stalin didn’t have journalists denouncing the Gulags [Soviet penal labor camps]?” Why not? Well, it would have been dysfunctional to the system. I suspect it’s not that the journalists in
Pravda
were
lying
—I mean, that was a different system, they used the threat of force to silence dissidents, which we don’t use much here. But even in the Soviet Union, chances are very strong that if you actually bothered to look, you’d find that most of the journalists actually believed the things they wrote. And that’s because people who
didn’t
believe that kind of thing would never have made it onto
Pravda
in the first place. It’s very hard to live with cognitive dissonance: only a real cynic can believe one thing and say another. So whether it’s a totalitarian system or a free system, the people who are most useful to the system of power are the ones who actually believe what they say, and they’re the ones who will typically make it through.

So take Tom Wicker at the
New York Times
: when you talk to him about this kind of stuff, he gets very irate and says, “Nobody tells
me
what to write.” And that’s perfectly true, nobody tells
him
what to write—but if he didn’t already
know
what to write, he wouldn’t be a columnist for the
New York Times
. Like, nobody tells Alex Cockburn what to write, and therefore he’s
not
a columnist for the
New York Times
, because he thinks different things. You think the wrong thoughts, you’re not in the system.

Now, it’s interesting that the
Wall Street Journal
allows this one opening, Alex Cockburn. I mean, the opening is so minuscule that it’s not even worth discussing—but it so happens that once a month, there is one mainstream journal in the United States which allows a real dissident to write a free and open column. So that means, like, .0001 percent of the coverage is free and independent. And it’s in the
Wall Street Journal
, which doesn’t care: for their audience the
New York Times
is Communist, so here’s a guy who’s even more Communist.

And the result of all of this is that it’s a very effective system of ideological control—much more effective than Soviet totalitarianism ever was. In fact, if you look at the entire range of media in the Soviet Union that people were actually exposed to, they had much more dissidence in the 1980s than we do, overtly, and people were in fact reading a much broader range of press, listening to foreign broadcasts, and so on—which is pretty much unheard of in the U.S.
  ¹⁶
Or just to give one other example, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there was even a newscaster [Vladimir Danchev] who made broadcasts over Moscow radio for five successive nights back in 1983, denouncing the Russian invasion of Afghanistan—he actually called it an “invasion”—and calling on the Afghans to resist, before he was finally taken off the air.
  ¹⁷
That’s
unimaginable
in the United States. I mean, can you imagine Dan Rather or anybody else getting on the radio and denouncing the U.S. “invasion” of South Vietnam, and calling on the Vietnamese to resist? That’s inconceivable. The United States couldn’t
have
that amount of intellectual freedom.

M
AN
: Well, I don’t know if that’s “intellectual freedom,” for a journalist to say that
.

Sure it is. It’s intellectual freedom when a journalist can understand that 2 + 2 = 4; that’s what Orwell was writing about in
1984
. Everybody here applauds that book, but nobody is willing to think about what it means. What Winston Smith [the main character] was saying is, if we can still understand that 2 + 2 = 4, they haven’t taken everything away. Okay? Well, in the United States, people can’t even understand that 2 + 2 = 4.

M
AN
: Couldn’t an editorialist say it, though, even if a reporter can’t?

Have any of them done it, in thirty years?

M
AN
: I don’t know
.

Well, I’ll tell you, nobody has; I’ve checked, actually.
  ¹⁸

W
OMAN
: You make it sound so uniform, though—like there’s only one or two people in the entire U.S. media who aren’t dishonest or blindly serving power
.

Well, that’s really not my point: obviously in any complex institution, there are going to be a fair number of people who want to do their work with integrity, and are good at it, and don’t just end up serving power—these systems aren’t totally monolithic, after all. A lot of people go into journalism with a real commitment to professional integrity—they like the field, and they want to do it honestly. And some of them continue to do an admirable job of it—in fact, some of them even manage to do it at journals like the
New York Times
.

In fact, to a large degree I think you can tell when the
New York Times
’s editors want a story covered accurately just by looking at who they send to the place. For instance, when they send John Kifner, that means they want the story told—because he’s an honest journalist, and he’s going to tell the story. I mean, I don’t know him personally, but you can just tell from his work that he’s a journalist of real integrity, and he’s going to dig, he’s going to find out the truth, and he’s going to write about it—and the editors must know that. So I don’t know anything about how they assign stories at the
Times
, but I’m willing to make a bet that when there’s a story the
Times
’s editors want told, they’ll send Kifner, and when his job is done they’ll probably send him back to the “Metro” desk or something.