If a person stands next to a large wasp
nest and repeatedly hits it with a stick, the person could consider
what happens next an unprovoked wasp attack, if the person is so
self-entranced that the person cannot discern cause and effect. Outside
the dome, the person will be viewed with astonishment, consternation
and, if the performance continues, with fear.
-- Nicholas Von Hoffman, on our current
world image
An Excellent Take On A
Very Big Hoax
It's hard to know where to start with this one. In terms of style, Hoax
can be seen as a reprise on
Jonathan's
Swift's classic"A Modest Proposal" -- and more. Remember
Jonathan's Swift from your course in World Literature? Remember
Swift's proposal in 1729 to alleviate the Irish starvation brought on
by England's ham-handed exploitation of the Irish land and peasantry?
It was part of the required reading for Western Literature when I was
in college --
the suggestion that,
since the Catholic Irish had such a high birth rate (which potentially
marketable product was continually dying in useless starvation,
squalor, and disease), their English overlords should afford the Irish
enough food for the peasants to fatten up their babies and sell them to
the affluent English as choice cuts of meat. These worthies could well
afford such a delicacy, so why not? More money into the Irish
economy. Less starvation and disease to embarrass the English rulers.
And best of all, less Irish unrest.
Excoriated by the horrified English at such unappetizing truthtelling,
especially by the English in-situ
rulers of the unfortunate Irish, Swift, the Dean of St. Patrick's,
Dublin, was totally unrepentant, and went on to write works of
both
compassion and misanthropy, including works on the perennial "Irish
Question," (now that we've got 'em, what'll we do with 'em?) and the
satiric "Direction to Servants." Swift died in October
of 1845 after a seven-year stretch of paralysis and acute pain, stunned
into
apathy by both the stupidity and cruelty of mankind and the onset of
what is believed today to have been Alzheimer's disease.
In terms of our current day Iraq imbroglio, Nicholas Von Hoffman, in
his
Swiftian turn, discusses problems that the US (and
the favored Israeli leadership) have with the Middle East. "If a
way could only be found to deal with the Arab problem,' he writes, and
goes on,
Certain laboratories are
working to perfect a process for converting Arabs into crude oil.
Scientists are hopeful that they will soon have a pilot plant making
oil at a ten to one ration, that is ten Arabs to produce a barrel of
crude. Since Arabs have a high birth rate, this technology will make
crude oil a newable energy resource.
So
much for the US view of the Mideast problem which differs markedly from
the rest of the world, particularly those in Europe, Africa, and the
near East, who not only understand Arabic and the Arabs, but depend on
them for trade. But what's with the American public's out-of-touch view
of Les Arabes? How did it
come to
this? Mr. Von Hoffman suggests that America's people have lived in a
hermetically sealed day-dream -- which he calls variously a biosphere,
a terrarium, a glass-domed version of our own reality -- in which we
are
forever right and the rest of the world is wrong and who cares what
goes on outside the glass anyway.
Life in the Biosphere
Von Hoffman, in a wide ranging critique of
the gullible American people, writes that we have been bred on the
idea that the United States is a special, God-given home for special
people. A "City on a Hill," as our early settlers, John Winthrop and
John Cotton, described it, that knows better than the rest of the world
what is right and what is wrong. We would never, for instance, drop the
Atom Bomb, though we have indeed dropped two of them -- one each on
Nagasaki and
Hiroshima. Those of us who have lived through the second world war and
remembered this two-bomb horror are becoming fewer and fewer and the
population that came after us have simply ignored what's in the history
books. We also take care of our poor, our sick, and our elderly better
than the rest of the world. Our children are healthier, minorities are
given full rights, unlike the repression that goes on everywhere
outside the US. The wide ocean that separates us from both Asia and
Europe helped to incubate these ideas of self worth and continues to
perpetuate them. Figures and facts from the outside, such as our
increasingly poor performance in child health and minority education
bounce off the glass enclosing our biosphere.
Moving from Nurture to Nature, Von Hoffman describes how, over the
years, under the radar of touting our uniquely superior morals and
ethics, our politicians have perfected The Big Lie. He explains that
The
Big Lie must be simple and must be repeated, "until it reverberates
like
a jack hammer digging up the street in front of where you live:
inescapable sound." Indeed, this worked well with rulers like
Hitler, who used The Big Lie, "simple and pure," to destroy most of
Europe
during
World War II. But, alas, our present day leaders in the Bush
administration don't lie well. Instead of the
lie simple and pure, they continue to embroider, retract, change
direction, offer suspect evidence, until the rest of the world is
falling down laughing, refusing to believe that we have only humanity's
good in mind in our wish to bring democracy to all the countries of the
world.
But the moral and ethical American people? They swallow it all
hook, line, and sinker, because, among other things, the leaders
have the media on
their side, and the media love war and its concomitant patriotism as a
career-enhancing road toward increased readership and viewership.
Viewership is key, of course, since most would rather sit in front of
the television screen, zoned-out on atrocities committed by the immoral
people outside the biosphere. In Von Hoffman's chapter on the US
as missionary, he summarizes incursions of the American military from
the Native Americans disenfranchisement from their own land in
the early decades of the republic to the present day Iraq war,
describing the US motives as
disinterested, as they
always are. Only nations on the outside of the biosphere have selfish
motives. America is the Johnnie Appleseed of democracy, spreading
self-rule wherever it bombs or sends in the marines.
Outside the American
terrarium, on the other hand,
Earlier, in 1917, many believed that the
United States wasn't going to war to save Europe but to save the Morgan
banking interests. Morgan had made loans to Great Britain which would
default if the other side won.
Where
Were the Protestors THEN?
An example of this type of American myopia, is a recent letter
to the editor in our local newspaper written by a woman who said that
"liberating" Iraq of the despicable Saddam
was a worthy cause. "Where were the (war) protestors when this
genocidal dictator disposed of thousands in mass graves? Another 1.7
million were killed in the Iran-Iraq war," she goes on, "and 5,000-
Kurds were killed
with poison/nerve gas (mostly women and children)." She lists
a few more atrocities, winding up with the fact that there were
no protests in the US against this slaughter as there were against the
US Iraq invasion of 2003.
Nicholas Von Hoffman tells us why there were no protests over these
horrors (which had actually occurred during the 1980s) -- "[Saddam] was
an unsightly but useful tool in the conflict which the United States
was carrying on against Iran and the ayatollahs." Saddam at the time
was consolidating his
recently seized power with mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Iraqi
citizens but -- not to worry -- he was also invading his neighbor,
Iran, hoping for hegemony over the entire Middle East. Starting in
1982, the US and its allies began funneling economic aid to the
dictator as well as weapons of chemical, biological, and nuclear
capabilities, turning a blind eye to the brutal slaughter on both
sides.
In a weird, but perhaps unsurprising, turn-up during this conflict,
arms were also being secretly sold by dealers in the US to Iran.
This last is especially mystifying since to the ayatollahs in Iran, the
US was the "Great Satan," they had sent into exile the US-sponsored
Shah of Iran, and had only recently encouraged a mob of
students to storm the American embassy there, taking 66 hostages, 52 of
whom were held
for 444 days from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981. The crisis,
incidentally, lost Jimmy
Carter the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan.
The hostages, in fact, were not released until after Reagan's
inauguration.1
Strange Bedfellows
There is a TV shot of Rumsfield shaking Saddam's hand at the time of
the US-backed Iraq invasion of Iran. A
famous shot that's found a permanent home on the Internet. To quote a
line Roosevelt said of some bloody-handed dictator in
South America, and that the Reagan administration might well have said
of
Saddam -- "He might be a son of a bitch, but he's OUR son of a bitch."
The American public should
have heard about
the Iraqi civilian deaths and the alleged Kurdish gassing (one theory
has it that the Iranians and
Iraqis, equally bloodthirsty, were attempting to gas each other and the Kurds got caught
in
the crossfire). But the talking heads on television, the ones Von
Hoffman calls the War Whores, were reluctant to muddy the diplomatic
waters. And besides, Iran was, ostensibly, the enemy at that point and Iraq was --
brace yourselves -- an
ally.
The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s turned out to be a draw which left both
countries
battered and heavily in debt. In August of 1990, Saddam, owing some $14
billion to Kuwait for the expenses of his Iranian venture and citing
territorial disputes, invaded Kuwait. Von
Hoffman's War Whores rose to the patriotic
challenge in our country's role as world policeman under President
George H.W. Bush. They not only brought up the
massacre of thousands of Iraqis by Saddam, his alleged gassing of the
Kurds,
and his rape and torture rooms, all previously ignored, but added some
more creative and
suspiciously sourced atrocities to sweeten the mix -- for
instance, the story of Iraqi
troops tearing premature babies from 100s of incubators in a
Kuwait
hospital. (The story of this fabricated atrocity can be found here.)
The Kuwait invasion by Saddam started the Gulf War of 1991, and
there has been ample reason to believe, that the US was given a heads
up by Saddam himself.
Casus Belli -- Take Your Pick
Fast forward to 2002. The George W. Bush administration decides
to abruptly switch focus from Afghanistan's al Qaeda by attacking Iraq.
Aside from Saddam's giving sanctuary to hordes of al Qaeda, the
US must safeguard the world and itself by capturing his vast store
of weapons of mass destruction which were at the ready to hit the
British Isles and Europe with missiles inside of 45 minutes. Again we
hear of
Saddam's atrocities. Without a doubt
Saddam was a
sadistic dictator with the blood of tens of thousands of his own people
on his hands as well as the lives of some 10,000 Kurds, but whether
his dissident-cleansing was finished by then or slowed to a trickle out
of exhaustion or satiation,
he'd done most of his slaughter over ten
years before. And as for the
feared weapons of mass destruction? They were nowhere to be found. Nor
were al Qaeda; though after American troops "liberated" Baghdad they
began pouring into Iraq by the thousands.
Why don't the
American people realize this? Why do such a large percentage of
the American people still believe that Saddam was responsible for
9/11 (fully 61% of
Republicans still believe this)? Many still
believe that Saddam
intended to send missiles to the US given 45 minutes lead time, and
that he
had weapons of mass destruction armed with both chemicals and nuclear
material, regardless of no evidence at all. Scraping the bottom of the
barrel, the story goes that if he didn't have weapons of mass
destruction, he wanted to have
weapons of mass destruction. As report after report shoots down each of
these reasons for invading Iraq, more and more inventive reasons crop
up to take their place.
Certainly a good bit of the blame can be laid at the feet of the War
Whores. As Von Hoffman pointed out, they
whooped, hollered and thigh-slapped the
United States into and through Gulf War II. Day in and day out, hour
after
hour, on TV cable news channels especially, they tingled with happy
excitement as they strained to infect viewers (and less often, readers)
with the upside of death and disfigurement.
The media were willing co-conspirators of this war, insists Von
Hoffman. And besides war "gooses," he notes, "the ratings."
Outside,
Looking In
The people outside the American biosphere know that
leaders lie routinely, or if they don't lie outright, they don't tell
the truth,
not all of it, "not in a way," Von Hoffman explains, "that lets you get
a handle on what's going
on." Here in America we get our information straight from the teat of
television news which gets it from the propaganda coming out of the
White house, but that's no excuse. America, Von Hoffman points out, is
uniquely fortunate in having enormous amounts of information available
if people
are willing to search for it in the many sources available -- say, on
the
Internet -- and then puzzle it out for themselves.
Especially when the Internet affords news outlets from all over the
world -- Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, the Arab countries,
Israel, India -- which have entirely different views of what is going
on in America and in Iraq right now.
Out local letter-to-the-editor correspondent speaks glowingly of the
freedom Iraq has now, that
all countries have great casualties in "wars of independence,"
believing in her heart that Iraq is now "independent." Except
Iraq is not independent. Iraq is a country occupied by
foreigners, with a government that its people view as puppets of the
US and, to a lesser extent, of the UK. Moreover, for the privilege of
this sham independence, Iraq has
suffered upwards of 100,000 deaths according to latest estimates, and
who
knows how many disfigurements, certainly an absurdly large number for
the
"gift" of independence. Moreover, the fallout from the depleted uranium
shells is likely to cause many decades of deformed babies and of cancer
in children and adults from both the soil and contaminated ground
water. Where do Americans get these ideas that Iraq is now happy
and healthy and free?
Language Manipulation
I wrote recently about the neoconservative Republicans now in power and
their use of language manipulation that equates well with Nicholas Von
Hoffman's thesis. Everything this group
wants to sell to the
American people, especially to people who value tradition and family,
as in the more traditional, rural states, is couched in terms redolent
of Family Values, God, Country,
and other Good Things. Thus, weakening the caps on mercury,
nitrogen oxide, and sulphur dioxide pollution is called the "Clear
Skies Act of 2003." A proposal to open up national forests to
alarmingly increased logging was called the "Healthy Forest
Initiative." An effort to amend the constitution to ban same-sex
marriage was an effort to Save the Institution of Marriage. Legislation
undermining basic American rights to the best in free public education
for our children is called Faith Based, Leave No Child Behind, and
other Orwellian blather.
Over a period of
forty years, the Radical and Christian Right and its rich patrons have
not only hijacked the Republican party, but also invested many hundreds
of millions of dollars in think tanks, young talent, and ideological
communication skills that has essentially transformed the language of
American politics. When a group controls the language, it controls the
message, and our patriotic media does the rest.
In short, facts
don't matter. Rather, neoconservative framing of those facts motivate
tradition- and family-oriented citizens to blindly accept political
agendas, no matter how much against their self-interest they may be.
What's wrong with taking wage cuts, exporting our jobs overseas,
paying 50% more in college tuition, and 17% more in Medicare premiums?
What IS important is keeping Gays, that small but ungodly fraction of
our US population, from getting married in San Francisco and trashing
the entire institution. What IS important is keeping that one woman in
20,000 from having a late term abortion because of fetal abnormality or
danger to herself. Meanwhile, the Right Wing agendas driving truly
hurtful legislation to American people become lost in rose-colored
neocon-speak.
To see what
language can do to politics, read any text on political propaganda; for
instance, George Lakoff, Dan Schechter,
or Rampton
and Stauber. Or
better yet, go right to the source: Frank Luntz, a
neoconservative
pollster who also advises on electioneering. During the legislative
session when the White House pushed the ending of the Inheritance Tax,
Luntz recommended the replacement of the term, Inheritance Tax with Death Tax,
because a tax that would affect only the affluent, would nevertheless
make most people angry enough to vote against it if it were associated
with an emotional term like Death.
In a letter rebutting this piece on neoconservative language
manipulation, a gentleman in the valley insisted that Democrats do the
same thing, so what's the big deal? While I don't doubt that
Democrats could work the same manipulation themselves and perhaps even
have
done it in the past, they are nevertheless rank amateurs compared to
the neoconservatives in power today. The Democrats have had the three
and a half
years of the
Bush administration to play catchup but it's not long enough.
The neoconservatives have had upwards of four decades working on this
skill.
As Nicholas Von Hoffman writes, the American people
have
been lied to more times than a month of TV commericals, but they still
get upset at being told untruths by those whom they have elected. This
is said to be a sign of the nation's enduring idealism and high ethical
standards. That may be so, or it may be a sign of political
infantilism, a refusal to recognize that one has grown up and been
allotted a place in the adult world of nations.
His message? Grow up America, break through the biosphere, and see
what's
really going on.
Buy this book. It's not only crammed with facts in its 195 pages, but
is a witty, terrifically gripping read.
___________________________________________
1As
it happens, the "October Surprise," which describes a situation where a
presidential incumbent uses
his office to do something very popular at
the last minute before election day to increase his chances of getting
elected, was alleged to have been manufactured by the Reagan campaign
to do just the opposite -- to prevent
an "October Surprise" -- a negotiated release of the hostages to
the Carter administration -- that would
have aided Carter, the incumbent. The allegation can be found in a book
written by Gary Sick, titled October
Surprise.
_______________________________________________________
Posted by Joan Shaw 10/15/04
Back to Review Index
Home
Jkshaw photo by Jonathan A. Shaw
Designed and Produced by jkshaw@bridgernet.com
Qestions and comments - jkshaw@bridgernet.com
All contents copyright (c) 2000-2004 by Joan K. Shaw. All rights
reserved.
Hoax, Why Americans Are Suckered
By White House Lies
Click to buy
1912-Wilson,
Roosevelt,Taft,&Debs-The Election that Changed the Country
Click to buy Against All
Enemies, an insider's view of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath