INTERVIEW WITH SHELDON RAMPTON - CO-AUTHOR "WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION"
19th July 2003
[The book is published by CONSTABLE + ROBINSON on July 28th 2003 - See RECOMMENDED READING]
Q: I've noticed a distinct sea-change over the last couple of years in that many books
and films about propaganda have become available in the
mainstream. Some have even become bestsellers. Do you think this is a result of the
unusually corrupt Bush administration, or do you think this is a
positive emerging trend regardless of the current figure head?
A: I think this trend began well before the Bush administration took office. It's also
reflected in movies like "The Matrix" or "The Truman Show," in which
reality itself is imagined to be some kind of artifically created false reality. During
the Clinton administration, there were also films like "Wag the Dog" or
"Primary Colors" that focused on the ways information was massaged and
artifically manipulated for political purposes, and of course you can find earlier
examples such as the Robert Redford movie, "The Candidate."
One of the people who first anticipated all of this was Walter Lippmann, the American
journalist. During the First World War, Lippmann served as a confidential assistant to the
U.S. Secretary of War (back when they still called it a "Department of War"
instead of a "Department of Defense"). The experience left him disillusioned
about the future prospects for democracy, and in a book titled "Public Opinion"
he readily acknowledged that all sides in the war, his own included, had lied to their own
citizens about matters ranging from battlefield losses to the real postwar objectives of
the warring governments. "We have learned to call this propaganda," he wrote.
"A group of men, who can prevent independent access to the event, arrange the news of
it to suit their purpose."
Lippmann was one of the first people to notice that emergence of mass media had created
what he called a "pseudo-environment" of images and ideas that shape the way
people think about the world. "As a result of psychological research, coupled with
the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner," he
stated. "Persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular
government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy
to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation
and modify every political premise."
Today, nearly a century later, these observations are even more true than they were when
Lippmann wrote them. People today are constantly bombarded with messages on billboards,
television, newspapers and radio. The "pseudo-environment" of which Lippmann
spoke has exploded enormously, and this in turn has created a new type of politics
inhabited by figures like Bill Clinton or Tony Blair or George Bush.
Q: The correlation between US television media and the US public perception that Iraq
was responsible for 9-11 is extraordinary, even by US propaganda standards. Could you go
into detail on how this was acheived?
A: If you look at the statements made by Bush administration officials, they rarely used
out-and-out lies, but they came very close. The administration never came right out and
said that Iraq was responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, but it hinted
ominously and created the APPEARANCE of a connection. For example, they helped foment
public speculation about a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq based on an alleged meeting
between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials that supposedly took
place in Prague between the dates of April 8 and 11, 2001. Reports of this meeting
first came from Czech officials in October 2001, during the period of intense speculation
that followed the terrorist attacks. It was investigated by Czech authorities and by the
FBI and discredited. Vaclev Havel personally told the White House that there was no
evidence to support it. Nevertheless, the Bush administration continued to promote it. In
February 2002, for example, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz gave an interview with
the San Francisco Chronicle in which he was asked about links between Iraq and Al
Qaeda. "A lot of this stuff is classified and I really can't get into discussing
it," he said, which provided a convenient way of avoiding specifics. He then alluded
to the alleged meeting between Atta and Iraqi officials in Prague, repeated again that
this was "classified" and he couldn't go into specifics, and then told the
interviewer that "we can't afford to wait for proof beyond a reasonable
doubt." The effect of this was to create the impression that there was substance to
the story, while dismissing requests for actual proof as the bureaucratic concern of
overly legalistic pencil-pushers. And this sort of vague hinting happened repeatedly. In
July 2002, Donald Rumsfeld told a news conference that Iraq had "a relationship"
with Al Qaeda but declined to be more specific. The following month, an anonymous
"senior Bush administration official" told the Los Angeles Times that the report
of Atta in Prague "holds up," again without offering evidence or specifics. In
September, Dick Cheney stated during a television interview that "there has been
reporting" that "suggests" contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Each new whisper of this sort had the desired effect, yielding a fresh harvest of
newspaper editorials, I-told-you-so's and speculation on the Internet. The media
functioned as a giant echo chamber, amplifying and spreading the message. People were led
to believe that where there is smoke, there must be fire. But actually, there was only
smoke.
Q: There seems to be a growing realisation in the so called 'dissident' movement that
the goals of the Bush / Blair policies are as much about ideology as they are about
securing business and investors' desires. Can you comment on the influence of the
'religion' of the neo-cons and hawks?
A: The neoconservatives who are running foreign policy in the Bush administration are
closely tied with the Israel lobby, and they tend to see politics in the Middle East
through the framing question of what will benefit the state of Israel. They see the Arab
world as a huge threatening horde that needs to be subdued so that Israel can be secure.
Of course, Israel itself has been trying to subdue the Palestinian hordes for several
decades now, and we can see readily how little peace this has brought to either people of
Israel or the people of the Middle East. From their point of view, however, the reason
they haven't succeeded is that they've been fighting with one arm tied behind their backs,
that political naysayers have kept them from doing what needs to be done to win a decisive
victory. Their fantasy is that if they simply ignore those restraints they will be
successful, and everyone who is criticizing them now will thank them later. Of course, the
same assumptions also hold with respect to way they view the history of the Vietnam war.
They believe that they would have won the war if only the politicians and peace movement
had not tied their hands.
I don't want to draw facile comparisons with Adolf Hitler, but these arguments bear a
striking similarity to some of the claims that Hitler made in MeinKampf, where he declared
that "Jewish" manipulators had used politics to undermine German soldiers and
thereby prevented them from winning the First World War. It's not surprising that these
sorts of arguments would circulate following a military defeat. Losers naturally start to
look for scapegoats. However, this sort of thinking is very dangerous and leads to
reckless, ideologically-driven behavior.
Q: Large sections of the British government definitely feel they have been hoodwinked
by Blair. If this feeling is as a result of their ignorance of the actual WMD situation in
Iraq, why have they been so ignorant?
A: Of course, part of the reason is Saddam Hussein, who was unquestionably a brutal
despot. Moreover, Hussein did have a weapons program during the1980s, and in the aftermath
of Operation Desert Storm, he attempted to cover up the extent of the program from
international arms inspectors. When the facts regarding his attempts at concealment became
know in the mid-1990s, it undermined whatever credibility he might have had when he
claimed that the weapons had been destroyed. The repressive nature of the Iraqi regime
also made it impossible to verify its claims independently. In a sense, therefore, Saddam
Hussein's own propaganda became part of his undoing.
At the time we finished writing "Weapons of Mass Deception," in fact, we didn't
know ourselves whether banned weapons might be found inside Iraq. We thought it was
unlikely that a weapons program could exist capable of presenting the sort of imminent
threat that Blair and Bush were describing, but it still seemed possible that some banned
weapons would indeed be found by the time our book arrived in stores. We were very
cautious on this point, and in retrospect perhaps we should have expressed more skepticism
about the Bush administration's claims.
As time goes by and nothing is found, however, I think this all makes sense if you look at
things from Saddam Hussein's point of view. Hussein managed to stay in power in Iraq for
35 years. He's a brutal dictator but not a fool or madman. During the 1980s, he had a
rational motive for accumulating biological and chemical or even nuclear weapons, which
gave him an advantage in the war with Iran and potential advantage against other regional
adversaries. Once the United States declared war following the invasion of Kuwait,
however, he faced an adversary with weapons that he could not possibly hope to
match. This point was noted by Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law who
defected to the west (and whose information was cited by the Bush administration as
evidence that Saddam had a banned weapons program). During his debriefing by UN weapons
inspectors, Kamal actually stated that during Operation Desert Storm "there was no
intention to use chemical weapons as the Allied force was overwhelming. ... They realized
that if chemical weapons were used, retaliation would be nuclear. S All chemical weapons
were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons-biological,
chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed."
During the 1990s, Saddam Hussein might have had aspirations to relaunch his weapons
programs someday, but he also had to have known that it would have been difficult to
develop them, let alone use them, without being detected and provoking massive
retaliation. He therefore had no rational reason to continue spending money and effort on
banned weapons programs. I think it's more likely that he spent the 1990s building luxury
palaces for himself and developing contingency plans for the event of a future U.S.
invasion and occupation.
Q: The sense in the public in the UK and US is that we have been treated like idiots.
Why do you think that the Bush / Blair camp feel they can get away with insulting our
intelligence so blatantly?
A: The short answer is: Because we let them. Sure we may rankle, but they're the ones in
power, and we haven't figured out how to throw them out yet.
A longer answer would be that propagandists in general tend to have a low opinion of the
public. This isn't because the public is actually stupid. It's because when propagandists
seek to manipulate people, they tend to look for the weak spots in our psyche -- the
emotional hot buttons, the primitive impulses that make us all do stupid things sometimes
and that can be readily manipulated. That's why marketers use very banal imagery over and
over again to sell their products: pretty girls with bikinis in advertisements selling
automobiles or beer, for example. We all know how these techniques work, and they're not
subtle in the least, but they work. Whether you are a day laborer or a professor with a
Ph.D. in semiotics, when you see the picture of the half-naked girl next to the beer
bottle, your mind starts to associate beer with sex. Fear is also a very primitive emotion
that has been especially used by propagandists in connection with the war in Iraq. It's
crude, but it works. Propagandists work with in the simplest, most elemental aspects of
the human psyche, and that tends to give them a warped view of human nature.
It is important to realize, however, that even though these emotional hot buttons
"work" at influencing people, this does not prove that people are genuinely
stupid. I like to point to the example of Ezra Pound, who was simultaneously a very
educated, intelligent, cultured individual AND a crude polemicist for the Nazis. What this
demonstrates is that it is possible for people to be simultaneously stupid about some
things and smart about others. Human nature is complex and diverse, and you get different
results depending on what part of the psyche you activate. I think the history of human
civilization can be read largely as a struggle by our rational selves to overcome the
limitations of our instincts and primitive impulses. Unfortunately, propagandists have a
way of dragging us back down again.
Q: US media in particular has badly failed the public. Aside from the obvious
corporate ownership of the media networks, and attendant editorial influence, why have the
indivudual journalists themselves failed the public so badly?
A: The corporate ownership is a major factor, so don't gloss over that too quickly.
Journalists have been fired in the United States for failing to kow-tow to their corporate
masters. Just prior to the war, for example, the MSNBC cable network cancelled Phil
Donahue's talk show, even though it was their best-rated program. In "Weapons of Mass
Deception," we cite an internal MSNBC corporate memo in which they state that Donahue
was too anti-war and that keeping him on the air would risk equating the network with
anti-war sentiments. At the same time that they fired Donahue, they hired Michael Savage,
a commentator who is so far to the right that I think it is perfectly legitimate and
accurate to call him a neo-fascist. Savage is openly racist and delights in abusing
language, referring for example to Third World nations as "Turd World nations"
and charging that the United States "is being taken over by the freaks, the cripples,
the perverts and the mental defectives." In one broadcast, Savage justified ethnic
slurs as a national security tool, saying that "We need racist stereotypes right now
of our enemy in order to encourage our warriors to kill the enemy." The point here is
that MSNBC didn't HAVE to fire Donahue, and they didn't have to hire Michael Savage. The
owners of the corporate media are ultimately the people who decide what gets broadcast.
Having said this, however, there are also some external factors that explain the current
state of affairs in the United States. One is that the United States is in denial about
the fact that it has become an empire. This is due in part, I think, to our origins as a
nation that was born in rebellion against an empire -- specifically, the British empire.
Today the United States has troops stationed in every corner of the world, and yet to
suggest that we've become an empire is considered beyond the pale politically in the
United States. People just don't want to hear that, discuss it or deal with it.
Of course, the events of September 11 are also very important. They still loom large in
Americans' mind. There is a palpable sense of fear, crisis and emergency, which the Bush
administration has exploited to stigmatize dissent. Journalists are not immune to the
effect of this. Like everyone else, they want the Bush administration to succeed in the
"war on terror," and they don't want to do anything that might contribute to its
failure. There is a heightened sense of patriotism and support-our-leader, and journalists
find it hard to go against the grain.
Another factor is the inherent SENSATIONALISM of the corporate media, which militates
against in-depth, serious journalism.
Finally, there is the deliberate influence of forces outside the media itself. Our chapter
on the media is titled "The Air War," because the broadcast airwaves have become
an important tool for influencing public opinion. There's also a corresponding
"ground war" -- grassroots organizing by various corporate-funded advocacy
groups and think tanks with mandates to promote right-wing political values. The right
wing has been organizing very effectively at the grassroots in the United States for
several decades now, and they've made a point of organizing to put pressure on the media.
Journalists are constantly being accused of having a "liberal bias" by
corporate-funded think tanks such as the Media Research Center. Pressures of this sort
also play a role in shaping media coverage.
Q: When viewed strictly from a perspective of western self-interest, my feeling is
that the recent propaganda campaign over Iraq is extremely dangerous and
counter-productive. The 'cry wolf' syndrome makes it very likely that the public will
simply not believe political rhetoric about 'threats' anymore, with potentially disastrous
consequences. Would you care to comment?
A: One of the paradoxes that I have noticed is that propaganda is often more successful at
indoctrinating the propagandists themselves than it is at indoctrinating its intended
"target population." This is certainly the case with the "war on
terror" and the war in Iraq. Shortly after 9/11, the Bush administration announced
appointed the appointment of Charlotte Beers to head a marketing campaign aimed at
polishing the American image in Muslim countries. We devote a chapter to this in our book,
titled "Branding America." Beers was an advertising executive who had headed
several top advertising agencies. She was known in the industry as the "queen
of Madison Avenue." Her specialty was "branding" -- the advertising
technique that attempts to establish emotional bonds between consumers and the products
they consume. Beers had previously been successful at persuading Americans to buy the
Uncle Ben's brand of rice, and Colin Powell reasoned that she got HIM to buy Uncle Ben's,
so if she could get him to buy her rice, she'd probably be able to get Muslims to go for
Brand America.
In reality, she failed miserably and resigned after a year in office, citing "health
reasons." Opinion polls in Muslim nations actually show a catastrophic drop in their
esteem for the United States following September 11, most of which can be attributed to
the war in Afghanistan, U.S. support for Israel, and the invasion of Iraq. There has been
a similarly striking negative shift in attitudes toward the United States in non-Muslim
nations, due not only to our policies in the Middle East but also to the Bush
administration's intransigence on issue such as global warming and GM foods. American
propaganda has fallen on mostly deaf ears abroad, but it has found a receptive audience
within the United States -- especially among conservative Bush supporters. Most of what
the propaganda is accomplishing, in other words, is to help reinforce their
already-existing ideological assumptions.
Q: In his book THE FIRST CASUALTY, author Philip Knightley reaches the rather dismal
conclusion that the public actually approves of war-time censorship and does not want to
view graphic images. The ECONOMIST magazine even went so far as to suggest that normal
democratic checks and balances be done away with during war time. Do you think this is as
a result of general cultural and social indoctrination, or just plain human nature?
A: Every time there is a march to war, this pattern seems to emerge. It isn't at all
unique to the United States, and Philip Knightly does a good example of documenting the
same pattern in a variety of times and places. As for whether it is "human
nature," I think we have to go back again to the fact that human nature is complex.
Certain ASPECTS of human nature come into play in wars and times of crisis. People rally
around their leaders, adopt an us-versus-them attitude and become less tolerant. Various
psychologists have interpreted this in various ways. Some of have suggested, for example,
that fear and uncertain leads to infantile regression in which we give ourselves over to
powerful authority figures who serve as surrogate parents. They also seek to minimize
their fears by finding scapegoats to persecute or by avoiding information that disturbs
them. Regardless of how you explain the underlying psychology, there's no question that it
happens, and it happens simply because there's a felt sense of crisis. In the United
States, for example, only four presidents other than Bush have seen their job rating meet
or surpass the 80 percent mark, and it all happened in times of crisis. With Bush, it
happened immediately after September 11. With his father, it happened during Operation
Desert Storm. Franklin Delano Roosevelt reached 84 percent immediately after the Japanese
attacked Pearl Harbor. Harry Truman hit 87 percent right after FDR died during the final,
crucial phase of World War II, and John F. Kennedy hit 83 percent right after the
failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The Kennedy case is especially telling because the
Bay of Pigs invasion marked a colossal failure of U.S. policy by any possible
interpretation. It's clear that they weren't rewarding Kenny for his performance but
simply because out of a sense of crisis. Other presidents have also seen their standings
rise during moments of crisis that called the quality of their leadership into question.
Nixon's highest rating came in 1969, after a week of intense protests against the Vietnam
War. Reagan's popularity peaked when he was shot by John Hinckley. Bill Clinton's highest
rating came right after he was impeached by the House of Representatives following the
Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Of course there is a dark side to human nature. We've seen it in the Nazi holocaust, the
Soviet purges, the internment of Japanese-Americans in the United States during the Second
World War, the Red Scare of the 1950s and a host of other examples. However, people are
also capable of overcoming their fears and leading rational lives.
Q: What methods can ordinary people adopt to shield themselves from propaganda and
gain access to honest reporting, and if they did, would they actually be any better off
when their government generally doesn't listen to them anyway?
Those are two quite different questions. The first thing people can do to shield
themselves from propaganda is to understand how it works, which of course means that they
should rush out and buy all my books. [!] However, there are also a number of other things
they can do. One is to simply read as widely as possible and choose a variety of
information sources. These days that is easier to do than ever before, thanks to the
proliferation of media technologies such as the Internet.
Equally importantly, I think it is important to get "off the grid" and spend
some time living in the real world rather than in the pseudo-reality of the modern media.
Join a club. Play cards with your neighbors. Do something that doesn't involve listening
passively to propaganda. You have to recognize that all broadcast media lends itself to
propaganda. By "broadcast media" I mean mostly television, radio and newspapers.
Those media are technologies that lend themselves, by their very nature, to being
controlled by a relatively small number of people who create messages and images that are
then broadcast to thousands or millions of people who have little or no say in shaping the
content that they are absorbing. However, there are other forms of media -- such as
telephones, for example, or to a considerable degree the Internet, or just plain old
spoken face-to-face conversation. Those forms of communication place the communicator and
the audience on a par as equals rather than creating a privileged broadcaster who CREATES
the news and a passive audience that just listens.
As for whether people would be better off when their government doesn't listen to them
anyway, I think this is rather unfair. It may be true in some sense, but it's not true
universally. Public opinion DOES constrain the behavior of governments. In Britain you
have a national health care system that is better than the system in the United States
because it would be political suicide for any politician to try to abolish it. The
government may be able on occasion to ignore or even persecute individual dissenters, but
I think it would be very hard to imagine wholesale arrests or persecution of large numbers
who disagree with the government.
I write about propaganda, and my books tend to focus on negative things about society and
its institutions. However, I think I'm an optimist about the prospects for humanity in
general. If we look at the larger picture, remember that the 20th century was marked by
unprecedented strides forward in human well-being, which can be measured empirically using
indicators such as average life expectancy, literacy rates and so forth. When people get
pessimistic about our ability to change the government, I like to ask when they
think things were better? Was it a century ago, when women did not have the right to own
their own property and African-Americans were effectively prevented from voting in the
United States? Sixty years ago, when fascism threatened the world? The Cold War? Humanity
has made progress in fits and starts, but it has made progress. Racism against Muslims and
Arabs has gotten worse in the past two years in the United States, but even so I don't
think it's as bad as the racism against Japanese-Americans that we saw during the Second
World War.
Q: It's my feeling that the concepts of 'left-wing' and 'right-wing' political views
are utilised in the propaganda system, that is to say: we all have much more in common
than not, and that this separation of people is part of the oldest trick in the book, that
of Divide and Rule. Comment?
A: As I understand it, the terms "left" and "right" arose during the
French revolution and had to do with where the various factions happened to sit in the
assemblies. The deputies who favored a constitutional monarchy sat on the right of the
president while those representing the interests of the "little people" sat on
the left. It's not clear at all to me why anyone nowadays thinks it makes sense to map
current politics based on where people happened to sit during a revolution whose goals
were all exhausted several centuries ago. Politics can't be mapped along a single
directional axis. It is multi-issue, multi-polar and complex. Of course this way of
mapping people lends itself to divide and rule, but so do other ways of labeling, such as
"American" vs."anti-American," "pro-progress" vs.
"Luddite," Muslim vs. Christian vs. Jew and so forth.
Q: Noam Chomsky has pointed out that no other industrialised democratic nation pledges
daily allegiance to a flag, nor has a comparable patriotic self-view . The only other
country in the modern era where it was considered a crime not to support your country was
the Soviet Union under communist rule. Why is there this hysterical reaction of
'anti-Americanism' whenever anyone questions the motives and actions of the US government?
A: Not everyone in the United States pledges daily allegiance to the flag. It happens in
some schools, in some school districts. It doesn't happen in the school district of
Madison, Wisconsin where I lived until recently. However, the degree of nationalist fervor
in the United States right now is unprecedented in my personal memory. I think in part it
reflects the point I made previously about our being an empire in denial and in crisis. We
have troops stationed around the world, even in places that face no conceivable foreign
threat such as Italy, yet we think of ourselves as merely everyone one else's helpful
older brother (or "Uncle Sam," to use the time-honored symbol of our
benevolence).
September 11 was a hugely traumatic event for the American psyche, not only because of the
death and suffering but also because it sent a signal that there are people who
categorically reject the American presence in their countries and are willing to kill and
die to get rid of it. Events following 9/11 have made it clear that these feelings are
held not only by Osama Bin Laden and his followers but also by a majority of the
population of the Middle East as well as substantial numbers in the rest of the world.
(Given the way the Bush administration has alienated the rest of the world, this may now
represent majority opinion worldwide.)
These are very painful facts to face, and I think some of the hyperpatriotism and
bellicosity we see coming from the United States reflects psychological denial by people
who aren't yet read to face them.
Q: To what extent does the US public identify with the government of America as the
'country' of America itself?
A: Almost totally.
Q: Why has not US media pointed out the most obvious fact that if any of the countries
in the 'axis of evil' ever even tried to use a WMD against the US, they would face
immediate nuclear retaliation? (As former Secretary of State James Baker informed Iraqi
Deputy Tariq Aziz in January 1991). Thus these countries could stockpile literally
millions of chemical or biological shells, but it would be suicide for them to even try to
use one, so what, exactly, then is their 'threat'?
[Note: for forty years the mutual nuclear deterrence policy of the US and the Soviet Union
was considered rational. Why has this suddenly changed in that anyone seeking to even
acquire a deterrent to US nuclear capability must be immediately destroyed?]
A: You're asking a rhetorical question here. I want to be fair in describing the thinking
that goes on in the mind of people like Donald Rumsfeld. Their concern in the aftermath of
9/11 is that countries like Iraq will use terrorist groups as PROXIES to attack the United
States, while concealing their behind-the-scenes sponsorship so that the United States
will be unable to retaliate. There is a historical basis for their thinking. In the past,
terrorists have sometimes acted as proxies of foreign governments, as for example in the
case of the Lockerbie airliner bombing. Shortly following 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld made the
following comments about the causes of terrorism: "Because of the end of the Cold War
and because of the Gulf War, which told people not to compete with armies, navies and air
forces, countries do look for asymmetrical ways they can threaten the United States and
Western countries. With proliferation, with the relaxation of tension, that proliferation
enables people to get their hands on capabilities that are increasingly powerful, powerful
to the point that you're not talking about thousands, you're talking about multiples of
thousands of people. S We have to recognize the magnitude of the threat and the extent to
which people are willing to give their lives, as these pilots of these airplanes did, and
impose damage on us."
The term "asymmetrical" is common military parlance for terrorism. He is
referring to the fact that terrorism is a military strategy used by the weak against the
strong. He is saying that since Operation Desert Storm demonstrated the overwhelming
military superiority of the United States, our adversaries are looking for asymmetrical
ways to attack us. In other words, it is precisely because the U.S. has become the last
standing world superpower that Islamist fundamentalists are flying airplanes into our
buildings.
What this demonstrates, however, is the absolute irrationality of attempting to achieve
security through "nuclear deterrence" or other forms of military dominance. As
you point out, there is an obvious contradiction between referring to our own arsenal as a
"deterrent" while saying that in other peoples' hands they constitute
"weapons of mass destruction." The reality is that even overwhelming military
superiority cannot make the United States safe.
Q: Although after 9-11 the US govt. went to great pains to stress support for
Arab-Americans, many writers have pointed out that American lives are represented by US
media simply to have more importance and value than those of any other nationality, the
so-called 'unpeople'. Why is this, and to what
extent is this a plainly racist view?
A: Of course it is racist. We're seeing a daily tally in U.S. newspapers of the number of
U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, and every new death is greeted with concern. By contrast,
there has been almost no attempt to even estimate the number of civilian Iraqis killed.
The best estimates available have ranged between 3,000 and 10,000. I haven't seen any
estimates at all of Iraqi deaths from official U.S. government sources, and the only
serious effort that has appeared in the mainstream U.S. press came in June when the
Associated Press reported that it had counted more than 3,000 Iraqi civilians dead,
including nearly 1,900 in Baghad. It wasn't a complete tally, but after they reached 3,240
they stopped counting. And no one even pretends to care about dead Iraqi SOLDIERS, even
though many of them were undoubtedly conscripts and certainly must have had families that
cared about them and mourn their loss. Even if you accept the premise that these deaths
were a reasonable price to pay for liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein, counting the dead
ought to be part of any honest attempt at assessing that cost-benefit equation. The fact
that no one is even attempting to count the dead shows how little concern people really
feel for the Iraqi people. And frankly, I don't think it is reasonable to EXPECT the
American people to care much about the Iraqi people. We've never met them and know nothing
about them. In an abstract, moral sense we certainly ought to care, but the same thing can
be said about people who are starving or dying of AIDS. The reality is that most people
care more about their own hangnail than they do about a million starving people in some
other part of the world, and I don't think this is a uniquely American trait.
Q: Lastly, I think it one of the most fantastic ironies of our time is that unelected
members of think tanks (like the Project for the New American Century and The American
Enterprise Institute) comprise mainly of corporate representatives (and even war
criminals) and they have the ear of policy makers in Bush's administration, who themselves
were not elected but appointed to those positions, in a government that itself wasn't even
fairly elected, and yet the first word out of all their mouths is 'democracy.' Care to
comment?
A: This is a good point. Ironically, the American Enterprise Institute recently made a
very similar point. In June they launched a new web site, NGOWatch.org, as part of a
campaign against nongovernmental organizations, which AEI says "are unregulated,
spared any requirement to account for expenditures, to disclose activities or sources of
funding or even to declare their officers." Rather ironic isn't it, that a these
sorts of complaints would come from a libertarian think tank with enormous political
influence that is itself a nongovernmental organization and that does not publicly
disclose its own institutional funders?
Sheldon Rampton
Editor, PR Watch www.prwatch.org
Author of books including:
Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
Mad Cow USA
Trust Us, We're Experts
Weapons of Mass Deception