[Peace-discuss] Re: More on school as propaganda [2]

[C. G. Estabrook]

[continued from part 1]

In the presidential address to the American Political Science Association
in 1934 William Shepard argued that government should be in the hands of
"an aristocracy of intellect and power," while the "ignorant, the
uninformed and the anti-social elements" must not be permitted to control
elections, as he mistakenly believed they had done in the past. One of the
founders of modern political science, Harold Lasswell, one of the founders
of the field of communications, in fact, wrote in the Encyclopedia of
Social Sciences in 1933 or 1934 that modern techniques of propaganda,
which had been impressively refined by Wilsonian liberals, provided the
way to keep the public in line. Lasswell described Wilson as "the great
generalissimo on the propaganda front." Wilson's World War I achievements
in propaganda impressed others, including Adolf Hitler. You can read about
it in Mein Kampf. But crucially they impressed the American business
community. That led to a huge expansion of the public relations industry
which was dedicated to controlling the public mind, as advocates used to
put it in more honest days, just as writing in the Encyclopedia of Social
Sciences in 1934, Lasswell described what he was talking about as
propaganda. We don't use that term. We're more sophisticated.

As a political scientist, Lasswell advocated more sophisticated use of
this new technique of control of the general pubic that was provided by
modern propaganda. That would, he said, enable the intelligent men of the
community, the natural rulers, to overcome the threat of the great beast
who may undermine order because of, in Lasswell's terms, the ignorance and
superstition of the masses. We should not succumb to "democratic
dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests." The
best judges are the elites, who must be ensured the means to impose their
will for the common good. Jefferson's aristocrats, in other words.

Lippman and Lasswell represent the more liberal, progressive fringe of
opinion which grants the beast at least a spectator role. At the
reactionary end you get those who are mislabelled conservatives in
contemporary newspeak. So the Reaganite statist reactionaries thought that
the public, the beast, shouldn't even have the spectator role. That
explains their fascination with clandestine terror operations, which were
not secret to anybody except the American public, certainly not to their
victims. Clandestine terror operations were designed to leave the domestic
population ignorant. They also advocated absolutely unprecedented measures
of censorship and agitprop and other measures to ensure that the powerful
and interventionist state that they fostered would serve as a welfare
state for the rich and not troubled by the rabble. The huge increase in
business propaganda in recent years, the recent assault on the
universities by right-wing foundations, and other tendencies of the
current period are other manifestations of the same concerns. These
concerns were awakened by what liberal elites had called the "crisis of
democracy," that developed in the 1960s, when previously marginalised and
apathetic sectors of the population, like women and young people and old
people and working people and so on, sought to enter the public arena,
where they have no right to be, as all right-thinking aristocrats
understand.

John Dewey was one of the relics of the Enlightenment classical liberal
tradition who opposed the rule of the wise, the onslaught of the
Jeffersonian aristocrats, whether they found their place on the
reactionary or the liberal part of this very narrow ideological spectrum.
Dewey understood clearly that "politics is the shadow cast on society by
big business," and as long as this is so, "attenuation of the shadow will
not change the substance." Meaning, reforms are of limited utility.
Democracy requires that the source of the shadow be removed not only
because of its domination of the political arena, but because the very
institutions of private power undermine democracy and freedom. Dewey was
very explicit about the antidemocratic power that he had in mind. To quote
him: "Power today" -- this is the 1920s -- "resides in control of the
means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and
communication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the country, even if
democratic forms remain. Business for private profit through private
control of banking, land, industry reinforced by command of the press,
press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda, that is the
system of actual power, the source of coercion and control, and until it's
unravelled we can't talk seriously about democracy and freedom."
Education, he hoped, of the kind he was talking about, the production of
free human beings, would be one of the means of undermining this
absolutist monstrosity.

In a free and democratic society, Dewey held, workers should be the
masters of their own industrial fate, not tools rented by employers. He
agreed on fundamental issues with the founders of classical liberalism and
with the democratic and libertarian sentiments that animated the popular
working class movements from the early Industrial Revolution, until they
were finally beaten down by a combination of violence and propaganda. In
the field of education, therefore, Dewey held that it is "illiberal and
immoral" to train children to work "not freely and intelligently, but for
the sake of the work earned," in which case their activity "is not free
because not freely participated in." Again the conception of classical
liberalism and the workers' movements. Therefore, Dewey held, industry
must also change "from a feudalistic to a democratic social order" based
on control by working people and free association, again, traditional
anarchist ideals with their source in classical liberalism and the
Enlightenment.

As the doctrinal system has narrowed under the assault of private power,
particularly in the past few decades, these fundamental libertarian values
and principles now sound exotic and extreme, perhaps even anti-American,
to borrow one of the terms of contemporary totalitarian thought in the
West. Given these changes, it's useful to remember that the kinds of ideas
that Dewey was expressing are as American as apple pie. They have origins
in straight American traditions, right in the mainstream. Not influenced
by any dangerous foreign ideologies. In a worthy tradition that's ritually
lauded, though it's commonly distorted and forgotten. And all of that is
part of the deterioration of functioning democracy in the current age,
both at the institutional and at the ideological level, in my opinion.

Education is, of course, in part a matter of schools and colleges and the
formal information systems. That's true whether the goal of education is
education for freedom and democracy, as Dewey advocated, or education for
obedience and subordination and marginalization, as the dominant
institutions require. The University of Chicago sociologist James Coleman,
one of the main students of education and effects of experience on
children's lives, concludes from many studies that "the total effect of
home background is considerably greater than the total effect of school
variables in determining student achievement." Actually, about twice as
powerful in effect, he concludes from a lot of studies. So it's therefore
important to have a look at how social policy and the dominant culture are
shaping these factors, home influences and so on.

That's a very interesting topic. The inquiry is much facilitated by UNICEF
study published a year ago called Child Neglect in Rich Nations, written
by a well-known American economist, Sylvia Ann Hewlett. She studies the
preceding fifteen years, the late 1970s up through the early 1990s, in the
rich nations. She's not talking about the Third World but about the rich
countries. She finds a sharp split between the Anglo-American societies on
the one hand and continental Europe and Japan on the other hand. The
Anglo-American model, spearheaded by the Reaganites and Thatcher, has been
a disaster for children and families, she says. The European model, in
contrast, has improved their situation considerably, from a starting point
that was already considerably higher, despite the fact that the European
societies lack the huge advantages of the Anglo-American societies. The
U.S. has unparalleled wealth and advantages, and while the United Kingdom,
Britain, has severely declined, particularly under Thatcher, it has the
economic advantage, at least, of being a U.S. client as well as being a
major oil exporter in the Thatcher years. That's something that makes the
economic failure of Thatcherism even more dramatic as authentic British
conservatives like Lord Ian Gilmour have shown.

Hewlett describes the Anglo-American disaster for children and families as
attributable "to the ideological preference for free markets." Here she's
only half right, in my opinion. Reaganite conservatism opposed free
markets. It did advocate markets for the poor, but it went well beyond
even its statist predecessors in demanding and winning a very high level
of public subsidy and state protection for the rich. Whatever you choose
to call this guiding ideology, it's unfair to tarnish the good name of
conservatism by applying it to this particular form of violent and lawless
and reactionary statism. Call it what you like, but it's not conservatism.
It's not the free market.

However, Hewlett is quite right in identifying the free market for the
poor as the source of the disaster for families and children. And there
isn't much doubt of the effects of what Hewlett calls the "anti-child and
anti-family spirit that's loose in these lands," in the Anglo-American
lands, most dramatically in the U.S., but also Britain. This
"neglect-filled Anglo-American model based on market discipline for the
poor has largely privatised child rearing while making it effectively
impossible for most of the population to rear children." That's been the
combined goal and policy of Reaganite conservatism and the Thatcherite
analogue. The result is, of course, a disaster for children and families.

Continuing, Hewlett points out, "in the much more supportive European
model, social policy has strengthened rather than weakened support systems
for families and children." It's no secret, except of course as usual to
readers of the press. As far as I'm aware, this 1993 study, rather
critically relevant to our current concerns, has yet to be reviewed
anywhere. It's not been, say, featured in the New York Times, although the
Times did devote last Sunday's book review section largely to this topic,
with sombre forebodings about the fall of IQ, the decline of SAT scores
and so on and what might be causing it. Say, in the city of New York,
where the social policies that have been pursued and backed by the Times
have driven about forty percent of the children below the poverty level,
so that they're suffering malnutrition, disease and so on. But it turns
out that is irrelevant to the decline in IQ, as is anything that Hewlett
discusses in this Anglo-American neglect-filled model. What's relevant, it
turns out, is bad genes. Somehow people are getting bad genes, and then
there are various speculations about why this is. For example, maybe it's
because black mothers don't nurture their children, and the reason is
maybe they evolved in Africa where the climate was hostile. So those are
maybe the reasons, and this is really serious, hard-headed science, and a
democratic society will ignore all this at its peril, the reviewer says.
Well-disciplined commissars know well enough to steer away from the
obvious factors, the ones rooted in very plain and clear social policy.
They are perfectly evident to anybody with their head screwed on and
happen to be discussed in considerable detail by a well-known economist in
a UNICEF study that's not likely to see the light of day around here.

The facts are no secret. A blue-ribbon commission of the state boards of
education and the American Medical Association reported, "Never before has
one generation of children been less healthy, less cared for, and less
prepared for life than their parents were at the same age." That's a big
shift in an industrial society. It's only in the Anglo-American societies
where this anti-child, anti-family spirit has reigned for fifteen years
under the guise of conservatism and family values. That's a real triumph
for propaganda. It's one that would very much have impressed even
"generalissimo" Woodrow Wilson, or probably Stalin and Hitler.

A symbolic expression of this disaster is that when Hewlett wrote her book
a year ago, 146 countries had ratified the international convention on the
rights of the child, but one had not: the U.S. That's a standard pattern
for international conventions on human rights. However, just for fairness,
it's only proper to add that Reaganite conservatism is catholic in its
anti-child, anti-family spirit, so the World Health Organization voted to
condemn the Nestle Corporation for aggressive marketing of infant formula,
which kills plenty of children. The vote was 118 to 1. I'll leave you to
guess the one. However, this is quite minor compared with what the World
Health Organization calls the "silent genocide" that's killing millions of
children every year as a result of the freemarket policies for the poor
and the refusal of the rich to give any aid. Again, the U.S. has one of
the worst and most miserly records among the rich societies.

Another symbolic expression of this disaster is a new line of greeting
cards by the Hallmark Corporation. One of them says, "Have a super day at
school." That one, they tell you, is to be put under a box of cereal in
the morning, so that when the children go off to school it says, Have a
super day at school. Another one says, "I wish I had more time to tuck you
in." That's one that you stick under the pillow at night when the kid goes
to sleep alone. [laughter] There are other such examples.

In part this disaster for children and families is the result simply of
falling wages. State corporate policy has been designed for the last
years, especially under the Reaganites and Thatcher, to enrich small
sectors and to impoverish the majority, and it succeeded. It's had exactly
the intended effect. That means that people have to work much longer hours
to survive. For much of the population both parents have to work maybe
fifty to sixty hours merely to provide necessities. Meanwhile,
incidentally, corporate profits are zooming. Fortune magazine talks about
the "dazzling" profits reaching new heights for the Fortune 500 even
though sales are stagnating.

Another factor is job insecurity, what economists like to call
"flexibility in the labour markets," which is a good thing under the
reigning academic theology, but a pretty rotten thing for human beings,
whose fate doesn't enter into the calculations of sober thinking.
Flexibility means you better work extra hours or else. There are no
contracts and no rights. That's flexibility. We've got to get rid of
market rigidities. Economists can explain it. When both parents are
working extra hours, and for most on falling incomes, it doesn't take a
great genius to predict the outcome. The statistics show them. You can
read them in Hewlett's UNICEF study if you like. It's perfectly obvious
without reading them what's going to happen. Contact time, that is, actual
time spent by parents with children, has declined forty percent in the
last twenty five years in the Anglo-American societies, mostly in recently
years. That's actually ten to twelve hours a week of eliminating contact
time and what they call "highquality time," time when you're not just
doing something else, is virtually disappearing. Of course that leads to
the destruction of family identity and values. It leads to sharply
increased reliance on television for child supervision. It leads to what
are called "latchkey children," kids who are alone, a factor in rising
child alcoholism and drug use and in criminal violence against children by
children and other obvious effects in health, education, ability to
participate in a democratic society, even survival, of course decline in
SATs and IQs, but you're not supposed to notice that. That's bad genes,
remember.

None of these things are laws of nature. These are consciously selected
social policies designed for particular goals, namely enrich the Fortune
500 but impoverish others. In Europe, where conditions are more stringent
but policy is not guided by the same anti-family, anti-child spirit, the
tendencies are in the opposite direction and the standards for children
and families are much better.

It's worth mentioning, and let me stress, that this is not just true in
the Anglo-American societies themselves. We're a big, powerful state. We
have influence. It's very striking to notice what happens when other
countries within the range of our influence try to undertake policies that
benefit families and children. There are two striking examples.

The region that we control most completely is the Caribbean and Central
America. There are two countries there that did undertake such policies:
Cuba and Nicaragua, and with considerable success, in fact. Something
which should surprise no one is that those are the two countries that were
primarily targeted for U.S. assault. And it succeeded. So in Nicaragua,
the rising health standards and the improvement in literacy and the
reduction in child malnutrition have been reversed thanks to the terrorist
war that we fought in Nicaragua, and now it's proceeding to the level of
Haiti. In the case of Cuba, of course, the terrorist war has been going on
a lot longer. It was launched by John F. Kennedy. It had nothing to do
with communism. There weren't any Russians around. It had to do with
things like the fact that these people were devoting resources to the
wrong sectors of the population. They were improving health standards.
They were concerned with children, with malnutrition. Therefore we
launched a huge terrorist war. A bunch of CIA documents were just released
recently filling in some of the details of the Kennedy period, which was
bad enough. It continues up to the present. Actually, there was another
assault just a couple of days ago. On top of that there's an embargo to
try to ensure that they'll really suffer. For years the pretext was that
this had to do with the Russians, which is completely fraudulent, as you
can see by what was going on when the policies were instituted and as is
demonstrated conclusively by what happened after the Russians disappeared.
Here was a real job for the bought priesthood. They have to not notice
that after the Russians disappeared we harshened the attack against Cuba.
Kind of odd if the reason for the attack was that they were an outpost of
communism and the Russian empire. But we can handle that.

So after the Russians disappeared from the scene and it really became
possible to strangle them, the conditions got harsher. A proposal was sent
through Congress by a liberal Democrat, Representative Torricelli, calling
for a cutoff of any trade with Cuba by any subsidiary of any American
corporation or any foreign corporation that used any parts produced in the
U.S. That is so obvious in violation of international law that George Bush
vetoed it. However, he was forced to accept it when he was outflanked from
the right by the Clintonites in the last election, so he did then allow it
to go through. That went right to the United Nations, where the U.S.
position was denounced by just about everybody. In the final vote, the
U.S. could pick up only Israel, which is automatic, and they got Rumania
for some reason. Everyone else voted against it. The U.S. position was
defended by no one. It is an obvious violation of international law, as
even Britain and others pointed out. But it doesn't matter. It's extremely
important to carry out our anti-child, anti-family spirit and our
insistence on highly polarised societies everywhere we can go. If any
foreign country under our control tries to go that way, we'll take care of
them, too. That's now continuing. It's the kind of thing you can actually
do something about if you like. In Chicago there is the Pastors for Peace
and the Chicago-Cuba Coalition has another caravan going to Cuba to try to
undermine the embargo and bring humanitarian aid, medicines, medical
books, powdered milk for infants and other assistance. They're in the
phone book under Chicago-Cuba Coalition. You can look them up. Anyone who
is interested in countering the anti-child, anti-family spirit that reigns
here and that we're exporting by violence elsewhere can do that, just as
they can do plenty of things at home.

I should say that the effects of this latest Democratic proposal, which
went through, to strangle Cuba, have recently been reviewed in this
month's issues, October, of two leading American medical journals,
Neurology and the Florida Journal of Medicine, which simply review the
effects. They point out the obvious thing. It turns out that about ninety
percent of the trade that was cut off by the Clinton-Torricelli bill was
food and humanitarian aid, food, medicine and things like that. For
example, one Swedish company which was trying to export a water filtration
device to create vaccines was blocked by the U.S. because there's some
part in it that's American-made. We really have to strangle them badly. We
have to make sure that plenty of children die. One effect is a very sharp
rise in infant mortality and child malnutrition. Another is a rare
neurological disease that's spread over Cuba that everyone pretended they
didn't know the reasons for. But of course they did, and now it's
conceded. It's malnutrition, a disease which hasn't been seen since
Japanese prison camps in the Second World War. So we're succeeding in that
one. The anti-child, anti-family spirit is not just directed against kids
in New York, but much more broadly.

I stress again that the difference in Europe -- it is different in Europe,
and there are reasons for it. One of the differences is the existence of a
strong trade union movement. That's one aspect of a more fundamental
difference, namely, the U.S. is a business-run society to quite an
unparalleled degree, and as a result the vile maxim of the masters
prevails to an unprecedented extent, pretty much as you'd expect. These
are among the means that allow democracy to function formally, although by
now most of the population is consumed by what the press calls
"anti-politics," meaning hatred of government, disdain for political
parties and the whole democratic process. That, too, is a great victory
for the aristocrats in Jefferson's sense, that is, those who fear and
distrust the people and wish to draw all power from them into the hands of
the higher classes. By now that means into the hands of transnational
corporations and the states and quasi-governmental institutions that serve
their interests.

Another victory is the fact that the disillusionment, which is rampant, is
anti-politics. A New York Times headline on this reads, "Anger and
Cynicism Well Up In Voters As Hope Gives Way. Mood Turns Ugly as More
People Become Disillusioned With Politics." Last Sunday's magazine section
was devoted to anti-politics. Notice: not devoted to opposition to power
and authority, to the easily identifiable forces that have their hands on
the lever of decision-making and that cast their shadow on society as
politics, as Dewey put it. They have to be invisible to the commissar
class. The Times has a story today again about this topic where they quote
some uneducated person who doesn't get the point. He says, "Yeah, Congress
is rotten, but that's because Congress is big business, so of course it's
rotten." That's the story you're not supposed to see. You're supposed to
be anti-politics. The reason is that whatever you think about government,
it's the one part of the system of institutions that you can participate
in and modify and do something about. By law and principle you can't do
anything about investment firms or transnational corporations. Therefore
nobody better see that. You've got to be anti-politics. That's another
victory.

Dewey's observation that politics is the shadow cast on society by big
business, which was incidentally also a truism to Adam Smith, has now
become invisible. The force that casts the shadow has been pretty much
removed by the ideological institutions and is so remote from
consciousness that we're left with anti-politics. That's another severe
blow to democracy and a grand gift to the absolutist and unaccountable
systems of power that have reached levels that a Thomas Jefferson or John
Dewey could scarcely imagine.

We have the usual choices. We can choose to be democrats in Thomas
Jefferson's sense. We can choose to be aristocrats. The latter path is the
easy one. That's the one that the institutions are designed to reward. It
can bring rich rewards given the locus of wealth and privilege and power
and the ends that they very naturally seek. The other path, the path of
the Jeffersonian democrats, is one of struggle, often defeat, but also
rewards of a kind that can't even be imagined by those who succumb to the
new spirit of the age, gain wealth, forgetting all but self. It's the same
now as it was 150 years ago when there was an attempt first to drive it
into the heads of the factory girls in Lowell and the craftsmen in
Lawrence and so on. Today's world is very far from Thomas Jefferson's. The
choices it offers, however, have not changed in any fundamental way.
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Document marked up by Ted Clark