[Peace-discuss] The politics behind the presidential campaign

[C. G. Estabrook]

The United States is a very free country, in fact it's the freest country in the
world. I don't think freedom of speech, for example, is protected anywhere in
the world as much as it is here. But it's a very managed society, it's a
business-run society, carefully managed, with strict doctrinal requirements and
no deviation tolerated - this would be too dangerous.  One of the reasons it's
too dangerous is that the political establishment, both political parties and
the political class, is, on many major issues, well to the right of the
population. On health care, for example, the population is to the left of the
establishment, and has been so forever. And the same is true for many other
issues. So, permitting issues to be discussed is threatening, and permitting
deviation from a kind of party line is dangerous and has to be carefully controlled.

One of the reasons for the extraordinary pressure of consumerism, which goes
back to the 1920s, is the recognition by the business world that unless it
atomizes people, unless it drives them to what it calls the "superficial things
of life, such as fashionable consumption," the population may turn on them.
Right now, for example, about 80% of the U.S. population believes that the
country is, in their words, run by "a few big interests looking out for
themselves," not for the benefit of the population. About 95% of the population
thinks that the government ought to pay regular attention to public opinion. The
degree of alienation from institutions is enormous. As long as people are
atomized, worried about maxing out their credit cards, separated from one
another, and don't hear serious critical discussion, the ideas can be controlled.

Popular opinion in the United States has been very well studied, mainly because
the business classes, who run the country, want to have their finger on the
public pulse - for the purpose of control and propaganda. You can only hope to
control people's attitudes and opinions if you know a lot about them, so we know
a lot about public opinion. In the last election, 2004, most Bush voters were
mistaken about his views on major issues - not because they're stupid or
uninterested, but because the elections are a marketing system. This is a
business-run society: you market commodities, you market candidates. The public
are the victims and they know it, and that's why 80% think, more or less
accurately, that the country is run by a few big interests looking after
themselves. So people are not deluded, they just don't really see any choices.

  The Obama phenomenon is an interesting reaction to this. Obama's handlers, the
campaign managers, have created an image that is essentially a blank slate. In
the Obama campaign the words are hope, change, unity - totally vacuous slogans
said by a nice person, who looks good and talks nicely - what commentators call
"soaring rhetoric" - and you can write anything you like on that blank slate. A
lot of people are writing on it their hopes for progressive change. In the
campaign, as the Wall Street Journal correctly notes, issues have received
little attention. Personal characteristics are the key element. It's character
that's up front.

The support for Obama is a popular phenomenon, and I think it reflects the
alienation of the population from the institutions. People are grasping at a
straw: here's a possibility that maybe somebody will stand up for what they
want. Even though he's not saying so, he looks like the kind of person who might
do it. It's quite interesting to look at the comparisons that are made. Obama is
compared to John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan - Kennedy and Reagan were media
constructions, Reagan particularly. He probably didn't even know what the
policies were, but he was a creation of the media. He wasn't particularly
popular, incidentally, but the media created the image of this wonderful cowboy
who would save us, and so on and so forth.

The Kennedy administration was more in control; they were the first ruling group
to understand the power of television and they created a kind of charisma
through good public relations: the image of Camelot, this marvelous place, with
wonderful things happening, and a great president. When you look at the actual
actions, it's grotesque. Kennedy is the president who invaded South Vietnam and
launched a major terrorist war against Cuba, and we could go on and on about it.
His administration was responsible for establishment of the Brazilian neo-Nazi
dictatorship. The coup took place right after Kennedy's assassination, but the
ground was prepared by the Kennedys and led to a horrible plague of repression
over Latin America, and on and on. But the image of Camelot is there, and
imagery is very important when you are trying to control a dissident population.

The United States is far from a fascist country, but the similarity to fascist
propaganda techniques is quite striking, and it's not accidental. The Nazis
explicitly, consciously, and openly adopted the techniques of American
commercial advertising, and said so. They took a few simple ideas, stressed them
over and over again, and made them look glamorous - that was the technique of
American commercial advertising in the 1920s and it was the model that the Nazis
explicitly adopted, and it's the model of business propaganda today.

The Obama phenomenon, I think, reflects the alienation of the population that
you find in the polls: 80% say the country is run by a few big interests. While
Obama says we are going to change that, there's no indication of what the change
is going to be. In fact, the financial institutions, which are his major
contributors, think he's fine, so there's no indication of any change. But if
you say "change," people will grasp at it; you say "change" and "hope," and
people will grasp at this and say, OK, maybe this is the savior who will bring
about what we want, even though there is no evidence for it.  So I think the
Obama phenomenon and people's alienation go hand in hand.

McCain is another example of very effective propaganda-creation imagery. Suppose
there was a Russian pilot who was bombing civilian targets in Afghanistan and
was shot down and tortured by the American-run Islamic fanatic terrorists there.
Would we say he's a war hero? Would we say he's an expert in strategic and
security issues, because he was a bomber of civilian targets? We wouldn't. But
this is the image that's been created of McCain. His heroism and his expertise
and strategy are based on the fact that he was bombing people from 30,000 feet
and he was shot down. It's not nice that he was tortured, it shouldn't have
happened, it was a crime, and so on. But that doesn't make him a war hero or a
specialist in foreign policy. That's all a public relations creation. The public
relations industry is a huge industry, very sophisticated. Probably something
like a sixth of the gross domestic product goes into marketing, advertising, and
so on, and that's a core element of society. It's the way you keep people
separated from one another, subdued, and focused on something else. And this is
explicit and, as I say, it's all discussed in public relations propaganda.

McCain may be worse than Bush. He doesn't say much, because you're not supposed
to say much about issues, but the few things he has said are pretty frightening.
He could be a real loose cannon.

I suppose Europeans are also writing what they want on the blank slate. And it's
no secret that they feared and disliked Bush. The American establishment itself
was afraid of Bush. Bush came under unprecedented criticism even from officials
of the Reagan administration, and from the mainstream generally. For example,
when his national security strategy was announced in September 2002, calling for
preventive war, virtually announcing a war in Iraq, immediately, within weeks,
there was a major article in Foreign Affairs (the main establishment journal)
condemning what they called the New Imperial Grand Strategy - not on principle,
but because it would be harmful to the United States. And there has been a lot
of criticism of the Bush administration as extremist, if not at the far extreme
of radical nationalism, and McCain is probably in the same territory. Obama very
likely would move back to the center-right, where the Clinton administration was.

The Bush doctrine itself, the doctrine of preventive war - you know, brazen
contempt for our allies and so on - is an interesting example. The doctrine,
however, was not new. Clinton's doctrine was even worse, taken literally.
Clinton's doctrine officially was that the United States has the right to use
force to protect access to markets and resources, and that's more extreme than
the Bush doctrine. But the Clinton administration presented it politely,
quietly, not in a way that would alienate our allies. The Europeans couldn't
pretend they didn't hear it - of course they knew it and, in fact, European
leaders probably approved of it. But the arrogance, brazenness, extremism, and
ultra-nationalism of the Bush administration did offend the mainstream center in
the United States and Europe. So, there's a more polite way of following the
same policies.

Every presidential candidate, including Obama, says we must maintain the threat
of force against Iran, keep the options open. It happens to be in violation of
the U.N. Charter, but elite opinion takes for granted that the United States
should be an outlaw state so nobody comments on that. But this is not what the
public wants. The large majority of the public says we should not make threats,
we should enter into diplomacy. The large majority, about 75%, of the public,
holds that Iran has the same rights as any signer of the non-proliferation
treaty: the right to enrich uranium for nuclear power but not for nuclear
weapons. And, strikingly, a very large majority of the public thinks we should
support a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region, including Iran, Israel, and
the American forces deployed there. That happens to be Iranian official policy,
too, and, in fact, the United States and England are officially committed to
this position, though the facts are unmentionable. When the U.S.-U.K. tried to
construct a thin legal cover for their invasion of Iraq, they appealed to U.N.
Security Council Resolution 687 in 1991, which called on Iraq to eliminate its
weapons of mass destruction, and they claimed it had not done so. That much was
publicized, but not the fact that the same Resolution commits the signers to
move to establish a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East (Article 14).
But no candidate can even mention this possibility. If the United States were a
functioning democracy in which public opinion influenced policy, the very
dangerous confrontation with Iran might well be settled peacefully.

Also, consider Cuba. For 45 years the United States has been dedicated to
punishing Cubans - we have the internal documents from the Kennedys and so on to
show it. We've got to punish the Cuban people because of their "successful
defiance" of U.S. policies going back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. The Monroe
Doctrine established the United States' right to run the hemisphere. The Cubans
are successfully defying that, so the population must be punished by a very
substantial war, a terrorist war. This aim wasn't concealed. Arthur Schlesinger,
the semi-official biographer of Robert Kennedy and a Kennedy adviser, says that
Robert Kennedy was put in charge of bringing "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba.
This was his prime responsibility. They were fanatical about it - also about
bringing economic strangulation to punish the Cuban population for its misdeed.
What does the U.S. public think about this? In polls taken since the 1970s,
about two-thirds of the public says we should enter into normal diplomatic
relations with Cuba, just as the rest of the world does. But the fanaticism of
the establishment includes the whole spectrum here - the Kennedys, the ones who
started it, along with others. No political candidate will ever mention it.

  The same is true for a host of other issues. So the United States should be an
organizer's paradise. I think the possibilities for the left are extraordinary,
and that's one reason for the clamping down on opinion, on expression of
attitudes, and so on. And, in fact, the country has a pretty activist
population. There are now probably more people involved in activism on one
serious issue or another than in the 1960s. It's just kind of subdued, and
atomized. There are many popular movements that never existed in the past. Take,
say, the solidarity movements with the third world: that's something totally new
in the history of European Imperialism, and it came from mainstream America in
the 1980s. Rural churches, evangelicals, people from the mainstream, thousands
of people, were going to Central America to live with the victims of Reagan's
terrorist wars, to help them, to try to protect them, and so on; and this was
thousands or tens of thousands of people. One of my daughters is still there, in
Nicaragua. This has never happened before in the history of Imperialism. Nobody
from France went to live in an Algerian village to help the people, to protect
them from French atrocities. It wasn't even an option that was considered,
during the Indochina wars either, apart from a very scattered few. But in the
1980s this developed spontaneously - not in the elite centers, so you didn't
find it in Boston, but in rural Kansas and Arizona, and it's now spread all over
the world. So you have Christian peace-keepers, and heaven knows who else.
Another very important new development is the international global justice
movement, which is called, ridiculously, "anti-globalization"...

--from an interview with Noam Chomsky by Vincent Navarro, 13 May 2008
(Full text at <http://zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18257>)