De Mainstream Pers 9

Doordat Obama omgeven is door 'amateurs' is de geweldsopbouw tegen Syrie gestokt en zijn de mainstream media nu gedwongen om ddoor hun eigen hysterie heen te prikken en het beleid van Obama in een bredere context te plaatsen, zeker nu bijvoorbeeld ook de International Herald Tribune wel op de voorpagina moet melden dat

Obama fails to win wide support for Syrian strike,

en de Washington Post een voorstaande Amerikaanse generaal laat schrijven dat de aanval op Syrie niets anders is dan:

A war the Pentagon doesn’t want

en wel omdat de Amerikaanse strijdkrachten ondermeer

are embarrassed to be associated with the amateurism of the Obama administration’s attempts to craft a plan that makes strategic sense. None of the White House staff has any experience in war or understands it. So far, at least, this path to war violates every principle of war, including the element of surprise, achieving mass and having a clearly defined and obtainable objective.

http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.nl/2013/09/syria-225.html

Een feit dat de Nederlandse mainstream nog niet door heeft. Op dezelfde voorpagina van vandaag meldt de IHT tevens over het onlogische politieke beleid waar de overgrote meerderheid van de Amerikanen fel tegen is:

Intervention for poison gas, but not other killings. 
Tens of thousands died before chemical attqack that became a 'red line'
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/ihtfrontpage/europefrontpage.pdf

Gezien de houding van de mainstream media in onder andere zulke ingrijpende en verstrekkende zaken als massaal geweld wil ik verder gaan met het geven van de context waarbinnen de commerciele westerse massamedia opereren. Eerder al schreef ik dit erover:

Zondag 8 februari 2009, nadat de Israelische strijdkrachten weer eens een groot bloedbad hadden veroorzaakt onder de Palestijnse burgerbevolking in Gaza schreef ik over de collaborerende rol van de Nederlandse mainstream media:

Als we het over de massamedia hebben, dan hebben we het onvermijdelijk over 'de waarheid', over het feit dat onze massamedia elke dag weer bepalen wat de waarheid is en wat niet. Volgens de ombudsman van de Volkskrant, Thom Meens, 'moet de waarheid ergens in het midden liggen.' De waarheid verandert dus met de dag, aangezien de waarheid de uitkomst is van wat de consumenten bepalen wat de waarheid is. De achterliggende gedachte is: hoe hoger de oplage des te groter de waarheid.

Zie: http://www.volkskrantblog.nl/bericht/240093

Welnu, over die waarheid schreef de journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski in 1988:

‘Sinds de ontdekking dat informatie een product is die torenhoge winsten oplevert, is deze niet meer aan de traditionele criteria van waarheid en leugen onderworpen, maar is ze geleidelijkaan aan volkomen andere wetten ondergeschikt gemaakt, namelijk die van de markt, met hun streven naar steeds hogere inkomsten en naar een monopolie.'

Het gevolg is dat dit soort informatie fundamenteel is veranderd, en daarmee ook de waarheid. Kapuscinski:

'Vroeger had de correspondent van een krant, een persagentschap of de radio eeen hoge mate van zelfstandigheid en het recht op eigen initiatief -- hij zocht informatie, probeerde iets te ontdekken, iets te scheppen. Tegenwoordig is hij een pion die als een schaakstuk wordt verplaatst door zijn baas in de centrale (die zich aan het andere eind van de aardbol kan bevinden). Deze baas beschikt over informatie omtrent de gegeven gebeurtenis uit velerlei bronnen tegelijk, hij kan een heel ander beeld van de gebeurtenissen hebben dan de reporter ter plaatse. Zonder te wachten op de resultaten van het werk van zijn reporter informeert de centrale hem wat men van die gebeurtenis weet, en verwacht van hem louter en alleen een bevestiging dat de situatie er inderdaad zo voor staat als de centrale zich voorstelt.'

Recentelijk bleek dit weer eens toen de Nederlandse commerciele massamedia zichzelf en hun klanten hadden wijs gemaakt dat de Israelische oorlogsmisdaden de schuld waren van Hamas. Groot was dan ook de verbazing toen de correspondenten na het bloedbad van de Israelische strijdkrachten de Gazastrook inmochten en ontdekten dat de Palestijnse bevolking Hamas niet de schuld gaf van de Israelische terreur. De Trouw-redactie schreef verbijsterd: 'De woede van de Palestijnen lijkt zich te richten op Israël, niet op Hamas.'

http://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/wereld/article2011148.ece/Gaza_ontwaakt_in_stof_en_puin_.html'

En die waarheid kon natuurlijk niet, want de Nederlandse massamedia hadden eerder al bepaald dat Hamas de schuldige was. Dus werd door Trouw de free-lance correspondente Jetteke van Wijk op pad gestuurd om alsnog Palestijnen te vinden die Hamas de schuld gaven van de Israelische oorlogsmisdaden. En ja, ze vond er vier en daarmee werd, in ogen van de redactie, de eerdere bewering alsnog gerechtvaardigd. Hetzelfde deden de NRC en de Volkskrant. Alex Burghoorn, die voor het CIDI optreedt en correspondent van de Volkskrant is, werd zelfs op pad gestuurd om te bewijzen dat 'Hamas burgers als menselijk schild [ zou] hebben gebruikt' maar ondanks zijn zoektocht moest hij toegeven dat 'overlevenden [dat] niet bevestigen.'

De waarheid, de werkelijkheid wordt in de centrale bepaald door ideologen, de waarheid, de werkelijkheid wordt niet langer bepaald door journalisten ter plaatse. Die krijgen opdracht een van te voren bepaalde waarheid, werkelijkheid te vinden, zoals Kapuscinski ontdekte.

Ook daarom is internet zo belangrijk geworden. Zo zijn we zijn niet meer afhankelijk van de ideologische berichtgeving van de massamedia, die op jacht zijn naar zo hoog mogelijke winsten.

Maar deze waarheid ontgaat ombudsman Meens, en wel om de simpele reden dat hij anders niet tot ombudsman zou zijn benoemd door zijn werkgever.

http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.nl/2009/02/internet-6.html#comment-form

Uit talloze internationale wetenschappelijke onderzoeken blijken de westerse commerciele massamedia een onmisbaar instrument te zijn voor de disciplinering van de massa. Zonder plooibare opiniemakers zou de macht niet kunnen heersen. De angelsaksische geleerde, wijlen Alex Carey, schreef in de jaren tachtig van de vorige eeuw dat:

Commercial advertising and public relations are the form of propaganda activity common to a democracy... In the 1940s Drew Dudley, then chief of the Media Programming Division of the Office of War Mobilisation and Reconversion, not only observed with satisfaction that ‘advertising is peculiarly American’, but added on a note of (perhaps rather less well founded) pride that ‘Hitler... employ[ed] the technique of advertising during the pre-war and war years, frequently referring to America's advertising during the pre-war and war years in glowing and admiring terms in Mein Kampf, and later utilising advertising's powerful repetitive force to the utmost.’ […]

Contrary to common assumptions, propaganda plays an important role - and certainly a more covert and sophisticated role - in technologically advanced democratic societies, where the maintainandce of the existing power and privileges are vulnerable to popular opinion.

Carey verwijst naar de invloedrijke Amerikaanse politiek wetenschapper Harold Lasswell die in 1927 in een wetenschappelijk standaardwerk over propaganda-technieken had geschreven dat 'vertwijfelde democraten' die niet langer meer in de 'intelligentie van de publieke opinie' geloofden 'should themselves determine how to make up the public mind,' of in de woorden van Lasswell ‘how to bamboozle and seduce in the name of the public good,' waaraan de gezaghebbende Lasswell de conclusie verbond: 'Preserve the majority convention but dictate to the majority.' Een advies dat onmiddellijk door de Amerikaanse heersende klasse werd overgenomen, uit angst voor de emancipatie van de arbeidersklasse.

Propaganda speelt in een parlementaire democratie onvermijdelijk een doorslaggevende rol, omdat geweld alleen in het uiterste geval kan worden gebruikt, omdat – in de woorden van Ortega y Gasset -- ‘men geen heerschappij kan uitoefenen tegen de publieke opinie in.’

De mythe van de democratie moet overeind worden gehouden, als goedkoopste en meest praktische methode om de macht in handen van een elite te houden. Lasswell:

The modern world is busy developing a corps of men who do nothing but study the ways and means of changing minds or binding minds to their convictions. Propaganda... is developing its practitioners, its teachers and its theories. It is to be expected that governments will rely increasingly upon the professional propagandists for advice and aid.

Alex Carey voegde daaraan toe:

Such control through propaganda is, Lasswell concludes, a response to ‘the immensity, the rationality, the wilfulness of the modern world. It is the new dynamic of [a] society... [where] more can be won by illusion than by coercion.’

Op grond van deze feiten concludeerde Carey in de jaren tachtig dat:

for sixty years in the United States propaganda techniques have been developed and deployed to ensure that, though the common man escape the coercive control of political despotism, he will remain manageable in the service of interests other than his own. Domestic propaganda is propaganda directed... inwards to control and deflect the purposes of the domestic electorate in a democratic country in the interests of privileged segments of that society.

Binnen deze vast  omlijnde context operereert elke dag weer de ‘vrije westerse pers,’ zoals zij zichzelf graag afficheert. De commerciele massamedia spelen bij de legitimering van de huidige neoliberale macht een doorslaggevende rol, zoals ook Alex Carey aantoont in zijn boek Taking the risk out of democracy. Corporate Propaganda verus Freedom and Liberty. Vandaar dat u analyses van critici als ik, nauwelijks of niet in de mainstream pers aantreft. Die versie van de werkelijkheid is taboe, ligt ver buiten de officiele consensus over de waarheid van het neoliberale kapitalisme. Dissidenten worden door elk totalitair systeem geweerd, zoals de emeritus hoogleraar aan de prestigieuze Princeton University, Sheldon Wolin, aantoont in zijn in 2008 verschenen studie Democracy Incorporated. Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, waarin hij stelt dat de Verenigde Staten geen democratie is maar ‘has unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined  and virtually unbridled – an inverted totalitarianism.’ Wolin laat zien dat de natie ‘is at best a “managed democracy,” where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst, it is a olace where corporate power no longer answers to state controls, but is instead a close collaborator.’ Wolin beschrijft tevens hoe de regering Obama ondanks de beloften van ‘change we can believe in' in werkelijkheid 'has left the underlying dynamics of managed democracy intact.’                                                                         

De gerespecteerde Amerikaanse geleerde Calmers Johnson schreef over Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated dat het een

comprehensive diagnosis [is] of our failings as a democratic polity by one of our most seasoned and respected political philosophers. For well over two generations, Sheldon Wolin taught the history of political philosophy from Plato to the present to Berkeley and Princeton graduate students (including me; I took his seminars at Berkeley in the late 1950s, thus influencing my approach to political science ever since). He is the author of the prize-winning classic Politics and Vision (1960; expanded edition, 2006) and Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (2001), among many other works.

His new book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism , is a devastating critique of the contemporary government of the United States -- including what has happened to it in recent years and what must be done if it is not to disappear into history along with its classic totalitarian predecessors: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia. The hour is very late and the possibility that the American people might pay attention to what is wrong and take the difficult steps to avoid a national Gtterdmmerung are remote, but Wolin's is the best analysis of why the presidential election of 2008 probably will not do anything to mitigate our fate. This book demonstrates why political science, properly practiced, is the master social science.

Wolin's work is fully accessible. Understanding his argument does not depend on possessing any specialized knowledge, but it would still be wise to read him in short bursts and think about what he is saying before moving on. His analysis of the contemporary American crisis relies on a historical perspective going back to the original constitutional agreement of 1789 and includes particular attention to the advanced levels of social democracy attained during the New Deal and the contemporary mythology that the U.S., beginning during World War II, wields unprecedented world power…

Wolin writes, "Our thesis is this: it is possible for a form of totalitarianism, different from the classical one, to evolve from a putatively 'strong democracy' instead of a 'failed' one." His understanding of democracy is classical but also populist, anti-elitist and only slightly represented in the Constitution of the United States. "Democracy," he writes, "is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs." It depends on the existence of a demos -- "a politically engaged and empowered citizenry, one that voted, deliberated, and occupied all branches of public office." Wolin argues that to the extent the United States on occasion came close to genuine democracy, it was because its citizens struggled against and momentarily defeated the elitism that was written into the Constitution.

"No working man or ordinary farmer or shopkeeper," Wolin points out, "helped to write the Constitution." He argues, "The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete. The republic existed for three-quarters of a century before formal slavery was ended; another hundred years before black Americans were assured of their voting rights. Only in the twentieth century were women guaranteed the vote and trade unions the right to bargain collectively. In none of these instances has victory been complete: women still lack full equality, racism persists, and the destruction of the remnants of trade unions remains a goal of corporate strategies. Far from being innate, democracy in America has gone against the grain, against the very forms by which the political and economic power of the country has been and continues to be ordered." Wolin can easily control his enthusiasm for James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, and he sees the New Deal as perhaps the only period of American history in which rule by a true demos prevailed.

To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: "inverted totalitarianism," a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on "private media" than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events. It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison -- 751 per 100,000 people -- of any nation on Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has "emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation's political traditions."

The genius of our inverted totalitarian system "lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual. A demotion in the status and stature of the 'sovereign people' to patient subjects is symptomatic of systemic change, from democracy as a method of 'popularizing' power to democracy as a brand name for a product marketable at home and marketable abroad. The new system, inverted totalitarianism, is one that professes the opposite of what, in fact, it is. The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed."

Among the factors that have promoted inverted totalitarianism are the practice and psychology of advertising and the rule of "market forces" in many other contexts than markets, continuous technological advances that encourage elaborate fantasies (computer games, virtual avatars, space travel), the penetration of mass media communication and propaganda into every household in the country, and the total co-optation of the universities. Among the commonplace fables of our society are hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds, and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose adepts are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge. Masters of this world are masters of images and their manipulation. Wolin reminds us that the image of Adolf Hitler flying to Nuremberg in 1934 that opens Leni Riefenstahl's classic film "Triumph of the Will" was repeated on May 1, 2003, with President George Bush's apparent landing of a Navy warplane on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to proclaim "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.

On inverted totalitarianism's "self-pacifying" university campuses compared with the usual intellectual turmoil surrounding independent centers of learning, Wolin writes, "Through a combination of governmental contracts, corporate and foundation funds, joint projects involving university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly integrated into the system. No books burned, no refugee Einsteins. For the first time in the history of American higher education top professors are made wealthy by the system, commanding salaries and perks that a budding CEO might envy."

The main social sectors promoting and reinforcing this modern Shangri-La are corporate power, which is in charge of managed democracy, and the military-industrial complex, which is in charge of Superpower. The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. Its primary tool is privatization. Managed democracy aims at the "selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry" under cover of improving "efficiency" and cost-cutting.

Wolin argues, "The privatization of public services and functions manifests the steady evolution of corporate power into a political form, into an integral, even dominant partner with the state. It marks the transformation of American politics and its political culture from a system in which democratic practices and values were, if not defining, at least major contributing elements, to one where the remaining democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled." This campaign has largely succeeded. "Democracy represented a challenge to the status quo, today it has become adjusted to the status quo."

One other subordinate task of managed democracy is to keep the citizenry preoccupied with peripheral and/or private conditions of human life so that they fail to focus on the widespread corruption and betrayal of the public trust. In Wolin's words, "The point about disputes on such topics as the value of sexual abstinence, the role of religious charities in state-funded activities, the question of gay marriage, and the like, is that they are not framed to be resolved. Their political function is to divide the citizenry while obscuring class differences and diverting the voters' attention from the social and economic concerns of the general populace." Prominent examples of the elite use of such incidents to divide and inflame the public are the Terri Schiavo case of 2005, in which a brain-dead woman was kept artificially alive, and the 2008 case of women and children living in a polygamous commune in Texas who were allegedly sexually mistreated.

Another elite tactic of managed democracy is to bore the electorate to such an extent that it gradually fails to pay any attention to politics. Wolin perceives, "One method of assuring control is to make electioneering continuous, year-round, saturated with party propaganda, punctuated with the wisdom of kept pundits, bringing a result boring rather than energizing, the kind of civic lassitude on which managed democracy thrives." The classic example is certainly the nominating contests of the two main American political parties during 2007 and 2008, but the dynastic "competition" between the Bush and Clinton families from 1988 to 2008 is equally relevant. It should be noted that between a half and two-thirds of qualified voters have recently failed to vote, thus making the management of the active electorate far easier. Wolin comments, "Every apathetic citizen is a silent enlistee in the cause of inverted totalitarianism." It remains to be seen whether an Obama candidacy can reawaken these apathetic voters, but I suspect that Wolin would predict a barrage of corporate media character assassination that would end this possibility.

Managed democracy is a powerful solvent for any vestiges of democracy left in the American political system, but its powers are weak in comparison with those of Superpower. Superpower is the sponsor, defender and manager of American imperialism and militarism, aspects of American government that have always been dominated by elites, enveloped in executive-branch secrecy, and allegedly beyond the ken of ordinary citizens to understand or oversee. Superpower is preoccupied with weapons of mass destruction, clandestine manipulation of foreign policy (sometimes domestic policy, too), military operations, and the fantastic sums of money demanded from the public by the military-industrial complex. (The U.S. military spends more than all other militaries on Earth combined. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion; the next closest national military budget is China's at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.)

Foreign military operations literally force democracy to change its nature: "In order to cope with the imperial contingencies of foreign war and occupation," according to Wolin, "democracy will alter its character, not only by assuming new behaviors abroad (e.g., ruthlessness, indifference to suffering, disregard of local norms, the inequalities in ruling a subject population) but also by operating on revised, power-expansive assumptions at home. It will, more often than not, try to manipulate the public rather than engage its members in deliberation. It will demand greater powers and broader discretion in their use ('state secrets'), a tighter control over society's resources, more summary methods of justice, and less patience for legalities, opposition, and clamor for socioeconomic reforms."

Imperialism and democracy are, in Wolin's terms, literally incompatible, and the ever greater resources devoted to imperialism mean that democracy will inevitably wither and die. He writes, "Imperial politics represents the conquest of domestic politics and the latter's conversion into a crucial element of inverted totalitarianism. It makes no sense to ask how the democratic citizen could 'participate' substantively in imperial politics; hence it is not surprising that the subject of empire is taboo in electoral debates. No major politician or party has so much as publicly remarked on the existence of an American empire."

From the time of the United States' founding, its citizens have had a long history of being complicit in the country's imperial ventures, including its transcontinental expansion at the expense of native Americans, Mexicans and Spanish imperialists. Theodore Roosevelt often commented that Americans were deeply opposed to imperialism because of their successful escape from the British empire but that "expansionism" was in their blood. Over the years, American political analysis has carefully tried to separate the military from imperialism, even though militarism is imperialism's inescapable accompaniment. The military creates the empire in the first place and is indispensable to its defense, policing and expansion. Wolin observes, "That the patriotic citizen unswervingly supports the military and its huge budgets means that conservatives have succeeded in persuading the public that the military is distinct from the government. Thus the most substantial element of state power is removed from public debate."

It has taken a long time, but under George W. Bush's administration the United States has finally achieved an official ideology of imperial expansion comparable to those of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms. In accordance with the National Security Strategy of the United States (allegedly drafted by Condoleezza Rice and proclaimed on Sept. 9, 2002), the United States is now committed to what it calls "preemptive war." Wolin explains: "Preemptive war entails the projection of power abroad, usually against a far weaker country, comparable say, to the Nazi invasion of Belgium and Holland in 1940. It declares that the United States is justified in striking at another country because of a perceived threat that U.S. power will be weakened, severely damaged, unless it reacts to eliminate the danger before it materializes. Preemptive war is Lebensraum [Hitler's claim that his imperialism was justified by Germany's need for "living room"] for the age of terrorism." This was, of course, the official excuse for the American aggression against Iraq that began in 2003.

Many analysts, myself included, would conclude that Wolin has made a close to airtight case that the American republic's days are numbered, but Wolin himself does not agree. Toward the end of his study he produces a wish list of things that should be done to ward off the disaster of inverted totalitarianism: "rolling back the empire, rolling back the practices of managed democracy; returning to the idea and practices of international cooperation rather than the dogmas of globalization and preemptive strikes; restoring and strengthening environmental protections; reinvigorating populist politics; undoing the damage to our system of individual rights; restoring the institutions of an independent judiciary, separation of powers, and checks and balances; reinstating the integrity of the independent regulatory agencies and of scientific advisory processes; reviving representative systems responsive to popular needs for health care, education, guaranteed pensions, and an honorable minimum wage; restoring governmental regulatory authority over the economy; and rolling back the distortions of a tax code that toadies to the wealthy and corporate power."

Unfortunately, this is more a guide to what has gone wrong than a statement of how to fix it, particularly since Wolin believes that our political system is "shot through with corruption and awash in contributions primarily from wealthy and corporate donors." It is extremely unlikely that our party apparatus will work to bring the military-industrial complex and the 16 secret intelligence agencies under democratic control. Nonetheless, once the United States has followed the classical totalitarianisms into the dustbin of history, Wolin's analysis will stand as one of the best discourses on where we went wrong.

http://www.alternet.org/story/85728/inverted_totalitarianism%3A_a_new_way_of_understanding_how_the_u.s._is_controlled

Voor meer van Chalmers Johnson zie:

http://home.planet.nl/~houck006/johnson.html

http://www.stanvanhoucke.net/audioblog/pivot/entry.php?id=16#body

Om de werkwijze van de ‘vrije westerse pers’ te kunnen begrijpen moet de lezer en kijker de hierboven beschreven context weten. Men dient de cultuur te begrijpen waarbinnen de journalistiek opereert. Anders is het absurde gebrek aan logica van de mainstream media niet te verklaren. Meer daarover later.