11/29/2007

Laundry of Brain but effective that in Dictatorships

The writer Noam Chomsky of the USA speaks of the mechanisms behind the modern communication, government's essential instrument in the democratic countries, as important for our governments as the propaganda it is to a dictatorship.   
  
By Daniel Mermet - Diplomatique Hulls Him   
DMK: Let us begin with the matter of the media. In France, in May of the 2005, with occasion of the referendum on the treaty of the European Constitution, most of press organs was in favor of the yes, and however 55% of the French voted for the no. Then, the power of manipulation of the means doesn't seem absolute. Would that vote of the citizens represent an also not to the means?   
  
NC: The work on the manipulation of the means or the factory of the consent made by Edgard Herman and I don't approach the question of the effects of the means in the public [1]. it is a complicated matter, but the few investigations that deepen in the topic they suggest that, in fact, the influence of the means is more important in the most educated population's fraction. The mass of the public opinion seems less tributary of the speech of the means.   
  
Let us take, for example, the eventuality of a war against Iran: the North Americans 75% estimates that United States should put an end to its military threats and to privilege the search of an agreement for diplomatic roads. You interview carried out by western institutes they suggest that the Iranian public opinion and that of United States also converges in some aspects of the nuclear question: the crushing majority of the population of the two countries esteem that the area that extends from Israel to Iran should be totally clear of nuclear, understood devices of war those that possess the North American troops of the region. Now then, to find this type of information in the means, it is necessary to look for a lot of time.   
  
As for the main political parties of the two countries, none defends this point of view. If Iran and United States were authentic democracies in whose interior most really determined the public politicians, the current dispute on the nuclear thing would be already without a doubt resolved. There are this way other cases.   
  
In what refers, for example, to the federal budget of United States, most of North Americans want a reduction of the military expenses and an increase, on the contrary, in the social expenses, credits granted to the United Nations, he/she helps economic and humanitarian international, and lastly, the annulment of the drops of taxes decided by the president George W. Bush in favor of the richest taxpayers.   
  
In all these matters the politics of the White House is completely contrary to the public opinion. But the surveys that you/they reveal this persistent public opposition are rarely published in the means. That is to say, to the citizens they are not had solely remote of the centers of political decision, but they are also maintained in the ignorance of the real state of this same public opinion.   
  
A relative international restlessness exists to the abysmal double deficit of United States: the commercial deficit and the deficit. Now then, these alone one exists in narrow relationship with a third deficit: the democratic deficit that doesn't stop to be deepened, not only in United States, but in a more general way in the group of the western world.   
  
Every time that is asked to a journalist it shatters or to a bearer of a great television journalist if it suffers of pressures, if it has passed him that they censor it, he answers that it is totally free that expresses their own convictions. How does the control of the thought work in a democratic society? In what concerns to the dictatorships we know it.   
  
When they are asked to the journalists, they respond immediately: "Nobody has pressed me, I write what I want". it is certain. Only that if they took positions contrary to the dominant norm, they would no longer write their editorials. The rule is not absolute, certainly; to myself it happens me that they publish me in the North American press, United States is not neither a totalitarian country. But anyone that doesn't satisfy certain minimum demands doesn't have opportunity some of reaching commentator's level with own house.   
  
It is on the other hand one of the big differences between the system of propaganda of a totalitarian State and the way of proceeding in the democratic societies. Exaggerating a little, in the totalitarian countries, the State decides the line that should be continued and then all should be adjusted to this. The democratic societies operate otherwise. The " line " is never enunciated as such, on he/she understands. You proceeds, somehow, to the laundry of brains in freedom". AND even the passionate debates in the big means are located in the mark of the spoilt implicit parameters, which have in their margins numerous contrary points of view.   
  
The system of control of the democratic societies is very effective; it instills the line guideline like the air that he/she breathes. One neither he/she notices, and he/she sometimes imagines to be in front of a particularly vigorous debate. In the bottom, it is much more rendidor that the totalitarian systems.   
  
Let us take the case of Germany for example at the beginning of the years 30. We have tendency to forget it, but it was then the most advanced country in Europe, it was to the head as regards art, of sciences, of technical, of literature, of philosophy. Then, in very little time there was a complete setback, and Germany became the most murderous State, the most terrible in the human history.   
  
Everything that was carried out distilling fear: of the Bolsheviks, of the Jews, of the North Americans, of the gypsies, in synthesis, of all those that, according to the Nazi, they threatened the heart of the European civilization, that is to say the direct heirs of the Greek civilization". in any event it was what the philosopher wrote Martin Heidegger in 1935. Now then, most of German media that you/they bombarded the population with messages of this gender used the techniques of on marketing to point… for the North American publicists.   
  
Let us don't forget how it is always imposed an ideology. To dominate, the violence is not enough, a justification of another nature is needed. This way, when a person exercises her power on another -trátese of a dictator, a colonist, a bureaucrat, a husband or a pattern -, you/he/she always requires of an ideology that justifies it, the same one: this dominance is made by the good of the one dominated. In other words, being possible always presents as altruistic, disinterested, generous.   
  
When the violence of State is not enough   
  
In the years 30, the rules of the Nazi propaganda consisted, for example, in choosing simple words, to repeat them without rest, and to associate them to emotions, feelings, fears. When Hitler invaded the Sudetes (in 1938), it was invoking the noblest and charitable objectives, the necessity of a humanitarian intervention to impede the ethnic cleaning suffered by the germanófonos and to allow that all could live under the wing protector of Germany, with the support of the power of more advanced of the world in the field of the arts and of the culture.   
  
As regards propaganda, if in certain way anything has changed from Athens, there has been at least quantity of improvements. The instruments have been tuned a lot, in particular in the countries more free of the world: the United Kingdom and United States. It is there, and not in another side, where the modern industry of public relationships, that is to say the factory of the opinion, or the propaganda, was born in the years 1920.   
  
Indeed, those two countries had progressed as regards democratic rights (I vote of the women, freedom of speech, etc.) to such a point that the aspiration to the freedom could no longer be contained alone for the violence of the State. They veered, because, toward the technologies of the factory of the consent". The industry of the public relationships takes place, in literal sense, consent, acceptance, submission. It controls the ideas, the thoughts, the spirits. In relation to the totalitarianism it is a great progress: it is much more pleasant to suffer a publicity that to be in a room of tortures.   
  
In United States the freedom of speech is protected until a degree that I find unknown in any country of the world. It is very recent. In the years 1960 the Supreme Court raised the very high bar by word of mouth as regards respect of the freedom, what expressed, according to my opinion, an established fundamental principle from the XVIII century for the values of the Illustration. The position of the Court was that the word was free, having for only limitation the participation in a criminal act. If, for example, when I enter to a store to rob her, one of my accomplices has a he/she arms and I tell him it Shoots!, that end is not protected by the Constitution. Apart from this, the reason should be particularly serious so that the freedom of speech is questioned. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this principle in favor of the Ku Klux Klan.   
  
In France, in the United Kingdom and I find that in the rest of Europe, the freedom of speech is defined in a more restrictive way. For me, the essential question is: is the State entitled the of determining what the historical truth is and the one of punishing who moves away from her? To think in he/she ends being adjusted to a properly Stalinist practice.   
  
The French intellectuals find difficult to admit that that it is their inclination. However, in the rejection of an approach they should not have this way exceptions. The State should not have half some of punishing anyone that seeks that the sun rotates around the Earth. The principle of the freedom of speech has something very elementary: or he/she is defended in the case of opinions that is hated, or he/she is not defended for anything. Hitler and Stalin even admitted the freedom of speech of those that shared their point of view…   
  
I add that there is something that worries and even scandalous in discussing these topics two centuries after Voltaire who, like one knows, he/she declared: " I would defend my opinions until the death, but he/she would give my life so that you could defend his. " To adopt one of the fundamental doctrines of their executioners, it is to do a sad favor to the memory of the victims of the holocaust.   
  
In one of their books, you commented the sentence of Milton Friedman: "To produce earnings is the same essence of the democracy"…   
  
To tell the truth, the two things are in such a contrary way that there is not even possible comment… The purpose of the democracy is that people can decide her own life and to make the political elections that concern him. The realization of earnings is a pathology of our societies, embedded to structures matters. In a decent society, ethics, this concern for the gain would be marginal. Let us take my university department (in the Technical Institute of Massachussets MIT): some scientists work five pesetas to make a lot of money, but they are considered a little as marginal, perturbed people, almost pathological cases. The spirit that encourages to the academic community is rather the one of trying to make discoveries for intellectual interest but also for the well-being of all.   
  
In the work that is dedicated in the Éditions of L'Herne, Jean Ziegler writes: "There have been three totalitarianisms: the totalitarianism estaliniano, Nazi and is Tina now (initials of There is non alternative, there is not alternative), proposed by Margaret Thatcher outlining the ineluctable character of the neoliberal capitalism that is not another thing that a possible globalization form). would you Compare those three totalitarianisms?   
  
I would not put them in the same plane. To face against " Tina " is to confront an intellectual company that you cannot assimilate to the concentration fields neither the gulag. And, in fact, the politics of United States raises a massive opposition to planetary scale. Argentina and Venezuela have expelled to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). United States should give up what was still twenty or thirty years ago the norm: the military blow in Latin America. The program economic neoliberal that has been imposed to the force to all Latin America in the years 1980 and 1990, nowadays is rejected in the group of the continent. He/she is this same opposition against the economic globalization to world scale.   
  
The movement for the justice that is low the fires of the projectors of the means during each World Social Forum, he/she works in fact the whole year. It is a very new phenomenon in the history that marks the International beginning of a true one maybe. Their main battle horse is in the existence of an alternative solution. On the other hand, how better example of different globalization that the World Social Forum? The hostile means call to those that are opposed to the neoliberal globalization the anti world", when in fact they combat for another globalization, the globalization of the towns.   
  
One can observe the contrast among some and other because in the same moment, he/she takes place in Davos, the World Economic Forum that works for the planetary economic integration, but in the only interest of the financiers, of the banks and of the pension funds. Powers that also control the media. It is their conception of the global integration, but to the service of the investors. The dominant means consider that this integration is somehow the only one that deserves, the official denomination of globalization.   
  
There is a good example of the operation of the ideological propaganda here in the democratic societies. It is effective to such an extent that even the participants in the Forum Social World cup sometimes accept the bitchy epithet of anti wolrd". In I Behave Cheerful, I intervened in the mark of the Forum, and I participated in the World Conference of the Peasants. Them alone they represent most of the population of the planet…   
  
To you he/she is located in the category of the anarchists or of the liberal socialists. In the democracy just as you does conceive it, which would the place of the State be?   
  
We live in this world, not in an imaginary universe. In this world tyrannical institutions exist, those they are the big companies. It is what there is nearer to the totalitarian institutions. These don't have, to tell it so to surrender him you count the public, to the society; they act to the depredador way whose preys would be other companies. To defend of them, the populations only have an instrument: the State. Now then, this it is not a very effective shield, because, in general, it is closely bound to the predators. With a non despicable difference: while, for example, General Electric doesn't have to surrender bills, the State should sometimes be explained before the population.   
  
When the democracy has gotten wider to the point that the citizens control the production means and of exchange, participate in the operation and in the address of the general mark in which live, the State could disappear then little by little. It will be replaced by voluntary associations located in the work places and where people live.   
  
The soviets?   
  
They were the soviets. But the first thing that Lenin and Trotski destroyed immediately after the revolution of October, they were the soviets, the labor advice and all the democratic institutions. Lenin and Trotski to this respect were the worst enemies in the socialism in the XX century. As long as orthodox Marxists, estimated that a society atrazada like the Russia of its time could not pass directly to the socialism before being precipitate to the force in the industrialization.   
  
In 1989, to the moment of the sinking of the communist system, I thought that this sinking, paradoxically, represented an even victory the socialism. Because the socialism just as me conceives it, or at least I respect it, it implies the democratic control of the production, of the exchanges and of the other dimensions of the human existence.   
  
Anyway, the two main propaganda systems have come to an agreement to say that the tyrannical system instituted by Lenin and Trotski, later become political monstrosity by Stalin, era the " socialism ". The western leaders were not able to but being loved by this absurd and scandalous use of the term that has allowed them during decades to defame the authentic socialism.   
  
With identical enthusiasm, but of contrary sense, the Soviet propaganda system has tried to explode in its profit the sympathy and the commitment that raised for many workers the authentic socialist ideals.   
  
It is not certain that all the autoorganization forms according to the anarchist principles have finished collapsing?   
  
There is not "fixed anarchist principles, a luck of liberal catechism to the fidelity should be lent. The anarchism, at least as me I understand it, it is a movement of the thought and of the human action that looks for to identify the structures of authority and of dominance, to request them that they are justified and, since they are unable, what happens frequently, to try to overcome them.   
  
Far from being had sunken the anarchism, the liberal thought, it is flourishing. It is in the source of numerous real progresses. Forms of oppression and of injustice that you/they were recognized hardly, and they less even combatted, they are no longer admitted. It is an achievement, an advance for the group of the mankind, not a failure.

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