Rebellion or Acquiescence

The following scenario might have taken place in 1968 in the United States, or Paris, or Prague.

            A few would-be revolutionaries meet at a sidewalk café, and over espresso light the spark of rebellion. Meetings are held, ideas are expressed and articulated and parried and regurgitated; pamphlets are published; events take place, and the media takes notice. So does the clandestine belly of the state beast. The passionate minority take to the streets; violence and chaos ensues, the status quo appears to be threatened. The media and government propaganda machine springs into action, vilifying the voices of change at every turn. Military units are called in to quell the disorder, and suppression finds retaliation. Those in the silent majority that might have felt pangs of sympathy toward the expressed grievances of the vocal minority, remain silent. The media and academy reflect on events, perhaps a few textbooks are rewritten, but the history is largely white-washed. Meeting places are surveilled and closed down. For a while, identity checks are stepped up. The world returns to normal. All the commotion, and what is the result? The status quo is retained. And the media and government pat themselves on the back, as another rebellion is quashed.

For two hundred and thirty five years, almost the entirety of our history, Americans have mostly stopped short of the kind of rebellion that brought about the creation of our republic. Of course, there are always a few individuals who are willing to be bloodied, jailed or even die for their cause. However, the relative modicum of comfort that most Americans enjoy, regardless of the economic uncertainty that envelops the majority of the working class and poor today, prevents them not only from seeking redress through revolutionary means themselves, but also makes them squeamish when seeing others protest. These attitudes are often accompanied not only by complete apathy toward the political process and those who participate in it, but also a palpable disdain for community organizing or involvement.

What makes so many Americans turn away or rail against revolutionary ideology? Most would offer simple explanations, such as a “conservative mindset” that views protestors as ungrateful and misguided at best, dirty and traitorous at worst. It should not be difficult for a young protestor today, at least one that knows history, to understand why they are looked upon with some indulgence, if not reviled. They need only read about or see how those in most vocal opposition to the Vietnam War, or those who rallied for social justice in that era, were treated and how they are remembered. As we shall see, part of the problem is that most Americans do not know their history; both those who demonstrate passivity and incredulity toward protestors and movements, but also the protestors themselves, who often do not understand the roots of so-called “conservative backlash.” In light of the burgeoning “Occupy” movement taking hold throughout the world, it is instructive to examine these roots, and why the same forces that checked rebellion in the 60s, using the same methods, are out in force to try to eliminate the Occupy phenomenon and ensure that those who have always demonstrated indifference towards the political process, remain on the sidelines.

The question of why so many Americans are apathetic on the subject of politics, or even the issues that affect them and their neighbors on a local or personal level, is a concern (though an indirect concern) of MIT professor of linguistics Noam Chomsky, who has reported extensively on the antiwar movements both in the Vietnam era and the more recent conflicts in the Middle East, as well as the use of propagandistic language. Chomsky might say that we need look no further than the advertising and public relations industries and their activities starting in the 1920s, for the origins of passivity. They learned their lessons and received their marching orders from the state. In his research into the origins of twentieth-century propaganda campaigns, Chomsky found that the United States and Britain founded state propaganda agencies during World War I.  The goal of Britain’s “Ministry of Information” was to “control the thought of the world” and particularly “American intellectuals, who could reasonably be expected to be instrumental in bringing the U.S. into the war” (Chomsky, 2002). U.S. President Woodrow Wilson formed the “Committee on Public Information,” which proved enormously successful in turning a “country of pacifists into hysterical jingoists and enthusiasts for war against the savage Huns” (Chomsky, 2002).

The success of these programs caught the attention of both Adolf Hitler and the American business community; one using it to win on the propaganda front leading up to and during World War II, the other utilizing its power to “shape attitudes and beliefs” (Chomsky, 2002); both targeting the civilian populations of their respective countries with a propaganda onslaught unparalleled in world history at the time. A founder of the PR industry, Edward Bernays, commented in his industry manual Propaganda, “it was the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind” (Chomsky, 2002). Soon government and industry enlisted the assistance of esteemed journalists such as Walter Lippman, also a member of Wilson’s propaganda office, to advance their agenda. Lippman called for nothing less than “the manufacture of consent,” aiding business and the state in unleashing a tidal wave of warlike propaganda designed to “put the public in its place” (Chomsky, 2002). In a disturbing precursor to contemporary political rhetoric, Lippman writes “the general public are ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” whose function in a democracy is “to be spectators, not participants” (Chomsky, 2002). Apart from the fact that this statement would not represent a dictionary definition of democracy, let alone any sensible person’s understanding of the concept, Lippman’s invective finds its contemporary companion in Dick Cheney’s dismissal of the American public’s growing opposition to the Iraq war; when told that two-thirds of Americans felt the war was not worth fighting, Cheney’s one word response: “So?” (Raddatz, 2008) Mr. Cheney clearly subscribes to the “regimentation of the public mind” playbook, meddlesome outsiders be damned! That citizens in a supposedly functioning democracy might temporarily forget their place in the world and state an opinion is but a minor inconvenience to people like Cheney and Lippman.

Bernays and his allies in business and government set to work on their grand designs. In order to indoctrinate the public to the proper state of passivity, creating “artificial wants and imagined needs” (Chomsky, 2002) was required. This work was big business starting in the 1920s. Manuals of the time stated that industry should seek to create a “philosophy of futility” and “lack of purpose in life” (Chomsky, 2002). They hoped to do this by finding ways to “concentrate human attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption” (Chomsky, 2002).  These leaders sought no less than the brainwashing of the American public to be mindless consumers. The delivery system or systems for this conditioning have taken many forms across the decades, from print media to radio, television to the internet, and their persistence and ubiquitous nature have made both advertising and the means in which it is delivered, as much as the products they present to us, insuperable parts of the zeitgeist. Today this is arguably most evident in the exalted status and fascination with commercials on Super Bowl Sunday. Talk around the water cooler is not necessarily about the products advertised during the big game (as many people do not remember the merchandise peddled), but the slapstick humor employed in the ads. Perhaps Marshall McLuhan did not have this sort of phenomenon in mind when he famously stated, “the medium is the message,” (McLuhan, 1964) as his “message” had more to do with the unintended consequences of new technology, while the argument put forth here is that the consequences have always been intended; those of passivity and disinterest to anything but the most superficial aspects of life.

The advertising and public relations industries, with ample assistance from government, launched their campaign with a flourish in the late 1920s with the ascendancy of radio. As Mark Pendergrast points out in “Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed our World,” in 1929 “Americans spent $842 million on new radios, a 1,000 percent increase from seven years earlier”(Pendergrast, 1999). Almost every one of those radios was tuned to “The Amos and Andy Show,” which was initially sponsored by Pepsodent toothpaste. Because food and drug products were impervious to the vagaries of the Depression, soon products like Maxwell House coffee were the “prominent sponsors of shows featuring entertainment industry titans such as Bob Hope and Gloria Swanson” (Pendergrast, 1999). The business/government /advertising alliance had their hook; not only were products promoted by well-known show business names, but the most popular items included addictive or habit forming properties (coffee, cigarettes, coca-cola), ensuring a steady stream of consumption regardless of the country’s economic realities.

During the Second World War, high-level US planners began devising ways to indoctrinate Americans to lives of conspicuous consumption, while simultaneously drawing up military plans and foreign policy doctrines addressing the need to protect the way of life that they envisioned. Young American men returning home from war overseas had the GI Bill waiting for them; a chance to educate themselves in order to move into the middle class in short order. Access to VA home loans also proved a boon to the post-war economy, as this hastened the move of millions of families to the newly created suburbs that saw its beginnings in places like Levittown, New Jersey (almost entirely white, as blacks were mostly denied access to housing outside of urban centers). Government programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, with its rural electrification projects, and later the Interstate Highway System, a means of more effective transport of goods, provided good-paying jobs to returning vets and graduates benefiting from the GI Bill. The burgeoning middle class now had the means to purchase all the products that were advertised to them through the new medium of television. Never in the history of mankind could a more effective means of indoctrination and propaganda be conceived, as we shall examine later. Television proved to be the major spur to post-war consumer activity. The 1950s saw the largest percentage increase in economic activity in world history, and American consumers had the purchasing power to realize not only their own dreams of upward mobility, but also the business/government/advertising alliance’s hopes for a placated, passive public, all the while boosting the bottom line of virtually every sector of the corporate community. These achievements in prosperity and material comfort, coupled with the invidious potential of television, would prove the underpinnings of the “conservative backlash” that met the social upheaval in the two decades that followed.

While many Americans were indulging in the fruits of a newfound prosperity unimaginable just a half-decade before, with what could easily be described as a patriotic fervor (consumption is good for the country and thus patriotic), the 1950s also saw the confluence of political and economic doctrines which, while appearing to work independently of one another, were in fact quite compatible in aiding the advance of what became known as the Military Industrial Complex and the Cold War, with the concomitant engendering of collective public mindset around an unquestioning, authoritarian brand of patriotism. According to Noam Chomsky, high-level government officials, during and immediately following World War II, “delineated a “grand area” that the U.S. was to dominate, including the Far East and Middle East, with its all-important energy resources” (Chomsky, 2011). President Dwight Eisenhower recognized the Middle East as “the most strategically important area in the world” and “probably the richest economic prize in the world” (Chomsky, 2010). Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, American military, strategic and foreign policy has adhered to these goals. In fact, the “Clinton Doctrine” extended these strategies by declaring that the U.S. “is entitled to resort to unilateral use of military power to ensure uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources” (Chomsky, 2004). Unbeknownst to the vast majority of the American public then and now, U.S. military power was projected in the form of CIA-backed military coups in the Middle East (1953, Iran) and Central and South America (1973, Chile), these being just two of many examples; and, of course, intervention and eventual invasion of Vietnam, which was in keeping with the “domino theory” that communist (i.e. Soviet) influence in strategic markets would play out like an avalanche if left unchecked, a Cold War “card” that is played when convenient even today. The American people may be blissfully unaware of this history of intervention (or the largely market-based reasons for intervention or invasion), but the peoples of the countries affected by these policies show no such compunction to willful ignorance; they know their history and act (and vote) accordingly, a situation problematic for today’s American policy makers and their allies. Thus, it should come as no surprise that in poll after poll, whether in the Middle East or Latin America, the U.S. is regarded as a greater threat to peace than the likes of Iran or Cuba.

While these plans were carried out largely under the radar of the American public, a future Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, began training his students at the University of Chicago in his theory of “Economic Shock Treatment.” In her startling account of a half century of economic “shock and awe,” “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” Naomi Klein documents how anyone who stood in the way of the United States and its allies exploitation of the resources (human and otherwise) of countries all over the globe, found themselves disappeared, tortured and killed in the name of the “free market.” A quote from Friedman encapsulates his doctrine: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change” (Klein, 2007). Friedman’s disciples from the Chicago School gang advised military coups in Argentina and Chile, among others (Friedman himself met with General Pinochet when his military junta took power) and continue to spread their pernicious ideology today, though not without considerable resistance, particularly in Latin America.  Moreover, the rise of democratically-elected leftist governments in that region of the world can be seen as a direct response to the decades of violence and repression which at its core are closely connected to Milton Friedman’s “pure market capitalism.” Unfortunately for the poor people in these corners of the globe (and the people who advocated and fought for them), Friedman’s policies could not take hold democratically, as only a shocking crisis (coups, natural disasters, etc) could bring about the necessary submission. After a crisis, when a state is at its most vulnerable, government planners, advised by Friedman disciples (often natives who studied under Friedman in Chicago) swoop in and destroy anything resembling a social safety net, while privatizing everything in their path; extremely unpopular measures to the majority who elected  socialist leaders such as Salvador Allende, who had improved conditions for the poor in Chile in the three years before his assassination at the hands of a CIA-sponsored death squad. One may ask, how is this connected to American apathy? Because, for nearly fifty years the American public has been led to believe that our intentions in foreign policy and use of force are benign, that we are fostering democracy in all corners of the globe, and that any resistance to this mission is communism or socialism, and therefore evil; the populace not able to make the important distinction between Stalin’s communism and a social welfare state in 1973 Chile which bears striking resemblance to much of Western Europe today. If you believe your country is morally right, you will support its policies and hold anyone who opposes them in severe contempt. It was relatively easy to foster these beliefs in the 1950s, the country still alive with the warm glow of appreciation for our righteous leaders and brave soldiers of World War II and Korea. However, the 1960s ushered in an era where some Americans, particularly students, not only found fault with the official story, but were willing to challenge that story and the leaders who sang its praises.

“….Americans have more often made photography partisan. Pictures got taken not only to show what should be admired but to reveal what needs to be confronted, deplored – and fixed up.” –Susan Sontag

At the dawn of the 1960s, the presidential election featuring John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon proved a harbinger for how the mass media would shape public opinion, both for liberals and conservatives and even those who were inclined not to choose sides. Kennedy’s youthful charm and good looks contrasted Nixon’s sweaty, tired countenance during the much-discussed television debates of the 1960 election that were likely the impetus to propel Kennedy to the White House; few would argue that JFK was the first “television president,” as he became expert at using the medium to full effect, in short order. And though Kennedy’s assassination is often viewed as the event most responsible for the politicization of the generation coming of age at this time, one could easily argue that the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, taking place months before JFK’s murder, played an equally important role in newfound political awareness. Photographs of Duc’s death, a protest of the Diem regime in South Vietnam, were widely disseminated and certainly a hot topic of conversation on campuses worldwide; in fact, this incident was one of the first television images associated with the war in Vietnam. Within a year of these events, the Free Speech Movement began at the University of California at Berkeley, and an era of protest and political unrest commenced.

The ability of the media, particularly television, to shape the political discourse is the thrust of Edward P. Morgan’s “What really happened to the 1960s.” The premise of Morgan’s text is worth quoting in full; He argues that:

 “the mass media of the sixties era helped to invite and spread that era’s protest activity, but they did so on terms reflecting broader structures of which they were part. As a result, they simultaneously helped to shape, marginalize, and ultimately contain protest movements. Along with the powerful ideological voices who enjoy significant, if not dominant, access to the media, they have been the major facilitators of our diversionary politics and warlike discourse ever since” (Morgan, 2010).

Morgan provides as evidence, among many others, the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. He notes that the protestors, in response to obvious police brutality inflicted upon them, chanted “The whole world is watching.” Morgan says, “The protestors, confident that television coverage of police brutality would turn viewers against the police, found that in fact the majority of the American public responded by siding with the police” (Morgan, 2010). Jerry Rubin said, “Television creates myths bigger than reality” (Copeland, 2010). When portraying violence, the media in general and television in particular focus on the most sensational; the lone violent protestor, for example, which simultaneously satisfies a viewer’s voyeuristic bloodlust and helps them to rationalize their opposition to protest and revolutionary ideology, though it may ultimately be in their interest to side with a populist stance. In this way, television serves both the purpose of concentrating the public’s attention on the superficial aspects of life (consumerism), while also creating a mindset of an oppositional stance to dissent through framing of events that concurrently entertain and appall. Much of the generation which grew up during the depression and were the first to enjoy the spoils of the 1950s growth of middle class prosperity, found the 1960s protestors to be dirty, ungrateful hippies that simply needed to be silenced, get a job and wave the flag. The conservative backlash, or what Nixon referred to as “the silent majority,” only came to oppose the war because of the perceived waste of American human and financial capital in a primitive country they also viewed as ungrateful, with no regard for the toll of the war on the Vietnamese. These notions are arguably best reinforced in images such as an August 1967 Time Magazine cover photo showing an American soldier walking alongside an injured Vietnamese child with the caption, “To Keep a Village Free,” or the horrific footage of the aftermath of the My Lai massacre. Essentially we were there to give them the freedom to be consumers like us, which is extremely difficult to achieve when your country is napalmed and bombed to bits by its so-called liberators. This ideology can be found four decades later in the current call to “spread democracy,” which of course is precisely what World War II planners envisioned, if one is willing to concede substituting  the terms “free markets” and “capitalism” for democracy.

“I admit it – the liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.” – William Kristol, New Yorker, May 22, 1995

Which brings us to the present, with the War on Terror, the “Made for Television” Gulf War of 1991, and the invasion to “liberate” Iraq. Our contemporary political discourse contains all the elements I have introduced previously in a toxic boil of apathy, mindless consumerism, hatred toward “the other” and jingoistic isolationism. This sorry state of societal affairs made the work of convincing the American public and its representatives in congress that invading the sovereign country of Iraq was a good idea, a relatively facile endeavor. To accomplish the task, the Bush administration employed their old friends in television, who in recent years had become frighteningly competent at propaganda, primarily due to the advent of 24-hour cable news and the consolidation of media in the hands of a powerful few moguls. As Jerry Mander points out in his long-forgotten but important work, “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” the very nature of the technology (television), “with the light constantly flickering upon our retinas, causes a state of hypnosis; not in the usual sense of a catatonic feeling, but much like a passive mental attitude, and since there is no way to stop the images, one merely gives over to them. Thinking only gets in the way” (Mander, 1977). With this sort of technology in the hands of people who eagerly employ political pundits who will dissemble, distort and lie to advance their ideology, the war machine had virtually no opposition. Once the invasion was complete and the “Mission Accomplished” banners came down, the media went to work demonizing any domestic opposition to American policies. This demonization was and is still directed primarily at the academic community and public intellectuals, providing the opportunity for champions of neo-conservatism to engage in a double-whammy of destruction of the commons; tearing down public education, which has always had a very tenuous hold on the foundations of our democracy, and silencing dissent, or at least destroying the reputations of those who dare question the status quo and uphold one of the lynchpins of a free republic. Henry Giroux points to “a growing sentiment on the part of the American public that people who suggest that terrorism should be analyzed, in part, within the context of American foreign policy should not be allowed to teach in the public schools, work in government, and even make a speech at a college” (Giroux, 2003). If any “mission” has been accomplished, it is that which has kept the majority of the American people blissfully unaware of the atrocities committed in their name, and for the sake of “protecting our way of life.” George W. Bush encouraging Americans to “go shopping” as a collective response to the terror attacks of 9/11, demonstrates perfectly how materialism and apathy have not only created a passive public, but one full of fear as well. Dick Cheney infamously said, “The American way of life is non-negotiable,” to which I would counter with a quote from Henry Giroux: “Is it utopian to believe that humans are capable of democratic conversation that builds toward a wider democratic future, or is it utopian to believe that the global system can continue to forge ahead on its current destructive path because its flaws will be effectively eclipsed by some as yet unforeseen technological fix?” (Giroux, 2003). Perhaps the American way of life is non-negotiable, but it is also unsustainable.

“Since memory is actually a very important factor in struggle…if one controls people’s memory, one controls their dynamism. And one also controls their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles.” –Michel Foucault

One of the definitions assigned to conservatism is “reluctance to change.” The conservative backlash that the media/government/business alliance formulated starting in the 1920s, strengthened and implemented in the 1960s, and still uses with great effect today, contains as one of its strongest pillars, fear of change. One of my favorite unattributed quotes is “When we seek permanence, that’s when our troubles begin.” We have become an apathetic, complacent, fearful society. The Occupy Movement has shown us many things, but chief among them are that the conservative backlash is still powerful (protestors still characterized as dirty and lazy) and that Americans long for permanence without struggle, revolutionary or otherwise. It is much easier to be a consumer than a citizen, and we have essentially handed over the keys of citizenship, of participatory democracy, to our corporate masters. Our memory has been erased, if it was ever there to begin with. It will be fascinating to see if the Occupy Movement can mobilize enough of our passive consumers to become citizens for the first time, before it’s too late.

References

Chomsky, N. (2002). On nature and language. Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press.

Chomsky, N. (2004). Understanding power. New York. The New Press.

Chomsky, N. (2010). Hopes and prospects. Chicago. Haymarket Books.

Foucault, M. (1996). Film and popular memory, in Foucault live (Interviews, 1961-1984), New York: Semiotext (e), p. 127. French original 1974.

Giroux, H. (2003). The abandoned generation: Democracy beyond the culture of fear. New York. Palgrave MacMillan.

Mander, J. (1977). Four arguments for the elimination of television. New York. William Morrow.

Morgan, E.P. (2010). What really happened to the 1960s: How mass media culture failed American democracy. Lawrence, KS. University Press of Kansas.

Sontag, S. (1977). On photography. London. Picador Macmillan.