"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
-H. L. Mencken
Mencken was a certainly a worthy scold.
I heard recently on an (excellent, you should get it if you do any driving) book-on-tape of "Only Yesterday" by F. L. Allen about the 1930's that Mencken had tremendous following in all the newspapers, and reactions from the White House. Kind of like Will Rogers a bit later.
Our current Beltway Bandits are above such scolds, they're in the rarefied atmosphere of direct-to-the-brain media malice by the 3 remaining media conglomerates (or whatever small number it is).
Your Chomsky link says it is essential to conceal the facts, otherwise Americans would take a very different course than the administration and Congress are now taking. That must be why NC draws such harsh criticism:
"...as long as people, ordinary people, are able to free themselves from the doctrinal controls imposed on them by their self-appointed betters and mentors, as long as they're able to do this, they'll continue to be able to struggle for peace and justice and freedom and limitations on violence, and constraints on power, as they've been doing for hundreds of years. And I don't see any end to that. Where it'll end up in the long run, I'd tell you where I'd like it to, but I wouldn't even dream about that.
NC: The immediate problem is to free ourselves from the shackles imposed, very consciously, by the kind of people you're talking about. Who don't want the facts to be known. And for very good reasons. Because if people know the facts they aren't going to tolerate them. So therefore you have to prevent them from knowing. You have to indoctrinate them, you have to tell them stories about how we're really good guys, and if we use violence, it must be for the general good because we represent the course of history.
NC: That's the job of propagandists, for power and violence, and it's the task of populations to free themselves from those kinds of controls and domination.
http://cbc.ca/programs/sites/hottype_chomsky911.html |
