Part Two: BREAKING THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION
by Stefan Schindler
Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
How do wars start? Politicians lie to journalists, then believe what they read.
Karl Kraus
The battles of the Sixties may someday come to seem merely an early skirmish in a conflict whose dimensions we have yet to grasp.
Mike Marqusee
President Donald Trump makes a telling point when he refers to the mainstream news media as “fake news.” There’s a lot of truth in his accusation, the dimensions of which ought to be honestly explored. Behold: those dimensions have indeed been explored, with awesome authenticity and shocking revelations, by Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Lewis Lapham, and Noam Chomsky, all of whom ought to have won a Nobel Peace Prize and a Pulitzer Prize for Literature. They have long been denied such recognition. Had their insights been widely discussed in the U.S. “marketplace of ideas,” Nixon, Reagan, Cheney-Bush and Trump would never have risen to the heights of power.
The elephantiastical lies of the Republican Party – for example: American-trained death squads in Central America are “freedom fighters;” Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons; global warming is a “liberal hoax;” mega-tax-breaks for the mega-rich will make everybody happy and secure – such lies too often succeed thanks to a criminally complicit Democratic Party, a mainstream news media owned by a handful of Republican oligarchs, an historically illiterate citizen population who (in Noam Chomsky’s astute observation) “don’t know they don’t know,” and an educational system designed primarily to ignorate, manipulate, stupefy and confuse.
When President Trump slings his accusation of “fake news” at American journalists – usually exempting the Fox News Network owned by right-wing Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, and championed by Newt Gingrich – he only does so in order to lie about his lies.
And why not? It worked for Ronald Reagan, who turned “liberal” into a dirty word, perpetuating the myth of America’s “liberal media.”
That Gingrich and Murdoch succeeded in turning American political discourse into a poisonous swamp is largely the fault of the traditional American mainstream news media, which perpetuates the ignoration that is the primary function of American education.
Thomas Jefferson recognized the problem, noting: “A country cannot long remain ignorant and free.” American citizens have lost more freedoms than they know, thanks to the most unpatriotic act in American history: the post-9/11 Congressional passing of the unread 340 pages of the Cheney-Bush “USA Patriot Act.”
Democracy cannot survive the shredding of civil rights, nor can it long endure sophistry and deception. It might be worthwhile, then, to pause a moment to reflect upon the words truth and trust. In his book On the Meaning of Human Being, Richard Oxenberg notes:
The English word ‘truth’ is related to the Middle English ‘troth,’ whose principal meaning is ‘trust’ (to be-troth someone … is to enter into a relation of trust ….) A truthful account, then, is one that is maximally trustworthy. … That Plato had [such an] understanding of truth is evident from his association of the true and the good. [The true is good – has maximal value – because it is worth our trust.]
To restore truth and trust in American social discourse and electoral politics, it is necessary to oppose the Weapons of Mass Dysfunction – deception, distortion, distraction – employed by the National Security State to bind its citizens with chains of illusion.
Let us give profound thanks that progress toward honesty and enlightenment is now being made. Although fraught with danger, and subject to abuse, the internet has nevertheless become a major instrument for awakening, as evidenced by websites like Common Dreams, Political Animal Magazine, and Engaging Peace.
This is a timely breakthrough in communication, enhancing solidarity among peacemakers and justice-seekers in the present conflict-ridden crucible of history.
John Le Carre provides context:
In our supposed ideological rectitude, we sacrificed our compassion to the great god of indifference. We protected the strong against the weak, and we perfected the art of the public lie. We made enemies of decent reformers and friends of the most disgusting potentates. And we scarcely paused to ask ourselves how much longer we could defend our society by these means and remain a society worth defending.
Having been betrayed by a corrupt political system, we are now in the early stages of America’s third Civil War. The second Civil War was embodied in The Spirit of The Sixties, when the civil rights and anti-war movements – quietly but greatly aided by Harry Belafonte and Marlon Brando – coalesced into an anti-establishment revolution, emphasizing peace, justice, gender rights, Earth Day, holistic health, nuclear disarmament, egalitarian economics, and authentically edifying education.
The Reagan counter-revolution succeeded in crushing that national outburst of activism, hope, and pragmatic idealism. It was aided in doing so by the pseudo-liberal wing of the Democratic Party, embodied in the Trilateral Commission, which in 1975 published The Crisis of Democracy. The crisis? Citizen activism in the body politic, hoping to influence a government supposedly “of, by, and for the people.” Citizen participation in the functioning of democracy was, and still is, considered outrageous by what C. Wright Mills called “the power elite.”
Yet citizen activism was the origin and impetus for the American Revolution; for the anti-slavery “abolitionist” movement; for the women’s-right-to-vote “suffragette” movement; and for the 1960s and 1970s anti-war and civil rights movements. Today, with an echo of Thomas Paine’s “these are the times that try men’s souls,” citizen insistence on a just society remains our only hope for democracy, peace, and ecological sanity.
To engage or not to engage in self-education, global citizenship, and active resistance to the forces of mega-wealth and tyranny – that is the question which every citizen now faces, and upon which the future of our children and grandchildren depends.
Stefan Schindler is the co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection; a Board Member of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey; and author of America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War. His forthcoming book is entitled Buddha’s Political Philosophy.
