U.S. Stood by as Indonesia Killed a Half-Million People, Papers Show
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It paints a vivid picture of the media consistently doing the government's* bidding by painting our mass murdering allies as heroes, while massively amplifying minor crimes committed by those we consider enemies (e.g. Communists). And they do this knowingly, too, by ignoring or outright silencing dissenting voices (like Chomsky's).
Really opened my eyes to how propaganda actually works.
It's not the overt stuff you see from the early 20th century. Instead it's subtle but pervasive omission and exaggeration of facts.
* They do the same for advertisers, too, not just the government. Which is why people like Harvey Weinstein can call up the NYT and get a disparaging story erased.
Further, The NYT had favorably reviewed books that denied the Khmer Rouge, and as late as 1990 published editorials denying that governments human rights abuses as being statistically insignificant[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial].
I think that this has less to do with manufacturing consent and instead realizing that the New York times isn't a bastion of truth but rather a flawed human organization that often makes terrible mistakes.
"American-made imports reached a high point in 1930, when approximately 25 percent of Soviet imported goods came from the United States. (..) By 1931, there were 134 signed technical aid agreements, the vast majority of them with American companies, servicing virtually every branch of the economy (...) General Electric had been eager to reenter the Russian market as early as 1922 to prevent German competitors from preempting it. Their granting of credits for up to five years, credits which were not guaranteed by the United States government, caused a sensation in the United States and signaled greater willingness by capitalist firms to take risks in the Soviet market (...) In 1913, there had been only some 600 tractors in all of Russia, mostly of German make; by 1930, there were 60,000, three quarters of them manufactured in the United States."
https://sci-hub.cc/https://www.jstor.org/stable/178483
And of course, 1933 was when Roosevelt officially recognized the USSR.
Additionally, the United States had joined a military Intervention in the Russian Revolution against the Bolsheviks (we sent almost 11,000 troops). As such relations between the two countries could not reasonably be considered friendly before recognition. [2]
Finally, The United States had gone through the First red scare just 10 years prior to the articles being written. As such it's unlikely that the U.S. Populace had an overwhelmingly positive view of the country. [3]
Whereas the two had a strong trade relation as you pointed out, the countries were very adversarial and as such I believe it is incorrect to imagine that the NYT's strings were pulled to show the USSR in a positive light.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty#Reporting_the_1...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Rus...
In any case, the model described by Chomsky applies mostly to post-WW2 media, as the newspapers and radio channels really began to grow and concentrate, fueled by the flourishing advertising industry. Whether the NYT in 1930 fit the model is not very relevant.
Why do Chomsky and his fellow believers point to such massive hard-to-prove examples like the Vietnam War to argue systemic and planned bias between media, business, and government? Why not more everyday examples, such as news outlets' ubiquitous coverage of violent crime. As someone who's worked to procure crime data from local jurisdictions to publish for the newspaper, I can tell you that bureaucrats and businessfolks most definitely do not like publicizing this information, or emphasizing crime events, because it's bad for business, particularly real estate.
News organizations most likely have killed stories/beats for not wanting to anger real estate developers, especially developers who happen to rub elbows with the publishers and top editors. Yet if this is a systematic issue, why is the media at a local level so incompetent when it comes to managing the happiness of the local business community when it comes to crime and corruption stories? Many reporters at top-tier institutions like NYT started at local/regional outlets. Do they all have a come-to-Jesus talk with the publisher as part of joining the elite, nationally powerful outlets?
Chomsky's position was basically that we must discount reports of genocide because they are coming from a biased western media.
Not to normalize the atrocities but I think you can generalize and say that we should expect any government to be doing the same. The issue with the US is purely the hypocrisy.
Looking at a distant country denying its crimes when they're denounced daily from the pages of our newspapers might be unnerving, but doesn't affect us. Knowing that part of what we actually believe, or our own news sources tell us, is propaganda, is much more enraging.
I know this is a highly charged topic, but that makes it more important to follow the guidelines, not less.
"My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that: namely, I can do something about it. So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences.
"It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century."
That doesn't apply at all to the US failing to denounce e.g. Indonesia.
I mean by that logic people will believe Marx belongs to the realm of evil thinkers because history proves that a political theory is "dangerous".
History and politics is built on nuance and precise facts, not some broad idea of how to define an ideology. Ideology can be shaped in any form and is subject to interpretation, that's why it belongs to the realm of propaganda.
I'm not defending communism nor those leaders, but saying "communism is evil because mao and stalin were murderers" is just poor argumentation.
Must be a nice life.
If Hitler murders 5 Million and Stalin murder 5 Million, we substract Hitler vom Stalin and End up with zero million. Nothing ever happened! So all we need, is enough crimes to substract from our owns, and we get away with clean hands.
And there i was muder was bad, when all i had to do, was get my muder victims family to shoot back in the general direction and hit somebody.
PS: Mugabe, Pol-Pot, Mao, Stalin are all crimes, where the US did not intervene.
It's only a crime because a victor chose to label it so, a different victor would have labeled a different thing the crime, it's all quite arbitrary in the end.
Phillip K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle is a very interesting thought experiment in that regard.
As enjoyable and gripping as the Amazon show might be, having the same show set in our reality would mean you'd be rooting for a couple of Neo-Nazis trying to revive the Third Reich. Would such a show still be as enjoyable to us? I doubt it.
Now, if the major news organizations don't publish something newsworthy but inconvenient for powerful people, they can be sure that it's going to show up on Twitter, or Facebook, or Wikileaks, or Reddit, or Breitbart, or HuffPo, or Gawker, or Hacker News, or somewhere. And if it's outrageous enough, it'll spread virally and the consequence will be that the media companies that missed it will look stupid, not that the information won't get out there.
"When President Donald Trump closed a nearly $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia on Saturday, his deputies’ spirits soared...The weapons sale was one of the largest in history, totaling close to $110 billion worth of tanks, artillery, radar systems, armored personnel carriers, and Blackhawk helicopters. The package also included ships, patrol boats, Patriot missiles, and THAAD missile defense systems. Much of that military hardware will likely be pressed into service in the Saudi fight against its neighbor Yemen, where more than 10,000 people have been killed over more than two years of heavy airstrikes and fighting."
[Edit: It's worth noting that those used to be only details we'd hear: who's a communist, who's a radical and who's a moderate, which individual people are monsters or the best hope for the country. To say the Chomsky critiques apply here is... a stretch. We got one story either essentially right or are making new mistakes.]
It's for sale, but increasingly the buyers are not the USG anymore.
So do we fear the devil we know or the one we don't see yet?
Think of it as a separate axis.
i don't know that these are directly comparable. it's like comparing a car's length to a truck's height. there may be some correlation, but they are distinct things.
No, it's not. Both are about flattening of power distribution vs. concentration of power distribution.
In this respect, ANTIFA and alt-right white-nationalists have a lot more in common than they'll admit.
It's true that just as both those seeking a broader distribution of power and those seeking to move it from the aristocracy to the mercantile class shared a small degree of common interest in the downfall of feudalism, the anarchocommunists and other leftists at the heart of Antifa and the White Nationalists in Trump's base might have something of a common opponent in at least some segment of the current cosmopolitan corporate elite, but that is a weak and transitory common interest, and their general interests are fundamentally in near-polar opposition.
The commonality between the anti-fascists (or whatever they want to call themselves) and white-nationalists is neither weak nor transitory. Their common enemy is liberal democracy, and their preferred strongmen will not always necessarily be different. Take a glance at places like Serbia and Russia to see this in action.
Back to the original point though, I think progressive vs conservative is not a useful basis with which to analyze these movements.
Further, I question the sincerity of the progressive commitment to equality, since the mob comes after anyone who points to data that don't support their apocalyptic narrative.
I thought the NYT was the outlet that broke the Weinstein scandal?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/insider/sexual-harassment...
The story I reported never ran.
After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included
having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to
vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my
head at the Times, the story was gutted.
I was told at the time that Weinstein had visited the
newsroom in person to make his displeasure known. I knew
he was a major advertiser in the Times, and that he was
a powerful person overall.
But I had the facts, and this was the Times. Right?
Wrong. The story was stripped of any reference to sexual
favors or coercion and buried on the inside of the Culture
section, an obscure story about Miramax firing an Italian
executive. Who cared?
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/09/harvey-weinstein-sh...
To summarize: He doesn't remember the conversation in which he allegedly argued that Weinstein wasn't a worthy public topic. And he never met with Weinstein at the Times, as Waxman claims. So it's her word against his. But we can as outsiders consider these assertions:
> Landman also questioned why “if the Times had been intent on protecting Weinstein, wouldn’t it be odd to send a reporter to pursue this story on two continents, at considerable time and expense?’
From the NYT's response (from the current exec editor, who wasn't at the NYT in 2004):
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/reader-center/dean-baquet...
> I’m sure Ms. Waxman believes she had a story. But if you read her own description, she did not have anything near what was revealed in our story. Mainly, she had an off-the-record account from one woman.
That's not to say that Waxman isn't right on a certain principle: stories don't need to face direct opposition to be "killed". If the NYT had been more open to the idea of Weinstein being a serial abuser, they would have given her more time and resources to pursue evidence that would eventually lead to on-the-record testimony and other hard evidence.
But that's not what you said. You simplified all of the NYT's (and others') inaction to an evil villain picking up a phone and making a threat. What do you mean that the current story came about because "it became absolutely impossible to ignore"? Do you think that it all started with tweetstorms from recent victims? The first story in NYT's investigation involved incidents that were decades old. Meaning that nothing became "impossible to ignore" -- ignoring was the status quo for decades. It's very difficult to square your assertion with the fact that the NYT would've needed to throw considerable money at this investigation to even get it off the grounds.
Sorry to be an apologist for the NYT, but your simplification does a bit of injustice to what the victims faced in the Weinstein scandal, as if they had been complaining on-the-record and openly for decades and they were ignored because of an elite conspiracy. It appears that what they faced was even worse, threats from their own industry and massive personal shame to the point that it was just easier to keep quiet and sign non-disclosure agreements than to speak out about injustice. And Waxman herself would probably agree to this, as she left the NYT to found her own media outlet, which until the NYT's investigation, seems to have completely ignored Weinstein's scandalous history.
In the case of the Indonesia massacre, it's very possible/likely that it was a story that news organizations didn't push hard enough to investigate. That's not at all inconceivable, especially as we see media organizations outright shutting down because of lack of money. But giving your argument the benefit of the doubt, that the media is "consistently doing the government's bidding", then why was it the media that rooted out the Pentagon Papers and the My Lai massacre (the NYT and Sy Hersh specifically for the latter) and published photos that contributed heavily to the public's disillusionment with the war?
But to the greater point: it seems ironic to simplify things into a media conspiracy because of something you read from a Chomsky book, in a thread about an article that hints (based on a recently declassified document) at how perversely/tragically complicated world politics is, even in the face of a massacre. To the smaller issue of media complicity, I'd completely agree that that media organizations have the capacity to act maliciously, or at least be too slow/unprepared to respond to injustice. But that's a result of media organizations -- similar to governments -- being complicated. To reduce the factors of a worldwide tragedy to the consequences of a S.P.E.C.T.R.E. caricature pulling all the strings, ultimately does not help in helping people remember history in order to avoid repeating it.
edit: I gave Waxman more benefit of the doubt before she recently came to the defense of Matt Damon, who was getting criticized as being complicit to the alleged killing of Waxman's story:
https://twitter.com/sharonwaxman/status/917821882556022786
And yet Waxman, an experienced reporter who was writing for her website (i.e. no constraints from ink/paper limits, or overreaching editors), wrote this about Damon:
> The story I reported never ran.
> After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted.
There is no way you intentionally write that about Damon and Crowe, without adding a caveat (e.g. "to vouch for Lambardo as a colleague, though I never asked them about the sexual abuse allegations"), unless you intend to amplify the drama of your own story, i.e. Hollywood's pressure on Waxman. That she only absolves Damon after he gives his side of the story makes me think that she might exaggerate the amount of real evidence she had on Weinstein in 2004 (evidence, again, that she sat on for 12+ years, as someone whose entire livelihood is reporting on Hollywood). But I do agree that the NYT columnist she wrote in response to is "sanctimonious" [0]. Even if that columnist, and his editors, were unaware of Waxman's 2004efforts, they do have current colleagues who cover Hollywood and who most definitely had heard the open secret. I don't agree with you that if the NYT suppressed news about Weinstein out of profit-motive, but I can believe that the NYT could have done more earlier to question someone who happens to be cozy with New York media and media reporters.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/business/media/harvey-wei...
No conspiracy necessary.
He investigates a number of "filters," or ways in which reporting is distorted. For example there's a massive disparity in sources. The US military and corporate America spend vast sums of money and manpower contributing stories and source information that media companies depend on. Another is advertising: newspapers that are not advertiser-funded are much less profitable, and therefore more expensive, and therefore suffer in distribution. Etc.
I think there are five in total. Then for each filter, he'll go through countless examples. It's actually quite fascinating.
With regard to specific events, I believe he talks about both the Pentagon Papers and the My Lai massacre. IIRC he builds a compelling case for how the powers that be were themselves incentivized to see the end of the Vietnam war.
As for Waxman, I don't recall reading in her story that she said her editor was the one who met with Weinstein, so it doesn't surprise me that he denies it was him. It also doesn't seem inconsistent with her story that they'd fund her, a reporter, to do reporting, given that (according to her) they weren't against the story until after it was done.
Of course it's entirely possible that she's lying and she made the whole thing up. I'm not a mind reader. But that's missing the point. Chomsky's case doesn't rest on a single story any more than it rests on a conspiracy theory. It doesn't require there to be airtight 100% successful manipulation of the news.
Rather, it's a case built on the back of consistent and sustained bias in favor of the government, advertisers, and sources, with hundreds of examples and troves of data.
> It also doesn't seem inconsistent with her story that they'd fund her, a reporter, to do reporting, given that (according to her) they weren't against the story until after it was done.
That's the wrong, simplistic way to think about things. Like startups and software, stories are not "done" until they are published or put on market. Waxman had a single off-the-record source. That is not a story, that is the beginning of an investigation (as it likely was for the current NYT-Weinstein investigation). Maybe the editors were at fault for not aggressively suspecting fire where there seemed to be smoke, but Waxman had nothing of the sort that the current NYT reporters had -- neither in notes nor draft form -- and for her to suggest so is dishonest, since she would be presenting that evidence in her critique.
Again, not having read "Manufacturing Consent", I can't address its specific evidence. But I would love to see what datasets and hypotheses Chomsky uses as proxies to empirically show the ties that you say. Because while data is the plural of anecdote, I'm inclined to believe the inherent nature of data and the politics of its collection means that many of the necessary datasets needed to make those conclusion do not exist in a comprehensive form.
To argue that the powers-that-be, including the media, were "incentivized" to see the end of the Vietnam War may be the actual objective reality. Or it may be a conclusion easy to reach in retrospect of history (i.e. the Vietnam War being a political disaster) by cherry-picking the "data". What would be the evidence/data that could conclusively show the null hypothesis here? And for that matter, why don't the "powers-that-be" include the U.S. presidents (and all of their corporate overloads) at the time whose careers were devastated by the negative perception of the Vietnam War?
I agree that Chomsky's hypothesis doesn't require 100% successful manipulation of the news. So what's the accepted success rate? 75%? 50%? When is the success rate so small that it's indistinguishable from coincidences in a random universe, or one in which the actors or much more independent and the factors much more complicated?
Maybe the answer -- like the hypothesis "Because God made it like so" -- is truly impossible to discern. But the hypothesis is still harmful because in a universe in which the hypothesis is false, it causes us to overlook the more mundane events and systemic factors that precipitate terrible things. Instead, we unconsciously absolve ourselves of action by assigning blame to conspiracy and collusion at a scale too great for us to act upon.
As for Waxman, I make no claim that she had evidence equivalent to what the current reporters had, nor does she make that claim. In fact, I claimed just the opposite: if the evidence had been that substantial, they would've had no choice but to run it. Besides, the only disincentive to do so — losing Weinstein's company's advertising dollars — would've been nullified by Weinstein's impending doom and loss of control over how that budget is spent, anyway.
We can speculate as to just how solid her piece was, but it never ran. She claims to have "had evidence of a payoff," and also claims that she was told directly why the story was killed. So you can say you don't believe her, and I don't fault you for that, but her reasoning is not unsound. And again, this is just a red herring.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/13/business/media/miramax-sue...
If you meant, "the story that proved Weinstein was a sexual predator didn't run", sure, but that begs the question. That story didn't run because that story didn't exist -- inasmuch stories "exist" when reporters find the supporting evidence.
But the story that did run is the kind of story that feels like the kind that Weinstein, if he had strong influence over the NYT's editorial desk, would kill. Because it was, as you say, the kind of story that is not too important to ignore. It's the opposite, it spotlights an otherwise obscure lawsuit about a minor Hollywood figure who is basically accused of embezzling from Miramax/Disney, a theft made possible by Weinstein's favoritism. If the NYT killed it, no one would really know or care because scandals about insignificant foreign film companies (Mirimax Italy) aren't the bread-and-butter for NYT's investigative team or Culture section.
But Waxman herself says that her foreign-reporting trip was green-lighted even before she knew the extent of the allegations, or the possibility/difficulty of gathering evidence:
> In 2004, I was still a fairly new reporter at The New York Times when I got the green light to look into oft-repeated allegations of sexual misconduct by Weinstein. It was believed that many occurred in Europe during festivals and other business trips there.
I haven't worked at the Times, but I do feel comfortable saying that a "fairly new reporter" whose beat is Hollywood would not have the easiest time to convince bosses to fund a trip to Italy on an enterprise story that lacks hard evidence. But now we're supposed to believe that the NYT editors would approve such a project, during a time of falling revenue, in which the initial premise is that rumors of sexual scandal about their friend/secret-boss Weinstein are true? Even when it would be completely easy to just say No? To what end?
I realize I'm writing a lot of words for your side note tangent, unrelated to Indonesia. But like I said, I haven't read Chomksy's book. But I would bet that the universe of facts and connections for arguing NYT/Weinstein complicity are far more accessible and direct than what Chomsky would use to argue for media+U.S+Indonesian massacres. But if Chomsky's hypothesis is so permissive/vague that a reader like yourself (whom I assume to be reasonable and thoughtful) could argue that it applies to NYT+Weinstein, despite the published evidence (including the facts in of Waxman's own accusatory essay) and reasonable application of Hanlon's and Occam's Razor, then I feel justified in thinking that Chomsky's hypothesis may not apply to the much more complicated situation of U.S.Gov+media+Indonesia. Or that it's not much of a useful hypothesis period for assessing world events/media fuckups in general.
You have your reasons for believing that she's lying, including that "she would not have the easiest time" convincing her bosses to fund a trip, that her editor claimed not to remember a conversation, that she injected Damon and Crowe into the story to add drama, etc. I do not find these reasons at all persuasive enough to conclude that she is lying. But it doesn't matter, because it's speculation on both of our parts anyway.
If you're trying to use this particular instance to in any way judge Chomsky's book, then you're at a loss. At one extreme, Waxman made up her entire story and I was duped, in which case the conclusion is merely that this is not an example of an advertiser manipulating the media, and says nothing of Chomsky's evidence. At the other extreme, Waxman was telling the truth and Weinstein's role as an advertiser did allow him to get the story gutted. In that case, it's still insufficient to prove Chomsky's thesis. Which it was never meant to do in the first place, as it was merely presented as an illustrative example.
A pointless discussion either way.
You could probably read the relevant parts of Chomsky's book in the time we've spent here going back and forth on Waxman's believability.
I agree that is futile for me to apply this topic to a book I haven't read, though I did just get a copy and have had time to skim things. I'm not sure what to argue against. I think Chomsky is absolutely right to point out that American news outlets focus on American issues from an American perspective, and that news outlets, being for-profit companies, live-and-die by advertisers. It's not at all a coincidence -- nor does it require a conspiracy -- that a news outlet's focus and coverage reflect that of its staff and publishers. You get a college-educated mostly white staff, you'll get a lot of stories that are relevant/understandable by that demographic, which may be an OK thing if that's the news outlet's entire readership, even as it skimps on a greater moral mission to represent society's minority.
That's a valid critique, and the underlying incentives would seem to produce results that showed a consistent adherence to maintaining the status quo. I don't believe that Chomsky is the first to point this out (nor the first to do so in an empirical way), but if he's spreading the news about the realities of the news business, that's worthy enough work.
But skimming down to things in which Chomsky attempts to point out their fit in his model is less convincing. He acknowledges the "shining moments' of journalism, such as reporting the My Lai Massacre and Watergate. Chomksy says in the conclusion:
> In short, the very examples offered in praise of the media for their independence, or criticism of their excessive zeal, illustrate exactly the opposite. Contrary to the usual image of an "adversary press" boldly attacking a pitiful executive giant, the media's lack of interest, investigative zeal, and basic news reporting on the accumulating illegalities of the executive branch have regularly permitted and even encouraged ever larger violations of law
But the media's action on My Lai and Watergate don't really seem to demonstrate the "exactly the opposite" of an adversarial media. The exact opposite would seem to be a media that doesn't report on these things at all. But the fact is that they did and Chomsky's explanation seems to boil down to:
- The media didn't act as fast as it could (e.g. it didn't cover the My Lai massacre the day of or after it happened)
- The supposed scandals weren't even that big of a deal, e.g. My Lai was just one of many atrocities committed by the U.S. The Watergate break-in was nothing compared to what the FBI was doing to the Socialist Workers party.
- And the media didn't go far enough in its investigative reporting, e.g. if the media really cared about My Lai, then military officers higher than a Lieutenant would have been court-martialed.
I think there is value in critiquing the lesser-celebrated details of media action/inaction, including lionized narratives of media's finest moments. But as something that purports to point out how media/government/industry complicity can explain all or even most of media's self-interested behavior? Chomsky's arguments seem virtually unfalsifiable. There is no possible unselfish/noble/independent media action that could not be waved away with his logic. But his logic is inherently self-defeating. My Lai and Watergate weren't a big deal, and the media were slow as fuck to finally cover them...OK, then that leaves completely explained why news outlets wasted considerable resources on stories that were not only inherently hostile to the U.S. government, but boring and stupid and not even significant compared to all the shit that was really happening. That argument is pretty airtight!
If by "American perspective" you mean that the news is complicit in spreading propaganda on behalf of advertisers and sources like the government, then sure, I agree. That's what Chomsky means. But I don't think you mean that, because that is not the American perspective.
Most Americans do not believe that they're being propagandized to the extent that they are, and would take issue with it if they knew the facts. If what the news reported was a simple extension of Americans' natural positions and perspectives, then there'd be no need for the propaganda in the first place.
For example, most Americans do not believe that the Vietnam war was an invasion, because it is instead reported as aiding an ally during a civil war. If we began reporting on Vietnam as an invasion and highlighting the relevant facts that made that case, do you think the natural American perspective would remain unchanged? I don't. It didn't take the German people long to feel shame for their actions in the second world war.
I think you're letting journalists off the hook here.
> But the media's action on My Lai and Watergate don't really seem to demonstrate the "exactly the opposite" of an adversarial media. The exact opposite would seem to be a media that doesn't report on these things at all.
That's an extreme standard. You're taking Chomsky's words "exact opposite" as literally as possible, when they are clearly meant to be hyperbole. He's not saying the machine is 100% effective. This isn't 1984. But it's still bad if it's even much less than that.
The media didn't cover My Lai the day after? It occurred in March 1968 and didn't gain extensive media coverage until a year and a half later in November 1969, despite extensive efforts by numerous people to publicize the story. By that time, there were already massive demonstrations in Washington and media attention was focused on antiwar protest. The cat was out of the bag, and needed to be reigned in.
Chomsky argues, convincingly, that massacres like in My Lai weren't particularly out of place, but in fact were part of a larger strategy that made such events more routine and normal than they ever should have been. In public scandal cases like these, the defense's strategy is always "scapegoat," and so you would expect the other atrocities and overall strategy to be downplayed while My Lai is highlighted and treated as exceptional, and some peon's head is offered up on a plate. And that's exactly what happened.
Rule #1 in every playbook is to offer a sacrificial lamb to the masses before they start demanding that more important heads roll. This is basic stuff. You see it in every company in crisis mode. What makes it nefarious here is that the media is complicit. The facts aren't difficult to dig up, and the American people by and large expect news outlets to report on this stuff accurately.
But they don't. They systematically filter out the stories, the facts, and even the journalists who push the wrong buttons and ask the wrong questions at inconvenient times.
It's not 100% fail proof. But it's systemic.
[1]http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/journalist-says-new-york-tim...
Ed: 2004
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam-c...
Look, I agree with a great deal of Chomsky's claims but doesn't prevent me from thinking that he's got faults of his own. Given his enormous stature as a linguistic scholar, those are more than mere shortcomings. He wouldn't accept his own style of political argument from one of his students.
The question is not whether he has faults (of course he does), but whether there is a double standard.
Maybe I'm judging him harshly, and if I'd encountered him at a younger age his writings would have been a worthwhile on-ramp into the same field of knowledge. But as an adult I find his writing like pouring gasoline or kerosene on a campfire: it flares up satisfyingly for a few seconds, but that's no way to build a fire that will burn steadily for hours and sustain people through a cold night.
It can be convenient for a political establishment to have some popular, attractive, but ultimately ineffective figures (often unconsciously - please don't overlook this) for others to cluster around. Such persons are referred to as Judas Goats, from ranching where the idea originates. This is why it bothers me that Chomsky gets his readers all fired up over injustice but never seems to equip them with the intellectual tools to do very much about it. Given his manifest intellectual talents, it's strange that he opts for the role of a preacher railing against sin rather than delving into the root causes.
I'm not saying don't read him or take him seriously, he has a lot of valuable things to say. But if you just rely on Chomsky and want to get into radical politics, it's like going into battle with a nerf gun. He's very moralistic, but as his arguments often never address things from the point of view he's railing against they're very easy to deflect. Of course Chomsky would argue that the The Establishment has a whole body of media arguing on its behalf and he sees no reason to do their work for them, but that doesn't really equip his readers to argue the case, which is where the rubber meets the road.
Also (and I know I'm not the first to say this) Chomsky is really good at saying what he thinks is wrong with the world but not at equipping his readers with tactical responses to do anything about it, other than shouting into a megaphone. This a problem with left activism in general, which has been lacking in the tactics and strategy department. That's not Chomsky's fault, but agitation without organization leads to futility and demoralization.
Alinsky's Rules for Radicals remains a standard primer of activist organizing methods but at times it seems to have been almost forgotten about by people on the left. I only heard about it because people in the Tea Party took up using it and shared its contents widely while pretending to be very outraged by their existence. (As a general rule, your opponents are often far better teachers than your friends, in any context, not just politics.) I could name a large pro-Democratic political forum that I've read for 10 years where I've only seen it mentioned once or twice, and then only in passing rather than as a repository of useful techniques. So if you're dissatisfied with the state of the world, the best thing you could do would be donate your Chomsky books to a thrift store and pick that up instead. Sun Tzu wouldn't hurt either.
This also addresses your point of "never addressing things from point of view he's arguing against", unless those points of view have different facts.
Maybe you can cite a few examples of what you mean for me to understand your argument better.
As far as root cause analysis, again, can you explain what you mean? Chomsky is a well known anarchist and frequently discusses issues of capital, power, etc. "Understanding Power" is a title of one of most popular books, for example.
Of course, in the real world the media played down the major crimes of Communists (cf. Walter Duranty, whose Pulitzer Prize has never been revoked), while massively amplifying the minor crimes of anti-Communists (e.g. South Vietnam, a nasty little republic significantly less nasty than the victorious North Vietnam).
Yes, the anti-Communists have their hundreds of thousands, but the Communists have their hundreds of millions. The death tolls aren't even comparable.
> And they do this knowingly, too, by ignoring or outright silencing dissenting voices (like Chomsky's).
There are many adjectives one can apply to Noam Chomsky, but 'silenced' is not among them.
That's... debatable, to say the least.
> Yes, the anti-Communists have their hundreds of thousands, but the Communists have their hundreds of millions. The death tolls aren't even comparable.
If you were a demonstrator abducted and killed by a CIA-backed & trained task force in Latin America in the 70s, these silly "death toll" comparisons would hardly matter. Evil is not necessarily measured in numbers. Had the Nazis "only" killed "hundreds of thousands" of Jews instead of millions, the crime would have been just as horrible.
This Wikipedia article is a good quick overview and introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
Or to put it another way, he's claiming that minor crimes are emphasized for enemies, which doesn't preclude major crimes being committed as well.
Deciding what to omit/include and what to emphasize/downplay is a very subjective task.
> "Would you describe the authoritarian result of the Bolshevik's actions as an honest mistake, a "historical accident" maybe-or was it just the natural outgrowth of the Leninist Worldview: the idea that only a few people are smart and knowledgeable enough to be the leaders, and they should run the show?"
> Chomsky: Yeah, in my opinion the heart of the problem is Marxism-Leninism itself-the very idea that a "vanguard party" can, or has any right to, or has any capacity to lead the stupid masses towards some future they're too dumb to understand for themselves. I think what it's going to lead them towards is "I rule you with a whip." Institutions of domination have a nice way of reproducing themselves-I think that's kind of like an obvious sociological truism. [1]
Yep, we definitely found the holodomor apologist, there.
Edit: It's entirely possible that he spent plenty of time and words on whitewashing crimes against humanity. His views have changed since then.
[1] Undestanding power, p226.
You're dodging the question: no one mentioned the Holodomor. The parent mentioned Pol Pot for a reason:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...
> In 1993, Chomsky acknowledged the massive scale of the Cambodian genocide in the documentary film Manufacturing Consent. He said, "I mean the great act of genocide in the modern period is Pol Pot, 1975 through 1978 - that atrocity - I think it would be hard to find any example of a comparable outrage and outpouring of fury."
I agree with your general thesis governments downplay their own murder but Communist regimes have killed millions of people[1]. Those are not "minor crimes". Both Capitalist (e.g. Native American population), Communist (Mao's purge), Socialism (Nazis' genocide)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
>Nazism rejected the Marxist concept of class conflict, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good" and accept political interests as the main priority of economic organization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism
Take a look at Sweden when their policies were more Socialist skewed, the government in order to manage the P/L sheet for social welfare programs compelled political out groups to be sterilized[1]. Roma people were considered a "drain" on Swedish society and attempts to exterminate them were done much more quietly.
If any government starts to make value judgements about who is more valuable than whom, they will repeat these same errors.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sw...
This point is _unusual_ in Swedish 20th century history as a time when the socialists where _not_ ruling by them self but instead ruled in coalition with the right wing. The minister of justice was for example _not_ socialist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansson_III_Cabinet
And the peak, some where around 1500 sterilizations a year, for eugenic reasons (if I read your diagram correctly) is _damn ugly_, but it is not extermination. It does not compare to Soviet, Chinese or American killing of their own populations (which is hard to call exterminations either even if we are talking about millions; genocide I guess is better term).
Ugly things happens in socialist democratic countries like Sweden. In general they get much uglier in powerful communist (Soviet, China) or powerful right wing countries (USA). The killing of native Indians in America by non-socialists is strikingly bad for your argument.
Kind of why McCain used the word in a negative manner this week.
We don't have one media. It's more accurate to say that we have leftist media (Jacobin, Chomsky), establishment liberal media (NY Times), generic for profit media (NBC nightly news, etc ), conservative populist media (Fox, Breitbert), conservative high-brow media )(City Journal, Commentary) and that all of them will at times exaggerate the crimes of their enemies and whitewash the crimes of their allies or ideological compatriots. Chomsky for example was himself guilty of whitewashing the Khemer Rouge back in the mid-1970s when he should have known better (see http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm )
Or read this New York Times obituary about Mao which totally whitewashes him -- http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1226.... The NY Times is hardly amplifying the crimes of communism!
Or going back further consider how the liberal mainstream press whitewashed the horrors of communist Russia (see this review of Malcolm Muggeridge's memoirs for example -- http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-... )
At this point I have come to the belief that it is very hard to trust any media source unless you personally know something about the subject and can figure out which sources are credible about that topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Indonesia#An...
Not that it's not that same voice today, as US "stands by", err, actively aids mass killing of Yemeni civilians as we speak.
Either you're incredibly naive or you're passing yourself as an disingenuous individual. The problem with cold war communists is that Moscow pulled the strings of terrorist groups to try to force whole nations into puppet states controlled by a communist dictatorship. That had absolutely nothing to do with the will of the people or even organic political movements arising from within any nation, and their single reason of existence was to add another communist puppet state to the list of nations behind the iron curtain.
> they tried to overthrow the government, they killed generals and other important figures of the government
That sounds like something pretty much anyone would consider a threat to "stability". Stability is not a mythical concept.
I, for one, think that the Myanmar situation is going to play out as it is, regardless of foreign involvement.
How about we bring wide-spread international attention to it? What about pressuring Myanmar's neighbors to take a stand against it (sanctioning Myanmar's leadership)? For fuck's sake, what about providing support for refugees fleeing that situation?
I don't know which answer would work, nor did I claim to, FYI since you somehow think I said that, but doing absolutely nothing is probably not a great idea.
Assuming that you know where other people are going with an argument is rarely well-founded or conducive to reasoned argument.
Wasn't the current Saudi regime put in place by the US?
> And that the Rohingya at one point tried to secede and have Rakhine state annexed by East Pakistan?
Absent other information, I tend to assume that when a population (especially one with identifiably distinct culture) wants to secede, they probably should secede, and refusal to let them secede is a violation of their human right to self-government. Of course this isn't always the case, especially if there are other populations on the land who won't have rights to self-government under the separate government, but it is a good default.
The British, but the US props them up. Hence the support for the Saudi campaign in Yemen, as well as Saudi 'causes' like Kosovo, the Rohingya, Uyghurs, etc...
> Of course this isn't always the case, especially if there are other populations on the land who won't have rights to self-government under the separate government, but it is a good default.
The Rohingya are still a minority in Rakhine, yet they started an insurrection and attempted to have it annexed by East Pakistan...
And in this case there's no State and there is no law being enforced. People using violence to force others to conform to rules that they made up themselves are usually called thugs.
It's unlike anything on film: The mass murderers believe they are showing off their exploits to an appreciative audience, demonstrating to the filmmakers what they did. They go so far as to end up acting out a surreal fantasy, complete with sets and costumes, which cannot be described. But this is a serious documentary about a horrible event; it's not parody or satire. Somehow, the perpetrators of the killings reveal themselves.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/movies/act-of-killing-re-e...
On 8 October 1975, Assistant Secretary of State Philip Habib told meeting participants that "It looks like the Indonesians have begun the attack on Timor." Kissinger's response to Habib was, "I'm assuming you're really going to keep your mouth shut on this subject."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/world/asia/files-show-comp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_invasion_of_East_Ti...
"We" aren't standing by as those thousands are killed, "we"'re doing as those neighborhoods have demanded. If you've got some awesome solution, I suggest you contact Rahm Emanuel asap.
That's an ungenerous interpretation of what BLM and sympathetic parties want.
Maybe BLM is demanding the police go away, but most of the rest of us want the police to learn how to deal with people, especially minorities, without shooting them.
Can you substantiate this? I've never seen anyone demand that, and I doubt any significant number of people did.
Demanding police do their jobs correctly is not at all the same as demanding they stop working. I demand my local police do their job correctly (and as they have some sense of responsibility and pride, they demand the same of themselves); if they did it poorly, I would tell them to do it better, not quit, take their ball and go home like a child.
Driving a handcuffed man around in a van until he breaks his back and dies or shooting a 12 year old is bad performance for those officers and organizations. Quitting is not an option for the police; they have responsibilities and need to do a better job.
High murder rates in inner cities have been occurring long before the BLM. Not sure why they are being inserted in this discussion
In Indonesia there was the growth of a population of people negatively disposed to the US and positively disposed toward Communism. Either case draws the CIA like flies, and you get coups and puppets or tyrants installed who can be relied upon to take "aid" bribes and leave the country accessible to US (and allies) businesses. In the USA, economic disparity leads to violence. There has never been a society with great economic disparity which did not produce high levels of violent crime, and there likely never will be. But the US, both the public and the leaders, are not willing to even consider doing anything about such disparity, and thus violence and suffering will increase.
Fallacy of relative privation ("not as bad as") – dismissing an argument or complaint due to the existence of more important problems in the world, regardless of whether those problems bear relevance to the initial argument.
At no point was the initial argument or complaint dismissed. Also, it was never claimed that there are more important problems in the world than the initial problem... You are applying a fallacy to a comment that does not merit that label.
Its really an apples and oranges comparison.