Bulletin N° 604
Subject: ON ILLUSIONS AND DELUSIONS IN PROFUSION.
18 March 2014
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of
CEIMSA,
A former colleague of mine, wishing
to remain anonymous, has been exchanging emails with me about developments in
Ukrainian as they unfold. In her most recent mail, she wrote: “I am surprised
no one seems to have heard of Babi yar among the French persons I
have met. You have heard of Babi Yar,
haven't you?”
Upon receiving this mail, I
immediately googled ‘Babi yar’ and found devastating Nazi films documenting ‘the
banality of evil’ acted out in graphic detail
before your eyes in the countryside surrounding Kiev; the mass murder of
Jewish families at the end of September 1941. Below is the first link to a long
series such documents :
Babi Yar 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q57sy0ZVDO0
This ‘intrusion’ from my former
colleague came while I was engaged in an extended study of political power. A
careful reading of John Kenneth Galbraith’s book, The Anatomy of Power, (1983) [for more
information on this book, see CEIMSA Bulletins 601 & 602] had led me to the
important anthology of essays by Noam
Chomsky, Understanding Power, The Indispensable Chomsky (which include
discussions at the Rowe, Massachusetts Teach-In of April 15-16, 1989, edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel and published by The New Press in 2002). A couple
of days prior to receiving the ‘Babi Yar’ reference, I had read an arresting section in the
second chapter of this book, entitled “The Real Anti-Semitism”. In these
pages, Chomsky briefly lays out the history of this political football, which
“anti-Semitism” represents, as it is gamed by corporate and political
organizations. In this section, Chomsky was responding to a question about “the
connections between the Republican Party and the neo-Nazis’ which had been
revealed a few months earlier [in fall, 1989].
That was
sort of an interesting phenomenon; it’s hard to know exactly how seriously to
take it, but it’s certainly very real. I don’t know how many of you followed
what happened
with the Nazis in the Bush campaign around last August –do you know about that
stuff?
There’s
this part of the Bush campaign called the ‘Ethnic Outreach Committee,’ which
tries to organize ethnic
minorities; obviously that doesn’t mean blacks or
Hispanics,
it means Ukrainians, Poles, that sort of business. And it turned out that it
was being run by a bunch of East European Nazis, Ukrainian Nazis, hysterical
anti-Semites,
Romanians who came out of the Iron Guard, and so on. Well, finally this
got exposed; some of the people were reshuffled, some were put into other
positions in the
Republican Party –but it all just passed over very quietly. The Democrats never
even raised the issue during the election campaign.
You might
ask, why? How come the Democrats never even raised the issue? Well, I think
there was a very good reason for that: I think the Jewish organizations
like the Anti-Defamation
League basically called them off. The point is, these organizations don’t
ultimately care about anti-Semitism, what they care about is
opposition to the
policies of Israel –in fact, opposition to their own hawkish version of
the policies of Israel. They’re Israeli government lobbies, essentially, and
they
understood that these Nazis in the Bush campaign were quite pro-Israel, so what
do they care? The New Republic, which is sort of an organ for these
groups,
had a very
interesting editorial on it. It was about anti-Semitism, and it referred to the
fact that this committee was being run by anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers,
Nazis, and
so on, and then it said: yes, that’s true, but this is just ‘antique and
anemic’ anti-Semitism. Nazism is just ‘antique and anemic’ anti-Semitism, not
terribly
important, we
shouldn’t get too upset about it. And then it said: the real anti-Semitism that
we ought not be worried about is in the Democratic
Party, which is filled
with
‘Jew-haters’ –that was the phrase they used. And part of the proof is, the
Democrats were actually willing to debate a resolution calling for Palestinian
self-
determination at their
National Convention, so therefore they’re ‘Jew-haters’ and that’s the ‘real’
anti-Semitism in America. (That was in fact the title of a book
by the
Director of the A.D.L., Nathan Perlmutter.) Well, the
Democrats got the message that they weren’t going to win any points with this,
so they never raised a
peep about it.
Incidentally,
this is only one of the things that happened at the time—there’s another story
which got even less publicity, and is even more revealing. The Department
of
Education has a program of grants that it dispenses to fund projects initiated
by local school systems, and for the last four or five years the school board of Brookline,
Massachusetts, has been trying to get funding for a project on the Holocaust
which always gets very favorably reviewed, but is always turned down. Again in
1988
–also
right before the election—the federal reviewing committee had to deal with
their proposal. As usual it got very favorable reviews, but instead of just
turning it
down, this
time the government simply eliminated the entire program category under which
it was being submitted. Well, at that point some information began to
surface as to why
the project kept getting turned down –and it turned out that it was being
refused every year because of letters the Department was getting from
people like
Phyllis Schlafly [a far right-wing activist]
attacking it for being unfair because it didn’t give adequate space to Nazis
and Ku Klux Klan members. Besides,
they said,
it’s kind of brain-washing children, and
turning them against things like the Holocaust, it’s just more of the
neo-liberal tampering with people’s thoughts.
Parts of
these letters actually got published in the Washington Post and the Boston
Globe.
Well,
you’d have thought there’d be an uproar. A program on
the Holocaust gets turned down by the government, by the Reagan administration,
because it doesn’t
give enough
space to Nazis and Klan members? Not a peep, not a peep. And the point is,
Phyllis Schlafly and that whole gang are adequately
pro-Israel –and therefore
it doesn’t
matter what they think. They can be in favor of the Klan, they can be in favor
of the Nazis, they can say you shouldn’t be allowed to
teach the Holocaust, it
doesn’t matter,
as long as they remain sufficiently supportive of hawkish Israeli policies. As
long as they meet that qualification, it’s fine, they
can say whatever they
want. (pp.52-53)
As the ideological authority of the
United States and Israel dissolves, nothing necessarily must replace it; it is entirely possible that instead of another
powerful organization taking control of this particular combination of the instruments of power, we will witness the rise of a multiplicity of organizations
representing new sources of power,
exercising the instruments of power, as they can, in various and new
combinations, some more refined than others . . . . Condign punishment, as an instrument of power, which traditionally
has stemmed from state institutions --like the police, the military and the
judicial system-- may be appropriated by local groups in a crisis period; but
always behind the scenes we can anticipate the presence of massive compensations from the centers of
capitalist accumulation –financial, industrial and mercantile capital—which will
attempt to achieve popular submission to the will of organized property
interests to benefit the owners; and finally, less visibly perhaps, the third
instrument of power, social conditioning,
has already appeared in schools, churches, businesses, and other organizations
which increasingly depend on indoctrination by imposing regimes of
authoritarian discipline and obedience training on its members, in place of
encouraging self-discovery and personal fulfillment. The dialectic is, of course, that
all these new authoritarian developments within crisis capitalism will give
rise to more conscious debates and eventually create stronger social
commitments to organized resistance.
The era of political monopolies is
coming to an end, as we free ourselves from the hypocrisies of our would-be
leaders and the dogmas of institutions, and continue to develop our critical
faculties that are adverse to coercion and manipulation of any kind. The
classic conundrum of means/ends has
conflated into a general concern for collective well-being; the ends include
the means, as more and more people seek radical changes in their social
relationships, an aim which will always remain plastic and open to public
debate. Today on the 143rd Anniversary of the beginning of the Paris
Commune, it is abundantly clear that measures must be taken to insure that this
political debate remains inclusive
and does not become the exclusive domain
of a select group of managers and coordinators at the behest of the owners of
capital, as it did in France in 1871, after the Paris Commune (March 18 – May
28, 1871), when Jules Ferry in a letter from Versailles, where Adolphe Thiers had gathered a monopoly of military force to
liquidate the power of the Commune, confided to his brother Charles that he
preferred to live in a society of criminals
than in a society of crazies;
that was the advent of the Third Republic, a blood bath where its capitalist-driven institutions gained
monopoly control over the organization of condign punishment, compensations,
and social conditioning (the first fruits of which were harvested in the Great
War of 1914-18).
28th May 1871 Defeat of the Paris Commune
http://www.onthisdeity.com/28th-may-1871-%E2%80%93defeat-of-the-paris-commune/
In his book, Ces
Truands qui nous gouvernent,
Jim Hightower fast forwards to the contemporary scene in the US and describes
how criminals govern us today. How have they gotten away with it, you might
ask, and here again is Noam Chomsky describing how power is being managed for the benefit of the few :
[T]he whole educational and professional
training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are
too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be
submissive, and so on –because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions. I
mean, it would be highly dysfunctional to have people in the media who could
ask [radical] questions . . . .
[O]ne of the
serious illusions we live under in the United States, which is a major part of
the whole system of indoctrination, is the ideas that the government is
the power –and the government’s NOT the power, the government is one segment of
power. Real power is in the hands of the people who own the society; the
state-managers are usually just servants. And Watergate is actually a perfect
illustration of the point –because right at the time of Watergate, history
actually ran a controlled experiment for us. The Watergate exposures, it turns
out, came at exactly the same time as the COINTELPRO exposures –I don’t know if
you know what I mean. . . . [T]he COINTELPRO exposures were a thousand times
more significant than Watergate. [This, Chomsky goes on to say, is why you know
nothing about it!]
Another State crime that occurred at
the time of the “the Watergate Scandal” and which was also skillfully
concealed from much of the public was the B52 carpet bombing of Cambodia, in
densely populated rural areas.
The bombing
of Cambodia did not even appear in Nixon’s Articles of Impeachment. It was
raised in the Senate hearings, but only in one interesting respect –the
question that was raised was, why hadn’t Nixon informed Congress? It wasn’t,
why did you carry out one of the most intense bombings in history in densely
populated areas of a peasant country, killing maybe 150,000 people? That never
came up. The only question was, why didn’t you tell
Congress. … [W]hat
it means is that infringing on the rights of powerful people is unacceptable.
[To maintain the public illusion that government is the source of power, the
lawmakers were saying publically:] We’re powerful, so you’ve got to tell us –then we’ll tell you, ‘Fine, go bomb Cambodia.’
But what is the trick? How can
people avoid being so easily manipulated to abandon their own interests and
submit to the interests of the few? To answer this question, Chomsky draws a
lesson from George Orwell’s book, 1984 :
It’s
intellectual freedom when a journalist can understand that 2 + 2 = 4; that’s
what Orwell was writing about in 1984. Everybody here applauds that
book, but nobody is willing to think about what it means. What Winston Smith …
was saying is, if we can still understand that 2 + 2 = 4, they haven’t taken
everything away. Okay? Well, in the United States, people can’t even understand
that 2 + 2 = 4.
The trick
is not to be isolated –if you’re isolated, like Winston Smith in 1984,
then sooner or later you’re going to break, as he finally broke. That was the
point of Orwell’s story. In fact, the whole tradition of popular control has
been exactly that: to keep people isolated, because if you can keep them
isolated enough, you can get them to believe anything. But when people get
together, all sorts of things are possible. . . . (from
pages 111 – 121)
As we slowly free ourselves from our
illusions, through continual social interaction, we find ourselves reflected,
as in a prism, in the hearts and minds of others. This human-scale community, free of cynicism, is our source
of power; and this power, if it inspires critical thinking and creative work,
will give rise to new ideas and new projects, requiring new knowledge and the
development of new skills. It is only with the total dissolution of the old system,
and not by simply replacing its broken parts, that a new political economy can
be achieved, more egalitarian, more enjoyable, and more just; where all submissions to the will of organizations
are conscious, and voluntary, and provisional.
The 10 items below raise
questions about the illusion of power and how the population at large is often
deluded so that it will agree to submit to the will of the few whose interests
are not our own, and they suggest what is necessary to put an end to the
reproduction of these power relationships, to be replaced by what . . . ?
Item A.,
from Information Clearing House, is an
article by Julie
Hyland on the quality of the western-capitalist-sponsored
revolution in Ukraine.
Item B.,
from Information Clearing House, is an
article by John Pilger
discussing Chile, Ukraine and what is soon coming to your local theater and
why.
Item C., from NYU Professor Bertell Ollman, is an article by Noam Chomsky on “Academic Labor: How
Higher Education Ought to Be.”
Item D.,
from ZNet, is the video tape of a conversation with Noam Chomsky in a café
in downtown Tokyo on Community Organizing, its means and ends.
Item E., from NYU Professor Mark Crispin Miller,
founder of News From
Underground, is an article by Diane Ravitch,
first published in Common Dreams,
on the well-organized campaign against public education the United States and
its social consequences.
Item F.,
from Information Clearing House, is an article by Paul Craig Roberts on
the historical patterns in the causes of war: “It’s WWI all over again.”
Item G.,
from the Bertell Ollman, is an
article with photos of Wall Street & Friends at play.
Item H.,
from Information Clearing House, is an article by Paul Craig Roberts on
Ukraine and the path to World War III.
Item I.,
from ZNet, is an appeal by the indefatigable Michael Albert, to join the international ZNet
community and to support Venezuela against North American predators.
Item J., from
Information
Clearing House, is an article by Patrick Cockburn on NATO and its causes and effects.
And finally we invite CEIMSA readers
to view a Real News Network March 7
interview with Moscow University Professor Aleksandr Buzgalin, the historical relations between the Crimea
region of Ukraine and Russia in the two-part series:
A Struggle Amongst Oligarchs in Ukraine
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11553
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
Professor of American Studies
University of Grenoble-3
Director of Research
University of Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced Study of
American Institutions and Social Movements
The University of California-San
Diego
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/
_______________
A.
From Information Clearing House :
Dates: 16 March 2014
Subject: A Path to World
War III.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
Ukraine’s newly-installed government of former bankers, fascists and oligarchs is preparing draconian austerity measures.
What the Western-backed Regime
is Planning for Ukrainian Workers
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37972.htm
by
Julie Hyland
_______________
B.
From Information Clearing House :
Dates: 16 March 2014
Subject: Coming Soon to
Your Local Theater?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
The story of this forgotten coup is
a salutary lesson for those governments that believe a "Ukraine" or a
"Chile" could never happen to them.
The Forgotten Coup
How the Godfather Rules from Canberra to Kiev
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37970.htm
by John Pilger
_______________
C.
From Bertell Ollman :
Dates: 16 March 2014
Subject: Academic Labor.
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/index.php
The following is an edited
transcript of remarks given by Noam Chomsky via Skype on 4 February 2014 to a
gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct
Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh,
PA. Prof. Chomsky’s remarks were elicited by questions from
Robin Clarke, Adam Davis, David Hoinski, Maria Somma, Robin J. Sowards, Matthew Ussia, and Joshua Zelesnick.
The transcript was prepared by Robin J. Sowards and
edited by Prof. Chomsky.
ON ACADEMIC LABOR: How
Higher Education Ought To Be
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/28/on-academic-labor/
by Noam Chomsky
_______________
D.
From ZNet :
Dates: 17 March 2014
Subject: Chomsky in
Tokyo discusses Community Organizing.
Leaders and members of Zenkoku Ippan Tokyo General Union
(“Tozen Union”) met Saturday afternoon (March 8,
2014) with Professor Noam Chomsky at Cafe Lavaderia
in Shinjuku, Tokyo
Chatting with Chomsky
http://zcomm.org/zvideo/chatting-with-chomsky/
_______________
E.
From Mark Crispin Miller :
Dates: 17 March 2014
Subject: [MCM] The
propaganda drive against our public schools.
Understanding the Propaganda Campaign Against Public Education
by Diane Ravitch
A few years ago, when I was blogging
at Education Week with Deborah Meier, a reader introduced the term FUD. I had
never heard of it. It is a marketing technique used in business and politics to
harm your competition. The term and its history can be found on Wikipedia. FUD
stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The reader said that those who were
trying to create a market-based system to replace public education were using
FUD to undermine public confidence in public education. They were selling the
false narrative that our public schools are obsolete and failing.
This insight inspired me to write
Reign of Error to show that the "reform" narrative is a fraud. Test
scores on NAEP are at their highest point in history for white students, black
students, Hispanic students, and Asian students. Graduation rates are the highest
in history for these groups. The dropout rate is at an historic low point.
Why the FUD campaign against one of
our nation's most treasured democratic institutions? It helps the competition.
It makes people so desperate that they will seek out unproven alternatives. It
makes the public gullible when they hear phony claims about miracle schools,
where everyone graduates and everyone gets high test scores, and everyone goes
to a four-year college. No such school exists. The "miracle school"
usually has a high suspension rate, a high expulsion rate, a high attrition
rate, and such schools usually do not replace the kids they somehow got rid of.
Some "miracle schools" have never graduated anyone because they have
only elementary schools, but that doesn't stop the claims and boasting.
It turns out that there is actually
a scholar studying the phenomenon of the "the cultural production of
ignorance."
He hasn't looked at the attack on
public schools, but his work shows how propaganda may be skillfully deployed to
confuse and mislead the public. Michael Hiltzik of theLos Angeles Times writes about the work of Robert
Proctor of Stanford University:
Robert Proctor doesn't think
ignorance is bliss. He thinks that what you don't know can hurt you. And that
there's more ignorance around than there used to be, and that its purveyors
have gotten much better at filling our heads with nonsense.
Proctor, a professor of the history
of science at Stanford, is one of the world's leading experts in agnotology ,
a neologism signifying the study of the cultural production of ignorance. It's
a rich field, especially today when whole industries devote themselves to
sowing public misinformation and doubt about their products and activities.
The tobacco industry was a pioneer
at this. Its goal was to erode public acceptance of the scientifically proven
links between smoking and disease: In the words of an internal 1969 memo legal
opponents extracted from Brown & Williamson's files, "Doubt is our
product." Big Tobacco's method should not be to debunk the evidence, the
memo's author wrote, but to establish a "controversy."
When this sort of manipulation of
information is done for profit, or to confound the development of beneficial
public policy, it becomes a threat to health and to democratic society. Big
Tobacco's program has been carefully studied by the sugar industry, which has
become a major target of public health advocates.
FUD was pioneered decades ago. Now
public education is the target, and privatizing it is the goal. I hope
Professor Proctor turns his attention to this issue, where a well-funded
propaganda campaign seeks to spread enough doubt to destroy an essential
Democratic institution.
There is no evidence from any other
nation that replacing a public system with a privatized choice system produces
anything but social, economic, and racial segregation.
_______________
Diane
Ravitch is a historian of education at New York
University. Her most recent book is Reign of Error: The Hoax of the
Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools
. Her previous books and articles about American education include: The
Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are
Undermining Education , Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform ,
(Simon & Schuster, 2000); The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict
What Students Learn (Knopf, 2003); The English Reader: What Every Literate
Person Needs to Know (Oxford, 2006), which she edited with her son Michael Ravitch. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
_______________
F.
From Information Clearing House :
Dates: 15 March 2014
Subject: Historical
Patterns in the Causes of War.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
Whatever
Washington says is truth. Whatever Washington does is legal, in accordance with
both domestic and international law.
World War 1 All Over Again
The Same Fools Play the Same Game
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37964.htm
by Paul Craig Roberts
_______________
G.
From Bertell Ollman :
Dates: 13 March 2014
Subject: Oh Sweet Jesus !
Francis -
This one's a beaut. It
offers an almost unique view into the secret lives and pleasures of our ruling
class. Very important for getting some insight into what they are really like
and how they think. Part of what should be a continuing series on "Know
Your Enemy". It's also a pleasure to read. Enjoy.
Bertell
Marty
Lipton's crowd at play
[This "fraternity"
includes several leading members of NYU's Board of Trustees, including the
current Chair.]
_______________
H.
From Information Clearing House :
Dates: 16 March 2014
Subject: A Path to World
War III.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
Do you need any more proof that the Ukrainian crisis is made up out of thin air by schemers in Washington who created the entire crisis for one purpose–to weaken Russia militarily?
Washington Has Set The World
On A Path To War
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37969.htm
by Paul Craig Roberts
_______________
I.
From ZNet :
Dates: 18 March 2014
Subject: Community
Organizing with Support for Venezuela.
Z News and
Critical Support for Venezuela
http://zcomm.org/sendpress/eyJpZCI6Mjk5OTY3LCJ2aWV3IjoiZW1haWwifQ/
by Michael
Albert
_______________
J.
From Information Clearing House :
Dates: 16 March 2014
Subject: NATO and it’s causes and effects . . . .
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
The Nato powers that overthrew Gaddafi did not do so
because he was a tyrannical ruler, but because he pursued a nationalist policy
which was at odds with western policies in the Middle East.
Three Years After Gaddafi,
Libya is Imploding into Chaos and Violence
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37973.htm
by
Patrick Cockburn