This study, consisting of two related volumes, deals
with relations between the United States and the Third World. It has a dual
focus: on facts and on beliefs. The basic fact
is that the United States has organized under its sponsorship and protection a
neo-colonial system of client states ruled mainly by terror and serving the
interests of a small local and foreign business and military elite. The
fundamental belief, or ideological
pretense, is that the United States is dedicated to furthering the cause of
democracy and human rights throughout the world, though it may occasionally err
in the pursuit of this objective.
Since 1960 over 18 Latin America regimes have been
subjected to military takeovers – a “domino effect” neglected in the West. U.S.
influence has been crucial in this process, in some cases by means of
deliberate subversion or even direct aggression, but invariably important given
the substantial economic and military penetration and presence of the
superpower. The phenomenon itself is neither new nor confined to Latin America.
The fate of Guatemalan democracy, subverted by the CIA in 1954 in favor of a
regime of torture and oppression, can be matched with that of Iran a year
earlier; and the Philippines, brutally subjugated at the turn of the century
has now been stripped of its short-lived democratic facade without a word of
protest by the United States. This, and the subsequent sharp increases in
economic and military aid to the martial law government of Marcos, not only
reflect a familiar and traditional pattern, they are also compelling evidence
of approval and support.
The ugly proclivities of the U.S. clients, including
the systematic use of torture, are functionally related to the needs of U.S.
(and other) business interests, helping to stifle unions and contain reformist
threats that might interfere with business freedom of action. The proof of the
pudding is that U.S. bankers and industrialists have consistently welcomed the
“stability” of the new client fascist order, whose governments, while savage in
their treatment of dissidents, priests, labor leaders, peasant organizers or
others who threaten the “order,” and at best indifferent to the mass of the
population, have been most accommodating to large external interests. In an
important sense, therefore, the torturers in the client states are
functionaries of IBM, Citibank, Allis Chalmers and the U.S. government, playing
their assigned roles in a system that has worked according to choice and plan.
With the spread and huge dimensions of the empire of
Third World fascism, complete with death squads, torture and repression, the
gap between the fact and belief has become a yawning chasm. The ideological
institutions – the press, schools and universities – thus face a growing
challenge. It is, one might have thought, a formidable task to transmute increasing
numbers of fascist thugs into respectable “leaders” worthy of our subsidies and
active support. Equally serious is the problem of depicting the United States
itself as fit to judge and assess the human rights record of other states, in
this context of sponsorship of an international mafia, and immediately after
its prolonged and brutal assault on the peasant societies of Indochina. Nevertheless,
these formidable tasks have been accomplished without notable difficulty, and
the credibility gap has been successfully bridged by a very effective system of
rewriting recent history and selecting, processing and creating current
“information”. As we describe in detail throughout this work, on fundamental
issues the mass media in the United States – what we will refer to as the “Free
Press” – function very much in the manner of a system of state-controlled
propaganda, and their achievements are, in fact, quite awesome.
The first volume is devoted to analyzing the forces
that have shaped the U.S.-sponsored neo-colonial world, the nature of the
client states, and the processes and rationales that the ideological
institutions have employed to defend and justify the proliferating terror. The
coverage is far from exhaustive; we have selected only a few instances to
explore in varying degrees of detail. Our primary few instances to explore in
varying degrees of detail. Our primary concern is the United States: its global
policies, their institutional basis in the domestic society and its mechanisms
of propaganda. We do not discuss at all the important matter of relations among
the powers within the First World of industrial capitalism, or relations
between these powers and the Soviet Bloc or China. We also will not consider
the background and nature of the movements called “socialist” or “Communist” in
the Third World. Nor do we discuss the Soviet empire and the characteristics
and effects of that lesser system of Sun and Planets.
Volume II, entitled After the Cataclysm, is devoted to “postwar Indochina and the
reconstruction of imperial ideology” (the subtitle). It deals with the postwar
condition of Indochina, the sources of its problems, Western responses to the
travail of its populations emerging from the wreckage. In addition to
considering each of the three Indochinese states, we look at the question of
refugees and postwar retribution in historical context and give considerable attention
to the Western media’s use and misuse of the Indochinese experience to
rehabilitate the bruised doctrinal system of the imperial powers.
The picture that emerges from this inquiry seems to
us a very grim one, both at the level of fact and with regard to the capacity
of Western ideological institutions to falsify, obscure and reinterpret the
facts in the interest of those who dominate the economy and political system.
But this system is not all-powerful, as millions of people learned from their own
experience during the U.S. war in Indochina. Until 1965, it was virtually
impossible to gain a hearing for any principled opposition to the U.S. military
intervention in Indochina, already well-advanced by that time. By “principled
opposition” we mean opposition based not on an estimate of national costs and
benefits but on the view that the United States has no unique right to exercise
force and violence to gain its objectives. Later, a hearing of sorts did become
possible, partly through organizations and publications associated with the
peace movement itself, and partly as a result of the news value of peace
activism as it assumed mass proportions. The Free Press remained largely closed
to direct access by the movement throughout the war. The peace movement also
had to overcome the obstacle of active state hostility of its efforts. It is
now well known that the U.S. government deployed its national political police
in a major efforts to undermine and destroy the mass movements of the 1960s.
Nevertheless, they continued to grow and undoubtedly had an impact on the
decisions ultimately taken at the center, without, however, modifying the
structure of domestic power in any meaningful way.
This experience shows that even the effective system
of ideological controls of the United States has its limitations. It is not
impossible for substantial groups to gain some real understanding of social and
political reality and to organize and act to modify state policy. The large
interests of the country dominate foreign policy, which cannot be altered in
its essentials without a change in the internal structure of power or the
external environment. But while far-reaching internal changes are not likely in
the short-run, organized opposition at home can sometimes make enough of a
difference to allow struggling peoples a little breathing space. U.S. failures
in Indochina and the 1978 upheavals in Iran are two examples out of many
showing the very real possibilities of loss of control in the outer reaches of
the empire.
While the U.S. and its allies have armed the
neo-fascist elites of the Third World to the teeth, and saturated them with
counterinsurgency weaponry and training, long-term elite control of the
underlying populations is by no means assured. The abuse of Third World
majorities in the empire is so flagrant, and their leaderships are so corrupt,
inept and visionless, that explosions and loss of control are highly likely in
many states over the next several decades. The voiceless majorities can be
helped by outsiders in many ways: among them, maximum world-wide exposure of
the actual impact of the West on these peoples; strenuous efforts to stem the
huge flow of aid and support to official terrorists; and helping to create an
ideological and political environment that will make open intervention
difficult when explosions do occur.
It is possible that developments in the United States
and other industrialized states might alter the present pattern of sponsorship
and support for Third World tyrannies. The arms race and the struggle to
control Third World countries are contrary to the interests of the majorities
of the developed countries, and while the system of indoctrination makes it
difficult for them to break out of the machine’s ideological control, the
growing irrationalities and problems of the West, including the extravagant use
of energy, the difficulty of controlling externalities, inflation, inadequate
work opportunities for increasing numbers, and the enormous waste on arms may
create pressures that will increase awareness or cause systemic shocks that may
bring real issues to the fore. It is most probable, unfortunately, that a real
crisis would result in a shift toward rightist totalitarianism, a
“Brazilianization” of the home country. But prediction in this dynamic era has
not been notable for its successes. Educational efforts on the true workings of
the machine, and organizational actions that build toward altering its basic
mechanisms, may yet yield their benefits, even without the major structural
changes required to establish democratic control over the basic social and
economic institutions, a prerequisite to a truly democratic politics.
The post-Vietnam war collapse of the movement has
relieved U.S. imperial authorities of much of the earlier constraining
pressure, and they have been able to continue the enlargement and protection of
the neo-fascist empire without significant internal impediment. This can only
be changed by a renewal of active involvement of large numbers. It is hoped
that this book will show that serious concern is urgently demanded by the facts
of the situation.
This book is a major revision of a small monograph
written in 1972-73 and then suppressed by the corporation that owned the
publisher, as described in the Prefatory Note that follows. Many friends and
associates have read parts of earlier drafts of the manuscript and have
provided information and critical comment that have helped us immeasurably. We
will refer to some of them, quite inadequately, in separate sections that
follow. Special mention should be made of Josh Markel for his research
assistance and Bonnie Wilker for both research and general help in preparation
of the manuscript. Finally we would like to express our thanks to the South End
Press collective for their assistance throughout, and in particular, for their
care, efficiency, and dedication in producing these books under unusually
difficult conditions.
A Prefatory Note by the
Authors on the History of the Suppression of the First Edition of This Book
An earlier version of this volume was originally
contracted for and produced as a monograph by Warner Modular Publications,
Inc., a subsidiary member of the Warner communications and entertainment
conglomerate. The publishing house had run a relatively independent operation
up to the time of the controversy over this document. The editors and publisher
were enthusiastic about the monograph and committed themselves to put it out
quickly and to promote it with vigor. But just prior to publication, in the
fall if 1973, officials of the parent company got wind of it, looked at it, and
were horrified at its “unpatriotic” contents. (1) Mr. William
Sarnoff, a high officer of the parent company, for example, was deeply
pained by our statement on page 7 of the original that “the leadership in the
United States, as a result of its dominant position and wide-ranging
counterrevolutionary efforts, has been the most important single instigator,
administrator, and moral and material sustainer of serious bloodbaths in the years
that followed World War II.” So pained were Sarnoff and his business
associates, in fact, that they were quite prepared to violate a contractual
obligation in order to assure that no such material would see the light of day.
Although 20,000 copies of the monograph were printed,
and one (and the last) ad was placed in the New
York Review of Books, Warner Publishing refused to allow distribution of
the monograph at its scheduled publication date. Media advertising for the
volume was cancelled and printed flyers that listed the monograph as one of the
titles were destroyed. The officers of Warner Modular were warned that
distribution of the document would result in their immediate dismissal.
The publisher struggled to keep open the possibility
of distributing the monograph. Since one ostensible reason for suppression was
the “one-sideness” of the document, a compromise was worked out for its release
upon roughly concurrent publication of a work that supports the
counterrevolutionary violence of the United States; in this case a printing of
a series of articles by Ithiel de Sola Pool. The
concept of a publishing house not being permitted to publish something without
either the work itself, or the publisher’s list, meeting somebody’s notion of
“balance,” is an extraordinary one. Needless to say it is never applied in the
case of pro-establishment productions or potential big money-makers, and the
application of the “balance” approach in this case was hardly designed to
encourage the free flow of ideas. It was, on the contrary, a means of cutting
off one side that has great difficulty in gaining a hearing in the United
States.
The officers of the parent corporation had regarded
the “absence of balance” argument as a reason for refusal to permit
distribution of our monograph, rather than as calling urgently for publication
of material offering a version of the facts more compatible with their needs
and perceptions. The idea of a “balancing publication” was reluctantly accepted
by the officers of Warner Modular, the publisher, only as a last resort, a
means to salvage a monograph to which they were committed and to meet their
moral and legal obligations to the authors. The officers of the parent
corporation initially went along with this proposal, presumably because the
outright suppression of the monograph would have been a little too blatant,
and, of course, in violation of the legally binding contract. But they accepted
the compromise without enthusiasm, and before it could be implemented, they
decided to close down the publishing house and sell its stocks of publications and
contracts to a small and quite unknown company loosely affiliated with the
parent conglomerate, MSS Information Corporation. This company is not a
commercial publisher and lacked distribution facilities. It did not promote its
list and at first did not even list the monograph, adding it only after a
considerable period on an additions
sheet. The monograph could be purchased by someone with prior knowledge of its
existence and of the fact that MSS had taken over the rights to it, or by
readers of Radical America, a small left-wing publication that distributed some
copies that they had obtained.
The monograph had a remarkably different history
abroad. While unadvertised, unsold, unreviewed, and unnoticed in the U.S., it
was translated into French and several other European languages. The French
edition appeared with an introduction by Jean-Pierre
Faye which discussed the issue of suppression and put the material
discussed in the monograph in the context of a Western “Gulag Archipelago” of
extensive proportions. In France it went into a second printing and the suppression
in the U.S. became a minor cause celèbre. The establishment media in France
claimed that the monograph was not sold simply because Warner Modular went into
bankruptcy, a complete fabrication. To our knowledge, the only notice of the
monograph in the English language can be found in the English translation of Jean-François Revel’s book The Totalitarian Temptation (Penguin, 1977). Here, in the course of
a denunciation of the French left for its alleged carelessness with regard to
fact, Revel presents an entirely fanciful account of the publishing history,
based on his own telephone call to an unidentified friend in the United States.
Despite the substantial interest abroad, it has so
far been impossible to provoke any discussion in the country where it was
written and to whose population it was addressed either on the merits of the
case presented in the monograph or the matter of its effective suppression by
the parent corporation. Well-known advocates of freedom of expression who were
apprised of the matter have regarded it as insignificant, presumably on the
grounds that there is no issue of state censorship but only of corporate
censorship. This reflects, we believe, a characteristic underestimation of the
importance of the selective policing of the flow of ideas by means of private
structures and constrained access, while all the legal forms of freedom are in
place. At a given level of quality, the more critical the message the smaller
the proportion of the population that will have an opportunity to consider it
at all, and there will be no exposure to such messages day after day (as there
is, say, to the merits of a new automobile or low tar cigarette, or to the
inflationary effects of government regulation, or to the allegations that North
Vietnam committed “aggression” in Vietnam or that a bloodbath would follow the
“loss” of Vietnam). (2)
The history of the suppressed monograph is an authentic
instance of private censorship of ideas per se. The uniqueness the episode lies
only in the manner of suppression. Usually, private intervention in the book
market is anticipatory, with regrets that the manuscript is unacceptable,
perhaps “unmarketable”. (3) Sometimes the latter contention is only an excuse
for unwillingness to market, although it may sometimes reflect an accurate
assessment of how the media and journals will receive books that are strongly
critical of the established order. With rare exceptions (e.g., C. Wright Mills’ Power
Elite or Seymour Hersh’s books on the My Lai
massacre and cover up), such works are ignored and allowed to fall still-born
from the press, or if reviewed, are dismissed with contempt. In the case of the
first edition of this work, events showed that there was an international
market, even if the parent corporation was able to prevent a test of the
domestic market. But the details of the publication history show that the
suppression was strictly a function of the contents of the monograph, not of
potential profitability.
By coincidence, the parent corporation that was the
agency of the suppression is the publisher (through an affiliate) of the
paperback edition of Richard M. Nixon’s memoirs. Both Warner and the hardback
publisher of the memoirs, Grosset & Dunlap, have been criticized for their
payment of $2 million for rights to publish and market aggressively the work of
a self-confessed prevaricator. The president of Grosset & Dunlap denounced
such criticisms in vigorous terms:
I find it difficult to understand such sentiments. It
is incredible that anyone should suggest that a book not be published. If we
abridge the freedom of any one writer or publisher, we effectively abridge the
freedom of all.
The New York Times reported that “also in the
audience, but not commenting, was William Sarnoff, chairman of Warner Books...”
(4)
1.
The principal sources for this account of the
suppression are affidavits supplied to the authors by the publisher and
associate publisher of Warner Modular Publications, Inc.
2.
See Chapter 2, section 2.2, and Volume II,
Chapter 4.
3.
For a more general discussion of mass media
choices and bases of selection see chapter 2, section 2.0.
4.
Herbert Mitgang, “Nixon Book Dispute Erupts at
Meeting,” New York Times (28 May 1978) p.16.
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