Select this to read [the Whole Story].That is because the intellectual aspect of that conflict remains unresolved. The people who sold that war are still selling wars and the profiteering is worse than ever. Dr. Chomsky has described the role of "pundits" and the US media in US society as "manufacturers of consent" to the elites' agenda. The arguments which were valid against the US invasion of Vietnam are also valid against "our" invasions of Iraq, Somalia, Granada, Panama, and Haiti (and for that matter the same argument applies against GATT, NAFTA, the World Bank and IMF, and MFN status for China), so it remains at the top of the media agenda to dismiss and erase and black out these arguments and the people who make them. There will be no honest discussion of these issues in newspapers or high school history books as long as the conflict remains current.
In your last message, you discussed profiteers and the roll of the press in controlling what is news. I understand war profiteering very well. They are the huge corporations who make substantial profits from the sale of war materiel, and their influence in foreign affairs often has more to do with their own profits than the national interest. Is this the way you see it?
Get a sociology textbook and look up the subculture known as the "power elite." They, by definition, are the people who run the world. They use corporations and government to effect their wishes. The power elite use war profiteering but their program is much more extensive than that. They also do agriculture profiteering and health care profiteering, for example.
However, I am not sure about "manufacturers of consent" in the media. It is difficult for me to imagine them actively suppressing news.
That is only because you have been immersed in the most powerful stream of propaganda ever directed at any human population for your entire life. One of the "necessary illusions" of that propaganda is that the commercial news media serve the public interest by reporting the most important stories and attempting objectivity. It's a lie. Media corporations serve the agenda of the power elite.
To understand the role of media, consider disappearances of people who were once accessible voices for change. When was the last time you saw Carl Sagan, or Ralph Nader, or Jaques Cousteau on television? The boundaries of acceptable discussion are contracting and they're outside them now. Did you know Nader ran for US President in 1992? That was the most effective media blackout I ever saw; even the so-called "alternative" press ignored him. Did you know Larry Agran was ahead of Harkin going into the Dem Primary in '92? He was erased from the field by the New York Times and the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour (which controlled the publicity for the New Hampshire Primary) so that Jerry Brown would be alone on "the left" in that race.
I can understand them passing over news stories in favor of news if the power elite doesn't understand the significance of the story.
No. They actively suppress stories that do not serve their investors' interest. There is a culture in journalism about "what is news" and the main thing is that the determinant of what is news is what will please the publisher and his investors. That is how the decision is made. Any editor who has been on the job for six months knows that he had better toe the line. What usually happens is they internalize the publisher's tastes as their own. Talk to any experienced journalist. They don't believe human rights or US interference in foreign elections, to give two examples, are stories. That's straight from the money men who would prefer the public not become alarmed about those things.
I can also understand passing over a story that the media does not believe will attract interest (i.e. money). Could those be the motivations for the news media's suppression of stories?
No. Journalists are keenly aware of what kind of stories will get them ahead. They know that if they don't please the investors their careers will not advance. That is the motivation.
We believed in a good cause: to stop an immoral war.
To state that in the past tense is to accept the bad guys' propaganda, and once you do that you can never understand the history past or current. Question your assumption that Vietnam was different or isolated from the other struggles for social justice.
Many of the movement's contributions are valuable to our nation's history in the following years, and deserve to be publicly acknowledged. Until now, the nation's coming to terms with the Vietnam War has largely been accomplished by ignoring the antiwar movement.
Question that assumption too. This history has *not* been ignored, it has been actively and energetically suppressed, at the behest of industrial giants who stand to lose billions or trillions of dollars should US imperialism be halted. Consider the fast rise to prominence of Rush Limbaugh. That was no accident nor grassroots "backlash"; it's been orchestrated by the American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institute, and National Association of Manufacturers. Limbaugh is now the most widely syndicated columnist and most widely placed radio commentator. It's not possible to get to that position on your own; the power elite must *install* people like Rush Limbaugh and George Will.
Select this to read [the Whole Story].
