HONDURAS UPDATE 10-25-10

Bill Quigley and Laura Raymond of the Center for Constitutional Rights have a Counterpunch piece, ostensibly on “artist resistance in Honduras,” which provides an update on the Obama administration’s continuing sell-out of democracy:

Meanwhile, in the United States, 29 members of Congress took a bold step, especially given the lead-up to midterm elections, in issuing a strongly worded condemnation of the “deplorable human rights record” in Honduras listing several recent cases of political violence.

The members of Congress registered their “serious concern that the rule of law is directly threatened by members of the Honduran police and armed forces” and called on the Obama Administration to end all direct assistance to Honduran authorities, especially the police and military. They also called on the US to cease its lobbying for the re-admittance of Honduras into the Organization of American States (OAS).

While most member countries of the OAS have stood firm in their rejection of Honduras as a member of the OAS, U.S. Secretary of State Clinton has made Honduras’s reinstatement a US priority in the region, raising it in her meetings with Latin American heads of state and lobbying for it at various regional meetings. For reasons that the Center for Constitutional Rights laid out in our Open Letter to Secretary of State Clinton, the Obama Administration must stop and the OAS should remain firm in rejecting Honduras as a member.

Those committed to working in solidarity with ordinary people organizing for democracy, equality and social justice in the Americas are outraged that the Obama Administration has become the Lobo regime’s most important ally. Without US support, the Lobo regime would not have been able to hold its illegitimate elections or hold on to power for as long as it has.
But history shows that anti-democratic regimes in Latin America and elsewhere can be overcome, even when they have the backing of the US, by campaigns for democracy and human rights. The FNRP is working to show the way in Honduras. Those of us in solidarity from afar watch in admiration as they work to transform their country and salute their efforts to celebrate while doing so!

Adrienne Pine has more. She also provides links to a two-part article by Edward S. Herman (co-author with Chomsky of Manufacturing Consent) and David Peterson contrasting media coverage of repression, elections, resistance, and social media in Iran and Honduras. Highly recommended analysis (though I take issue, as with similar comparative analyses in the past, with the unnecessary and misleading downplaying of abuses by the Iranian regime).

Extraordinary is one word for it.

Last week I posted on a gnus-vs.-accomodationists thread at Pharyngula. PZ, building on the “it’s about truth” theme of his conference talk, had said:

I am unconvinced by these feeble appeasement tactics that don't really advance the ideas, but do leave people unperturbed from their comfortable positions of ignorance. But here's something else to consider, if the marshmallows of accommodationism are still committed to convincing me otherwise. Even if Rosenhouse's argument wasn't valid, if there were a thousand concrete empirical studies demonstrating that my approach was turning people into fundagelical Christians faster than a tent revival, it wouldn't matter. I'd still be me. I'd still express myself as I do, as I want, because that is all I ever do here — I have never considered myself to be competing in a popularity contest.

Seeing people (understandably) express incomprehension at what might appear to be intransigence in the face of evidence, I thought Václav Havel’s work on “living within the truth” was apt (I also had him on my mind since I had just read Largo Desolato). I posted two links with excerpts from his writings. There is much contained even in these short passages from the days of the Cold War: Havel is presenting – in response to those who see politics in terms of organized movements and parties and governments – seemingly simple, personal, local acts of living within the truth as the genuine form of political action and necessary basis for any movements for change. He’s also suggesting that these acts, which are inherently defiant even when not thought of as such, have a political power in terms of changing conscience and consciousness that is largely unrecognized. Their power lies in the fact that these actions respond to a drive for honesty, a refusal to participate in a lie.

I saw these arguments as completely relevant to and supporting of the gnu atheist position: Living without beliefs that have no basis in reality and without deferring to those beliefs or the people who hold them – without practicing ritualized deference or remaining silent in the face of nonsense – is living within the truth. It’s a stand of conscience and life rather than a narrow political tactic.

After posting this, I started to wonder about Havel’s religious beliefs, about which I don’t think I had ever read anything. My googling, unfortunately, quickly turned up this bit of blather from the constitutionally confused professional troll Andrew Brown. It begins “Václav Havel made a perfectly extraordinary speech yesterday...,” and that is certainly accurate. It’s about Havel’s opening remarks at this year’s Forum 2000, which are remarkable.

Since the speech lends itself, and since it’s become a habit, I’m going to respond to Havel’s remarks as I would a blog post:

While I am aware of the countless more serious problems with human settlements on this planet – from the slums on the fringes of Asian or Latin American megalopolises to cities devastated by earthquakes or floods – with your permission I will start in a somewhat personal vein.

I’ll just start by pointing out what he’s brushing aside in this first sentence, in the form of a link:

Years ago when I used to drive by car from Prague to our country cottage in Eastern Bohemia, the journey from the city centre to the signboard that marked the city limits took about fifteen minutes. Then came meadows, forests, fields and villages. These days the selfsame journey takes a good forty minutes or more, and it is impossible to know whether I have left the city or not. What was until recently clearly recognisable as the city is now losing its boundaries and with them its identity. It has become a huge overgrown ring of something I can’t find a word for. It is not a city as I understand the term, nor suburbs, let alone a village. Apart from anything else it lacks streets or squares. There is just a random scattering of enormous single-storey warehouses, supermarkets, hypermarkets, car and furniture marts, petrol stations, eateries, gigantic car parks, isolated high-rise blocks to be let as offices, depots of every kind, and collections of family homes that are admittedly close together but are otherwise desperately remote.

...In other words all the time our cities are being permitted without control to destroy the surrounding landscape with its nature, traditional pathways, avenues of trees, villages, mills and meandering streams, and build in their place some sort of gigantic agglomeration that renders life nondescript, disrupts the network of natural human communities, and under the banner of international uniformity it attacks all individuality, identity or heterogeneity. And on the occasions it tries to imitate something local or original, it looks altogether suspect, because it is obviously a purpose-built fake.

Congratulations. You’ve discovered urban sprawl.

There is emerging a new type of a previously described existential phenomenon: unbounded consumer collectivity engenders a new type of solitude.

There is nothing new about what Havel’s describing here. Note, though, that the cause is being introduced as the “unbounded consumer collectivity,” an abstract entity disconnected from any social, political, or economic referents.

Where has all this woeful development come from and why does it go on getting worse? How is at all possible that humans can treat in such a senseless fashion not only the landscape that surrounds them but the very planet which they have been given to inhabit? We know that we are behaving in a suicidal manner and yet we go on doing it. How is it possible?

Capitalism and unequal political power. Violence. You may want to ask some of the “business leaders” participating in your conference, or maybe some of your corporate sponsors – Coca-Cola, Imperial Tobacco,... – whose names keep flashing on the side of the screen as I read your remarks. Where in the city are the conference-goers staying, I wonder? (There are several people in the list of participants whom I admire, but I don’t admire their participation.)

We are living in the first truly global civilisation. That means that whatever comes into existence on its soil can very quickly and easily span the whole world.

But we are also living in the first atheistic civilisation, in other words, a civilisation that has lost its connection with the infinite and eternity. For that reason it prefers short-term profit to long-term profit. What is important is whether an investment will provide a return in ten or fifteen years; how it will affect the lives of our descendants in a hundred years is less important.

Yes, he really said this. That disembodied consumerism is...atheism. Forget that this isn’t what atheism means and join the chorus of misrepresenters. Atheism, “in other words,” is capitalism. (I always wonder what these arguments would look like if “Jewish” were substituted for “atheistic”...) What the part about infinity and eternity is about, and what it has to do with cities, I don’t know. Sounds quite like the standard “Science lacks a sense of wonder or appreciation of the cosmic” claptrap.

However, the most dangerous aspect of this global atheistic civilisation is its pride.

Of course it is! Where would atheist-and-science-bashing be without the overweaning-pride trope?

The pride of someone who is driven by the very logic of his wealth to stop respecting the contribution of nature and our forebears, to stop respecting it on principle and respect it only as a further potential source of profit.

And indeed, why should a developer go to the trouble of building a warehouse with several storeys when he can have as much land as he wants and can therefore build as many single-storey warehouses as he likes? Why should he worry about whether his building suits the locality in which it is built, so long as it be reached by the shortest route and it is possible to build a gigantic car park alongside it? What is to him that between his site and his neighbour’s there is a wasteland? And what is to him, after all, that from an aeroplane the city more and more resembles a tumour metastasizing in all directions and that he is contributing to it? Why should he get worked up over a few dozen hectares that he carves out of the soil that many still regard as the natural framework of their homeland?

Remember: this isn’t about capitalism, but about atheism and science.

I sense behind all of this not only a globally spreading short-sightedness, but also the swollen self-consciousness of this civilisation, whose basic attributes include the supercilious idea that we know everything and what we don’t yet know we’ll soon find out, because we know how to go about it.

Not capitalism or governments at all. Nope. Don’t bother to look into it. It’s The Atheistic Technological Society pure and simple (no slight meant to Jacques Ellul’s book, which I quite liked).

We are convinced that this supposed omniscience of ours which proclaims the staggering progress of science and technology and rational knowledge in general, permits us to serve anything that is demonstrably useful, or that is simply a source of measurable profit, anything that induces growth and more growth and still more growth, including the growth of agglomerations.

Who is convinced of this? Atheists?

But with the cult of measurable profit, proven progress and visible usefulness

In other words, atheism, of course.

there disappears respect for mystery and along with it humble reverence for everything we shall never measure and know,

Naturally it follows: The problem of cities (aesthetic issues are very important; yeah, slums, too, but he’ll get to those some other time) is due to atheistic, scientific arrogance, so the solution is the return to naive, humble reverence for mystery.

not to mention the vexed question of the infinite and eternal, which were until recently the most important horizons of our actions.

This has no meaning.

We have totally forgotten what all previous civilisations knew: that nothing is self-evident.

Who has?

I believe that the recent financial and economic crisis was of great importance and in its ultimate essence it was actually a very edifying signal to the contemporary world.

Yup, the financial crisis, too – ATHEISM.

Most economists relied directly or indirectly on the idea that the world, including human conduct, is more or less understandable, scientifically describable and hence predictable. Market economics and its entire legal framework counted on our knowing who man is and what aims he pursues, what was the logic behind the actions of banks or firms, what the shareholding public does and what one may expect from some particular individual or community.

And all of a sudden none of that applied. Irrationality leered at us from all the stock-exchange screens. And even the most fundamentalist economists, who – having intimate access to the truth - were convinced with unshakeable assurance that the invisible hand of the market knew what it was doing, had suddenly to admit that they had been taken by surprise.

In fact, science told us that it would happen; it was entirely predictable to (and foreseen by) those using empirical knowledge and reason and not blinded by market fundamentalism.

I hope and trust that the elites of today’s world will realise what this signal is telling us.

To fear atheism? (Again, pay no attention to capitalism. This is all about atheism and science and how prideful they are.)

I regard the recent crisis as a very small and very inconspicuous call to humility.

Of course you do.

A small and inconspicuous challenge for us not to take everything automatically for granted. Strange things are happening and will happen. Not to bring oneself to admit it is the path to hell. Strangeness, unnaturalness, mystery, inconceivability have been shifted out the world of serious thought into the dubious closets of suspicious people. Until they are released and allowed to return to our minds things will not go well.

Yes, this is precisely what we need more of.

The modern pride that I refer to did not manifest itself in architecture only recently. In the inter-war period many otherwise brilliant avant-garde architects already shared the opinion that confident and rational reflection was the key to a new approach to human settlement. And so they started planning various happy cities with separate zones for housing, sport, entertainment, commerce or hospitality, all linked by a logical infrastructure. Those architects had succumbed to the aberrant notion that an enlightened brain is capable of devising the ideal city. Nothing of the sort was created, however. Bold urbanist projects proved to be one thing, while life turned out to be something else. Life often demands something quite different from what the architects offer, such as an urban district consisting of the strangest hotchpotch of different functions, where the children’s playground is next to the government building, the government building next to a pub, and the pub next to an apartment house, which in turn is next to a small park.

Urban planning/”development” has very often been undemocratic and imposed with no attention to real human needs or nature and no respect for the rights of people in cities. The solution is to make it democratic, rights-based, and responsive to needs. This can’t be done on the basis of reverent awe, and it requires real struggles.

Wonder and an awareness that things are not self-evident are, I believe, the only way out of the dangerous world of a civilisation of pride.

No, democracy and the sorts of struggles you used to talk about a few decades ago, which take different forms in a different context, are the only way out of a destructive world of corporate and technocratic power. These have to be founded on reason and empirical knowledge – it’s impossible otherwise.

Can anything be absolutely self-evident?

No.

Wonder at the non-self-evidence of everything that creates our world is, after all, the first impulse to the question: what purpose does it all have? Why does it all exist? Why does anything exist at all? We don’t know and we will never find it out.

These might not be questions of any value in any case. But shouldn’t you be telling this to the religious? Also, “wonder at the non-self-evidence of everything that creates our world” (a strange phrase) is also the impulse to investigating it (humbly, cooperatively, skeptically – scientifically) and discovering amazing and awesome things.

It is quite possible that everything is here in order for us to have something to wonder at.

It is?

And that we are here simply so that there is someone to wonder.

Seriously?

But what is the point of having someone wonder at something?

I don’t know. You posed the inane idea.

And what alternative is there to being?

Not being.

After all if there were nothing, there would also be no one to observe it. And if there were no one to observe it, then the big question is whether non-being would be at all possible.

The big question for whom?

A disappointing read, to put it mildly, and far removed from his earlier writings.

Halloween banned in Honduras

I wish I could laugh. It would be one thing if this just involved some lone, nutty public official with silly ideas about holidays, but in context it’s sad and terrifying. The coup in Honduras, in standard fashion, has been enthusiastically abetted by the domestic and international right-wing religious organizations. Adrienne Pine and David Vivar’s article “Saving Honduras” provides not only a concise discussion of the neoliberal coup but a specific analysis of the current activities of Marco Cáceres, his publication “Honduras Weekly,” and his Project Honduras conference. I recommend the piece as a whole (note the link to this article about Goldcorp), but what it really brought into relief was the central place religious power and ideology have in these antidemocratic efforts.

The discussion of the Project Honduras conference is illuminating. As they describe,

The theme this year is "Responding to Domestic Abuse in Honduras." One wonders if the increase in femicides since the coup documented by feminists in resistance, the dozens of documented targeted police and military rapes of female resistance members, the sexualized torture methods used, or the vast drop in reports of domestic abuse linked to fear of the police for these very reasons will be discussed. Probably not. Also unlikely to be discussed by the speakers, who include ardent coup-supporter Lizeth Godoy of the National Institute of Women (INAM), is the fact that the current INAM administration is in power thanks to the violent ouster by police and military of the women who had previously worked there last July, when they resisted the takeover of the institute by anti-feminist members of the reactionary Opus Dei coup leadership under Micheletti.

It seems that the purpose of the event is to use a secular issue to push what is a clear religious program:

While…individuals representing the U.S. State will be presenting, the vast majority of individuals attending come from reactionary evangelical groups, promoting charity work based on a premise of "apolitical" salvation that stand in direct opposition to the vibrant Honduran resistant movement's goals of justice and self-determination.

And it goes beyond that. In an article published in Honduras Weekly on September 28th titled "The Holy City of Copán," Cáceres argues that his conference is a "pilgrimage" leading to the goal of people "eventually truly becom[ing] One." Throughout the article, he returns to the concept of "One," capitalized.

Indeed he does! It is presented as a religious event through and through. I can’t see how anyone could read “The Holy City of Copán” and see it any other way. The authors ask:

So why-despite Cáceres' journalistic deceit, his increasingly public messianic delusions, his pro-coup proselytization and polarizing unfounded attacks on the resistance movement-does the U.S. embassy continue to so openly support his conference? Why is USAID ("From the American People") officially sponsoring the Conference on Honduras this year? It's not because the NGOs involved are doing any good; they aren't. In their acceptance of a Social Darwinist model that identifies poverty as the result of a lack of "empowerment" and human capital, they can't.

Yes, I agree (though I have no expectation of USAID genuinely supporting democracy in any context). But is this even constitutional? It’s a plainly religious event, and not only are US military personnel participating, but the US government is a sponsor?!

It’s in this unsettling context of organized religious political action – and the longer history of violence against dissidents justified by accusations of occult activities* - that Áfrico Madrid, Honduran Minister of the Interior and Population, issued a statement the other day essentially banning Halloween – using a law concerning fraud to prohibit “any type of event related to satanic cults or holidays.” It is theocratic rhetoric and policy, and deserves mockery and condemnation.

*This lends an ominous note to the plans described by Carlos Portillo later in the article.

Poem: The Mine Clinic

Back in September I entered Dr. Charles’ poetry contest. The winning poems were beautiful, and I enjoyed reading the entries he posted earlier in the month.

Here's my poem, submitted at almost literally the last minute:

The Mine Clinic

The people of Siria Valley
are losing pieces of themselves -
patches of skin like cellophane wrappers,
divots of hair.

The company’s doctor
chides them for untidiness,
straw-hatted carelessness,
prescribes mineral baths, vitamins, vinegar.

It's about this situation in Honduras. Rights Action made a documentary about it in 2008:



While I was writing, this happened. (Even if you hate my poem, you shouldn’t ignore the Siria Valley and the harm done by Goldcorp.) It appears that a judge ruled this week in favor of the Canadian corporation, but this is being appealed amidst international pressure. The situation in the Siria Valley has been developing for a decade and can’t be said to result from last year’s coup, but the fight for justice and its current possibilities show how intricately linked political and economic inequality and struggles for justice are to human health and the fate of the environment.

My poem was different from the others in that it was, to the extent that this can be said of a poem, critical concerning medicine. I had read the name of the real doctor somewhere – he gave a press conference following “clinical” consultations in the area - but wasn’t able to find it later. His name isn’t central, though (well, perhaps to future prosecutions...). My questions - relevant to but not circumscribed by this extreme case - concern the role of medicine in the contemporary global context. What does it mean to be a patient or health professional in conditions of gross inequality and poverty, corporate power, repression, and massive environmental destruction?

The ‘hero’ of this story, to whom the poem was dedicated, is Dr. Juan Almendares,* whose life has been about fighting for justice in Honduras and for an ethical medicine. The Honduras Human Rights Platform, of which Almendares is a representative, won this year’s Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award from the Institute for Policy Studies. Adrienne Pine has the text of Almendares’ short speech and video of the full awards ceremony. Here’s a clip of Bertha Oliva’s acceptance speech:



*It mentions at that link, and I’ve seen hints elsewhere, that he is a practitioner/advocate of “alternative” medicine, which is potentially troubling. I haven’t been able to find exactly which.

...I wanna puke

I watched the livestream of the Free Inquiry conference in LA this afternoon. I thought PZ’s (theme: "But is it true?") talk was great, but the pinheaded accomodationists got to me. I’ll use this comment as a launching pad:

Mooney’s argument seems to be, if you agree with Francis Collins on 99% of things, then the last 1% is totally off limits. Don’t bring it up, or you’re hurting the cause.

While we're on the subject, I have no idea what "moderate" is supposed to mean outside of a very specific context. Ken Miller is wrong about science history and how science works, he appears to have some repellent political ideas ("welfare queens"?), and his thinking about theistic evolution is erroneous. And he's a Catholic, and not a liberation theologist, so I can only assume he holds or supports many other disgusting notions (of course, he tacitly supports them by not openly refuting them and by being a member of an organization that’s about them). I agree with nowhere near 99% of what he thinks, and I'm sure this is true of Collins – an Evangelical - as well. It's also true of many "skeptics." Who is anyone to tell me which of these disagreements are important to me? Messed up, unevidenced thinking is what I'm going to fight.

…When writing the above, I almost said "especially that unevidenced thinking that has horrible effects," but that would be naïve. It ALL does. We simply cannot say, even if some religious beliefs are patently toxic, that others are benign. None are benign, because they are all premised on the acceptance of the idea that beliefs can be based on something other than evidence. If you accept that in one case, you accept it in all of them, because you’ve conceded that absurd epistemic foundation. Game over.

And which cause are the accomodationists talking about?, one might reasonably ask. Or, whose cause? I’m an anarchist, and anarchism historically has included atheism, freethought, feminism, skepticism, and science. There are parts of the movement that have gone in other directions, but my historically-based version incorporates these. Anarchism, and social justice more generally, needs and includes science (see Kropotkin, Chomsky, Sokal,…). Don’t pontificate to me about what my priorities are. And don't try to don the mantle of compassion and tolerance when your approach is mendacious and belittling.

Oh, and, by the way, I have yet to see an accomodationist who has the slightest knowledge of the history of social movements or social change. Victor Stenger alluded to the evidence from social revolutions. Outstanding. They are messy. Study them. Until you do, don’t pretend to an expertise you don’t have.

Imperial PR

My last update on Honduras mentioned this analysis comparing US media coverage of Honduras to coverage of Iran over the past year. One accusation Chomsky has been at pains to contest is the simplistic characterization of the propaganda model as a conspiracy theory. The notion is of course wrong, and I can’t believe anyone with the slightest knowledge of the model could honestly hold such a view, particularly in this era of capitalist consolidation.

That said, I think it’s important to look into key moments in the history of the development of media filters as they’ve been shaped by conscious human action. What we find are PR and control strategies of increasing sophistication extending and expanding from the nineteenth century to the present. The story of media manipulation and complicity in the course of imperial conquest and consolidation in the US is very much one of intent and coordinated action. Here I’ll discuss in some depth the work of the Office of Public Diplomacy in the 1980s, drawing extensively from Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism.



I’ll then mention a lesser-known episode from the early days of US imperialism.
In Chapter Four, “Bringing It All Back Home: The Politics of the New Imperialism,” Grandin investigates the means by which the Reagan administration, in the context of its Central American adventures, sought to build support for – and weaken resistance to – imperialist policy. This they did, as Grandin describes, through a three-pronged program:

First, to confront an adversarial press, tame a presumptuous congress, and make inroads on college campuses, the administration orchestrated a sophisticated and centralized ‘public diplomacy’ campaign that deployed techniques drawn from both the PR world and the intelligence community. Second, the White House either loosened or circumvented restrictions placed on domestic law-and-order surveillance operations against political dissidents, reviving tactics that the FBI and other intelligence agencies had used to intimidate the antiwar movement in the 1960s, tactics that were thought to have been repudiated by the Rockefeller Committee and other congressional investigations into domestic covert actions in the mid-1970s. Finally, and most consequentially, the administration built countervailing grassroots support to counter what seemed a permanently entrenched anti-imperialist opposition, mobilizing militarists and evangelicals on behalf of a hard-line foreign policy (p. 123).

Grandin describes the creation of the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean in 1983 under Otto Reich, serving the White House and the CIA. Both in order to circumvent the law and to better propagandize, the Office, employing advertising agencies and front groups, “implemented…a ‘public-private strategy’, coordinating the work of the NSC with PR firms, psychological warfare specialists, and New Right activists, intellectuals, and pressure groups” (p. 124).

The focus at this time was Nicaragua and the need to present an image of the Sandinistas and the Contras. Working to expand the perceived threat from a narrower Communism to a pervasive terrorism, the Office simplified “foreign policy to a series of emotionally laden talking points that linked the Sandinistas to any number of world evils” (p. 129):

The Sandinistas were ‘evil’, Soviet ‘puppets’, ‘racist and repress human rights’, ‘involved in U.S. drug problems’. The Contras were ‘freedom fighters’, ‘good guys’, ‘underdogs’, ‘religious’ and ‘poor’ (p. 125).

But in addition to the rhetorical tropes, familiar in such propaganda, was the establishment of a coordinated action plan and complex and lasting structure of organizations. “Over just a two month period in early 1985,” Grandin offers, “the office laid out a chronology of seventy-nine tasks to accomplish” (p. 126). He provides a partial list, from which I’ll draw a selection of those focused directly at the media and public:

-Encourage U.S. reporters to meet individual Contra fighters;…

-Supervise preparation and assignment of articles directed to special interest groups at rate of one per week (examples: article on Nicaraguan educational system* for National Educational Association, article by retired military for Retired Officers Association, etc.);

-Draft one op-ed per week for signature by Administration officials. Specify themes for the op-eds and retain final editorial rights;

-Conduct public opinion poll of American attitudes toward Sandinistas, freedom fighters;…

-Prepare list of key media outlets interested in Central American issues; identify specific editors, commentators, talk shows, and columnists;

-Call/visit newspaper editorial boards and give them background on the Nicaraguan freedom fighters;…

-Review and restate themes based on results of public opinion poll;

-Prepare document on Nicaraguan narcotics involvement;

-Publish and distribute “Nicaragua’s development as a Marxist-Leninist state”;

-Sponsor media events for Central American resistance leaders;

-Administration and prominent non-government spokesman on network shows regarding Soviet, Cuban, East German, Libyan, and Iranian connection with Sandinistas;…

-Release paper on Nicaraguan drug involvement;…

-Organize nationally coordinated sermons about aid to the freedom fighters;

-Organize Washington conference “Central America: Resistance or Surrender?” (Presidential drop-by?);…

…and [with no irony]:

-Release paper on Nicaraguan media manipulation.

Far from content to allow the independent development of interpretations and positions, the OPD

published a steady flow of white papers, briefings, talking points, pamphlets, and books on El Salvador and Nicaragua. For El Salvador, the job was primarily proving Cuban and Sandinista ties and rapidly refuting charges of atrocities committed by the Salvadoran military. For Nicaragua, when the White House was not fabricating facts wholesale it was amplifying every statement and action made by the Sandinistas to prove their malfeasance. Documents with the titles “Mothers of Political Prisoners,” “Religious Repression in Nicaragua,” “Nicaragua and Cuba – Drugs,” “In Their Own Words – Former Sandinistas Tell Their Story,” “Human Costs of Communism,” “Nicaragua in Quotes,” “Inside the Sandinista Regime,” and “Christians Under Fire” were distributed either directly by the administration or by allied think tanks, ad hoc committees such as Citizens for America, CIA-front publishing houses, college organizations such as Young Americans for Freedom and Campus Crusade for Christ, the newly created National Endowment for Democracy, and an emerging network of alternative conservative news outlets, the most important at the time being the Christian Broadcasting Network and the Moon-owned Washington Times.

The administration distributed its literature not just to New Right organizations but to ‘church groups, human rights organizations, lawyers, political scientists, journalists, etc.’, each receiving ‘cover letters tailored to their specific interests’. The Office of Public Diplomacy organized conferences on Central America and invited ‘leaders of special interest and public policy groups (think tanks, foundations, church groups, labor organizations, Indian and Black organizations, academics) with special interest in Latin America. In its first year of operations, the office arranged more that [sic] 1,500 speaking engagements and distributed material to ‘1,600 libraries, 520 political science faculties, 122 editorial writers and 107 religious organizations’. It complied [sic] a comprehensive list of moral and political objections to Contra funding and drafted appropriate responses to each one, briefed the press and Congress on a regular basis, and wrote, or helped write, op-eds that were published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal under the bylines of administration officials, retired military officers, Contra leaders, foreign policy experts, and sympathetic scholars” (pp. 128-9).

The other prong in this campaign was the organized effort to “prevent an oppositional consensus from forming” (p. 130). According to Grandin, OPD generally “helped shift the debate in favor of the White House not by winning over domestic hearts and minds but by making it too costly for mainstream journalists and politicians to challenge policy” (p. 131). As is clear in the Honduras case, the tactics involved have become standard in imperial PR. First, OPD used unsubstantiated but provocative claims to distract journalists and edge the media as a whole toward the administration’s preferred frame:

By flooding the media with questionable facts and allegations, the Office of Public Diplomacy forced Reagan’s opponents to dissipate their energies disproving allegations rather than making their own positive case for nonintervention. Confronted by government spokespeople and sympathetic experts ready to rebut unfavorable coverage, no matter how slight the criticism or how marginal the source, reporters came to dread the amount of fact checking it took to cover Central America.

…By offering alternative interpretations, no matter how far-fetched, to discredit charges of atrocities committed by U.S. allies, Public Diplomacy muddied the waters and made it difficult, if not impossible, for human rights organizations to establish the facts of the case (p. 131).

Otto Reich bullied journalists and news organizations. His activities included

visits to reporters whom he felt to be too sympathetic to either the Sandinistas or the Salvadoran rebels. At an NPR studio, Reich let journalists know that his office had contracted a ‘special consultant service [to listen] to all NPR programs on Central America – a serious threat to an agency that operated by government largesse. Reich later boasted that he had succeeded in getting reporters who he felt were too easy on the Sandinistas reassigned. Following his visit, NPR hired conservative commentator Linda Chavez to provide ‘balance’ (p. 132).

Some resisted: “It was [Raymond] Bonner who broke the story of the El Mozote massacre, which Washington vigorously denied for over a decade. Bonner’s reporting met with a firestorm of criticism from the State Department and the Wall Street Journal, leading the New York Times to pull him out of El Salvador. ‘We finally got rid of that sonuvabitch’, said one officer delighted to see him go” (p. 135).

They watched organizations like CISPES - “Activists who traveled to Central America had their official documents and personal papers seized, their mail tampered with, and their landlords and employers questioned” (p. 140). Activists and dissenting organizations were subject to rumor mongering, harassment, intimidation, and break-ins (for which there was apparent impunity).

But critical reports from the regular media were not the norm. With a few exceptions, the press was soft on or silent about (the importance of silence shouldn’t be underestimated) the Reagan administration’s policies in Central America. The “return to deference” that Grandin describes on the part of the media following more penetrating reporting during the Vietnam War was due in part to conscious efforts on behalf of the Pentagon and the CIA, who, understanding that a more independent stance likely resulted in part from greater functional autonomy in source and story development, began to supply a select group of reporters with special access. This led these privileged journalists and organizations (and by extension the public) to become further accustomed to viewing government representatives as knowledgeable and reliable sources and to be wary of losing access by challenging their framing of the issues or seeking out hostile voices. More generally, it “created a bonding experience in which privilege was transformed into sympathy for the institution granting the access” (p. 135).

But this was far from the first such propaganda push. James Bradley’s The Imperial Cruise (a popular rather than a scholarly work)



describes how Teddy Roosevelt used propaganda to build support for imperial projects at the turn of the last century. The PR of expansion and exploitation in that era played openly on the ideologies of male and “Aryan” superiority and racial destiny. Roosevelt styled his public persona after the popular Buffalo Bill,** “the embodiment of the blond Aryan who sowed civilization as he race-cleansed his way west” (p. 51). (Following a visit to South Dakota just three years after the Wounded Knee Massacre, Roosevelt wrote that the U.S. government had treated the Indians “with great justice and fairness,” p. 67). With regard to Rooselvelt's expansionist policy, the newspapers largely hewed to the official line, ready to portray the Cuban and Filipino people as freedom fighters one minute and “lazy, thieving, murderous bands” (p. 81) of non-whites incapable of self-government and in need of Aryan “wards” the next.

The administration sought to place the occupation of the Philippines within a narrative of US virility, heroism, and democratic nation building. According to Bradley,

Teddy’s most prominent enunciation of his Big Stick philosophy was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. President Monroe’s goal had essentially defensive; now Roosevelt took the offense, asserting that the U.S. military was an ‘international police’ and that he had the right to order invasions to enforce American foreign policy. The world could trust such a policy, he argued, because the goal of U.S. foreign policy was ‘the peace of justice’. Roosevelt posed as reluctant to deploy his international police force but warned barbarian countries that if they ‘violated the rights of the United States,’ or if he observed a general loosing of the ties of civilized society’, the United States could exercise its ‘international police power’. Roosevelt informed Congress that American police powers extended to the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, as well as to North Asia (Korea and Manchuria) and to enforcing the Open Door policy in China (p. 204).

Roosevelt made use of photo ops and celebrity distractions (in the form of his daughter Alice) while his administration and – very significantly - organized pro-interventionist groups sought to do imperial damage control and to spread the message of American benevolence by way of a largely compliant press.
Mark Twain’s anti-imperialist 1906 “Comments on the Moro Massacre” called attention to the massacre by the US military of hundreds of people trapped in the crater of a dormant volcano in the Philippines and to the larger exercise in brutality and torture (including waterboarding) that was the US occupation and “pacification” project:

General Wood was present and looking on. His order had been. "Kill or capture those savages." Apparently our little army considered that the "or" left them authorized to kill or capture according to taste, and that their taste had remained what it has been for eight years, in our army out there - the taste of Christian butchers.

But Twain’s comments weren’t limited to the military’s actions, extending to the role of the newspapers both in ignoring the event and its implications and in allowing the government to present these events through the administration’s and military’s lens.

There, with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded-counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy numbered six hundred -- including women and children -- and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.

Now then, how has it been received? The splendid news appeared with splendid display-heads in every newspaper in this city of four million and thirteen thousand inhabitants, on Friday morning. But there was not a single reference to it in the editorial columns of any one of those newspapers. The news appeared again in all the evening papers of Friday, and again those papers were editorially silent upon our vast achievement. Next day's additional statistics and particulars appeared in all the morning papers, and still without a line of editorial rejoicing or a mention of the matter in any way. These additions appeared in the evening papers of that same day (Saturday) and again without a word of comment. In the columns devoted to correspondence, in the morning and evening papers of Friday and Saturday, nobody said a word about the "battle." Ordinarily those columns are teeming with the passions of the citizen; he lets no incident go by, whether it be large or small, without pouring out his praise or blame, his joy or his indignation about the matter in the correspondence column. But, as I have said, during those two days he was as silent as the editors themselves….

The next day, Sunday, -- which was yesterday -- the cable brought us additional news - still more splendid news -- still more honor for the flag. The first display-head shouts this information at us in the stentorian capitals: "WOMEN SLAIN MORO SLAUGHTER."

"Slaughter" is a good word. Certainly there is not a better one in the Unabridged Dictionary for this occasion.

The next display line says:

"With Children They Mixed in Mob in Crater, and All Died Together."

They were mere naked savages, and yet there is a sort of pathos about it when that word children falls under your eye, for it always brings before us our perfectest symbol of innocence and helplessness; and by help of its deathless eloquence color, creed and nationality vanish away and we see only that they are children -- merely children. And if they are frightened and crying and in trouble, our pity goes out to them by natural impulse. We see a picture. We see the small forms. We see the terrified faces. We see the tears. We see the small hands clinging in supplication to the mother; but we do not see those children that we are speaking about. We see in their places the little creatures whom we know and love.
The next heading blazes with American and Christian glory like to the sun in the zenith:

"Death List is Now 900."

I was never so enthusiastically proud of the flag till now!

A few examples of newspaper coverage can be read here. Note the reliance exclusively on military sources and repetition of the military line.

As shown in my posts about Honduras over the past year, the tactics described above have, in one version or another, become common and ever more developed. I think it’s useful to be aware of the history in order to better recognize the characteristic markings of imperialist – and corporate - PR (part of a propaganda baloney detector kit, I suppose), and, perhaps, to better understand the situation of journalists. In short, these examples can help us to appreciate not only the seriousness with which governments and corporations approach their project of manufacturing consent but the tools they’ve used to do it.


*It’s interesting to note one US scientist who was part of this educational system.

**Galeano:

SHOWBIZ CULTURE

Offscreen, the world is a shadow unworthy of confidence.

Before television, before the movies, it was already so. When Buffalo Bill seized some unsuspecting Indian and managed to kill him, he immediately proceeded to tear off his hairy scalp, feathers, and other trophies, and in a single gallop hurtled from the Wild West to the theaters of New York, where he repeated the heroic deed he had just performed. Then, as the curtain rose and Buffalo Bill raised his bloody knife onstage, reality occurred for the very first time there in the footlights.

And so it goes.

Wishing the speediest of recoveries to my phavorite blogger

That is all.

Interlude - From The Book of Embraces

Another from Galeano:

***

THE NOBODIES

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on them - will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn't rain down yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn't even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they began the new day with their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.

Who are not, but could be.

Who don't speak languages, but dialects.

Who don't have religions, but superstitions.

Who don't create art, but handicrafts.

Who don't have culture, but folklore.

Who are not human beings, but human resources.

Who do not have faces, but arms.

Who do not have names, but numbers.

Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.

The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.

***

HONDURAS UPDATE 8-18-10

The news from Honduras, difficult to come by, has not been good. There continues to be pressure, led by the US administration, for the OAS to recognize the Honduran regime, and they are making headway despite the Honduran reality. It’s a joke. Here’s the statement of the Honduran resistance coalition, the FNRP, to the OAS, and here’s a statement concerning the continuing human rights violations in Honduras from COFADEH (according to a statement issued today, three more activists in Aguan have just been killed).

One of the more striking aspects of the coup and its aftermath is how journalists – but not only journalists - have been restricted, intimidated, terrorized, and murdered with impunity. This has received appallingly little attention from the US media. Even the repression of journalists hasn’t led them to tell the truth. This article by Kevin Young – “Honduras, Iran, and the Propaganda Model” – offers a Chomskian analysis of US press coverage of Honduras and Iran. Well worth reading.

My next substantive post will expand on this topic by looking at some of the history of imperialist propaganda in the US.

Interlude - American Troglodyte

Kropotkin on The Primate Diaries!

Eric Michael Johnson of The Primate Diaries in Exile is writing a three-part series on Kropotkin and Huxley. Here are the first two segments:

"The Scientist and the Anarchist - Part I"

"The Scientist and the Anarchist - Part II"

As many know, this is a subject dear to my heart. I'll update with a link to the third part (and a few comments) when it appears.

Interlude - From The Book of Embraces

The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano



is wonderful. I'm going to share a few of my favorites. Here are the first two:

THE FUNCTION OF ART/2

The Preacher Miguel Brun told me that a few years ago he had visited the Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco. He was part of an evangelizing mission. The missionaries visited a chief who was considered very wise. The chief, a quiet, fat man, listened without blinking to the religious propaganda that they read to him in his own language. When they finished, the missionaries awaited a reaction.

The chief took his time, then said:
"That scratches. It scratches hard and it scratches very well."

And then he added:
"But it scratches where there isn't any itch."

***

CELEBRATION OF FANTASY

It happened at the entrance to the town of Ollantaytambo, near Cuzco. I had detached myself from a group of tourists and was standing alone looking at the stone ruins in the distance when a small boy from the neighborhood, skinny and ragged, came over to ask if I would give him a pen. I couldn't give him my pen because I was using it to write down all sorts of boring notes, but I offered to draw a little pig for him on his hand.

Suddenly the word got around. I was surrounded by a throng of little boys demanding at the top of their lungs that I draw animals on their little hands cracked by the dirt and cold, their skin of burnt leather: one wanted a condor and one a snake, others preferred little parrots and owls, and some asked for a ghost or a dragon.

Then, in the middle of this racket, a little waif who barely cleared a yard off the ground showed me a watch drawn in black ink on his wrist.

"An uncle of mine who lives in Lima sent it to me," he said.

"And does it keep good time?" I asked him.

"It's a bit slow," he admitted.

***

Grizzly Man

I was transfixed by Werner Herzog's film Lessons of Darkness


Watch Lessons of Darkness, 1992, by Werner Herzog in Entertainment  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

at the tremendous 2008 "After Nature" exhibit at the New Museum (I hate the description there).

So I was thrilled to see his Grizzly Man, another film I missed when it was playing originally. It's an intelligent meditation on our relationship with nature and what our ideas about it say about us, told through the story of an unlikable man.*



*(Why didn't he just get some dogs, I had to wonder.)

UPDATE, moments later: I don't know about Herzog's politics, and some things I've read, if true, I disagree with. But I recommend the film as a film. One moment in which I did not share his vision was in the description of what he saw in the bear in the final footage. It was simply not what I saw in the eyes of that bear. Interesting....

Pairings

I've been recommending Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich



in various contexts of late. It happens that while I was reading it I caught this movie, which I had missed when it was out:



They're delicious together.

Interlude - Blue Horizon

Strange to have an "interlude" with such limited posting, I know, but I need this now and want to share.