% FROM THE NOAM CHOMSKY ARCHIVE
% http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu:/usr/tp0x/chomsky.html
% ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/user/cap/chomsky/
% Filename:    articles/chomsky.z.force-and-opinion
% Title:       Force and Opinion
% Author:      Noam Chomsky
% Appeared-in: Z Magazine, July/August 1991
% Source:      scanned by Harel Barzilai (harelb@math.cornell.edu), proof-read and edited by Kwynn Buess 
% Keywords:    
% Synopsis:    
% See-also     

                        FORCE AND OPINION
                          Noam Chomsky
                  Z Magazine, July/August 1991


(This essay is an edited version of the conclusion to Chomsky's
_Deterring Democracy_, which is itself a compilation of edited
versions of articles that have appeared in _Z_.)


In his study of the Scottish intellectual tradition, George Davie
identifies its central theme as a recognition of the fundamental
role of ``_natural beliefs_ or principles of common sense, such
as the belief in an independent external world, the belief in
causality, the belief in ideal standards, and the belief in the
self of conscience as separate from the rest of one.'' These
principles are sometimes considered to have a regulative
character; though never fully justified, they provide the
foundations for thought and conception. Some held that they
contain ``an irreducible element of mystery,'' Davie points out,
while others hoped to provide a rational foundation for them. On
that issue, the jury is still out.
 
We can trace such ideas to 17th century thinkers who reacted to
the skeptical crisis of the times by recognizing that there are
no absolutely certain grounds for knowledge, but that we do,
nevertheless, have ways to gain a reliable understanding of the
world and to improve that understanding and apply it---
essentially the standpoint of the working scientist today.
Similarly, in normal life a reasonable person relies on the
natural beliefs of common sense while recognizing that they may
be parochial or misguided, and hoping to refine or alter them as
understanding progresses.
 
Davie credits David Hume with providing this particular cast to
Scottish philosophy, and more generally, having taught philosophy
the proper questions to ask. One puzzle that Hume posed is
particularly pertinent today. In considering the First Principles
of Government, Hume found ``nothing more surprising'' than ``to
see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and
to observe the implicit submission with which men resign their
own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we
enquire by what means this wonder is brought about, we shall
find, that as Force is always on the side of the governed, the
governors have nothing to support them but opinion. 'Tis
therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this
maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments,
as well as to the most free and most popular.''
 
Hume was an astute observer, and his paradox of government is
much to the point. His insight explains why elites are so
dedicated to indoctrination and thought control, a major and
largely neglected theme of modern history. ``The public must be
put in its place,'' Walter Lippmann wrote, so that we may ``live
free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd,'' whose
``function'' is to be ``interested spectators of action,'' not
participants. And if the state lacks the force to coerce and the
voice of the people can be heard, it is necessary to ensure that
that voice says the right thing, as respected intellectuals have
been advising for many years.
 
Hume's observation raises a number of questions. One dubious
feature is the idea that force is on the side of the governed.
Reality is more grim. A good part of human history supports the
contrary thesis put forth a century earlier by advocates of the
rule of Parliament against the King, but more significantly
against the people: that ``the power of the Sword is, and ever
hath been, the Foundation of all Titles to Government.'' Force
also has more subtle modes, including an array of costs well
short of overt violence that attach to refusal to submit.
Nevertheless, Hume's paradox is real. Even despotic rule is
commonly founded on a measure of consent, and the abdication of
rights is the hallmark of more free societies---a fact that calls
for analysis.
 

The Harsher Side
 
The harsher side of the truth is highlighted by the fate of the
popular movements of the past decade. In the Soviet satellites,
the governors had ruled by force, not opinion. When force was
withdrawn, the fragile tyrannies quickly collapsed, for the most
part with little bloodshed. These remarkable successes have
elicited some euphoria about the power of ``love, tolerance,
nonviolence, the human spirit, and forgiveness,'' Vaclav Havel's
explanation for the failure of the police and military to crush
the Czech uprising. The thought is comforting, but illusory, as
even the most cursory look at history reveals. The crucial factor
is not some novel form of love and nonviolence; no new ground was
broken here. Rather, it was the withdrawal of Soviet force, and
the collapse of the structures of coercion based upon it. Those
who believe otherwise may turn for guidance to the ghost of
Archbishop Romero and countless others who have tried to confront
unyielding terror with the human spirit.
 
The recent events of Eastern and Central Europe are a sharp
departure from the historical norm. Throughout modern history,
popular forces motivated by radical democratic ideals have sought
to combat autocratic rule. Sometimes they have been able to
expand the realms of freedom and justice before being brought to
heel. Often they are simply crushed. But it is hard to think of
another case when established power simply withdrew in the face
of a popular challenge. No less remarkable is the behavior of the
reigning superpower, which not only did not bar these
developments by force as in the past, but even encouraged them,
alongside of significant internal changes.
 
The historical norm is illustrated by the dramatically
contrasting case of Central America, where any popular effort to
overthrow the brutal tyrannies of the oligarchy and the military
is met with murderous force, supported or directly organized by
the ruler of the hemisphere. Ten years ago, there were signs of
hope for an end to the dark ages of terror and misery, with the
rise of self-help groups, unions, peasant associations, Christian
base communities, and other popular organizations that might have
led the way to democracy and social reform. This prospect
elicited a stern response by the United States and its clients,
generally supported by its European allies, with a campaign of
slaughter, torture, and general barbarism that left societies
``affected by terror and panic,'' ``collective intimidation and
generalized fear'' and ``internalized acceptance of the terror,''
in the words of a Church-based Salvadoran human rights
organization. Early efforts in Nicaragua to direct resources to
the poor majority impelled Washington to economic and ideological
warfare, and outright terror, to punish these transgressions by
destroying the economy and social life.
 
Enlightened Western opinion regards such consequences as a
success insofar as the challenge to power and privilege is
rebuffed and the targets are properly chosen: killing prominent
priests in public view is not clever, but rural activists and
union leaders are fair game---and of course peasants, Indians,
students, and other low-life generally. Shortly after the murder
of the Jesuit priests in El Salvador in November 1989, the wires
carried a story by AP correspondent Douglas Grant Mine entitled
``Second Salvador Massacre, but of Common Folk,'' reporting how
soldiers entered a working class neighborhood, captured six men,
lined them up against a wall and murdered them, adding a
14-year-old boy for good measure. They ``were not priests or
human rights campaigners,'' Mine wrote, ``so their deaths have
gone largely unnoticed''---as did his story, which was buried.
 
``The same week the Jesuits were killed,'' Central America
correspondent Alan Nairn writes, ``at least 28 other civilians
were murdered in similar fashion. Among them were the head of the
water works union, the leader of the organization of university
women, nine members of an Indian farming cooperative, ten
university students, . . . . Moreover, serious investigation of
the Salvadoran murders leads directly to Washington's doorstep.''
All ``absolutely appropriate,'' hence unworthy of mention or
concern. So the story continues, week after grisly week.
 
The comparison between the Soviet and U.S. domains is a
commonplace outside of culturally deprived sectors of the West,
as illustrated in earlier _Z_ articles. Guatemalan journalist
Julio Godoy, who fled when his newspaper, _La Epoca_, was blown
up by state terrorists (an operation that aroused no interest in
the United States; it was not reported, though well-known),
writes that Eastern Europeans are, ``in a way, luckier than
Central Americans``: ``while the Moscow-imposed government in
Prague would degrade and humiliate reformers, the Washington-made
government in Guatemala would kill them. It still does, in a
virtual genocide that has taken more than 150,000 victims . . .
[in what Amnesty International calls] a `government program of
political murder'.'' That, he suggested, is ``the main
explanation for the fearless character of the students' recent
uprising in Prague: the Czechoslovak Army doesn't shoot to kill
. . . . In Guatemala, not to mention El Salvador, random terror is
used to keep unions and peasant associations from seeking their
own way''---and to ensure that the press conforms, or disappears,
so that Western liberals need not fret over censorship in the
``fledgling democracies'' they applaud.
 
Godoy quotes a European diplomat who says, ``as long as the
Americans don't change their attitude towards the region, there's
no space here for the truth or for hope.'' Surely no space for
nonviolence and love.
 
One will search far to find such truisms in U.S. commentary, or
the West in general, which much prefers largely meaningless
(though self-flattering) comparisons between Eastern and Western
Europe. Nor is the hideous catastrophe of capitalism in the past
years a major theme of contemporary discourse, a catastrophe that
is dramatic in Latin America and other domains of the industrial
West, in the ``internal Third World'' of the United States, and
the ``exported slums'' of Europe. Nor are we likely to find much
attention to the fact, hard to ignore, that the economic success
stories typically involve coordination of the state and
financial-industrial conglomerates, another sign of the collapse
of capitalism in the past 60 years. It is only the Third World
that is to be subjected to the destructive forces of free market
capitalism, so that it can be more efficiently robbed and
exploited by the powerful.
 
Central America represents the historical norm, not Eastern
Europe. Hume's observation requires this correction. Recognizing
that, it remains true, and important, that government is
typically founded on modes of submission short of force, even
where force is available as a last resort.
 

The Bewildered Herd And Its Shepherds
 
In the contemporary period, Hume's insight has been revived and
elaborated, but with a crucial innovation: control of thought is
_more_ important for governments that are free and popular than
for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward.
A despotic state can control its domestic enemy by force, but as
the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to
prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs,
which are none of their business. These prominent features of
modern political and intellectual culture merit a closer look.
 
The problem of ``putting the public in its place'' came to the
fore with what one historian calls ``the first great outburst of
democratic thought in history,'' the English revolution of the
17th century. This awakening of the general populace raised the
problem of how to contain the threat.
 
The libertarian ideas of the radical democrats were considered
outrageous by respectable people. They favored universal
education, guaranteed health care, and democratization of the
law, which one described as a fox, with poor men the geese: ``he
pulls off their feathers and feeds upon them.'' They developed a
kind of ``liberation theology'' which, as one critic ominously
observed, preached ``seditious doctrine to the people'' and aimed
``to raise the rascal multitude . . . against all men of best
quality in the kingdom, to draw them into associations and
combinations with one another . . . against all lords, gentry,
ministers, lawyers, rich and peaceable men'' (historian Clement
Walker). Particularly frightening were the itinerant workers and
preachers calling for freedom and democracy, the agitators
stirring up the rascal multitude, and the printers putting out
pamphlets questioning authority and its mysteries. ``There can be
no form of government without its proper mysteries,'' Walker
warned, mysteries that must be ``concealed'' from the common
folk: ``Ignorance, and admiration arising from ignorance, are the
parents of civil devotion and obedience,'' a thought echoed by
Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor. The radical democrats had ``cast
all the mysteries and secrets of government . . . before the
vulgar (like pearls before swine),'' he continued, and have
``made the people thereby so curious and so arrogant that they
will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule.'' It
is dangerous, another commentator ominously observed, to ``have a
people know their own strength.'' The rabble did not want to be
ruled by King or Parliament, but ``by countrymen like ourselves,
that know our wants.'' Their pamphlets explained further that
``It will never be a good world while knights and gentlemen make
us laws, that are chosen for fear and do but oppress us, and do
not know the people's sores.''
 
These ideas naturally appalled the men of best quality. They were
willing to grant the people rights, but within reason, and on the
principle that ``when we mention the people, we do not mean the
confused promiscuous body of the people.'' After the democrats
had been defeated, John Locke commented that ``day-labourers and
tradesmen, the spinsters and dairymaids'' must be told what to
believe: ``The greatest part cannot know and therefore they must
believe.''
 
Like John Milton and other civil libertarians of the period,
Locke held a sharply limited conception of freedom of expression.
His Fundamental Constitution of Carolina barred those who ``speak
anything in their religious assembly irreverently or seditiously
of the government or governors, or of state matters.'' The
constitution guaranteed freedom for ``speculative opinions in
religion,'' but not for political opinions. ``Locke would not
even have permitted people to discuss public affairs,'' Leonard
Levy observes. The constitution provided further that ``all
manner of comments and expositions on any part of these
constitutions, or on any part of the common or statute laws of
Carolines, are absolutely prohibited.'' In drafting reasons for
Parliament to terminate censorship in 1694, Locke offered no
defense of freedom of expression or thought, but only
considerations of expediency and harm to commercial interests.
With the threat of democracy overcome and the libertarian rabble
dispersed, censorship was permitted to lapse in England, because
the ``opinion-formers . . . censored themselves. Nothing got into
print which frightened the men of property,'' Christopher Hill
comments. In a well-functioning state capitalist democracy like
the United States, what might frighten the men of property is
generally kept far from the public eye---sometimes, with quite
astonishing success.
 
Such ideas have ample resonance until today, including Locke's
stern doctrine that the common people should be denied the right
even to discuss public affairs. This doctrine remains a basic
principle of modern democratic states, now implemented by a
variety of means to protect the operations of the state from
public scrutiny: classification of documents on the largely
fraudulent pretext of national security, clandestine operations,
and other measures to bar the rascal multitude from the political
arena. Such devices typically gain new force under the regime of
statist reactionaries of the Reagan-Thatcher variety. The same
ideas frame the essential professional task and responsibility of
the intellectual community: to shape the perceived historical
record and the picture of the contemporary world in the interests
of the powerful, thus ensuring that the public keeps to its place
and function, properly bewildered.
 
In the 1650s, supporters of Parliament and the army against the
people easily proved that the rabble could not be trusted. This
was shown by their lingering monarchist sentiments and their
reluctance to place their affairs in the hands of the gentry and
the army, who were ``truly the people,'' though the people in
their foolishness did not agree. The mass of the people are a
``giddy multitude,'' ``beasts in men's shapes.'' It is proper to
suppress them, just as it is proper ``to save the life of a
lunatique or distracted person even against his will.'' If the
people are so ``depraved and corrupt'' as to ``confer places of
power and trust upon wicked and undeserving men, they forfeit
their power in this behalf unto those that are good, though but a
few.''
 
The good and few may be the gentry or industrialists, or the
vanguard Party and the Central Committee, or the intellectuals
who qualify as ``experts'' because they articulate the consensus
of the powerful (to paraphrase one of Henry Kissinger's
insights). They manage the business empires, ideological
institutions, and political structures, or serve them at various
levels. Their task is to shepherd the bewildered herd and keep
the giddy multitude in a state of implicit submission, and thus
to bar the dread prospect of freedom and self-determination.
 
Similar ideas have been forged as the Spanish explorers set about
what Tzvetan Todorov calls ``the greatest genocide in human
history'' after they ``discovered America'' 500 years ago. They
justified their acts of terror and oppression on the grounds that
the natives are not ``capable of governing themselves any more
than madmen or even wild beasts and animals, seeing that their
food is not any more agreeable and scarcely better than that of
wild beasts'' and their stupidity ``is much greater than that of
children and madmen in other countries'' (professor and
theologian Francisco de Vitoria, ``one of the pinnacles of
Spanish humanism in the sixteenth century''). Therefore,
intervention is legitimate ``in order to exercise the rights of
guardianship,'' Todorov comments, summarizing de Vitoria's basic
thought.
 
When English savages took over the task a few years later, they
naturally adopted the same pose while taming the wolves in the
guise of men, as George Washington described the objects that
stood in the way of the advance of civilization and had to be
eliminated for their own good. The English colonists had already
handled the Celtic ``wild men'' the same way, for example, when
Lord Cumberland, known as ``the butcher,'' laid waste to the
Scottish highlands before moving on to pursue his craft in North
America.
 
One hundred and fifty years later, their descendants had purged
North America of this native blight, reducing the lunatics from
10 million to 200,000 according to some recent estimates, and
they turned their eyes elsewhere, to civilize the wild beasts in
the Philippines. The Indian fighters to whom President McKinley
assigned the task of ``Christianizing'' and ``uplifting'' these
unfortunate creatures rid the liberated islands of hundreds of
thousands of them, accelerating their ascent to heaven. They too
were rescuing ``misguided creatures'' from their depravity by
``slaughtering the natives in English fashion,'' as the New York
described their painful responsibility, adding that we must take
``what muddy glory lies in the wholesale killing til they have
learned to respect our arms,'' then moving on to ``the more
difficult task of getting them to respect our intentions.''
 
This is pretty much the course of history, as the plague of
European civilization devastated much of the world.
 
On the home front, the continuing problem was formulated plainly
by the 17th century political thinker Marchamont Nedham. The
proposals of the radical democrats, he wrote, would result in
``ignorant Persons, neither of Learning nor Fortune, being put in
Authority.'' Given their freedom, the ``self-opinionated
multitude'' would elect ``the _lowest of the People_'' who would
occupy themselves with ``Milking and Gelding the Purses of the
Rich,'' taking ``the ready Road to all licentiousness, mischief,
mere Anarchy and Confusion.'' These sentiments are the common
coin of modern political and intellectual discourse; increasingly
so as popular struggles did succeed, over the centuries, in
realizing the proposals of the radical democrats, so that ever
more sophisticated means had to be devised to reduce their
substantive content.
 
Such problems regularly arise in periods of turmoil and social
conflict. After the American revolution, rebellious and
independent farmers had to be taught by force that the ideals
expressed in the pamphlets of 1776 were not to be taken
seriously. The common people were not to be represented by
countrymen like themselves, that know the people's sores, but by
gentry, merchants, lawyers, and others who hold or serve private
power. Jefferson and Madison believed that power should be in the
hands of the ``natural aristocracy,'' Edmund Morgan comments,
``men like themselves'' who would defend property rights against
Hamilton's ``paper aristocracy'' and from the poor; they
``regarded slaves, paupers, and destitute laborers as an
ever-present danger to liberty as well as property.'' The
reigning doctrine, expressed by the Founding Fathers, is that
``the people who own the country ought to govern it'' (John Jay).
The rise of corporations in the 19th century, and the legal
structures devised to grant them dominance over private and
public life, established the victory of the Federalist opponents
of popular democracy in a new and powerful form.
 
Not infrequently, revolutionary struggles pit aspirants to power
against one another though united in opposition to radical
democratic tendencies among the common people. Lenin and Trotsky,
shortly after seizing state power in 1917, moved to dismantle
organs of popular control, including factory councils and
Soviets, thus proceeding to deter and overcome socialist
tendencies. An orthodox Marxist, Lenin did not regard socialism
as a viable option in this backward and underdeveloped country;
until his last days, it remained for him an ``elementary truth of
Marxism, that the victory of socialism requires the joint efforts
of workers in a number of advanced countries,'' Germany in
particular. In what has always seemed to me his greatest work,
George Orwell described a similar process in Spain, where the
Fascists, Communists, and liberal democracies were united in
opposition to the libertarian revolution that swept over much of
the country, turning to the conflict over the spoils only when
popular forces were safely suppressed. There are many examples,
often influenced by great power violence.
 
This is particularly true in the Third World. A persistent
concern of Western elites is that popular organizations might lay
the basis for meaningful democracy and social reform, threatening
the prerogatives of the privileged. Those who seek ``to raise the
rascal multitude'' and ``draw them into associations and
combinations with one another'' against ``the men of best
quality'' must, therefore, be repressed or eliminated. It comes
as no surprise that Archbishop Romero should be assassinated
shortly after urging President Carter to withhold military aid
from the governing junta, which, he warned, will use it to
``sharpen injustice and repression against the people's
organizations'' struggling ``for respect for their most basic
human rights.''
 
The threat of popular organization to privilege is real enough in
itself. Worse still, ``the rot may spread,'' in the terminology
of political elites; there may be a demonstration effect of
independent development in a form that attends to the people's
sores. Internal documents and even the public record reveal that
a driving concern of U.S. planners has been the fear that the
``virus'' might spread, ``infecting'' regions beyond.
 
This concern breaks no new ground. European statesmen had feared
that the American revolution might ``lend new strength to the
apostles of sedition'' (Metternich), and might spread ``the
contagion and the invasion of vicious principles'' such as ``the
pernicious doctrines of republicanism and popular selfrule,'' one
of the Czar's diplomats warned. A century later, the cast of
characters was reversed. Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State
Robert Lansing feared that if the Bolshevik disease were to
spread, it would leave the ``ignorant and incapable mass of
humanity dominant in the earth''; the Bolsheviks, he continued,
were appealing ``to the proletariat of all countries, to the
ignorant and mentally deficient, who by their numbers are urged
to become masters, . . . a very real danger in view of the
process of social unrest throughout the world.'' Again it is
democracy that is the awesome threat. When soldiers and workers
councils made a brief appearance in Germany, Wilson feared that
they would inspire dangerous thoughts among ``the American negro
[soldiers] returning from abroad.'' Already, he had heard, negro
laundresses were demanding more than the going wage, saying that
``money is as much mine as it is yours.'' Businessmen might have
to adjust to having workers on their boards of directors, he
feared, among other disasters, if the Bolshevik virus were not
exterminated.
 
With these dire consequences in mind, the Western invasion of the
Soviet Union was justified on defensive grounds, against ``the
Revolution's challenge . . . to the very survival of the
capitalist order'' (John Lewis Gaddis). And it was only natural
that the defense of the United States should extend from invasion
of the Soviet Union to Wilson's Red Scare at home. As Lansing
explained, force must be used to prevent ``the leaders of
Bolshevism and anarchy'' from proceeding to ``organize or preach
against government in the United States``; the government must
not permit ``these fanatics to enjoy the liberty which they now
seek to destroy.'' The repression launched by the Wilson
administration successfully undermined democratic politics,
unions, freedom of the press, and independent thought, in the
interests of corporate power and the state authorities who
represented its interests, all with the general approval of the
media and elites generally, all in self-defense against the
``ignorant and mentally deficient'' majority. Much the same story
was re-enacted after World War II, again under the pretext of a
Soviet threat, in reality, to restore submission to the rulers.
 
When political life and independent thought revived in the 1960s,
the problem arose again, and the reaction was the same. The
Trilateral Commission, bringing together liberal elites from
Europe, Japan, and the United States, warned of an impending
``crisis of democracy'' as segments of the public sought to enter
the political arena. This ``excess of democracy'' was posing a
threat to the unhampered rule of privileged elites---what is
called ``democracy'' in political theology. The problem was the
usual one: the rabble were trying to manage their own affairs,
gaining control over their communities and pressing their
political demands. There were organizing efforts among young
people, ethnic minorities, women, social activists, and others,
encouraged by the struggles of benighted masses elsewhere for
freedom and independence. More ``moderation in democracy'' would
be required, the Commission concluded, perhaps a return to the
days when ``Truman had been able to govern the country with the
cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers
and bankers,'' as the American rapporteur commented.
 
The fears expressed by the men of best quality in the 17th
century have become a major theme of intellectual discourse,
corporate practice, and the academic social sciences. They were
expressed by the influential moralist and foreign affairs adviser
Reinhold Niebuhr, who was revered by George Kennan, the Kennedy
intellectuals, and many others. He wrote that ``rationality
belongs to the cool observers'' while the common person follows
not reason but faith. The cool observers, he explained, must
recognize ``the stupidity of the average man,'' and must provide
the ``necessary illusion'' and the ``emotionally potent
oversimplifications'' that will keep the naive simpletons on
course. As in 1650, it remains necessary to protect the ``lunatic
or distracted person,'' the ignorant rabble, from their own
``depraved and corrupt'' judgments, just as one does not allow a
child to cross the street without supervision.
 
In accordance with the prevailing conceptions, there is no
infringement of democracy if a few corporations control the
information system: in fact, that is the essence of democracy.
The leading figure of the public relations industry, Edward
Bernays, explained that ``the very essence of the democratic
process'' is ``the freedom to persuade and suggest,'' what he
calls ``the engineering of consent.'' If the freedom to persuade
happens to be concentrated in a few hands, we must recognize that
such is the nature of a free society.
 
Bernays expressed the basic point in a public relations manual of
1928: ``The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the
organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important
element in democratic society . . . It is the intelligent
minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and
systematically.'' Given its enormous and decisive power, the
highly class conscious business community of the United States
has been able to put these lessons to effective use. Bernays'
advocacy of propaganda is cited by Thomas McCann, head of public
relations for the United Fruit Company, for which Bernays
provided signal service in preparing the ground for the overthrow
of Guatemalan democracy in 1954, a major triumph of business
propaganda with the willing compliance of the media.
 
The intelligent minorities have long understood this to be their
function. Walter Lippmann described a ``revolution'' in ``the
practice of democracy'' as ``the manufacture of consent'' has
become ``a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular
government.'' This is a natural development when public opinion
cannot be trusted: ``In the absence of institutions and education
by which the environment is so successfully reported that the
realities of public life stand out very sharply against
self-centered opinion, the common interests very largely elude
public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized
class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality,'' and
are thus able to perceive ``the realities.'' These are the men of
best quality, who alone are capable of social and economic
management.
 
It follows that two political roles must be clearly
distinguished, Lippmann goes on to explain. First, there is the
role assigned to the specialized class, the ``insiders,'' the
``responsible men,'' who have access to information and
understanding. Ideally, they should have a special education for
public office, and should master the criteria for solving the
problems of society: ``In the degree to which these criteria can
be made exact and objective, political decision,'' which is their
domain, ``is actually brought into relation with the interests of
men.'' The ``public men'' are, furthermore, to ``lead opinion''
and take the responsibility for ``the formation of a sound public
opinion.'' ``They initiate, they administer, they settle,'' and
should be protected from ``ignorant and meddlesome outsiders,''
the general public, who are incapable of dealing ``with the
substance of the problem.'' The criteria we apply to government
are success in satisfying material and cultural wants, not
whether ``it vibrates to the self-centered opinions that happen
to be floating in men's minds.'' Having mastered the criteria for
political decision, the specialized class, protected from public
meddling, will serve the public interest---what is called ``the
national interest'' in the webs of mystification spun by the
academic social sciences and political commentary.
 
The second role is ``the task of the public,'' which is much more
limited. It is not for the public, Lippmann observes, to ``pass
judgment on the intrinsic merits'' of an issue or to offer
analysis or solutions, but merely, on occasion, to place ``its
force at the disposal'' of one or another group of ``responsible
men.'' The public ``does not reason, investigate, invent,
persuade, bargain, or settle.'' Rather, ``the public acts only by
aligning itself as the partisan of someone in a position to act
executively,'' once he has given the matter at hand sober and
disinterested thought. It is for this reason that ``the public
must be put in its place.'' The bewildered herd, trampling and
roaring, ``has its function``: to be ``the interested spectators
of action,'' not participants. Participation is the duty of ``the
responsible man.''
 
These ideas, described by Lippmann's editors as a progressive
``political philosophy for liberal democracy,'' have an
unmistakeable resemblance to the Leninist concept of a vanguard
party that leads the masses to a better life that they cannot
conceive or construct on their own. In fact, the transition from
one position to the other, from Leninist enthusiasm to
``celebration of America,'' has proven quite an easy one over the
years. This is not surprising, since the doctrines are similar at
their root. The critical difference lies in an assessment of the
prospects for power: through exploitation of mass popular
struggle, or service to the current masters.
 
There is, clearly enough, an unspoken assumption behind the
proposals of Lippmann and others: the specialized class are
offered the opportunity to manage public affairs by virtue of
their subordination to those with real power---in our societies,
dominant business interests---a crucial fact that is ignored in
the self-praise of the elect.
 
Lippmann's thinking on these matters dates from shortly after
World War I, when the liberal intellectual community was much
impressed with its success in serving as ``the faithful and
helpful interpreters of what seems to be one of the greatest
enterprises ever undertaken by an American president'' (_New
Republic_). The enterprise was Woodrow Wilson's interpretation of
his electoral mandate for ``peace without victory'' as the
occasion for pursuing victory without peace, with the assistance
of the liberal intellectuals, who later praised themselves for
having ``impose[d] their will upon a reluctant or indifferent
majority,'' with the aid of propaganda fabrications about Hun
atrocities and other such devices. They were serving, often
unwittingly, as instruments of the British Ministry of
Information, which secretly defined its task as ``to direct the
thought of most of the world.''
 
Fifteen years later, the influential political scientist Harold
Lasswell explained in the _Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences_
that when elites lack the requisite force to compel obedience,
social managers must turn to ``a whole new technique of control,
largely through propaganda.'' He added the conventional
justification: we must recognize the ``ignorance and stupidity
[of] . . . the masses'' and not succumb to ``democratic
dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own
interests.'' They are not, and we must control them, for their
own good. The same principle guides the business community.
Others have developed similar ideas, and put them into practice
in the ideological institutions: the schools, the universities,
the popular media, the elite journals, and so on. A challenge to
these ideas arouses trepidation, sometimes fury, as when students
of the 1960s, instead of simply bowing to authority, began to ask
too many questions and to explore beyond the bounds established
for them. The pretense of manning the ramparts against the
onslaught of the barbarians, now a popular pose, is scarcely more
than comical fraud.
 
The doctrines of Lippmann, Lasswell, and others are entirely
natural in any society in which power is narrowly concentrated
but formal mechanisms exist by which ordinary people may, in
theory, play some role in shaping their own affairs---a threat
that plainly must be barred.
 
The techniques of manufacture of consent are most finely honed in
the United States, a more advanced business-run society than its
allies and one that is in important ways more free than
elsewhere, so that the ignorant and stupid masses are more
dangerous. But the same concerns arise in Europe, as in the past,
heightened by the fact that the European varieties of state
capitalism have not yet progressed as far as the United States in
eliminating labor unions and other impediments to rule by men
(and occasionally women) of best quality, thus restricting
politics to factions of the business party. The basic problem,
recognized throughout, is that as the state loses the capacity to
control the population by force, privileged sectors must find
other methods to ensure that the rascal multitude is removed from
the public arena. And the insignificant nations must be subjected
to the same practices as the insignificant people. Liberal doves
hold that others should be free and independent, but not free to
choose in ways that we regard as unwise or contrary to our
interests, a close counterpart to the prevailing conception of
democracy at home as a form of population control.
 
A properly functioning system of indoctrination has a variety of
tasks, some rather delicate. One of its targets is the stupid and
ignorant masses. They must be kept that way, diverted with
emotionally potent oversimplifications, marginalized, and
isolated. Ideally, each person should be alone in front of the TV
screen watching sports, soap operas, or comedies, deprived of
organizational structures that permit individuals lacking
resources to discover what they think and believe in interaction
with others, to formulate their own concerns and programs, and to
act to realize them. They can then be permitted, even encouraged,
to ratify the decisions of their betters in periodic elections.
The rascal multitude are the proper targets of the mass media and
a public education system geared to obedience and training in
needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans
on timely occasions.
 
For submissiveness to become a reliable trait, it must be
entrenched in every realm. The public are to be observers, not
participants, consumers of ideology as well as products. Eduardo
Galeano writes that ``the majority must resign itself to the
consumption of fantasy. Illusions of wealth are sold to the poor,
illusions of freedom to the oppressed, dreams of victory to the
defeated and of power to the weak.'' Nothing less will do.
 
The problem of indoctrination is a bit different for those
expected to take part in serious decision-making and control: the
business, state, and cultural managers, and articulate sectors
generally. They must internalize the values of the system and
share the necessary illusions that permit it to function in the
interests of concentrated power and privilege or at least be
cynical enough to pretend that they do, an art that not many can
master. But they must also have a certain grasp of the realities
of the world, or they will be unable to perform their tasks
effectively. The elite media and educational systems must steer a
course through these dilemmas, not an easy task, one plagued by
internal contradictions. It is intriguing to see how it is faced,
but that is beyond the scope of these remarks.
 
For the home front, a variety of techniques of manufacture of
consent are required, geared to the intended audience and its
ranking on the scale of significance. For those at the lowest
rank, and for the insignificant peoples abroad, another device is
available, what a leading turn-of-the-century American
sociologist, Franklin Henry Giddings, called ``consent without
consent'': ``if in later years, [the colonized] see and admit
that the disputed relation was for the highest interest, it may
be reasonably held that authority has been imposed with the
consent of the governed,'' as when a parent disciplines an
uncomprehending child. Giddings was referring to the ``misguided
creatures'' that we were reluctantly slaughtering in the
Philippines, for their own good. But the lesson holds more
generally.
 
As noted, the Bolshevik overtones are apparent throughout. The
systems have crucial differences, but also striking similarities.
Lippmann's ``specialized class'' and Bernays' ``intelligent
minority,'' which are to manage the public and their affairs
according to liberal democratic theory, correspond to the
Leninist vanguard of revolutionary intellectuals. The
``manufacture of consent'' advocated by Lippmann, Bernays,
Niebuhr, Lasswell and others is the Agitprop of their Leninist
counterparts. Following a script outlined by Bakunin over a
century ago, the secular priesthood in both of the major systems
of hierarchy and coercion regard the masses as stupid and
incompetent, a bewildered herd who must be driven to a better
world---one that we, the intelligent minority, will construct for
them, either taking state power ourselves in the Leninist model,
or serving the owners and managers of the state capitalist
systems if it is impossible to exploit popular revolution to
capture the commanding heights.
 
Much as Bakunin had predicted long before, the Leninist ``Red
bureaucracy'' moved at once to dismantle organs of popular
control, particularly, any institutional structures that might
provide working people with some influence over their affairs as
producers or citizens.
 
Not surprisingly, the immediate destruction of the incipient
socialist tendencies that arose during the ferment of popular
struggle in 1917 has been depicted by the world's two great
propaganda systems as a victory for socialism. For the
Bolsheviks, the goal of the farce was to extract what advantage
they could from the moral prestige of socialism; for the West,
the purpose was to defame socialism and entrench the system of
ownership and management control over all aspects of economic,
political, and social life. The collapse of the Leninist system
cannot properly be called a victory for socialism, any more than
the collapse of Hitler and Mussolini could be described in these
terms; but as in those earlier cases, it does eliminate a barrier
to the realization of the libertarian socialist ideals of the
popular movements that were crushed in Russia in 1917, Germany
shortly after, Spain in 1936, and elsewhere, often with the
Leninist vanguard leading the way in taming the rascal multitude
with their libertarian socialist and radical democratic
aspirations.
 

Short Of Force
 
Hume posed his paradox for both despotic and more free societies.
The latter case is by far the more important. As the social world
becomes more free and diverse, the task of inducing submission
becomes more complex and the problem of unraveling the mechanisms
of indoctrination, more challenging. But intellectual interest
aside, the case of free societies has greater significance for
us, because here we are talking about ourselves and can act upon
what we learn. It is for just this reason that the dominant
culture will always seek to externalize human concerns, directing
them to the inadequacies and abuses of others. When U.S. plans go
awry in some corner of the Third World, we devote our attention
to the defects and special problems of these cultures and their
social disorders---not our own. Fame, fortune, and respect await
those who reveal the crimes of official enemies: those who
undertake the vastly more important task of raising a mirror to
their own societies can expect quite different treatment. George
Orwell is famous for _Animal Farm_ and _1984_, which focus on the
official enemy. Had he addressed the more interesting and
significant question of thought control in relatively free and
democratic societies, it would not have been appreciated, and
instead of wide acclaim, he would have faced silent dismissal or
obloquy. Let us nevertheless turn to the more important and
unacceptable questions.
 
Keeping to governments that are more free and popular, why do the
governed submit when force is on their side? First, we have to
look at a prior question: to what extent is force on the side of
the governed? Here some care is necessary. Societies are
considered free and democratic insofar as the power of the state
to coerce is limited. The United States is unusual in this
respect: Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, the
citizen is free from state coercion, at least, the citizen who is
relatively privileged and of the right color, a substantial part
of the population.
 
But it is a mere truism that the state represents only one
segment of the nexus of power. Control over investment,
production, commerce, finance, conditions of work, and other
crucial aspects of social policy lies in private hands.
Unwillingness to adapt to this structure of authority and
domination carries costs, ranging from state force to the costs
of privation and struggle; even an individual of independent mind
can hardly fail to compare these to the benefits, however meager,
that accrue to submission. Meaningful choices are thus narrowly
limited. Similar factors limit the range of ideas and opinion in
obvious ways. Articulate expression is shaped by the same private
powers that control the economy. It is largely dominated by major
corporations that sell audiences to advertisers and naturally
reflect the interests of the owners and their market. The ability
to articulate and communicate one's views, concerns, and
interests---or even to discover them---is thus narrowly
constrained as well.
 
Denial of these truisms about effective power is at the heart of
the structure of necessary illusion. Thus, a media critic,
reviewing a book on the press in the _New York Times_, refers
without argument to the ``traditional Jeffersonian role'' of the
press ``as counterbalance to government power.'' The phrase
encapsulates three crucial assumptions, one historical, one
descriptive, one ideological. The historical claim is that
Jefferson was a committed advocate of freedom of the press, which
is false. The second is that the press in fact functions as a
counterbalance to government rather than as a faithful servant,
presented here as doctrine, thus evading any need to face the
massive array of detailed documentation that refutes this dogma.
The ideological principle is that Jeffersonian libertarianism
(considered abstractly, apart from its realization in practice)
would demand that the press be a counterbalance to government
power. That is incorrect. The libertarian conception is that the
press should be independent, hence a counterbalance to
centralized power of any form. In Jefferson's day, the powers
that loomed large were the state, the church, and feudal
structures. Shortly after, new forms of centralized power emerged
in the world of corporate capitalism. A Jeffersonian would hold,
then, that the press should be a counterbalance to state or
corporate power, and critically to the state-corporate nexus. But
to raise this point carries us into forbidden ground.
 
Apart from the general constraints on choice and articulate
opinion inherent in the concentration of private power, it also
set narrow limits on the actions of government. The United States
has again been unusual in this respect among the industrial
democracies, though convergence toward the U.S. pattern is
evident elsewhere. The United States is near the limit in its
safeguards for freedom from state coercion, and, also in the
poverty of its political life. There is essentially one political
party, the business party, with two factions. Shifting coalitions
of investors account for a large part of political history.
Unions, or other popular organizations that might offer a way for
the general public to play some role in influencing programs and
policy choices, scarcely function apart from the narrowest realm.
The ideological system is bounded by the consensus of the
privileged. Elections are largely a ritual form. In congressional
elections, virtually all incumbents are returned to office, a
reflection of the vacuity of the political system and the choices
it offers. There is scarcely a pretense that substantive issues
are at stake in the presidential campaigns.  Articulated programs
are hardly more than a device to garner votes, and candidates
adjust their messages to their audiences as public relations
tacticians advise. Political commentators ponder such questions
as whether Reagan will remember his lines, or whether Mondale
looks too gloomy, or whether Dukakis can duck the slime flung at
him by George Bush's speech writers. In the 1984 elections, the
two political factions virtually exchanged traditional policies,
the Republicans presenting themselves as the party of Keynesian
growth and state intervention in the economy, the Democrats as
the advocates of fiscal conservatism; few even noticed. Half the
population does not bother to push the buttons, and those who
take the trouble often consciously vote against their own
interest.
 
The public is granted an opportunity to ratify decisions made
elsewhere, in accord with the prescriptions of Lippmann and other
democratic theorists. It may select among personalities put forth
in a game of symbolic politics that only the most naive take very
seriously. When they do, they are mocked by sophisticates.
Criticism of President Bush's call for ``revenue enhancement''
after having won the election by the firm and eloquent promise
not to raise taxes is a ``political cheap shot,'' Harvard
political scientist and media specialist Marty Linsky comments
under the heading ``Campaign pledges---made to be broken.'' When
Bush won the election by leading the public in the ``read my
lips---no new taxes'' chant, he was merely expressing his ``world
view,'' making ``a statement of his hopes.'' Those who thought he
was promising no new taxes do not understand that ``elections and
governing are different ball games, played with different
objectives and rules.'' ``The purpose of elections is to win,''
Linsky correctly observes, expressing the cynicism of the
sophisticated; and ``the purpose of governing is to do the best
for the country,'' he adds, parroting the necessary illusions
that respectability demands.
 
Even when issues arise in the political system, the concentration
of effective power limits the threat. The question is largely
academic in the United States because of the subordination of the
political and ideological system to business interests, but in
democracies to the south, where conflicting ideas and approaches
reach the political arena, the situation is different. As is
again familiar, government policies that private power finds
unwelcome will lead to capital flight, disinvestment, and social
decline until business confidence is restored with the
abandonment of the threat to privilege; these facts of life exert
a decisive influence on the political system (with military force
in reserve if matters get out of hand, supported or applied by
the North American enforcer). To put the basic point crassly,
unless the rich and powerful are satisfied, everyone will suffer,
because they control the basic social levers, determining what
will be produced and consumed, and what crumbs will filter down
to their subjects. For the homeless in the streets, then, the
primary objective is to ensure that the rich live happily in
their mansions. This crucial factor, along with simple control
over resources, severely limits the force on the side of the
governed and diminishes Hume's paradox in a well-functioning
capitalist democracy in which the general public is scattered and
isolated.
 
Understanding of these basic conditions---tacit or explicit---
has long served as a guide for policy. Once popular organizations
are dispersed or crushed and decision-making power is firmly in
the hands of owners and managers, democratic forms are quite
acceptable, even preferable as a device of legitimation of elite
rule in a business-run ``democracy.'' The pattern was followed by
U.S. planners in reconstructing the industrial societies after
World War II, and is standard in the Third World, though assuring
stability of the desired kind is far more difficult there, except
by state terror. Once a functioning social order is firmly
established, an individual who must find a (relatively isolated)
place within it in order to survive will tend to think its
thoughts, adopt its assumptions about the inevitability of
certain forms of authority, and in general, adapt to its ends.
The costs of an alternative path or a challenge to power are
high, the resources are lacking, and the prospects limited. These
factors operate in slave and feudal societies---where their
efficacy has duly impressed counterinsurgency theorists. In free
societies, they manifest themselves in other ways. If their power
to shape behavior begins to erode, other means must be sought to
tame the rascal multitude.
 
When force is on the side of the masters, they may rely on
relatively crude means of manufacture of consent and need not
overly concern themselves with the minds of the herd.
Nevertheless, even a violent terror state faces Hume's problem.
The modalities of state terrorism that the United States has
devised for its clients have commonly included at least a gesture
towards ``winning hearts and minds,'' though experts warn against
undue sentimentality on this score, arguing that ``all the
dilemmas are practical and as neutral in an ethical sense as the
laws of physics.'' Nazi Germany shared these concerns, as Albert
Speer discusses in his autobiography, and the same is true of
Stalinist Russia. Discussing this case, Alexander Gerschenkron
observes that ``Whatever the strength of the army and the
ubiquitousness of the secret police which such a government may
have at its disposal, it would be naive to believe that those
instruments of physical oppression can suffice. Such a government
can maintain itself in power only if it succeeds in making people
believe that it performs an important social function which could
not be discharged in its absence. Industrialization provided such
a function for the Soviet government . . ., [which] did what no
government relying on the consent of the governed could have done
. . . But, paradoxical as it may sound, these policies at the
same time have secured some broad acquiescence on the part of the
people. If all the forces of the population can be kept engaged
in the processes of industrialization and if this
industrialization can be justified by the promise of happiness
and abundance for future generations and---much more
importantly---by the menace of military aggression from beyond
the borders, the dictatorial government will find its power
broadly unchallenged.''
 
The thesis gains support from the rapid collapse of the Soviet
system when its incapacity to move to a more advanced stage of
industrial and technological development became evident.
 

The Pragmatic Criterion
 
It is important to be aware of the profound commitment of Western
opinion to the repression of freedom and democracy, by violence
if necessary. To understand our own cultural world, we must
recognize that advocacy of terror is clear, explicit, and
principled, across the political spectrum. It is superfluous to
invoke the thoughts of Jeane Kirkpatrick, George Will, and the
like. But little changes as we move to ``the establishment
left,'' to borrow the term used by _Foreign Policy_ editor
Charles William Maynes in an ode to the American crusade ``to
spread the cause of democracy.''
 
Consider political commentator Michael Kinsley, who represents
``the left'' in mainstream commentary and television debate.
When the State Department publicly confirmed U.S. support for
terrorist attacks on agricultural cooperatives in Nicaragua,
Kinsley wrote that we should not be too quick to condemn this
official policy. Such international terrorist operations
doubtless cause ``vast civilian suffering,'' he conceded. But if
they succeed ``to undermine morale and confidence in the
government,'' then they may be ``perfectly legitimate.'' The
policy is ``sensible'' if ``cost-benefit analysis'' shows that
``the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in'' yields
``democracy,'' in the conventional sense already discussed.
 
As a spokesperson for the establishment left, Kinsley insists
that terror must meet the pragmatic criterion; violence should
not be employed for its own sake, merely because we find it
amusing. This more humane conception would readily be accepted by
Saddam Hussein, Abu Nidal, and the Hizbollah kidnappers, who,
presumably, also consider terror pointless unless it is of value
for their ends. These facts help us situate enlightened Western
opinion on the international spectrum.
 
Such reasoned discussion of the justification for terror is not
at all unusual, which is why it elicits no reaction in
respectable circles just as there is no word of comment among its
left-liberal contributors and readers when the _New Republic_,
long considered the beacon of American liberalism, advocates
military aid to ``Latin-style fascists . . . regardless of how
many are murdered'' because ``there are higher American
priorities than Salvadoran human rights.''
 
Appreciation of the ``salutary efficacy'' of terror, to borrow
John Quincy Adams's phrase, has been a standard feature of
enlightened Western thought. It provides the basic framework for
the propaganda campaign concerning international terrorism in the
1980s. Naturally, terrorism directed against us and our friends
is bitterly denounced as a reversion to barbarism. But far more
extreme terrorism that we and our agents conduct is considered
constructive, or at worst insignificant, if it meets the
pragmatic criterion. Even the vast campaign of international
terrorism launched against Cuba by the Kennedy administration,
far exceeding anything attributed to official enemies, does not
exist in respected academic discourse or the mainstream media.
In his standard and much respected scholarly study of
international terrorism, Walter Laqueur depicts Cuba as a sponsor
of the crime with innuendos but scarcely a pretense of evidence,
while the campaign of international terrorism _against_ Cuba
merits literally not a word; in fact, Cuba is classed among those
societies ``free from terror.''
 
The guiding principle is clear and straightforward: _their_
terror is terror, and the flimsiest evidence suffices to denounce
it and to exact retribution upon civilian bystanders who happen
to be in the way; _our_ terror, even if far more extreme, is
merely statecraft, and therefore does not enter into the
discussion of the plague of the modern age. The practice is
understandable on the principles already discussed.
 
Huge massacres are treated by much the same criteria: _theirs_
are crimes, _ours_ statecraft or understandable error. In a study
of U.S. power and ideology a decade ago, Edward Herman and I
reviewed numerous examples of two kinds of atrocities, ``benign
and constructive bloodbaths'' that are acceptable or even
advantageous to dominant interests, and ``nefarious blood-baths''
perpetrated by official enemies. The reaction follows the same
pattern as the treatment of terrorism. The former are ignored,
denied, or sometimes even welcomed; the latter elicit great
outrage and often large-scale deceit and fabrication, if the
available evidence is felt to be inadequate for doctrinal
requirements.
 
Such devices as mass starvation have always been considered
entirely legitimate, if they meet the pragmatic criterion. As
director of the humanitarian program providing food to starving
Europeans after World War II, Herbert Hoover advised President
Wilson that he was ``maintaining a thin line of food'' to
guarantee the rule of anti-Bolshevik elements. In response to
rumors of ``a serious outbreak on May Day'' in Austria, Hoover
issued a public warning that any such action would jeopardize the
city's sparse food supply. Food was withheld from Hungary under
the Communist Bela Kun government, with a promise that it would
be supplied if he were removed in favor of a government
acceptable to the U.S. The economic blockade, along with Rumanian
military pressure, forced Kun to relinquish power and flee to
Moscow. Backed by French and British forces, the Rumanian
military joined with Hungarian counter-revolutionaries to
administer a dose of White terror and install a right-wing
dictatorship under Admiral Horthy, who collaborated with Hitler
in the next stage of slaying the Bolshevik beast. The threat of
starvation was also used to buy the critical Italian elections of
1948 and to help impose the rule of U.S. clients in Nicaragua in
l990, among other noteworthy examples.
 
A review of the debate over Central America during the past
decade reveals the decisive role of the pragmatic criterion.
Guatemala was never an issue, because mass slaughter and
repression appeared to be effective. Early on, the Church was
something of a problem, but, as Kenneth Freed comments in the
_Los Angeles Times_, when ``14 priests and hundreds of church
workers were killed in a military campaign to destroy church
support for social gains such as higher wages and an end to the
exploitation of Indians,'' the church was intimidated and
``virtually fell silent.'' ``The physical intimidation ceased,''
the pragmatic criterion having been satisfied. Terror increased
again as the U.S. nurtured what it likes to call ``democracy.''
``The victims,'' a European diplomat observes, ``are almost
always people whose views or activities are aimed at helping
others to free themselves of restraints placed by those who hold
political or economic power,'' such as ``a doctor who tries to
improve the health of babies'' and is therefore ``seen as
attacking the established order.'' The security forces of the
``fledgling democracy,'' and the death squads associated with
them, appeared to have the situation reasonably well in hand, so
there was no reason for undue concern in the United States, and
there has been virtually none.
 
Throughout this grim decade of savagery and oppression, liberal
humanists have presented themselves as critical of the terror
states maintained by U.S. violence in Central America. But that
is only a facade, as we see from the demand, virtually unanimous
in respectable circles, that Nicaragua must be restored to ``the
Central American mode'' of the death squad regimes, and that the
U.S. and its murderous clients must impose the ``regional
standards'' of El Salvador and Guatemala on the errant
Sandinistas.
 
Returning to Hume's principles of government, it is clear that
they must be refined. True, when force is lacking and the
standard penalties do not suffice, it is necessary to resort to
the manufacture of consent. The populations of the Western
democracies---or at least, those in a position to defend
themselves---are off limits. Others are legitimate objects of
repression, and in the Third World, large-scale terror is
appropriate, though the liberal conscience adds the qualification
that it must be efficacious. The statesman, as distinct from the
ideological fanatic, will understand that the means of violence
should be employed in a measured and considered way, just
sufficient to achieve the desired ends.
 

The Range of Means
 
The pragmatic criterion dictates that violence is in order only
when the rascal multitude cannot be controlled in other ways.
Often, there are other ways. Another RAND corporation
counterinsurgency specialist was impressed by ``the relative
docility of poorer peasants and the firm authority of landlords
in the more `feudal' areas . . . [where] the landlord can
exercise considerable influence over his tenant's behavior and
readily discourage conduct inconsistent with his own interests.''
It is only when the docility is shaken, perhaps by meddlesome
priests, that firmer measures are required.
 
One option short of outright violence is legal repression. In
Costa Rica, the United States was willing to tolerate social
democracy. The primary reason for the benign neglect was that
labor was suppressed and the rights of investors offered every
protection. The founder of Costa Rican democracy, Jose Figueres,
was an avid partisan of U.S. corporations and the CIA, and was
regarded by the State Department as ``the best advertising agency
that the United Fruit Company could find in Latin America.'' But
the leading figure of Central American democracy fell out of
favor in the 1980s, and had to be censored completely out of the
Free Press, because of his critical attitude towards the U.S. war
against Nicaragua and Washington's moves to restore Costa Rica as
well to the preferred ``Central American mode.'' Even the
effusive editorial and lengthy obituary in the _New York Times_
lauding this ``fighter for democracy'' when he died in June 1990
were careful to avoid these inconvenient deviations.
 
In earlier years, when he was better behaved, Figueres recognized
that the Costa Rican Communist Party, particularly strong among
plantation workers, was posing an unacceptable challenge. He
therefore arrested its leaders, declared the party illegal, and
repressed its members. The policy was maintained through the
1960s, while efforts to establish any working class party were
banned by the state authorities. Figueres explained these actions
with candor: it was ``a sign of weakness. I admit it, when one is
relatively weak before the force of the enemy, it is necessary to
have the valor to recognise it.'' These moves were accepted in
the West as consistent with the liberal concept of democracy, and
indeed, were virtually a precondition for U.S. toleration of
``the Costa Rican exception.''
 
Sometimes, however, legal repression is not enough; the popular
enemy is too powerful. The alarm bells are sure to ring if they
threaten the control of the political system by the
business-landowner elite and military elements properly
respectful of U.S. interests. Signs of such deviation call for
stronger measures, as in Central America through the past decade.
The broader framework was sketched by Father Ignacio Martin-Baro,
one of the Jesuit priests assassinated in November 1989 and a
noted Salvadoran social psychologist, in a talk he delivered in
California on ``The Psychological Consequences of Political
Terrorism,'' a few months before he was murdered. He stressed
several relevant points. First, the most significant form of
terrorism, by a large measure, is state terrorism, that is,
``terrorizing the whole population through systematic actions
carried out by the forces of the state.'' Second, such terrorism
is an essential part of a ``government-imposed socio-political
project'' designed for the needs of the privileged. To implement
it, the whole population must be ``terrorized by an internalized
fear.'' Third, the sociopolitical project and the state terrorism
that helps implement it are not specific to El Salvador, but are
common features of the Third World domains of the United States.
The reasons are deeply rooted in Western culture, institutions,
and policy planning, and fully in accord with the values of
enlightened opinion. But terror is constrained by the pragmatic
criterion. Thus, Martin-Baro observes, the ``massive campaign of
political terrorism'' in El Salvador declined when ``there was
less need for extraordinary events, because people were so
terrorized, paralyzed.''
 
In a paper on mass media and public opinion in El Salvador which
he was to deliver at an International Congress in December 1989,
the month after he was assassinated, Martin-Baro wrote that the
U.S. counterinsurgency project ``emphasized merely the formal
dimensions of democracy,'' and that the mass media must be
understood as a mechanism of ``psychological warfare.'' The small
independent journals in El Salvador, mainstream and pro-business
but still too undisciplined for the rulers, had been taken care
of by the security forces a decade earlier in the usual
efficacious manner---kidnapping, assassination, and physical
destruction, events considered here too insignificant even to
report. As for public opinion, Martin-Baro's unread paper reports
a study showing that among workers, the lower-middle class, and
the poor, less than 20 percent feel free to express their
opinions in public, a figure that rose to 40 percent for the
rich---another tribute to the salutary efficacy of terror, and
another result that ``all Americans can be proud of,'' to borrow
George Schultz's words of self-praise for our achievements in El
Salvador.
 
When Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned after the Fascist takeover of
Italy, the government summed up its case by saying: ``We must
stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.'' Our current
favorites leave less to chance: the brains must be stopped from
functioning forever, and we agree that their thoughts about such
matters as state terrorism had best not be heard.
 
The results of U.S. military training are evident in abundance in
the documentation by human rights groups and the Salvadoran
Church. They are graphically described by Rev. Daniel Santiago, a
Catholic priest working in El Salvador, in the Jesuit journal
_America_. He reports the story of a peasant woman, who returned
home one day to find her mother, sister, and three children
sitting around a table, the decapitated head of each person
placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands
arranged on top ``as if each body was stroking its own head.''
The assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it
hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they
nailed the hands onto it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood
was tastefully displayed in the center of the table.
 
Rev. Santiago writes that macabre scenes of the kind he recounts
are designed by the armed forces for the purpose of intimidation.
``People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador---
they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and
used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the
Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed
into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the
National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to
cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are
dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones
while parents are forced to watch.'' ``The aesthetics of terror
in El Salvador is religious.'' The intention is to ensure that
the individual is totally subordinated to the interests of the
Fatherland, which is why the death squads are sometimes called
the ``Army of National Salvation'' by the governing ARENA party,
whose members (including President Cristiani) take a blood oath
to the ``leader-for-life,'' Roberto d'Aubuisson.
 
It has been a constant lament of U.S. government officials that
the Latin American countries are insufficiently repressive, too
open, too committed to civil liberties, unwilling to impose
sufficient constraints on travel and dissemination of
information, and in general reluctant to adhere to U.S. social
and political standards, thus tolerating conditions in which
dissidence can flourish and can reach a popular audience.
 
At home, even tiny groups may be subject to severe repression if
their potential outreach is perceived to be too great. During the
campaign waged by the national political police against The Black
Panthers---including assassination, instigation of ghetto riots,
and a variety of other means---the FBI estimated the ``hard core
members'' of the targeted organization at only 800, but added
ominously that ``a recent poll indicates that approximately 25
per cent of the black population has a great respect for the
[Black Panther Party], including 43 per cent of blacks under 21
years of age.'' The repressive agencies of the state proceeded
with a campaign of violence and disruption to ensure that the
Panthers did not succeed in organizing as a substantial social or
political force---with great success, as the organization was
decimated and the remnants proceeded to self-destruct. FBI
operations in the same years targeting the entire New Left were
motivated by similar concerns. The same internal intelligence
document warns that ``the movement of rebellious youth known as
the `New Left,' involving and influencing a substantial number of
college students, is having a serious impact on contemporary
society with a potential for serious domestic strife.'' The New
Left has ``revolutionary aims'' and an ``identification with
Marxism-Leninism.'' It has attempted ``to infiltrate and
radicalize labor,'' and after failing ``to subvert and control
the mass media,'' has established ``a large network of
underground publications which serve the dual purpose of an
internal communication network and an external propaganda
organ.'' It thus poses a threat to ``the civilian sector of our
society,'' which must be contained by the state security
apparatus.
 
We can learn a good deal by attention to the range of choices.
Keeping just to Latin America, consider the efforts to eliminate
the Allende regime in Chile. There were two parallel operations.
Track II, the hard line, aimed at a military coup. This was
concealed from Ambassador Edward Korry, a Kennedy liberal, whose
task was to implement Track I, the soft line; in Korry's words,
to ``do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to
utmost deprivation and poverty, a policy designed for a long time
to come to accelerate the hard features of a Communist society in
Chile.'' The soft line was an extension of the long-term CIA
effort to control Chilean democracy. One indication of its level
is that in the 1964 election, the CIA spent twice as much per
Chilean voter to block Allende as the total spent per voter by
both parties in the U.S. elections of the same year. Similarly in
the case of Cuba, the Eisenhower administration planned a direct
attack while Vice-President Nixon, keeping to the soft line in a
secret discussion of June 1960, expressed his concern that
according to a CIA briefing, ``Cuba's economic situation had not
deteriorated significantly since the overthrow of Batista,'' then
urging specific measures to place ``greater economic pressure on
Cuba.''
 
To take another informative case, in 1949 the CIA identified
``two areas of instability'' in Latin America: Bolivia and
Guatemala. The Eisenhower administration pursued the hard line to
overthrow capitalist democracy in Guatemala but chose the soft
line with regard to a Bolivian revolution that had the support of
the Communist Party and radical tin miners, had led to
expropriation, and had even moved towards ``criminal agitation of
the Indians of the farms and mines'' and a pro-peace conference,
a right-wing Archbishop warned. The White House concluded that
the best plan was to support the least radical elements,
expecting that U.S. pressures, including domination of the tin
market, would serve to control unwanted developments. Secretary
of State John Foster Dulles urged that this would be the best way
to contain the ``Communist infection in South America.''
Following standard policy guidelines, the U.S. took control over
the Bolivian military, equipping it with modern armaments and
sending hundreds of officers to the ``school of coups'' in Panama
and elsewhere. Bolivia was soon subject to U.S. influence and
control. By 1953, the National Security Council noted improvement
in ``the climate for private investment,'' including ``an
agreement permitting a private American firm to exploit two
petroleum areas.''
 
A military coup took place in 1964. A 1980 coup was carried out
with the assistance of Klaus Barbie, who had been sent to Bolivia
when he could no longer be protected in France, where he had been
working under U.S. control to repress the anti-fascist
resistance, as he had done under the Nazis. According to a recent
UNICEF study, one out of three Bolivian infants dies in the first
year of life, so that Bolivia has the slowest rate of population
growth in Latin America along with the highest birth rate. The
FAO estimates that the average Bolivian consumes 78 percent of
daily minimum calorie and protein requirements and that more than
half of Bolivian children suffer from malnutrition. Of the
economically active population, 25 percent are unemployed and
another 40 percent work in the ``informal sector'' (e.g.,
smuggling and drugs). The situation in Guatemala we have already
reviewed.
 
Several points merit attention. First, the consequences of the
hard line in Guatemala and the soft line in Bolivia were similar.
Second, both policy decisions were successful in their major aim:
containing the ``Communist virus,'' the threat of
``ultranationalism.'' Third, both policies are evidently regarded
as quite proper, as we can see in the case of Bolivia by the
complete lack of interest in what has happened since (apart from
possible costs to the U.S. through the drug racket); and with
regard to Guatemala, by the successful intervention under Kennedy
to block a democratic election, the direct U.S. participation in
murderous counterinsurgency campaigns under Lyndon Johnson, the
continuing supply of arms to Guatemala through the late 1970s
(contrary to illusory claims) and the reliance on our Israeli
mercenary state to fill any gaps when congressional restrictions
finally took effect, the enthusiastic U.S. support for atrocities
that go well beyond even the astonishing Guatemalan norm in the
1980s, and the applause for the ``fledgling democracy'' that the
ruling military now tolerates as a means to extort money from
Congress. We may say that these are ``messy episodes'' and
``blundering'' (which in fact succeeded in its major aims), but
nothing more (Stephen Kinzer). Fourth, the soft line and the hard
line were adopted by the same people, at the same time, revealing
that the issues are tactical, involving no departure from shared
principle. All of this provides insight into the nature of
policy, and the political culture in which it is formed.
 

The Untamed Rabble
 
Hume's paradox of government arises only if we suppose that a
crucial element of essential human nature is what Bakunin called
``an instinct for freedom.'' It is the failure to act upon this
instinct that Hume found surprising. The same failure inspired
Rousseau's classic lament that people are born free but are
everywhere in chains, seduced by the illusions of the civil
society that is created by the rich to guarantee their plunder.
Some may adopt this assumption as one of the ``natural beliefs''
that guide their conduct and their thought. There have been
efforts to ground the instinct for freedom in a substantive
theory of human nature. They are not without interest, but they
surely come nowhere near establishing the case. Like other tenets
of common sense, this belief remains a regulative principle that
we adopt, or reject, on faith. Which choice we make can have
large-scale effects for ourselves and others.
 
Those who adopt the common sense principle that freedom is our
natural right and essential need will agree with Bertrand Russell
that anarchism is ``the ultimate ideal to which society should
approximate.'' Structures of hierarchy and domination are
fundamentally illegitimate. They can be defended only on grounds
of contingent need, an argument that rarely stands up to
analysis. As Russell went on to observe 70 years ago, ``the old
bonds of authority'' have little intrinsic merit. Reasons are
needed for people to abandon their rights, ``and the reasons
offered are counterfeit reasons, convincing only to those who
have a selfish interest in being convinced.'' ``The condition of
revolt,'' he went on, ``exists in women towards men, in oppressed
nations towards their oppressors, and above all in labour towards
capital. It is a state full of danger, as all past history shows,
yet also full of hope.''
 
Russell traced the habit of submission in part to coercive
educational practices. His views are reminiscent of 17th and 18th
century thinkers who held that the mind is not to be filled with
knowledge ``from without, like a vessel,'' but ``to be kindled
and awaked.'' ``The growth of knowledge [resembles] the growth of
Fruit; however external causes may in some degree cooperate, it
is the internal vigour, and virtue of the tree, that must ripen
the juices to their just maturity.'' Similar conceptions underlie
Enlightenment thought on political and intellectual freedom, and
on alienated labor, which turns the worker into an instrument for
other ends instead of a human being fulfilling inner needs---a
fundamental principle of classical liberal thought, though long
forgotten, because of its revolutionary implications. These ideas
and values retain their power and their pertinence, though they
are very remote from realization, anywhere. As long as this is
so, the libertarian revolutions of the 18th century remain far
from consummated, a vision for the future.
 
One might take this natural belief to be confirmed by the fact
that despite all efforts to contain them, the rabble continue to
fight for their fundamental human rights. And over time, some
libertarian ideals have been partially realized or have even
become common coin. Many of the outrageous ideas of the 17th
century radical democrats, for example, seem tame enough today,
though other early insights remain beyond our current moral and
intellectual reach.
 
The struggle for freedom of speech is an interesting case, and a
crucial one, since it lies at the heart of a whole array of
freedoms and rights. A central question of the modern era is
when, if ever, the state may act to interdict the content of
communications. As noted earlier, even those regarded as leading
libertarians have adopted restrictive and qualified views on this
matter. One critical element is seditious libel, the idea that
the state can be criminally assaulted by speech, ``the hallmark
of closed societies throughout the world,'' legal historian Harry
Kalven observes. A society that tolerates laws against seditious
libel is not free, whatever its other virtues. In late 17th
century England, men were castrated, disemboweled, quartered, and
beheaded for the crime. Through the 18th century, there was a
general consensus that established authority could be maintained
only by silencing subversive discussion, and ``any threat,
whether real or imagined, to the good reputation of the
government'' must be barred by force (Leonard Levy). ``Private
men are not judges of their superiors . . . [for] This wou'd
confound all government,'' one editor wrote. Truth was no
defense: true charges are even more criminal than false ones,
because they tend even more to bring authority into disrepute.
 
Treatment of dissident opinion, incidentally, follows a similar
model in our more libertarian era. False and ridiculous charges
are no real problem: it is the unconscionable critics who reveal
unwanted truths from whom society must be protected.
 
The doctrine of seditious libel was also upheld in the American
colonies. The intolerance of dissent during the revolutionary
period is notorious. The leading American libertarian, Thomas
Jefferson, agreed that punishment was proper for ``a traitor in
thought, but not in deed,'' and authorized internment of
political suspects. He and the other Founders agreed that
``traitorous or disrespectful words'' against the authority of
the national state or any of its component states was criminal.
``During the Revolution,'' Leonard Levy observes, ``Jefferson,
like Washington, the Adamses, and Paine, believed that there
could be no toleration for serious differences of political
opinion on the issue of independence, no acceptable alternative
to complete submission to the patriot cause. Everywhere there was
unlimited liberty to praise it, none to criticize it.'' At the
outset of the Revolution, the Continental Congress urged the
states to enact legislation to prevent the people from being
``deceived and drawn into erroneous opinion.'' It was not until
the Jeffersonians were themselves subjected to repressive
measures in the late 1790s that they developed a body of more
libertarian thought for self-protection---reversing course,
however, when they gained power themselves.
 
Until World War I, there was only a slender basis for freedom of
speech in the United States, and it was not until 1964 that the
law of seditious libel was struck down by the Supreme Court. In
1969, the Court finally protected speech apart from ``incitement
to imminent lawless action.'' Two centuries after the revolution,
the Court at last adopted the position that had been advocated in
1776 by Jeremy Bentham, who argued that a free government must
permit ``malcontents'' to ``communicate their sentiments, concert
their plans, and practice every mode of opposition short of
actual revolt, before the executive power can be legally
justified in disturbing them.'' The 1969 Supreme Court decision
formulated a libertarian standard which, I believe, is unique in
the world. In Canada, for example, people are still imprisoned
for promulgating ``false news,'' recognized as a crime in 1275 to
protect the King.
 
In Europe, the situation is still more primitive. France is a
striking case, because of the dramatic contrast between the
self-congratulatory rhetoric and repressive practice so common as
to pass unnoticed. England has only limited protection for
freedom of speech, and even tolerates such a disgrace as a law of
blasphemy. The reaction to the Salman Rushdie affair, most
dramatically on the part of self-styled ``conservatives,'' was
particularly noteworthy. Rushdie was charged with seditious libel
and blasphemy in the courts, but the High Court ruled that the
law of blasphemy extended only to Christianity, not Islam, and
that only verbal attack ``against Her Majesty or Her Majesty's
Government or some other institution of the state'' counts as
seditious libel. Thus the Court upheld a fundamental doctrine of
the Ayatollah Khomeini, Stalin, Goebbels, and other opponents of
freedom, while recognizing that English law protects only
domestic power from criticism. Doubtless many would agree with
Conor Cruise O'Brien, who, when Minister for Posts and Telegraphs
in Ireland, amended the Broadcasting Authority Act to permit the
Authority to refuse to broadcast any matter that, in the judgment
of the minister, ``would tend to undermine the authority of the
state.''
 
We should also bear in mind that the right to freedom of speech
in the United States was not established by the First Amendment
to the Constitution, but only through dedicated efforts over a
long period by the labor movement, the civil rights and anti-war
movements of the 1960s, and other popular forces. James Madison
pointed out that a ``parchment barrier'' will never suffice to
prevent tyranny. Rights are not established by words, but won and
sustained by struggle.
 
It is also worth recalling that victories for freedom of speech
are often won in defense of the most depraved and horrendous
views. The 1969 Supreme Court decision was in defense of the Ku
Klux Klan from prosecution after a meeting with hooded figures,
guns, and a burning cross, calling for ``burning the nigger'' and
``sending the Jews back to Israel.'' With regard to freedom of
expression there are basically two positions: you defend it
vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it in favor of
Stalinist/Fascist standards.
 
Whether the instinct for freedom is real or not, we do not know.
If it is, history teaches that it can be dulled, but has yet to
be killed. The courage and dedication of people struggling for
freedom, their willingness to confront extreme state terror and
violence, is often remarkable. There has been a slow growth of
consciousness over many years and goals have been achieved that
were considered utopian or scarcely contemplated in earlier eras.
An inveterate optimist can point to this record and express the
hope that with a new decade, and soon a new century, humanity may
be able to overcome some of its social maladies; others might
draw a different lesson from recent history. It is hard to see
rational grounds for affirming one or the other perspective. As
in the case of many of the natural beliefs that guide our lives,
we can do no better than to choose according to our intuition and
hopes.
 
The consequences of such a choice are not obscure. By denying the
instinct for freedom, we will only prove that humans are a lethal
mutation, an evolutionary dead end: by nurturing it, if it is
real, we may find ways to deal with dreadful human tragedies and
problems that are awesome in scale.