The United States continues to wage endless wars, sometimes through proxy wars. Are we being deceived into believing that all these wars are necessary in self-defense?
At the end of this post, I will raise some questions, one of which is: Have America’s “endless wars” of the past few decades been intended to advance the aims of the military-industrial complex, and not national security?
The winners write history
This may be an obvious statement, but I doubt most people think about this. In my experience, most Americans think of history as history. What was taught in school is what happened. Of course, you may not have heard everything. There may be stories that were not covered in your education. After all, you can’t tell the whole story. The Gospel of John even says:
“Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in these books” (John 20:30).
“And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which, if they were to be written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written” (John 21:25).
But history tells us, if we look carefully (and let’s be honest, most of us don’t bother to look carefully), that this is not true.
Consider, for example, how Afghans are told about the history of the U.S.-Afghanistan war, or what the history of the Korean War is from the North Korean perspective.
Now, these examples are fine, but I think many Americans would conclude that the people in Afghanistan and North Korea just don’t know the truth about those wars. But in the United States, we are being told the truth.
Apocalypse and Propaganda
The book of Revelation suggests that things are more complicated than that. As I argue in my commentary, Revelation tells a story, and an epic story. In this story, God (the Father) on the throne is the true King of the world. Caesar is not. (You would need to substitute “Empire,” “Rome,” “Germany,” “USA,” and any number of nations, or kingdoms of the world, for “Caesar.”)
The Book of Revelation declares that the nations of the world maintain their power through violence and oppression, but they also practice deception (or what might be better called “propaganda”).
In the book of Revelation, deception is partly the role of beast number two (aka the “false prophet”), and one of the primary roles of the false prophet is, “And he will make the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast” (Revelation 13:12).
The false prophet will be working with Beast #1 (which I prefer to call an “empire” inasmuch as I recognize that all nations are “empires” to some degree; I believe Beast #1 is more than an empire, but I will leave that story for now).
In other words, we worship (or, better, are “loyal” to) the Beast (the Empire) because we have been deceived into doing so (there are degrees of deception, but ultimately, loyalty to the Empire is the result of some degree of deception), or we might say we have been led to believe the propaganda.
Some may find this unsettling, and I would argue that it’s part of the problem.
That might seem a bit extreme, so let me clarify a few things: I’m not saying all empires are evil, nor am I saying that everything they say is a lie (or propaganda).
An empire pursues its own interests (like every other nation), and it wants its people to believe that its actions are right and in their interests, but ultimately it acts in the interests of the empire. An empire’s central goal is to maintain or increase its power and wealth, and propaganda is a central tool for garnering support from its people.
Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”
In Noam Chomsky’s classic work, Manufacturing Consensus, he describes the role of the media as furthering the imperial project.
We may all like to believe that the media (at least in the Western world, where freedom of speech and freedom of the press are guaranteed — there is much more to say about this, but I will keep quiet for now) is independent and relatively unbiased.
Our press freedom stands in stark contrast to Russia and China, where dissidents are routinely jailed.
Note: Amnesty International reports that just three weeks ago human rights activist Alexei Sokolov was arrested in Russia for a Facebook post that displayed an “extremist” logo. Sokolov has been an active advocate for prisoners’ rights and against the use of torture in Russian prisons.
Chomsky points out:
“In countries where the locus of power is in the hands of the state bureaucracy, monopolistic control over the media is often complemented by official censorship, making it clear that the media serve the aims of the ruling elites” (88).
But Chomsky argues that the US media also plays a role in promoting national policy.
“In our view, the media serve, among other functions, the powerful social interests that control and fund them and carry out propaganda on behalf of those interests” (8).
Chomsky does not deny that there are dissenting voices in the media, but he states, “The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissenting voices and inconvenient information are kept within bounds, on the periphery, so that their presence, while showing that the system is not monolithic, is not so great as to unduly interfere with the dominance of the official agenda” (9).
Chomsky added:
“Our belief [about the media]Based on years of research into how the media works, [is] They function to mobilize support for special interests that dominate state and private activity, and their selections, emphasis, and omissions are best understood, sometimes with astonishing clarity and insight, by analyzing them in this light” (81).
Chomsky points out that this is not how we generally think about the media.
“A premise of democracy is that the media is independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth, and not simply reflecting the world as powerful groups want it to be.”
To some extent, we know that the media is not completely independent. Even if journalists believe they are writing the truth, and I think most journalists are conscientious and want to print what they believe to be true, we know that at the end of the day the media is owned by big corporations and must support and answer to their interests. We all know intuitively that advertising money plays a big role in controlling the media.
“Since 1990, a wave of huge deal-making and rapid globalization has centralized the media industry into nine multinational conglomerates: Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom (owner of CBS), News Corporation, Bertelsmann, General Electric (owner of NBC), Sony, AT&T Liberty Media, and Vivendi Universal. These giants own every major film studio, television network, music company, and a significant percentage of the world’s most important cable channels, cable systems, magazines, television stations in major markets, and book publishers” (11).
Note: We don’t know what Chomsky would say about the rise of independent, non-mainstream journalism and the rise of YouTube — his book was published in 1988 and updated in 2002 — but let’s listen carefully to what Chomsky has to say.
Contemporary media is “a guided market system, as described here, directed by governments, leaders of the corporate community, top media owners and executives, and a range of individuals and groups who are assigned or authorized to take constructive initiatives” (82).
Chomsky’s papers may sound alarmist, but he is no random theorist whose ideas should be ignored. As a former professor at MIT, he has been writing and teaching linguistics and social criticism for over half a century. He is one of the founders of the field of cognitive science and is widely regarded as the father of modern linguistics.
In his book, Manufacturing Consensus, Chomsky details 600 pages of examples of how the media have unwittingly spread state-sponsored narratives.
Were we fooled by the propaganda too?
My answer is, without a doubt. And if Chomsky is right, the situation is worse than we might imagine. This will be the subject of my next post. But let me conclude by saying why I think this is important.
With the right information we might have come to some fundamentally difficult conclusions, but have we come to believe such things about the world and our country in particular? Are our national ambitions not as lofty as we have been led to believe?
Have America’s “endless wars” of the past few decades been about advancing the aims of the military-industrial complex rather than national security?
Our elected officials know they are beholden to these very powerful corporations, and so they tell the media what they want them to know and hide what they don’t want them to know in order to promote a narrative that war is necessary, when in reality they are primarily lining the pockets of their executives and investors.
This is exactly what the Book of Revelation shows us, and hence its cry is, “Come out of her, my people” (Revelation 18:4).
. . . to be continued.
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