| Number 131 | November 9, 2001 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, I went to an exhibit at nearby Augsburg College this week depicting the little-known World War II Nazi program aimed at "cleansing" the Third Reich of the "vermin" known as people with disabilities. At a camp in the small town of Hadamar, Germany, more than 10,000 PWDs were gassed to death, and many more met the same fate in other locations around the country. The exhibit was put together by a group of Norwegians and they brought it to Minneapolis at the request of activists here. I was proud that the newspaper I have been working with, Access Press, helped to publicize the event by publishing the story on our front page last month. The organizer of the event told me that she could not get any other local media to write any articles about the exhibition because, as they told her, it was "too depressing." This comment is relevant to this week's Nygaard Notes, which is about History and the lessons we learn, or don't learn, from it. For someone who is actually engaged in trying to make the world a better place, factual information about what has gone before is never "depressing." Ignorance is not bliss to an activist. Every activist knows that the first thing we need if we are to address any problem is an accurate understanding of the nature of that problem. This is why we study history, and why an accurate telling of that history is the opposite of depressing, but rather empowering. If the history we are looking at is unpleasant, ignorance won't make it less unpleasant; it will only make it easier to repeat. Nygaard |
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"U.S. Tries to Sway Worldwide Opinion in Favor of War." - Lead headline from the national edition of the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") of November 6, 2001 |
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Many of you have written me over the years telling me how much you appreciate Nygaard Notes, and how you hope it is widely read. I very much appreciate your letters, and I also appreciate those of you who have signed up others who now are faithful subscribers. That's how Nygaard Notes has grown to the mammoth size it is now, with more than 600 subscribers. However, I am aiming for 20,000 readers, so I need your help. Now is your chance to increase the circle that reads the Notes without ever leaving the comfort(?!) of your computer terminal (apologies to the paper subscribers; you'll have to go to the nearest library to follow up on this). No, I am not asking for financial support! The following paragraph is directly from the most recent (November 12th) issue of The Nation magazine. Just read it and follow the instructions:
That's it! I hope you will nominate Nygaard Notes if you think it is worthy of wider attention. (Say, why don't you do it RIGHT NOW?!) If you don't mind, maybe you could send me a copy of your letter, with permission to reprint sections of it. I am planning to put together a promotional brochure, and I could use some more good comments to jazz it up. Whaddaya say? Thanks to all of the readers, old and new, who have supported the Notes up until now. Really, I would not have stayed at it this long without your help. Thank you! |
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The press reports on what is happening now, today, at this moment. For this reason the news sometimes seems almost irrelevant, since we all know that history is much bigger than any moment, or set of moments. The reason it is not irrelevant is that today's News becomes tomorrow's History, as I discuss in the accompanying essay on the "lessons of Vietnam." So it is very important to pay attention to the underlying assumptions upon which the mass media base their decisions on what makes up today's News, and to be careful about what we absorb during a historical turning point like the one in which we find ourselves this fall. I want to talk here about how the things we are taking in about today's events will shape our understanding of events in the future. Nobody remembers the specific headlines from 1, 2, 5, or 10 years ago. But the images, impressions, and sets of beliefs reported then did get lodged in the public mind, attached as they were to vivid images and words, reinforced at the time with the power of immediacy. Not individually, but collectively, they stay in the public mind. The assumptions about the world that make one thing "newsworthy" while another thing is not are firmly rooted in the social location of the people who produce the news, including reporters, editors, producers, and the owners of the media. Class, race, cultural background, ethnicity, gender, and a variety of other factors influence not only the decisions about what makes it into the news, but also the "angle" used to present those things, and the sources selected to reinforce those angles.These assumptions then work their way into the belief systems of the average citizen. By "average" I mean the citizen who takes a passive role in acquiring information, getting it mainly from the mass media. The media is not monolithic. Scholars and historians are able to, and often do, dig around and study the events that have been reported in the media. Sometimes they find that much of what was in yesterday's News-that is, today's received History-is distorted, incomplete, or just plain wrong. But, since such scholarly work is not "news," and since most Americans are consumers of news and not scholars, very rarely does this research change the conventional understanding of History. In this sense, the mass media functions as the "Official Historian" of the United States. It is unfortunate that our Historian has a confused allegiance. As an analyst for Wall Street mega-finance corporation Merrill Lynch put it recently, speaking about the reality that good coverage of the U.S. attack on Afghanistan could cut into the profits of the corporate media, "Newspapers are in a very odd spot right now in terms of both serving the public and trying to serve shareholders." I wouldn't use the word "odd"-it seems pretty straightforward to me-but, nonetheless, I think she's onto something. The fact is that good reporting on a war-or on foreign affairs in general-is expensive. That's part of why we know so little about Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, or any other country in the news these days, and that's also why we are hearing almost nothing about the war that isn't coming from official press briefings. Stenography is cheap; reporting is expensive. It's a dangerous combination: The shareholders want profits, the citizens need information, and the acquiring and presenting of accurate, meaningful information is costly. Something has to give. Voila! Here we are, with Stenography instead of Journalism. One result of the increasing reliance on stenography rather than journalism in our media is that many Americans are completely baffled when they see evidence of the seething hatred and anger caused in other parts of the world by U.S. foreign policy. As noted American political scientist Chalmers Johnson put it, as quoted in The Canberra [Australia] Times of September 19th: "Only when we come to see our country as both profiting from and trapped within the structures of an empire of its own making will it be possible for us to explain many elements of the world that otherwise perplex us." Those who have grown up getting their information mainly from the mass media can be forgiven for believing that the history of the United States is a history of the benevolent spreading of "American values" to the uncivilized, and grateful, nations of the world. These "average" Americans" most likely have internalized the version of history that our "leaders" funnel to us every day through the corporate media. This is the sense in which I mean that today's News eventually becomes History. If we want our citizenry to have any clue about the matters that "perplex us"-including the September 11th outrages-we have to demand a media that is accountable to our citizens, one that has as its goal the pursuit of truth rather than profit. When we have a media system like this-made up of independent, grassroots media like the one you are reading-we will have the power not only to record a different History, but to make it. |
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Last week I read in the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") the now-obligatory reference to "the lessons of Vietnam." The article, "Quagmire Recalled: Afghanistan as Vietnam," by R.W. Apple, described how bad it would be for the United States if Afghanistan were to become "another Vietnam." Don't allow yourself to imagine that Mr. Apple thinks America's experience in Vietnam was bad because of the more than 2 million Vietnamese who were killed, or because of the almost total destruction of the Vietnamese economy, or because the United States prevented free elections from being held in 1956 that would have put an end to that senseless war before United States ground troops ever got there. That is not the Official History. No, Apple reminds us that the Vietnam war was a bad thing because of "the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia." He is referring to the American psyche. Apple concludes by saying that
Note that the Official History of the Vietnam war is not a history of a superpower attacking a Third World nation to prevent it from democratically choosing its own leaders. No, the questions raised by the Official History are the ones we see bubbling up in the mass media whenever the bombs start falling, and Mr. Apple presents them in the standard manner. The Official History of Vietnam, carried forward into all subsequent conflicts, assumes that the United States has the right to decide "how to solve" the question of who should rule [name the country], as well as the right to decide when our solution would be "satisfactory." It is further assumed that the only ones to whom a "solution" must be "satisfactory" is us, or, rather, our small cadre of elites. The only disagreements in respectable circles, to this day, are tactical ones, asking such questions as : "Is it worth the price (to us)?" "How we can avoid 'scarring [our] national psyche' again?" and "Why did we fail?" (For the record, I don't think we did "fail," since our destruction of Vietnam made it pretty much impossible for that country to develop in any way for many years, thus achieving perhaps the primary goal of U.S. foreign policy in the post-war era: to terrorize any nation that might consider an existence independent from U.S. power.) Move ahead now to October 16th, 2001, and read the following editorial in the pages of that paragon of "respectable" journalism, the Washington Post, penned by its editors:
So the U.S. attack on Afghanistan thus becomes another chapter in the unending saga of Good vs Inexplicable Evil. Who else but Evil People, after all, would respond to America's all-encompassing love with "blind hatred?" And the assumptions underlying the writing of this chapter-the Official History-are the assumptions that the United States has the right to attack anyone, anywhere, at any time, in an attempt to "solve" a problem that we define, and that we have the right to keep at it until the outcome is "satisfactory" to us. Anywhere but in the United States of Amnesia, this is known as "imperialism." The New York Times, the Washington Post, and virtually every other agenda-setting media organization are in agreement on the essential righteousness of the American Empire, and the prevailing ideology is sufficiently strong that those who dare to "imagine" something more "reasonable" risk being labeled naive and idealistic, if not treasonous. These are indeed dangerous times. How many of us will dare to imagine something better? |