This Week:

Quote of the Week

A Little Housekeeping

Website of the Week

Local Anti-War Events
Propaganda Watch

Greetings,

A warm welcome to all the new readers this week. I will be looking forward to your feedback, if you are moved to send it along. These days, Nygaard Notes is almost entirely about the ongoing war on Afghanistan, but you should know that this is not always the case. Amy Goodman has been calling her daily radio show "The War and Peace Report," and perhaps I should do the same.

It's a bit of a quandary as, contrary to establishment reports to the contrary, "everything" is not different since September 11th. Global power relations remain essentially the same, one to two billion people in the world are still living on less than a dollar a day, and white supremacy still permeates the body politic in the United States. Did I mention health care? Economic policy? Prisons and police? Crime? I'll get back to those issues before too long, I promise.

Still, when a nation commits itself to war—especially a nation as powerful as the United States—it seems only right that we should focus our attention in the moment on the suffering which that entails and the possibilities for reducing that suffering. As the unchallenged global military and economic power on the planet, the capacity of the United States to wreak havoc around the globe is far-reaching and now almost unlimited.

As bad as the situation in Afghanistan continues to be, the recent repetition by the Bush people that "The War on Terror does not end with Afghanistan" hints at a willingness to wage global war that, combined with a great and growing capacity to do so, is truly terrifying. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, there is no state power willing or able to challenge U.S. power head-to-head. It thus appears that any limits there may be to the U.S. war fervor will have to come largely from popular resistance, both here and abroad. To be effective, that resistance will have to be based on an understanding of the particular conditions that have given birth to this particular militarized environment. With that in mind, here is another installment of the post-September 11th Nygaard Notes.

‘Til next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

"The American people have this lesson to learn; that where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to rob, oppress, and degrade them, then neither persons nor property will be safe...hungry men will eat, desperate men will commit crimes, and outraged men will seek revenge."

-- Frederick Douglass, speaking in Washington in 1886 (forgive the sexist language of the day)

Bonus "Quote" of the Week:

"OUR CALL IS THIS: President Bush and citizens around the globe, let us not enter into World War III. Rather, let us begin immediately to forge WORLD PEACE I."

-- From the website of "9-11peace.org – Action for Justice, not War" (see this week's Website of the Week for details).

A Little Housekeeping

Many of you responded to last year's "Nygaard Notes Pledge Drive" with generous financial contributions. Thank you! In acknowledging your contributions, I promised to send you a reminder to renew your monthly pledge at the one-year anniversary of that pledge. For those of you who keep track of these things, I want to let you know that I am aware that it has been more than one year for many of you since your donation was received. Here's the story:

Since I took almost three months off earlier this year to attend to personal business, what I have done is to extend everyone's pledge period by three months. So, if you donated in October of 2000 (and many of you did—that was the last "pledge month"), instead of getting your renewal notice in October of this year, I will be sending them out in January. I haven't forgotten! It just didn't seem right to count the period of my extended absence against your pledge period.

I hope you will adjust your budgets accordingly so you'll have a little cash left for Nygaard Notes sometime after the new year begins. Look for details in a future issue.

Website of the Week

There are many, many internet resources to which one can turn for information, analysis, or to take action in response to the current violence. This week's Website of the Week might be a good starting point for those just beginning to wonder if there may not be some alternative to a military response to terror. Started by an individual in Massachusetts, Eli Pariser, the site "9-11peace.org: Action for Justice, not War" is a well-organized mix of action ideas, links, a petition, and a good, brief answer to the question "Why Peace?"

It is possible to subscribe to the 911peace.org email bulletin on this site, which offers great links to alternative info sources. This week, the subject is the U.S. government's latest "allies," the so-called Northern Alliance. It's a good bulletin.

Go and take a look at the 9-11peace.org site. Then take some action. Find it at: http://www.9-11peace.org/index.php3

Note to readers: Please send along the addresses of any websites you have found particularly useful. I'll try to mention as many as I can.

Local Anti-War Events

There are many anti-war events, activities, and gatherings happening all the time all over the United States and the world. Be sure to get in touch with your local social justice organizations for details in your area. If you don't know which groups are active in your area, I could probably help you find them; send me an email.

A couple of the various local events are worthy of mention this week. The Anti-War Committee here in Minneapolis will be holding a conference on December 1st to "educate activists and community members about the current U.S. ‘war on terrorism,' on-going U.S. wars around the globe, and to further develop our local activist community." It looks to be a good one.

The conference is called "War At Home and Abroad: Building Opposition through Education & Action," and will be held Saturday December 1, 2001; 12 noon to 9 p.m. at the Carlson School of Management, 321 19th Ave S, Univ. of Minnesota, West Bank Campus.

Between the opening panel at noon and the closing panel at 7 p.m., the conference will feature workshops organized by theme: Countries Under Attack; Organizing 5101; and Effects of the War on Terrorism. Dinner and a cultural event are scheduled for 6 p.m.

For more information, check out the web at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/antiwarmn/message/97#2 or email the committee at antiwarcommittee@hotmail.com.

The very next day, December 2nd, a group of social work students and their allies will be hosting an afternoon peace event on the St. Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota, starting at 1:30 p.m. One of the keynote speakers is Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, and if local folks haven't heard him speak, I recommend taking this opportunity. This event will likely have a very different "feel" and focus than the one mentioned above, and that's what building a movement is all about: many different doors to provide points of entry for many different people. For more information on this door, email Mark Davis at kats2humans2@aol.com.

Propaganda Watch

As the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") put it in their lead article of November 6th, "In all conflicts, winning the information war has been an essential element of military strategy." Hmm... "information as military strategy." Sounds like propaganda to me.

It was thus no surprise when I opened the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) on November 11th and saw the smiling face of Charlotte Beers, head cocked jauntily to one side in a photo above a caption that informed us that the new Undersecretary of State's job is "to make U.S. values as much a brand name as McDonald's hamburgers or Ivory soap."

We have to imagine that Ms. Beers is speaking of official U.S. values, such as democracy and individual liberty. These are, of course, already pretty well-known, having inspired revolutionaries the world over for a couple hundred years (including some of our most famous official enemies). Ms. Beers is likely not thinking of increasing the visibility of the unofficial American values that much of the world infers from our actions, such as fantastic wealth, power, and the unlimited freedom to exploit other humans and the planet in pursuit of same.

The Highly-Orchestrated Effort

Leaving that aside, the article, reprinted from the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print"), tells us that Ms. Beers, a former high-powered advertising executive, was brought on board at the State Department a few weeks ago to team up with White House communications director Karen Hughes to form a "war news bureau." This team is responsible for getting out to the world—and they mean the WORLD—the U.S. government's official "Message of the Day."

As the Times puts it, "The highly-orchestrated communications effort is a first step in a broader campaign to create a 21st century version of the muscular propaganda war that the United States waged in the 1940s." Muscular? Well, anyway, the Times informs us that now "propaganda is back in fashion." [Hidden premise alert: You are to agree that propaganda was, until now, out of fashion in the United States. Har de Har Har.]

Here is where the public discussion, especially in the media, gets quite surreal and very revealing. While the idea that the government is engaging in a "highly-orchestrated" propaganda effort is spoken of openly by the media, they don't seem to be able to use that knowledge to inform their reporting. Take, for example, the following piece of reporting from the November 6th NY Times:

"To soothe Islamic opinion, the Pentagon has modulated the message it has delivered in the region. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that the war might be over in a matter of months. ‘Do I think Afghanistan will take years?' he said at a news conference in India. ‘No, I don't.' In a Pentagon briefing last week, however, Mr. Rumsfeld sent a different message to the American people. ‘We're still in the very, very early stages of this conflict,' he said. ‘The U.S. bombed Japan for three and a half years, until August 1945, before they accomplished their objectives.' To influence international public opinion, the United States and Britain are also establishing information centers in Washington, London and Pakistan to field questions about the war."

That's pretty good reporting, if you ask me. The reporter, Michael Gordon, exercised a little memory, juxtaposed contradictory comments from a prominent official, and pointed out (by inference) that the purpose of the "information centers" is not about anything that might be called "truth," but rather is about public relations. Unfortunately, that's where it stops.

Many years ago I stumbled across an adage that I was told originated in Japan: "To know and not to do is not to know at all." If these high-powered reporters can report that they are being fed propaganda, don't they know what to do? It's not impossible to find sources outside of the government who are knowledgeable about war, intelligence, history, and terror. After you attend the daily press briefing, couldn't a reporter go attempt to find out what some of these other people have to say about whether this "conflict" is likely to last for months or years?

This is a potentially a very subversive path to take, as it could easily lead to a questioning of the very premises upon which the case for war rests. For example, what if the discrepancy in the projected time frame of the War on Terrorism is best explained by considering that the current conflict is not a War on Terrorism at all, but is actually a war on something else? I'll talk about this in a little more detail next week.

In the meantime, the propaganda effort continues on all fronts, with reports ranging from White House intimidation of journalists, to strategizing with Hollywood as to how to best whip up patriotic fervor, to monopolizing all photographs from outer space that might give any information about what is actually happening in Afghanistan. (All true stories! Details in future issues of Nygaard Notes.)

Comments from readers and others with whom I have spoken indicate that it may be difficult for many people to fully comprehend the power of our domestic propaganda system, which is hardly unique to wartime. In hopes that the flagrant nature of the current manifestation might help folks to begin to break through the fog, next week I will have the first installment of who-knows-how-many installments of a new feature which I may call Propaganda Watch. In this series I hope to give a few details about how our public information is currently being manipulated to support the goals of a very small group of people. I hope to provide enough detail so as to allow people to more clearly understand exactly how fierce and rigorous must be our efforts to maintain the open minds necessary to really understand—and thus be more able to call to heel—the dogs of war.