| Number 186 | January 3, 2003 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, We start out the year 2003 with a look back at the year 2002. This week’s Notes, like last week’s, is in the spirit of the end of the year, reflecting on the past year, nostalgia, etc, etc. Hope you enjoy it. I had forgotten that I wrote a lot of this stuff! As we approach the year 2003 C.E., I ask you to send along your ideas for topics or themes for me to write about in the Notes. I never have time to get to everything that people send, but I think I get to talking about quite a few of them. OK, outta room, so that’s it for this week. Welcome to all you new readers! Nygaard |
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Back in August of 2001 I wrote about some E-mail propaganda making the rounds about Social Security. The gist of it was 1) our U.S. Senators do not pay into Social Security; 2) They have a “special plan;”3) They pay nothing for this plan, and 4) If they were stuck with this loser of a plan (Social Security) like the rest of us, “watch how fast they would fix it!” As I pointed out at the time, all of this is false—and I mean ‘way false, as in “not even close to the truth.” I won’t go over the details here; you can read the details on the NN website, by looking at issue Number 123, “Social Security E-mail Propaganda.” I mention it now because the same bogus E-mail is making the rounds again, as I learned when a reader forwarded me a copy that had been sent to his 90-year-old mother. The latest version has been “updated,” including new bogus numbers and new examples of greed and graft, including a reference to “former Senator Byrd,” (he’s not “former” yet!) and other fake details, all geared to making it seem more “believable,” which they no doubt do. I don’t know exactly where this propaganda e-mail originated, but it’s part of the general attack on the idea of social insurance of which Social Security is the best example we have. This modest propaganda effort puts me in mind of a famous propaganda event known as the “Sisson Affair,” about which I’d like to say just a few words. Lenin and the Kaiser Back in the days of World War I, a man named Edgar Sisson was the associate chairman of the Committee on Public Information, Wilson’s wartime propaganda ministry. In the spring of 1918, Sisson made a trip to the brand-new Soviet Union, where the Bolsheviks had recently come to power. Recall that, in 1918, anti-communism was not yet the national religion of the United States; the great enemy at that time was Germany, and all efforts in this country were aimed at getting people to hate the Germans. So, Sisson comes home and presents to President Wilson some documents he had obtained “under dramatic circumstances” in Petrograd. The documents “proved,” in Sisson’s eyes, that “the present Bolshevik government is not a Russian government at all but a German government acting solely in the interests of Germany and betraying the Russian people, as it betrays Russia’s allies, for the benefit of the Imperial German Government alone.” This was the “spin” put on these documents when the CPI published them as Pamphlet #20 in the War Information Series, “The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy.” And this spin was widely believed and reported, as reflected in the headline in the New York Times of the day: “Documents Prove Lenin and Trotzky Hired By Germans.” If It’s “Reasonable,” No Proof Is Needed Like the Social Security E-mail, the documents turned out to be crude forgeries, and false in every important respect. But, no matter. As historians of the era (Mock and Larson, 1939) put it, “By the great majority of Americans [the Sisson Documents] were accepted as proving not only German connivance in the Bolshevik Revolution (which connivance nearly everyone was prepared to grant on the grounds of reasonableness if not actual proof) but also that Lenin and Trotzky were serving only a German cause.” The phenomenon in which “everyone” is prepared to believe something “on the grounds of reasonableness if not actual proof” is one very familiar to propagandists, and very much alive today. The facts about our Senators’ relationship to Social Security—to use the current example—are not in dispute among those who care to look. But the propagandist who started the e-mail knew full well that many who would receive it would find any report of reprehensible conduct on the part of U.S. elected officials “reasonable.” Coupled with the years of attacks on Social Security’s “crisis” and the “failure” of the program, this becomes a pretty effective propaganda story, and my modest efforts to counter it will take but a few drops from the fuel tank of this propaganda machine. There is a lesson here for those of us who are horrified by the propaganda being put out by the current administration in Washington: It is not enough simply to argue the facts of each tall tale released to the public. Who among us has not shot down a popular belief about the intentions of our government only to hear the response, “Well, that exact case may not be true, but something like it surely is.” We need to attack the beliefs and attitudes that lie beneath the lies, what I have called “Deep Propaganda.” These are the beliefs that make the absurd seem reasonable, and the reasonable absurd. If we don’t attack the foundations upon which our leaders build their houses of misinformation, then all we can ever do is chip the paint; the houses will remain. |
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There are many new readers to Nygaard Notes in recent months, so I thought it might be a good idea to summarize the past year of the Notes to give a hint of what they missed by coming on board so late in the game. This week I only talk about the year 2002; heaven knows I’m not going to try to go farther back than that right now. For long-time readers, this review can serve as a reminder of some pieces you may want to review. (And, shocking though it may sound, I suspect that some of you don’t read each and every issue cover-to-cover, so it may tip you off to some good ones you missed.) Fortunately, all of you have the option of going to the Nygaard Notes website at http://www.tc.umn.edu/~jdwalker/nygaard_notes/ and looking up any and all back issues. (At the moment, the key word search function isn’t working properly, but you can search by date and scan the titles—that’ll work fine.) So, in the spirit of the New Year, here’s a look at what appeared in the pages of Nygaard Notes in the recently-completed year of 2002 C.E. IN JANUARY I ran a three-part series on the phenomenon of suicide in the United States. Few people know that far more United Statesians die from suicide than from murder. So, I took a look at some facts, pondered the sociology and public-health aspects of suicide, then finished with a look at the ideology of individualism as it relates to suicide in our culture. IN FEBRUARY, and continuing into March, I did another three-part series, this time looking at how what I call the “American Ideology” fetishizes freedom, what that means for democracy in this nation, and how we can deal with the advancing powers that are running the War Against Terrorism (the WAT?!). You can get an idea of what I was talking about by looking at the titles of the three parts in the series: “Fetishes, Cults, and Infinite Possibilities,” “Balancing Democracy and Freedom,” and “Beyond Freedom to Liberation.” IN MARCH a local Somalian man named Abu Kassim Jeilani was shot to death by Minneapolis police. I spent some time looking at how race, disability, and xenophobia may have contributed—directly and indirectly—to this needless death. Then I gave some resources, especially for use by European-American (i.e. “white”) readers, on how to deal with the issues exposed by Jeilani’s death, in “Racism, Nativism, and Ablism: Resources for Beginners.” IN APRIL I talked about Israel/Palestine, gave some ideas about how to educate ourselves about what’s going on there, and suggested some resources for action. Also in April I looked at how the death of Jonas Savimbi, one of the great terrorists of our age (or any age) was covered in the U.S. media and elsewhere in the world. April was when I officially stopped using the word “Americans” to refer to residents of the United States, and now used the awkward-sounding but more accurate “United Statesians.” April ended with a look at racism in health care and the phenomenon of hate crimes against Asian Americans. April was a busy month at Nygaard Notes. IN MAY I spent pretty much the whole month looking at the ongoing disaster that we call “Welfare Reform” including, as always, some ideas on actions to take to make the situation better. I also began talking about a Harvard commencement address called “American Jihad” and the hysteria unleashed by the idea. (I came back to this issue in subsequent editions of the Notes.) Another issue that came up in May was the hugely-important and underappreciated push on the part of the Independent and Competitive (i.e. “conservative”) forces for something called “The New Federalism.” I also came back to this several times in subsequent months. IN JUNE the man of the hour was Wade Horn, point man for the Bush administration’s “crusade for the government to take a more active role in promoting marriage.” Yikes! The rest of June was a mish-mash of the usual profound and amazing commentary and analysis of the sort to which all you Nygaardians have become accustomed. IN JULY I talked about double standards in the criminal “justice” system, the terrorist state known as Turkey, and explained at some length the terrifying lunacy known as the “Bush Doctrine.” I also pondered, in a piece called “Fully Cognizant of the Threats,” the paired concepts of “us” and “them” as they play out during the WAT?!. I returned to that idea in September. IN AUGUST I considered how editors and producers decide what “the news” is. It’s not a science. In my piece “What ‘They’ Are Worried About” I speculated a bit about the lust for power and how it shapes every move by our leaders. At the end of August I published the first of what may be quite a few issues with a special Anti-War focus. IN SEPTEMBER I introduced the idea of two levels of propaganda, with “overt” propaganda being the thing you are supposed to believe, and “deep” propaganda being what makes the overt propaganda believable. Tips on how to spot the two types of prop, as well as how to defend oneself against it, were included. IN OCTOBER the Notes had a series called “Beyond Good and Evil,” in which I exposed and explained how dangerous it is to go along with a simplistic “either/or” way of thinking, using the “President’s” rallying cry of “You’re Either With Us Or You’re Against Us” as a starting point. This exploration went on for a few weeks, with such sections as “The Dualism Trap,” “From No to Yes,” and “The Philosophy Continuum.” As October ended I spent a little time considering the phenomenon of the rise in the United States of the political philosophy known as Libertartianism. I used Minnesota politician Tim Penny (from my hometown!) as a case study, especially looking at how he “sold” himself as a “centrist, and how the media bought it and the rest of us got confused. IN NOVEMBER, right on the 1st of the month (Nygaard Notes #178), I wrote a piece rather boringly titled “A Word on the Elections, and Wellstone.” Proving once again that we can’t judge a book by its cover—or an essay by its title—a lot of people told me they really liked this one, so you may want to go and read it on the web if you missed it. As I usually do, right around the election I re-published the ever-popular “Seven Steps to Better Elections.” Finally, IN DECEMBER I got off on my “History of Wartime Propaganda” jag, and I don’t think that’s quite finished yet. We’ll see. I’ve only mentioned a few of the things I consider highlights. Throughout the year I commented on all sorts of other stuff, like: workplace safety, taxes, budget cutting mania, education, the environment, labor organizing, Public Relations!, the International Criminal Court, fear as a political weapon, “superwaivers,” Native rights, and lots and lots of news about the various wars that our government is engaged in or planning. Everybody else was talking about Enron, so I even put in my two cents on that popular subject. Last, but not least, I really tried to make the popular “Stroll Through the News With Nygaard” a more regular feature. I did pretty good for a while, running it in March, April, June, and September. I’ve kind of gotten off the track just lately, but look for it again later this month. |