This Week:

Quote of the Week

From One Big Lie to Many Little Lies

“Unwilling to Provide the Funds Necessary”

A Little Economic Reality

Greetings,

I realize that there are only a couple of issues remaining in the 2003 edition of Nygaard Notes. And I haven’t even gotten to the exciting things I promised were coming up! (I know, some of you think that every issue is filled with exciting things, but I had something different in mind...)

I try to reserve the honor of “Quote” of the Week for comments that are revealing and substantive. Still, it is hard to pass up the simply amusing, such as this comment cited in the NY Times this week: “A State Department official said Tuesday night that, in relations with countries that opposed the war, ‘we are committed to putting the past behind us.’” (I just had to get that in.)

This week’s piece about Big and Little Lies stands on its own, as a comment on how propaganda works and how to counter it. Next week, as a way of illustrating the point, I will take apart one single paragraph from a recent speech by George W. Bush. And I’ll add a comment or two on the distinction between simple lying and sophistry. Stay tuned.

Honestly yours,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

The following two quotations illustrate the U.S. media’s habit of ridiculing other countries for flaws that are all too apparent in our own. The article appeared on the front page of the New York Times (“All The News That’s Fit To Print”) of December 9th. First of all I noticed a caption under a photo of subway riders reading newspapers:

“Turnout in Russia’s ballot on Sunday was only 56 percent, but some riders on a Moscow subway train yesterday diligently checked the results.”

And the final sentence of the article reported that the winner (Vladimir Putin) “seemed to anticipate criticism of the elections,” and went on to report:

“[Putin] noted that the low turnout, while a disappointing 56 percent of eligible voters, was close to those in Britain and Canada.”

Turnout in Britain’s last election was about 58 percent, true, but since WWII the average turnout has been more than 70 percent.

More importantly, nowhere in the article was there mention of the United States, where turnout for a presidential election has been lower than 56 percent in every election since 1968. In the last two presidential elections in this country, fewer than half of eligible voters bothered to exercise their right to vote.

From One Big Lie to Many Little Lies

It has often been said that Adolf Hitler invented the idea of the Big Lie. That’s not quite true. In fact, he accused “the Jews” of using it. Speaking in Volume One, Chapter X of Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote the following, discussing Germany’s “downfall” in “the world war,” what we now call World War I:

“But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of [General Erich] Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice.

"All this was inspired by the principle - which is quite true in itself - that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

"Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.”

I hope this excerpt sounds ridiculous to the modern ear, due to its simplistic anti-Jewish bias and contempt for the intelligence of the common folk that Hitler was to lead. But, despite the absurdity of how he arrived at the theory, many political leaders since Hitler’s time have operated successfully on the basis of the Big Lie theory that he described. In our own country, we have seen many Big Lies promulgated by the political establishment in my lifetime, from the Cold War lie of “The Russians are coming” to the 1980s lie about the Nicaraguan Sandinistas threatening to march against U.S. democracy (“only a two-day drive from Harlingen, Texas!”) to the 1990s lie that crime rates were skyrocketing and thus provided justification for the U.S. having the highest incarceration rates in the world (crime rates actually started falling in 1993 and fell nationwide throughout the 1990s).

The Internet and Little Lies

Things are different now. The rise of the internet has made the Big Lie less useful. Before the internet, there was a meaningful time lag between the uttering of a Big Lie and the appearance of a refutation by reporters or the political opposition, which gave time for the Big Lies to take root and establish themselves in the public mind. Now, Big Lies can be documented as false within hours, sometimes minutes, by anyone with an internet connection. And, as soon as the facts are uncovered, they can be posted on easily-accessed websites and carried around the world in moments by e-mail. What does this mean?

The meaning is that we are seeing a change in propaganda tactics by political leaders and other elites. Rather than relying on one or a few Big Lies, leaders increasing depend on constant repetition of many smaller lies. Rather than constructing a big wall to hide the truth, modern propaganda chooses instead to construct a sort of obstacle course, composed of many little impediments and intellectual hurdles. In propaganda terms, the theory is that each obstacle (Little Lie) may be refuted, but as long as the target of the propaganda remains inside of the obstacle course, their view of reality remains in the control of those who make the course. Clear one hurdle, in other words, and you will simply have prepared yourself to meet another one.

In addition, since the obstacles are so numerous, our eyes have to remain down, focused on the obstacles, and not looking up and out toward the ideas that are being obscured. Once the wall that is the Big Lie is taken down, we can get a clear view of what’s on the other side. Liberating oneself from the obstacle course of Little Lies, on the other hand, is a different task.

Little Lies and Big Lies are what I was referring to last week when I talked about Overt Propaganda and Deep Propaganda. We are offered the Little Lies—the Overt Propaganda—but in order to fall for them we have to have already internalized and accepted the Big Lies—the Deep Propaganda. For example, if one believes that the foreign policy of the United States is primarily concerned with lofty principles like Freedom and Democracy rather than the pursuit of power and wealth, then all sorts of smaller lies seem plausible, if not obviously true. Take the argument that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction primed to attack the United States. That is believed by many USers because of the following logic, which is embedded in the Big Lie ideology: We attacked that country and a country like the U.S. would not attack a country that wasn’t an imminent threat to ourselves. Would it?

The importance of this change from a reliance on one Big Lie to many Little Lies cannot be overemphasized. One can refute Little Lie after Little Lie, but if the Big Lies remain unchallenged, then the next batch of Little Lies will be just as believable as the ones just refuted. There is, of course, an endless supply of Little Lies. And finally, how effective is it to expose a number of Little Lies when, in each case, the likely response from those immersed in the mainstream propaganda culture will be along the lines of, “Well, that may not be true, but something very similar certainly is true.”

The answer is not to stop refuting the Little Lies, but to devote more of our time to addressing the Big Lies. And it’s not simply about promoting the Big Truths—that is, replacing one set of facts with another—since ultimately it is not a matter of disagreement about facts. It’s really about dogma and indoctrination.

In the dominant dogma, the United States is Good, therefore what it does is Good. The alternative is not to show that the United States is Bad. The alternative is to provide a different way of understanding the world, one that doesn’t judge acts by looking at who did them, but that judges actors by what they do. This requires a fearless look in the mirror, among other things, and such self-assessment, while often very gratifying and pleasant can also be painful and uncomfortable. Getting ourselves, as a nation, to do such a thing will not be easy. But the alternative is a simple one: America, Love It or Leave It. And I’m not willing to leave.

“Unwilling to Provide the Funds Necessary”

Is it a crime in the United States to be mentally ill? One might think so if one read a recent report by Human Rights Watch called “Ill-Equipped: U.S. Prisons and Offenders with Mental Illness.” Of course, it is unlikely that one would know about this report—issued on October 21—since it was only reported in two newspapers in the entire U.S. of A. And it was hardly prominent in those papers.

Here are a few highlights (or, rather, lowlights), from one of the brief reports that did appear:

“One in six U.S. prisoners is mentally ill. Many of them suffer from serious illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. There are three times as many men and women with mental illness in U.S. prisons as in mental health hospitals.”

“The rate of mental illness in the prison population is three times higher than in the general population.”

“Public officials have been unwilling to provide the funds necessary to ensure adequate treatment for all the mentally ill offenders who need it.”

“Unless you are wealthy, it can be next to impossible to receive mental health services in the community,” said [report co-author Jamie] Fellner. “Many prisoners might never have ended up behind bars if publicly funded treatment had been available.”

“We measure what we treasure,” as I always say. In that light, consider this comment on page 49 of the report: “Many individual prison systems Human Rights Watch contacted indicated they were unable to calculate the portion of their medical budgets devoted to mental health services.”

I don’t think any newspaper in Minnesota covered this story at all, despite our state being mentioned in the report as having a per capita prison mental health budget 60 percent below that of Michigan, and 57 percent below that of New York. That seems like important news to me.

A Little Economic Reality

Here are two really, really short notes about recent media reports:

The first one is from the NY Times of September 9, page 15:

Headline: “Poor Workers Finding Modest Housing Unaffordable, Study Says”

Lead paragraph:

“With the rise in housing costs outpacing that of wages, there is no state where a low-income worker can reasonably afford a modest one- or two-bedroom rental unit, according to a study issued today by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an advocacy group based in Washington.”

The national minimum wage is $5.15 per hour. The nation's median hourly wage last year was roughly $12 an hour. According to the report, the “Housing Wage”— the amount a person working full-time has to earn to afford a two-bedroom rental unit at fair market rent while paying no more than 30% of income in rent—is now $15.21 per hour.

The study is called “Out of Reach 2003,” and was released on September 8th by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Find it online at http://www.nlihc.org/oor2003/.

Here’s the second one...

As you know, Nygaard Notes does not do graphics, charts, or graphs. So here, from the Business Section of the Star Tribune of September 20th, is the caption for a couple of little pie-charts that I can’t reproduce here:

“In the early 1970s, a single-paycheck family spent just over half of its income on fixed expenses (defined as mortgage, child care, health insurance, car payment, taxes). Today, a two-paycheck family spends nearly three-quarters of its income on fixed expenses.”

Two more comments from the same article: “This year, more children will live through their parents’ bankruptcy than their parents' divorce.” Says Minneapolis bankruptcy lawyer George Roberts,

“I don't sense people are filing [for] bankruptcy because they are engaged in wild spending sprees at the mall. For a lot of them, their income just really hasn't kept pace with the cost of living. Just to buy school clothes or occasionally even groceries, they are having to use credit cards. This is not extravagant, frivolous spending.”