One of the worst aspects of the United States of America is the disinformation that constantly bombards its citizens. Perhaps that’s true of all countries of the world – but that doesn’t make it any more tolerable. There have been, of course, many journalists, authors, and statesmen throughout our history who have attempted to buck the establishment and speak truth to power. But never without severe obstruction or consequences. Chris Hedges discusses this problem at length in his book, “
Death of the Liberal Class”. His discussion of the rise, fall, and rise of one of our greatest journalists,
I.F. Stone, is very interesting, informative, scary, and inspiring at the same time:
I.F. Stone… was one of the most famous reporters in the nation by the end of World War II. He was a regular on television news programs and had easy access to those in power… And he was a confidant of many in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.
And then, challenging President Harry Truman’s loyalty program and the establishment of NATO, Stone disappeared from public view and was swallowed up in the hysteria over communism. He became a nonperson… He was soon under daily FBI surveillance… He was blacklisted as a reporter. Even the Nation, the centerpiece of the liberal intelligentsia, would not give him a job. He was forty-four and wrote that such actions made him “
feel for the moment like a ghost”.
Stone gathered up a few stalwarts from his old magazine… and launched a newsletter in 1953 called
I.F. Stone’s Weekly… He self-published his work in his basement. Stone’s work exposed the damage done to journalism by mass culture. The stories Stone broke were ignored by most organizations. It was Stone who
punctured the Johnson administration’s assertion that U.S. ships had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin… He found that only 179 of approximately 7,500 weapons captured from the Vietcong had come from the Soviet bloc. The remainder, 95%, came from U.S. arms provided to the South Vietnamese.
He did this reporting while shut out of the big news conferences and confidential background briefings given to well-placed Washington reporters. The establishment reporters, he conceded, knew things he did not, but “a lot of what they know isn’t true”… By the time he closed the weekly nearly two decades later, it had seventy thousand subscribers, and he had become a journalistic icon… Stone would not sell out. He never forgot, as he famously quipped, that “every government is run by liars”…
It is only when radicals such as Stone exist that the commercial media wake from their slumber. Figures like Stone, in essence, shame the press into good journalism….
And let’s not forget about the
treatment of Bradley Manning.
If I were to write a book in an attempt to make some small contribution to waking up the American public to the problems we face as a nation, this is how I might write the introduction:
INTRODUCTIONThe United States of America was conceived on July 4, 1776, with our
Declaration of Independence, one of the finest and most important proclamations ever written. It is basically a proclamation against tyranny. It proclaims that all of humanity – not just Americans, but
all of humanity – has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Then it justifies the creation of our nation by noting that it is the purpose of government to secure the inalienable rights of its citizens, and that government derives its legitimacy only from the consent of those whom it governs. Therefore, whenever a government becomes destructive of that purpose, it is the moral right of its citizens to abolish that government.
Notwithstanding the lofty sentiments and purpose of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the
reality did not then – and still has not – lived up to its ideal. Most obvious in this regard was the institution of slavery, which in some respects made a mockery of the sentiments expressed in our Declaration. Yet, it was a great start, and it served then – as it still does – to shine as a beacon of hope for our infant nation, and the rest of the world as well.
The dark side of the United States of AmericaSince its founding, the actions of the United States of America during its almost two and a half centuries of existence, like most if not all the other nations of the world, contain a mixture of good and bad – actions noble and ignoble. Yet most written histories of the United States emphasize the good things while overlooking much of the bad. This is especially true of the teaching of U.S. history to students.
In that respect the United States is probably not much different from other nations and cultures of the world. Most or all nations and cultures have a strong tendency to describe their histories and current actions in an exaggerated favorable light. In that way they attempt to elicit the cooperation or enthusiastic participation of their members or citizens. If people believe that their nation’s goals are noble and inspiring they will be inclined to cooperate with those goals willingly. Many of them will even willingly risk their lives by going to war in order to further the goals of their nation. Even many of those who don’t fully believe in the nobility of their nation’s goals will be moved by peer pressure to willingly fight for them. Obtaining the willing cooperation and enthusiastic participation of its citizens in furthering their goals is almost always far preferable to a nation’s leaders than trying to obtain that cooperation by force.
Most people prefer it this way. Doing and believing what they are told by their leaders is easier than developing their own beliefs and plotting their own independent course of action based on an independent assessment of the value of what they are advised to do. Furthermore, in following the prodding of their leaders, people can make themselves feel that they are acting “patriotically”. It helps to give them a sense of identity, feel a connection to their fellow citizens and feel good about themselves.
But there are very important downsides to this kind of relationship between a nation and its citizens. The “noble” actions portrayed by the leaders may not be noble at all. Instead, they may – and often are – designed for the enrichment and private satisfaction of the leaders. They may – and often do – have terrible consequences for hundreds, thousands, or millions of other people, including those whose participation in their goals they endeavor to elicit. In short, nations can – and often have – evolved into tyranny.
The end result can be that a nation’s government creates a system in which masses of people are led around and manipulated like sheep – all for the benefit of the leaders, at the great expense of everyone else. The sheep see themselves as benefiting because they are spared the necessity of doing the hard work of thinking for themselves, and because they are manipulated into feeling good about themselves.
Just as an individual cannot grow if he is unwilling to recognize his faults, a nation cannot improve if its citizens are unwilling to look at and seriously consider the dark side of their nation’s history and current actions. It may be very painful for some to do that. But it is necessary in order to facilitate the development of a nation that works for the benefit of all its citizens rather than exclusively for its leaders.
Politicians against historians – The attack on “National Standards for United States History”A great example of how politically dangerous it is to challenge the standard feel good stories told about our country is the U.S. Senate’s unanimous rejection, in 1995, of the proposed
National Standards for United States History, by a
vote of 99-1 (The one vote against the resolution was cast because the Senator felt that the resolution wasn’t strong enough.)
Creation of the standardsThe standards were produced by a policy-setting body called the National Council for History Standards (NCHS), consisting of the presidents of nine major organizations and twenty-two other nationally recognized administrators, historians, and teachers, and two taskforces of teachers in World and United States history, with substantial input from thirty-one national organizations. The document was created through an unprecedented process of open debate, multiple reviews, and the active participation of the largest organizations of history educators in the nation.
In November 1994, NCHS released its document, which was meant to provide purely voluntary guidelines for national curricula in history for grades 5-12. As
explained by Gary Nash, who led the effort, these standards were meant to have one thing in common: “to provide students with a more comprehensive, challenging, and thought-provoking education in the nation's public schools.” Their signature features were said to include “a new framework for critical thinking and active learning” and “repeated references to primary documents that would allow students to read and hear authentic voices from the past”.
Controversy over the standardsCritics focused largely on two main issues: Multiculturalism and so-called “political correctness”. As an example,
Lynn Cheney aggressively criticized the document as containing “multicultural excess”, a “grim and gloomy portrayal of American history”, “a politicized history”, and a disparaging of the West. Other major critics of the document included Newt Gingrich and Republican presidential candidates Pat Buchanan and Bob Dole.
Dole blamed the document on “the embarrassed to be American crowd” of “intellectual elites”. With regard to the criticisms of “grimness and gloominess”, Nash has this to say:
To be sure, it is not possible to recover the history of women, African Americans, religious minorities, Native Americans, laboring Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans without addressing issues of conflict, exploitation, and the compromising of the national ideals set forth by the Revolutionary generation… To this extent, the standards counseled a less self-congratulatory history of the United States and a less triumphalist Western Civilization orientation toward world history…
Reduced to its core, the controversy thus turned on how history can be used to train up the nation's youth. Almost all of the critics of the history standards argued that young Americans would be better served if they study the history presented before the 1960s, when allegedly liberal and radical historians "politicized" the discipline and abandoned an "objective" history in favor of pursuing their personal political agendas.
Nash then discusses the historians’ point of view:
On the other side of the cultural divide stands a large majority of historians. For many generations, even when the profession was a guild of white Protestant males of the upper class, historians have never regarded themselves as anti-patriots because they revise history or examine sordid chapters of it. Indeed, they expose and critique the past in order to improve American society and to protect dearly won gains… This is not a new argument. Historians have periodically been at sword's point with vociferous segments of the public, especially those of deeply conservative bent.
So why then did the U.S. Senate unanimously reject these standards? Well, the last thing our leaders want is for our children to be taught a “grim and gloomy portrayal” of American History, as Lynn Cheney describes the Standards. There were probably some U.S. Senators who appreciated the value of these standards – as they voted to reject them. But they know that failing to vote with their colleagues to reject them would be greatly frowned upon by the powers that be and result in their being targeted for a political hatchet job and even political extermination. A system for teaching history to school children that rocks the boat by questioning the motives of our great leaders is just too threatening to our nation’s leaders to be allowed to exist.
The purpose of the bookMy purpose in writing this book is to encourage American citizens to think more about the dark side of their nation’s history, current policies and current directions – in the belief that this is the surest way to make us better than who we are today.
Our history has been a mixture of wise and stupid, moral and immoral actions. Yet, most Americans are led to believe that we are so far superior to the other peoples of the world that we have the moral right to force them to do whatever we believe to be in our best interests – which we claim to be in the best interests of everyone. Such an attitude is arrogant, hypocritical and dangerous in the extreme.
Worse, we are moving swiftly in the wrong direction. A minority of very wealthy and powerful people – an elite oligarchy – has concentrated more and more power
and wealth into their own hands, and they continue to do so. In the midst of the
worst economic crisis our country has known since the
Great Depression of the 1930s, tens of thousands of Americans
die every year because they can’t afford decent health care,
millions lose their homes, and
millions are driven into poverty, while those institutions and individuals responsible for the crisis
make record profits and take home
multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses.
To distract us from the true cause of our crisis, the oligarchy tries to turn us against each other. As I write this book, the Governor of Wisconsin is attempting to demonize and
destroy the public employees unions in his state. This is one part of an ongoing war against
American labor unions – one of the last bastions of hope for the working people of our country.
An outline of some things Americans need to better understand The following outline is not meant to be all-inclusive. Rather, it is meant to serve as a counter-balance for a population that has mostly been exposed to sanitized versions of U.S. history and current U.S. policies:
I. Dark Aspects of U.S. HistorySlavery and imperialismEconomic history and class warfareII. Dark aspects of 21st Century developmentsIII. Factors responsible for the decline of U.S. democracy In summary The problems facing our country and the world are enormous. Unfortunately, we are now at a time in U.S. history when anti-democratic forces in our country are accelerating, leading to the concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands, as our nation’s previous robust middle class continues to shrink and become more and more insecure. In many respects this represents a vicious downward cycle. The more power accumulated by the oligarchy, the more power they have to accumulate more power and successfully demand the passage of legislation that adds still more to their increasing power and wealth.
One important key to breaking and reversing this downward vicious cycle lies in an accumulating awareness of the American people about the true nature of their nation’s history and current status. Finding ways to facilitate this task is one of the greatest and most important challenges of the 21st Century.
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