We Are The Thought Police

[babylonsister]

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/11/06/we_are_the_thought_police

We Are The Thought Police
Michael Massing

Orwell's Big Brother never showed up. Instead of centralized Iraq war propaganda, we have an America in which the public and the press jointly impose their own controls.


At first glance, the war in Iraq would seem to represent the realization of George Orwell's darkest fears. In "Politics and the English Language," he expressed alarm over how political speech and language, degraded by euphemism, vagueness, and cliché, was used to defend the indefensible, to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. Three years later, in "1984," Orwell offered an even grimmer vision, one in which an all-powerful Party, working through an all-seeing Ministry of Truth, manipulates and intimidates the public by pelting it with an endless series of distorted and fabricated messages.

The Bush administration, in pushing for the war in Iraq, seems to have done much the same. It concocted lurid images to stir fear ("weapons of mass destruction," the prospect that the "smoking gun" could become a "mushroom cloud"). It asserted as fact information known to be false (the purported ties between Iraq and al Qaeda). It clipped and cropped intelligence data to fit its policy goals (dropping important qualifiers from the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq). It worked up snippets and scraps of unsubstantiated evidence into a slick package of deception and misrepresentation (Colin Powell's speech at the United Nations). And it created a whole glossary of diversionary terms -- "preemptive war" for unprovoked aggression, "shock and awe" for a devastating bombing campaign, "coalition" for an invading force that was overwhelmingly American -- all of which helped win the White House broad domestic support for a war that most of the rest of the world had decisively rejected.

Yet in many key respects, the Iraq war has diverged from Orwell's dystopic vision. Orwell had expected advances in technology to allow the ruling elite to monopolize the flow of information and through it to control the minds of the masses. In reality, though, those advances have set off an explosion in the number and diversity of news sources, making efforts at control all the harder to achieve. The 24-hour cable news channels, the constantly updated news Web sites, news aggregators like Google News, post-it-yourself sites such as YouTube, ezines, blogs, and digital cameras have all helped feed an avalanche of information about world affairs. In Iraq, reporters embedded with troops have been able via the Internet to file copy directly from the field. Through "milblogs," soldiers have been able to share with the outside world their impressions about their experiences on the ground. Even as the war has dragged on, it has given rise to a shelf-full of revealing books, written by not only generals and journalists but also captains, lieutenants, privates, national guardsmen, and even deserters.

In short, no war has been more fully chronicled or minutely analyzed than this one. And, as a result, the Bush administration has been unable to spin it as it would like. The spreading insurgency, the surging violence, the descent into chaos -- all have been thoroughly documented by journalists and others, and public support for the war has steadily ebbed as a result.

Yet even amid this information glut, the public remains ill-informed about many key aspects of the war. This is due less to any restrictions imposed by the government, or to any official management of language or image, than to controls imposed by the public itself. Americans -- reluctant to confront certain raw realities of the war -- have placed strong filters and screens on the facts and images they receive. This is particularly true regarding the conduct of U.S. troops in the field. The U.S. military in Iraq is an occupation army, and like most such forces, it has engaged in many troubling acts. With American men and women putting their lives at risk in a very hostile environment, however, the American public has little appetite for news about such acts, and so it sets limits on what it is willing to hear about them. The Press -- ever attuned to public sensitivities -- will, on occasion, test those limits, but generally respects them. The result is an unstated, unconscious, but nonetheless potent co-conspiracy between the public and the press to muffle some important truths about the war. In a disturbing twist on the Orwellian nightmare, the American people have become their own thought police, purging the news of unwanted and unwelcome features with an efficiency that government censors and military flacks can only envy.

snip//

In his reflections on politics and language, Orwell operated on the assumption that people want to know the truth. Often, though, they don't. In the case of Iraq, the many instruments Orwell felt would be needed to keep people passive and uninformed -- the nonstop propaganda messages, the memory holes, the rewriting of history, Room 101 -- have proved unnecessary. The public has become its own collective Ministry of Truth -- a reality that, in many ways, is even more chilling than the one Orwell envisioned.

[NMMNG]

1. We demand to know the tru--

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