Knowledge can be power

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” - George
Orwell

1963 was the year that covert CIA operations assisted the Ba’ath Party in its overthrow of the governments of both Syria and Iraq.  In that year, the C.I.A. ensured that the Ba’ath Party was successful in its overthrow of the Syrian and Iraqi governments. The party, although "socialist", was adamantly anti-communist and anti-Nasserist. The U.S. thus realized it could instigate sectarian conflict among the anti-imperialist, pan-Arab left by sponsoring Ba’athist coups—and providing “kill lists” to purge the countries’ prominent "communists". These two U.S.-organized and -funded coups were directly responsible for the eventual rise of power of dictators Hafez al-Assad (the father of Bashar al-Assad) in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, both of whom worked their way up the Ba’ath Party ranks. When the Ba’ath party divided into an Iraqi and a Syrian factions in 1966, the U.S. too exploited the sectarian divisions. Such is the principal strategy of the imperialist West: divide and conquer.

But you won’t read about the ’63 coups in a U.S. newspaper or have it mentioned on the tv or radio, however.  Contemporary news will report  Assad as the “brutal dictator” (that he undoubtably is) as though the US/UK had nothing to do with his rise to power.

 To adequately consider the problems we face today, in order to understand all of their implications, we must take into consideration the historical contexts in which they are situated. Syria didn’t just appear yesterday. The civil war didn’t just happen today. These things are the products of a series of historical, politico-economic factors. Contemporary journalism, however,  just want the “facts,” and want them now. No nuance, no complexity and no ambiguity.  Complexity inhibits the ease with which one can disseminate simple, watered-down “news,” confusing and alienating readers and viewers, who have gotten used to a world in which events are always either black or white. Worst of all, the communication of complexity simply takes more words or air-time and that means a financial cost.

Chomsky explains one ways in which “news” sources justify this historical disregard: “concision.” He is guilty of the crime of  demanding evidence for one’s assertions. “In fact, the structure of the news production system is you can’t produce evidence,” he states. He recalls that the producer of Nightline, one Jeff Greenfield, when asked why he’s never featured Chomsky on the show, says “he lacks concision.” Chomsky does not reject such a claim; he agrees entirely;
“The kind of things I would say on Nightline you can’t say in one sentence, because they depart from standard religion. If you want to repeat the religion, you can get away with it between two commercials. If you want to say something that questions the religion, you’re expected to give evidence, and that you can’t do between two commercials. Therefore you lack concision; therefore you can’t talk. That’s a terrific technique of propaganda. To impose concision is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated over and over again and that nothing else is heard.”

In capitalism, journalism and information is commodified, manipulated to serve profits, mass-marketed and sold to the hungry consumer. If there is a demand for a far-right-biased “news” source it will be supplied but of course we are not taling about a demand from the audience. We mean the demand from those who pay for the advertising. Or provide the political lobby for the media industry. The Golden Rule of consumer capitalism is “The customer is always right” and in the media the customer is the piper who calls the tune. Its why stations and papers follow the party line.

TV news follows the business model of tabloid journalism: dispense with actual reporting, which costs a lot to do well, and replace it with far less expensive pontificating that will attract audiences.  All “news” must be forced through a filter. A particular kind of action (e.g., military intervention by a “democratic” country) becomes inherently “pro-freedom,” by its very definition; its particular historical, political or economic context needn’t be considered. The ways in which those in  power and in possession of capital struggle to bury unpleasant histories is in fact quite remarkable. It does take a certain kind of ingenuity to erase entire peoples’, entire lands’ histories from public consciousness. The Chinese leader Zhou Enlai once said “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.” There is a degree of truth in that it applies to all peoples when subjected to propaganda manipulation.

The historian Howard Zinn said  in his “Conversations in History” in 2001.

“If I don’t have any history, then whatever you, the person in authority, the president at the microphone, announcing we must bomb here, we must go there—the president has the field all to himself; I cannot counteract because I don’t know any history. I can only believe him. I was born yesterday. What history does is give you enough data so you can question anything that is said from on high, and you can measure the claims that are being made by people in authority against the reality. And you can look at similar claims that were made before, and see what happened then. Here’s a president who’s saying ‘We’re going to war for democracy,’ and then you go back through history and see how many times have presidents said ‘We are going to war for democracy’ and what have those wars really been about.”

 A knowledge of history is subversive. We don’t need subversion, we need obedience; we don’t need knowledgeable citizens, we need uninformed consumers. The media controls mainstream access to information at present in almost completely disregard of the past.  In the place of actual historical fact we are offered up  collective delusion, a ludicrous vision of the world which white-washes the future with benevolent motives. The pain today is a price for a better tomorrow that never ever comes as we witnessed the success of "humanitarian wars" in Iraq and Libya and a host of other “liberated" lands.

Remember when the Americans sent the Marine Corps into Lebanon in 1983? Soon afterwards,  the single largest non-nuclear explosion anywhere in the world since WWII took place  – 241 American troops in what was the largest loss of American military life in a single incident since Iwo Jima, as well as 58 French soldiers and 6 civilians.  Remember when Reagan bombed Libya in 1986? Two years later Libyan agents blew up Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in retribution. Remember Bill Clinton’s 1998 strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan? These helped precipitate the al-Qaeda attacks on  bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than 220, including 12 Americans, the attack on the USS Cole and eventually the World Trade Center.

Nor will the media remind us that Obama met with the Assad,Syrian’s President, in November 2008, before he himself was even elected in an attempt to convince him to serve U.S. interests in the region—namely pro-Israel and -Iran policies. The news media concentrate upon the chemical weapon atrocities but this isn’t about chemical weapons. The U.K. sold chemicals to Syria 10 months after the civil war began. The U.S. provided Saddam Hussein with the chemical weapons he used to massacre the Kurds and assisted in providing him intelligence to use them against the Iranians. No, this is about political power and the in particular control of energy sources and their routes.

A re-writing of this article