November 19, 1998
Propaganda is a dirty word - or at least it has been since the Nazis tried to control the minds of their fellow countrymen. But here in America, we use the comfortable Orwellian term "public relations" to describe what corporations and Congress do to try and influence the thoughts, opinions and attitudes of the American people.
At the Constitutional Convention, James Madison claimed that the purpose of democracy is to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." And because America has enough vestiges of democracy to prevent using state violence to affect your actions, one out of every six dollars spent in America is instead aimed at influencing how you think about government and business. When you read the New York Times, listen to network news or view advertising, you are presented with but one view of the world. Sure, there's Democrats and Republicans, right and left, but although they disagree on how Madison's goals are to be achieved, there is no disagreement that they must be.
Noam Chomsky is a celebrated political critic and intellectual who presents a surprisingly different view of America, one that shows corporate capitalism and government working in tandem to keep voters apathetic and disenfranchised for fear of what they might accomplish if they were truly organized. This spoken word CD is from a speech given at Harvard in 1997,and outlines his views about the largely unreported class struggle that is being fought on a daily basis.
Chomsky is a brilliant speaker: warm, funny, humane and refreshingly sane, he promotes working-class interests and provides people with intellectual tools for self-defense. Rather than a boring lecture, this is an utterly fascinating take on the motives behind the PR industry and the hypocrisy of our "democratic" government. Learn what all your history teachers didn't tell you, but should have.
- Jared O'Connor
PS. This recording and many more like it are available through mail order at AK Press
From the CD:
"The war against working people
should be understood to be a real
war. It's not a new war. It's an
old war. Furthermore, it's a
perfectly conscious war
everywhere, but specifically in
the US...which happens to have a
highly class-conscious business
class... And they have long seen
themselves as fighting a bitter
class war, except they don't want
anybody else to know about it.
There's no doubt that one of the
major issues of twentieth century
history, surely in the US, is
corporate propaganda... Its goal
from the beginning, perfectly
openly and consciously, was to
'control the public mind,' as
they put it. The reason was that
the public mind was seen as the
greatest threat to corporations."