Title: Manufacturing Consent

Author/Artist: Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman

Publisher:Vintage Books

Media: Book

Reviewer: Simon Whitechapel

I remember when I was a kid that I thought the Vietnam war was very simple: one side, the Vietnamese, were in the right, the other, the Americans, in the wrong. As I grew up, my views became more "balanced" without my learning much more about the wa]. Reading this book has completed my journey back to my original position. If one can argue that a good way to defend a people's democratic freedoms is to slaughter the people in question, the Americans were defending the democratic freedoms of the Vietnamese.

They were also, and perhaps even more vigorously, defending the democratic freedoms of the Cambodians and Laotians. Afterwards, the Americans went home and agonized over the traumas the war had caused them, and congratulated or condemned - according to political persuasion - the media whose awful power had brought the war to an end. Part of this book is a detailed examination of what this attempted defence of Indochina against communism meant for Indochina's inhabitants, and of how the American media actually had very little to do with ending it.

It's an academic text but isn't as difficult to read as that - or Noam Chomsky's reputation as the writer of impossible-to-understand books on linguistics - might suggest. Which is not to say that it's not badly written: it is. Ugly sentences and unnecessary jargon don't invalidate the arguments and facts presented in this book but they must be surely damaging to it, if only because they make it easier for the book to be dismissed. Re-written by someone like George Orwell, its value would increase considerably, and it is already a very valuable book.

It begins by setting out the "propaganda model" of the American media that the authors will use to examine the way the brutalities of American foreign policy are disguised or concealed from the American people. There is no sinister right-wing conspiracy involved in this: it is, as the book attempts to demonstrate, a natural consequence of the way the media are dependent on money provided by a small financial elite and on information provided by the American government.

Newspapers are extremely expensive to run and so will naturally tend to adopt positions that are pleasing to those who finance and provide advertising revenue for them. Similarly, they will naturally tend to take the line of least resistance (i.e. expense) in gathering information, and take what is provided free by the government and its agencies.

Television conforms in the same way, only more so, and, because it is a very superficial medium, is even less hospitable to radical or unconventional ideas. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out here and elsewhere, dissenting from a conventional -- and therefore widely known -- view-point is made more difficult by the fact that more time is needed to develop an argument and present evidence for it. In short, though the media may not consciously set out to defend the interests of a tiny financial and political elite, this book claims that this is what they do. I believe it.

After this presentation of a propaganda model, the authors, in self-consciously scientific fashion, test it against the real world. For example, according to their model, the media should present elections very differently depending on whether they are held in countries approved of by the elite or not. Criteria used to decide whether an election in right-wing El Salvador was legitimate will not be applied in left-wing Nicaragua, and vice versa. If one believes the information presented here, this is what happened in coverage of the elections that took place in these countries.

Similarly, the propaganda model predicts that some victims of political murder will be "worthy" and some "unworthy". Jerzy Popieluszko, a Catholic priest murdered by the police of communist Poland in 1984, will be a worthy victim, and receive a great deal of media attention; the dozens of religious workers murdered in right-wing Latin American countries will be unworthy victims, and will receive little media attention. Conforming with these predictions, Popieluszko, a worthy victim, receives 78 articles and 1183 column inches in the New York Times, while "72 religious victims in Latin America, 1964-78", all unworthy, receive 8 articles and 117.5 column inches in the same paper.

If the facts reported and emphases made are examined, the distinction between "worthy" and "unworthy" victims becomes even sharper: the suffering undergone by Jerzy Popieluszko is strongly emphasized, the shock and horror roused in Poland by the killing comprehensively reported, and the question of how responsible the Polish authorities were vigorously pursued. Latin America's more brutal murders do not get similar coverage, with questions like official culpability being ignored.

The book also points out the strong possibility that the extensive, daily coverage given to Popieluszko's killing prompted the Polish authorities to take firmer action in finding and trying the culprits. In US client states like El Salvador and Guatemala, where such coverage might be expected to have greater effect, the fact that it is not given to worse murders leads one to conclude that the American media must share, however indirectly, the responsibility for the murderous nature of these countries' regimes. The responsibility of the American government, of course, is not at all indirect: this book isn't merely a survey of the way the media serve the elite, but also of how that elite protects its interests by sponsoring -- in some cases creating -- governments for whom labels like "fascist" or "genocidal" are perfectly justifiable.

In the history of America's involvement in Indochina that forms the final section of the book, the authors examine how, for once, the American defence of freedom went wrong. America failed very badly in Vietnam. It spent vast sums of money and killed, maimed, and poisoned vast numbers of people to prevent a communist takeover of the region. When the war had ended, there was a communist government not only in Vietnam but also in Laos and Cambodia, which had also benefited from the American anti-communist crusade.

Reading what the Americans did in these countries is a revolting experience. Comparison with the behavior of the Nazis in the invasion of the Soviet Union is not fanciful or hyperbolic: the authors point out that the indignation of American newspapers over the treacherous refusal of southern Vietnamese peasants to welcome and support the American army is almost certainly echoed in Nazi newspapers reporting of the Balkan campaign.

The My Lai massacre, which was cunningly held up both as an example of understandable-if-not-excusable US army brutality and of how America accepted and attempted to atone for this, was not an isolated incident. It was not a uniquely appalling act in a war that took terrible psychological and physical toll of both sides, but part of a consistent pattern of an overwhelmingly powerful invader waging war mostly against civilians. A prime example of this was the the pacification campaign in Kien Hoa province in the Mekong Delta, the target of one of the most brutal American operations of the war in an area with no known North Vietnamese presence. As reported in the book this campaign included:

air strikes using napalm, high explosives, and anti-personnel bombs, B-52 bombing, and artillery shelling "around the clock" at a level that "it is impossible to reckon", with armed helicopters "scouring the landscape from the air night and day" and accounting for "many and perhaps most of the enemy kills" -- about 11,000 according to the U.S. command, with 748 weapons captured, a fair indication of who was killed.

This book is not a survey of the evils perpetrated in the name of communism in the Soviet bloc, but there is sufficient reference to communist behavior to show that the authors recognse these evils and are opposed not just to American state brutality but to state brutality in itself. Comparisons are drawn between the American invasion of Vietnam and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and there's no suggestion that one is more or less justifiable than the other: both were wrong, and the behavior of the Russian army and media in Afghanistan would, the authors presume, provide similar evidence for their propaganda model of how the media work on behalf of a tiny elite.

British readers won't just find this book interesting as a survey of foreign wickedness. Although the things reported here do seem worse in America, general conclusions and examples are just as applicable in the UK as they are there. British foreign policy is not quite as criminally vicious and stupid as America's, but then we are neither as powerful nor, it's to be hoped, as ignorant and xenophobic as Americans seem to be. But we have, in almost every case of murderous American interference in the affairs of another country presented here, been supportive, openly or otherwise, of American actions.

How much have you read in the papers of what goes on in Guatemala and El Salvador? Reporting the consequences of American foreign policy is as little to the liking of the British media as it seems to be to the American. In Indonesia, many thousands of communists were being massacred at the same time as many thousands of "anti-communists" were being massacred in Cambodia. One set of victims was worthy, the other unworthy, one set was paid a great deal of attention, the other almost ignored. This applied as much here as it did in America, and the British government has never been reluctant to sell arms to the regime responsible for the massacres in Indonesia.

Our involvement in what can only be described as the evil of Western foreign policy is smaller today than America's but that reflects our smaller size and power, not the willingness of our politicians to work on behalf of the military-industrial complex and Western capitalism.