REALITY CHECK: People, stop saying “What has the West become?” and “I’ve never seen anything like this,” because just because you didn’t see reality before doesn’t mean it didn’t exist before.

First, I want to say that I now have a little free time, so if I can motivate myself, I will write some posts on very important and unbelievable subjects. To start, I wanted to write this post as a basic reality check – a kind of mental palate cleanser.

In this post, I will use the work of one of my heroes, Michael Parenti, to show you that whatever is happening now is nothing new. As the title of this post says, I want people to stop saying things like “What has the West become?” or “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” That frustrates me, because the truth is that you simply didn’t see reality before – you were inside the bubble of Western propaganda. Just because you didn’t notice reality, doesn’t mean reality didn’t exist.

When I hear people say, “What have the Western media become? I’ve never seen such propaganda,” it doesn’t mean such propaganda hasn’t existed before. It’s just that you were inside the bubble of Western propaganda, shielded from reality. Nothing truly new is happening – except that, for the first time, you are seeing the reality that was previously hidden behind that bubble.

Let’s begin.

10:57

When they take your money—the money that you work for as a worker, the money as a taxpayer—when they cut that big chunk from your check, they are not taking your money, they are taking your life. That’s your life, your blood, your energy, your brains that you put in there. They are stealing from your life when they do that. And when they accumulate their millions, billions, and trillions, they then take your taxes to safeguard and support their investments in other countries. This allows them to steal your jobs and close down your factories here because you’ve worked, organized, and fought back, and you’ve gotten your wages up to five, six, or ten dollars an hour.

They can then close that factory and open it up in Korea and get a Korean farm girl into that factory, into that textile mill, and work her for 18 cents an hour, 12 hours a day, seven days a week. They are stealing it from you; they are stealing it from them. They are victimizing the people of both countries. That’s why we’re in El Salvador, and that’s why we’re in Nicaragua, and that’s why we’re in South Korea and everywhere else. It’s not to make the world safe for democracies; it’s to make the world safe for hypocrisy. If Ronald Reagan is against the Nicaraguans because they’re not democratic and he doesn’t like undemocratic regimes, then why doesn’t he invade Chile? Why doesn’t he invade South Africa? Instead, he’s been in bed with these countries. He gives them aid.

This is what we’re talking about now: that ruling class, which owns the land, the labor, the technology, the science, and the natural resources of our country. That ruling class never stands naked with its wealth and power. It cloaks that wealth, wraps the flag around it, and sets up a whole ethos. It talks about how this is the right or natural condition of things. In other words, it seeks to control not only the material environment but also the symbolic environment. And one of the ways it does that is through its control of the U.S. news media, the mass media.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you want to discuss whether the media is free and independent, let’s first discuss who they belong to, because “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” In my investigation of the mass media, I found that the media may be free and independent, but they are owned. They are owned by the giant corporations. They are themselves giant corporations. CBS Incorporated is a multinational conglomerate. Time Incorporated is a multinational conglomerate. It owns about 20 national and regional magazines and newspapers. It owns radio stations and TV stations. It owns timberland and paper mills. It owns recreational parks, publishing houses, furniture stores, and all sorts of things. The media are not merely friendly toward the corporate world; they are part of it. I mean, they are corporations.

The largest stockholder of NBC is Chase Manhattan Bank. The largest stockholder of CBS is Chase Manhattan Bank. The largest stockholder of ABC is Morgan Guaranty, and Chase Manhattan is the third largest stockholder of ABC. The other large stockholders are First National Citibank and Bank of America. Their representatives sit on the boards of directors of these major networks and decide all fiduciary policy. They pick the executive officers, who in turn pick the line officers, staff officers, and producers, who in turn pick the station managers and program managers. So, the mass media are part of corporate America.

Very much like rich and successful businessmen, they sit on the boards of directors of our universities, our foundations, our museums, our science establishments, and in many cases, our churches. It was a group of rich, conservative businessmen who decided that you could not hear me teach. Even though my department, the faculty senate on tenure and renewal, the council of deans, and the president and vice president of the university all voted unanimously to renew my contract, this rich board of trustees, this group of businessmen, by a vote of 15 to 4, said no, “We don’t want him.” The reason was their political prejudice and their class perspective. That class perspective is in the media also.

There are stories that just don’t appear in the media; they are continually suppressed. I’ll give you one, and I’ll make you agree with me and believe it’s true because you know it’s true: the story of the suppression, the brutal exploitation, the death squads, and the unspeakable and limitless corruption of the Marcos regime in the Philippines. Ladies and gentlemen, that story was suppressed for 20 years. You did not hear about it for 20 years. We oddballs on the left, us extremists, were saying that Marcos was a thug for 20 years. American leaders were kissing and hugging him and saying he was a protector of democracy. You saw the clipping on TV not long ago: George Bush hugging him and saying “a friend of democracy.” For 20 years, for six years, you had Ronald Reagan hugging and kissing Marcos. Then, when they finally decided that Marcos was a liability, when these dictators and thugs whose purpose is to keep their people in tow so that multinationals can go in there and exploit that labor and employ people at 80 cents or 56 cents an hour (which is the average wage in the Philippines) and turn their people into beggars and prostitutes (which happens to be one of the biggest industries in the Philippines—it is the world’s leading producer of child prostitutes, ahead of even Hong Kong), and in return, they collect handouts from the U.S. government and the multinationals and throw the country open to those corporations, saying, “Here it is, boys, cheap labor, no occupational safety to worry about, no environmental protections to worry about—this is the capitalist dream. Your profit margin will be five and ten times what it is in the U.S.”

And those corporations go there, and when they come to you and say, “We have to close down because we just don’t have the market,” and when General Motors comes to you and says, “We’re closing down our factories in Detroit,” the part they don’t tell you is that in the last dozen years, in the last 10 years, they’ve opened up a dozen new factories in other countries, in countries like the Philippines. That story doesn’t get into the U.S. media. That is consistently and deliberately suppressed until one day it becomes evident that Marcos is so corrupt, so rotten, and so inefficient that instead of being the purveyor of what they euphemistically call “stability,” he is himself becoming an object of instability. The hatred for him is developing, and the momentum against him is such that all classes are joining together in what is looking like a revolutionary development. So the boys in Washington sit there and they say, “We saw what happened with the Shah. We hugged and kissed the Shah for 25 years.”

I thought the Shah was great. Everything I used to read about the Shah was that he was the great modernizer of Iran. But I had Iranian graduate students at Cornell when I taught there; they hated him. They would sit and talk and snarl about the Shah. These were kids from well-to-do families, too, and they would tell you stories about how their brother disappeared when they got back to the Tehran airport. Just two police would come pick him up, and they never heard from him again. How her sister was raped and tortured and they found her, and she was like a basket case. They would tell you story after story about this guy, the Shah. I said, “I don’t think we’re getting the whole story about the Shah of Iran and what’s going on.” And then one day, as if something happened, a revolution came.

And so the boys in Washington say, “I think we’ve got ourselves another Shah. I think we’ve got ourselves another Somoza.” He is becoming such an object of instability and destabilization. He’s becoming so corrupt, so obviously repressive. He’s ripping off so much that the people are getting so angry at him that he’s losing any kind of base or appearance of power, and there may be a revolutionary upheaval. “We’ll be faced with a revolution in the Philippines,” and in fact, there is a revolution going on—the New People’s Army.

So what we’ve got to do is get rid of him and get a fresh face. We’ve got to get a Duarte in there. We’ve got to get somebody who’s going to give a cosmetic front and make a few little reforms and keep the class structure and the multinational corporate structure in place, because what we care about is not democracy. Elections or no elections, they’ll go for elections when it looks like it will legitimize their rule, or they will suppress elections, as in Chile under Allende, as in Guatemala under Árbenz, as in Iran under Mosaddegh when they overthrew him and put in the Shah, as in Brazil under Goulart when they brought in the generals, as in Argentina when they brought in the generals who then proceeded to kill 15,000 people. They will destroy elections, or they’ll go for elections if it looks like it gives the appearance of democracy, as in El Salvador where you had a choice of a fascist like D’Aubuisson or an apologist for the fascists like Duarte, with all parties to the left of them being outlawed.

So we go for an election, and that election was held a few months ago at the behest of the U.S. State Department and the CIA with the understanding that Aquino would probably win it and that you’d have this fresh transition. But something happened on the way to the polls, and that is Marcos did the same old thing. What happened is the U.S. media now reported it because that was now the policy of the multinationals, the policy of the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the DuPonts, and the Mellons. That was now the policy of Ronald Reagan, although he waffled back and forth because as a right-winger, his heart was with Ferdinand Marcos. And by the way, all through that election, right to last month, the right wing in America was supporting Marcos. I know, I was talking to them down in Miami. I was talking to the Christian Broadcasting Network. They loved Ferdinand Marcos and they said, “This Aquino woman, she’s probably a communist,” and so forth. And Reagan himself waffled. You remember after the election, it was so corrupt, he got up and said, “It was a fair election. There were irregularities on both sides. It’s a two-party system. Let’s keep them.” The boys got to him again and said, “Look, Ronnie, this guy’s a liability, an albatross. We’ve got to get rid of him. We had a whole election; it’s all been televised now, and it doesn’t look good at all.”

So then I see an astonishing thing. I’m sitting there and I’m watching the NBC evening news, and I hear the announcer with that authoritative, objective, neutral intonation, that all-knowing voice. They have a whole set of phrases they can say, and nobody can say for sure, which means, “I don’t know,” right? And they give you all these insightful things like, “Unless this bill gets through Congress soon, it may have an ill fate or meet an early demise,” or “If things continue this way, we may be facing a lot of turmoil.” I mean, really profound stuff, these truisms. “If the voter interest is as heavy as it seems, there’s going to be a big turnout.”

So NBC was saying, “This election in the Philippines has been marred by corruption and violence, as every election under President Marcos has been.” And I almost came off my chair. I said, “As every election has been? Then why haven’t we heard about all those other elections? Why was that never mentioned? Why was he portrayed in the media the way the U.S. government wanted him portrayed? The way his multinational corporate pals wanted him portrayed?” So I just demonstrated to you a story that has been suppressed. You can tell they’re liars. You can get proof of their lies when they’re finally forced to say the truth, and then you see them not only forced to say the truth, but say they knew the truth all along. That’s what NBC was saying. That last phrase was remarkable. They were saying, “We knew the truth all along that this guy was corrupt to the tune of six to ten billion dollars that he scooped out of the country and took out.” Isn’t it nice to know where your tax money is going—into shoes, 3,000 pairs of them?

When you talk to journalists, they fall into two groups. There are those who will say to you, “Yeah, we’re censored all the time. It’s a problem.” There are journalists who worry. They worry about their copy being cut, their copy being rewritten, and stories getting killed. When friends of mine were in Nicaragua, they met a number of American journalists who talked about their frustrations. They said, “Our stories don’t get run. They don’t get printed. If we say anything positive the government is doing—feeding the people, building health clinics—this stuff isn’t news. It doesn’t get into the U.S. press. You can’t say that about the Sandinistas.” They worry about getting passed over for promotions. They worry about getting reassigned.

When Raymond Bonner exposed what those great defenders of freedom in El Salvador were doing—the Salvadoran death squads, the Salvadoran army—when he gave that description, the El Mozote massacre, and went in and talked about the degree of slaughter and assassination, what did the New York Times do? How did they reward him? They pulled him off the story and stuck him on the financial pages. That has a cooling and chilling effect on the other reporters. After a while, they have to report what their editors want to hear, and reporters will tell you that people are very finely tuned as to how far they can go and what they can say and not say. If they cross that line, there’ll be a call from upstairs. In my book Inventing Reality, I have instance after instance where publishers call and say, “Don’t print that. Kill that story. I don’t want this.”

Generally, you don’t have to do that because what you usually do is you pick an editor who already agrees with you. If you have to keep censoring your editor day after day, you fire him. That’s not why you hired the man. You hired someone who would produce the kind of product you wanted. When Sulzberger took over the New York Times from his father, he brought in Abe Rosenthal as managing editor of the New York Times. I talked to a Times editor who said, “I can’t imagine,” and he said, “Look at this chart. It’s pretty much from the top down. Looks to me like the U.S. Army.” I said, “The publisher, managing editor, editors, the desk, journalists—looks like what you call your basic hierarchy command, your basic university, anything army.” And this editor said, “It doesn’t operate like that. On the chart, no self-respecting managing editor would have a publisher leaning over his neck telling him what to put on the front page of the paper. Abe Rosenthal would quit tomorrow if that happened. I would quit if I were being told.” But the point that he was conveniently missing is that Sulzberger doesn’t have to stand over Rosenthal’s shoulder. The reason he picked Rosenthal is because he knew that that was the kind of product he would turn out. When Rosenthal came in, he announced that the New York Times had gotten too far into “advocacy journalism” and that it was his purpose to bring it further to the right. He said “further to the center,” but Rosenthal’s center happens to be a neo-conservative center. He happens to be a right-winger himself. When that editor himself was transferred because of “advocacy journalism,” he didn’t quit, by the way, and I will mention his name.

There’s another set of journalists, however, who get very angry if you insinuate that they’re not their own person. “Are you saying to me that I’m not free to say what I want or write what I want? Is that what you’re trying to say to me? I’ll have you know that in 15 years of journalism, I have always said what I like.” And I answered, “You say what you like because they like what you say.” And should you ever move beyond that, should you ever feel the tug of the leash, then you’ll feel the tug of the leash. If your view and worldview are that of your newspaper, then you will not feel any kind of conflict. It will be quite “egocentonic” or “ideologically syntonic,” if you will.

The effect of a media which, in effect, propagates the business perspective or has a class perspective (even though it never labels it that) is to short-circuit the democratic process. It means that we can have tens and hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating over issues, and these issues are then downplayed. I have a whole section here on the way protest and dissent are reported in the media. Generally, it’s trivialized. Protesters are looked at as screwballs or people who are out there working on their suntans, with their cameras, or smoking pot, and they’re kind of out for a frolic. I have descriptions in the Washington Post and New York Times of how they describe marches—”U.S. out of Central America,” whatever else—trivialized, minimalized, marginalized.

Generally, the democratic process is short-circuited because there’s a whole host of opinions that people have which do not get registered, which normally would act upon our elected representatives and which would create the climate of opinion in which policy is made. But they often do not. One of the things I discovered in this research is that the media do not always control our opinion. While the bulk of the business-owned media in this country reflects the positions of the powers that be (and that includes the White House and the State Department), the bulk of the American people, by every measurement of opinion polls, are going a different direction.

The American people want more environmental protection; Ronald Reagan is moving toward less environmental protection, as is Congress. The American people want out of Central America by 75-80%—overwhelming majorities, three to one, four to one, want out of Central America. Ronald Reagan is getting us into Central America, and Congress is sitting there saying, “Well, we didn’t give him 100 million, but we have to give him something, don’t we?” Those Democratic senators and congressmen who so worry about being soft and wimpy on communism are nothing but wimps in relation to Ronald Reagan. They worry about being wimps; why don’t they stop acting like wimps? The American people do not want aid to El Salvador’s government, and they don’t see their interests there, and yet aid is going to El Salvador. The American people want a nuclear freeze that Reagan has opposed, a bilateral, mutually verifiable nuclear freeze, one which has been passed by the Supreme Soviet unanimously and one which was passed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—a nuclear freeze virtually identical to the one that was voted and passed by scores of townships here in Vermont and by nine states in the union and by hundreds of other townships throughout the country. But the U.S. government has resisted and opposed any nuclear freeze.

So on issue after issue, you find that ownership may translate into propaganda, but propaganda doesn’t seem to translate into indoctrination. Or if it does, it does not translate into support at the policy level. You might have Americans just generally feeling, “Well, the Sandinistas are some bad guys.” That’s all they’ve been hearing—they’re a bad group. But they still do not see what’s in their interest to have to spend their tax money and send their sons off to Central America to fight these Sandinistas.

What the media do is they don’t always influence what we think, but they do influence what we think about. They set the agenda. They create an “opinion visibility,” and in that sense, they short-circuit the democratic process, because what Congress responds to is not actual opinion; they respond to the opinion visibility. So, now one of those wimps will get up and have a word to say about the Sandinistas. Now one of them will get up—I shouldn’t say not one of them, in fact, there are a number of progressives in Congress who do take a different stance: the Black Caucus and a few others—but they’re a very small group. Most of them will not get up and say, “Maybe we shouldn’t attack the Nicaraguans, not only because it would be a loss of American lives, not only because it isn’t a workable policy, but also because it’s unjust and immoral. Maybe they’re doing some good things for their country. They’re building these health clinics, and they’ve got these land cooperatives going, and for the first time, the people can go to school and can see a doctor. For the first time, every Nicaraguan, whatever the shortages and hardships, every one of them gets a ration of beans and rice, and every kid in Nicaragua has food. For the first time in Nicaragua, despite the earthquake, despite Somoza’s plundering, despite civil war, despite foreign invasion and the Contra destruction, despite all that, Nicaragua today has the lowest infant mortality rate in Central America, lower even than Costa Rica’s.” Why don’t they get up and say that? They don’t say that because the media doesn’t say it, and they would sound odd and strange if they said it out of nowhere.

This gets you back to what Alvin Gouldner called the background assumptions. Often, the persuasiveness of any datum is determined not by the information that’s in it, or the logic of it, or the argument made, but by how congruent it is with the background assumptions that you’ve been fed, or that buttress, that make you define reality, that make you then see this data as something true or not true. And what the media do through that everyday ideological pounding is create a background assumption that short-circuits the democratic dialogue that we keep trying to create.

So, is anything that is happening now actually new? Is the propaganda in Western media anything new? As we can see from this fragment, there is nothing new in what’s happening now. This Western propaganda existed before – you simply hadn’t seen it.

Look at this fragment about the Nuclear Freeze movement and U.S. intervention in South America. Doesn’t it sound similar to people today talking about reducing military spending and stopping interventions in the Middle East? Back then, people wanted to stop intervention in South America, just as today people want to stop intervention in the Middle East. And just like back then, public opinion didn’t matter – it didn’t stop interventions in South America. Today, public opinion still doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t stop interventions in the Middle East. So, is anything happening now that is really new?

Back then, people wanted a Nuclear Freeze to stop wasting money on weapons, just as today people call for reducing military spending. And just like before, public opinion didn’t matter – it didn’t succeed in forcing a Nuclear Freeze. Today, people called for reducing military spending and even voted for Trump because he promised cuts. In the end, Trump increased military spending. So again, is anything happening now truly new?

Nothing has changed from the past. The West didn’t suddenly become something bad or evil – you simply began to see what was always there. The fact that you now see what I call our Western Capitalist Empire of Evil does not mean it didn’t exist before.

43:55

So when Ronald Reagan gets up and gives that kind of talk about Nicaragua, the Democrats will follow it by saying, “Well, we, of course, agree with the president, but we don’t think we should go that far and do it that way.” They’re not worried about Nicaragua; they’re not worried about the truth, and they’re not worried about the interests of the American people. They’re worried about the appearance of their respectability in this field of conservatism.

Now, I’ve had reporters say to me, “Look, Parenti, we can’t editorialize the news. You understand, we’re neutral. If the president says one thing, we put that down, and we say ‘the president says.’ And if someone else says something, we put that down, and we compare the two.” And I say to them, “Look, I don’t want you to inject your editorial opinions into the news. I just wrote a whole book about how you already do that—you don’t even realize it. That’s number one. Number two is, it’s not that I want you to editorialize, nor do I want you to pretend to neutrality. I want you not to be objective. I want you to be truthful.

“When the president of the United States gets up and he sets out a stream of words which at best are very one-sided interpretations and at worst are outright lies, and you just report that to the American people without the slightest hint that there might be an alternative perspective, then you’re nothing but a mouthpiece for power and wealth. And that’s not objectivity. What you’ve done is traded in your commitment to accuracy and truth for an appearance of neutrality.

“When the president in October 1984 gets up and he says, ‘I’m going to support Social Security,’ and you put in the headlines, ‘President Reagan in favor of Social Security,’ and you read this in the Washington Post on page one, and it’s written like a straight story, and you read it in the New York Times on page one, and you hear it announced by Dan Rather, and you sit there and you say, ‘What is this? Little Johnny Lollipop Wonderland?’ And you don’t mention the fact that for 20 years, this man has hated Social Security. He’s gone after it with claw and fang, and he equates it with welfare, which he detests and hates. And you don’t even mention that the day after the election, he’s already going after cost-of-living allowances and trying to squeeze it out and trim it down anyway, despite his pledges.

“When he gets up before the American people and he says, ‘The Sandinistas are guilty of torture,’ and you don’t mention that Amnesty International has gone into Nicaragua and gave them a clean bill of health and said that no prisoners are being tortured. When he says, ‘The Sandinistas are drug runners and they’re trying to smuggle drugs into our country,’ and his own Drug Enforcement Agency has come out and said, ‘No, we have no evidence of the Nicaraguan government, the Nicaraguan regime,’ as the media would always say it, ‘dealing with drugs. In fact, they have a very hard line against drugs.’

Again, let’s look at today, when Trump said he would not touch Social Security. Did the media point out that Trump had always hated welfare and thought of people as “welfare queens,” just as Ronald Reagan did when he popularized that term? And of course, just like Reagan, as soon as Trump came into power he began attacking Social Security and welfare. So again, is any of this new?

The same goes for the parallels between Nicaragua in the past and Venezuela today. Back then, the U.S. government claimed Nicaragua’s government was tied to gangs and drug trafficking. Today, the same accusations are made about Venezuela. And just like before, official statements from U.S. agencies denying these claims but that doesn’t matter – the media simply repeats Trump’s accusations against Venezuela. Why? Because truth does not matter. So again, I ask you: is anything happening now that is actually new?

55:58

A very common way is just the way things are framed or slanted. Let me give you one example. I have tons of them in my book, but I’ll just give you this one. In 1984, the New York Times ran a news analysis story headlined: “What’s Behind Castro’s Softer Tone?”

The headline right there, before you even get into the story, suggests that Castro is up to something. The opening sentence reads: “Once again, Fidel Castro is talking as if he wants to improve relations with the United States.” This makes the overtures an object of suspicion. What could this possibly be? “As if he wants to improve relations.” So what you do is you discredit the overture and you imply that it isn’t really happening.

In fact, the New York Times explains that Castro is interested in “taking advantage of American trade, technology, and tourism,” and that he would “prefer not to be spending so much time and energy on national defense.” That’s a remarkable thing. Fidel Castro, the aggressor, who is going to conquer Florida and Georgia and march his troops right up the Atlantic coast and right into Burlington—this Fidel Castro doesn’t want to spend that much on military defense. He’s saying, “I would like not to have aggressive, belligerent relations with you. I would like to have trade and tourism.” This is, of course, seen as illegitimate because the background assumption is of a negative, pernicious, diabolical communist. “What is this communist, where does he get off wanting trade and less military defense? Seriously, knock it off with this acting friendly stuff.”

It just seems to be a promising basis for improved relations. The guy says, “Look, let’s have improved relations.” You explore it. If he’s bluffing, you call it. And if he backs off, then you can say, “Look, he isn’t really serious; he doesn’t really want it.” Cuba’s own self-interest, Castro was saying, is something much stronger than love. Castro isn’t saying, “I love you, gringos, I love Ronald Reagan.” Policy is not based on love, but on something much stronger. Love, as you know, comes and goes, but self-interest is always there.

His self-interest is that he wants more trade. His self-interest is that he wants to be able to deal with the United States and buy from the United States. His self-interest is that he doesn’t want to have to go 16,000 miles around to Japan to buy school buses, which is where Cuba buys their school buses. He’d like to buy them 90 miles away from Florida, or from Detroit. His self-interest is that he’d rather buy medical supplies from the U.S. than have to buy them from Czechoslovakia or China, which is where he gets them. I know, I was in the hospital when I was in Cuba and there were Chinese bandages and Czech stuff and all that. That’s his self-interest.

So how did the Times deal with this threat of friendliness? The Times literally made nothing of Castro’s stated desire to ease tensions and instead presented the rest of the story from a U.S. government perspective. It noted that “most Reagan administration officials seem skeptical. The administration continues to believe that the best way to deal with the Cuban leader is with unyielding firmness. Administration officials see little advantage in wavering.”

The article doesn’t explain why they seem skeptical. What are the observable actualities that justify such skepticism? Nor does the article explain why a negative response to Castro is described as “unyielding firmness.” Why not call it unyielding rigidity, or hostile rigidity, or uncooperativeness, or lack of friendliness? Nor does it explain why a willingness to respond seriously to Castro’s overtures would be labeled as “wavering.” You see, “the administration officials see little advantage in wavering.” Wavering from what? What is diplomacy about? You explore overtures; you explore areas. So in the very vocabulary you have to deal with, you can see how the story is loaded. What the Times did is they left an impression of a power-hungry Castro who was up to no good, who was out to deceive the United States with his “softer tones.”

By the way, the same kind of framing goes on with the Soviet Union. The one thing Ronald Reagan will not take from Gorbachev is “yes” for an answer. Gorbachev says, “I will unilaterally call a moratorium on atmospheric testing. Will you follow me, Mr. Reagan?” And the Reagan administration says, “They stopped testing because they did all their testing early in the year, and we still have a few tests, so we’ve got to get ours done so we can’t listen to this.” Okay, then get yours done, and the day before their moratorium is up, you say, “Okay, we’ll be in with you. You don’t test anymore; we won’t test anymore.” Nothing from the White House.

Gorbachev turned around and said, “We are extending our unilateral moratorium on atmospheric testing for three more months.” And the White House explained to us, “Well, it’s wintertime. They don’t do much testing in the winter. Most of their testing is in March, and all that, so they don’t test in December, January, February.” And then in February, Gorbachev said, “We’re extending our ban another three months,” and the U.S. continued to test. All the U.S. has to do is say, “We won’t test,” but they say, “That’s not a serious offer. That’s not a serious overture.” What’s more serious than actually doing it? “There’s got to be action and not just words.” What’s more of an action than banning your own testing and saying, “Now you don’t test. As long as you don’t test, we won’t test”?

Now let’s look at the media’s treatment of Castro and Gorbachev, and compare it to the treatment of Putin today. Again, is any of this new? Putin has expressed interest in reducing nuclear arms and cutting military spending – just like China. And yet, this is presented in exactly the same way Cuba and the Soviet Union were treated: as some kind of sinister plot.

This is, of course, seen as illegitimate because the background assumption is of a negative, pernicious, diabolical communist. What is this communist doing, where does he get off wanting trade and less military defense? Seriously, knock it off with this acting-friendly stuff.

Doesn’t this sound exactly like the way we treat Putin or China today? So again I ask you: is anything happening now actually new?

5:44

Europe’s kings needed to increase taxes to pay their bankers, who lent them money to go to war with each other. The parliaments of Britain and other countries, however, opposed paying taxes, especially during the Crusades, when they resisted the kings of England imposing taxes to pay bankers to fight wars on behalf of Rome in its infighting with countries like Germany that didn’t accept Roman domination. So, in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, the bankers helped the kings organize trade monopolies. You don’t need parliamentary approval to make a trade monopoly, and that would yield money. As the recipient of these monopolies, the king could then pay the bankers.

“You don’t need parliamentary approval to create a trade monopoly.” Doesn’t that sound similar to today’s situation with Trump and tariffs? Trump could not get Congress (the American equivalent of a parliament) to approve new taxes, so he imposed tariffs – just as kings did in the past. In effect, Trump reduced taxes for wealthy oligarchs and corporations while introducing tariffs, which are a regressive tax that hurts the poor the most. At the same time, he claimed to care about the American working class.

That’s why I said they preferred Trump over Kamala Harris and the Democrats: Trump’s tax cuts for oligarchs and corporations had expiration dates, and they were about to end. No democratic government would have been able to extend those tax cuts. Trump didn’t become president against the wishes of the Deep State and the neocons – he was their candidate. They only needed to convince you that he wasn’t on their side. Do you really think American oligarchs wanted the Democrats to win, knowing that would mean the end of Trump’s corporate and oligarch tax cuts?

I’ll leave you with the ending of this lecture by Parenti.

1:03:32

One way is to support and seek out alternative media. This includes what is promoted by local political organizations and national alternative media, which is sometimes hard to locate because it doesn’t have millions of dollars to circulate, distribute, and publicize. Examples include publications like The Progressive, The Nation, In These Times, and Monthly Review.

A second thing we have to do is talk back and fight back against the existing mainstream media. You do this by writing letters and calling in and telling them they’re liars. They take notice of these calls. They may not put you on the air, but they hear them. They may not print your letter, but they read it. I write letters all the time, and I see it as a political act. In the last 10 years, I’ve gotten seven pieces published in the New York Times—two articles on the opinion page and five letters. In the last five years, I’ve gotten three things into the Washington Post. You have to keep pushing and holding them accountable on these things. So, you talk back and fight back.

The third thing is that we must keep organizing. There are alternative networks that, even with a complete media blackout and suppression, can still get things done. The peace and democratic forces in this society got a million people into New York in June of 1982 for the nuclear freeze rally. That was done through church newsletters, community newsletters, and labor newspapers. There is an alternative network.

As these democratic forces mobilize, they create a climate of opinion that sometimes breaks through and forces its way into the media. For example, the years of struggle around the issue of South Africa finally brought a breakthrough. For 30 years, the story of South Africa was suppressed. And by the way, the major story is still suppressed. It’s still being treated as a civil rights struggle. You’re told about the humiliation of pass laws and segregation and apartheid, meaning people being kept “separate and apart.” Brothers and sisters, that ain’t even half of it.

Apartheid has very little to do with pass laws and the indignity and humiliation of apartheid. It has to do with taking whole populations and bringing them out to starvation sites and watching your baby die. Apartheid is the brutal exploitation of Black labor in the mines. Apartheid is throwing people out of jail windows who raise their voices against this, and beating them to death and killing them. Apartheid is killing 15 to 20 people a day. Apartheid is 50% of all the Bantu and Black children in South Africa dying before the age of five from malnutrition. That’s what apartheid is about.

Apartheid is incredible profits for the multinational corporations and banks in South Africa. It’s profit off the labor, the sweat, and the blood of those people. That’s what the struggle is about. It’s not a civil rights issue. So even when the media finally does become aware of it, they dare not get into that class oppression and class struggle. But that fight did break through, and I can tell you, 30 years ago, I wrote a paper about this thing called apartheid when I was a graduate student at Brown University. Most people had never even heard of it at the time. All I heard then was, “It’s on its way out. It’s a harebrained scheme, and a gradual change will come, and it’ll all get better.” Well, 30 years later, all it did was get worse and worse until the democratic forces in South Africa moved with their massive boycotts, general strikes, and fightbacks.

The world’s opinion was shaken, and in the United States, Black leadership picked it up, along with whites and trade union leaders. I lived in Washington D.C., and we would go down in front of that embassy and march and get arrested. On the days that the unions came, our numbers would jump from three and four hundred from our peace and church groups to two and three thousand in front of that embassy. I’m talking about unions. I’m talking about “redneck” unions from Maryland—plumbers and guys like that—saying, “God damn, we don’t want that apartheid.” The maritime union came in with their jackets on. These are Americans, whites and blacks together, because they don’t want to compete with slave labor, and they don’t want to see labor enslaved anywhere. Because wherever labor is enslaved, it will also enslave you in some way; it will come at a cost to you and a danger to your interests. Also, they just don’t want to see other people suffering and dying.

That story does break through, and it finally gets into the media. So, you see, they’re not totally impermeable. They have to respond to the limits of actuality. It’s not a total manipulation. The limits of actuality are the limits of propaganda itself, as Joseph Goebbels discovered when he would announce victory after victory by the invincible German armies and yet had trouble explaining why the Germans were retreating on two fronts, east and west.

That actuality was encountered in the Vietnam War. We said this was a war for democracy, a war that all Americans ought to get behind. And it went on and on, and stories came back about villages being burned and children being executed, and Americans at home were tearing up the place, getting arrested, and putting themselves in front of buses. We began to wonder about the democratic process and the nature of this war. Other Americans began to see people doing this and saying, “What’s going on? If this is such a great war, why are hundreds of thousands of people here turning against it?” All the while, the media was just saying, “Well, we’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” or “Maybe we’re relying a little bit too much on military solutions, Senator. Do you think that might be it?” But the actuality was that the war went on, and eventually, the media itself began to take a critical tone as the country began to turn against that war. This opinion permeated into the major media, and they could feel freer and freer to talk about the negative aspects of that war.

One of the things the media has to do, besides lying and suppressing and framing and bending and muting reality for the few, is also to produce a mass product called the news for the many. And that’s a hard thing because while they’re owned by the few and are an instrument of the few, they also have to deal with the mass of people. So they have to constantly deal with what Gramsci called the double consciousness in people’s minds. The great Italian communist Antonio Gramsci talked about the dual consciousness. One is the consciousness we’re fed, the one we get in our schools and from our media—the propaganda that comes down to us: “Those other communists are horrible. This is going to happen, but get your mom. We need the guns. Defense will make us safe. More missiles will make us safer,” and all that sort of thing. That’s one consciousness. The second consciousness is the one we have from our own experience in everyday life, which tells us that something is out of sync, that this isn’t right. We ask certain questions: “Why am I being taxed so much? Why does it cost the Navy $511 for an electric bulb? Why must my son register for the draft? Why are they closing down this factory? Why do things cost so much? Why are we in Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua—name the country? Why are we there? Why do we need this? Why are there these dioxin dumps? Why do people over in that community all get sick and have these birth defects? Why do the companies dump and turn the river into an open sewer? What’s going on?”

These are questions that the media has to deal with, even if only to mute or deflect. But in the process of dealing with them, they often have to present information that becomes very embarrassing to the ruling elites, which is why the right wing is constantly attacking the media as suffering from a liberal bias. The ruling elites in this country do not realize what a great job the media does in protecting their interests. To protect their interests and to legitimize the status quo, the mass media must have a certain legitimacy and credibility among the public. To have a legitimacy and credibility among the public, they must deal to some degree with that reality, that second part of your dual consciousness. To deal with that, they must at times make actual concessions to that reality to make it believable.

So you have this in every institution that has some kind of relative autonomy from the ruling class. There is always this problem. The law is a ruling-class law, but to maintain its credibility, it’s got to give the pretense of treating the rich and poor alike or occasionally letting these guys win a case or keeping the jury system, which they’d like to junk because they could have all these reactionary judges make the decisions. Democratic forces have won victories. We do mobilize; we do set new standards that restrain them, and we do fight back. And that’s what we must continue to do—fight back, talk back, not just in the privacy of your own living room, but loudly. Shake the walls, ring the heavens, and bring democracy back to us. Let us learn not to be victimized by our cultures and our technology, but let us know that we are the makers of our own history. Thank you.

It’s not all lost. Just as back then the media had to modify its stance on Apartheid in South Africa or the Vietnam War to remain believable, today the media has had to adjust its coverage of what’s happening in Gaza for the same reason. And it was people – those who spoke out, those who spread the truth about the atrocities in Gaza – who forced that change. The media had no choice but to adapt in order to maintain credibility.

We need to keep fighting and continue supporting alternative media. That’s why I constantly write in support of The Duran, one of the few places where you can read truths like the ones I’ve shared in this post.

As the title of this post says, nothing has changed from the past – except that, thanks to the internet, you are seeing the truth for the first time. A truth that was always there, but hidden from you. If you think the West is “turning into the Communist Soviet Union” because of all this propaganda, it simply means you’ve been living inside a bubble of Western propaganda and are only now catching a glimpse of the real world – a world that existed long before, but was concealed from you.

There is nothing new in what is happening now. The only thing that is new is that, for the first time in your life, you are seeing the truth that was hidden behind all those lies. That’s why you had never heard of Michael Parenti or listened to this lecture before.

Thanks to everyone who stuck with me until the end of my post. And, as always… 

“Knowledge will make you be free.”

― Socrates

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“Knowledge isn’t free. You have to pay attention.”

― Richard P. Feynman

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“Freedom is not free, you need to pay attention.”

― Grzegorz Ochman

Please pay enough attention, or we will all be screwed. God bless you all.

“Power is always more secure when cooptive, covert, and manipulative than when nakedly brutish. The support elicited through the control of minds is more durable than the support extracted at the point of a bayonet. The essentially undemocratic nature of the mainstream media, like the other business-dominated institutions of society, must be hidden behind a neutralistic, voluntaristic, pluralistic facade.

“For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be nonexistent…. It is essential, therefore, that people who are manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions,” writes Herbert Schiller.”

― Michael Parenti

“The media have been tireless in their efforts to suppress the truth about the gangster state.”

― Michael Parenti

“The mass media are class media.”

― Michael Parenti