Shouting Truth to Depraved Power (and Its Unwitting Accomplices): Stephen Lendman Sounds Off

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By Jason Miller (about the author) Page 4 of 7 page(s)

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Despite the 1930s New Deal age of enlightenment, things began changing after the war. It moved slowly at first with measures like the harsh anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 (passed over Harry Truman's veto) that began reversing the great labor benefits under the Wagner Act of the 30s (that to this day was the high water mark for organized labor rights). Today, worker rights have been crushed as the corporate threat to export jobs leaves many unions with little option but to surrender to management. The ones able to fight back and win at times are those representing the kinds of service jobs (mostly low-paying) that can't be offshored, like restaurant and hotel workers."

What are your thoughts on the mainstream media in the United States?

"It's no surprise the state of the dominant media in the country is appalling. Moneyed interests own or run it, and they control how it's used. It represents state and corporate interests, and no one is allowed air time on it or space in it if they are not of a single mind (with very little wiggle room allowed). I'm writing a long article on it called The Spirit of Tom Paine. In it I say things like the corporate-controlled media (including the corrupted NPR, PBS and BBC) function as a national thought-control police, but look why. In Britain from inception, the BBC had a stated policy of serving as a voice for its government and through the years it fulfilled it using all the technological advances that came along to do it even better.

The same is true here in the US where the dominant media is either corporate-owned (now by five goliaths plus cable giant Comcast serving my building with no other choice allowed--if it even mattered) or controlled including so-called public radio and TV (other than Pacifica Radio, the original and still credible public radio). They're heavily dependent on government and corporate funding to operate and thus are servile to the interests of both. It gets even worse with NPR and PBS that defraud the public, on the one hand, and regularly go to it asking for generous donations to help them keep us dumbed-down, in the dark, uninformed, well-distracted and believing the most outrageous government policies are only done in the public interest. No one should buy this baloney or ever support the NPR or PBS affiliates feeding it to us. Whenever they want your money, respond if you must with a strong show of contempt and rejection and a message to their management that one day we're coming to get you, and we intend reclaiming our public airwaves, there to serve our interests ill-served under their aegis.

Because they failed in their mandate to serve us, the result overall is the US public is the most uninformed and dumbed-down in the developed world and a good part of the rest of it as well. Voices opposing state policy or corporate interests are verboten beyond an occasional sound bite that slips through the cracks and never resonates. The same thing is true in the other dominant institutions that influence the public like academia, the clergy, and the think tank community, mostly right wing, with generous funding to spew their business-friendly agenda and government policies supporting it.

I can attest to the way it was in school when I was at Harvard in the 1950s. I recall only one outstanding professor on the left, and his field was biology. His name was George Wald, and he later won a Nobel Prize in his field. I took a required sophomore natural sciences course with him and to this day remember how he startled us in class one day when he said in 1953 "there is no such thing as a safe amount of radiation." He became a strong nuclear power opponent for any purpose as I've been for many years after learning this is a technology from hell that will end up sending us there if we don't end its use for military or commercial purposes.

I recall one other professor in the social sciences who went part way to the left but not nearly enough for me today. At the Wharton School, no explanation is needed about the philosophy espoused there. Only rarely were professors like Ed Herman allowed on the faculty, but even he felt he was only tolerated and decided finally to retire early because he'd had enough.

He fared much better than Scott Nearing, an extraordinary man most people never heard of but should make an effort to find out about. He lived an exemplary life of about 100 years until 1983 and taught at the Wharton School after graduating from it from 1906 till at the end of the 1915 June semester when he got a brief note from the Provost advising him his contract wouldn't be renewed. It was because he spoke out against the abuses of that time including child labor. Later in life in 1972, he wrote a magnificent political autobiography called The Making of a Radical, that I read, recommend and have on my shelves along with seven of his other important books. He wrote many and lectured constantly. You might call him a Noam Chomsky before the real one emerged. But unlike Chomsky's experience at MIT, Nearing's philosophy didn't go down well in the Wharton environs. And having lived in it for a time, it's easy to know why. He also ended up being unwelcome on any faculty, was a pacifist speaking out against war, and once said he felt like he was "living as an unwilling citizen in a warfare state." I share that view but chose to stay here just as Nearing did."

What do you think of the Bush administration's consistent refusal to engage in direct negotiations with nations it has designated as "enemies" or "evil"?

"The Bush administration, and others preceding it, usually refuse to negotiate with nations it vilifies using language like sponsors of state terrorism. It doesn't mean they are, just that we say they are with the corporate-controlled media picking up the line and echoing it. In the Reagan years we had "the evil empire" we only negotiated with reluctantly and even then never in good faith. Today we have an axis of evil that began with Iraq, Iran and North Korea and now is down to the latter two. Never reported is the fact that both these nations for at least the past 20 years or so tried and failed to normalize relations with the US, wanting to live in peace with us. It never happened because that state would run contrary to this country's agenda needing enemies to scare the public enough to go along with whatever outrageous schemes the administration in power wishes to pursue.

It's an old and dirty business that Nazi Hermann Goering explained in the Nuremberg dock (before he took his own life) when asked by a Tribunal psychologist how his regime convinced the German people to go along with all their abuses. He explained it's as easy in a democracy as in a dictatorship. He said "the people don't want war (but they) can always (be manipulated by telling) them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." It always works and shows how easily the public can be duped to believe almost anything fed to them if it's done effectively and repeated often enough.

In the age of George Bush, Iran and North Korea are still villains (plus Syria) along with Hezbollah in South Lebanon and the democratically elected Hamas government in the Palestinian Occupied Territories (OPT). They all share one common denominator making them enemies of the US Empire. They maintain their independence as Saddam did refusing to give it up to bow to the wishes of the ruling authority in Washington. As a result, their leaders remain in our cross hairs and are used to scare the public to go along with all the outrageous policies the Bush administration followed since the 9/11 attack. The only way this country will ever agree to negotiate with any of them, or any other less developed country we can't intimidate, is if they'll renounce their national sovereignty and agree to go along with US policies and interests - in other words, surrender unconditionally and betray the interests of their people."

What do you think of Noam Chomsky's 1990 assertion: "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."?

"I've used Chomsky's assertion and fully support the notion that "If the Nuremberg laws were applied (that convicted Nazi war criminals), then every post-war American president would have been hanged." But I'd go even further and say most every one of them pre-WW II should be as well because their actions were hardly any different than the post-war leaders."

Chomsky posited the notion of applying the Nuremberg laws to US Presidents prior to Bush II's rise to power. What (if any) war crimes do you believe Bush and members of his administration have committed?

"No US administration has been more egregious in its foreign and domestic policy initiatives than the Neocon-led one under George Bush. The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands was established in 2002 to prosecute individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide for those who committed these acts and aren't held to account for them in an existing national tribunal. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and many others in the current administration, past and present, are guilty of all these offenses as are those in the Congress who went along with them by their complicity or silence. They should all be made to answer for their crimes, and if found guilty in fair trials with competent counsel, be made to pay for them. My own view is an unqualified opposition to the death penalty for any crime. If fairly convicted, I want them to spend the rest of their lives in prison on hard labor."

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Jason Miller, Senior Editor and Founder of TPC, is a tenacious forty something vegan straight edge activist who lives in Kansas and who has a boundless passion for animal liberation and anti-capitalism. Addicted to reading and learning, he is mostly (more...)

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