Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [45]
There were critics of the new business of manufacturing public opinion. John Dewey challenged those who now routinely disguised propaganda as news. “There is uneasiness and solicitude about what men hear and learn,” wrote Dewey, and the “paternalistic care for the source of men’s beliefs, once generated by war, carries over to the troubles of peace.” Dewey noted that the manipulation of information was visible in coverage of post-revolutionary Russia. The Nation agreed in 1919, arguing that “what has happened in regard to Russia is the most striking case in point as showing what may be accomplished by Government propaganda . . . Bartholomew nights that never take place, together with the wildest rumours of communism in women, and of murder and bloodshed, taken from obscure Scandinavian newspapers, are hastily relayed to the U.S., while everything favorable to the Soviets, every bit of constructive accomplishment, is suppressed.”
The Hun, the object of hatred and scorn during the war, was supplanted by the Bolshevik. Social manipulation through fear, which had consolidated the power of the elite during the war, was employed again and again to ferret out those attacked as “internal enemies” and ward off external ones. But it was corporate advertising, rather than government witch hunts, which would prove the most deadly. News had to do battle with huge, sophisticated and well-funded propaganda campaigns. It would also be denied the tools of emotional persuasion perfected by mass propaganda. News would be restricted to fact, to balance and objectivity. The powerful techniques of appealing to emotion, of creating pseudo-events that a public could confuse with reality, of constantly taking the pulse of the public through surveys and opinion polls to appear to give people what they desired, would be left in the hands of the enemies of truth. The public would be trained, as Bourne wrote, to communicate in a language in which “simple syllogisms are substituted for analysis, things are known by their labels, [and] our heart’s desire dictates what we shall see.”
The war launched the destruction of American cultures—for we once had distinct regional cultures—through mass communication. It would turn consumption into an inner compulsion and eradicate difference. Old values of thrift, regional identity that had its own iconography, aesthetic expression and history, diverse immigrant traditions, self-sufficiency, and a press that was decentralized to provide citizens with a voice in their communities, were destroyed by corporate culture. New desires and habits were implanted by corporate advertisers to replace the old. Individual frustrations and discontents could be solved, corporate culture assured the populace, through the wonders of consumerism and cultural homogenization. American culture, or cultures, were replaced with junk culture and junk politics. And now, standing on the cultural ash heap, we survey the ruin. The slogans of advertising and mass culture have became the common idiom, robbing citizens of the language to make sense of the destruction. Manufactured commodity culture became American culture. As newspapers consolidated into chains, local and independent voices were silenced. The shift in the press from hatred toward the Hun to hatred toward the Red was seamless. Initial propaganda tied communists to the German war machine. On June 15, 1919, the New York Times summed up a Senate investigation into communism in which one anticommunist witness after another assured senators that Lenin and Trotsky were German agents and Germany had underwritten the Soviet revolution. “Experts” testified that the new Soviet regime enthusiastically supported “free-love” clinics and were “anti-Christ.” One witness, Reverend