THE BOUNDS OF THINKABLE THOUGHT

...In short, there are no Danchevs here...

...The techniques have been honed to a high art, far beyond anything that Orwell dreamt of...

...It is necessary to control not only what people do, but also what they think...

...But such resistance, while sometimes effective in raising the costs of state violence, is of limited efficacy as long as it is not based on understanding of the forces at work and the reasons for their systematic behavior, and it tends to dissipate as quickly as it arises...

...Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism...

...The United States openly recognized throughout that a political settlement was unacceptable, for the simple reason that the "enemy" would win handily in a political competition...

...He was returned to his position last December...

...Israeli-sponsored polls reveal that the population of the territories under Israeli military occupation overwhelmingly oppose the "peace process," regarding it as detrimental to their interests...

...The "peace process," as was evident at the time of the Camp David Accords and should be transparent in retrospect, was designed in such a way as to remove the major Arab military force, Egypt, from the conflict, so that Israel would be free to intensify settlement and repression in the conquered territories and to attack its northern neighbor...

...More than sixty years ago, Walter Lippmann discussed the concept of "manufacture of consent," an art that is "capable of great refinements" and that may lead to a "revolution" in "the practice of democracy...

...what counts is what they do...

...To put it plainly, war crimes, including the crime of launching aggressive war, are wrong, even if they succeed in their "noble" aims...

...There is, of course, a possible position omitted from the fierce debate between the hawks and the doves which allegedly tore the country apart during these trying years—the position of the peace movement, which saw the war not merely as a "mistake," but as fundamentally wrong and immoral...

...Implicit in the coverage of the Danchev affair by Western media was a note of self-congratulation: It couldn't happen here...

...It is necessary to establish a framework for possible thought that is constrained by the principles of the state religion...

...In fact, as Gabriel Kolko notes, "From the turn of the century until this day [the public mind] was the object of a cultural and ideological industry that was as unrelenting as it was diverse: ranging from the school to the press to mass culture in its multitudinous dimensions...

...The significance of this symmetry is lost as we debate the accuracy of the government case, meanwhile continuing to labor under the mysterious collective amnesia that prevents us from seeing that there is little here that is new...

...These distinctions between totalitarian and democratic systems of thought control are only rough approximations...

...In the Soviet Union today, the penalties may be psychiatric torture, or exile, or prison, under harsh and grim conditions...

...is in my judgment the only serious danger confronting the company...

...Democracy permits the voice of the people to be heard, and it is the task of the intellectual to ensure that this voice endorses what far-sighted leaders know to be the right course...

...They are outside the spectrum of thinkable thought...

...Alsop will be right," and "we may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government" if the U.S...

...invasion of South Vietnam would be more appropriate, but is inconceivable within the mainstream...

...Danchev was taken off the air and sent to a psychiatric hospital...

...Lost in the debate is a more striking symmetry...

...In fact, even a totalitarian state must be concerned about popular attitudes and understanding...

...The critics question whether Nicaragua is really supporting the guerrillas in El Salvador or whether Nicaragua has already succumbed to totalitarianism...

...It is common now to deride any analogy between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S...

...He was predictably critical of the Vietnam war, in these terms: This is "an age when we get our power politics overextended into foreign disasters like Vietnam mainly through an excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence...

...In the West, all of this was understood as a glimpse into the world of Orwell's 1984...

...The hawks were those, like journalist Joseph Alsop, who felt that with a sufficient exercise of violence we could succeed in our aims...

...It is because of their notable contribution to thought control that the critics are tolerated, indeed honored— that is, those who play by the rules...

...Popular resistance to military aggression does serve as an impediment to the planners, as has been evident in the last few years with regard to Central America...

...In each country, a terrorist military force is massacring civilians, and in each country we support that force—the government of El Salvador and the con-tras...

...It is unimaginable that any American journalist would have publicly called upon the South Vietnamese to resist the American invasion...

...succeeds (contrary to his expectations) in a war policy that was turning Vietnam into "a land of ruin and wreck...

...The doves felt that the war was "a hopeless cause," we learn from Anthony Lake, who resigned from the Government in protest against the Cambodia invasion...

...The crucial point is that the pattern is pervasive, persistent, and overwhelmingly effective in establishing a framework of thinkable thought...

...the quite comparable U.S.Israeli stance, obviously racist in essence, is considered the soul of moderation...

...The debate pitted the hawks against the doves...

...The "pragmatic" opponents argued that the war could not be won at an acceptable cost, or that the goals were not clear, or that errors were made in execution...

...There is no protest here, or even mere reporting of the facts, when the U.S...

...In the early 1970s, this re-jectionist stance was so extreme as to block even Arab initiatives (by Egypt and Jordan) to attain a general peace settlement that entirely ignored Palestinian rights...

...We cannot plead fear of state violence, as followers of the party line can in a totalitarian state...

...The problem is easily solved...

...This aroused great admiration in the West...

...The New York Times commented accurately that this was a departure from the "official Soviet propaganda line," that Danchev had "revolted against the standards of doublethink and newspeak...

...In Paris, a prize was established for a "journalist who fights for the right to be informed...

...That is, the year in which the United States undertook direct aggression against South Vietnam was the year in which aggression was checked in Vietnam...

...invasion of Grenada, and indeed they differ radically in scale and character...

...Note that here it takes no courage to tell the truth, merely honesty...

...Or, to turn to another part of the world, consider what is universally called "the peace process" in the Middle East...

...One possibility is that the question has never arisen because no American journalist would ever mimic Danchev's courage, or Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...

...As always, the American posture is defensive, even as we invade a country half way around the world after having failed to destroy the political opposition by large-scale violence and terror...

...Since the international consensus shifted to adherence to a two-state settlement a decade ago, any such possibility has consistently been barred by the United States and Israel, which persist in rejecting any claim by the indigenous population to the rights that are accorded without question to the Jewish settlers who largely displaced them, including the right to national self-determination somewhere within their former home...

...The United States is again "standing tall," President Reagan proclaimed after 6,000 elite troops managed to overcome the resistance of a handful of Cubans and Grenadians, and the reaction here could not fail to awaken memories of popular response when other great powers won cheap victories not too many years ago...

...If this were the case, it would signify a stage of indoctrination well beyond any achieved under Soviet terror, well beyond anything Orwell imagined...

...For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination...

...Rather, there is an American defense of South Vietnam against terrorists supported from outside (namely, from Vietnam), a defense that was unwise, the doves maintain...

...The official historian of the Kennedy Administration, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., regarded as a leading "dove," does, indeed, refer to aggression in 1962...

...The conflict had to be restricted to the military dimension, where the United States could hope to reign supreme...

...rather, there is a Russian defense of Afghanistan against bandits operating from Pakistani sanctuaries and supported by the CIA and other warmongers...

...that is, we were combating aggression by the Vietnamese against us in Vietnam, just as we had combated aggression by the Mexicans against us in Mexico a century earlier...

...invasion of South Vietnam followed our support for the French in their attempt to reconquer their former colony, our disruption of the 1954 "peace process," and a terrorist war against the South Vietnamese population that had already left some 75,000 dead...

...In this case, too, it would be salutary to overcome our mysterious collective amnesia about the facts of recent history...

...What was remarkable about Danchev's radio broadcasts was not simply that he expressed opposition to the Soviet invasion and called for resistance to it, but that he called it an "invasion...

...In 1964 it began to plan a ground invasion of South Vietnam which took place in early 1965, accompanied by bombing of North Vietnam and intensified bombing of the South...

...On similar grounds, the German general staff was no doubt critical of Hitler after Stalingrad...

...Those who rule by violence tend to be "behaviorist" in their outlook...

...Surely of all the people in the region, they are among those who must be yearning the most for peace...

...But no journalist seems to have inquired into this strange paradox...

...Such a person would not have been sent to a psychiatric hospital, but he would surely not have retained his professional position and standing...

...it is better that they be presupposed...

...In Soviet theology, there is no such thing...

...This position does not enter the debate, even to be refuted...

...If even the harshest critics tacitly adopt these premises, then, the ordinary person may ask, who am I to disagree...

...The device of feigned dissent, incorporating the doctrines of the state religion and eliminating rational critical discussion, is one of the more subtle means, though more crude techniques are also widely used and are highly effective in protecting us from seeing what we observe, from knowledge and understanding of the world...

...The doves felt that this was unlikely, although, as Schlesinger explained, "We all pray that Mr...

...Danchev was admired for his courage, for a triumph of the human will, for his refusal to be cowed by totalitarian violence...

...The idea was also taken up with vigor in the social sciences: The leading political scientist Harold Lasswell wrote in 1933 that we must avoid "democratic dogmatisms," such as the belief that people are "the best judges of their own interests...

...In mainstream academic circles, it would have been difficult to find a more committed critic of the war than John King Fairbank of Harvard," the dean of American Asian scholars, who was considered so extreme as to be a "comsymp" or worse in McCarthyite terminology...

...American scholarship is particularly remarkable in this respect...

...In a typical U.S...

...There is no such event in history...

...In the following years, the United States resisted every attempt to arrive at a peaceful settlement...

...Orwell would have been impressed...

...To be admitted to the debate, they must accept without question the fundamental doctrine that the State is benevolent, governed by the loftiest intentions, adopting a defensive stance, not an actor in world affairs but only reacting—though sometimes unwisely—to the crimes of others...

...Within the mainstream, there is no one who can call an invasion by its proper name, or even perceive the fact that one has taken place...

...Aggression [was] checked in Vietnam...

...It is hardly a cause for wonder that the victims of the "peace process" overwhelmingly condemn and reject it...

...Those who do not appreciate these self-evident truths, or who maintain the curious view that they should be supported by some evidence, simply demonstrate thereby that they are emotional and irresponsible ideologues, or perhaps outright communists...

...This article is adapted from a speech he delivered last December at the Community Church of Boston...

...Consider, for instance, the current debate as to whether there is a "symmetry" between El Salvador and Nicaragua, each confronted with rebels supported from abroad who are attempting to overthrow the government...

...A courageous newscaster, Vladimir Danchev, denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in five successive radio broadcasts...

...There are no Danchevs here, except at the remote margins of political debate...

...Since the State lacks the capacity to ensure obedience by force, the threat to order must be excised at the source...

...We had done the same in Greece in the late 1940s, Stevenson went on to explain, intervening to protect Greece from "the aggressors" who had "gained control of most of the country," these "aggressors" being the Greeks who had led the anti-Nazi resistance and whom we succeeded in removing with an impressive display of massacre, torture, expulsion, and general violence, in favor of the Nazi collaborators of our choice...

...Three-quarters of the population may support a nuclear freeze, and some may even know that this is official Soviet policy as well, but that has no impact on the policy of massive government intervention to subsidize high-tech industry through a state-guaranteed market for armaments, since no serious alternative is available in the system of political economy...

...Analogous rejectionist attitudes on the part of Libya and the minority PLO Rejection Front are condemned here as racist and extremist...

...The more subtle methods of indoctrination just illustrated are considerably more significant than outright lying or suppression of unwanted facts, though the latter are also common enough...

...Government blocks a U.N...

...In the words of Douglas Pike, now head of the Indochina archives at Berkeley and much revered in mainstream journalism as one of a new breed of "non-ideological" scholars, the South Vietnamese enemy "maintained that its contest with the [U.S.-installed government and the] United States should be fought out at the political level and that the use of massed military might was in itself illegitimate" until forced by the U.S...

...to use counter-force to survive...

...This was shown dramatically by the Grenada invasion...

...could even perceive that an American invasion of the Afghan type is in fact an invasion or that a sane person might call on the victims to resist...

...At the same time, a frightened and insecure populace, trained to fear Soviet demons and Third World hordes, is susceptible to jingoist fanaticism...

...plans to escalate the terror, or when they were feared to be considering a peaceful settlement...

...Among his many books is "The Fateful Triangle...

...The Reagan Administration claims that in one case the rebels are "freedom fighters" and the government is an illegitimate tyranny, while in the other case the rebels are terrorists and the government is a still somewhat flawed democracy...

...The realities were observed, but not seen...

...A Soviet official was quoted as saying that "he was not punished, because a sick man cannot be punished...

...They must obey and this obedience is secured by force...

...These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of "brainwashing under freedom" to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments...

...The United States also extended the war to Laos, and then to Cambodia...

...The devastating bombing of northern Laos and other attacks were suppressed by the media—these are called "secret wars," meaning that the Government keeps them secret with the complicity of the press—but in the case of the American assault on South Vietnam, sufficient information was always available...

...Another respected figure in the liberal pantheon, Adlai Stevenson, intoned at the United Nations that in Vietnam we were combating "internal aggression," another phrase that Orwell would have admired...

...A kind of opposition to the Vietnam war did develop in the mainstream, of course, but it was overwhelmingly "pragmatic," as the critics characterized it, distinguishing themselves from the "emotional" or "irresponsible" opponents who objected to the war on principled grounds...

...What people may think is not terribly important...

...A comparison with the U.S...

...All agree that it was a "failed crusade," "noble" but "illusory" and undertaken with the "loftiest intentions," as Stanley Karnow puts it in his best-selling companion volume to the PBS television series on Vietnam, highly regarded for its critical candor...

...Fairbank gave the presidential address to the American Historical Society in December 1968, almost a year after the Tet offensive had converted most of the corporate elite and other top planning circles to dovedom...

...Iwill not proceed with further examples...

...It is because of their notable contribution to thought control that the critics are tolerated, indeed honored—that is, those who play by the rules All of this illustrates the genius of democratic systems of thought control, which differ markedly from totalitarian practice...

...Articulate American opinion lauds this stance, urging the Palestinians to accept the Labor Party program that denies them any national rights and regards them as having "no role to play" in any settlement, as Labor dove Abba Eban has said...

...Democratic systems are different...

...These need not be asserted...

...dependency such as El Salvador, the dissident is likely to be found in a ditch, decapitated after hideous torture...

...The idea was taken up with much enthusiasm in business circles—it is a main preoccupation of the public relations industry, whose leading figure, Edward Bernays, described "the engineering of consent" as the essence of democracy...

...A closer look at the debate that did develop over the Vietnam war provides some lessons about the mechanisms of indoctrination...

...Anyone who troubles to review the diplomatic record will quickly learn that there have been possibilities for peace with a modicum of justice for about fifteen years, blocked in every instance by U.S.-Israeli rejectionism...

...Air Force to attack rural South Vietnam, where more than 80 per cent of the population lived, as part of a program intended to drive several million people to concentration camps (called "strategic hamlets") where they would be surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards and "protected" from the guerrillas whom, we conceded, they were willingly supporting...

...1962 had not been a bad year," he writes in his history A Thousand Days...

...and when a sufficient number are dispatched, we can have elections in which people march toward democracy by rejecting the Nazi-like D'Aubuisson in favor of Duarte, who presided over one of the great mass murders of the modern period (the necessary prerequisite to democratic elections, which obviously cannot proceed while popular organizations still function...

...in fact, it was regularly overthrown and replaced when its leaders appeared to be insufficiently enthusiastic about U.S...

...We might, however, inquire further into just why this has never happened...

...The United States protested that it was invited in, but as the London Economist recognized in the case of Afghanistan (never in the case of Vietnam), "an invader is an invader unless invited in by a government with a claim to legitimacy," and outside the world of newspeak, the client regime established by the United States had no more legitimacy than the Afghan regime established by the Soviet Union...

...The analogy was, in fact, more apt than Stevenson—apparently a very ignorant man—was likely to have known...

...For the past twenty-two years, I have been searching for some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an American invasion of South Vietnam in 1962 (or ever), or an American attack against South Vietnam, or American aggression in Indochina—without success...

...No American newscaster has been sent to a psychiatric hospital for calling an American invasion "an invasion" or for calling on the victims to resist...

...This is obvious in the United States, where the poor tend not even to vote, and more significant forms of political participation—the design and formulation of political programs, candidate selection, the requisite material support, educational efforts, or propaganda—are the domain of privileged elites...

...The reason, as an AT&T vice-president put it in 1909, is that "the public mind...

...The critics reinforce this system by tacitly accepting these doctrines and confining their critique to tactical questions...

...Consider the following facts: In 1962, President Kennedy sent the U.S...

...peace initiative, stating that it will accept only negotiations "among the parties directly concerned with the Arab-Israeli dispute," crucially excluding the Palestinians, who are not one of these parties...

...Nor did the United States regard this government as having any legitimacy...

...The more intensely the debate rages between the hawks and doves, the more firmly and effectively the doctrines of the state religion are established...

...The penalties for disobedience vary depending on the characteristics of the state...

...It is not that the facts were unknown...

...The direct U.S...

...How has this remarkable subservience to the doctrinal system been achieved...

...Why should this be so...

...And in a democracy, it is the politically active segments of the population, the more educated and privileged, who are of prime concern...

...Examples are legion...

...It was this book that established Schlesinger as a "leading war opponent," in the words of Leslie Gelb...

...A similar article by the author, "1984: Orwell's and Ours," appears in a recent issue of The Thoreau Quarterly (Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota...