Inventing Reality

by Michael Parenti

  Doing the Third World

  Despite a vast diversity of cultures, languages, ethnicity, and geography, the nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, with some exceptions, show striking similarities in the economic and political realities they endure. Lumped together under the designation of the “Third World,” they are characterized by (1) concentrated ownership of land, labor, capital, natural resources, and technology in the hands of rich persons and giant multinational corporations; (2) suppressive military forces financed, trained, equipped, and assisted by the United States—their function being not to protect the populace from foreign invasion but to protect the small wealthy owning class and foreign investors from the populace; (3) the population, aside from a small middle class, endure impoverishment, high illiteracy rates, malnutrition, wretched housing, and nonexistent human services. Because of this widespread poverty, these nations have been mistakenly designated as “underdeveloped” and “poor” when in fact they are overexploited and the source of great wealth, their resources and cheap labor serving to enrich investors. Only their people remain poor.

  For the better part of a century now, successive administrations in the United States have talked about bringing democracy and economic advancement to the “less-developed” peoples of the Third World, when in fact, the overriding goal of US policy toward these countries has been to prevent alternate social orders from arising, ones that would use the economy for purposes of social development and for the needs of the populace, rather than for the capital accumulation process. The purpose of US policy has been not to defend democracy, in fact, democracies—as in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1965), and Chile (1973)— are regularly overthrown if they attempt to initiate serious economic reforms that tamper with the existing class structure. The US goal is to make the world safe for multinational corporate exploitation, to keep things as they are even while talking about the need for change and reform.1

  In all this, the US corporate-owned news media have been, intentionally or not, actively complicit. As one critic of the press observed, “It is a truism that in U.S. foreign reporting the State Department often makes the story”2—to which we might add: when not the State Department, then the CIA, the Pentagon, or the White House itself.

  THE VIETNAM APOLOGY

  The US press, especially television news, is credited with bringing the Vietnam War home to millions of Americans, thereby inciting their impassioned opposition. Certainly daily media exposure to the fact that the war existed served as a continual reminder of the seemingly endless and senseless nature of the conflict. But in fact most of the really damaging news about the cruelties and costs of the Vietnam War reached Americans through alternative popular channels such as campus teachins; student, church, and labor groups; peace organizations; the radical press; and the underground press. What the corporate-owned media left unreported was far more spectacular than what it reported.

  From 1945 to 1954 the United States spent several billion dollars supporting a ruthless French colonialism in Vietnam, but the American public was never informed of this. In the following decade Washington assumed full responsibility for the maintenance of the South Vietnamese right-wing dictatorship, but the public neither read nor heard a word of debate in the media about this major policy commitment. In 1965 the US government began a massive build-up of ground forces in Vietnam, but Americans were told that the troops were merely a small support force. The New York Times and other major news agencies knew the real nature of the escalation but felt it was in the “national interest” to keep this information from the public.3 Reporters who covered the Vietnam War were expected to “get on the team”—to share the military’s view of the war and its progress—and most of them did. The press, with few exceptions, censored the worst of the war, saying almost nothing about the massive saturation bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the “free-fire zones,” US-sponsored torture, the Phoenix death squad program, the massive destruction of Indochinese rural life, the indiscriminate killing of the civilian population, and the dumping of 12 million tons of Agent Orange and other toxic chemicals on the countryside—the effects of which are still being felt in Vietnam in the form of premature deaths, deformed births, and abnormally high cancer rates.

  On those relatively infrequent occasions when journalists reported some of the more unsavory aspects of the war, they encountered difficulties. The experience of Martha Gellhorn, a veteran war correspondent, is instructive. No newspaper in the United States would publish the articles she wrote documenting the death and destruction wreaked upon the Vietnamese peasantry.- Eventually the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran the two mildest ones. Gellhorn had to turn to the Manchester Guardian in Great Britain to get all five published. But she paid a price even for that. When she tried to return to Vietnam, the South Vietnamese government repeatedly turned down her requests for a visa.4

  When Nicholas Tomalin gave the Washington Post his graphic account of how US troops gunned down Vietnamese from helicopter gunships, that newspaper refused to run the story.5

  Philip Jones Griffiths concentrated on photographing what the war did to Vietnamese civilians but could not get his pictures published. “1 was told time after time that my photographs were too harrowing for the American market.” After he eventually published a book of his work, the US-supported South Vietnamese government prohibited him from returning to Saigon.6

  A former staff member of Time magazine recalls that during the sixties she witnessed how Time rewrote the news from Vietnam “because of weekly phone calls [President] Lyndon Johnson would make to Otto Fuerbringer urging him to call his own reporters in the field ‘liars.’ Some of the best reporters and writers Time had in those days quit over these distortions.”7

  The My Lai massacre of over one hundred unarmed Vietnamese women, children, and elderly men by US troops was not publicized until over a year after it happened—and then by a small independent news service.8 Belatedly picked up by the mainstream press after initially being turned down by Life, Look, and numerous newspapers, the My Lai story was treated as an isolated incident not representative of US conduct in the war. In fact, the systematic obliteration of villages, described as “pacification,” was a commonplace occurrence and a conscious US counterinsurgency goal.

  The murder of Vietnamese civilians on a much larger scale than My Lai was documented by two Newsweek correspondents in 1971. Newsweek refused to print their story for six months and would not release it for freelance submission to other publications. In 1972, the magazine finally ran a heavily cut version of the story. When the reporters asked to do a follow-up, they were turned down.9

  Critical reports on Vietnam were usually treated by editors and public officials as an unpatriotic attack on the US government and the war effort. As Time reporter John Shaw noted, “For years the press corps in Vietnam was undermined by the White House and the Pentagon. Many American editors ignored what their correspondents in Vietnam were telling them in favor of the Washington version.”10 Regardless of what the White House thought, most reporters actually were just as interested in having their country win the war as was the US military. What they questioned was not US policy but the measures taken to implement it, not the violent interventionism and all the suffering it inflicted but its effectiveness.

  One could argue that the news media’s job was not to judge or denounce the war but to report it. But the criticism here is that they failed to report it honestly. Only late in the war were some atrocities revealed on television: the execution of a Vietnamese resistance fighter by an American-trained South Vietnamese military officer, a naked Vietnamese girl running down a road in terror and pain after being napalmed. But the essence of the war, the magnitude of its death, destruction, and atrocity was never shown. In that sense the press—with its favorable treatment—did make a judgment about the war.

  Even among those whose job was to evaluate policy and express an opinion—the columnists, editorialists, and TV news commentators— t
here was almost no criticisms of the premises and claims behind US intervention. Few if any in the press questioned whether the US had a right to inflict such death and suffering upon another nation. Few if any questioned whether the professed goals: to “stop communism” and “Asian aggression,” and to “build democracy,” were not a cloak for other interests.

  Questions were confined to operational concerns: Will our efforts succeed? Are we overcommitted? Have we seen the light at the end of the tunnel? Are we relying too heavily on military means? Throughout this limited public discussion, the implication was that if the United States could have won, then the intervention and all its dreadful devastation would have been justified.

  All the major TV discussion programs were dominated by official supporters of the war such as Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and Henry Kissinger. Antiwar activists, including political leaders like George McGovern, were either completely absent or accorded scant exposure.11 A survey of the editorial stance of thirty-nine leading American newspapers found that, while several eventually became more critical of the US military escalation, not one newspaper advocated withdrawal from Vietnam, despite the strong antiwar sentiments expressed by millions of people in the United States and abroad.12

  STORIES THEY WOULD NOT TELL US

  In Vietnam racism became a patriotic virtue. All Vietnamese became “dinks, “slopes,” “slants,” or “gooks,” and the only good one was a dead one. So the Americans killed them when it was clear they were Vietcong... . And they killed them when it was clear they were not Vietcong. [On one mission the GIs opened fire on a farmer.] Soon he lay dying among the ripening rice in a corner of the paddy field, the back of his skull blown away. He was somehow conscious, making a whimpering sound and trying to squeeze his eyes more tightly shut. He never spoke and died with the fingers of his left hand clenching his testicles so tightly they could not be undone... .

  Some Americans mutilated bodies. One colonel wanted the hearts cut out of dead Vietcong to feed to his dog. Heads were cut off, arranged in rows, and a lighted cigarette pushed into each mouth. Ears were strung together like beads. Parts of Vietnamese bodies were kept as trophies; skulls were a favorite... . Some Americans photographed dead Vietnamese as if they were game trophies—a smiling Marine with his foot on the chest of the nearest corpse or holding a severed ear or two—or in the case of a dead Vietcong girl, without her pajama pants and with her legs raised stiffly in the air... .

  Killing Vietnamese became almost mundane, almost like a movie in which the Americans were the cowboys and the Vietnamese the Indians. [Ian Adams reports in a Canadian publication:] “Bachelor squeezes off a careful shot. The Marines around him cheer. ‘Holy Jesus! You see that? Just like the movies. The guy sagged, then just kinda slowly slid down holding on to the doorway.’ ” [One pilot], who flew a Cobra helicopter gunship, used to drop specially printed visiting cards over his target areas. The cards read: “Congratulations. You have been killed through courtesy of the 361st.” On the reverse side were various messages: “Call us for death and destruction night and day.” Or, “The lord giveth and the 20mm [cannon] taketh away. Killing is our business and business is good.” ... American [press] coverage was weak on the racist and brutalizing nature of the war and on the way Americans treated the Vietnamese.

  Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty (London: Quartet Books, 1975), pp. 355—356.

  If coverage was so slanted toward the official line, why do we credit the media with turning public opinion against intervention by “bringing the war into our living rooms”? Maybe the credit is not deserved. A study of TV coverage between 1968 and 1973 found less than a quarter of the stories of a 180-program sample concerned Vietnam, and only rarely did the stories include footage of combat. Pictures of the dead or wounded were featured in only about 2 percent of war-related reports. American battlefield dead were never shown; body counts appeared only as pictureless statistics.13 Likewise, a recent army study rejected the notion that negative press coverage was responsible for eroding public support for the war. The American people were alienated not by the news coverage but by the casualties.14

  After the war, the news media strove to put the best face on US involvement, describing it as either a well-intentioned venture gone awry or a foolish mistake. US intervention in Vietnam, declared Richard Stout in the New Republic, “was not wickedness; it was stupidity ... one of the greatest blunders of our history.”1S James Reston in the New York Times chided those who thought that “somehow the United States was responsible for the carnage in Southeast Asia.”16 Assisted by academics and officials, the national media rewrote the history of the war, asserting that the United States had selflessly intervened to try to install a Western-style democracy.17 Left out of this view was any thought that our leaders had waged a horrific war in support of a dictatorship and against a largely civilian population to prevent a popularly supported but noncapitalist alternative social order from gaining power.

  After the war, the news about Vietnam was all bad. The country was reportedly impoverished because of “economic failure” and not because of the massive destruction of capital resources inflicted by US forces. Little if anything appeared in the major media about the tens of thousands of Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange, the tens of thousands of Vietnamese amputees and others permanently crippled and disabled by US firepower, the 100,000 Vietnamese drug addicts hooked by the same suppliers who serviced the invading troops, and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese prostitutes, petty criminals, mentally disturbed persons, and other victims of the war. Or if attention was given to them, nothing was said about US responsibility in their creation. Nor did the American press give much attention to the educational, health, housing, and agrarian development programs of the revolutionary Vietnamese government. Relying on the establishment news media, one came away with the impression that the US defeat in Vietnam, rather than the murderous intervention, was the only thing Americans needed to regret.

  MURDER IN CHILE

  In 1970, when a socialist candidate, Salvador Allende, was elected president of Chile and began initiating reforms, that country suddenly became the hottest news story in Latin America. From the beginning the US press saw the democratically elected government as an ominous threat to democracy. ABC’s Howard K. Smith observed that the new “Marxist” government had “outright Communist internal policies.” Both the New York Times and the 'Washington Post pondered whether Chile’s “free institutions” could survive what the Times termed a “sharp turn to the left.” And a Los Angeles Times editorial discerned “totalitarian inclinations” in Chile.18

  In fact, for almost three years President Allende presided over a country whose citizens enjoyed a wide range of civil liberties, including freedom for all political organizations even ultra-rightist ones. Most of the television stations and some two-thirds of the country’s radio stations were controlled by the opposition, as were all the privately owned newspapers.19 The US media never mentioned these facts.

  The US press questioned the legitimacy of Allende’s mandate by repeatedly reminding its audience that he was a “minority president,” having won only a 37 percent plurality. The press never mentioned that a conservative predecessor, Jorge Alessandri, had also been a minority president, not an unusual occurrence in Chilean multiparty politics, nor for that matter in American politics. Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Richard M. Nixon had all been elected with less than a majority of the popular vote.

  What exactly was Allende doing to deserve such a bad press? He was moving toward an egalitarian socialized society, having begun by nationalizing the copper mines owned by US multinational corporations. And, under a statute passed in 1967 by a conservative Chilean Congress but left largely unimplemented, his government was taking unused land from big estates and distributing it to landless peasants. Through a variety of government programs, agricultural production showed a dramatic upsurge, the inflation rate dropped by half, constructio
n was up 9 percent and unemployment down to less than 5 percent, the lowest in a decade. Beef and bread consumption increased by 15 percent in the 1971—72 period. A government program sought to provide every Chilean child with a half-liter of milk daily. During Allende’s first year, the economy enjoyed an 8.5 percent growth in GNP, the second highest in Latin America. Generally, Allende pursued policies that threatened the prerogatives of the rich, cut into profits while increasing wages, and brought a modest redistribution of goods and services in favor of the poorer strata.20

  In response, the Chilean business class withheld investments, hoarded supplies and destroyed livestock. The United States eagerly assisted in this campaign to “make the economy scream” (President Nixon’s phrase) by cutting off food aid, denying Chile any new loans, and cutting exports to Chile by some 40 percent and imports from that country almost by half. Only the Chilean military flourished, being the recipient of a sumptuous $47 million in US aid.

  The US news media chose to ignore the fact that the Chilean economy was under assault from within and without and nevertheless had been performing more democratically than under previous administrations. Instead the press ran alarming reports of impending economic collapse.21 By 1973 acts of economic sabotage and political violence by rightists had become a daily occurrence.22

  The democratic government was overthrown in September 1973, in a violent coup led by right-wing generals who abolished the constitution, suppressed all political parties, closed all newspapers except two right-wing dailies, outlawed all independent trade unions, and arrested, tortured, and executed thousands of persons. Editorial opinion in the United States was remarkably mild, considering the press’s seemingly arduous concern for the survival of Chilean democracy during Allende’s tenure. The New York Times observed, “Dr. Allende and his Popular Unity Coalition dominated by socialist and Communist parties attempted to socialize Chile. The Government met stiff opposition from the upper and middle classes, and the armed forces, traditionally nonpolitical, finally sided with the regime’s opponents.”23