Inventing Reality

by Michael Parenti

  References may occasionally appear in the press about the great disparities of wealth and poverty in Third World nations, but US corporate imperialism is never treated as one of the causes of such poverty. Indeed, it seems the US press has never heard of US imperialism. Imperialism, the process by which the dominant interests of one country expropriate the land, labor, markets, capital, and natural resources of another, and neo-imperialism, the process of expropriation that occurs without direct colonization, are both unmentionables. Anyone who might try to introduce the subject would be quickly dismissed as “ideological.” Media people, like mainstream academics and others, might recognize that the US went through a brief imperialist period around the Spanish-American War. And they would probably acknowledge that there once existed ancient Roman imperialism and nineteenth-century British imperialism and certainly twentieth-century “Soviet imperialism.” But not many, if any, mainstream editors and commentators would consider the existence of US imperialism (or neo-imperialism), let alone entertain criticisms of it.

  Media commentators, like political leaders, treat corporate investment as a solution to Third World poverty and indebtedness rather than as a cause. What US corporations do in the Third World is a story largely untold. In tiny El Salvador alone, US Steel, Alcoa, Westinghouse, United Brands, Standard Fruit, Del Monte, Cargill, Procter & Gamble, Chase Manhattan, Bank of America, First National Bank, Texaco, and at least twenty-five other major companies reap big profits by paying Salvadoran workers subsistence wages to produce everything from aluminum products and baking powder to transformers, computers, and steel pipes— almost all for export markets and all done without minimum-wage laws, occupational safety, environmental controls, and other costly hindrances to capital accumulation. The profits reaped from the exploitation of a cheap and oppressed labor market in an impoverished country like El Salvador are much higher than would be procured in stateside industries. Of the hundreds of reports about El Salvador in the major broadcast and print media in recent years, few, if any, treat the basic facts about US economic imperialism. Nor does the press say much about El Salvador’s internal class structure, in which a small number of immensely rich families own all the best farmland and receive 50 percent of the nation’s income. Nor is much said about how US military aid is used to maintain this privileged class system.15

  What capitalism as a transnational system does to impoverish people throughout the world is simply not a fit subject for the US news media.16 Instead, poverty is treated as its own cause. We are asked to believe that Third World people are poor because that has long been their condition; they live in countries that are overpopulated, or there is something about their land, culture, or temperament that makes them unable to cope. Subsistence wages, forced displacement from homesteads, the plunder of natural resources, the lack of public education and public health programs, the suppression of independent labor unions and other democratic forces by US-supported police states, such things—if we were to believe the way they remain untreated in the media—have nothing much to do with poverty in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

  “MODERATE AUTHORITARIAN” REGIMES

  Nations like Guatemala, El Salvador, South Korea, South Africa, Indonesia, Chile, Turkey, Pakistan, Zaire, and Honduras are not just police-dominated states, they are client states of the United States; that is, their economies serve the needs of Western—especially American—capitalism, providing natural resources, cheap labor, and profitable investment in exchange for millions of dollars in aid that go to the client states’ wealthy ruling elites and military chieftains (often one and the same). As already noted, the everyday acts of repression, torture, and assassination perpetrated by these regimes with the aid and assistance of US counterinsurgency agencies are usually ignored by the major media.

  The scale and savagery of political repression is less a factor in commanding the media’s attention than the politics of victim and victimizer. If the left is suppressing the right, as with the treatment of dissidents in communist countries, then the American public is treated to protracted press coverage. But if the repression is by the right against the left, even if of much greater scope and ferocity, the news is suppressed or downplayed and given none of the detailed repetition and strong editorial commentary needed to create a climate of opinion on the issue.

  Thus the arrest of anti-government leaders and the death of several protestors in what was communist Poland in 1981 received saturation coverage for several weeks, as did the suppression of the Tiananmen Square student protestors in communist China in 1989. But the massive political repressions in Turkey in 1980-81, involving the incarceration of over 100,000 persons and the torture and execution of about 5,000, and the 1965 massacre in Indonesia, resulting in the slaughter of about half a million (some estimates are as high as a million) received but slight attention or went entirely unreported in the mainstream media, even though the last two incidents were of a magnitude many times greater than anything that happened in Poland or China.17

  Along with downplaying repression and atrocities, the press describes US client states as “friendly to US interests,” again with no precise explanation as to what that might mean. The press also regularly describes client-state leaders as purveyors of order and stability. Popular agitation is assumed to be an undesirable thing while the absence of such agitation, even if achieved with police repression, is taken as beneficial.

  Terms like “the country’s strongman,” “tough,” “severe,” “firm,” “no-nonsense,” and “clampdown” give a noncriminal disciplinary framing to the coups and massacres perpetrated by the Chilean, Indonesian, Argentinian, Uruguayan, Turkish, Bolivian, Greek, and Brazilian militaries, all of whom were supposedly obliged to take firm action against the prevailing chaos. Thus the 'Washington Post could describe the bloody repression in Turkey as “a military clampdown that rescued the country from the brink of civil war”; and the New York Times noted how Pinochet “took power” in Chile “amid social chaos.”18

  Often the “military clampdown” is portrayed as an evenhanded one, equally repressive of left and right extremists. Thus press stories about Guatemala long propagated the fiction of a besieged centrist government trying to end a “terrorist war that has been raging for years between leftist and rightist groups.”19 But reports by Amnesty International indicated that the “large-scale extrajudicial executions of noncombatant civilians,” numbering many thousands in Guatemala had been perpetrated by government troops, and paramilitary death squads.20

  By portraying the military autocrats as striking a course between the violent extremes of left and right, the press is able with one stroke to exonerate them from any complicity in the government-sponsored mass terror and transform them into a middle-of-the-road peaceable leadership that is potentially, if not actually, democratic. Thus, NBC News in 1980 described the government of El Salvador, which had been terrorizing and murdering peasants and workers for several decades, as “moderate.”21 The Christian Science Monitor exonerated the Salvadoran military government of any guilt: “The country’s buffeted junta, weathering almost daily disorders and vicious verbal attacks from both the left and the right, faces its most serious tempest to date.”22 The image is touching: the “buffeted” generals steering the ship of state through disorderly waters, enduring “vicious verbal attacks” from left and right, with nothing to help them through their travails except their troops, death squads, artillery, jet bombers, helicopter gunships, and the CIA, Pentagon, and US State Department.

  The New York Times repeated the State Department line that the “moderate” Salvadoran government was implementing “the most sweeping land reform—and fastest—ever carried out in Latin America”23 —so fast as to soon become indiscernible. Other junta activities received less media fanfare. By 1990 some 75,000 people, mostly noncombatants, had been killed by the military. Over one million refugees, or one out of every four Salvadorans, had abandoned their home regions or fled the country entirely, the milita
ry’s moderation having proven too much for them.24

  South Africa is another repressive regime that has been morally renovated by the US corporate news media. By 1990, the government of F. W. deKlerk was being portrayed as charting a courageous middle course between right-wing White supremacists and the Xhosa communists of the African National Congress (ANC). Thousands of people were killed in what the US press repeatedly called “bloody tribal battles,” “ethnic fighting,” and “black-on-black violence” between the “opposing clans” of the ANC Xhosa and the Inkatha Zulu.25 (The US media never label the bloodletting in places like Northern Ireland or Yugoslavia as “white-on-white violence.”) Government troops and police are described as “trying to stop blacks chanting war cries from slashing and stabbing each other.”26 Such reports elicit the racist image of African tribal warriors who are too primitive and violent to rule themselves.27

  Inkatha is an atavistic, counterrevolutionary South African organization set up in 1975 by Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi. The New York Times enthusiastically described Buthelezi as “a man of regal bearing” and “a leader with whom both president F. W. deKlerk and Nelson Mandela must reckon.”28 Buthelezi has been portrayed in the US media as an independent and popular nationalist leader who, while against apartheid, supports a moderate, democratic course, differing from the revolutionary one taken by Mandela’s ANC.29

  In fact, far from opposing apartheid, Buthelezi is himself a product and beneficiary of that system, having been appointed head of the KwaZulu bantustan, one of a number of racially segregated, puppet regime “homelands” set up by the apartheid regime. Democracy does not exist in KwaZulu. Chief Buthelezi tolerates no opposition parties and no dissent. While posing as a Black nationalist, he has secretly collaborated with the apartheid regime and the military, receiving large sums of money to carry out his attacks against the ANC. His Inkatha forces have been secretly trained by the South African Defense Force and are linked to terrorist groups like RENAMO in Mozambique.30 The US media have done less to probe the links between the government and Inkatha than the censored South African press.31

  Far from being nonviolent and moderate, Buthelezi has waged a war of terror and murder against ANC supporters, most of whom are unarmed.32 Buthelezi has been designated a “Zulu leader” by the US media, but surveys reveal that relatively few Zulus outside his Inkatha organization support him, the majority indentifying themselves as feeling closest to Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress.33 Relying solely on the US mainstream media, we would not likely be privy to this debunking information about yet another “moderate” leader who carries the banner of “democracy” on his lethal weapons.

  EVIL, POWER-HUNGRY LEFTISTS

  The accomplishments of revolutionary or populist governments in advancing the well-being of their peoples remain one of the more thoroughly suppressed stories in the US press. “You never read anything about the good that Allende was doing,” admitted one former attache to the US embassy in Chile.34 Earlier we noted how the press squelched news about the economic advances of the Allende government, the New Jewel in Grenada, and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and depicted them as oppressive regimes. The US press characterizes nations going through transformations that limit the prerogatives of private capital as taking the “totalitarian road.” Once designated as “leftists,” they are assumed to be up to no good and are accused of destroying individual freedom and democracy—in countries where no freedom and democracy had existed under the previous right-wing regimes.

  After almost a century of propaganda, designations like “Marxist,” “communist,” “leftist,” or “leftist guerrillas” create their own automatic negative framing. Thus, in regard to the invasion of Grenada in 1983, a New York Times editorial decided that the fear was “real” that Grenada could “infect the [Caribbean] region with militant leftism.”35 But the Times offered not a word about the actual programmatic content of Grenadian “militant leftism.” In such instances the media do not publicize the capitalist ideology as such, they just assume it.

  In actuality, the distinguishing characteristic of “Marxists” or “leftists” as opposed to “rightists” is a commitment to the kind of social and economic change that benefits the less favored mass of peasants and workers at the expense of the wealthy classes of the Third World and Western financial interests. The revolutionary and Marxist left is committed to using a country’s resources and labor for the purpose of eliminating poverty and illiteracy and serving the social needs of the populace rather than the profit needs of rich investors.

  From the US news media one learns that “leftists” and “communists” are not persons motivated by longings for justice, equality, and a decent life, but conspirators who “take advantage” of such longings. Discussing the struggles in Guatemala and El Salvador, Washington Post editor (and former CIA agent) Philip Geyelin referred to “communist exploitation of grievances,” and “the communist contribution to instability.”36 We learn that leftists try to “gain strength,” “create chaos,” “take advantage of turmoil,” “destabilize,” and “grab power,” subverting whole countries in the doing.37

  What moves them to such perilous undertakings? As the press would have it, Marxists and other leftist revolutionaries will risk and sacrifice their lives because of nothing more than a nihilistic pursuit of power. Supposedly they do not seek the power to end misery and hunger; they simply hunger miserably for power. If they initiate land reform, public health programs, and literacy programs, it is only to win popular support and further secure their power base. The media usually do not explain why right-wing leaders are above using popular programs to secure their power base. Such reforms would defeat the very purpose of their existence—which is to live well off the impoverished labor of others. So they rely instead on death squads, police terror, and slash-and-burn counterinsurgency.

  The leftists are so wanting in virtue that even their seemingly good acts can be dismissed as venally motivated. The press does not explain why—if revolutionaries are driven only by a hunger for power—they identify themselves with the oppressed and powerless rather than with the powerful oppressors. Why do talented and highly intelligent leftist leaders take such a dangerous and painfully circuitous road to power when they might more advantageously apply their energies to winning the rewards of high position and influence by serving the existing system in the manner of countless political climbers in both rich and poor countries?

  The media treat leftist revolutionary struggles in El Salvador, Angola, Guatemala, and other countries as dangerous conspiracies, not as the outgrowth of popular grievances and mass struggle. Revolutions are seen as being, by their very nature, disruptive, destabilizing, violent, and undemocratic—even when directed against oppressive tyrants, especially the “moderate authoritarian” tyrants who preside over US client states. However, revolution becomes a good thing, enthusiastically celebrated in the media, when it takes a rightward course, as when directed against communist governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. So a Washington Post TV critic could gush, after viewing the PBS 1991 series “Soviets”: “Every revolution is a mystical human upheaval.”38

  All communist or other left revolutionary governments, be it Cuba, Vietnam, Libya, or Nicaragua (under the Sandinistas), have made friendly overtures to the United States. But even when reporting such positive gestures, the US press perpetuates the stereotype of communists as sinister aggressors. In 1984 the Neiv York Times ran a “news analysis” headlined “WHAT’S BEHIND CASTRO’S SOFTER TONE.” The headline itself suggested that Castro was up to something. The opening sentence read, “Once again Fidel Castro is talking as if he wants to improve relations with the United States” (“as if,” not “actually”). Castro, explained the Times, was interested in “taking advantage” of American trade, technology, and tourism and would “prefer not to be spending so much time and energy on national defense.” Here seemed to be a promising basis for improved relations. Cuba’s own self-inte
rest, Castro was saying, rested on closer economic ties with Washington and cuts in Cuban defense spending and not, as the United States was saying, on military buildups and aggressive confrontations. Nevertheless, the Times analysis made nothing of Castro’s stated desire to ease tensions and instead presented the rest of the story from the US government’s 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.”39 The article did not explain what justified the “skeptical” stance, nor why a negative response to Castro should be described as “unyielding firmness” rather than, say, “unyielding rigidity”; nor did it say why a willingness to respond seriously to his overture must be labeled “wavering.” The Times left the impression that power-hungry Castro was out to get something from us but our leaders weren’t about to be taken in. There was no mention in the article of what the United States had to lose if it entered friendlier relations with Cuba.

  Another leftist defamed by US press propaganda was Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, a populist priest who sided with the poor against the rich, and who blamed the United States government and its corporate system for much of Haiti’s economic woes.40 In December 1990, shortly before Aristide won an overwhelming 70 percent vote to become Haiti’s first freely elected president, the New York Times ran an article headlined: “FRONT-RUNNING PRIEST A SHOCK TO HAITI.” The story admitted that Aristide was popular among Haiti’s poor (who compose the vast majority of the country). Who then in Haiti was “shocked” by Aristide’s candidacy?—the business community, the army, the church, and the landowners, the kind of people to whom the Times accords respectful attention? The story quotes a “downtown businessman” who alarmingly describes Aristide as “a cross between the Ayatollah and Fidel.”41