My Edward Herman biography project

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I also drafted a section on challenges and defenses to the propaganda model, which I will put in the criticisms chapter.

Best,

Wade

Challenges and defenses of the propaganda model

Ever since Manufacturing Consent was published, it has received a wide spectrum of response. Herman and Chomsky’s PM is a hypothesis of how the media operates, not how effective it is. In the conclusion of Manufacturing Consent, the authors wrote:


“The system is not all-powerful, however. Government and elite domination of the media have not succeeded in overcoming the Vietnam syndrome and public hostility to direct U.S. involvement in the destabilization and overthrow of foreign governments.”


NYT published a review of Manufacturing Consent by Cornell professor Walter LaFeber. LaFeber wrote that the impressive detailed work in Manufacture Consent was weakened by the tendency of the authors to “overstate” their cases, and LaFeber provided examples that he argued contradicted the PM, notably that activists had hampered the Reagan administration’s attempts to support the Nicaraguan Contras.

The year after Manufacturing Consent was published, Chomsky addressed critiques of the PM in his Necessary Illusions. Chomsky wrote that the PM held up well to tests of its validity, and noted that paired examples clearly identify the double-standards that the media uses for reporting similar events. Chomsky reiterated the dichotomous treatment of Polish and Central American priest and nun murders, in which the murder of one priest in an enemy regime received far more coverage than a hundred priests and nuns in client regimes.

Chomsky replied to LaFeber’s critique by noting that it was one of the few reactions to a PM that was not “invective.” Chomsky replied to LaFeber’s assertion that activist victories contradicted the PM with:


“Consider [LaFeber’s] first argument: the model is undermined by the fact that efforts to ‘mobilize bias’ sometimes fail. By the same logic, an account of how Pravda works to ‘mobilize bias’ would be undermined by the existence of dissidents. Plainly, the thesis that Pravda serves as an organ of state propaganda is not disconfirmed by the fact that there are many dissidents in the Soviet Union. Nor would the thesis be confirmed if every word printed by Pravda were accepted uncritically by the entire Soviet population. The thesis says nothing about the degree of success of the propaganda. LaFeber’s first argument is not relevant; it does not address the model we present.”


LaFeber’s second and third arguments against Manufacturing Consent fared similarly in Chomsky’s analysis, particularly an instance of reporting that LaFeber argued undermined the PM, when the Reagan administration lied when stating that Soviet MIGs had been delivered to the Nicaraguan government, coinciding with the Nicaraguan election. The MIG lie pushed the Nicaraguan election completely out of media attention. Chomsky replied that it was not an exception at all, but conformed to the PM. Chomsky’s response to LaFeber’s “exception” finished with: “That the media questioned what was openly conceded by the government to be false is not a very persuasive demonstration of their independence from power.” Herman replied that the MIG event “fits our propaganda model to perfection.”

Herman and Chomsky noted that LaFeber’s was one of the few critiques of Manufacturing Consent worth replying to, but it contained logical fallacies that invalidated his critique.

Chomsky wrote that the PM generated several kinds of predictions, of first, second, and third orders. Chomsky wrote that the first order prediction of the PM was that constructive bloodbaths will be welcomed, benign bloodbaths ignored, and nefarious bloodbaths will be:


“…passionately condemned, on the basis of a version of the facts that would merely elicit contempt if applies to a study of alleged abuses of the United States or friendly states. We presented a series of examples to show that these consequences are exactly what we discover.”



The second-order prediction is that within mainstream circles, studies such as Manufacturing Consent will be absent, which was true, and the third-order prediction was how the mainstream would receive the analysis in works such as Manufacturing Consent.

Chomsky and Herman’s third-order prediction was that exposure of the facts would elicit no reaction for constructive bloodbaths, “occasionally noted without interest in the case of benign bloodbaths; and it will lead to great indignation in the case of nefarious bloodbaths.” Chomsky’s reasons for the reactions were that for constructive bloodbaths the facts cannot be acknowledged, partly because it would expose the hypocrisy of the denunciations of nefarious bloodbaths, as well as the social role of the “specialized class” of privileged intellectuals, but that the exposure also “interferes with a valuable device for mobilizing the public in fear and hatred of a threatening enemy.” Chomsky wrote that for benign bloodbaths, as long as the United States’s role remained suppressed, then exposure of the facts produced little ideological damage.

As can be seen in the following examples, the greatest attacks against Herman and Chomsky conformed to the PM’s third-order prediction, when they exposed the media’s treatment of three nefarious genocides, in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I finally put up Ed’s bio draft, here. The next step is getting feedback from Ed’s pals, then making a Wikipedia-sized version of it, then doing battle with Wikipedia’s editors. I hope to have something at Wikipedia within a week. I kind of look forward to it, and kind of don’t. But for Ed, I happily will. More eulogies came in, such as here. Those who knew and worked with Ed stressed his kindness, humility, and generosity. Ed’s giant shoes are now empty, but we will carry on.

While working on Ed’s bio, plenty of ideas for posts came up. I’ll never run out of topics to write on.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

As I worked on Ed’s Wikipedia bio, I realized that the only way to do justice to Ed’s work, at least at Wikipedia, is going to be to either make new Wikipedia articles for some of his books or beef up articles that already exist. That is going to be a big job that I won’t finish this year. At this time, there are Wikipedia articles on:

Manufacturing Consent
The propaganda model
The Political Economy of Human Rights
Counter-Revolutionary violence
Lies of Our Times

Which may all be largely “notable” because of Noam’s involvement, but I think that I may be able to add articles on:

Corporate Control, Corporate Power
Hope and Folly
Demonstration Elections
The Politics of Genocide
Enduring Lies

I would like to be able to add articles for:

The Real Terror Network
Beyond Hypocrisy
The Global Media

But I might run into notability problems for those.

I understand that The Politics of Genocide and Enduring Lies are going to be tough going, and might get erased by the “editors,” but it is worth a try. I’ll go after the less controversial ones, first, but with Ed, that is relative.

I can tell what I am going to be plunking along on next year (and maybe even longer).

Last night, I already worked on the Counter-Revolutionary violence article.

Nobody changed it back yet. While Ed’s bio is truly atrocious, the other articles misrepresent Ed and Noam all the time, by clever omissions, sources that miss the point, etc. This is going to be a long haul.


Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Before I write the Wikipedia article on Noam and Ed’s Political Economy of Human Rights, I am reading both books cover-to-cover. For books that I have studied, I often made notes, which I then placed in those books. As I began reading those volumes, I found my notes from when I read them 20 years ago. I have written about their initial suppression before. So, this is very familiar territory for me, also because the themes of those books have been repeated by Ed and Noam ever since. This year is the 45^th anniversary of their work’s original suppression.

Speaking of anniversaries, this year I not only turn 60, but the raid happened 30 years ago on this coming Sunday, which began my life’s worst year (so far! ). How times flies, and how short life is.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

To my earlier post on global poverty, Oxfam released a report on the eve of Davos, and the numbers I saw confirms what I thought the situation was many years ago. That the world’s rich got almost all of the global wealth increase last year is no surprise, but Oxfam put a number on what would end extreme poverty on Earth: about $100 billion annually, or about 15% of what the top 1% of humanity raked in last year, or about 17% of the Pentagon budget. What is wrong with that picture? I am not sure, Krishna, on the relationship of high school education and extreme poverty. Those numbers, of 17% of the Pentagon budget, are about the same as I recall them 30 years or so ago. I was likely remembering the extreme poverty stats.

I am studying Noam and Ed’s The Political Economy of Human Rights before writing the Wikipedia article on it, and they made the case that corruption is an essential feature of American foreign policy, and that state terror was an integral part of producing a favorable investment climate. You have to beat the slaves into submission.

Of course, you will never find Noam and Ed’s positions fairly presented in the mainstream media. If they are mentioned at all, big lies are told about them. If not for my days with Dennis, I wonder how much of Noam and Ed’s message I could have digested.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I had another surprising overlap with Uncle Ed’s professional work. That mutual fund study that Ed co-wrote had enduring relevance. It was not only a U.S. Senator who threw darts at stock listings and outperformed most mutual funds. When I was in college, I recall reading about The Monkey Fund, in which some researchers had a chimpanzee throw darts at a stock listing, and The Monkey Fund also outperformed most mutual funds. Those dartboard exercises were inspired by the mutual fund study that Ed co-wrote. So, I knew of Ed’s work while in college, amazingly.

I am working long hours at work, and that won’t change soon. But working on Ed’s bio project is my top priority for my next published work (other than forum writings), then it will be off to my essay update. What I have been doing lately is making posts in the chapter discussions, as a way to “store” my thoughts on recent study when it comes time to update the big essay, which I greatly look forward to. After I get that done, this year, I hope, but it is already looking like a stretch, with everything else on my plate, I will do more visibility work, attempt to recruit some writers who I think can contribute, and related efforts. On one hand, it is nice to have such a hill to climb ahead of me, but it is also about the journey.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Some other odds and ends….

Reading Morris’s books took away from my bio project on Ed, and I am getting back at it. It was a happy detour, but back to work. Related to that, I am currently reading War, Peace, and Human Nature, seeing Ed refer to it and Noam write a blurb for it, and I suspected that it was a rather ideological effort, but so far, not too bad. Frans de Waal wrote the foreword, and the book covers very familiar territory. I’ll report on the book after I have read the whole thing, but it seems to be trying to resurrect the “peaceful savage” meme, and I doubt that the effort will be successful. Primitive warfare was very deadly, proportionally. In my studies of the warfare debates, not many have addressed the idea that warfare was borne of scarcity, and the relatively peaceful interludes in the human journey were the “golden ages” of the early days of exploiting a new energy source. That dynamic has been barely dealt with in war studies, with some nice exceptions. The reasons for warfare have always been primarily economic, going back to chimps. War, Peace, and Human Nature is taking on a very trite idea, arguably a straw man effort, of the “killer ape” meme. That idea is not taken seriously by scientists and scholars in the field, at least the ones worth reading. Maybe War, Peace, and Human Nature will set the record straight, but it did not need to be straightened, IMO, as de Waal’s and others’ ideas are pretty mainstream today. Goodall, Wrangham, and de Waal are the most prominent chimp researchers in the West, and they largely sing the same song, and de Waal and Wrangham have written extensively on the bonobo exception. In the Fifth Epoch, war ends.

Ed referred to War, Peace, and Human Nature in shredding Pinker’s imperial valentine, which I recently wrote about. Just as Ed noted when studying the media, Ed laid bare Pinker’s double standards when dealing with “our” and “their” violence. If it was “their” violence, Pinker’s work could stoop to the rumor level, but when it was “our” violence, Pinker dissected the sturdiest studies yet performed, trying to invalidate them, all the while trying to appear as an impartial scholar. Ed called that kind of behavior an exercise in chutzpah, which imperial hacks excel at. That Morris lauded Pinker’s work is telling. So did Bill Gates, who takes photo ops with mass murderers.

On Ed’s bio project, I am studying The Political Economy of Human Rights, and will write the first substantial Wikipedia article on it. What a harrowing read. I am finishing the “benign terror” section, and will start on the “constructive terror” section. Then it will be Volume II, on the Cambodia issue. I have written plenty on these subjects and books before, but it was 20 years ago, and I need to do a good job on the Wikipedia article, or the hacks will come running. They may come running anyway, but my work will be hard to attack. Then I will do a little sprucing up of various articles, such as the Propaganda Model article, Manufacturing Consent, and other odds and ends, before writings Ed’s Wikipedia article, which is an abomination today. After I do my big essay update, I plan to write Wikipedia articles for some of Ed’s other books. That phase won’t happen this year, but the next few months promise to be “fun.”

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

My Uncle Ed project marches on. I just put up a quotation page at Wikiquote. It is a start….

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have a little time to write this weekend, and want to cover a topic near and dear to me. Making that Wikiquote page for Uncle Ed is just a prelude to some substantial Ed work that I will do at the Wikis. My first effort was on the censorship of Ed and Noam’s first work together, and a lot more is coming. I am finishing my Ian Morris detour, and getting back to Ed and Noam, and I needed a break from it – it is harrowing stuff. While making Ed’s Wikiquote page, I looked at Noam’s. The quotes about him were largely about American hacks defending their imperial turf. Here is an example, from Daniel Flynn’s Intellectual Morons:


“Chomsky blasts the United States for having supported [post WWII] internal movements to liberate Eastern Europe from Soviet totalitarianism. "These operations included a 'secret army' under U.S.-Nazi auspices that sought to provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through the early 1950s." This U.S.-Nazi army is so "secret" that only Chomsky knows of it, and he has thus far kept the documentation of it to himself, lest his secret get out.”


Chomsky was referring to the well-known Operation Gladio, Christopher Simpson’s Blowback has a chapter on the “Guerillas for World War III,” the Gehlen Org was deeply involved in those events, and so on. Some secret that only Chomsky knows about.

Brad DeLong has long been one of Chomsky’s chief assailants, and he wrote:


“PUH-LEEAAZE! Chomsky did not write that Faurisson was a Nazi sympathizer whose right to free speech needed to be defended on Voltairean principles. Chomsky wrote that Faurisson seemed to be "a relatively apolitical liberal" who was being smeared by zionists who--for ideological reasons--did not like his "findings." Herman then repeats the lie by claiming that Faurisson's critics were "unable to provide any credible evidence of anti-Semitism or neo-Naziism." Feh!”


Of course, it is easy to see what Chomsky actually wrote and compare it to DeLong’s characterization of it. Chomsky wrote long on the issue, which, along with the Cambodia fabrications, was his biggest source of grief as a public intellectual. Ed wrote on DeLong’s smears of Noam.

It is really something to study for writing Ed’s biography and being struck by how clear Ed and Noam’s work is, to see how the hacks misrepresent it while attacking it. I almost wonder who put up those quotes, Chomsky’s supporters or attackers. If it was the attackers, what a statement, to publish such easily disproven, even libelous, attacks. If it was his defenders, they had to be showing how credible the attacks on Noam were.

Those attackers fail on the integrity or sentience issues, or both. As Orwell said, the biggest violators against clear thinking and common sense are usually “intellectuals.” It is really amazing how the most irrational writings often come from the “smart.”

The attacks on those great men strongly remind me of the attacks that I have seen on Dennis over the years, as his critics vie to tell the biggest lies about him, which easily dupe the credulous and, to be frank, the credulous lap it up because it aligns with what they want to believe.

As I look back at my life, carrying the spears for Dennis, Brian, Ed, and the like have been among my life’s greatest honors, greater than I could have imagined when I met Dennis. Those are some of the greatest humans to walk the Earth, and I was able to carry their spears, for a task that can help right humanity’s ship, and quickly. On one hand, it has been anything but an easy ride, but on the other, I don’t know of a higher calling. That damned voice knew what it was doing.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

This post will be about what a heavy lift my Uncle Ed bio project is. I will beef up that Wikiquote page before I write the article on Noam and Ed’s first books that were not censored. Then I will make changes to the Manufacturing Consent and propaganda model articles before I take on Ed’s bio. I have had my fair share of “fun” with Wikipedia’s “editors,” and look at this article on one of Wikipedia’s “editors,” who is also the most prolific editor of the hack bio on Ed. Once I read that article on him, his edits to that CRV article confirmed my suspicions. It was an artful bit of deception, quoting a publication far removed from the issue, to provide spin that made the censorship seem more reasonable. I am going to have my work cut out for me.

Dealing with the “editors” will be a heavy lift in itself, but the material is a heavy lift. I am currently rereading the “constructive bloodbath” chapter of The Washington Connection, and what grim subject matter. The genocide in East Timor was a “benign bloodbath,” while the simultaneous one in Cambodia was a nefarious one. Closely comparable genocides, which happened at the same time, were treated entirely differently by the media, depending on their political-economic utility. The slaughter in East Timor was perpetrated by an ally, using American weapons and diplomatic support, so when the slaughter reached genocidal levels (at a far higher proportion - the greatest since World War II - than happened in Cambodia), American media coverage actually fell to zero, while the media had a constant drumbeat on the Cambodian slaughter. Those kinds of behaviors inspired Ed to coin a new term to describe the performance: chutzpah.

The genocide as Suharto came to power was a “constructive bloodbath,” as it made for an attractive investment environment for American interests. The media literally treated that genocide in “constructive” terms, calling it a “gleam of light” and other approving terms. In their chapter on “constructive terror,” Noam and Ed showed that far from an unintended consequence, torturing dissidents to the neocolonial order was the essence of the endeavor. You can’t enslave entire nations without resistance, so torture was part of the array of strategies to keep the populace cowed. Torture and kill enough prominent dissidents, and the rest will fall into fear and apathy. Noam and Ed devoted sections of their constructive terror chapter to Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, and they also covered the trends in Latin America before Reagan was elected and the rise of butcher-dictatorships in places such as El Salvador and Guatemala, which they covered in Manufacturing Consent.

I want to cover the Philippines in particular. It was one of the USA’s first colonies, the USA’s actions there inspired Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, and the Marcos regime was notable. Noam and Ed wrote about Trinidad Herrera, a community leader of a slum in Manila who openly defied Marcos’s martial law. She was seized and tortured, including electrodes to her nipples, which was one of their specialties (genital torture was also one of their neat tricks). Her seizure and torture was so high-profile that even the USA had to say something (when goaded into it by global outcry), so she was released (but unable to speak for days). Marcos’s torture victims living to speak out about their treatment was a PR problem, so Marcos’s goons then just began disappearing people. When people are “disappeared,” they don’t get to tell about their treatment. Noam and Ed discussed a similar situation in Thailand, where the authorities disappeared people (protesting students were one of the Thai government’s favorite targets) by incinerating them (while still alive), to remove the evidence. They were writing about the exact situation that Ralph McGehee encountered in Thailand, as he crafted a “gentler” strategy to keep the communists at bay. Ralph did not publish his book until several years after Noam and Ed’s books were published, he contributed an article to Lies of Our Times (LOOT), and it was an ad in LOOT where I discovered Ralph’s book.

A close friend has visited the Philippines a few times and has friends there. He asked one of them what the best times were in the Philippines, and the reply was during the Marcos era. The rationale was that under Marcos, the Philippines made the global news regularly. It was the Philippines’s day in the sun. My friend was stunned by that reply. Today, the Philippines has a leader as colorful as Marcos was. In the 1980s, before I met Dennis, I recall reading about children assassins in the shanty towns of Latin America, who would murder somebody for as little as $5. My friend told me that in the Philippines today, under the “drug war” and other initiatives by the Philippines’s president, hit men working for the government are paid $50 a pop. Maybe that is inflation at work, but also those are grown men who have to feed their families.

As I stated, this is going to be a very heavy lift, to finish Ed’s bio project, not the least of which is the subject matter.

Time to start my busy week.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I plan to slow down on my normal posting while I work on my Ed bio project. Something has to give. My study of Noam and Ed’s Political Economy of Human Rights is for writing this article. My chapter on it in Ed’s bio will also get an overhaul. After that, I will take on Ed’s bio at Wikipedia (after making some changes to other articles), and will likely have to battle the hacks. We’ll see how it goes.

There is a series of concepts in Political Economy of Human Rights worth a post or two. In Latin America, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and elsewhere, the USA installed and propped up murderous regimes that tortured and slaughtered their domestic populations. Noam and Ed described those “leaders” as “denationalized,” in that they had no allegiance to their citizenry, but were completely beholden to foreign interests, primarily American, who funded, armed, and diplomatically supported them. Noam and Ed compared them to Nazi Germany and other fascist states, with one important exception: Hitler at least had allegiance to his “volk,” however extreme his views and genocidal he was to “inferiors” (communists, Jews, Gypsies, Slavs), and he could hold Nuremberg rallies, with his mindless adherents gathering in huge crowds. The dictatorships that the USA installed had no such allegiance to their “volk,” but saw them as the enemy. Those regimes were purely comprised of military elites and a tiny urban elite who were usually landholders that milked the peasants, and their allegiance was to each other and their foreign sponsor. The 80-90% of the rest of the population was regarded as the enemy, and it can mess you up just to hear about their evil activities. Noam and Ed called them “subfascist,” as they did not have the popular support that fascist regimes enjoyed. Noam and Ed ended one section on such activities with this observation on the USA’s popular image in the West:


“It is the ultimate Orwellism that this same superpower is thought in the West to be fighting a noble battle for ‘human rights.’”


Ed and Noam cited Orwell plenty in their work, as Orwell was a prophet.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am finishing my reread of The Washington Connection, and then it will be the second volume. From Ed and Noam’s first political writings onward, they always stood on the highest ethical ground, of taking the polity that they were members of to task for its behavior, and it quickly became a two-pronged approach. In Ed’s first political work (written before Noam’s first), the focus was on American government’s foreign policy in Vietnam, which it had invaded, and Ed noted that its rhetoric was Orwellian from the beginning. In their first (censored) book together, they acknowledged the propaganda role of the press, and in their first books that weren’t censored, they were explicit on the media’s role, and the outlines of their propaganda model are clearly seen.

Their theme from the beginning was the accountability of the American government and their sponsoring interests, and the media’s enabling role. The Washington Connection is a harrowing account of American imperial efforts around the world. Their After the Cataclysm is about reconstructing the imperial ideology that got a dent in it during the Vietnam War era. They repeatedly emphasized that their emphasis was on the behavior of their nation, as it interfered in other nations, from CIA interventions to outright invasions.

There is no way that an honest and sane person could read those books and conclude that Noam and Ed were flacking for the Khmer Rouge. You would have to be an idiot, insane, or a knowing imperial hack to write that Noam and Ed were doing that. It was all about our crimes, no somebody else’s. That is what high ethical ground means. But ever since they managed to publish those books without being censored, the drumbeat lasts to this day of how Noam and Ed were Khmer Rouge apologists. If you ever want to understand the depths of evil and insanity that motivates imperial apologists, digest the literature that accuses Noam and Ed of being Khmer Rouge apologists.

Virtually without exception, the attacks on Chomsky either avoid the entire thrust of his work, or lie about it. Ed was relatively unscathed, because Noam was the most prominent member of that partnership.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

As I read Ed and Noam’s early work in The Washington Connection, in parts of it, they throw in a little ironic humor on nearly every page. I think that it must have helped them deal with such dark material, and I think that I can usually tell what was Noam’s and what was Ed’s. In later years, their work was more refined, with fewer ironic asides, and just better writing. Ed often went straight for the humor, such as in his Doublespeak Dictionary (his Great Society Dictionary was a precursor). Ed was a better writer than Noam, IMO, but that is quibbling. They are two of the greatest scholars of conscience that the USA has yet produced.

As they finished The Washington Connection, they presented a prelude to After the Cataclysm, as American writers began spinning the wars in Southeast Asia as a noble cause gone wrong, full of “tragic errors,” not something that was criminal from the outset.

One day, I may have to write more on Noam, Ed, and the JFK hit. I rarely found scholars whom I entirely agreed with on the matter, but there have been some, such as Mike Parenti’s take on it and Peter Dale Scott’s work, although neither one of them dealt with Gary’s testimony. A writer who I think is pretty good on the JFK hit failed rather badly, IMO, in this critique of Noam and the JFK hit. Noam and the JFK hit is quite a subject. Ed gave Gary’s story some thought, and a LOOT issue’s cover story was on the media establishment’s attack on Oliver Stone’s JFK before it was even released. Ed had some good JFK-related terms in his Doublespeak Dictionary.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I finished Noam and Ed’s The Washington Connection last night, and I am off to reread their second volume, After the Cataclysm. Then I will be writing the Wikipedia article, updating my bio on Ed on my site, and then tackling Ed’s bio at Wikipedia. I have more plans for my Ed bio project, but once I get those little projects done, then it will be on to the long-overdue update of my big essay. It may be the most significant revision that I will ever make or, at least, the most significant that I will make in the decade after I first published it. Again, no changes to the essay’s basic thrust, but I will be putting more meat on the bones, to help my readers attain the comprehensive perspective that is needed for my plan to work.

I am going to provide an example of the problems that I will likely encounter when I rewrite Ed’s Wikipedia bio. Ed’s first collaboration with Noam was subjected to one of history’s most spectacular instances of censorship.

One facet of my reread of The Washington Connection was realizing how right Noam and Ed were in their writings about communism, especially in Southeast Asia and Vietnam in particular. What Ralph McGehee was finding out the hard way in Southeast Asia, Noam and Ed had discovered through their scholarly work. During my studies, especially my studies since 2007, as I prepared to write my big essay, it became obvious that no life form likes being coerced, and that applies in spades to humans. Nobody wanted to become somebody’s slave, and in Fourth Epoch societies, the idea of slavery is evil, whereas slavery was a hallowed institution for the entire Third Epoch, only ending when the Fourth Epoch began, and slavery no longer made economic sense.

The Han Chinese are to China what white people are to North America, Australia, and elsewhere: invaders who displaced the natives and form the dominant population today. China’s history is a rich one, and during my studies, it became clear that places such as Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia had long resisted China’s domination. Korea, like Tibet, Japan, and Vietnam, had long resisted being incorporated into China, and Korea was known as the Hermit Kingdom. The International Communist Conspiracy is one of the wildest and most untenable conspiracy theories of all time, but it was an official theory of the American government’s for generations, which Ralph discovered was an elaborate lie, used to justify imperial behavior. To the colonized peoples of Earth, communism had great appeal, but what they really wanted was simply freedom from white people’s domination. Their crime was wanting to be free, and the USA has murdered millions ever since World War II, when the international colonial order began unravelling, especially as the UK and France were so weakened by World War II, as the USA became the new imperial overlords.

In Vietnam, communism was part of the revolutionary ideology to throw off the imperial shackles, and throughout the colonized world, it was really about the rise of nationalism, not the capitalist versus communist false dichotomy that the USA sold to its population. The benefits of industrialization were obvious to all colonial nations, and the first thing that they all did after winning at least formal ending of colonial status was attempting to industrialize (but you need cheap energy to do that, which they usually did not have access to). The Soviet Union sold itself to former-colonial nations as a friend who could help them rapidly industrialize, and their motto was industrializing within a generation. But while Vietnam pursued communist ideology and methods, the last thing that they wanted was Soviet or Chinese domination, and the USA’s Big Lie of the Cold War was that those colonized peoples yearning for freedom were Soviet or Chinese pawns. JFK well understood what the colonized peoples wanted and took a very different path, quite different from all presidents that preceded or succeeded him, which was partly due to his Irish roots, as they were among the first peoples to feel the English boot across their necks. JFK was a decidedly reluctant imperialist, which had a lot to do with his murder. All subsequent American presidents have been puppets and know it, although Trump may just be waking up to that fact.

For the peasants of Vietnam, communism had great appeal, and the USA knew full well that if the free election called for, when the French reconquest effort failed, would have been held, that Ho Chi Minh would have won 80% of the vote. So, the USA prevented such an election and continually escalated its tactics of thwarting the Vietnamese desire for freedom, leading to one of history’s most evil deeds, and we even outperformed the Nazis at times. Although Noam will disagree, maybe even violently, JFK was planning to withdraw the American military from Vietnam, and as with Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK’s stance on Vietnam may have been the last straw for those who had him murdered.

So, Vietnamese communism had great appeal to its peasantry. The peasants formed the communist “base” in Vietnam, and the last thing that the communists were going to do was alienate the peasants through violence. They didn’t need to. Perhaps the biggest of the Big Lies that the USA told about the communists of Southeast Asia was that they terrorized and coerced the peasantry. The opposite was true, as Ralph learned in Thailand. One the other hand, the regimes that the USA installed and propped up in Vietnam and throughout the colonized lands were murderous dictatorships with no allegiance to their populations. Ed and Noam called those “leaders” “denationalized,” and their allegiance was to each other and their American backers. There was no way that any of the USA’s puppets could ever win free elections in their countries, and the USA specialized in what Ed termed “Demonstration Elections,” which were free in name only, and were basically PR stunts designed to delude the American people.

The American slaughters of Vietnamese peasants, who comprised 80% of Vietnam’s population, a typical proportion in agrarian societies, reached into the millions. The My Lai massacre was only unusual in that it got publicity in the USA, and in its wake, the USA’s propaganda machine went into overdrive, trying to downplay My Lai as an anomaly, when it was really just a day at the office for the American genocidists. The media not only tried to portray the My Lai slaughter as an anomaly, but they played up Nixon’s “preventing a communist bloodbath” Big Lie for the USA’s presence in Southeast Asia, which brings me to a Wikipedia article which shows what a chore I will have on my hands with Ed’s bio. The article is on the so-called “communist massacre” at Huế, which Ed and Noam called a “mythical bloodbath” in The Washington Connection, which built on their earlier writings on the subject.

The main thrust of the Wikipedia article on the subject is pure propaganda. It is true that during the American bombardment of Huế, which was perhaps the most vicious and destructive of all of the USA’s attacks on Vietnam, and that is saying something, communist battle leaders did execute prisoners as they withdrew from Huế (easier than evacuating them, which is not unusual in warfare situations like that) with credible estimates ranging up to 700, which was likely fewer than the executions committed by the American-led forces after they conquered the city, which their bombardment largely reduced to rubble. Also, the communist military leaders were reprimanded by their leadership for executing prisoners, which was something that the USA never did, at least unless they were goaded into it with the My Lai incident, so they put Calley’s head on a platter while exonerating the system, as usual.

Those “captured documents” from Huế were all either fabricated or mistranslated, such as the one that states:


“We eliminated 1,892 administrative personnel, 38 policemen, 790 tyrants, six captains, two first lieutenants, 20 second lieutenants, and many NCOs.”


Noam and Ed wrote about that sentence:


“…nowhere in the document is it claimed or even suggested that any civilians had been executed. Furthermore, the quoted sentence was taken out of the context of the document as a whole, which had nothing to do with the punishment of individuals, but was rather a low-level report, describing the military victory of the NLF in a particular district of Huế. But the press was too interested in reaffirming the cruelty of the Viet Cong to pay attention to such fine distinctions.”


Noam and Ed wrote that the French word in the document, “diet,” which Americans translated as “eliminated,” had no relationship to violence or executions. The “translation” of the document was a creative writing exercise by American propagandists.

If you read that Wikipedia article, Douglas Pike’s work is given prominent weight on the “massacre,” but he eventually admitted that his job was being a propagandist. He was one of the greatest promoters of the “communist terror” Big Lies, as Ralph discovered. Also, a Rand Corporation study is treated like the definitive document on the “massacre” in that article, when Rand’s role was largely providing imperial disinformation, which Noam and Ed noted in The Washington Connection. So, outright disinformation and propaganda dominates the article, while at least there was a section for “dispute,” which presented some of the facts that make a “communist massacre” problematic at best. But at the top of the article, the “massacre” count is 2,800 – 6,000, which is a wild exaggeration, off by about an order of magnitude.

I have experience with how Wikipedia’s “editors” deal with massacres: if they are “ours,” they are simply erased, but if they are “theirs,” then any rumor will do, and outright disinformation is prominently used.

I could go on about the disinformation in that article, and the jingoists that are readily seen holding forth in the “talk page” on the article, but that is enough for now. When I see tripe like that parading as an encyclopedia article, I know that I will have my work cut out for me with Ed’s Wikipedia bio, which today is basically a propaganda piece, as it alleges Ed’s “genocide denial” regarding Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. In one way, it is a confirmation of what the Propaganda Model predicts for “nefarious bloodbaths,” and when I write Ed’s Wikipedia bio, I will be stating that calling Ed a “genocide denier” is just what the Propaganda Model predicted.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am reading Noam and Ed’s After the Cataclysm and performing the very disagreeable task of dealing with their critics. First of all, to call Noam and Ed apologists for the Khmer Rouge is fraudulent, but their critics constantly fall all over themselves to make that bogus claim. To anybody with the slightest familiarity with their political work, it began with the American invasion of Vietnam and was always focused on the crimes of their nation, which is the highest ethical ground that one can stand on. It is similar to Jesus’s admonition to attend to the logs in one’s own eyes, not seek the splinters in their neighbors’. It is all about that rare commodity, integrity. Their censored Counter-Revolutionary Violence was about how the American establishment, including the media, dealt with bloodbaths, based on their political-economic utility. When they finally got something published that was not censored, it became the focus of “genocide denial” claims ever since.

If you are an American (or the USA is your adoptive nation, as it is for Steven Pinker and Ian Morris), the only high ethical ground is to deal with your nation’s contributions to the humanitarian disasters that it has inflicted on the world, especially in nations that it violently attacked, and the USA is second to none in that category since World War II. Nobody else comes remotely close.

So, on the subject of Cambodia, “genocide denial,” and the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, in virtually every instance that I saw, the prominent people charging the Khmer Rouge with monstrous crimes where white people, and almost always Americans. In addition, while they heaped all of the responsibility for the catastrophe in Cambodia on the Khmer Rouge’s shoulders, I have yet to see an instance where they failed to minimize the American role, even though its bombs were devastating that nation, creating two million refugees (around a quarter of the population) by the time of the Khmer Rouge’s victory.

In Ed’s critique of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, he noted how Pinker ignored scholars such as Drèze and Sen in favor of Rudolf Rummel, who hailed from the extreme far right. In Rummel’s work, he put the number of Vietnamese civilians subjected to American “democide” at about 5,000 people. No kidding. That is the “scholar” that Pinker used lavishly in Better Angels, while ignoring scholars such as Drèze and Sen, and Sen is a fellow professor at Harvard and won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Rummel was way out there, but look at the respectful Wikipedia article on him. In fact, I could not find a critical word about him or his work in his Wikipedia bio, although it at least acknowledged that he was an enthusiastic supporter of the invasion of Iraq. Bruce Sharp, an American, of course, has a site devoted to the Khmer Rouge’s crimes, and to the very slight extent that he dealt with the American contribution, he could be counted on to minimize the American role. You will look in vain on his site for much on that subject. His attacks on Noam are prominent, to the extent of calling Noam and Ed’s work “evil.” This is a nice dissection of Sharp’s tripe.

When I see those American experts on Khmer Rouge atrocities, who don’t even acknowledge the American role in the catastrophe or they use “scholars” such as Rummel to minimize it, it can be a pretty sickening experience.

These are days of heavy lifting, and I hope they end soon.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

While doing my reread of After the Cataclysm, and reading what their critics have to say once more, it can be mind-boggling to see how Noam and Ed were attacked with lies and irrationality, from professors and other “intellectuals.” Noam has been the world’s most prominent intellectual for the past 50 years, although brainwashed Americans would not know it. His work can be censored, and when TPTB cannot do that, he is attacked with a chorus of lies, issuing from leading “intellectuals.” Incredible.

If they could do that to Noam, how hard is it to amass a parade of liars about Dennis? I put Dennis’s name into Google, and the first thing that comes up is Mr. Skeptic’s article, which is actually criminal libel. Virtually the entire first page of results comes from the “skeptics” and other liars. On the second page is my essay on Dennis and his critics. I have yet to see one of his critics ever deal the slightest bit honestly about his past, as he put the world’s best heating system on people’s homes for free. And that barrage of disinformation easily dupes the credulous.

The issue, as always, is about integrity and sentience, both of which are in short supply, and particularly with intellectuals, bizarrely. When I see that, I really wonder if humanity has a prayer. One thing is for sure: establishment science, so-called “intellectuals,” the rackets, and the like are not where the answers will hail from.

How time flies. It seems like just yesterday that the 50^th anniversary of JFK’s murder passed, and in a few days, the 50^th anniversary of RFK’s murder will pass. Both were taken out in spook operations that were covered up by the official “investigations.” I am planning to write on Noam and JFK in my new comprehensive thread. Noam got that one wrong, IMO. Mike Parenti’s take was the best from the Left, and Ed also entertained the idea that JFK was taken out by the spooks.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am about halfway through my reread of Noam and Ed’s After the Cataclysm, and I am in their Cambodia chapter. I first wrote about it nearly 20 years ago, and it is still one heck of a read. After all these years, it is really something to read Ed and Noam’s work, and then read the hack attacks on it. For instance, the first paragraph of After the Cataclysm states:


“We will consider the facts about postwar Indochina insofar as they can be ascertained, but a major emphasis will be on the ways in which these facts have been interpreted, filtered, distorted or modified by the ideological institutions of the West.”


They really could not have been more explicit, and they repeated that emphasis several times in After the Cataclysm, but that did not prevent a major international campaign by the world’s “intellectuals” to lie about what Noam and Ed wrote.

The full title of their book is After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, and the part about reconstructing imperial ideology was explicit in the book and was a theme of theirs ever since. After the war was over, the spin doctors in the USA began framing the USA’s genocide as “blundering efforts to do good” and other outright lies. What the USA did was never a crime, but a “tragic error” in bringing the light to the world with its bombs and murders.

Noam and Ed made astute comparisons of the USA’s apologetics with Nazi Germany’s. Hermann Goering, while being interrogated at Nuremberg, said that the genocide of the Jews was not a crime, but a “vast political blunder; many would have made good nationalists and joined in the Liquidation of the communists. If only Hitler had not confused the issues….” Klaus Barbie, during his comfortable “retirement” in Bolivia, after rendering his heroic service to U.S. intelligence, like Gehlen and so many others, said about the Jewish genocide, “the mass killings of Jews constituted a grave error. Many of the SS officers believed that the Jews could have been put to better use building roads to facilitate the advance of our troops.” They weren’t crimes, but mistakes.

At the Dachau museum, which I visited in 1974, the Washington Post quoted the museum’s director as saying about the corporate use of slave labor, “It is a guilt never acknowledged here and rarely spoken about in our history books.”

In 2009, Ed and Noam noted that the American media was already treating the invasion of Iraq in the same terms, while the occupation was ongoing. Ours are always noble efforts.

I attended the California equivalent of Adolf Hitler Grammar School, in a town with a lovingly preserved mission, which was the concentration camp that was the instrument of genocide, so this is a subject near and dear to me.

More heavy lifting, but it should be done soon.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Orwell called orthodox thinking a form of unconsciousness, and wrote (in his censored preface to Animal Farm) that trading one flavor of Kool-Aid for another was not exactly “progress.” The mind-boggling part of that is that the so-called “smart” are often the most trapped in their ideological cages. I saw it many times with Level 3s, and it has really been something to study for Ed’s biography project, as I will likely be doing for years. In The Political Economy of Human Rights, which was a prelude to Manufacturing Consent, Noam and Ed were crystal clear on how the propaganda system works, and the response to their work proved their point. Initially, their work was censored, in one of the most outrageous instances of censorship in the 20^th century. That did not work, and The Political Economy of Human Rights was their censored version beefed up by nearly an order of magnitude.

Their thesis and support for it were undeniable, so their critics completely ignored the thrust of their work and tried to twist it into their being apologists for Pol Pot, which was the furthest thing from what their work was about. Noam and Ed knew it was coming and tried to forestall that attack, but it was a futile effort, as the propaganda barrage overwhelmed their arguments in the public eye. Ed’s current Wikipedia bio is Exhibit A on how the propaganda system works, and we’ll see how my upcoming battle with the hacks goes. Academics and professors led the attacks on Noam and Ed, incredibly. A five-year-old could see how irrational their attacks were. But all manner of pundit attacked Noam and Ed with outright lies and obfuscations, and never addressed their thesis or evidence, as they tried mightily to twist their work into something unrecognizable to those familiar with Noam and Ed’s work. It was beyond insane, but as Ed and Noam wrote, those irrational pundits were usually not intentionally lying (although many did), but were incapable of being rational when their self-serving faith was challenged. While that may seem to absolve them of responsibility, it also brings up Brian’s question: are we a sentient species? It is just more proof of my journey’s primary lesson, which I learned 30 years ago. Dennis was arrested 30 years ago this month, and then my nightmare truly began. When the dust settled a couple of years later, I had been radicalized and would never see the world the same way again, and it prepared me for work such as Noam and Ed’s.

This insanity can be seen in all manner of ideological addiction, and as Noam stated many times, a good propaganda system will have the appearance of rigorous debate, but only within the narrow confines of self-serving assumptions (that are clearly false, to anybody not drinking the Kool-Aid). As the Nazis did, the American pundits, virtually without exception, framed our evil activities in Southeast Asia as “tragic errors” and “blundering attempts to do good,” when the facts (always suppressed or ignored) show that that was the furthest thing from the motivation of the war planners and others. Imperialism has always been, and always will be, evil in its motivation. It is all about conquering, plundering, and exterminating distant peoples for the benefit of the imperial capital and the “settlers.” Academics such as Ian Morris argue that those evil activities have made the world safer and more prosperous, as Morris cheers on the empire from his cushy berth. What an argument to make, and what a prescription for the future (shudder). There is a different path to take, but time is short.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Before I write the Wikipedia article on Noam and Ed’s first books that weren’t censored, I’ll be revising Ed’s bio a little, especially the chapter on those books. I expect that I will be spending this summer’s “spare” time on those tasks, as I write Ed’s bio at Wikipedia, to replace the hack version, and then the battles will likely begin. I spent time today beefing up Ed’s quotes, for his and Noam’s writings on Cambodia and the propaganda system. I have less than 100 pages left of my reread of their 750-page version of their originally censored work, and I then will get to some serious writing.

One aspect of this task that is very pleasant, so to speak, is digesting the work of two brilliant scholars of high compassion and integrity, as they discuss issues of great import that have only received the propaganda treatment in the American media. Noam has been the world’s leading intellectual for the past 50 years for good reason, and Ed was no slouch. Their work invites deep thinking, in great contrast to the comic book version that the media presents, which on the subject of Cambodia was eerily similar to Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate. Comparing their work to what the hacks said their work was about is like exploring two different worlds.

It is like when I would read media articles about us, which were a series of lies and misdirections so great that if I didn’t know who they were writing about, I would have had no idea who they were writing about. Dennis is the greatest human being that I ever met, and the media invariably portrayed him as the criminal of the century. Noam and Ed were similarly attacked. That is how the saints fare in our insane world.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

After the Cataclysm has been posted to the Internet (and the link was recently erased from the Wikipedia article, hmmm, I’ll have to look into that when I write the article), and I am sure that Ed would not have minded, and I am sure that Noam doesn’t. I am almost finished with the reread, and then will be updating Ed’s bio and writing that Wikipedia article. I want to briefly cover some aspects of that book that are ignored by its assailants.

Back in Ed’s earliest political writings, about Vietnam, he noted the canard of the USA’s trying to prevent a communist bloodbath. The USA slaughtered millions to “save” millions. Strange logic. It was an entirely false rationale, but all imperial rationales are false, and knowingly false by the people concocting them. Every crime has some flowery justification invoked by the perpetrators. If anything can be called human nature, that is it, as humans can justify anything, even eating their children.

So, no communist bloodbath happened in Vietnam, but one happened in Cambodia. Ed and Noam discussed an aspect of what happened in Cambodia that has always been ignored in imperial apologetics, which was not only how the bombing of Cambodia, especially at its climax in 1973, brought the marginal Khmer Rouge into power, but it also created the brutal conditions among Cambodia’s peasantry to incite what became a genocidal bloodbath, mainly of Cambodia’s city dwellers, who were primarily the colonial elite. Noam and Ed discussed an idea raised by others, that Nixon and Kissinger intentionally inflicted a firestorm of bombing to create exactly what happened. A communist bloodbath was not going to happen in Vietnam, as Nixon constantly invoked, but if they bombed Cambodia to dust, then maybe they could make their prophesized bloodbath happen in Cambodia, and it worked, so the imperial class could retroactively justify their immense crimes. It also had the virtue of preventing a good example of socialism that might have inspired the peasants of other American client regimes, such as in Thailand, to overthrow their brutal rulers.

Of course, the actual murders by the Khmer Rouge were far less than the propagandists stated (far more were the responsibility of the USA’s epic bombing), although they were plenty. However, as a proportion of the population, the simultaneous one in East Timor, inflicted by Indonesia, with American weapons and diplomatic support, was greater, the greatest since World War II, was completely blacked out in the USA, while what happened in Cambodia was covered by the American media with a constant drumbeat of genocide, and that was the entire point of Noam and Ed’s book: how the media enables imperial behavior. Their writings in The Political Economy of Human Rights matured into Manufacturing Consent a decade later, which was their most famous work, both jointly and individually, and Ed was the primary author. Ed developed the Propaganda Model and wrote the chapters before the Indochina wars, and Noam wrote the Indochina chapters.

Ed and Noam also wrote at length, particularly in Manufacturing Consent, that after the murderous Khmer Rouge were overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion, the USA supported Pol Pot for the next dozen years because he was an enemy of Vietnam, as he terrorized Cambodia. It would be as if Hitler’s genocide of the Jews was retroactively used to justify the American invasion of Europe, but Hitler fled to South America and was supported in style by the USA ever since, because he still had political-economic utility for killing Jews. It was Orwell to the extreme and continues to this day, with the absolutely insane attacks on Noam and Ed for their Cambodian writings, among other hack activities.

Best,

Wade