They Don't Brainwash the Sheeple Like They Used To

The way that "brainwashed" is used in this tweet, and by many other people from all over the political spectrum, annoys me.  The notion of brainwashing went viral during the Korean War, as a horrible thing that the Chicoms and the North Korean Commies did to Our Boys whom they held prisoner for no reason at all, just invading their country.  The scare was bogus, but the idea was useful, though almost always it's applied to other people, the brainwashed sheeple who swallow whatever lies the Mainstream Media ram down their throats.

Strictly speaking, brainwashing is supposed to be done in a totally controlled environment, such as a prison camp for captured enemy soldiers.  In such a place, the information the victim is given can be restricted by his or her captors, and he or she can be held in isolation, which breaks down the ability to resist.  (Which is why solitary confinement is regarded as torture when it's done by our official enemies, though not when we, the good guys, do it.)  Despite the power of such a situation, it's not clear that such brainwashing was ever very effective.

The corporate media do not have that kind of power, nor are their audiences as isolated as POWs.  If an American encounters only one side of an issue, it's because he or she chooses to.  True, many people do choose to, but they aren't being held captive by Evil MSM, they have the cell door (as it were) locked from inside.  (Another pet peeve of mine is people who confuse "manufacturing consent," the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model of Media, with brainwashing.  It's really the opposite, but more on that another time perhaps.)  And even before the Internet came along, there were abundant alternatives available to the corporate media, and nobody was going to throw you into a lightless cell for using them.  If people didn't use them, and most didn't, it wasn't because they were brainwashed.  And if you did turn to alternative sources, sensible moderate people would caution you that you needed to listen also to the "other side" - as if they ever did.

Perhaps the crowning irony, which indicates that Retired Man is less free of media control than he likes to believe, is that despite decades of media propaganda on the evils of Socialized Medicine, most Americans consistently favor some form of government-run healthcare (the private insurance lobby's term of art, picked up by their beneficiary Pete Buttigieg), just as they consistently hold other opinions that are Truly Politically Incorrect according to the all-powerful mind-controlling media: higher taxes on the rich, say, or less military spending.  I've noticed that most liberals and progressives who denounce the Sheeple for opposing these commonsense policies seem to accept the corporate-media line that they are unpopular, when in fact they are quite popular.  So who's brainwashed here?

Where Do Credentials Come From, Mommy?

On to other matters. David Sirota posted this a couple of days ago:

Sirota's a smart journalist, and I take him seriously.  But in this case -- no, I don't think so.

First, I thought polls showed that most people hate the media because they see them as too adversary, too hostile to wealth and power. Judging from what I hear from people I know and those I read on social media, that belief probably divides along partisan lines, as when Republicans believe that the media just make up stuff about their President.  I noticed that many Democrats believed that Hillary Clinton lost because the Lying Media misled the public about her.  So it seems to me that many people want the media to be loyal to wealth and power as represented by their own party.

Second, I question the word "ideologically."  Most people don't know what it means anyhow, and I don't think that loyalty to wealth and power is usually ideological.  Rather it's opportunistic ("I've got mine and I want to hang on to it"), personal (because a person likes and identifies with the wealthy and powerful, hoping that some of the goodies will trickle down), and self-interested.

Third, a 2016 poll

found respondents valued accuracy above all else, with 85 percent of people saying it was extremely important to avoid errors in coverage. Timeliness and clarity followed closely, with 76 percent and 72 percent respectively saying those attributes were imperative among media sources.

“Over the last two decades, research shows the public has grown increasingly skeptical of the news industry,” the report reads. “The study reaffirms that consumers do value broad concepts of trust like fairness, balance, accuracy, and completeness. At least two-thirds of Americans cite each of these four general principles as very important to them.”

That's moving and inspiring, only -- how do respondents know whether a news source is accurate?  From what I see, for many people "accuracy" means that the news tells them what they want to hear.  How often do most people pay any attention to the corrections department of their newspaper?  The meaning of terms like fairness, balance, and the like are disputed in the press, and I don't see any reason to believe that news consumers are any clearer about them than the professionals.  I see many people who dismiss news sources lightly -- ah, they'll print anything if it'll make them money, they're just trying to divide us, etc.  Again, all very well, but they still seem to trust some sources, usually Fox News or Breitbart or Limbaugh or Mike Savage or Rachel Maddow.  If they trust them, it isn't because they've carefully examined the facts (wherever they would get facts in the first place) and subjected them to rigorous scrutiny, and decided that their preferred network or commentator is reliable.

Interestingly, though, those who are cynical about "the media" in general tend to trust local news sources, which isn't a bad idea except that local news sources are increasingly non-local in ownership and control.  It's like public education: many people are sure that Our Schools across the nation are failing miserably, but they like and trust their own local schools.

Which makes this column from last December, by the Washington Post's media columnist Margaret Sullivan, interesting.  She found that when they were allowed to discuss the question at length, instead of replying to narrow poll questions, people (she talked to several dozen, outside the Beltway) had a much more nuanced understanding of the news.

But not that much more nuanced.  She heard a lot of complaint about "bickering" in the media, for example from this "young Trump voter":

"I wish the bickering would stop," he said, referring to commentary by pundits. He listens to Fox News Radio on SiriusXM, and he compares what he hears there with what's offered on CNN and other news outlets, like NBC News, which he watches some evenings: "There's a pretty stark contrast between what they report." So he weighs them against each other. "At this point, I'm pretty tired of it all," he explained, saying he wants reporting presented straight — just the facts, with less opinion attached. "It's called the news — it's not supposed to be about their agendas." Journalists, especially cable pundits, he said, "need to grow up."

I doubt very much that the bickering will stop, at least not until people stop listening to it.  I've run into numerous people with the same complaint, and I've begun asking them why, if they hate the bickering so much, they continue listening to it.  At best they stop for a while, and then they tune back in.  But panels of pundits aren't all there is to the news media, as this guy seems to realize.  I almost never listen to such roundtables, having quit decades ago when I realized how useless they mostly were -- and in those days the emotional temperature they exhibited was a lot lower.  It happens that I recently watched the now-notorious "I'm a communist, you idiot" segment from Good Morning Britain on Youtube; after watching Piers Morgan's antics, I can understand why people would object to this sort of thing -- so why do they watch it at all?  Many clearly do; what do they get from it?  It can't be for the information.  I was amazed at the utter lack of professionalism Morgan displayed; if he gets away with it regularly, someone at ITV must like him. I prefer reading text, largely because it filters out grandstanding like Morgan's.

Wanting the news to report "just facts" seems no less quixotic to me.  It's true, the line between "news" and "commentary" is blurred, but it always has been.  When I see old (Sixties or Seventies' vintage, say) news stories from the New York Times, I'm constantly struck by the amount of commentary that found its way into them.  But even leaving that aside, which facts an outlet chooses to report, which stories it finds significant, which stories it ignores, what facts it leaves out, who it talks to -- all these factors put a slant on the "news."

Sullivan puts heavy stress on the claim, which I don't dispute, that reporters almost never make up stories.  I bet she'd be surprised to find out that a harsh press critic like Noam Chomsky not only agrees with her, he regularly commends the professionalism and competence of most mainstream reporters.  He directs most of his criticism at the institutions: the companies, the corporations, the publishers, the editors.  The Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model, contrary to the fantasies of many of its critics, is not a conspiracy theory but a theory about institutions and their interests.  I'm less bothered by the fact that many media/press people mistake it for a conspiracy theory -- that's a natural human defense mechanism -- than that many of Chomsky's fans make the same misreading.

Like many people, Sullivan is concerned that so many Americans get their news from Facebook or other social media.  She reports that a Bernie Sanders supporter is "aware that some of what's on social media has been fabricated."  The thing is that neither Facebook nor Twitter nor any other social media outlet I know of produces its own news: I don't "get news from Facebook or Twitter," I get references and links and recommendations, which point me to reports and stories and essays I may decide to read at length.  I know not to believe everything I see there; what I find fascinating is that so many of the same people who are vocally cynical about the media are also extremely credulous, shocked to learn that The Onion just makes stuff up and you aren't supposed to take their stories as fact.  They have even more difficulty understanding that there are people who really do make stuff up and post it in order to fool people -- the piteous photos, for example, of little children in hospital beds, if you give them an amen and a like then Facebook will donate a dollar to their medical fund.  Cynicism and credulity are highly selective.

Sullivan continues:

Much worse was my conversation with Jason Carr of Green Bay, Wis., a middle-aged member of the Oneida Nation who was visiting his girlfriend in western New York. Wearing a "Born to Chill" T-shirt and sitting behind the wheel of his Ford F-150 pickup truck in a KeyBank parking lot, Carr told me that media reports strike him as nothing but "a puppet show" that is "filtered and censored" by big business. He buys into the conspiracy theories that the United States government was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that the 2012 massacre of Connecticut schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School was staged. Carr didn't vote in the presidential election and said there's nothing the news media could do to earn his trust. "I don't believe anything they say," he said. "They get paid to be wrong." I left the conversation shaking my head, knowing that, as is clear from the huge following of sites like the conspiracy-promoting Infowars, he's far from alone in his beliefs.

My question for Jason Carr, if I could ask one, would be which sources -- media, that is -- he gets his information from, and why he trusts them over other media.  He didn't invent the "conspiracy theories" he believes; he got them from somewhere, and he trusts those sources.  Why them and not others?  Sullivan, I suspect, would regard Carr's sources, whatever they are, as untrustworthy because they're uncredentialed.  But where do credentials come from?  Even in the good old days before the Internet, anyone could start a newspaper, and most of the newspapers in the US used to be independently owned and run.  It was not uncommon for even small communities to have two newspapers, a Republican one and a Democratic one.  So which one was real news, which one was trustworthy?  How did you decide which source to trust?  The same way you do nowadays on the Internet: by exercising your critical faculties.  It's good to bear in mind that corporate media tend to report the news from the point of view of the stockholder class; but there is no source that has no point of view.  There is no magic crystal ball that will bring you the Truth, allowing you to shut off your mind.

This doesn't mean assuming that the media are out to lie to you; it means assuming that the news is produced by fallible human beings with biases, and with the best will and intentions they won't always be right.  Their stories will be partial, both in the sense of incomplete and that of biased.  So I (and you) need to be aware of that, as well as of our own limitations and biases.  It's not always easy, though it gets somewhat easier with practice -- and then one day you find that your bullshit detector failed spectacularly and you fell for an amazingly bogus story.  Whereupon you pick yourself up and go on, chastened and ready to continue learning.

Those Who Think They Remember History

A friend posted this to Facebook today:

Oh myyyy, as George Takei would say (but probably wouldn't, since he likely agrees with it).  Like I haven't heard liberal Democrats saying basically the same things about the media whenever they didn't like what the media were reporting.  If Hitler did denounce "the lying media," it wasn't because he was a Nazi, it was because he was a politician.  Like I haven't heard liberal Democrats demanding laws which would allow (require) the government to rule on whether the news being reported was "true," and to punish unruly media for "lying." (Meaning, again, saying things that the liberal Democrats didn't want to hear. As often as not, those things were true, like the revelations about Hillary Clinton during the campaign. But the truth hurts. And "lie" doesn't mean "what I don't want to hear.")

And like the media haven't discredited themselves by collaborating with the government, acting as stenographers for the powerful, passing on Bush's and Obama's (and their predecessors') lies.  I have to admit, though, the widespread unpopularity of the media in the US has little or nothing to do with the media's dishonesty or corruption; I'm not sure exactly why the media are unpopular -- which doesn't keep people from tuning in to them, either. But it hasn't got anything to do with their "corruption." Most Americans, like most human beings, are perfectly comfortable with corruption, at least the corruption of their own factions and buddies, and from what I see, most Americans wouldn't know whether what they saw in the news was true or not.

The same friend also shared this meme today:

My first reaction was that this was an accurate description of mainstream American politics over the past century and more.  It describes conditions under the Obama regime no less than under his predecessors or successor.  Outside our borders, American politicians and corporate leaders have liked, praised, supported, and protected right-wing dictatorships, including those with fascist or even Nazi leanings.  The US war with Nazism was an anomaly; at that, it wasn't until Hitler actually attacked the US that our elites were willing to fight him.  After World War II was over, the US supported Nazi, Fascist, and Japanese collaborators, using them to crush the socialists, Communists and Jews who'd led and fought in the resistance.  (Which is one reason why seeing the word "resistance" used by liberals to refer to their opposition to Trump sets my teeth on edge.)

Then I realized why the meme seemed oddly familiar to me: It was very much like, and perhaps even based on the "Communist Rules for Revolution" things that the fascist American right circulated when I was growing up.  We didn't have memes and Facebook in those days, but we did have mimeographs and photocopiers, and the propaganda mills of the Right took advantage of the available technology.  I'm often amazed, in fact, when I remember that the available media included the mainstream corporate media, but corporate bigwigs have always been happy to subsidize right-wing wackery.

Here's one version of the Communist Rules, allegedly codified by the Reds and discovered by Our Boys in Uniform in Germany in 1919:

1. Corrupt the young, get them away from religion. Get them interested in sex. Make them superficial. Destroy their ruggedness.

2. Get control of all means of publicity.

3. Get people's minds off their government by focusing their attention on athletics, sexy books and other trivialities.

4. Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial matters of no importance.

5. Destroy the people's faith in their natural leaders by holding the latter up to contempt, ridicule and obloquy.

6. Always preach true democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.

7. By encouraging government extravagance, destroy its credit and produce fear of inflation with rising prices and general discontent.

8. Foment unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders, and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of government toward such disorders.

9. By specious argument cause the breakdown of the old moral virtues, honesty, sobriety, continence, faith in the pledged word, ruggedness.

10. Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with a view to confiscating them and leaving the populace helpless. 

Like whoever composed the Early Warning Signs of Fascism, whoever wrote this simply made a list of current trends they disliked, and attributed them to the official enemy they wished to attack.  It could be seen as a subset of apocalyptic literature, in which someone attributes an account of recent history to a prophet who lived centuries before.  Here's another recent example, with the element of projection brought to the forefront:

Let’s say somebody were [in the White House] and they wanted to destroy this nation. I would create division among the people, encourage a culture of ridicule for basic morality and the principles that made and sustained the country, undermine the financial stability of the nation, and weaken and destroy the military. It appears coincidentally that those are the very things that are happening right now.

In any case, the resemblance between the incipient Trump regime and the supposed characteristics of fascism is due to fascist and proto-fascist sympathies and trends in America that have always been with us.  Those sympathies and trends have also always been opposed and fought, but that opposition has mostly been against the American mainstream, as exemplified by its leaders, business elites, and official media.  Donald Trump is frightening because he wants to extend and confirm those trends, but in so many respects -- his hostility to media, his love of big business, his disregard for civil liberties and civil rights, his embrace of state violence, and so on -- he represents continuity with his recent predecessors, including Barack Obama, and his defeated opponent Hillary Clinton.

One doubt nags at me, though: Do people really need to know accurate history in order to oppose and work against Trump?  I suspect not.  Sometimes I think that lies motivate and mobilize people more effectively than truth.  Could people oppose Trump effectively if they admitted the ways in which he simply continues many of Obama's policies, as Obama continued so much of the legacy of George W. Bush?  I don't know.  Maybe it makes no difference, but I think it could make a difference in what the Resistance would do if they defeated him: a kinder, gentler, less uncouth Trumpism, most likely -- but that means Obama and Clinton.

This Is the Dawning of the Age of the Internet

Let me procrastinate a bit on another post I'm in the middle of by writing this one.  It all ties together in the end anyway.
I disagree rather strongly with a recent post by Bodhipaksa on Fake Buddha Quotes on the more general issue of misquotation in the age of the Internet.  He quoted a paper by Giovanni Gaetani, on misquotations of the philosopher Albert Camus.  Like so:

Nonetheless, we underestimate [the] Internet’s impact on literature and philosophy: ever since everyone has the power to say his personal opinion about everything, even when he is a total incompetent about the subject; ever since everyone can quote a writer without feeling the need to report the source and ever since everyone seems to not care at all about sources, believing in everything he sees on Internet, every quote has completely lost reliability.

There's a fair amount of Occidental hyperbole in this paragraph: "everyone seems to not care at all about sources," etc.  But everyone has always had the power to say his personal opinion about everything.  Before literacy became widespread, anybody could stand outside and announce that he (less often she) was filled with the Holy Spirit and you'd better listen.  Often people did.  Often they didn't.  There was always rumor, and folklore, and sources had a way of disappearing after a couple of iterations.  You could never be sure who had said something, and the same sayings were attributed to different sages.

After writing was invented, there was the problem of forgeries, or pseudepigrapha as they're more delicately known.  Who composed the Homeric poems?  No one knows, so it's convenient and not unreasonable to ascribe them to Homer.  Other poems were ascribed to the same author, though probably they were not his.  Works were written in the name of Plato and other philosophers.  You'll find that many ancient works from the Greco-Roman world were written by Pseudo-guys.

Only those who believe everything they see in print take for granted that all the books in the Bible were written by the authors tradition assigns to them.  All but the most conservative scholars believe that not all the letters ascribed to the apostle Paul in the New Testament were actually written by him, and many enterprising people wrote in the name of this or that patriarch, apostle, or hanger-on; many people took their word for it.  Some scholars will tell you that it was commonplace and accepted to write pseudepigrapha in those days, but while it was commonplace, it wasn't accepted. Many writers denounced such works.  Whoever wrote Second Thessalonians, for example, warned readers not to be fooled by letters "as though from us" (2.2), indicating that forged letters in Paul's name were already circulating in his lifetime -- which is ironic if, as many scholars believe, Second Thessalonians was not itself written by Paul.  (How better to distract attention from one's own deception than by calling someone else a deceiver?)

Before the Internet came along in my own lifetime, many rumors and legends circulated: that queers wore yellow (or was it green?) on Tuesdays (or was it Thursdays?), for instance.  That Franklin Delano Roosevelt was actually a Jew, who had syphilis not polio.  At about the time I graduated from high school, the myth that Paul McCartney had died and been replaced by a lookalike began to circulate, and it persists to this day; even many people who don't believe it still think that the Beatles were responsible for the story and had put clues about it in their songs and on their album covers.  Some of these canards circulated orally, others were mimeographed or printed cheaply on offset presses.  It was often impossible to track such falsehoods to their source, and not many people cared much.  If they liked what they heard, they believed it; if not, they scoffed.   And although most people are acquainted with the concept of "urban legends," popularized by the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, they still readily believe them.  The people who post lists of criteria for discerning fact from deception generally fail to observe them themselves.

The Internet has increased the reach of ordinary people, and the speed with which information travels and spreads.  But the difference is one of degree, not kind.  True, anyone with Internet access can express his or her opinions, regardless of competence, but most that is posted on the Internet will never be seen by more than a few people.  No one can predict when a given posting will go viral.

Do people believe everything they see on the Internet?  Of course not; that's more Occidental hyperbole.  People believe what they want to believe, and ignore what they don't want to believe.  So, for example, my Third Right-Wing Acquaintance boasted that since she couldn't tell who was telling the truth on the Internet, she just believed what she found congenial.  Many other people do the same, but are less forthright about it.

Bodhipaksa quotes another passage from Gaetani:

During my research I have contacted many bloggers, asking them where Camus should have written/said this or that; their answer was always the same: «check it on Google». Indeed, their reasoning was simple but tremendously naïve: if a quote is reported by so many people – millions of references in some cases – the author of this quote “must” be Albert Camus.

I believe that it's much easier now, in the age of the Internet, to find out whether a given quotation is authentic or not.  It helps that there are sites like Quote Investigator and Wikiquote, to say nothing of Fake Buddha Quotes itself, where people do a lot of the necessary detective work.  But something else is going on here.  Bodhipaksa remarks, "I paraphrase this attitude as 'It must be true. I read it on the internet.'" It's true, many people believe this, or act as if they do.  But how different is it from saying, say, "It must be true, I read it in the Bible"?  Or "I heard it on the news"?  Much of the current concern about "fake news" is explicitly intended to recall people to the fold shepherded by traditional authority: print media, the three big television networks, government officials -- the right government officials, meaning those of one's favored party.  Yet these authorities have discredited themselves again and again, with no accountability, and have never been particularly reliable.  Who is competent to have an opinion?  The general answer is: the same wise, credentialed, responsible commentators your parents trusted.  But those people got us into the mess we're in now, and have no idea how to get us out of it except to proffer more of the same.

In narrow domains, where comparatively little is at stake -- Camus studies, say -- credentialed authority can be relied on much of the time.  It's fairly easy to tell whether a saying ascribed to Jesus is authentic or not, if you agree to limit authenticity to the contents of the four canonical gospels: they're not very long, they've been studied and indexed exhaustively, and it's easy enough to look up a saying you're not sure about to see if it can be found in them.  The same is true for the Buddhist scriptures, though there are more of them.  But where much is at stake  -- the national or world economy, international conflicts that could turn into war, etc. -- it's harder to know whom to trust  For one thing, the credentialed authorities disagree with each other.  As with the variety of religions in the world, they can't all be true; how can you know whose claims to believe?  For another, they often lie, and it's difficult for us ordinary schmucks to know when they're lying. These are problems that, like the poor, have always been with us and probably always will.  It's not because of the Internet that we don't know what to do about them.  I'd say, however, that anyone who blames the Internet for our difficulty in knowing what is true is probably not to be trusted.

Useful Geniuses; or, Resistance Is Futile

To my half-surprise this meme turned out to be authentic.  It's from Huxley's Brave New World Revisited, published in 1958, when his 1931 novel Brave New World had become a classic and a watchword.  (The passage originally began: "Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and over-organization ...", which I think changes its import a bit, and not for the better; and "a new kind of totalitarianism" read "a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism" [italics added].)  It's the kind of supposed prophecy that appeals to a certain set of mind.

Yet despite all this mind-manipulation, Donald Trump is the Republican candidate for President, and Bernie Sanders came very close to beating Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Brexit passed in the UK. Most citizens disagree with most of the corporatist agenda in the US. Governments around the world are losing legitimacy, the consent of the governed that makes it possible for them to rule at all. Our would-be rulers are not pleased. The Sheeple aren't as manipulable as they like to think -- or, oddly, as wise truthtellers such as Huxley like to think.

None of this means that I think the People are necessarily wise, or always right.  Trump's success, like the Brexit vote, has various causes, some of which are edifying and others not.  The point is that "the ruling oligarchy" and its technicians are not as omnipotent or competent as they and this meme would have you believe.

I recently read H. Bruce Franklin's M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America (Lawrence Hill, 1992), in which he described how the Nixon administration, hoping to raise domestic support for its war in Vietnam, concocted the fantasy of thousands of American troops being held prisoner by the North Vietnamese.  Enlisting the participation of families of soldiers who were missing in action, Nixon's people were fairly successful in selling the fantasy -- but when they found it an impediment to negotations and ending the war, they were trapped by their own invention.  The families and their supporters, understandably, felt betrayed; unwilling to accept that they'd been sold a bill of goods and used so cynically, they clung to the myth and turned on Nixon.  When even Ronald Reagan, several years later, accepted that there were no American POWs alive in Southeast Asia, they denounced him too.  As Franklin said, the long-term result was the rise of a politically reactionary group of Americans, officially patriotic but bitterly hostile to their government, constructing a paranoid mythology of bold Rambos trying to free large numbers of captive Americans but undermined and stymied by government bureacrats.  M.I.A. was originally published almost a quarter century before Donald Trump declared his candidacy, but his supporters clearly live in the alternate universe built by the Nixon gang.  The "ruling oligarchy" has only very limited control over the tigers it unleashes.

It's a mistake to think that that oligarchy or its technicians really know what they're doing.  Today I was looking at the chapter on political lying in Hannah Arendt's Crises of the Republic.  Writing of the processes that led to a major American war, Arendt refers to

the strange fact that the mistaken decisions and lying statements consistently violated the astoundingly accurate factual reports of the intelligence community ... The crucial point here is not merely that the policy of lying was hardly ever aimed at the enemy ..., but was destined chiefly, if not exclusively, for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home, and especially for the purpose of deceiving Congress [14].

Arendt was writing about the Pentagon Papers, the internal history that revealed how U.S. interference in Vietnam had been "planned" -- though that word is probably far too generous -- but she could just as easily have been describing the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  The same is true of what follows: 

Of even greater interest is that nearly all decisions in this disastrous enterprise were made in full cognizance of the fact that they probably could not be carried out: hence goals had constantly to be shifted.  There are, first, the publicly proclaimed objectives -- "seeing that the people of South Vietnam Vietnam are permitted to determine their future" [in reality, this was the last thing the US was interested in] or "assisting the country to win their contest against the ... Communist conspiracy" ... The same flexibility marks tactical considerations: North Vietnam is being bombed in order to prevent "a collapse of national morale" in the South and, particularly, the breakdown of the Saigon government.  But when the first raids were scheduled to start, the government had broken down, "pandemonium reigned in Saigon," the raids had to be postponed and a new goal found.  Now the objective was to compel "Hanoi to stop the Vietcong and the Pathet Lao," an aim that even the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not hope to attain.  As they said, "it would be idle to conclude that these efforts will have a decisive effect" [15].

And so on.  Those who, like me, are old enough to remember the promulgation of the War on Terror and the invasion of Afghanistan (to say nothing of the First Gulf War, which also fit this pattern), will remember how the goalposts were moved repeatedly for propaganda purposes.  The manipulation of public and Congressional opinion was scattershot: rationales generated almost randomly and thrown at audiences in hopes that one or more would stick.  Far from controlling events or the public, our rulers and their publicists were careening along in panic, and the results were far from what they had hoped.  (Not that either group has ever taken responsibility or accepted accountability for their blunders and crimes, of course.)

The corporate media gladly gave Donald Trump plenty of free publicity by their diligent coverage of his every blurt and mindfart; now that he's the Republican candidate, they're horrified: this is not what they meant at all.  Non-corporate media, not to mention liberal Democrats, are equally fascinated by him, and can't seem to tear their fascinated gaze from the trainwreck his campaign seems to have become.  But Trump and his supporters dismiss and denounce the "lamestream media" as readily as his opponents do.  On Brexit, liberal commentators here and in the UK tended to line up with the Establishment Right; they usually missed the irony.  So did right-wingers, usually contemptuous of the Mob, who suddenly but briefly became populists -- on Brexit, though not on Trump, whom they tried to repudiate.

And yet many people who believe themselves to be smarter than the canaille want more control -- laws (for example) that would require the press, or politicians, to tell the truth, on pain of State punishment. (Who do they think would decide what is true and what is false?) Again I find myself wondering why so many people who suppose themselves to be the sapient elite, mysteriously free from the control of the Bad Guys, sound so weirdly complacent and smug when they inform the rest of us that Resistance Is Futile. Whose side are they are on, really?