Fool Me Once, Shame on You; Fool Me Seventy Times Seven, Shame on Me

I agree that social media are an abundant source of misinformation.  Take this meme, shared to Facebook last week by a friend.

I commented that it's odd, because despite relentless propaganda campaign over many decades, most Americans favor all those things by a solid majority. Who exactly has been propagandized? It seems to be whoever made this meme.

Someone replied:  "the ~35% of the population (a majority of whom identify as Republicans and evangelical/Christian) that believe it's all socialism, but are somehow the only portion of the population the GOP caters to?"

I replied: "Like I said, you've been propagandized very effectively. I'm surprised at how many liberals and even leftists have been convinced that 35% of the American population is a majority."

Someone else, presumably a friend of the first responder, wrote: "no one said anything about that being the majority. And he's also not wrong. The right is so lost and confused because they blame the left for everything when we actually fight for most of the things they complain about not having."

It went downhill from there, though I suppose it was my fault for being sarcastic.  I still think it tells a lot about the mindset of many liberal Democrats that they see a 35 percent minority as an insuperable obstacle to instituting polices that most Americans want, or say they do.  At least that person acknowledged that it is a minority, not most Americans, who oppose universal healthcare.

In terms of public support and approval, the struggle for universal healthcare and those other programs and policies has already been won: comfortable bipartisan majorities support them.  It's worthwhile, I guess, to try to persuade right-wing opponents of such programs to support them instead, but I don't think it's where most of our energy should go.  I doubt they could ever be persuaded, though I also believe that once those programs were in place they would use them and support them, as they do with "socialist" Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  (Remember the line "Keep your government hands off my Medicare"?)  Republican politicians who voted against Biden's stimulus payments and other big-spending acts are already trying to take credit for them, because they know how popular they are even with Republican voters. 

True, the corporate media would like us to believe that most Americans don't want universal healthcare, and they give very sympathetic coverage to its opponents.  You'll see plenty of warm fuzzy stories interviewing rabid Trump fans at breakfast in small-town diners, or with anti-vaccination fanatics on ventilators in ICUs; you'll see columnists urging pro-vaccination Americans to sympathize with the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers.  I suspect that many people who are derisive of those stories will still post memes aimed at telling their opponents that they've been propagandized, or better, "brainwashed."   

It doesn't help that so many liberals manage to convince themselves that Democratic politicians like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg support universal healthcare, despite those pols' explicit and public repudiation of it.  It isn't only Republicans who've been effectively propagandized, and not only on these issues.

Or consider the failed recall vote in California.  Jacob Bacharach cited a corporate-media commentator who claimed that the recall "highlighted the vulnerabilities of leaders who seemed well positioned before the coronavirus pandemic."  Bacharach pointed out that California's system requires "signatures only equal to 12% of the total votes cast in the last gubernatorial election" to trigger a recall; I suppose such a small number of partisan malcontents can be called a vulnerability, but the commentator mainly seemed interested in inflating the influence of the Right, even though Governor Newsom trounced his opponent soundly.  This sort of thing has been going on too long for clear-eyed, rational liberals to be fooled by it, but they still keep falling for the propaganda -- while blaming the Right for being brainwashed.

I confess I'm a little uneasy about vaccine mandates, another policy that has bipartisan majority support among the public.  Getting injected with anything against one's will is profoundly invasive, and the fact that a majority of one's fellow citizens support it doesn't make it less so.  But those who support a mandate have presumably already been vaccinated.  We're not forcing something on our neighbors that we wouldn't and haven't accepted ourselves -- or that they haven't already accepted for themselves and their children.  (Someone in a local Facebook group angrily denied that schoolchildren have to be vaccinated against numerous diseases to attend school; I replied with a link to Indiana's state requirements.)  Besides, there seems to be considerable overlap between those who refuse vaccination and those who refuse to wear masks, which aren't invasive.  Yet not only do they refuse to wear masks, they attack (verbally and sometimes physically) people who do wear masks.  Whatever motivates them, it isn't a concern with personal freedom.

My critics under the Facebook meme talk as if they believe that unanimity is needed to institute progressive policies.  Maybe they know better, but a third of voters voted against FDR in 1936, at least partly in opposition to the New Deal.  I doubt that any important program has been enacted without that much opposition.  The one-third proportion seems to be stable over time.  Those who feel impotent in the face of such a minority should remember that most elections in this country are won by a simple 51 percent majority; the Presidency is the main exception, because of the Electoral College, but in general no one except a Republican is going to win sympathy by protesting that he or she got 35 percent of the vote.

As bothersome as that hardcore thirty to thirty-five percent of right-wingers are, they really aren't the reason we can't have nice things, and it's a distraction to blame them first. The real obstacle is a much smaller minority of wealthy right-wingers and their collaborators in the corporate media, who either platform them or promote them as the reasonable center.  If the Trump base weren't useful to those elites, they'd be dismissed as easily as the real majority of Americans are.

Someone else posted a meme depicting a flag with the legend "Get Vaxxed and Shut Up!"  An anti-vaxxer complained that it was authoritarian and oppressive.  I commented that I half-agreed: he doesn't have to shut up, but he does have to get vaccinated.  The reactionary -- and authoritarian -- Right minority has had its way for too long.  I don't necessarily want to say to them, "Who cares what you think?" but as long as they're in the minority they don't get to run things.

Don't Bite the Hand that Feeds You Propaganda

A few days after his skirmish with the Iranian ambassador to the UN, NPR's Steve Inskeep interviewed Trump's National Security Adviser, Robert O'Brien.  It's instructive to compare the two.  Inskeep put his foot in it immediately, asking O'Brien about the briefing about the assassination of Qasem Soleimani he gave to lawmakers the day before.  O'Brien noted that it wasn't he but Mike Pompeo, Mark Esper, Joseph McGuire, and Gina Haspel who gave the briefing.  Inskeep's full response: "Right."  O'Brien went on:

I've heard from a lot of people that it was a fantastic briefing. So there's always mixed reviews on those, depending on what people's viewpoint is on the subject matter. Mike Lee's a friend of mine, and someone who I greatly respect and the president really respects. And so I was disappointed to hear that he wasn't happy with the briefing. But I've also heard from other senators, including Chairman [James] Risch of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — he thought it was one of the best briefings he'd ever had. So I think there's there's always mixed reviews on these things.

I think these claims should be taken with a grain of salt.  It wasn't only Mike Lee who was displeased with the briefing, quite a few other Senators were unhappy.  If James Risch thought well of it, he should say so publicly.

O'Brien, it should be remembered, is the fellow who tried to help Trump cover for Anne Sacoolis, a US diplomat who ran over a young Englishman, by tricking his parents into meeting with her.

The Dunn family blames National Security Adviser O’Brien for the misstep. “It struck us that this meeting was hastily arranged by nincompoops on the run and in particular Mr. O’Brien, who appeared to be extremely uptight and aggressive and did not come across at all well in this meeting which required careful handling and sensitivity,” [Dunn family spokesperson Radd] Seiger wrote. “The family remain open to the possibility of meeting Mrs. Sacoolas one day in the future but in a neutral and appropriately controlled environment.”

In other words, not in a reality-TV setting. 

More recently, O'Brien got attention for his apparent belief that the family name of the leader of North Korea is "Un" rather than "Kim."  To be scrupulously fair, numerous better-informed individuals, such as the lefty journalist Amy Goodman, have made the same blunder.  But O'Brien's gaffe fits so well with the general level of professionalism in Trump's White House that it deserved the whoops and cackles he got for it.  (And really, "the most notorious dictator in the world"?  More notorious than Mohamed bin Salman, Sisi, and other US buddies?)

O'Brien basically bullshitted his way through the interview with Inskeep, who was not totally subservient (just mostly) but still collegial as his subject repeated Trump / US propaganda.  It's different when a bold journalist is shooting the breeze with one of our guys.

The Ministry of Truth Explains It All to Iran

I decided last night to write something about the crisis of US involvement in Iraq, leading to the current standoff between the US, Iran, and Iraq.  And then this morning I heard a sort of interview between NPR's Steve Inskeep and Iran's Ambassador to the United Nations, Majid Takht Ravanchi.  Inskeep was trying to be an adversary journalist, holding Ravanchi's (and by proxy, Iran's) feet to the fire, but as usual with elite US media personalities, he came across as an obnoxious, clumsy buffoon.  I don't remember who introduced the segment, but he advised listeners to pay attention to the tone of Ravanchi's remarks, not to take his words at face value.  This reminded me of some ancient Doonesbury cartoons from the early days of the Iranian revolution, depicting an Iranian student during the hostage crisis. A voiceover balloon reminded the viewer that "this could be propaganda."

First Inskeep asked Ravanchi, "Is Iran's retaliation against the United States finished?"  Presumably he was referring to reports, including a statement by Ravanchi himself, that the retaliation was indeed finished.  Inskeep tried to play "gotcha":

When you said you don't take responsibility for the actions of others, that raises a question because there was an Iraqi militia leader who was killed in the same U.S. drone strike as Gen. Soleimani. So far as we know, no revenge attack has been taken out for him. Are you saying it is entirely possible that Iraqi militias aligned with Iran could still lash out and Iran would not accept responsibility for what they're doing?

It seems to me that if anyone might want to take revenge for the killing of an Iraqi militia leader, it would be the government of Iraq.  And, of course, the US constantly tries to dodge responsibility for
the actions of its proxies, but it wouldn't do to go into that.  Ravanchi replied fairly directly, disavowing responsibility for the actions of anyone but the government of Iran.

A bit later, Inskeep asked:

Ambassador, you're correct that Iraq's parliament did vote to expel forces from Iraq. But we should be clear, they didn't vote to expel the United States from Iraq. They voted to expel foreign forces from Iraq. And that leads us to note that Gen. Soleimani, a member of Iran's military, was in Iraq when he was killed. What was he doing there?

Strictly speaking Inskeep was right, that the vote called for the removal of US, "coalition" and other foreign forces.  The catch is that Iran claims to have no forces in Iraq; the US can't make the same claim.  There are Iranian "technical advisors" in Iraq, a term that covers a multitude of sins, but as Ravanchi replied to Inskeep more generally, the burden of proof lies on the US.  Soleimani, he said, was in Iraq to fight "terrorists," a mission to which the US can hardly object; because of his successes against Daesh, aka ISIS, he was popular in Iraq and in the region.  And, as even Inskeep must be aware, the resolution against foreign forces in Iraq was passed after and as a direct response to Soleimani's assassination.

Inskeep pressed on:

[Inskeep:] As you must know ambassador, the United States asserts that General Soleimani was plotting attacks against Americans, against the United States. Are you able to say if he was plotting such attacks?

[Ravanchi:] It is, it is the duty of the United States to to to prove otherwise, I mean, to prove that he was he was, in fact, plotting to to kill Americans. Because --

[Inskeep:] But I can also ask you, was he plotting to kill Americans?

[Ravanchi:] No, as I said, he was there in order to help the Iraqi government to better, I mean, fight terrorists pure and simple.

We should be as skeptical of an Iranian government representative as we should be of any government's representative.  But Inskeep here is parroting the claims of an administration that has been shown many times to be a gang of liars, and this particular claim has already largely been discredited as a typical Trump fabrication.  But that's NPR for you: when Trump announced the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on a Sunday morning last October, NPR's anchors treated his fantasies with total credulity.

As I've said before, the loud laments over public distrust of the media are hard to take seriously when the media work so hard to be worthy of distrust.  (Which probably isn't why many people distrust them, I realize.)  Inskeep's little clown show this morning was just embarrassing; or would be, if NPR had any shame.

The Unreality-based Community

I recently read The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time (Workman, 2017), by Brooke Gladstone, the co-host of an NPR program called On the Media.  The portentous title fooled me, to my discredit, but once I read a few pages of this short book I realized it was symptomatic of the present state of American political discourse.  Also of every past state of American political discourse.  Gladstone drops a lot of impressive names (Thomas Szasz in the book's epigraph, Philip K. Dick, Arthur Schopenhauer, Walter Lippmann, Hannah Arendt, and -- course -- George Orwell) and indulges in professionally overwrought rhetoric ("moral panic" in the title; Dick was "America's most determined architect and annihilator of reality", [3]) that she seems not to understand very well.  (She uses the term "moral panic" exactly once, near the end of the book, without context or evident meaning.)  So, for example, she quotes a 1978 speech by Dick:

"... because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups ..."

And, he might have added, by science-fiction writers turned gurus. "Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured"?  When didn't we live in such a society?  Besides, "spurious realities" is at best an oxymoron: if it's spurious, then it's not reality.  This is a hustler playing a shell game.

"Very sophisticated people are using very sophisticated electric mechanisms.  I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power.  They have a lot of it.  And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.  I ought to know. ... It is my job to create universes. ... And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later.

"... And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human.  Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly -- as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides.  Fake realities will create fake humans. ... It's just a very large version of Disneyland [3-4]."

Dick claimed that his novels and stories "asked the question 'What is reality?'" All he could come up with was "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."  But, Gladstone says, "he knew we urgently needed a better answer", though I don't see what's wrong with that one.  Dick confused the issue by equivocating between the "reality" that "doesn't go away" and the "spurious realities" that he and other "very sophisticated people" invented; but since human beings only have direct access to the inventions, we do have a problem.

Gladstone then declares:

What Dick saw forty years ago many of us see now, at least of those whose reality embodies liberal values [4].

Later in her book, Gladstone gestures at conspiracy theories, citing research which found that "conservatives [were] more likely than liberals to believe conspiracy theories, especially apocalyptic ones" (31).  It says something that she begins her book by declaring allegiance to an apocalyptic conspiracy theory.

She then unreels a breezy survey of the failings of the media, as if she weren't part of the media herself, and starts explaining how The Demagogue Trump did his wicked work.

Which explains why so many of the rest of us [that is, Not-Trump-Supporters] are still reeling.  We also knew the system was rigged.  But once the bad behavior was exposed, the guilty were supposed to pay the consequences, at least in the court of public opinion.  That Trump's misconduct actually would help vault him to the White House was inconceivable [40; link added by me]

And no, she doesn't seem to recognize the irony in her use of that word.  I admit when she invokes the fantasy that "the guilty were supposed to pay the consequences," it's as a "stereotype" that "those whose reality embodies liberal values" clung to in the face of disconfirming evidence, though I don't think she wants to recognize that American political, business and media elites almost never do pay the consequences.  And then she says that Trump's "system clearly was unmoored to facts" (44)..

Even as an anti-Trump jeremiad, The Trouble with Reality is a failure.  Gladstone skims over the weighty history and political theory she discusses, getting them wrong most of the time.  She misses the import of much of it, for example:

"Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States," said Arendt.

"Because of the immensity of his job, he must surround himself with advisers ... who exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him" [61].

Gladstone applies this to Trump, which is fair, though I wonder if (say) President Obama spent as much time actually watching Fox News, CNN, and other media as Trump seems to.  It also appears that he watches them as most people do, inattentively, only perking up when a buzzword gets his attention, and he doesn't bother to make sure that what he thinks he heard was what was said.  It's not as if he was any better-informed before he went into politics.  He also, as we've seen repeatedly, bullies and fires his advisors when they don't tell him what he wants to hear.  But the point is that Arendt was not talking about Trump; she was talking about all US Presidents.  The quotation appears to come from a 1978 interview with Arendt published in the New York Review of Books, so she most likely had Richard Nixon chiefly in mind.  Barack Obama also entered a bubble when he moved into the White House.  Remember when he jumped to the conclusion that the Supreme Court had overturned the Affordable Care Act, because CNN (and other media) mistakenly said so?

All of Gladstone's polemic is directed at Trump and his reality-challenged base, but her book is clearly written for a liberal-Democrat, NPR and PBS-supporting readership.  Few of them need to be told that Trump is a very bad man, the worst, a big-league demagogue who will destroy democracy if he isn't stopped, who became President because his conspiracy-theory-loving base were (willingly, don't let them off the hook) fooled by his propaganda.  Gladstone's intended readers are in no danger of being fooled by him.  But she betrays no awareness that her discussion of American politics also applies to the Democratic leadership; even when she cites a nineteenth-century critic of the press like James Fenimore Cooper, she does so because of his "eerie prescience" (39), not because his complaints show that the abuses he identified go back to (or even before) the beginning of the Republic.  In short, Gladstone is preaching to the choir, flattering and stroking their fears and prejudices, while believing that she's taking a courageous stand for Truth, Justice, and the American way.

Imagine -- well, you probably don't have to imagine -- that some Fox News personality wrote a book about the peril demagoguery poses to America, citing the same authorities Gladstone does, warning his or her readers not to be fooled by Barack Obama's or Hillary Clinton's manipulations, propaganda, and doggone-it undermining of reality.  Some, even most of their criticisms of the Adversary might well be justified, though that's purely optional.  But like Gladstone, they would never think of turning their analytical gaze on their own side.

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.

The Care and Feeding of Propaganda

A site called HowStuffWorks posted a "quiz" about the history of the Vietnam War, which I saw on Facebook this morning.  Usually I ignore these things, but I was curious to see what kind of history they were peddling, so I clicked through and answered the first question.

At first I was pleased to see that HSW knew that the war began before the Kennedy Administration, but everything else here is wrong.  Spectacularly wrong, in fact.

Exactly when "the Vietnam War" began depends partly on how you define the war.  Americans tend to think of it in terms of US troops on the ground, but it makes a lot more sense to go back to 1945, when the Vietnamese declared their independence from Japanese occupation and French colonialism.  You could probably trace it back at least to the 1800s, when French seized control of "Indochina," a blanket term for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and probably even farther back than that.  Beginnings in history are generally hard to pin down.  But as far as US involvement goes, 1945 is a convenient and not inaccurate starting point.

The French wanted to keep its possessions, and the US, not without some controversy, decided to back imperialism over self-determination.  Anti-communism was a handy excuse, since the Viet Minh, the most significant resistance force, was led by Communists.  The Vietnamese, who had fought with the Allies against the Japanese, resisted.  The fighting escalated, and by 1954 the US was giving France a billion dollars a year in military aid.

I can't really make sense of HowStuffWorks's official answer.  It seems to assume that Vietnam was already divided into North and South before 1954, which isn't so.  That division was a consequence of the truce line drawn in at the Geneva Conference later that year, and the truce line became a border when the US client dictator in the South, Ngo Dinh Diem, officially refused to hold the referendum required by the truce settlement, and South Vietnam became a separate state.

The North did not attack the South, however, until 1960, when Hanoi finally admitted that the Geneva agreements were a dead letter.  Before 1960 the fighting in the South involved Southerners, not all of them Communists, resisting the Diem dictatorship without the support of the North.  US aid to Diem's regime increased incrementally throughout that period, including weaponry and US military "advisers," officially just guys from the US government and there to help but in reality getting more and more involved in the fighting.  (This was typical of Eisenhower's foreign policy in Southeast Asia; see also the use of American forces in Indonesia, for example.)  In 1963 Diem began to lose his will to fight, so the US had him removed and largely took over that side of the fighting, thus commencing "the War in Vietnam" as most Americans think of it today.

So, as I say, HowStuffWorks got the history spectacularly wrong with the first question in its quiz.  I don't feel like continuing, or checking out their quiz about the Korean War.  But this is a reminder not to be too dismissive of most people's ignorance of history; it takes some work to find accurate accounts, and most people would have no idea how to begin looking for them.  Even events in people's own lifetimes are confusing, especially if they happened when one was young.  (Last week a student op-ed piece appeared the university newspaper, which exhibited utter confusion over the Birther controversy.  My scorn was tempered slightly when I remembered that the writer was still in grade school when Obama was first elected President.  It's not an excuse, but it's a partial explanation.  I might write more about that piece.)  The overall history of US involvement in Vietnam isn't all that murky, but it still involves battered US pride, so it will continue to be distorted.  We can expect the same about the War in Terror, but then you knew that, didn't you?

The Birth of Propaganda

I had a very interesting exchange on Facebook the other day.  Someone had posted a link to a PBS News Hour story about six US soldiers killed, and two more wounded, by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.  Judy Woodruff reported, "Defense Secretary Carter said the Bagram attack is a 'painful reminder' of the dangers U.S. troops face in Afghanistan."

I regret the deaths, though they're far fewer than the "More than 90 Afghan soldiers [who] were killed in Helmand in two days of fighting" at around the same time, to say nothing of the Afghan civilians we're killing with abandon.  But we could get out of Afghanistan. We have no business being there. There's no good reason for US troops to "face danger" there.

I said so in a comment, and got this reply:

Actually, we did have business there. We were part of a UN assistance mission that the was sent in to help the Afghan government deal with the Taliban. We sent additional troops, with the UN's blessing, at around the same time in order to go after bin Laden. He was in Afghanistan at the time. The operations merged and the UN is still there, according to their website. So is the Taliban and they sound like they're just as bad as they were 20 years ago.

That's quite a nice distortion of history, and it's not even ancient history.  It was written by someone around my age, who's old enough to remember the actual course of events.  Bush's invasion of Afghanistan was his own decision, based on the pretense that the Taliban were responsible for the September 11 attacks because some of the al-Qaeda leadership were based there.  The Taliban had offered to extradite Bin Laden if the US provided evidence of his guilt, an offer the US spurned.  Who did these ragheads think they were, calling for due process?  The United States is above all law.  The UN was brought in to ratify his agenda, though the US' main allies were the Northern Alliance, Islamist fanatics so vicious that the Taliban had at first been welcomed as liberators when they defeated them.  (The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan was founded in March 2002, after the US invasion.) The US installed Hamid Karzai, whose government is the one the other commenter had in mind that needed help "deal[ing] with the Taliban," but he only came to power after the Taliban had been defeated.  At which point the Bush regime lost most interest in Afghanistan and Bin Laden as Bush moved to invade Iraq.  Despite the Obama regime's escalation of the war after his election, the Taliban have gained back much of their territory and their influence.  True, they are as bad as they were twenty years ago, but the takeover of Afghanistan by Islamists in the first place was largely the work of the US, which supported them in overthrowing Afghanistan's Soviet-backed secular government and then fighting against the Soviet forces who really were asked in by the government for help against the jihadists.  Even after Gorbachev withdrew Soviet troops, that secular government managed to fight on against the Islamists for some time before it fell.

I pointed out to the other commenter that her fantasy version of history was rather like the distortion involved in the US invasion of Vietnam.  The more I thought about it, I realized that it was virtually cut from the same mold.  The propaganda justification for the US invasion of Vietnam had been that the government of Free South Vietnam, under attack by Communists in the pay of Moscow and "Peiping," had asked for our help to defend Vietnamese freedom.  This was a complete lie: the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem was installed by the US in 1954 to keep an anti-Communist foothold there, and US support including weapons, money, and American "military advisors" had grown steadily ever after, years before North Vietnam got involved after 1960.  Before then, the rebellion against the Saigon regime was almost entirely fought by Southerners, with no external support.  When Diem finally became interested in negotiating with those rebels, the US had him removed -- so much for the claim that we were standing by our allies.

Out of curiosity I looked at the other commenter's own Facebook page.  One of her recent posts claimed that Thanksgiving celebrates "the arrival of a group of people who were fleeing religious persecution. They were refugees, just like the people from Syria who are fleeing violence and oppression, looking for a new lives in new lands."  Thanksgiving isn't about the arrival of the Pilgrims, it's about their survival, celebrating a successful harvest.  But the Pilgrims were not refugees: they were refugees in the Netherlands, where they lived before they decided to try the New World, but they had freedom of religion there.  What they wanted was a place where they could be the persecutors, and they got one -- ironically enough from the same British government that repressed them at home. And there the parallel breaks down totally, for the Syrian refugees have not been granted land in the US by the Assad regime to start their own colony.  I credit the lady for having her heart in the right place and defending the acceptance of refugees in this country, but her distortions of history are not innocent.

It's hard for me to understand how someone who lived through the past fifteen years as an adult could have produced such a garbled version of US involvement in Afghanistan, but I'm not really surprised either.  And maybe "garbled" is the wrong word: her version was coherently written, it was just false.  I'm mostly intrigued that the propaganda narrative she'd absorbed was structured so much like the one used to justify the war in Vietnam, though I suppose most invaders and aggressors have used similar stories.  The United States often has.

Propagandists and Anti-Propagandists

The most useful part (for me, anyway) of Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe (Seven Stories Press, 2013), another book of interviews with Noam Chomsky, though by Laray Polk rather than Chomsky regular David Barsamian, is the appendices, which take up almost the last third of the book.  Appendix 1, for instance, is a declassified 1945 dialogue between two US Army brass who want to squelch reports from Japan about the effects of A-bomb radiation on survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima.  They're especially indignant because one of the sources is an American, not just the "Jap scientists" they can easily dismiss as "propagandists."  Appendix 4 is an open letter from a Marshallese magistrate to the US military doctor who'd been waltzing in irregularly to study the effects of radiation from nuclear testing on the islanders in 1970s.  "We've never really trusted you," says the writer.  "So we're going to invite doctors from hospitals in Hiroshima to examine us in a caring way" (105).  There's also material on the use of chemical weapons by Iraq in the early 1980s, and more I haven't gotten to yet. 

Readers unfamiliar with Chomsky's political writings could do worse than begin with this book, especially those with a special interest in the environment.  Since Chomsky is in his eighties now and has been concerned with politics as a dissident and writer for more than half a century, he provides a long view that shows the continuity in US policy and practice over that period.  For example:

It should be remembered that when he escalated the attack on South Vietnam fifty years ago from support for a murderous client state [installed by his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower] to outright US aggression, President Kennedy authorized the use of chemical weapons to destroy ground cover and also food crops, a crime in itself, even apart from the dreadful scale and character of the consequences, with deformed fetuses to this day, several generations down the line in Saigon hospitals as a result of persistent genetic mutations [36].

This conversation took place before President Obama's manufactured indignation over the use of chemical weapons in Syria this fall, which nearly led to another war in the Middle East.  It's good to be reminded that the US' own record with chemical warfare would (if we applied our own standards to ourselves) require a "humanitarian intervention," or invasion, to clean up our act.

Chomsky also talks about the symbiosis between academia, the military, the government, and corporate interests in the post-WWII period, which fits with David F. Noble's account in Forces of Production.

The actual US economy since the colonies has relied quite substantially on government intervention.  This goes right back to the earliest days of independence, and for advanced industry in the latter part of the nineteenth century.  The American system of mass production, interchangeable parts, quality control, and so on -- which kind of astonished the world -- was largely designed in government armories.  The railroad system, which was the biggest capital investment and, of course, extremely significant for economic development and expansion, was managed by the Army Corps of Engineers.  It was too complicated for private business [56].

Later Polk quotes a right-wing Christian radio pundit who said that Christian voters "would love to see a false smarty pants decapitated [!] by a real intellectual... He [Newt Gingrich] would tear Obama's head off."  Chomsky comments:

When we look over the record of famous debates, we find that they are not "won" on the basis of serious argument, significant evidence, or intellectual values generally.  Rather, their outcome turns on Nixon's five o'clock shadow, Reagan's sugary smile, lines like "have you no shame" or "you're no Jack Kennedy," etc.  That's not surprising.  Debates are among the most irrational constructions that humans have developed.  Their rules are designed to undermine rational interchange.  A debater is not allowed to say, "That was a good point.  I'll have to rethink my views." ... I don't know who Richard Lund is, and if he regards Gingrich as a "real intellectual," I don't see much reason to explore further [68].

Here I part company with Chomsky somewhat.  I think he's using "debate" in a narrow, tendentious way, referring to public spectacles like the candidates' debates staged during the American presidential campaigns.  Maybe we need another word for those performances, because it's true, they have nothing to do with "serious argument, significant evidence, or intellectual values generally."  They're gladiatorial combat, political sports events for people who are watching to cheer on their team, not to learn anything.  But that's not all there is to debate, as Chomsky knows, being a fierce, even bloodthirsty debater himself, whether about politics or about linguistics.  I have the same difference with him over his use of the word "intellectual," which he uses to refer to paid functionaries of the state and of business, not people who are interested in working with ideas.  But as with so many terms, I'm not going to harp too much on terminology: it's not the words but what they refer to, and there I agree about the function of argument and the proper role of those interested in ideas and evidence.

What Did "We" Know, and When Did "We" Know It?

We're now approaching the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, and Democracy Now! had a remarkable exchange today between longtime media critic Norman Solomon and Colonel Lawrence Wilkinson, who as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff helped him prepare Powell's notoriously mendacious presentation to the United Nations of the case for war.  Wilkerson surprised me by being fairly forthright: "George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others had decided to go to war with Iraq long before Colin Powell gave that presentation. ... It added to the momentum of the war. ... Frankly, we were all wrong. Was the intelligence politicized in addition to being wrong at its roots? Absolutely."

Solomon quite properly pointed out that "We weren't all wrong," that many people at the time were right: they shredded Powell's presentation immediately, and opposed the war.  The trouble, of course, was that the critics weren't "we": they weren't government insiders or mass media personalities, who almost unanimously and uncritically supported Bush and Powell and their war.  I noticed while listening to the program (as you can by clicking through on the first link above) that some of those TV news guys reacted to Powell's speech as if he were a football player who'd kicked the winning goal, as if war were a football game.  I'm thinking mainly of Sean Hannity, though it may not come across unless you hear his voice --

This irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible evidence today. Colin Powell brilliantly delivered that smoking gun today. Colin Powell was outstanding today. I mean, it was lockstep. It was so compelling, I don’t see how anybody at this point cannot support this effort.

 -- and Morton Kondracke: 

It was devastating, I mean, and overwhelming. Overwhelming abundance of the evidence. Point after point after point with—he just flooded the terrain with—with data.

But why not?  War is sport and football is a continuation of war by other means.

Solomon came down very hard on Wilkerson, stressing the lack of accountability for the men (they were mostly male) who fabricated the case for war, part of

a pattern of impunity—impunity to lie, impunity to deceive and distort, impunity that is personal, that is professional and is governmental. And that kind of impunity, which has caused so much death and misery in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, is being fast-forwarded, is prefigurative for where we are now.

He accused Wilkerson and his colleagues of using the long-discredited "We were just following orders" excuse.  Wilkerson's response was interesting, not quite what I expected.  First he tried to dismiss Solomon as

someone who makes comments as if he’d never been in government a day in his life or never been in—associated with power at this level. But I will say, first of all, that when I said "we," quote-unquote, I meant those in government, not people like him or Scott Ritter or anybody else who were protesting that Iraq didn’t have WMD at the time.

You see?  He made it explicit that "we" means only our ruling elites.  The rest don't count, even if they were right.  Solomon pointed out that whatever support there was for the war was a result of the relentless propaganda barrage, excluding critical and dissenting voices.  Wilkerson then tried to paint Solomon as a cultured despiser of The People:

I find it very difficult to, in the whole, say that all of those entities that you just described to include the American people were led down the primrose path by the propaganda flowing out of the White House and the Congress and elsewhere. That presents a picture of a pretty purblind, apathetic, ignorant public, representatives in the government and elsewhere. I can’t support that kind of broad-brush painting of the situation.

Amy Goodman then mentioned a million people protesting the war in the US alone before it even began; she might also have mentioned millions more around the world.  As Noam Chomsky says, it was virtually unprecedented to have so much activism against a war before it started.  Wilkerson then tried to justify the war after all.  There were, he claimed, good reasons to believe Bush's fabricated case for war:

—which was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, had used them against his own people. No one thought he would get rid of them, since his number-one enemy, Iran, was kept at bay, certainly in part, because he possessed them. I think there was a pretty good feeling across the world, not just in the United States, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And by the way, there is no question, I don’t think, in anyone’s mind, that once the international sanctions were off Saddam Hussein and once the international focus was off of him, he would go right back to building weapons of mass destruction again, including a pursuit of a nuclear weapon. So, let’s not make this too much of a—of, essentially, a calumny on the American people, their representatives in the Congress and all of those in the government.

NORMAN SOLOMON: It’s not a calumny on the American people at all. It’s an accurate accusation that the administration of George W. Bush, which Colonel Powell—former General Powell and you served—

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: You thought for yourself. You thought for yourself. Why can’t other Americans think for themselves?

NORMAN SOLOMON: —lied and deceived and spun for war continuously. And that’s reality. And the public responded to that.

I've probably quoted more of the debate than I should, and I recommend anyone who's interested to at least read the transcript, or watch the video.

Wilkerson surprised me because he ingenuously described the highest levels of government as an echo chamber where wishful thinking and outright lies bounce around and drive out any alternate, let alone critical or dissenting ideas.  To dissent, far from being desirable, is disloyalty.  Since war is the default approach to foreign policy, with diplomacy merely a frustrating form of foreplay, high officials inevitably look for reasons to go to war.  But these are rationales, not reasons: as the Downing Street Memo put it, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

To this day many people will say, and evidently want to believe, that the President knows more than we do, so we should trust his claims about policy.  This is probably the opposite of the truth: the President is at the center of the echo chamber, sealed off from the real world.  It doesn't have to be that way, since there is an expensive and well-organized staff organization whose job is to follow the media and brief the President on what it reports.  Clearly this process is highly selective, not merely weeding out but ignoring and excluding media that aren't part of the echo chamber.  The elite media get their information from (often anonymous) government sources who may or may not be trustworthy, but usually aren't.  This material is then fed back to the President in the daily press briefings. The President and his advisors, therefore, are probably less well-informed than many citizens outside this feedback loop who follow a wider range of media.  One example of how this can go wrong is President Obama believing at first the the Supreme Court had overturned the Affordable Care Act, partly because he relied on CNN instead of reading the opinion, and partly because the President and his partisans expected the law to be overturned.

Wilkerson asked Solomon why "the American people didn't think for themelves", but the question is why no one in the government thought for themselves.  Wilkerson even complained that Solomon hadn't come pounding on his door with the information that would have proven Bush and Powell wrong!

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: You did not call.

NORMAN SOLOMON: Are you saying Colin Powell would have met with us to talk about this information? It wasn’t secret at all, as well you know.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: We met with a number of people.

NORMAN SOLOMON: You knew how to reach Scott Ritter.

Of course Wilkerson had already dismissed Ritter, and Solomon himself, as ignorant nobodies whose opinions don't count.  His "we" only refers to those who count, even though he's explicit that those people were ignorant and even malignant.  Wilkerson got up in front of Democracy Now!'s audience -- who aren't "we" either, from his viewpoint -- and announced that the wise insiders who are qualified to guide our nation into the future aren't wise at all.

The reason all this is still important, and not the vain looking backward our President has so often deplored, is that we face a similar situation now, though it hasn't yet reached critical mass.  The US government and elite media continue to claim that Iran is a threat because of its "nuclear program," and the more they're corrected the more they keep repeating it.  Aside from that, we have the President continuing to talk about various crises -- Social Security and other "entitlements," health care, unemployment, the deficit (and the "fiscal cliff," averted for now but yawning not far ahead), and education, -- while making it clear that he has no more idea what he is talking about than Bush did, and doesn't care.  Or he's simply lying.  (Ah, the old Lying or Incompetent? conundrum.)  A president who wanted to hear a wider range of information and opinion could do so, at least in theory.  It would take some effort and would surely encounter resistance, but it could be done.  President Obama, however, won't be the president to do it.

Where the Wild Things Are

Open Salon features some strange stuff, often several months past its sell-by date, but some garbage is timeless, y'know? Like this piece denouncing the burning of books, reacting to the threatened Koran-burning last fall, by a "former advertising and marketing executive and winner of over 50 advertising awards for excellence, ... an unpaid Senior Advisor on John Kerry's 2004 Presidential Campaign... [and a] blogger, activist, Democratic Strategist on MSNBC and FOX News and founder of Common Sense NMS." As you'd expect from such a person, his post was bogus from the title on, which he repeated in the main text. "Americans Don't Burn Books"? I suppose this is an example of the "No True Scotsman" tactic, because of course, Americans often have burned books, though nowadays it's simpler just to pulp them. The blogger's extended tantrum is, by the way, an example of the very magical thinking that underlies burning books or flags or effigies: that the burned object is a poppet, and by burning it you burn the person it stands for. (This is often associated with "voodoo dolls", but poppets are European magic, as American as apple pie.)

Then there was this one, "Political Propaganda Has Defined Patriotism." Patriotism often goes along with the poppet-magic mentality, and it has always been associated with propaganda. (Remember Samuel Johnson's quip that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels -- the unsavory aspects of patriotism are not exactly a new discovery.) The post begins by invoking the "Nazi's" (a plural was presumably meant but the possessive was written) and the popular legend about the Big Lie, blithely ignoring, oh, say, Parson Weems, "The Star-Spangled Banner," and "Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'" According to the blogger, Paul Joseph Goebbels wrote that "The most brilliant propagandist technique… must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over and over." (Except that Goebbels didn't write that, it was Hitler. Details, details.) Then she writes, "Over the past two years, many of the very techniques Goebbels employed have been used to mobilize a discontent and fearful America." You'd have to call that liberal propaganda defining patriotism, because it's the kind of big lie that was a staple of liberal discourse under Bush, like Molly Ivins's 2007 lament, "What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn't supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny?" The US was never such a nation, any more than it was the kind of nation depicted in Reaganite propaganda (white people living behind picket fences in small towns, self-reliant and beholden to no one, especially government bureaucrats). So this post is a textbook example of what it pretends to denounce.

Most recently I stumbled on this post. The title was promising: "I'm an Atheist, Ask Me How." Except that the blogger doesn't know how. She begins:

I can hardly believe that Christianity is still so prevalent in this, the year of our Lord, 2010. It’s fucking bizarre that an organization advocating homophobia and misogyny is so globally cherished.

Starting from the atheist premise that there is no god, the answer should be obvious: an organization advocating homophobia and misogyny is globally cherished because homophobia and misogyny are globally cherished. To oversimplify somewhat, since there is no god, religious doctrines and dicta must be invented by people. Religions are collective constructions, so they don't need to be consistent or reasonable. Someone who for political reasons has a voice gets to insist that this or that bit goes into the stew. If enough people agree with him, his bit will be embraced and cherished and trumpeted by most believers. If not, his bit will be tactfully reinterpreted, or paid respectful lip service and ignored. Consider Mark 10:25, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God." It's as securely scriptural as Leviticus 18:22, in fact it's a teaching of Jesus, but you won't find most Christians putting a lot of store by it.

Or consider Jesus' prohibition of divorce, Mark 10:11. Even in the New Testament this teaching is diluted by Matthew, who shows Jesus giving a loophole for someone with an adulterous spouse. Conservative Christians hung on to it in the US until fairly recently, but by the time the divorced and remarried Ronald Reagan became a presidential contender, they were ready to shove this Christian teaching down the slippery slope. And now, homosexuals are demanding the "right to marry," and it's Reagan's fault.

I don't know why misogyny and homophobia are so popular, but they are, and if they weren't, it wouldn't be possible for religion to exploit them. And the blogger knows this, because she also says, "There is no God, Heaven, or Hell, all religion is man-made, and you are not morally superior because of your faith." See that? "All religion is man-made."

Further, where traditional religion fades, other, newer authorities take up these attitudes and run with them. Secular science's first take on homosexuality and women was straightforwardly reactionary: Homosexuals were not sinners, but they were sick, and could be cured. Women needed to stop trying to usurp the place of men, such as universities (hard study would render women sterile and eventually drive them mad), and should stay at home tending the children, as Evolution intended. Women who continued to rebel in this manner were clearly mannish and might even try to love each other (see homosexuality), would wear suits and smoke cigars, and civilization would perish as the contagion spread.

But this was all in the past, I hear you say, and we are more enlightened now! Perhaps, or perhaps not. Not until 1973 did the American Psychiatric Association remove homosexuality from its official list of disorders, and not for another couple of decades did it reject therapeutic attempts to "cure" us, though there had always been good evidence that such attempts were ineffective and mainly succeeded at making the patients miserable. As for gender, there are still plenty of scientists pushing a biological determinist line, that boys like guns and girls like dolls, and despite the critical flaws in their evidence and their claims, they still have no trouble getting funding for their research or publicity for their claims. The corporate media give them all the exposure they could wish, and the line is that only backward, biased feminists and leftists quibble with these secure, unbiased scientific findings. The case of race is similar.

The problem isn't science, or even religion; it's what the philosopher Walter Kaufmann named "decidophobia," the fear of fateful decisions. Neither science or religion can make our decisions for us. And that is frightening, as Kaufmann acknowledged. Most people evidently want to believe that there is a solid, certain place where they can stand, and absolute principles by which to make their moral choices. Atheists tend to choose different ones than theists, but they seem to be no less likely to pretend to know more than they know.

Look at You, Miss Information!

Here's another story that people should be aware of, but I can link to it. Briefly, John Caruso at The Distant Ocean saw a story from Ha'aretz claiming that another blockade-busting aid ship, the Rachel Corrie, had been negotiating with the Israeli government and would land quietly in Ashdod and allow its cargo to be shipped to Gaza from there. "The most recent messages from Halliday were said to be particularly encouraging," Ha'aretz reported.

But then, another story, from CNN this time, reported:

"We have not stopped and have no intention of stopping," said former Assistant U.N. Secretary-General Denis Halliday from aboard the vessel. "We will only stop when Israelis force us to do so." [...]

But [Adam] Shapiro said people on the ship deny that report and believe it is part of a misinformation campaign by the Israeli government.

So, be wary what you believe from the Israeli and US governments. The other day an article at the Korea Times described what is known as the "Sleeper Effect," complaining that "many South Koreans remained doubtful" about about the report, the work of "a multinational investigation team ... [which] concluded late last month that the Navy frigate Cheonan sank on March 26 due to a North Korean torpedo attack."

A vast majority of countries accepted the explanation backed by convincing evidence but many South Koreans seemingly remained doubtful. Rather, they turned to online posts, which alleged the Seoul administration fabricated evidence.

Domestic observers point out that the phenomenon is caused by the "sleeper effect," under which people tend to trust a message from low-credibility sources some time after they learned of it.

"Most people do not advocate even a persuasive message if it comes together with a discounting cue, or incredible sources, such as rumors on the Web," said a professor at a Seoul-based university.

"After some time passes, however, people forget about the source and remember just the persuasiveness of the message. Then, they believe in it and this is called the sleeper effect. I think the effect is behind the distrust on the Cheonan case."

This story appeared in the Biz/Finance section, under News rather than Opinion. But notice the sourcing. Why wasn't the professor or his university named?

Media Research, a local public opinion pollster, commissioned a survey in late May on the announcement of the sunken navy ship. To the surprise of the government, 24 percent of respondents said that they did not trust the official report.

This means that more than 10 million of the country's 48 million population are suspicious about the in-depth investigation by a multinational team, comprising both private experts and government officials.

North Korea reportedly used identity theft of South Korean people to upload a flurry of posts to contend that the South manipulated the evidence and the North had nothing to do with the case. The anonymous professor said that such a maneuver would have also played a role in creating the sleeper effect.

"Reportedly"? According to whom? And once again, why is that professor anonymous?

Now, there's very good reason to disbelieve anything worked on by low-credibility sources like the US government, or the South Korean government, or the Israeli government -- particularly when official enemies like North Korea or Iran or Hamas are involved. And while "online posts" are not necessarily reliable, sometimes they are, much to the fury of governments. Staff Reporter Kim Tae-gyu is carefully vague as to which "online posts" people were going to. And at the very end of the article, he tells us this:

Ever since the idea of the sleeper effect appeared around 60 years ago, debate has continued as to whether the phenomena take place often or is observed under only very unusual circumstances.

So, we have an anonymous professor pulling an unproved "effect" and North Korean computer hacking out of his fundament to explain away people's distrust of their untrustworthy government. That's serious journalism!

Staying with responsible and thoughtful newspaper work, longtime Korea Times pundit Michael Breen argues that South Korea should change its name so people won't confuse it with North Korea. Oh, and Kim Kardashian wants a bigger ass.