Manufacturing Consent

Public Opinion Series

Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, 1921, Excerpts

The manufacture of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique, because it is now based on analysis rather than of rule of thumb. The processes by which public opinions arise and the opportunities for manipulation are open to anyone who understands the process.

To most of the big topics of news, the facts are not simple, and not at all obvious. News and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.

The picture which the publicity man makes for the reporter is the one he wishes the public to see. He is censor and propagandist, responsible to the whole truth only as it accords with his employers’ own interests. The development of the publicity man is a clear sign that the facts of modern life do not spontaneously take a shape. They are given shape by somebody. Thus the ostensible leader often finds that the real leader is a powerful newspaper proprietor.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, 2016, Excerpts 

Osip Ivanovich had actually mastered the English language right down to the past perfect progressive as early as 1939. But American movies still deserved their careful consideration, he argued, not simply as windows into Western culture, but as unprecedented mechanisms of class repression. For with cinema, the Yanks had apparently discovered how to placate the entire working class at the cost of a nickel a week. “Just look at their Depression,” he said. “From beginning to end it lasted ten years. An entire decade in which the Proletariat was left to fend for itself, scrounging in alleys and begging at chapel doors. If ever there had been a time for the American worker to cast off the yoke, surely that was it. But did they join their brothers-in-arms? Did they shoulder their axes and splinter the doors of the mansions? Not even for an afternoon. Instead, they shuffled to the nearest movie house, where the latest fantasy was dangled before them like a pocket watch at the end of a chain. Yes, Alexander, it behooves us to study this phenomenon with the utmost diligence and care.”

And the westerns? They were the most devious propaganda of all: fables in which evil is represented by collectives who rustle and rob; while virtue is a lone individual who risks his life to defend the sanctity of someone else’s private property. In sum? “Hollywood is the single most dangerous force in the history of class struggle.”

Blinded Elites

Imperial Hubris Series

Imperial Hubris by Michael Scheuer, 2004, Excerpts

Because of the pervasive imperial hubris that dominates the minds of our political, academic, social, media, and military elites, America is able and content to believe the Islamic world fails to understand the benign intent of U.S. foreign policy and its implementation. When U.S. leaders speak blithely and ad nauseum of building a democracy like our own in Afghanistan or Iraq or Burma or Russia or Liberia or Saudi Arabia, saying that it can be done speedily and on the cheap, they betray ignorance of foreign lands, cultures, and histories as well as the creeds and ambitions of other peoples.

It is comforting to American elites still refusing to see that U.S. government actions in the Islamic world are causing Muslims to attack the United States. And because our elites are so full of themselves, they think America is invulnerable; cannot imagine the rest of the world does not want to be like us; and believe an American empire in the twenty-first century not only is our destiny, but our duty to mankind, especially to the unwashed, unlettered, undemocratic, unwhite, unshaved, and antifeminist Muslim masses. Arrogance because the elites cannot believe a polyglot bunch of Arabs wearing robes, sporting scraggily beards, and squatting around campfires in Afghan deserts and mountains could pose a mortal threat to the United States.

Enemies of the State

Lucifer Effect Series

The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts

Among the operational principles we must add to our arsenal of weapons that trigger evil acts by ordinarily good men and women are those developed by nation-states to incite their own citizens. Nations prepare their young men to engage in deadly wars while also preparing citizens to endorse engaging in wars of aggression. Propaganda helps accomplish this difficult transformation. Images of the enemy are created by national media propaganda, in complicity with governments, to prepare the minds of soldiers and citizens to hate those who fit the new category “your enemy". Such mental conditioning is a soldier’s most potent weapon. Without it, he might never put another young man in the cross-hairs of his gun sight and fire to kill him.

In creating a new evil enemy in the minds of good members of righteous tribes, “the enemy” is: aggressor, faceless, rapist, godless, barbarian, greedy, criminal, torturer, murderer, an abstraction, or a dehumanized animal. Scary images reveal one’s nation being consumed by the animals that are most universally feared: snakes, rats, spiders, insects, lizards, gigantic gorillas, octopi, or even “English pigs.”

In the News:

US military apologizes to Afghans over offensive propaganda leaflet

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/06/us-military-apologises-to-afghans-over-offensive-propaganda-leaflet

07 Sep 2017

The US military in Afghanistan has apologized for distributing propaganda leaflets featuring a passage from the Qur’an superimposed on to the image of a dog, considered unclean in Islam, which causes offence to Muslims. The leaflets depict a lion chasing a dog bearing a Qur’anic passage that appears on banners used by Taliban militants. The recent leaflet reads: “Take back your freedom from the terrorist dogs and cooperate with coalition forces so they can identify and eliminate your enemy.” Dropping propaganda leaflets is a basic part of military psychology operations, and has been widely used by coalition forces in Afghanistan. The method has at times had detrimental outcomes. In 2009 a box of leaflets dropped from a British Royal Air Force plane landed on and killed a young Afghan girl in Helmand after it failed to open in mid-air. 

US airdrops anti-Isis propaganda cartoon over Syrian city of Raqqa

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/27/us-airdrops-anti-isis-cartoon-propaganda-raqqa-syria

27 Mar 2015

The latest US attempt at combatting the Islamic State’s social-media-borne propaganda is decidedly low-tech: leaflet drops displaying a grisly cartoon that portrays the jihadist army as indifferent murders.

Thoughts on Religious Extremism

Mormon Series

Bertrand Russell

“One is often told that it a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world.”

Philip Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs

“Extreme and bizarre religious ideas are so commonplace in American history that it is difficult to speak of them as fringe at all. To speak of a fringe implies a mainstream, but in terms of numbers, perhaps the largest component of the religious spectrum in contemporary America remains what it has been since colonial times: a fundamentalist evangelicalism with powerful millenarian strands.

The doomsday theme has never been far from the center of American religious thought. The nation has always had believers who responded to this threat by a determination to flee from the wrath to come, to separate themselves from the City of Destruction, even if that meant putting themselves at odds with the law and with their communities or families. We can throughout American history find select and separatist groups who looked to a prophetic individual claiming divine revelation, in a setting that repudiated conventional assumptions about property, family life, and sexuality. They were marginal groups, peculiar people, people set apart from the world, the Shakers and the Ephrata community, the communes of Oneida and Amana, the followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.” 

Opium Series

This series explores opium and its history. Opium is a commodity of notoriety and tremendous value. Wars have been fought over this lucrative commodity, the infamous Opium Wars in China. The fighting in Afghanistan is currently being waged in the province of Helmand, the world’s most productive region of opium. Apparently, it’s still worth fighting over.

Opium: A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon by Barbara Hodgson, 1999, Excerpts

Opium: potent and evocative, it is a word with the power to intoxicate both speaker and listener, a word that implies languor, mystery and a sort of sinister beauty. Nothing seems to capture the sensuousness of this word better than the image of the dreamy smoker adrift in his illicit paradise. To consume opium regularly, in any form, is to risk forging an almost unbreakable and deadly bond. Opium is one of the most addictive and debilitating substances on earth, the opium addict has been called slave, fiend and ghost.

Seeds of Terror by Gretchen Peters, 2009, Excerpts

Opium makes up between 30 and 50 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP. It’s essential to recognize the economic miracle the drug traffickers have achieved. From one of the world’s most remote and backward regions, where the transport network and infrastructure is almost completely shattered, they have managed to integrate an agricultural product into the global economy. From importing precursor chemicals to giving loans to thousands of small farmers to providing security for shipments as they move across the border, this is an organizational feat of the highest order. And it’s all about making money. Although the Taliban commanders are deep in the opium trade, they are not the masterminds. This is being run by businessmen.

The Opium Plant

Medicinal Opium

Heroin, Morphine and Opium

Opium Early History

Jesus Opium – Prelude to the Opium Wars

Indian Farmers - Opium Debt

British Empire and the Opium Trade

Mandarins’ Message to the Opium Merchants

Opium Smugglers

Opium Wars – Plundering China

Golden Triangle

French Monopolize Vietnam Opium Trade

1960s Thailand Heroin Trade

1960s Burma Heroin Trade

1960s Acetic Anhydride: Opium to Heroin

Opium and Afghanistan

Soviet-Afghan War: 1979-1989

Opium and the Soviet-Afghan War: 1979-1989

Opium, Pakistan, and the Soviet-Afghan War: 1979-1989

Opium Lords Emerge during Soviet-Afghan War

Post Soviet-Afghan War

Post Soviet-Afghan War: U.S. Aid Cut Off

Mujahideen Consolidate Power

Origins of the Taliban

Pakistan and the Taliban

Osama bin Laden and Opium

Victor Bout: Merchant of Death

Opium Poppy Ban of 2000: Inside Trader Con

Post 9/11 Afghan War

Afghan Opium Government Installed

Juma Khan’s Opium Network

Helmand Province: World’s Leading Opium Producer

Opium in Literature and Film

Opium in the News

San Francisco, Clarion Alley

A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan

Short film by Media Storm, from the Soviet invasion and the mujahideen resistance to the Taliban and the American occupation, examines thirty years of Afghan history.

How Collecting Opium Antiques Turned Me Into an Opium Addict

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/journey-into-the-opium-underworld/

24 Sep 2012

Great selection historical photographs and story of Steve Martin’s, no relation to the actor, journey from opium paraphernalia collector to opium user.

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, 2003 Exceprts

He brought what I asked for – a steel spoon, distilled water, disposable syringes, heroin, and a carton of cigarettes – and he set the items out on the little dresser. I cooked up a taste of heroin. The dose sat in the syringe for almost an hour. I picked it up and put the needle against a fat, strong, healthy vein in my arm. The damnation drug, the drug that had driven me to commit stupid, violent crimes; that had put me in prison; that had cost me my family, and lost my loved ones. The everything-and-nothing drug: it takes everything, and gives you nothing in return. But the nothing that it gives you, the unfeeling emptiness it gives you, is sometimes all and everything you want.

I pushed the needle into the vein, pulled back the rose of blood that confirmed the clean puncture of the vein, and pressed the plunger all the way to the stop. Before I could pull the needle from my arm, it made my mind like the Sahara. Warm, dry, shining, and featureless, the dunes of the drug smothered all thought, and buried the forgotten civilization of my mind. The warmth filled my body, killing off the thousand little aches, twinges, and discomforts we endure and ignore in every sober day. There was no pain, there was nothing.

Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh, 2016, Excerpt 

Then Mr. Chan said, ‘We’re almost ready now, Mr. Reid. When I roast the opium again it will catch fire. The smoke will last for one or two seconds. You must be prepared – you must blow out your breath, emptying your chest so you can draw in all the smoke. When the opium begins to burn I will put it on the dragon’s eye’ – he pointed to the tiny hole in the pipe’s octagonal cup – ‘and you must draw hard.’

Zachary had already emptied the air from his chest: when the flaming pellet was placed on the ‘dragon’s eye’ he inhaled deeply, filling his lungs with the smoke. Its consistency was almost that of a liquid, dense, oily and intensely perfumed; it poured into his body like a flood, coursing through his veins and swamping his head.

As he leant back against the cushions Zachary suddenly became aware of his pulse – except that it wasn’t beating only in his wrist or his neck. It was as if his whole body were pulsating; the drumming of his heart was so powerful that he could feel his blood surging into his capillaries. The sensation was so strong that he looked down at his forearm and saw that his skin had changed color. It was flushed and red, as if every pore had been awoken and irradiated. 

He looked up at the ceiling and suddenly it was as if his eyes had become more sensitive, his gaze more powerful. He could see minute cracks in the wood; his hearing too seemed to have become more acute and the lapping of water was loud in his ears. He closed his eyes, luxuriating in the feeling of weightlessness, allowing the smoke to carry him away, as if on a tide.