Fantastic media analysis, thanks a million. Reminds me of this passage from Scott Horton’s recent post, discussing Hannah Arendt’s views on the political lie with Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz:

Excerpted from Thinking in Dark Times: Six Questions for Roger Berkowitz, published December 4, 2009 by Scott Horton in Harpers.org

2. Both in her study of totalitarianism and her writings in the wake of the Pentagon Papers, Arendt focused on the relationship between politics and lying. How do you relate this to the experience America has been through in the wake of the attacks on 9/11?

[Berkowitz:] Members of the U.S. government claimed that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. They asserted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They insisted that all the prisoners held in Guantánamo prison were hardened terrorists. They swore that the United States does not torture its prisoners. What is striking in all of these claims is not that we now know them to be false. Rather, it is that at the time they were made, repeated, and accepted, facts already existed that showed these assertions to be false.

Arendt helps us to see that these lies were not like the lies a President tells when he conceals information to avoid a panic. Such lies are important to politics. Nor were these post-9/11 lies along the lines of Lincoln’s claim that the Civil War was fought so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.” Such a lie exemplifies the grand and dignified freedom of human beings to change the world for the better. It reminds us that it is the great liars who are remembered as the great politicians.

The political lies Arendt worries about are not mere falsehoods. They are political acts in which facts are denied and alternative realities are created. In denying facts, the political liar acts to change the world, to make reality anew so that it conforms to our needs and desires. In this way, lying is at the essence of political action.

In its hostility to facts, however, the political lie opens the door to a politics that not only denies facts but works actively to disempower facts, thus enabling the creation of a coherent albeit fictitious world. The danger inheres in the utter logicality of the fictional narrative. To preserve the fiction, facts that contradict it need to be eliminated.

That’s precisely what I’m on about under the neologism, myth-jacking. The power of the political lie comes from its ability to tap into the ultimate powers of our own dreams, terrors, and aspirations. It does so by employing the very metaphorical language of myth.

In Harold Pinter’s memorable words, “It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay.”

Excerpted from Art, Truth & Politics, Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Lecture in Literature

But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The power of myth is powering weapons-grade propaganda the world over. You know what that means?

Hey, poets, wake up! Time to rise and shine.

By knowbuddhau on December 5th, 2009 at 1:25 pm