Last Sunday’s Washington Post<\/i> carried a front-page article by Dana Priest, in which she revealed \u201ca CIA covert action program that has helped Colombian forces kill at least two dozen rebel leaders.\u201d Thanks to \u201ca multibillion-dollar black budget\u201d\u2013\u201cnot a part of the public $9 billion package of mostly U.S. military aid called Plan Colombia\u201d\u2013as well as \u201csubstantial eavesdropping help from the National Security Agency,\u201d the initiative has been successful, in Priest’s assessment, decimating the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, as the country’s \u201cvibrant economy\u201d and \u201cswanky Bogota social scene\u201d flourish.<\/p>\n
The lengthy piece offers a smorgasbord of propagandistic assertions, pertaining both to Washington’s Colombia policies, and to its foreign conduct in general. For a sampling of the latter, consider one of the core assumptions underlying Priest’s report\u2013namely, that our noble leaders despise drugs. The FARC’s \u201clinks with the narcotics trade\u201d and \u201cdrug trafficking\u201d motivated U.S. officials to destroy their organization, we’re supposed to believe. True, CIA informants in Burma (1950s), Laos (1970s), and Afghanistan (1980s) exploited their Agency ties \u201cto become major drug lords, expanding local opium production and shipping heroin to international markets, the United States included,\u201d Alfred W. McCoy’s research demonstrates. True, a few decades ago the Office of the United States Trade Representative joined \u201cwith the Departments of Commerce and State as well as leaders in Congress\u201d for the purpose of \u201cpromoting tobacco use abroad,\u201d the New York Times <\/i>reported in 1988, quoting health official Judith L. Mackay, who described the resulting \u201ctobacco epidemic\u201d devastating the Philippines, Malaysia, and other countries: \u201csmoking-related illnesses, like cancer and heart disease\u201d had surpassed \u201ccommunicable diseases as the leading cause of death in parts of Asia.\u201d True, the DEA shut down its Honduran office in June 1983, apparently because agent Thomas Zepeda was too scrupulous, amassing evidence implicating top-level military officials in drug smuggling\u2013an inconvenient finding, given Honduras’ crucial role in Washington’s anti-Sandinista assault, underway at the time.<\/p>\n
But these events are not part of History, as the subject has been constructed in U.S. schools. It’s common to read, every year or so, an article in one of the major papers lamenting the fact that \u201cAmerican students are less proficient in their nation’s history than in any other subject,\u201d as Sam Dillon wrote in a 2011 piece for the Times<\/i>. The charge is no doubt true, as far as it goes: Dillon explained that only a \u201cfew high school seniors\u201d tested were \u201cable to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War,\u201d for example. But the accusation is usually leveled to highlight schools’ inadequacies, with little examination of the roles these institutions are meant to serve. And the indictments are hardly novel: in 1915, a Times<\/i> story on New York City’s public schools complained their graduates \u201ccan not spell simple words,\u201d were incapable of finding \u201ccities and States\u201d on a map, and so on. That piece explicitly critiqued graduates’ abilities to function as disciplined wage-earners, and so was more honest than the majority of today’s education coverage. The simple fact is \u201cthat the public schools are social institutions dedicated not<\/i> to meeting the self-perceived needs of their students [e.g., by providing an understanding of how the world works] but to preserving social peace and prosperity within the context of private property and the governmental structures that safeguard it,\u201d David Nasaw concludes in his fascinating history of the subject. Private schools, to be sure, are similar in essential respects. And one result of this schooling is that well-educated journalists can repeat myths about U.S. foreign policy, as their well-educated readers nod in blind assent.<\/p>\n