It\u2019s important, when listening to the official shapers of opinion in the media, to ask ourselves what they really mean by the words they use. As Orwell pointed out in \u201cPolitics and the English Language,\u201d those in power use language to obscure meaning more often than to convey it.<\/p>\n
A good example is the recurrence of phrases like \u201cendangered our national security\u201d and \u201caided the enemy,\u201d from people like Eric Holder, Peter King and Lindsey Graham, in reference to leaks by people like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. Now, they certainly intend to evoke certain associations in the minds of listeners with their word choices. If you\u2019re not careful, you may find yourself responding in just the way the users intend \u2013 allowing their words to conjure up in your mind homes, families, neighbors, churches, a whole way of life, threatened with invasion and destruction by a nameless, faceless enemy \u2013 in the words of Orwell\u2019s Two-Minute Hate, \u201cthe dark armies \u2026 barbarians whose only honour is atrocity.\u201d<\/p>\n
But if you look behind the words, their actual meaning is something entirely different. To the kinds of people who throw around such words, \u201cnational security\u201d is a corporate-state world order enforced by the United States, run by people like themselves, which enabling global corporations to extract resources and labor from the people of the world and live off unearned rents. \u201cThe enemy\u201d is you. And the danger is that you might figure out what\u2019s going on and disturb their cozy little setup.<\/p>\n
Alex Carey, historian of propaganda, argues that the central pillar of elite rule in mass democracies is the engineering of consent. In the late 19th century two phenomena emerged simultaneously: First, the giant corporation and the power nexus between corporation and state; and second, the threat to that power nexus from universal literacy and universal suffrage. Hence the importance of propaganda, of managing public opinion, in formally representative political systems.<\/p>\n
Samuel Huntington wrote in The Crisis of Democracy,<\/em> in 1974, that the United States in the two decades after WWII had been the \u201chegemonic power in a system of world order\u201d \u2013 a state of affairs possible only because of a domestic power structure in which the country \u201cwas governed by the president acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the Executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private establishment.\u201d And this, in turn, was possible only because of the acquiescence, the passivity, of the American people, and their acceptance of it as a natural, inevitable, and perfectly legitimate state of affairs.<\/p>\n The Sixties, as you might expect, scared the crap out of these people. Until then the \u201cNew Deal social contract\u201d had worked fairly well (at least for middle class whites): We\u2019ll give you a suburban home, a TV, a new car every five years, and a secure union job with benefits and periodic pay raises. In return, you\u2019ll show up for work in between contract renewal times and let us manage the factories as we see fit without bothering your pretty little heads about it. And you\u2019ll let us manage the world in the interests of GE, GM and United Fruit Company, and look the other way when we install genocidal fascist regimes or fund death squads in Indonesia, Nigeria and Latin America.<\/p>\n The 1960s was the first time since WWII when it seemed to dawn on a significant portion of the public that \u201canother world is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n Since then, management of public opinion to engineer consent has been doubly important to them. That\u2019s why the \u201cnational security\u201d community engages in psychological operations to manage public perceptions, the same way they\u2019d manage the perceptions of a wartime enemy \u2013 in both cases, \u00a0the goalbeing to manipulate the desired reaction out of us.<\/p>\n See, we really are the enemy. Every once in a while one of them slips up and reveals that all that stuff about government representing the sovereign will of the people is so much buncombe. For example, former Clinton Press Secretary Sandy Berger\u2019s statement in 2004: \u201cWe have too much at stake in Iraq to lose the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s why they get so bent out of shape when people like Manning and Snowden tell the enemy \u2013 people like you and me \u2013 the ugly truth about how their sausage is made. Their power depends on keeping us \u2013 the enemy \u2013 in the dark.<\/p>\n Kevin Carson<\/strong> is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org<\/a>) and holds the Center\u2019s Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory.<\/em><\/p>\n