"you can't handle the truth"

Susan A. Brewer. Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. x + 342 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-538135-1.

Reviewed by H. Matthew Loayza (Minnesota State University, Mankato)

The concluding chapter of Susan A. Brewer’s Why America Fights begins with a quotation from the climactic scene of the 1992 film A Few Good Men, where Marine Colonel Nathan Jessep (Jack Nicholson) contemptuously dismisses the right of prosecuting attorney Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) to weigh in on national security matters.  When the furious Jessep roars “You can’t handle the truth!” to Kaffee, he echoes the verdict that U.S. policymakers have customarily rendered upon the American public for over a century.  In Why America Fights, Brewer explores the U.S. government’s use of overt propaganda to handle, manipulate, and advance specific versions of the truth to convince the public that the wars that they are asked to fight are worthwhile and virtuous.
...
The Second World War, according to Brewer, temporarily diverged from the general pattern when the Roosevelt administration originally defined the target audience for wartime propaganda as an educated, informed citizen who needed to be persuaded of the viability and righteousness of Uncle Sam’s plans.  However, this idea neither survived the war, nor was it resurrected in subsequent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.  These limited conflicts, unlike the total mobilization of 1941-45, required relatively fewer contributions or sacrifices, and as Brewer observes, less civic participation.  Indeed, the author advances a compelling, if disturbing argument that since 1945, civic participation in wartime has declined to the point where citizens are asked to serve only as spectators and cheerleaders.  The mass media, she contends, has usually failed to challenge the official line in any meaningful way until discrepancies between the official narrative and reality became so evident (as occurred in both Vietnam and Iraq) that sticking to script would be to indulge in fantasy.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29336  

What's 9/11? Afghans never heard of NYC terror

Derrick Jensen on Pacifism

The Colbert Report: Nassir Ghaemi

Nassir Ghaemi

Psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi believes that mental illness can foster great leadership, but the Republican presidential candidates are too "normal."

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/394151/august-08-2011/nassir-ghaemi

"Democracy Now?"

Meet Professor Juan Cole, Consultant to the CIA

by JOHN WALSH

 

None of this is all too surprising given Cole’s status as a “humanitarian” hawk.  But it is outrageous that he is so often called on by Democracy Now for his opinion.  One of his appearances there was in a debate on the unconstitutional war in Libya, with CounterPunch’s estimable Vijay Prashad taking the antiwar side and Cole prowar.  It would seem strange for the left to have to debate the worth of an imperial intervention.  Certainly if one goes back to the days of the Vietnam War there were teach-ins to inform the public of the lies of the U.S. government and the truth about what was going on in Vietnam.  But let us give Democracy Now the benefit of the doubt and say that the debate was some sort of consciousness raising effort.  Why later on invite as a frequent guest a man who was the pro-war voice in the debate?  That is a strange choice indeed.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/08/30/meet-professor-juan-cole-consultant-to-the-cia/

Urban Rebellions Can Trigger Social Change

Saturday, 13 August 2011 09:05 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 
 

The riots, in effect, were the "forcible entry" of the Black masses into political discussions that usually treated them and their communities as invisible or irrelevant. Black poverty, deprivation and racism in urban areas went from being political non-issues to one of the most important issues of the decade.

http://www.international.to/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1961%3Aurban-rebellions-can-trigger-social-change&catid=97%3Abreaking-news&Itemid=119

The Bad Deal

 by James K. Galbraith

The President is not a progressive – he is not what Americans still call a “liberal.” He is a willful player in an epic drama of faux-politics, an operative for the money power, whose job is to neutralize the left with fear and distraction and then to pivot rightward and deliver a conservative result.

What Barack Obama got from the debt deal was exactly what his sponsors have wanted: a long-term lock-in of domestic spending cuts, and a path toward severe cuts in the core New Deal and Great Society insurance programs – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And, of course, no tax increases at all.

To see the arc of political strategy, recall that from the beginning Obama handed economic policy to retainers recruited from the stables of Robert Rubin. From the beginning, he touted “fiscal responsibility” and played up the (economically non-existent) “problem” of the budget deficit. From the beginning his team sabotaged economic recovery with optimistic forecasts and inadequate programs – in the clear interest of protecting the banking system from reform.