a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Here in Canada, the technique that the conservative  Prime Minister  Stephen Harper uses to support the fossil fuel energy industries, including the tar sands oil extraction industries, is to detour around the Parliament.  He has twice closed Parliament down (this rarely used legal maneuver is called peroguing).  Last week,  he used another authoritarian maneuver,  which was  to call a vote –on one hour’s notice– in the Senate (a non-elected advisory body which Harper has stacked with conservatives).  When the Senate rejected  the first major a climate bill since 2006, called C311, which had wide-spread legislative support,  the bill was effectively blocked from making  its way to the elected Parliament. No Canadian Prime Minister has used that “snap vote” technique to avoid  debate and discussion for seventy years, and polls show that the majority of Canadians in all parties were appalled. Suppressing democracy –suppressing debate–and supporting non-green corporations go hand-in-hand in Stephen Harper’s drive to make Canada a bulwark against what he calls “socialist schemes” to undermine the economy,  harm industries, destroy jobs,  and so forth.

One major work of education that Harper’s opponents are undertaking –particularly the Green Party– is to inform the citizens about the many ways that their democracy is being compromised.  Secondly,  they argue that a careful conversion of the economy into a green economy will create jobs while  it is protecting the environment  and the nation’s vast natural resources, particularly its minerals and its fresh water.  As the Canadians are not afraid in the American manner of social democracy or afraid to look elsewhere  for examples, the opposition parties try hard to get green economy success stories from around the world into public consciousness. This week they are rejoicing at a local success they can refer to.  A report by ClearSky Advisors, released in summary form to the media, says that by 2015, Ontario’s solar PV industry will have created 72, 000 person-years of jobs. The majority of Canadians do not view a green economy as a “socialist” threat to their livelihoods or their way of life; they view it as the key to a green future and to new job creation.

A key reason why environmental  activists and liberal-to-left politicians can put their attention to an education effort so effectively is that in Canada it is not normal practice for  corporations –or the government—to pay  scientists to generate  fake science about global warming and climate change.  Stephen Harper does not appeal to fake or propaganda science, he just uses the more direct methods of old-fashioned dictators: close down  from inside or render impotent the people’s elected government,  smother their democracy.

Appealing to fake science is, however,  crucial to the ill-health of American democracy now. And the 2010 book I mentioned last week,  Merchants of Doubt,  is a good place to find out how mis-education through propaganda science is driving so many American citizens to oppose all federal and many local efforts to create a green economy in America.  Propaganda science provides the hooks on which citizens who are not scientists can hang their delusions; it provides the channels into which citizens’ fears can flow, so that democracy becomes distorted,  unreal.  The government is busy closing itself down so that it will be “limited”–no dictator is needed.  And the Obama Administration has not yet figured out how to analyze the propaganda that is spurring so many citizens to vote against their economic self-interest and against the health of the country and the environment.

Ever since the years in which pre-war and wartime  propaganda campaigns were so successful in promoting the developments of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and in the USSR under Stalin,  both psychoanalysts and political theorists have produced  shelves of studies of propaganda and how it works.  It seems to me that the most important insight of all this work is that a successful propaganda message must be rooted in an ideology or a religious belief suitable for proselytizing or a philosophical tenet –it cannot be superficial, it is not like a catchy advertisement for a useless product that will make you Superman or a sexy promo for something that will make you Cinderella. People must not be able to dismiss the propaganda  as trivial or self-serving; they must not be able  to discover that  they have been seduced into a wishful fantasy world.  Lastingly effective propaganda  must get people to feel that their lives and their ways of life are at stake in the message and that the messengers are saviors or redeemers or in some way people who are willing to risk their own lives to save the world. The message must be more like a sermon or an exhortation than an entertainment, and it needs to go way beyond mere disinformation or lying about facts.

Particularly in wartimes or economic hardtimes, when mere “facts” are contested continuously as part of military strategy or desperate retailing,  propaganda  succeeds by being more noble and more about ultimate needs for security or safety, about meaning and world-view.  It induces people to delusions if it is “total,” embracing everything,  explaining the way the world really is down to the last fact, as a controlling parent might–or a Big Brother. Once someone has imbibed the propaganda, it can make him or her feel that now everything is clear, intelligible, retrospectively and prospectively. You make a kind of  pact with the vision and with your fellow visionaries,  submitting, and feeling tremendously enlivened  and meaningful doing so.

During the War, the mechanisms of Nazi and Soviet propaganda were not well understood, but by about 1950,  after the Nuremburg Trials and after reports of the Gulag leaked out of the USSR, propaganda analysis got more sophisticated.  Hannah Arendt could offer in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), for example,  a formulation that showed what propaganda in the two regimes had in common.  She explained that the root of Nazi propaganda was an alleged “law of nature” asserting the superiority of the Aryan race over all others and the rightness of the promise of a Thousand Year Reich, a world conquest. For the Stalinists, an alleged “law of history” asserted that the bourgeois ruling class would inevitably collapse from within,  so that all the working classes needed to do was seize the revolutionary moment and then emerge triumphantly  into the classless society. Both regimes drew upon “science” to assert their guiding ideology: race science, on the one hand,  and a version of historically oriented Marxian political economy, on the other. Both regimes had departments of propaganda in which their propagandists were located (and where the science of propaganda manufacture could also be cultivated and the latest technologies –radio, film—used to disseminate it).  “Science” proved the ideologies and disproved any science threatening to them. Dissenters to the propaganda  science were  not funded, disgraced or disappeared.

The American wartime government land military learned from both the Nazis and the Soviets about propagandizing techniques, and attacked back. But, unfortunately, they attacked back not by raising questions about why people need ideologies but by trying to mount a counter-ideology.  No fully formed counter-ideology was ready to hand, but to those who ran America’s propaganda departments it was clear that the American people would have to be described as a superior people,  a chosen people (perhaps even God’s chosen people). America’s destiny would have to be presented as exceptional,  a bigger and better Manifest Destiny. There would need to be a vision of righteous conquest. Christian soldiers. Racial ideology was not, of course, invoked, that would have been too Nazi; but neither was it repudiated in the assertion of American superiority.  Eventually, the propaganda script stressed the superiority of democratic individualism over collectivist  socialist authoritarianism. To counter the Stalinist campaign, American superiority was linked to capitalism,  as free of state planning as possible.

For many of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project,  the American  wartime propaganda campaign and its Cold War continuation offered justification for making the most destructive weapon in the history of war,  for using it, and for asserting its ethical acceptability . The A-bomb was disproof of the Nazi law of nature and the Soviet law of history, and proof of the alternative America-Wins scenario. After the war was, in fact, won,  the majority of the Manhattan Project scientists began to reconsider what they had done,  and joined directly or indirectly the various campaigns in America and in Europe that were  opposed to any further development of nuclear weapons (“the freeze campaign”). They argued for strict control of existing nuclear weapons through international treaties and inspections.  But a vocal and tenacious minority of the scientists gave their allegiance to the weapons and to the America-Wins ideology. They became the key Cold Warrior scientists, and the Merchants of Doubt shows in meticulous detail how they also stood behind every subsequent “scientific” research effort to discredit any kind of science felt to be a threat to the triumph of American capitalism or the greatness of American democracy.

Both governments and corporations drew upon the services of the unrepentant Manhattan Project  scientists (and others who hitched onto their patriotic and pro-capitalist cause). In chronological order, they offered: disproof (in the 1950s) of the health dangers of tobacco smoking;  disproof  of the dangers to wildlife, soil, and water  of chemical pollutants like DDT; disproof of the dangers of acid rain; disproof of the concept of “Nucelar winter”; disproof of the dangers of the ozone hole; and disproof of all objections to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which disproof is in use  currently among Republicans claiming that the New Start treaty fails to address “modernization” of America’s nuclear arsenal and its missile defenses. But the most extensive  merchandizing of doubt coming from this fake science group, its labs, its think tanks, and its radio talk show propagandists focuses on global warming and climate change. The the fake scientists say that the science demonstrating global warming is “junk science,” and all the evidence  that human activity is influencing the climate is bogus and corrupted by a hidden agenda.

Consistently, the propaganda science developed over the last fifty years has been used to show that American capitalism still has socialist or communist enemies outside and inside the country –now they are leftist climate scientists. The identities of our enemies have changed over time,  particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union,  but they are always there,  “socialist” (or collectivist)  and evil.  The scientists who are talking about climate change –and are thus anti-American–have  a secret agenda for destroying capitalism with unnecessary regulations and with  treaties that are attacks on American sovereignty,  like those that were  proposed in Kyoto and Copenhagen, and those that will be proposed  several weeks hence in Cancun, Mexico.

Over the fifty years that the merchants of doubt have been supplying America-Wins talking points, the general public has become  more and more confused about how “a cause” is identified, how to tell the difference between real science and fake science, how to know whether there is any such thing as uncontaminated or uncorrupted science, who to trust. By this time in our history,  when we are losing wars –in Iraq, in Afghanistan—and losing economic clout in a terrible crisis,  confidence is our country’s Most Valuable World-Player status is at a low,  low,  ebb.  So the latest version of our America-Wins ideology, which features unregulated, free markets carrying America to victory,  has been pumped with increasing fervor, and it has grown strong enough to do double service as both a law of nature and a law of history.  As a law of nature, it asserts that America will survive and triumph because it  will be the  nation most able to globalize and to adapt to the planet’s changes,  caused by the sun and by normal shifts in temperature.  If not regulated by their government,   Americans will innovate,  like pioneers in the wilderness: building new types of homes and cities, buying up whatever  resources they do not have and inventing new ways to use them.  They will control the world’s financial markets. They will grow their way out of any threat to their hegemony. As a law of history,  free marketism says that all remaining socialisms are collapsing from within and American capitalists need only seize the revolutionary moment to create a capitalist utopia.  Any form of socialism, communism,  mixtures of communism and capitalism (like China), or social democracy will fall before a deregulated system of “freedom.” Freedom will show its stuff. Also, no need to try to combat climate change –which is a propaganda myth of our enemies anyway; whatever  natural climate fluctuations we face in the future will be met head-on by freedom-loving American  techno-geniuses and financial wizards.

Citizens who get caught up in this kind of thinking cannot demand the re-orientation of our political life that is necessary to create a green economy,  regulate capitalism so that it serves the nation and humankind rather than inflating further a tiny super-rich capitalist class –the very class that the America-Wins ideology assumes will lead America to its triumph. Citizens who get caught up in this kind of thinking can see and say that “Wall Street” and “the big corporations that spill oil into the Gulf” are ripping off everybody and the harming  the environment, but then turn right around and oppose any government regulation that might stop the abuses they rightly identify. “Limited government” trumps “People abuse and neglect.” It is so illogical!  say those who  have not signed up for  the ideological framework.

But the framework has its own logic or supralogic.  People who have  for decades believed “science”-backed propaganda  assuring them that America  is the good, the great, and the chosen nation,  “the mightiest nation on earth,” the inevitably superior sole superpower, the parent above all parents in the world,  the source of security and faith in the future,  hold onto their beliefs, even when –or especially when—reality raises questions. They hope their beliefs will prove true if buttressed with more patriotism, more America is Number One!  slogans, more pseudo-science.  When you believe your own country’s propaganda –which is another way of saying, when you are deluded—you feel more secure than when you are  in an uncertain  world, which seems to be growing more and more frightening, hostile, and chaotic, wandering around like Hansel and Gretel.

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