Mark Phillips: The American Question

7/22/03: Unprecedented? Hardly.

MoveOn's we-smell-blood project, misleader.org, makes a false and misleading claim on its home page:

"If the Bush administration distorted intelligence or knowingly used false data to support the call to war, it would be an unprecedented deception."

It would by no means be unprecedented. It would be in keeping with the mainstream of American political leadership since the Spanish-American war.

The Vietnam war comes to mind. Americans were told by successive presidents that,

1. A sovereign nation named "South Vietnam" existed. It did not. South Vietnam's temporary existence was purely the result of the American government's refusal to allow elections in the south, which would have been handily won by Ho Chi Minh.
2. This nation was under external aggression by a totalitarian neighbor named "North Vietnam." It was not. It had declared war on its own people, who were so close to defeating it that American troops were required to ensure its temporary survival.
3. North Vietnam was using military force against South Vietnam because its dominance over South Vietnam was unwanted by the South Vietnamese people. It was not. It was using military force in the south to oppose the foreign (American) army there.
4. South Vietnam was a democratic country, part of the Free World. It was not. It was one of the most murderous military dictatorships in history.
5. North Vietnam had attacked American naval vessels in international waters. They had not. North Vietnamese patrol boats had come under attack by American escorts after intercepting a joint American - South Vietnamese commando raid on the North Vietnamese coast.

Sadly, our leaders' deceptions about our presence in Vietnam were hardly unique. Public support for the first Gulf War was achieved in part by the tear-streaked Congressional testimony of a "nurse" from a "Kuwaiti hospital", who sobbingly said she'd seen little babies die after their incubators were stolen by Iraqi soldiers. Turned out she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Minister of Information, who had not been in the hospital at the time of the Iraqi invasion. The invasion of Greneda was said to have been a "rescue mission" to save American students from something-or-other. Reagan labeled his contra thugs "freedom fighters" and "the George Washingtons of their country." Americans were told that their invasion of the Dominican Republic would "restore democracy" there. Pacifist American public opinion was manipulated into World War One by the Creel Commission's propaganda campaign based on false stories of German atrocities. The Spanish-American war was justified by accusing Spain of sabotaging an American battleship: "Remember the Maine!" American campaigns in Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua (twice), China and elsewhere were justified in the names of freedom and democracy; General Smedley Butler, who fought in many of them, later called them "a racket", and said that he himself had been "a gangster for capitalism."

Why is MoveOn blind to this history?

Because their political ideology forces them to be.

MoveOn's purpose is to use the electoral apparatus to empower Democrats. Their ideology is that the government is responsive to the will of the people, if only the right candidates are elected. Misleaders like Bush are aberrations within a system which otherwise functions as a force for good in the world. This story is an ideological narrative which spirits away real history, disallowing the historical truth that liberal Democrats such as Kennedy and Johnson practice the same deception, for the same purposes, as Reagan, Bush, and other right-wingers.

Ideology is a type of narrative which makes invisible that which should be obvious. MoveOn's ideologically-inspired blindness is one illustration.

Back to 2003 menu
Back to Mark's Blogspace main page

More Information

1. "All roads lead to Tehran", Phillips
2. "Complexity", Phillips
3. "weblogs: a history and perspective", blood
4. "You've got blog", Mead
5. EatonWeb Portal
6. BlogHop
7. Blogger
8. Blogroots
9. The Pepys Project