by Mickey Huff
Indeed, a LexisNexis search for “bin Laden” and “conspiracy theories” yields over 500 such stories and opinion pieces appearing across Western print and broadcast media outlets for the week of May 2, 2011.25 “While much of America celebrated the dramatic killing of Osama bin Laden,” the Washington Post opined, “the Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists still had questions. For them and a growing number of skeptics, the plot only thickened.”26
Along these lines, retired General Mark Kimmitt remarked on CNN, “Well, I’m sure the conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this, about why it was done? Was it done? Is he still alive?”27 “The conspiracy theorists are not going to be satisfied,” Glenn Beck asserted. “Next thing you know, Trump is going to ask for the death certificate. And is it the real death certificate? And then all hell breaks loose.”28
Like the Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the Vietnam War and the events of 9/11 used to justify the invasion of Iraq,29 the narrative has since become a part of official history, disingenuously repeated in subsequent news accounts and elementary school history books—a history handed down from on high and amplified by corporate news outlets continually perpetuating nightmare fictions to a poorly informed and intellectually idle public.
This psycho-symbolic template is simultaneously evident in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on December 14, 2012, and in the Boston Marathon bombing events and their aftermaths on April 15, 2013. Indeed, the brief yet intense Sandy Hook conspiracy panic, and to a lesser degree that of the Boston bombing, revolved at least partially around the “conspiracy theory professor,”30 who, as a credentialed member of the intellectual class, overstepped his bounds by suggesting how there are many unanswered questions related to the tragedies that might lead one to conclude that the events did not take place in the way official pronouncements and major media have represented them. It is telling that critical assessments of domestic events and their relatedness to a corrupt media and governing apparatus are so vigorously assailed.
Yet to suggest that the news and information Americans accept as sound and factual on a routine basis is in fact a central means for manipulating their worldviews is not a matter for debate. Rather, it is an empirically verifiable assertion substantiated in a century of public relations and psychological warfare research and practice. Such propaganda efforts once reserved for foreign locales are now freely practiced in the US to keep the population increasingly on edge and disinclined to voice valid questions and concerns.
As a disciplinary mechanism against the public use of reason directed toward political leaders and the status quo, conspiracy panics serve to reinforce the myths and thought processes sustained by the corporate media’s typically wholehearted advocacy of official narratives and deference to the dominant political rationality. Despite (or possibly because of) the immense technological sophistication at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a majority of the population remains bound and shackled in the bowels of Plato’s cave, forever doomed to watch the shadows projected before them.
CONCLUSION
In 2013, the truth emergency remains a major concern, and in an era of seemingly never-ending pseudo-events and Potemkin villages presented as the reality with which we must contend,31 the application of independent reason in pursuit of truth has all too frequently been replaced with an unthinking obeisance toward the smoke screen of expertise disguising corporate power and control.
Addressing the present truth emergency that began with the complex and still largely inexplicable set of events surrounding 9/11 requires a broad rekindling of the reasoning faculties so critical to further apprehending the objective reality Fromm pointed to almost sixty years ago. With this in mind we must ask whether modern educational institutions themselves are up to such a task. Project Censored is incorporated into scores of college classrooms each year, and is exemplary in pursuing the broader goal of an authentically liberal (liberating) education. Yet much of what passes for education today increasingly involves the conditioning of a docile yet efficient workforce and citizenry. Such a populace is far removed from seriously understanding or questioning the overall order of things, much less recognizing their own intrinsic social and historical agency.
In fact, the university environment actually makes one less inclined to voice opinions generally regarded as unpopular. This is reflected in a 2010 study by Association of American Colleges and Universities revealing that less than 20 percent of 9,000 faculty members surveyed believe it is safe to hold “unpopular views” on campus. Along these lines, the research also suggested how the longer students are enrolled at university the less open-minded they become. Of 25,000 students polled, only 40 percent of first-year students feel safe expressing unpopular positions versus 31 percent of seniors. Thus, ironically, the modern university tends to diminish the capacities it was originally established to cultivate—namely an appreciation of and proficiency in reasoning and informed inquiry.32
In a vein similar to Fromm’s, Mills observed how the liberal educator’s responsibility to the student and public revolves around two central aims:
What he ought to do for the individual is to turn personal troubles and concerns into social issues and problems open to reason—his aim is to help the individual become a self-educating man, who only then would be reasonable and free. What he ought to do for the society is to combat all those forces which are destroying genuine publics and creating a mass society—or put as a positive goal, his aim is to help build and strengthen self-cultivating publics. Only then might society be reasonable and free.33
Moving forward with such an orientation toward the intersections of history, biography, and society can only aid in addressing the ongoing truth emergency. And so is it also a central underlying theme guiding the endeavors of Project Censored—namely the undaunted use of reason toward the identification and reaffirmation of truth as a fundamental tenet in public deliberation, to authentically inform and sustain the human condition.
JAMES F. TRACY, PHD, is associate professor of media studies at Florida Atlantic University. His scholarly and critical writings have appeared in a wide variety of academic journals, edited volumes, and alternative news and analysis outlets. Tracy is editor of the Union for Democratic Communications’ journal Democratic Communiqué. He is also a regular contributor to the Center for Research on Globalization’s website GlobalResearch.ca, and a contributor to Project Censored’s previous publication, Censored 2013: Dispatches From the Media Revolution.
Notes
1. This chapter draws in part on two previously published essays I have authored. “Social Engineering and the 21st Century Truth Emergency,” Global Research, March 19, 2013, http://www.globalresearch.ca/false-flags-fake-media-reporting-deceiving-the-public-social-engineering-and-the-21st-century-truth-emergency/5325982; and “Media Disinformation and the Conspiracy Panic Phenomenon,” Global Research, May 24, 2013, http://globalresearch.ca/media-disinformation-and-the-conspiracy-panic-phenomenon/5336221. Thanks to Project Censored director Mickey Huff for additional edits and sourcing for publication in this volume.
2. Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, “Truth Emergency and Media Reform,” Daily Censored, March 31, 2009, http://www.dailycensored.com/truth-emergency-and-media-reform/. For more on the Truth Emergency, see Peter Phillips, Mickey Huff, et al., “Truth Emergency Meets Media Reform,” in eds. Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth, Censored 2009 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 281–295; Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, “Truth Emergency: Inside the Military Industrial Media Empire,” in eds. Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, Censored 2010 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009), 197–220; and Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips, eds., Censored 2011, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010), sec. 2, “Truth Emergency,” 221–352; Mickey Huff, Andy Lee Roth, and Project Censored, eds., Censored 2013: Dispatches From the Media Revolution (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), sec. 2 , “Truth Emergency,” 213–331; and the Truth Emergency conference website from 2008 at http://truthemergency.us.
3. Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Ig Publishing, 2005 [1928]), 48, 71, 72.
4. Eliane Glaser, “The West’s Hidden Propaganda Machine,” Guardian, May 17, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/17/west-hidden-propaganda-machine-social-media.
5. J. S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought (New York: Routledge, 1996), 25.
6. The tentative transition from community to society examined by Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and their contemporaries suggests the basis for such myths as the individual’s faith in religion and collective ties was eclipsed by acceptance of the narratives from those representing civil society’s apparent rationality. This faith, however, is groundless and devoid of the moral dimension accompanying the myths arising from communal existence. For Tönnies, “community is the true and lasting common life; society is only temporary.” In other words, the community provides the concrete basis for human existence and involvement while society is characterized by a tentative expression arising from an industrial-metropolitan milieu. Julien Freund, “German Sociology in the Time of Max Weber,” in Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet, eds., A History of Sociological Analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 154.
7. David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd, abridged ed. (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1961 [1950]), 192–197; C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 171–173.
8. Maggie Koerth-Baker, “Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times, May 21, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazine/why-rational-people-buy-into-conspiracy-theories.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
9. For some of the latest research on this subject, read Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 1-52.
10. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 335. “That we follow the laws of our inner nature—and this is what freedom is—becomes perceptible and convincing to us and to others only when the expression of this nature distinguish themselves from others; it is our irreplaceability by others which shows that our mode of existence is not imposed upon us from the outside.”
11. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1955), 63. On issues relating to objectivity in previous Project Censored publications, see Mickey Huff, Andy Lee Roth, and Project Censored, Censored 2013: Dispatches From the Media Revolution (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), sec. 2, “Truth Emergency,” 214–15.
12. Slavko Splichal, Principles of Publicity and Press Freedom (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 98, 102.
13. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000[1959]), 174. Hans-Georg Gadamer similarly analogizes such a psycho-social “situation” in terms of the “standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence an essential part of the concept of situation is the concept of ‘horizon’ . . . A person who has no horizon is a man who does not see far enough and hence overvalues what is nearest to him. Contrariwise, to have an horizon means not to be limited to what is nearest, but to be able to see beyond it.” The rule similarly persists “[i]n the sphere of historical understanding.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Historicity of Under-standing,” in Paul Connerton, ed., Critical Sociology (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 118.
14. Jack Z. Bratich, Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2008).
15. See CIA Document 1035-960, “Concerning Criticism of the Warren Commission Report,” JFK Lancer, n.d. http://www.jfklancer.com/CIA.html.
16. See deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America.
17. Bratich, Conspiracy Panics, 11.
18. See the work of deHaven Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America, especially 1–52, and the works of Peter Dale Scott.
19. This despite some of the findings of the “Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the US House of Representatives” (1979) that admitted problems with the earlier government reports on JKF’s death, as did the previous Church Committee (1976). Oliver Stone’s new book and Showtime series with Peter Kuznick, Untold History of the United States, continues to challenge conventional interpretations and official narratives of US history in the twentieth century.
20. That was the coroner’s official report. Some have argued it was a possible murder by elements within the US government, but that evidence is not conclusive. For example, Charlene Fassa, “Gary Webb: More Pieces in the Suicide Puzzle, Pt. 1,” Rense.com, December 11, 2005, http://rense.com/general69/webbi.htm.
21. Robert Parry, “CIA Admits Tolerating Contra- Cocaine Trafficking in 1980s,” Consortium News, June 8, 2000, http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/060800a.html.
22. Death Certificate of Timothy James McVeigh, June 11, 2001, http://www.autopsyfiles.org/reports/deathcert/mcveigh,%20timothy.pdf.
23. Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee, Final Report on the Bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, April 19, 1995, 2001. See also Oklahoma City: What Really Happened? Chuck Allen, dir., 1995, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmBrMpcd_2k.
24. The film, A Noble Lie, argues the April 19, 1995 bombing that destroyed much of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building involved far more revealing evidence than the Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains, http://www.anoblelie.com/articles/the-noble-lie-in-oklahoma-city. For more on historical issues regarding controversial and potentially dubious dealings of the FBI and the post 9/11 war on terror, see Trevor Aaronson, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism (New York: Ig Publishing, 2013), which is based on Aaronson’s article, “The Informants,” Mother Jones, September/October 2011, http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-informants. Aaronson’s story was #4 in Censored 2013.
25. See James F. Tracy, “State Propaganda, Historical Revisionism, and Perpetuation of the 911 Myth,” Global Research, May 6, 2012, http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-9-11-myth-state-propa-ganda-historical-revisionism-and-the-perpetuation-of-the-9-11-myth/30721.
26. Emily Wax, “Report of bin Laden’s Death Spurs Questions From Conspiracy Theorists,” Washington Post, May 2, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/report-of-bin-ladens-death-spurs-questions-from-conspiracy-theorists/2011/05/02/AF90ZjbF_story.html. For an academic review and analysis on previous reports of the death of Osama bin Laden, see David Ray Griffin, Osama bin Laden: Dead of Alive? (Northampton: Olive Branch Press, 2009).
27. Gen. Mark Kimmitt on CNN Breaking News, “Osama bin Laden is Dead,” CNN, May 2, 2011.
28. Glenn Beck, “Beck for May 2, 2011,” Fox News, May 2, 2011.
29. See Norman Soloman, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (Hoboken: Wiley, 2006). See the film online at http://www.warmadeeasythemovie.org.
30. “Florida Conspiracy Theory Professor Who Said that the Sandy Hook Shooting May Not Have Happened Now Argues that the Government Was behind the Boston Marathon Bombing,” Daily Mail, April 24, 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2314370/James-Tracy-Florida-conspiracy-theory-professor-said-Sandy-Hook-shooting-happened-argues-government-Boston-Marathon-bombing.html. [Editors’ note: the professor in question is the author of this chapter. Also, it should be noted that Tracy has been quoted out of context often and attacked both in and by the media. That is one of the main focal points of this chapter—how corporate media work to discredit unpopular views and play “shoot the messenger” rather than report factually and transparently about controversial matters and how the press often fail to question the very people in power who craft official historical narratives.]
31. For more on the notion of pseudo-events, see Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Athenum, 1962); and for analysis on how this phenomenon impacts news reporting and public consciousness in the
present, see Mickey Huff, Andy Lee Roth, et al., “American Idle: Junk Food News, News Abuse, and the Voice of Freedumb,” in Censored 2013, 151–176.
32. Eric L. Dey, Molly C. Ott, Mary Antonaros, and Matthew A. Holsapple, Engaging Diverse Viewpoints: What is the Campus Climate for Perspective Taking? (Washington DC: American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2010), 7, http://www.aacu.org/core_commitments/docu-ments/Engaging_Diverse_Viewpoints.pdf.
33. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 186.
CHAPTER 7
Censorship That Dares Not
Speak its Name
The Strange Silencing of Liberal America1
John Pilger
Note: The chapter that follows, John Pilger’s “Censorship That Dares Not Speak Its Name: The Strange Silencing of Liberal America,” is an honest and heartfelt account of the frustration on the part of a distinguished journalist when faced with censorship from within our community. We include it here because to do otherwise would be to join in the silencing of a necessary voice. As the publishers of Gary Webb, Noam Chomsky, Kurt Vonnegut, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and, indeed, Project Censored, we could not do otherwise. At the same time it pains us to do so, since in it John writes critically of friends of ours, and because we do not want to be part of the long-standing habit of the Left of disparaging its own. Nonetheless, in the end, our clear choice, our responsibility, is to include it here. We hope that readers will understand that in doing so we are placing our vote squarely on the side of openness and of free speech.
