Alternative Radio producer and author David Barsamian says rhetoric in the wake of the terrorist attacks is eerily reminiscent of Nazi propaganda, and the U.S. media are in lockstep with the government.
Speaking to an audience of about 50 people at UNM Sunday, Barsamian discussed what he called a rising tide of dissent from people who oppose the war in Afghanistan, and the renewed importance of an alternative voice to corporate and publicly-funded media.
Based in Boulder, Colo., Barsamian is the author of "The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting" and "Propaganda and the Public Mind: Interviews with Noam Chomsky," among other books. He produces the weekly radio show Alternative Radio, heard locally on Saturdays at 6 p.m. on KUNM, 89.9 FM.
He said well-known U.S. policy critics such as Noam Chomsky and historian Howard Zinn have been beleaguered with speaking requests as the war advances to include other nations suspected of supporting terrorism.
"These are the kind of voices that are omitted from corporate media and largely from National Public Radio," he said.
He said the U.S. media keep the viewing public in a burqua - the screened headdresses worn by women in some Muslim countries that have become a metaphor for what some call oppression by religious leaders. By keeping our field of vision narrow, he said, Americans have little context for the Sept. 11 attacks and the resulting war.
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And the mainstream media neglect to cover stories about international war criminals harbored in the United States and the history of U.S. support for nations that later become our enemies, he said.
"This is the information not getting out there - these are the wrong stories for corporate media," he said. "You are the main target for propaganda in this country. It's important that information be shaped to control how you view events."
He said the media follow suit with the government's claim that the United States became a target because it is a "beacon of democracy," ignoring complex political and economic factors that play roles in terrorism.
"They just say, 'The evildoers hate us,'" he said.
Drawing a comparison to the 1972 film "The Godfather," Barsamian said the United States' relationship to foreign nations is not unlike the Mafia as depicted in the movie.
"The supplicant knows that if he disobeys - lights out, he's dead," he said, referring to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and former Panamanian general Manuel Noriega, once an ally of the United States and now serving a 40-year sentence in a Miami federal prison for racketeering.
"The United States is occasionally critical of weapons of mass destruction, but if you're on our side, you get a free get-out-of-jail pass," Barsamian said, adding that the United States government had no criticism for Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
Similarly, the United States' support of the Afghan Mujahadeen during an attempted Soviet invasion in the late '70s and '80s is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media, he said. The Taliban later emerged from the Mujahadeen, a few years after the Soviets' 1989 withdrawal.
"It was all just about humiliating the Soviet Union," he said. "That's the hidden story of U.S. support for the Taliban. If we had an open and democratic media, these things would be known."
He said U.S. journalists overseas weren't taken seriously because of their lack of understanding of the political systems, languages and causes behind years of ethnic clashes.
"In the United States, we have what is called 'drive-by journalism,'" he said, relating a story about a 22-year-old Boston Globe reporter sent to cover the war without any local contacts or knowledge of the language.
Barsamian called President George Bush's reference to North Korea, Iran and Iraq as an 'axis of evil' a phrase that would make Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proud.
"The media in the U.S. constitute a private ministry of propaganda," he said.
Barsamian said his recent studies of Nazi propaganda techniques had revealed some striking similarities.
Examples he cited include the use of simple slogans such as "the war on terrorism," clear identification and vilification of the enemy such as the reference to the terrorists as "evildoers," and the creation of an environment of perpetual fear.
"They keep you in a state of fear so you will sign off on more military budget and give up more of your rights," he said.
Barsamian earned one of several laughs from the crowd when he decried a New York Times writer who, after describing the conditions of Afghan prisoners held at Camp X-Ray in Cuba, wrote "and still, they are angry and frustrated."
"Well, why would these ungrateful detainees be angry about an eight by eight cage and two chances a week to exercise?" he said. "What ingrates. I wonder if he wrote this with any sense of irony. That's the kind of stuff you get in the newspaper of record."
Barsamian issued a call to arms to activist organizations and members of the Green Party, which sponsored the event, to maintain dialogue against the war.
He ended with a revised version of Gil Scott-Heron's 1974 song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."
