Understanding Power - The Indispensable Chomsky (Part 1 of X)

Being a summary of pretty much most of Noam Chomsky's views on virtually everything, ranging from the role of media, global affairs, the corporate capitalism that form the basis of the system that everyone single one of us live in today, irregardless of whether we like it or not, this is a must-read. Noam Chomsky simply turned my worldview upside down.

I am just gonna sit on the idea of summarizing and sharing everything that I've learnt or read, because that's quite impossible. This is just part 1, of many parts that will follow, and I am going to start with a point that he shared:

'Back in the 1920s, the major manual of the public relations industry actually was entitled Propaganda (in those days, people were a little bit more honest). It opens saying something like this: the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is a central feature of a democratic system - the wording is virtually like that. Then it says: it is the job of the "intelligent minorities" to carry out the manipulation of the attitudes and opinions of the masses. And really that's the leading doctrine of modern liberal-democratic intellectual thought: that if you lose the power to control people by force, you need better indoctrination' (p. 36)

The proclaimed critical discussion facilitated by the supposedly media industry that happened under the watch of Western government, or rather should I say corporate capitalism, is in fact constricted and merely allowed to an acceptable limit for the purpose of a subtle but nevertheless truly exists propaganda movement, as Chomsky called "brainwashing under freedom".

When they're supposedly a counterweight to those in power, they're still under the purview and therefore being moderated by exactly those who they are supposed to be critical of and undermine, contrary to popular beliefs. In this manner, it's naturally hard for them to fulfil the role that they were meant to fulfil.

Media press such as Daily Herald, News Chronicle and the Sunday Citizen which had a much larger readership than the elite press disappeared in the 1960s, largely due to market pressures - the readership didn't matter, what mattered was the business interests who held the power to dictate the live or death of these press, and they didn't like these press one bit, for they threaten the system of power these business interests flourish under, that's why they're gone.

Allende Coup in Chile where President Salvado Allende was overthrown by a coup engineered by the CIA. In a declassified document from Robert Mcnamara to Mcgeorge Bundy, the open discussion about funding military counterparts to thwart and drag down democratic governments so as to secure "the welfare of nations", which in fact was just the welfare of multinational corporations.

On that, Chomsky and his team garnered much support to support the 'Propaganda Model' of media.

Looking across atrocities of the same depravity, those where the locus of responsibility lies with the perceived enemies: evidences, however flimsiest and potentially biased as they may be, were used to bolster their allegations.

But when it comes to those affecting them and their allies, they attempt to weasel their way out of complicity and responsibility by remaining silent and blaming the complexities of worldview, history and foreign cultures.

The only saving grace? Perhaps the slowly but steadily growing political consciousness and sophistication in the general population, in large part due to the cumulative return on education investments, is at least positive trend that we're seeing that could perhaps serve as a bulwark to stem further indoctrination.