Edward S. Herman Quotes

Jesus Christ: An irresponsible rabble rouser of communistic tendency; victim of an early witch-hunt.

Suspecting that we would be accused of apologetics for the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky and I went to some pains to point out Khmer Rouge crimes and to stress that our purpose was to emphasize the discrepancy between available facts and media claims and to lay bare what we saw to be a propaganda campaign of selective indignation and benevolence. This effort was futile. With such a powerful propaganda bandwagon underway, from the very beginning the mass media were closed to oppositional voices on the issue, and any scepticism, even identification of outright lies, was treated with hostility and tabbed apologetics for the Khmer Rouge. Our crime was the very act of criticizing the workings of the propaganda system and its relation to US power and policy, instead of focusing attention on approved villainy, which could be assailed violently and ignorantly, without penalty. The issue was framed as a simple one: those for and against Pol Pot. […] I would estimate with some confidence that over 90 percent of the journalists who mentioned Chomsky's name in connection with Cambodia never looked at his original writings on the subject, but merely regurgitated a quickly adopted line. The critics who helped formulate the line also could hardly be bothered looking at the actual writings; the method was almost invariably the use of a few selected quotations taken out of context and embedded in a mass of sarcastic and violent denunciation.

The beauty of the democratic system of thought control, as contrasted with their clumsy totalitarian counterparts, is that they operate by subtly establishing on a voluntary basis – aided by the forces of nationalism and media control by substantial interests – presuppositions that set the limits of debate, rather than by imposing beliefs with a bludgeon. Then let the debate rage; the more lively and vigorous it is, the better the propaganda system is served, since the presuppositions (U.S. benevolence, lack of rational imperial goals, defensive posture, etc.) are more firmly established. Those who do not accept the fundamental principles of state propaganda are simply excluded from the debate (or if noticed, dismissed as “emotional,” “irresponsible,” etc.).

In the post-Vietnam War era the need for Communist abuses has been no less pressing than before. More facts have come to light on the scope of U.S. violence in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the extent of which U.S. officials lied to the public with regard to their programs and methods, and the brazenness with which these officials defied treaty obligations and international law. Much as the government and the media tried to isolate the scoundrelism of Watergate from the much more profound immorality of the “secret” devastation of Cambodia, the linkage between the two could not be entirely concealed and therefore tended to discredit still further the campaign to bring “freedom” to South Vietnam. Counterrevolution, torture and official murder in Argentina, Guatemala, Chile, and other U.S. satellites was also reaching new peaks. Thus, if Cambodian terror did not exist, the Western propaganda systems would have had to invent it, and in certain respects it did […].

An earlier version of this volume was originally contracted for and produced as a monograph by Warner Modular Communications, Inc., a subsidiary member of the Warner communications and entertainment conglomerate. The publishing house had run a relatively independent operation up to the time of the controversy over this document. The editors and publisher were enthusiastic about the monograph and committed themselves to put it out quickly and to promote it with vigor. But just prior to publication, in the fall of 1973, officials of the parent company got wind of it, looked at it, and were horrified by its “unpatriotic” contents. Mr. William Sarnoff, a high officer of the parent company, for example, was deeply pained by our statement on page 7 of the original that the “leadership in the United States, as a result of its dominant position and wide-ranging counter-revolutionary efforts, has been the single most important instigator, administrator, and moral and material sustainer of serious bloodbaths in the years that followed World War II.” So pained were Sarnoff and his business associates, in fact, that they were quite prepared to violate a contractual obligation in order to assure that no such material would see the light of day. […] they decided to close down the publishing house […]. The history of the suppressed monograph is an authentic instance of private censorship of ideas per se. The uniqueness of the episode lies only in the manner of suppression. Usually, private intervention in the book market is anticipatory, with regrets that the manuscript is unacceptable, perhaps “unmarketable.” Sometimes the latter contention is only an excuse for unwillingness to market, although it may sometimes reflect an accurate assessment of how the media and journals will receive books that are strongly critical of the established order.

On the assumption that the shoot-down was central to the larger plan of Hutu Power and genocide, this would have required a miracle of Hutu incompetence; but it would be entirely understandable if it was carried out by Kagame’s force as part of their planned program to seize state power.

The model does suggest that the mainstream media, as elite institutions, commonly frame news and allow debate only within the parameters of elite interests; and that where the elite is really concerned and unified, and/or where ordinary citizens are not aware of their own stake in an issue or are immobilized by effective propaganda, the media will serve elite interests uncompromisingly [...] Many liberals and a number of academic media analysts of the left did not like the propaganda model. Some of them found repugnant a wholesale condemnation of a system in which they played a respected role; for them it is a basically sound system, its inequalities of access regrettable but tolerable, its pluralism and competition effectively responding to consumer demands.

Free election: A post-pacification election, in which the “hearts and minds” of the survivors are shown to have been won over by the force of pure reason.

Operation Rat-Killer: A U.S. military campaign of 1951-1952, designed to wipe out North Korean guerillas; the terminology reveals an early version of the Mere Gook Rule.

As American foreign policy has moved toward the open use of military power to dominate other states, the employment of Orwellian language has become more frequent. Words with emotionally satisfying (or repellant) qualities are increasingly employed to describe their precise opposites. Nowhere is this more in evidence than the claim by President Johnson and Secretary Rusk that the goal of American policy in Southeast Asia is the preservation of “independent” states.

The question of relative atrocities may be illustrated by this fact: a close examination by the author of newspaper files for 1966 alone disclosed somewhere between 600 and 1,000 reported South Vietnamese civilian deaths attributed to “errors” in the use of “allied” firepower. During the same year the number of NLF killings, including paramilitary personnel, according to official Saigon estimates, was 1,000. That is, our acknowledged accidental civilian killings were of the same order of magnitude as official claims of NLF killings. It should be obvious that U.S. bombings and killings in “unfriendly” villages were many times greater than killings by mistake.

On June 20, 2009, twenty-six-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan was shot to death in Iran while participating in a peaceful demonstration in Tehran. Her death became a “galvanizing symbol, both within Iran and increasingly around the world,” Rachel Maddow said on MSNBC. Video images of her plight circled the globe. The same day Roger Cohen denounced the killing on the editorial page of the New York Times. Only fifteen days later, nineteen-year-old Isis Obed Murillo was shot dead by the Honduran military during a peaceful protest in Honduras. Like Agha-Soltan’s, his death was recorded in video images that circulated on the Internet. The differential media interest in US newspaper coverage was 736-8 in favor of Agha-Soltan; the TV differential was 231-1 in favor of Agha-Soltan. The dramatic video images of Murillo’s killing never caught hold in the world beyond Honduras. The social media, which had displayed such potential for organizing protest in Iran, failed to come to life in Honduras. The Propaganda Model is as strong and applicable as it was thirty years ago. […] the performance of the MSM [mainstream media] in treating the run-up to the Iraq War, the conflict with Iran, and Russia’s alleged election “meddling” and “aggression” in Ukraine and Crimea, offer case studies of biases as dramatic as those offered in the 1988 edition of Manufacturing Consent. The Propaganda Model lives on. [the last published words in Herman’s lifetime]

Amazeen: “Is there anything you’d do differently if you could go back?”
Herman: “No, I don’t think so. No. It’s kind of hard to reconstruct the past, but I think we would have hedged more on Cambodia and maybe put in more qualifiers. We did realize that we were going to be vulnerable and did attend carefully to putting in qualifiers. I did this reluctantly. I’ve always hated to make excuses for what I was going to do, and inserting more than scientifically necessary qualifiers is sort of a cop-out.”

Few countries have suffered more bitterly than did Cambodia during the 1970s. The “decade of genocide,” as the period is termed by the Finnish Inquiry Commission that attempted to assess what had taken place, consisted of three phases – now extending the time scale to the present, which bears the heavy imprint of these terrible years:

Israel is a major regional rival of Iran, and having succeeded in getting the United States to turn lesser rivals, Iraq and Libya, into failed states, it has been extremely anxious to get the United States to do the same to Iran. And Israel’s leaders have pulled out all the stops in getting its vast array of U.S. politicians, pundits, intellectuals, and lobbying groups to press for a U.S. military assault on Iran.