Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy
By Lewis H. Lapham
The Penguin Press, 2004
178 pages, US$19.95 (hb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

When the US went to war against Iraq, a majority of people in the US opposed the invasion but their voices, writes Lewis Lapham, “couldn’t make it past the security guards at the White House or CNN” and were muted to faint echoes “in literary journals of modest circulation, in the letters to the editors of the Washington Post or the New York Times, among a scattering of guests on National Public Radio, in the farther reaches of the Internet”.

Lapham is the editor of Harper’s Magazine, one of those “literary journals of modest circulation” that carried the voices of dissent, and in his latest book of essays, Gag Rule, he continues his erudite and scathing assault on lying governments, their gagging of dissent, and their faithful media lap dogs.

As US President George Bush’s administration primed a reluctant population for war, the corporate media performed their patriotic duty with natural, and long-practised, skill, “content to forgo any moral or legal questions in favour of their obsession with the logistics — timing, troop numbers, tactics”. Their camera lenses could see only khaki.

When former Secretary of State Colin Powell played the United Nations in February 2003, “every newspaper in the country” ran rave reviews. Their political theatre critics were awestruck as “the Secretary held up air force surveillance photographs requiring the same kind of arcane exposition that New York art critics attach to exhibitions of abstract painting”. They marvelled at other theatrical effects involving vials of white powder and “satellite telephone intercepts of Iraqi military officers screaming at each other in Arabic”. All the while, they evaded the question, “why does America attack Iraq when Iraq hasn’t attacked America?”.

The “Secretary’s powerpoints”, notes Lapham, “didn’t add to the sum of a convincing argument but then neither had the advertising copy for the Spanish-American War or the sales promotions for the war in Vietnam”. But the “agitprop” was good enough for the major US news media, which dismissed the unprecedented mass global protests 10 days after Powell’s exhibition, as the inconsequential, anti-US stammerings of uninformed ageing hippies, Hollywood celebrities and focus groups.

When the invasion began and Saddam Hussein’s reputed “weapons of mass destruction” failed to materialise, the corporate media, confident in their powers of propaganda, regurgitated the White House’s changed rationale for war from removing “the totalitarian menace threatening all of Western civilisation” to liberating the Iraqi people. “One excuse for war was as good as any other.” What price truth compared to oil?

The “demonstration effect” of the war, however, was genuine — delivering a shock and awe precedent to other disobedient regimes and/or peoples (Syria, Iran, North Korea) and to detractors (France, Germany). “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business”, was the crudely accurate annotation of the resident “scholar” in the “Freedom Chair” at the American Enterprise Institute.

As war became occupation, attorney-general John Ashcroft capitalised on the opportunity with his message, as Lapham puts it, that “if America was to be kept safe from further harm, then the laws must become more vigilant, not less”, because “the continuing bloodshed on the streets of Baghdad” is “indicative of terrorists lurking under the Brooklyn Bridge, driving bomb-laden trucks north to Boston, south to Tallahassee”. Seguing seamlessly, and shamelessly, between Al Qaeda and Iraq, the Bush administration invoked “national security” in the cause of “deleting another few paragraphs from the Bill of Rights” in the grand tradition of previous US governments.

At the turn of the 20th century, the enemy was social and political reform, and striking coal miners. War against Spain in Cuba and the Philippines, and the annexation of Puerto Rico, helped to lance the “anarchistic, socialistic and populistic boil”. Love of the flag was aroused against Spain’s “fifth-rate colonial power” (described in the words of the McKinley administration as “the most wicked despotism there is today on this earth”). Next, the patriotic pulse was agitated by new demons — Germany in the first world war, which was erroneously said by the Wilson administration to be able to land 387,000 troops, fresh from roasting Belgian nuns over burning coals, on the coast of New Jersey in just 16 days. Hussein’s equally mythical ability to launch intercontinental weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes was but a reprise of its alarmist antecedent.

Love, of the patriotic kind, is as blind to political faults as its romantic counterpart is to personal faults. Under first world war espionage and sedition acts, socialists and pacifists were slapped in jail, journals banned from the post, and dissent criminalised. By 1920, after the “Red” had replaced the “Hun” as the new post-war villain, an aspiring deputy of the attorney-general (the future FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover) had compiled dossiers on “two million American citizens suspected of an illicit relationship with the ideas of Karl Marx”. Ten-thousand “aliens” were deported for lack of “loyalty”.

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) continued to hunt the “red menace” from the late 1930s. Loyalty oaths and blacklists purged Hollywood screenwriters, actors, authors and musicians, such as Charlie Chaplin, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Robeson, Orson Welles, Dorothy Parker and more than 300 others. HUAC’s Senator McCarthy fired up the post-war Cold War — he “accepted rumours as evidence and accused anybody and everybody who could be placed at the scene of a subversive thought”. Between 1947 and 1954, 6 million US citizens “fell into the nets of government investigations strung together with illegal wiretaps, false testimony and synthetic evidence”.

During the ’60s, clandestine surveillance of “citizens objecting to the Vietnam War, demonstrating on behalf of the civil rights movement, talking too loudly in favour of women’s rights” was in full swing. The CIA and FBI, in a massive law-breaking spree, spied on several millions, opened 500,000 pieces of private mail, infiltrated organisations, jailed and entrapped hundreds and “engaged, when occasion arose, in blackmail, false arrest and assassination”.

Now, following 9/11, the spooks have been unshackled from the restrictions that had been placed on them following the expose of their illegal operations in the ’60s — “no longer will the FBI’s 11,000 agents sit feebly in their chairs ... waiting ‘to sift through the rubble following a terrorist attack’”. In the attorney-general’s words, they can now “intervene early and investigate aggressively”. They have, writes Lapham, a fully renewed “license to commit crimes”, disposing of civil rights as “nuisances that get in the way of law enforcement officers rummaging through bank records and lingerie drawers in order to protect the American people from the swarm of terrorists in their midst”.

Protection measures are also well in place for Bush. “Free speech areas” are set up when Bush travels the country, so that those wanting to voice dissent are “quarantined behind chain-link fences at a discreet distance from the Presidential motorcade (preferably out of earshot and far enough away to avoid notice on the evening news)”.

The evening news and the rest of the corporate media are the essential accomplices in the government’s stripping of civil liberties. Lapham, who began his professional life as a journalist, observes that “the risk of independent thought” is averted in the newsrooms by a winnowing out of the partisans of truth, and self-censorship by those for whom self-advancement and privileged access to the powerful, are the career rewards. At the apex of the docile are the heavyweight, gold-plated news anchors and media celebrities, “expensive publicists” for political, economic and military power, rather than journalists.

And the point of herding dissent behind the “ropelines of consensus”, says Lapham, is to defend (and extend!) the 80% of the wealth held by 10% of the population. There is only one winner from suppression of civil rights, gagging of dissent, and military spending of US$17 trillion since 1950 — the “American ruling class”, that elusive beast that Lapham, with deadly wit, beats from its euphemistic cover (“the business community”) in the intellectual landscape.

A left-liberal not a socialist, a commentator not an activist, Lapham’s preferred weapon is the word, his delivery system the essay. Few, however, wield these arms with more flair, greater relish or better aim, than Lewis Lapham.

From Green Left Weekly, May 4, 2005.
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