-Caveat Lector-
Deterring Democracy
Copyright (c) 1991, 1992 by Noam Chomsky.
Published by South End Press
Chapter 12: Force and Opinion
2. The Bewildered Herd and its Shepherds
In the contemporary period, Hume's insight has been revived
and elaborated, but with a crucial innovation: control of thought
is MORE important for governments that are free and popular than
for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward. A
despotic state can control its domestic enemy by force, but as
the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to
prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs,
which are none of their business. These prominent features of
modern political and intellectual culture merit a closer look.
The problem of "putting the public in its place" came to the
fore with what one historian calls "the first great outburst of
democratic thought in history," the English revolution of the
17th century. This awakening of the general populace raised the
problem of how to contain the threat.
The libertarian ideas of the radical democrats were
considered outrageous by respectable people. They favored
universal education, guaranteed health care, and democratization
of the law, which one described as a fox, with poor men the
geese: "he pulls off their feathers and feeds upon them." They
developed a kind of "liberation theology" which, as one critic
ominously observed, preached "seditious doctrine to the people"
and aimed "to raise the rascal multitude ... against all men of
best quality in the kingdom, to draw them into associations and
combinations with one another ... against all lords, gentry,
ministers, lawyers, rich and peaceable men" (historian Clement
Walker). Particularly frightening were the itinerant workers and
preachers calling for freedom and democracy, the agitators
stirring up the rascal multitude, and the printers putting out
pamphlets questioning authority and its mysteries. "There can be
no form of government without its proper mysteries," Walker
warned, mysteries that must be "concealed" from the common folk:
"Ignorance, and admiration arising from ignorance, are the
parents of civil devotion and obedience," a thought echoed by
Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor. The radical democrats had "cast
all the mysteries and secrets of government...before the vulgar
(like pearls before swine)," he continued, and have "made the
people thereby so curious and so arrogant that they will never
find humility enough to submit to a civil rule." It is dangerous,
another commentator ominously observed, to "have a people know
their own strength." The rabble did not want to be ruled by King
or Parliament, but "by countrymen like ourselves, that know our
wants." Their pamphlets explained further that "It will never be
a good world while knights and gentlemen make us laws, that are
chosen for fear and do but oppress us, and do not know the
people's sores."
These ideas naturally appalled the men of best quality. They
were willing to grant the people rights, but within reason, and
on the principle that "when we mention the people, we do not mean
the promiscuous body of the people." After the democrats had been
defeated, John Locke commented that "day-labourers and tradesmen,
the spinsters and dairymaids" must be told what to believe; "The
greatest part cannot know and therefore they must believe."
Like John Milton and other civil libertarians of the period,
Locke held a sharply limited conception of freedom of expression.
His Fundamental Constitution of Carolina barred those who "speak
anything in their religious assembly irreverently or seditiously
of the government or governors, or of state matters." The
constitution guaranteed freedom for "speculative opinions in
religion," but not for political opinions. "Locke would not even
have permitted people to discuss public affairs," Leonard Levy
observes. The constitution provided further that "all manner of
comments and expositions on any part of these constitutions, or
on any part of the common or statute laws of Carolines, are
absolutely prohibited." In drafting reasons for Parliament to
terminate censorship in 1694, Locke offered no defense of freedom
of expression or thought, but only considerations of expediency
and harm to commercial interests. With the threat of democracy
overcome and the libertarian rabble dispersed, censorship was
permitted to lapse in England, because the "opinion-formers ...
censored themselves. Nothing got into print which frightened the
men of property," Christopher Hill comments. In a
well-functioning state capitalist democracy like the United
States, what might frighten the men of property is generally kept
far from the public eye -- sometimes, with quite astonishing
success.
Such ideas have ample resonance until today, including
Locke's stern doctrine that the common people should be denied
the right even to discuss public affairs. This doctrine remains a
basic principle of modern democratic states, now implemented by a
variety of means to protect the operations of the state from
public scrutiny: classification of documents on the largely
fraudulent pretext of national security, clandestine operations,
and other measures to bar the rascal multitude from the political
arena. Such devices typically gain new force under the regime of
statist reactionaries of the Reagan-Thatcher variety. The same
ideas frame the essential professional task and responsibility of
the intellectual community: to shape the perceived historical
record and the picture of the contemporary world in the interests
of the powerful, thus ensuring that the public keeps to its place
and function, properly bewildered.
In the 1650s, supporters of Parliament and the army against
the people easily proved that the rabble could not be trusted.
This was shown by their lingering monarchist sentiments and their
reluctance to place their affairs in the hands of the gentry and
the army, who were "truly the people," though the people in their
foolishness did not agree. The mass of the people are a "giddy
multitude," "beasts in men's shapes." It is proper to suppress
them, just as it is proper "to save the life of a lunatique or
distracted person even against his will." If the people are so
"depraved and corrupt" as to "confer places of power and trust
upon wicked and undeserving men, they forfeit their power in this
behalf unto those that are good, though but a few."
The good and few may be the gentry or industrialists, or the
vanguard Party and the Central Committee, or the intellectuals
who qualify as "experts" because they articulate the consensus of
the powerful (to paraphrase one of Henry Kissinger's insights).
They manage the business empires, ideological institutions,
and political structures, or serve them at various levels. Their
task is to shepherd the bewildered herd and keep the giddy
multitude in a state of implicit submission, and thus to bar the
dread prospect of freedom and self-determination.
Similar ideas had been forged as the Spanish explorers set
about what Tzvetan Todorov calls "the greatest genocide in human
history" after they "discovered America" 500 years ago. They
justified their acts of terror and oppression on the grounds that
the natives are not "capable of governing themselves any more
than madmen or even wild beasts and animals, seeing that their
food is not any more agreeable and scarcely better than that of
wild beasts" and their stupidity "is much greater than that of
children and madmen in other countries" (professor and theologian
Francisco de Vitoria, "one of the pinnacles of Spanish humanism
in the sixteenth century"). Therefore, intervention is legitimate
"in order to exercise the rights of guardianship," Todorov
comments, summarizing de Vitoria's basic thought.
When English savages took over the task a few years later,
they naturally adopted the same pose while taming the wolves in
the guise of men, as George Washington described the objects that
stood in the way of the advance of civilization and had to be
eliminated for their own good. The English colonists had already
handled the Celtic "wild men" the same way, for example, when
Lord Cumberland, known as "the butcher," laid waste to the
Scottish highlands before moving on to pursue his craft in North
America.
150 years later, their descendants had purged North America
of this native blight, reducing the lunatics from 10 million to
200,000 according to some recent estimates, and they turned their
eyes elsewhere, to civilize the wild beasts in the Philippines.
The Indian fighters to whom President McKinley assigned the task
of "Christianizing" and "uplifting" these unfortunate creatures
rid the liberated islands of hundreds of thousands of them,
accelerating their ascent to heaven. They too were rescuing
"misguided creatures" from their depravity by "slaughtering the
natives in English fashion," as the New York press described
their painful responsibility, adding that we must take "what
muddy glory lies in the wholesale killing til they have learned
to respect our arms," then moving on to "the more difficult task
of getting them to respect our intentions."
This is pretty much the course of history, as the plague of
European civilization devastated much of the world.
On the home front, the continuing problem was formulated
plainly by the 17th century political thinker Marchamont Nedham.
The proposals of the radical democrats, he wrote, would result in
"ignorant Persons, neither of Learning nor Fortune, being put in
Authority." Given their freedom, the "self-opinionated multitude"
would elect "the <I>lowest of the People</I>" who would occupy
themselves with "Milking and Gelding the Purses of the Rich,"
taking "the ready Road to all licentiousness, mischief, mere
Anarchy and Confusion." These sentiments are the common coin of
modern political and intellectual discourse; increasingly so as
popular struggles did succeed, over the centuries, in realizing
the proposals of the radical democrats, so that ever more
sophisticated means had to be devised to reduce their substantive
content.
Such problems regularly arise in periods of turmoil and
social conflict. After the American revolution, rebellious and
independent farmers had to be taught by force that the ideals
expressed in the pamphlets of 1776 were not to be taken
seriously. The common people were not to be represented by
countrymen like themselves, that know the people's sores, but by
gentry, merchants, lawyers, and others who hold or serve private
power. Jefferson and Madison believed that power should be in the
hands of the "natural aristocracy," Edmund Morgan comments, "men
like themselves" who would defend property rights against
Hamilton's "paper aristocracy" and from the poor; they "regarded
slaves, paupers, and destitute laborers as an ever-present danger
to liberty as well as property."
The reigning doctrine, expressed by the Founding Fathers, is
that "the people who own the country ought to govern it" (John
Jay). The rise of corporations in the 19th century, and the legal
structures devised to grant them dominance over private and
public life, established the victory of the Federalist opponents
of popular democracy in a new and powerful form.
Not infrequently, revolutionary struggles pit aspirants to
power against one another though united in opposition to radical
democratic tendencies among the common people. Lenin and Trotsky,
shortly after seizing state power in 1917, moved to dismantle
organs of popular control, including factory councils and
Soviets, thus proceeding to deter and overcome socialist
tendencies. An orthodox Marxist, Lenin did not regard socialism
as a viable option in this backward and underdeveloped country;
until his last days, it remained for him an "elementary truth of
Marxism, that the victory of socialism requires the joint efforts
of workers in a number of advanced countries," Germany in
particular. In what has always seemed to me his greatest work,
George Orwell described a similar process in Spain, where the
Fascists, Communists, and liberal democracies were united in
opposition to the libertarian revolution that swept over much of
the country, turning to the conflict over the spoils only when
popular forces were safely suppressed. There are many examples,
often influenced by great power violence.
This is particularly true in the Third World. A persistent
concern of Western elites is that popular organizations might lay
the basis for meaningful democracy and social reform, threatening
the prerogatives of the privileged. Those who seek "to raise the
rascal multitude" and "draw them into associations and
combinations with one another" against "the men of best quality"
must, therefore, be repressed or eliminated. It comes as no
surprise that Archbishop Romero should be assassinated shortly
after urging President Carter to withhold military aid from the
governing junta, which, he warned, will use it to "sharpen
injustice and repression against the people's organizations"
struggling "for respect for their most basic human rights."
The Archbishop had put his finger on the very problem that
must be overcome, whatever euphemisms and tortured argument are
used to conceal that fundamental fact. Accordingly, his request
for a "guarantee" that the U.S. government "will not intervene
directly or indirectly, with military, economic, diplomatic or
other pressure, in determining the destiny of the Salvadoran
people" was denied with the promise that aid to the military
junta would be reassessed should evidence of "misuse develop."
The Archbishop was assassinated, and the security forces turned
to the task of demolishing the people's organizations by savage
atrocities, beginning with the Rio Sumpul massacre, concealed by
the loyal media.
It also comes as no surprise that the Human Rights
Administration should see no "misuse developing" as the
atrocities mounted, except briefly, when American churchwomen
were raped, tortured, and murdered, so that a cover-up had to be
arranged. Or that the media and intellectual opinion should
largely disregard the assassination of the Archbishop (which did
not even merit an editorial in the New York Times), conceal the
complicity of the armed forces and the civilian government
established by the U.S. as a cover for their necessary work,
suppress reports on the growing state terror by Church and human
rights groups and a congressional delegation, and even pretend
that "There is no real argument that most of the estimated 10,000
political fatalities in 1980 were victims of government forces or
irregulars associated with them" (Washington Post)/
When a job is to be done, we must set to it without
sentimentality. Human rights concerns are fine when they can be
used as an ideological weapon to undermine enemies or to restore
popular faith in the nobility of the state. But they are not to
interfere with serious matters, such as dispersing and crushing
the rascal multitude forming associations against the interests
of the men of best quality.
The same dedicated commitment to necessary terror was
revealed a decade later, in March 1990, when the Archbishop's
assassination was commemorated in El Salvador in an impressive
three-day ceremony. "The poor, the humble and the devout flocked
by the thousands" to honor his memory at a Mass in the cathedral
where he was murdered, the wire services reported, filling the
plaza and the streets outside after a march led by 16 bishops,
three from the United States. Archbishop Romero was formally
proposed for sainthood by the Salvadoran Church -- the first such
case since Thomas a Becket was assassinated at the altar over 800
years ago. Americas Watch published a report on the shameful
decade, symbolically bounded by "these two events -- the murder
of Archbishop Romero in 1980 and the slaying of the Jesuits in
1989" -- which offer "harsh testimony about who really rules El
Salvador and how little they have changed," people for whom
"priest-killing is still a preferred option" because they "simply
will not hear the cries for change and justice in a society that
has had too little of either." In his homily, Romero's successor,
Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas, said that "For being the voice
of those without voice, he was violently silenced."
The victims remain without voice, and the Archbishop remains
silenced as well. No high-ranking official of the Cristiani
government or his ARENA party attended the Mass, not even their
leader Roberto d'Aubuisson, assumed to be responsible for the
assassination in coordination with the U.S.-backed security
forces. The U.S. government was also notable for its absence. The
ceremony in El Salvador passed with scarcely a notice in the
country that funds and trains the assassins; commemorations at
home also escaped the attention of the national press.
There should be no further embarrassment, however --
assuming that there is any now. This will be the last public
religious homage to Romero for decades, because Church doctrine
prohibits homage for candidates for sainthood. Revulsion at the
assassination of Thomas a Becket compelled King Henry II, who was
held to be indirectly responsible, to do penance at the shrine.
One will wait a long time for a proper reenactment, another sign
of the progress of civilization.
The threat of popular organization to privilege is real
enough in itself. Worse still, "the rot may spread," in the
terminology of political elites; there may be a demonstration
effect of independent development in a form that attends to the
people's sores. As noted earlier, internal documents and even the
public record reveal that a driving concern of U.S. planners has
been the fear that the "virus" might spread, "infecting" regions
beyond.
This concern breaks no new ground. European statesmen had
feared that the American revolution might "lend new strength to
the apostles of sedition" (Metternich), and might spread "the
contagion and the invasion of vicious principles" such as "the
pernicious doctrines of republicanism and popular self-rule," one
of the Czar's diplomats warned. A century later, the cast of
characters was reversed. Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State
Robert Lansing feared that if the Bolshevik disease were to
spread, it would leave the "ignorant and incapable mass of
humanity dominant in the earth"; the Bolsheviks, he continued,
were appealing "to the proletariat of all countries, to the
ignorant and mentally deficient, who by their numbers are urged
to become masters,... a very real danger in view of the process
of social unrest throughout the world." Again it is democracy
that is the awesome threat. When soldiers and workers councils
made a brief appearance in Germany, Wilson feared that they would
inspire dangerous thoughts among "the American negro [soldiers]
returning from abroad." Already, he had heard, negro laundresses
were demanding more than the going wage, saying that "money is as
much mine as it is yours." Businessmen might have to adjust to
having workers on their boards of directors, he feared, among
other disasters, if the Bolshevik virus were not exterminated.
With these dire consequences in mind, the Western invasion
of the Soviet Union was justified on defensive grounds, against
"the Revolution's challenge ... to the very survival of the
capitalist order" (John Lewis Gaddis). And it was only natural
that the defense of the United States should extend from invasion
of the Soviet Union to Wilson's Red Scare at home. As Lansing
explained, force must be used to prevent "the leaders of
Bolshevism and anarchy" from proceeding to "organize or preach
against government in the United States"; the government must not
permit "these fanatics to enjoy the liberty which they now seek
to destroy." The repression launched by the Wilson administration
successfully undermined democratic politics, unions, freedom of
the press, and independent thought, in the interests of corporate
power and the state authorities who represented its interests,
all with the general approval of the media and elites generally,
all in self-defense against the "ignorant and mentally deficient"
majority. Much the same story was re-enacted after World War II,
again under the pretext of a Soviet threat, in reality, to
restore submission to the rulers.
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