A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Elliot D. Cohen, Ph. D.

Recently President George W. Bush returned from a visit to Vietnam with a lesson he thought we could learn from our past involvement there. Comparing our involvement in Iraq to that of Vietnam, he said, "We will succeed unless we quit." Of course, we did "quit" in Vietnam, so one might have thought the President would have concluded that we should likewise "quit" in Iraq, or even more pointedly, that we should never have gotten involved there in the first place. After all, as was true in the case of Vietnam, Iraq is now embroiled in civil war, making the prospect of "victory" there no more sanguine than it was in Vietnam, But the more profound and important lesson is one that could only with paradox have been uttered by Bush: "Don't believe things just because I say so."

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution grants you freedom of speech. As long as you are not using your speech to harm others, such as yelling "Fire!" in a crowded auditorium, you have a right to speak your mind and your conscience. Unfortunately, there are-and doubtless will always be-political, legal, and social pressures to accept the views of the establishment. But what is lost when pressures to conform destroy your freedom of speech? According to philosopher John Stuart Mill, the human race always loses something valuable when people are prevented from expressing themselves freely, for if a suppressed opinion is true, others are prevented from being enlightened, and if it is false, others miss the chance to strengthen their conviction by seeing it in collision with error. Either way, true or false, we lose when free speech is trumped by pressures to accept the prevailing view.

Since even true opinions are rarely completely true, they can usually be improved by rational discussion. And, unless we allow the pros and cons of a purported truth to be freely and openly probed, the reasons for accepting it will escape us, and we will end up holding it as a dogma or sacred cow instead of a reasoned conviction. Says Mill, "Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their posts as soon as there is no enemy in the field." Nor should any traditional view be so obvious as to put it beyond doubt. "The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors."

When you simply accept the views of the establishment or of officialdom, without probing into their veracity, not only do you increase the odds of believing falsely, you also fortify an unthinking and rigid habit of conformity that makes you liable to the deceitful manipulation by the powers that be. Allow me to illustrate.

In the 1960s, when the Vietnam War was waged, it was popular to believe
that this war was necessary to prevent communism from "coming here." So, to defend our freedom, all "patriotic" Americans were expected to support the war. Those who opposed it were labeled "hippies" and "draft dodgers."

Those who lost their lives, their limbs, or their mental health while defending
our nation in the jungles of Vietnam were well meaning and trusted the establishment not to deceive them. In retrospect, however, history has shown that the threat of communism invading our shores was a crock and that the war was waged for economic and political gain. While the military-industrial complex made out like bandits, faithful young soldiers
were being mangled and destroyed.

The lesson to be learned here is one that is at least as urgent now as it was then. Do your own independent thinking. Don't believe something just because someone tells you it's true. Instead, require evidence before you believe it. The fact that someone says something is not itself evidence. As Watergate clearly demonstrated, not even the president of the United States is above the law and beyond question.

Unfortunately, these hard-won insights are destined to be in vain unless we keep them in the forefront as we confront our futures. As philosopher George Santayana stated, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the government claimed that there were weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq and that its leader, Saddam Hussein was an "evil man" who would use these weapons on us as he did on his own people. But the claim that Saddam harbored such weapons was based largely on the assumption that because he had such weapons in the 1980s, he must also have them now. Moreover, after twenty years of laboring under the belief that he had these weapons (in fact, the United States had helped Saddam obtain them to use against the Iranians), it was bewildering why the need to stop him suddenly became so urgent as to warrant a preemptive war with all its risks and sacrifices. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the government attempted to find such a rationale by trying to link the attacks to Saddam.

Despite the fact that there was shoddy evidence for WMD in Iraq and for a connection between September 11 and Saddam, the media parroted the official line instead of doing its own careful investigative reporting. Unfortunately, many Americans swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. When the conjecture that these weapons still existed was disproved along with the myth that Saddam somehow had something to do with September 11, the official line became tempered. Now the rationale for preemptive war was to stop Saddam from brutalizing his own people. Yet the brutality of this dictator was nothing new and had been ignored for two prior decades. So, while companies like Halliburton got no-bid contracts in Iraq for exorbitant amounts of money and media giants like General Electric's NBC, Time Warner's CNN, Viacom's CBS, Disney's ABC, and News Corp's Fox cooperated with the federal government in order to maximize their bottom lines, we Americans were fed the official line and were expected to swallow it.

For those of us who have lived through the Vietnam era, this course of events is neither surprising nor new. It is the same old bullshit of waging bloody war for economic interests, cloaked in an atmosphere of officialdom and concern for humanity. It is, just as Santayana said, a failure to pay attention and learn from past history. It is, as Mill admonished, failure to exercise our reason and instead to believe things just because someone in an official position said them. The end product of this parrotfest is mass destruction of innocent lives.

In case you ever wondered how the people in Nazi Germany were able to follow Adolf Hitler, look no further. These people were no different than any other people. They were not especially ruthless and callous. They believed what they were told. It was the same old falling for the official line, believing because the words were spoken and not because they were proven. This is the deadly truth about parroting.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Elliot D. Cohen is a media ethicist and author of many books and articles on the media and other areas of applied ethics. This article is adapted from his latest book, The New Rational Therapy: Thinking Your Way to Serenity, Success, and Profound Happiness [1] (Rowman and Littlefield 2006).

Bookmark/Search this post with:

buzzflash [2] | delicious [3] | digg [4] | yahoo [5] | technorati [6]