I pulled up to my house one day but I didn't get out of the car for five minutes. I was listening to WORT, Madison's invaluable community station, and there was an interview on with a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. I couldn't turn it off. He was describing what had happened to him and his family on April 17, 1975, the day the Khmer Rouge took over. He told of hearing shots, of seeing bodies by the side of the road. And he told of seeing his own mother shot dead by the Khmer Rouge a few days later.

I called up my friends at WORT to praise the program and to find out who the guest was. They told me his name is Sophea Mouth, and he lives right here in town. I decided to invite him in for a half- hour Second Opinion interview. The encounter has stayed with me ever since, and I thought you might be interested in his views on the need to bring Pol Pot before an international tribunal (see page 11).

A few weeks after I spoke with Sophea Mouth, Anthony Lewis wrote a column in The New York Times about Pol Pot and the left. "A few Western intellectuals, notably Professor Noam Chomsky, refused to believe what was going on in Cambodia," he wrote. "At first, at least, they put the reports of killing down to a conspiratorial effort by American politicians and press to destroy the Cambodian revolution."

Was this true? I felt compelled to find out. I have to conclude it wasn't Chomsky's finest hour. Writing in the June 25, 1977, issue of The Nation, he and Edward S. Herman tried to poke holes in books that warned of Khmer Rouge atrocities. Though one of these books was "serious and worth reading" and did include a "grisly account" of Khmer Rouge "barbarity," they cited "repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false." They also gave short shrift to accounts from Cambodians who had fled, citing the "extreme unreliability of refugee reports."

Of course, Chomsky and Herman had reason to be skeptical. The American people had been fed lies about the situation in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia for twenty years. They were also correct to point out how the massive destruction of Cambodia by U.S. bombing paved the way for the Khmer Rouge. And they were right that the U.S. media tend to be much more interested in communist atrocities than in the atrocities that U.S. allies commit.

But they were wrong to suggest that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge may have been "more similar to France after liberation" than to Germany under the Nazis. Chomsky and Herman did equivocate, however: "We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments," they wrote.

And what of The Progressive? This magazine didn't exactly shower itself with glory, either. In a November 1978 editorial, The Progressive expressed skepticism about the reports of genocide in Cambodia and scolded Senator George McGovern for being "taken in." McGovern had warned that "something horrible is now transpiring in Cambodia" and called for an international intervention.

In the issue that followed, Milton Mayer, the longtime "roving editor" of The Progressive, mocked a UPI dispatch that concerned Cambodia. Mayer quoted the dispatch as follows: "A refugee from Siem Reap recalled a friend who was discovered having intercourse. The communists beat him to death, forcing his girlfriend to watch." Mayer then added this commentary: "Did the refugee from Siem Reap witness the intercourse? If so, he may have been a dirty old man. If not, how (and how reliably) was he informed of it? Did he witness the beating to death of his friend and, if so, why didn't he intervene (the cad), and if not, how does he know that it wasn't the communists who were having intercourse with the girlfriend and the friend who beat the communists to death -- in accord with the best anti-communist scenario?"

Only in August 1980, when William Steif wrote an excellent report for The Progressive from the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand, did readers of this magazine receive a glimpse of the Khmer Rouge holocaust.

What lessons do I draw from all this? First, we on the left need to recognize that the United States does not commit every evil in the world; there is plenty to go around.

Second, the Khmer Rouge prove, once and for all, the horrific potential of violent revolutions, followed by vanguard dictatorships, suffused with romantic Marxist and Rousseauian notions about creating a new man, a "species being."

Third, our anti-interventionism and pacifism can blind us to the grossest human-rights abuses abroad.

And, on a personal note, I have a renewed sense of caution about issuing pronouncements.

BOB EDWARDS, Host: It's 11 minutes before the hour. Using propaganda to rally the public behind foreign-policy objectives.

[News headlines]

EDWARDS: The ideas of linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky are the subject of a new Canadian film called Manufacturing Consent. The title is taken from the 1988 book Chomsky co-authored about the way reporters choose which issues to cover and how to present them; how journalists, in his opinion, manipulate public thinking about government policy. Pat Dowell has seen the film and says its not a dry, sober collection of sound bites and talking heads.

PAT DOWELL, Reporter: Manufacturing Consent runs nearly three hours, with intermission, spanning more than 20 years worth of radio and television recordings of Noam Chomsky here and abroad. Filmmakers Mark Achbar [sp] and Peter Wintonic [sp] also travelled to several countries themselves to film Chomsky's speaking engagements.

UNIDENTIFIED FILMMAKER: We couldn't make it to Japan. We had to fax our instructions to the camera crew there. The first film directed by fax machine, I think.

DOWELL: The film's unusual in other ways, illustrating and sometimes playfully dramatizing Chomsky's objections to the media's coverage of U.S. foreign policy. Chomsky calls it propaganda and so, in the film, while he explains how different governments control the thoughts of their citizens, the filmmakers cut from Chomsky to a Hitler rally, to American police arresting peace protesters, to a shot of a church steeple and a minaret.

[Excerpt from Manufacturing Consent]

NOAM CHOMSKY, Linguist and Political Activist: When you can't control people by force, and when the voice of the people can be heard, you have this problem. It may make people so curious and so arrogant that they don't have the humility to submit to a civil rule, and therefore, you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what, in more honest days, used to be called propaganda - manufacture of consent, creation of necessary illusions.

DOWELL: The film draws on 185 archival sources for many of its images, and also on Wintonic and Achbar's fertile imaginations, which conjure up such items as philosopher trading cards in a future world. The filmmakers themselves don scrubbies and impersonate surgeons in one scene. While a heart monitor and a respirator provide sound effects, they take scalpel and sutures to a newspaper article about human- rights abuses in East Timor, a country invaded by Indonesia in 1975. They're acting out Chomsky's allegations that because Indonesia is a U.S. ally, the New York Times played down the invasion's atrocities by reprinting a severely edited London Times report.

Mr. CHOMSKY: It ended up being a whitewash, whereas the original was an atrocity story.

DOWELL: Clearly, audiences expecting a staid presentation of ideas will get something else from Manufacturing Consent, perhaps even the kind of slick media object Chomsky himself might call manipulative. The filmmakers say their techniques recontextualize Chomsky, raise questions about the place of such dissenters in our society. Mark Achbar hopes the audience will think just as hard about the medium as they do about its message.

MARK ACHBAR, Filmmaker: Another function of these recontextualization strategies, if we can call them that, is to prod the audience as they' re watching the film just to continually remind people that they are consuming a media product - the media product being our film - and we want to keep that idea alive in people's minds as they're watching the film to encourage a kind of critical distance from the material itself.

DOWELL: Another way they do this, says Peter Wintonic, is by showing footage of people watching - and sometimes ignoring - their film, specifically in places where those people might expect to find commercials or news or sports scores.

PETER WINTONIC, Filmmaker: We rented the Olympic stadium in Montreal and had to pay the hydro company quite a bit of money just to turn on the lights. But we played back Chomsky there, or in Times Square on the Sony Jumbotron. And we replayed materials that we'd gathered over these years on the largest point-of-purchase video wall - which is like this 264-screen video cube in the middle of a huge shopping center.

[Excerpt from Manufacturing Consent]

DOWELL: Only the mall shoppers aren't watching. They're playing miniature golf, seemingly oblivious to Chomsky's looming image discussing thought control, the Gulf War, or spectator sports as training for irrational jingoism. Audiences who've seen the finished film in theaters have been more responsive. Chomsky says he's gotten lots of mail, much of it angry about his analysis of sports. More gratifying to him is the fact that the movie has proved useful to activists raising public awareness of East Timor. And that makes Chomsky glad he agreed to let Wintonic and Achbar follow him with a camera, literally for years.

Mr. CHOMSKY: In fact, for a while, I couldn't get off an airplane in some foreign country without seeing those two smiling faces there, and my heart sinking. It felt the first scene of Dolce Vita a bit.

DOWELL: Noam Chomsky goes to the movies? Fellini movies?

Mr. CHOMSKY: Yeah, I'm not as remote from the popular culture as I sometimes pretend.

DOWELL: He didn't let Wintonic and Achbar follow him everywhere, however.

Mr. CHOMSKY: My wife, particularly, laid down an iron law that they were to get nowhere near the house, the children, personal life - anything like that - and I agreed with that. I mean, this is not about a person. It's about ideas and principles. If they want to use a person as a vehicle, okay, but, you know, my personal life and my children and where I live and so on have nothing to do with it.

DOWELL: Which helps to explain why Noam Chomsky has not seen Manufacturing Consent, and won't.

Mr. CHOMSKY: Partly for uninteresting personal reasons, namely, I just don't like to hear myself and mostly think about the way I should have done it better, and so on. There are, however, some more general reasons. Much as the producers may try to overcome this, and I'm sure they did, there's something inevitable in the nature of the medium that personalizes the issues and gives the impression that some individual - in this case, it happens to be me - is the, you know, the leader of a mass movement or trying to become one, or something of that kind.

DOWELL: Chomsky says he's not any such thing and that movements for social change succeed not because of leaders, but because of largely unknown workers on the front lines. He does understand, however, that people can be reached by a medium that puts a face on ideas that challenge the official story.

Mr. CHOMSKY: There's very little in the way of political organization or other forms of association in which people can participate meaningfully in the public arena. People are- feel themselves as victims. They' re isolated victims of propaganda, and if somehow, somebody comes along and says, you know, the kind of thing that they sort of have a gut feeling about or believed anyway, there's a sign of recognition and excitement and the feeling that maybe I'm not alone.

DOWELL: Maybe Chomsky's right. The weekend Manufacturing Consent opened in San Francisco, it outgrossed every other movie but Indecent Proposal. The movie is also showing in Los Angeles, Boston, Hartford and San Diego. It opens in a dozen more cities next month. For National Public Radio, this is Pat Dowell in Washington.

[music]

EDWARDS: This is NPR's Morning Edition. I'm Bob Edwards.

[Funding credits given]

[Production credits given]

[This transcript has not yet been proofread against audiotape and cannot, for that reason, be guaranteed as to accuracy of speakers and spelling.]

These are hard times for intellectualsof the left. Many have fled to cultural studies. A brave few seek to recast old political ideas. To what effect?

THE INTELLECTUALS AND SOCIALISM. By Friedrich Hayek. Institute of Economic Affairs; 28 pages; K4

AS A reminder, if one were needed, of how far the left has lost the intellectual initiative, it may be worth a look at Friedrich Hayek' s slender polemic first published half a century ago. Whether or not you accept Hayek's scornful dismissal of intellectuals as ``professional second-hand dealers in ideas'', with socialist intellectuals the worst of the lot, you will get a sense of Hayek's powerful conviction that socialist ideas of material equality had won the day and were posing a threat to post-war liberty. To Hayek there was an affinity between the preachiness of intellectuals and the bossiness of socialism, and though he never fully explained how, in a democracy, such an unappealing combination could be both popular and dangerous, he was in no doubt that conservatives should respond by developing liberal radicalism into a popular philosophy of their own.

ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN 20TH-CENTURY AMERICA. By Richard Rorty. Harvard University Press; 170 pages; $18.95 and K11.95

THE intellectual boot is now very much on the opposite foot, as Richard Rorty, an American philosopher, laments. At times you feel he almost shares Hayek's contempt for left-wing intellectuals. He regrets the rise of what he calls a ``spectatorial, disgusted, mocking left'', a university left distracted by cultural studies and post-modern theories of the ``end of man''.

Instead, Mr Rorty calls for a left which ``dreams of achieving'' America, a patriotic left he recognises from the days of the New Deal and which he remembers from the early 1960s when, for example, people campaigned for civil-rights laws to make their country better. Where, he wonders, has such reformist pride gone? In place of ``Marxist scholasticism'', Mr Rorty wants a left which makes reducing inequalities part of a ``civic religion''. Yet material differences are not the only sort of thing that bothers Mr Rorty about the contemporary United States. On a communitarian note, he argues that the ``civic religion' ' he advocates should include commitment to shared values that rise above ethnic or minority loyalties.

THE CULTURAL TURN. By Fredric Jameson. Verso; 206 pages; $45 & K30.

THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNITY. By Perry Anderson. Verso; 160 pages; $50 & K35

THERE is no better American example of a ``Marxist scholastic'' than Fredric Jameson, professor of comparative literature at Duke University. Not that anyone turning to this rich collection of essays about ``post- modernity'' in 1983-98 should expect to find straightforward politics and economics or even history. His range of reference is daunting, though like any generalist, Mr Jameson relies a lot on a fast tempo to get through the tricky bits. To sum up his take on things is a risk: he is too deft to be pinned to a position. But it is not far wrong to say that, for him, capitalism forms an all-embracing system, that how people think about things is somehow trapped and distorted by that system, and that in order to imagine alternatives to capitalism, you must first break its mental hold by thinking obliquely and unconventionally, especially about literature, architecture and the arts. It is a search strategy that will strike some people as despair. But it has its following on the intellectual left. Perry Anderson's short book, which began life as a foreword to Mr Jameson's, is as lucid and patient an account of the idea of post-modernity as you could wish for.

PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER. By Noam Chomsky. Seven Stories Press; 176 pages; $32. Turnaround; K22

THOUGH Hayek mocked the intellectual capacities of intellectuals, in brainpower Noam Chomsky yields to none. A formidable MIT scholar who revolutionised linguistics and opened the door to modern cognitive science, Mr Chomsky could have chopped Hayek into liver paste and put him on toast. Yet mental brilliance and argumentative rigour is not everything in political economy: you need good assumptions. To Mr Chomsky liberal capitalism is structurally flawed and morally wicked. You have to accept that before much of what he says can make sense: unequal trade and destructive flows of capital hurt developing economies; in rich nations, big firms control politics and the media; the free market is a myth (huge American subsidies to industry); and much democracy is superficial (low voter turnouts). Mr Chomsky is a firebrand, untempted by cultural politics and unpersuaded by the soft social-democracy Richard Rorty recommends. His most recent collection excoriates neo- liberalism as a threat to democracy but offers little practical clue as to how welfare and equality are to be improved.

THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM: AN INITIATIVE FOR POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC REFORM. By Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornell West. Beacon Press; 94 pages; $20. Airlift; K15.99

BEMOANING the timorousness of today's progressives, these two Harvard professors want the left to think hard again about real economic and political issues. Like Mr Chomsky, they believe that correcting inequalities of wealth and power in America is urgent; yet unlike him they have specific proposals, which they throw out for debate: they would ``re- energise'' democracy with compulsory voting and public financing for campaigns; they would ``democratise the market'' with more consumption taxes, much higher federal spending on schools, greater tax help for new businesses and encouragement of profit-sharing schemes for company workers.

The question of whether rigorous strategic planning, guided by an overarching principle, or the pro-Israel lobby, constituted the real engine behind U.S. policy is not our major concern in this study. The dichotomy, in fact, is over-simplified and rather irrelevant, in as much as the perspectives and world views of the pro-Israel lobby and those of the U.S. strategic establishment have been congruent and complementary, hence the special and strategic relationship between the U.S. and Israel.(3) By contrast, certain Arab regimes share the same world view with the United States, but that has never qualified them as strategic allies. At best, they serve as facilitators, sub- contractors and local gendarmes in charge of public order. Today, after the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, stability has remained a strategic goal for U.S. policy in the Middle East. It is now deemed as the primary guarantor of a hospitable environment for investment and trade.

There has been a wide-range of issues at stake - more than who and what dictates or influences U.S. policy in the region. There are large- scale, long-term economic interests that operate throughout the Middle East. These interests embody organized groups and socio-economic categories which influence various levels of policy-planning, including those which allocate resources and define goals. During the formative period of the Cold War, the organized groups with economic interest in the Middle East pursued policies largely conflictual with those advocated by the politically-organized constituencies associated with Israel. Today that gap no longer stands, in as much as the policy-making apparatus, which represented economic interests, presumably in conflict with Israel, has been phased out of Clinton's White House and Albright' s State Department. The last of the so-called Arabists in that apparatus, under-Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, Robert Pelletreau, has just been replaced by Martin Indyk, the Australian immigrant who was sworn in as a U.S. citizen a few days before he changed jobs from executive director of a pro-Israel Washington think tank to the top Middle East advisor in Clinton's National Security Council.(4) Not only was Indyk the first pro-Israel lobbyist to occupy the key post for the Middle East in the NSC, but he was also the first lobbyist to serve as U.S. ambassador to Israel and now under-Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.

No longer can it be properly claimed that the economic and political dimensions of U.S. Middle East policy are separated on two different tracks. Post-cold war Israel is being groomed for the role of regional economic hegemon in the area. Arab resources, markets and labor would become available for Israeli investors equipped with superior technology, a sophisticated network of global business, and modern organizational techniques. The vision of Shimon Peres, a principal architect of the Oslo accords, is that of a Middle East in which the Arabs would be economically exploited, politically subservient and militarily inferior to Israel.(5) Israel's role in the region would be a microcosm of the U.S. role in the global South.

Prior to the era of Oslo and globalization, however, the U.S. policy process in the Middle East was informed by economic and political interests, which ultimately established the modalities and determined the time schedule that structured policy. United States policy in the Middle East has had and continues to have two important linkages: first, the economic/strategic, which comprises petroleum resources, banking and armaments. Policy makers in the U.S., whether Democrats or Republicans, hawks or doves, have almost always defined these corporate interests as matters of "national security." Secondly, the Israeli linkage, which stems from Israel's regional strategic role and powerful domestic pressure, leading to the largest subsidy program in the history of U.S. foreign policy. U.S. military-strategic planners continue to relate to Israel as a "political contraceptive" against oppositional groups and nationalist upheavals in the region.(6)

There is an interplay between the two linkages, which has eluded many an analyst who would assert that U.S. economic interests are tied to the Arabs and not to Israel, thereby casually concluding that U.S. policy should be pro-Arab and not pro-Israel. They would then recommend that the remedy for that seeming discrepancy would consist of providing the American people with accurate information, as if the people make or even influence policy. A case in point are the public opinion polls, which reveal U.S. public support for the idea of a Palestinian state but rejection of that same idea at the governmental level.(7)

THE STRATEGIC/ECONOMIC LINKAGE: A GLOBAL STRATEGY WITH IMPRESSIVE CONTINUITY(*)

The United States military intervention in the Gulf in the wake of the Cold War is a natural extension of the policy it has pursued for four decades. Since the end of the Second World War, the Middle East has been viewed by the U.S. establishment through the prism of the conflict with the Soviet Union. The U.S. strategic doctrine underlying the course of the Cold War has been based on a distorted assessment of Soviet intentions.

That policy was based on the proposition that there existed a legitimate world order, for which the U.S. assumed the major responsibility, and that the Soviet Union, together with disaffected Third World nations, including Arab nationalist forces, were intent on challenging that order. A succession of U.S. doctrines and strategies which expressed a resolve to contain that challenge included the Truman Doctrine (1948), the Eisenhower Doctrine (1957), Kennedy's flexible response, the corollaries of limited nuclear war, counterinsurgency, the Johnson Doctrine (1865), the Nixon-Kissinger Doctrine (1969), and finally the Carter Doctrine (1980) and Reagan's codicil (1981). These doctrines were predicated on the assumption that the United States had a title to the Arab World's petroleum resources, a privileged access to its markets and waterways, and an undisputed right to define, contain and rollback the region's enemies, be they internal dissidents (Eisenhower Doctrine and Reagan Codicil), ambitious regional leaders, such as Saddam Hussein (Bush Doctrine), or Arab states which would assume responsibility for strategic deterrence vis-avis Israel, such as Egypt in 1967 and Iraq in 1991. Syria, however, was able to prevent the knock-out blow delivered to Egypt and later to Iraq by restructuring its alignments.

While the U.S. seemed to be operating from a position of relative weakness vis-a-vis the Soviet Union in Southeast Asia and in Angola during the early Seventies, it enjoyed a decisive edge over the U.S.S.R. in the Middle East. It presented the U.S.S.R. with several threats in the region forcing the erosion of Soviet influence and a corresponding ascendancy of American power. In his State of the World message in February 1970, President Nixon declared, "The U.S. would view any effort by the Soviet Union to seek predominance in the Middle East as a matter of grave concern."(8) Henry Kissinger called for and secured the expulsion of Soviet personnel from Egypt in 1972.

An important difference between Vietnam and the Middle East for U.S. foreign policy concerns the economic linkage between the U.S. and the Middle East. The status quo in the Gulf, which succeeding doctrines pledged to uphold, has provided the United States with an exceedingly favorable economic climate, one in which the levels of economic penetration are maintained and enhanced. Here, much more than in Vietnam and Central America, the economic stakes are very high, and the U.S. was bound to project its military power. Hence, when President Bush claimed in 1991 that his goal was to protect our jobs and our way of life, he really meant, first and foremost, corporate interest defined as a matter of national security. Such interests frequently condition military and political decisions.

Middle East trade had more than doubled its share of total U.S. trade between 1960 and 1980, almost tripled its share of Japanese trade, and increased by 50% its share of European Community (EC) trade. By 1980, Middle East oil provided 20% of U.S. supplies, 70% of EC supplies and over 75% of Japanese supplies. The region has the largest concentration of oil and natural gas reserves in the world. The countries of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and Abu Dhabi each contain greater oil reserves than those found in the United States. In fact, Saudi Arabia alone has reserves six times greater than the U.S. possesses. Middle East oil is not only plentiful, but cheap as well. The cost of producing a barrel of oil in the Gulf has been estimated at $2, compared to between $15 and $18 in Alaska.

U.S. economic gains are further enhanced by the exceedingly high rate of return on investments in the oil industry. While Middle East oil accounts for less than 2% of U.S. investments, its share of total U.S. foreign earnings is about 33%. Moreover, U.S. and British financial institutions claim the lion's share of Middle East oil surplus, which they recycle as loans to impoverished Third World nations. Throughout the post-World War II period a lucrative arms trade has claimed a sizable portion of the Middle East market, by far the largest arms- importing region in the world, with the highest military expenditure on a percapita basis and in terms of the Gross National Product. Seven of the largest ten arms importers during the past decade were Middle Eastern countries, and the West, particularly the United States, is their largest supplier. Annual percapita military expenditure in the Gulf region ranges between $1,060 for Oman to $2,400 for Saudi Arabia. The military expenditure as a percentage of GDP for 1991 ranges between 16.4% for Oman, to 12.5% for Qatar, and 14% for Saudi Arabia.(9)

The post-World War 11 period has witnessed increases in arms sales to the region at astronomical levels: from $2.36 billion for the entire fifteen-year period between 1955-1969 to $3.2 billion per year between 1970 and 1975 to $8.9 billion per year between 1975 and 1979. The Middle East accounted for $40 billion of the world military spending of $500 billion in 1980, with Saudi Arabia leading at the level of $20.7 billion. In 1992, Saudi Arabia spent $17.88 billion, while tiny Bahrein spent $1.48 billion and Kuwait expended $2.49 billion.(10) Most of these purchases were made in the United States.

Given these interests, the oil companies, major financial institutions and the defense industry, together with the political and social forces which supported them, projected their power into the policy-making arena and shaped the perimeters of U.S. interventionist policies in the Middle East. During the 1950s the defense of these economic interests was predicated on a network of alliances pulling together conservative pro-Western regimes in the area and on the readiness of the U.S. to intervene directly.

The history of the U.S. involvement with this region reveals a great deal about George Bush's claim that the 1990-1991 military conflict in the Gulf was about moral principles and jobs. It also explains the sudden discovery of Saddam Hussein as the most dangerous man in the world, the latest incarnation of Hitler. The sudden transformation of Saddam Hussein's Iraq from a virtual U.S. proxy in the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) and protector of the pro-American dynastic regimes, including the Houses of Saud, Sabah, Khalifa, Abu Sa'idi and Thani, to a radical perpetrator of instability and the most menacing threat to U.S. vital interest in the Third World since Korea and Vietnam, is connected to this history.

The virtual occupation of the Gulf by the U.S. is the logical product of the transfer of imperial control from Britain to the United States. That transfer was completed in the mid-1980s, when the U.S. Navy began its reflagging operation on behalf of Kuwaiti commercial shipping. The term "responsibility," transferred from Britain to the U.S., means safeguarding the region for U.S. corporations. The conservative rich dynasties which rule in the Gulf act as virtual partners of the United States entrusted with internal security. American policy has endeavored to contain and defeat the enemies of the status quo and so the containment policy, whose strategic doctrine was based on the assumption that there existed a legitimate world order for which the U.S. assumed major responsibility, was extended to the Middle East in the early days of the Cold War. The stated enemy was, of course, Soviet communism. But the unstated enemy of the 1950s and 1960s was Arab nationalism, which vowed to unify the Arab World, nationalize its wealth and resources, and declare itself non-aligned in the East-West conflict. Today's enemies are subsumed under the rubric of terrorism, be they bombers of U.S. military installations in the Arabian Peninsula, resisters of Israeli occupation in south Lebanon, suicide bombers in Palestine/Israel, or simply dissidents who oppose the so-called peace process, even though it has lost the confidence of its own sponsors.

America's global posture has been characterized by an impressive consistency in terms of policy objectives since George F. Kennan wrote his famous 1947 "X" article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," an official policy paper based on the assumption that the United States had the ability to contain the Soviet Union and thus produce the kind of changes in Soviet society that would make it acceptable to the U.S.(11) The pursuit of these objectives in the Middle East region revealed two general patterns which entailed alternating between direct intervention and reliance on surrogates or regional influentials: (1) containment through military alliances, followed by an interlude of attempted containment through nationalism, and (2) the politics of informal alliances and what Zbigniew Brzezinski called "regional influentials." The first phase, during the period 1948-1960, was dominated by vigorous and consistent attempts to build a network of military alliances that would link up NATO with SEATO, thus forming a wall of encirclement around the Sino-Soviet periphery. The potential members of the alliance were Arab and Islamic states, but not Israel. The interlude between 1960 and 1966 saw the U.S seek a rapprochement with radical Arab nationalism in an attempt to "contain" the Soviet Union. The latter phase, from 1967 to the end of the 1980s, had its principal emphasis on the promotion of an anti-communist constellation of forces including Arab and Islamic states as well as Israel. The de facto alliance of regimes which shared U.S. strategic perspectives was counted on to hold the region within the U.S. sphere of influence. Crisis in the projected alliance, however, contributed to zigzags in U.S. policy between a direct U.S. presence in the aftermath of the downfall of the Shah's regime in Iran to a reliance upon surrogates. Actually, the second phase of U.S. policy is divided into sub-phases showing these policy swings.

Regardless of the means employed to accomplish America's policy objectives, these objectives remained constant: to ensure, through the threat of force, either directly or via certain regional influentials, that the region remained unalterably and irrevocably under U.S. hegemony. That implied a fairly high level of U.S. strategic and economic penetration through control of the area's strategic waterways, its most precious resources, oil, derivative financial surpluses and vast markets, all of which were defined as a matter of national security. The status quo, which U.S. policy has attempted to uphold during the past four decades, was a region free of Soviet intrusion and free of nationalist forces committed to social transformation, Arab unity, and liberation from foreign domination and occupation.

The crisis in the Gulf was the first important indication of the way the United States was going to respond to the much touted "New World Order." Military intervention in that region was an ominous sign that the United States perceived its international role as unchanged from the Cold War period. As it did throughout the Cold War, the U.S. continued to invest extraordinary resources in support of its military power, and the Gulf response was yet another demonstration of a foreign policy oriented to the use of that power. This remained so even while America's relative economic status continued to decline and a domestic debate raged over whether the U.S. should divert substantial resources from the military "peace dividend" to rebuilding an economy plagued with massive debt, bank failures, and a crumbling infrastructure. What President Bush believed to be at stake in the Gulf was American hegemony within its sphere of influence, the preservation of which has been a primary goal of U.S. foreign policy since the Truman administration, as noted above.

In the "New World Order," containment has lost its original rationale as a response to the Soviet challenge. Regional interventions can no longer be explained in terms of Soviet "aggression" or Soviet sponsored insurrections. The idea of global containment as a tool for maintaining the geopolitical balance of power has lost its force and indeed its raison d'etre. The anti-communist rhetoric of containment, however, masked the identity of another real enemy of American hegemonic designs: Third World nationalism and social revolution. In the words of Samuel Huntington, the post-Cold War interventions would be propelled by a civilizational threat.(12) That replaces the largely non-existent communist threat of forty years and would fill the threat vacuum.

THE ISRAELI LINKAGE

A tendency to identity United States security interests with a militarily strong Israel was beginning to take hold in Pentagon circles in the 1960s. A congressional sub-committee on Middle East peace concluded in April 1967 that the United Arab Republic (composed of Egypt and Syria) constituted the principal obstacle to peace, thus legitimizing the future offensive which came to be know as the Six Day War. Israel, which prior to 1967 was receiving the highest per capita aid from the U.S. of any country - a fact which remains true today - had indeed anticipated a proxy role for itself prior to the 1967 war and prior to the Nixon Doctrine. A spokesman for the Israeli foreign office expressed that readiness on 11 June 1966:

The United States has come to the conclusion that it can no longer respond to every incident around the world, that it must rely on local power, the deterrent of a friendly power as a first line to stave off America's direct involvement. Israel feels that it fits this definition. (13)

Indeed, Israel has emerged as the principal U.S. surrogate, entrusted with blunting the nationalist tide in the West's favor. The defeat of Egypt and Syria in June 1967 and the subsequent rise to prominence in inter-Arab affairs of such conservative Arab states as Saudi Arabia was cited as a vindication of this assumption. Although the offensive against Egypt and its brand of Arab socialism was not to involve the deployment of American troops, the 1967 War brought about consequences desirable not only to Israel, but to the U.S., as well, namely, the defeat of Nasserism as a potent force in Middle Eastern politics. This fact was emphasized by the former prime minister of Israel, Levi Eshkol, in 1968:

The value of Israel to the West in this part of the world will, I predict, be out of all proportion to its size. We will be a real bridge between the three continents and the free world will be very thankful not only if we survive but if we continue to thrive in secure and guaranteed frontiers. (14)

The June 1967 war, in which the American "hose and water" were placed in the hands of Israeli "firemen," anticipated the Nixon-Kissinger Doctrine. The Nixon-Kissinger Doctrine was premised on the ability and willingness of certain countries in key regions of the world to play the role of local policeman under the direction of the United States. The doctrine was articulated in several presidential speeches and policy statements, beginning with the Guam speech of 3 November 1969, and the State of the Union message of 1970. The new guiding principle postulated that unilateral intervention was expensive at home and unpopular abroad. Thus Israel, guaranteed by the U.S. a " margin of technical superiority"(15) over its Arab neighbors, was thrust into a position of dominance, enabling it to bring about conditions suitable to United States' as well as Israeli interests. Nixon's State of the World message explained this concept of partnership thus: " Others now have the ability and responsibility to deal with local disputes which once may have required our intervention." The New York Times reported that the Nixon administration remained "firmly committed to Israel's security and to her military superiority in the Middle East, for only Israel's strength can deter attack and prevent a call for direct American intervention."(16) [Emphasis added]

The first test of this partnership concept came in 1970, when during the confrontation between the Palestinian nationalist movement and the Jordan army, the U.S. alerted airborne units from its Sixth Fleet, which began to steam toward the east Mediterranean, and Israel expressed readiness for intervention in the event of a Palestinian triumph over King Hussein.

The October 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the ensuing oil embargo enabled Secretary of State Kissinger to embark on a post-Vietnam strategy in the Middle East. Gradually, the Big Four talks on the Middle East, which began shortly after the 1967 war, had dwindled to talks between the two superpowers. By the end of the October 1973 war, the United States was beginning to act as if there was only one superpower in the Middle East. Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy as well as the American decision to ensure the failure of the Geneva Conference at the end of 1973 marked the start of a new era in Middle East diplomacy. The phrase "peace process" became synonymous with U.S. diplomatic efforts conducted in a solo fashion. One of the salient features of U.S. diplomacy was its consistent opposition to the internationalization of the Palestine question and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The U.S. was to emerge as chief arbiter despite a steadily growing special relationship with Israel, which compromised its credibility as mediator.

Kissinger's post-October 1973 mediation revealed three objectives. The first was to bring about a general eclipse of Soviet influence in the region. The second objective was to obtain a political settlement capable of creating a transformation of the very nature of the Arab- Israeli conflict, a settlement which would remove the conflict from its ideological context and transform it into an ordinary territorial conflict. Such an approach was inherently detrimental to the Palestinians and Arab nationalists, who, at that time, viewed the struggle as one against settler colonialism and imperialist penetration. Kissinger devised a settlement which would highlight the global concerns of American policymakers and address the economic and strategic imperatives of American foreign policy, i.e., the steady flow of oil to the West, the security of American investments and trade with the Arab World, the stability of the region, the security of pro-Western conservative regimes, and the maintenance of a strategic military presence. The third objective was to provide Egypt with such a vested interest in stability (through economic aid and territorial adjustments) as to insure its neutralization and effective removal from the Arab front against Israel. The overall aim was to give the United States the necessary leverage not only to neutralize Egypt but also to pressure Syria and the PLO into making significant concessions to Israel. The Sinai accord negotiated by Egypt and Israel under U.S. auspices in 1975 was calculated to achieve that end.

Furthermore, the United States committed itself then to continue refusing to recognize or negotiate with the PLO until the latter recognized Israel's right to exist and agreed to abide by U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. No such reciprocal demands recognizing Palestinian national rights were made on Israel. In fact these rights were non- existent in the Camp David formula negotiated later by President Carter, and for the first time, West BankGaza sovereignty was actually floated. Later, it would be classified by U.S. diplomats as a "final status issue," which effectively implied that the Palestinians would go to the negotiating table to discover whether they had rights rather than to assert their internationally recognized rights.

Under Reagan and Bush, the U.S. continued to press for a settlement based on two separate tracks (Arab and Palestinian) and two phases (transitional and permanent). The settlement, in full conformity with Israeli wishes, would not be predicated on Palestinian sovereignty, full Israeli withdrawal (later reclassified as 'redeployment'), any meaningful sharing of Jerusalem, or return of the Palestinian refugees.

A striking feature of United States policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict since the 1967 occupation was the insistence by the U.S. on playing the role of chief arbiter, if not sole peacemaker, when in fact it has been cobelligerent. The steady growth of the U.S.-Israeli special relationship, transformed into a full-fledged strategic alliance, during and after the Cold War, was paralleled by a corresponding ascendancy of the U.S. diplomatic role. That role has now dwarfed and eclipsed all the conventional methods of conflict resolution which have been attempted since 1967, including mediation, multilateral initiatives, regional endeavors and UN-sponsored peace-making.

The diplomatic history of the Middle East during that period reveals that half-a-dozen U.S. administrations stood consistently in opposition to a settlement supported by an international consensus, one that would provide for an end to the Israeli occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state, existing side by side with Israel.

At the same time, Israel had managed to reject every U.S. initiative involving a territorial settlement, even when such initiatives excluded Palestinian sovereignty. Israel still adheres to the position that Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 did not obligate it to withdraw from all the occupied Arab territories. The Palestinians have thus been confronted with two protagonists intent on denying them a national existence and a sovereign order. This is not to imply that U.S. and Israeli policies have been consistently in tandem but despite occasional wrinkles, higher interests have always prevailed. The two interests coincided to the extent that succeeding U.S. administrations viewed the disaffected Palestinians as a volatile anti-establishment group whose irredentist goals precluded any stakes in the existing regional order; hence the convergence of U.S. strategic designs and Israeli expansionist ambitions.

REAPING THE HARVEST

The U.S. endeavor to impose its hegemony on the Middle East, which predates the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, has finally reached an advanced stage. The new additions to the Middle East diplomatic vocabulary - Madrid, Washington, Oslo, Cairo, and so on - symbolize harvest time. The four-decade long U.S. investment of military hardware, economic aid, and diplomatic capital has finally paid off. The signing ceremonies at the White House (13 September 1993) and at Wadi Araba (27 October 1994) sponsored and witnessed by President Clinton, underscore a proclaimed domination based on a U.S.-Israeli alliance which is beginning to generate deep concern among ordinary Arabs.

The outcome was clearly the result of a coherent and consistent policy, which aimed to realize a clearly-defined, though euphemisticaily proclaimed objective: a region in which advocates of a variety of ideas or programs, including Arab unity, self-sufficiency, independent foreign policy, democratic governance, Palestinian self-determination and Arab-Israeli parity and mutuality, would be removed to the sidelines or held at bay. Instead, the region is being recolonized in the age of decolonization, and its post-World War II status is being settled on the basis of pax-Americana, pax-Israelica.(17) And yet, the endeavor is widely known as the "peace process," as if peace has some other meaning.

These objectives have been pursued relentlessly by U.S. politicians representing the right, "left" and center. It did not matter that Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, who represented the liberal trend, had pursued policies similar to those of John Foster Dulles and Richard Nixon, the conservatives. Nor was it strange that Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan adhered to the same Middle East policy consensus, irrespective of the fact that the former's name is synonymous with human rights and international conciliation, while the latter was the advocate of rollback, who vowed to exorcise some of the demons of Vietnam which had haunted a whole generation of Americans. Now Clinton, whose mission is to expand and promote the new and strange concept of "market democracies" throughout the world, is collecting the "pay-off," which represents the fruit of the combined energies and resources mobilized by his liberal and conservative predecessors. This is a remarkable testimony to the ability of the U.S. politico-strategic establishment to forge a stable foreign policy consensus.

The tools of U.S. policy were constantly in place but they were not fully understood by those who were the object of that policy. Arabs and Palestinians in top-level positions have often misconstrued policy aberrations as policy changes, ignoring the permanence of U.S. long- term policy objectives. Short-term signals and seductions emanating from Washington, which invariably included widely-advertised threatened reassessments of U.S.-Israeli relations by disgruntled presidents, were mistakenly read as movements at last in the direction of fairness. Exceptional deviations, such as Gerald Ford's call for a reassessment, Carter's confrontation with Menachem Begin in 1977, Baker's ordeal with Yitzhak Shamir in 1990, the dialogue between the U.S. and the PLO, and the conflict over loan guarantees, among other episodes, were not seen by Palestinian and other Arab leaders as manifestations of normal disagreements in need of tactical adjustment, but as signs of a fundamental change. Such naivete or wishful thinking stems from a political culture in which policy changes derive from pronouncements or autocratic rulers decreed not by structural changes, but by short- term imperatives or the leaders' own preferences. Hence the simplistic comparisons between the policies of U.S. presidents, ignoring the role of permanent strategic considerations and objective factors, both domestic and international.

Thus, Arafat's appearance at the White House Rose Garden on 13 September 1993 was seen by him and by many around him as the crowning achievement of his career and the sure sign of a new American policy, when in fact Clinton, Rabin, and the informed public regarded it as a form of his surrender. Arafat's frivolous statement that the Palestinians have a new friend in the White House must have amused his Israeli and American listeners. Moreover, it would have made more sense had President Clinton been the one to thank Arafat three times on 13 September, rather than the other way around; Arafat, after all, had enabled Clinton to proclaim the realization of objectives detrimental to fundamental Palestinian rights, which U.S. policy-makers have been struggling to achieve since before Clinton reached the voting age. The Oslo accord was, therefore, not only the product of fundamental changes in the global and regional environments, but it was also a culmination of U.S. persistence and tenacity, coupled with a proclivity for ad hoc methods of decision-making by Arab leaders.

THE ARAB STATES AS INSTRUMENTS OF U.S. POLICY

Among the tools of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East were the Arab regimes themselves. The Jordanian military onslaught against the Palestinian movement in September 1970 had inflicted structural damage, the effect of which continued to retard the Palestinian struggle for years to come. Not only had King Hussein terminated the Palestinian- enforced de facto dual authority in Jordan between 1967 and 1970, but he also helped accomplish policy objectives for the U.S. and Israel. Similarly, when Palestinian fighters regrouped in Lebanon after the "Black September" debacle of 1970 and began to threaten the delicate balance inside Lebanon and in the region, Syria was tacitly accepted by the U.S. and Israel as the logical candidate for policing Lebanon in 1976. The Palestinian national movement once again had to be reduced to manageable proportions; this time, however, not by a conservative pro-western monarchy, but by a "revolutionary" Arab nationalist regime. The modus operandi, in which Israel and Syria came to share suzerainty over Lebanon, with differential U.S. blessings until this day, was the product of that mission. Egypt was subsequently drafted to deliver the coup de grace, peacefully this time, against the Palestinians. The 1978 Camp David agreement inflicted more damage on Palestinian nationalism by non-military means than the two previous armed onslaughts combined. Thus, the first Arab state to assume responsibility for strategic balance vis-a-vis Israel, from the mid-1950s until 1970, was transformed in the late 1970s to an enforcer of U.S. policy and a facilitator for Israel. Not only had Camp David secured the removal of Egypt from the Arab strategic arena, but it had also allowed Israel to dodge its legal responsibilities to the Palestinian people, and to shrug off its obligation to withdraw from Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese territories, under Security Council resolutions.

Even Iraq, the third and most recent contender for strategic balance visa-vis Israel (after Egypt and Syria), had allowed itself to become an instrument of U.S. foreign policy during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. U.S. policy makers were gratified to see Iraq inflict damage on the Islamic Republic of Iran without cost to the U.S., and also to weaken itself in the process, while pretending to play the role of pace-setter in the Gulf. Moreover, Iraq's war against America's enemy in the Gulf had refocused Arab attention away from the Israeli threat and toward an imaginary new "Shiite Iranian threat." The Palestinian cause, already battered by Camp David, was further bruised by the new priorities of Saddam Hussein. And when the latter began to exaggerate his own importance to U.S. strategy in the Gulf, he was reduced to size, not only with the acquiescence of Arab regimes, but also with the active participation of many of them.

A "WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY" FOR THE U.S.

With the destruction of Iraq, followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a settlement based on U.S. designs suddenly became possible and operational; Madrid was the venue. Although James Baker III was the architect of the Madrid Conference in 1991, much of the construction work on the road to Madrid had already begun under Baker's predecessors. In fact, the Madrid framework represents a synthesis of previous U.S. diplomatic initiatives. The two-track approach, the self-rule concept, and transitional arrangements are derived from the Camp David accords negotiated under Carter's auspices in 1978. The Jordanian dimension of a Palestinian-Israeli settlement is grounded in the Reagan Plan of 1 September 1982.(18) The linguistic bait designed to attract the Palestinians was largely inherited from the Shultz plan of 1988, which itself incorporated the salient features of Camp David and the Reagan Plan.(19)

Two characteristics are shared in common by all of these initiatives. First, they were all occasioned by structural changes in either the regional or the global environment. The de-Nasserization of Egypt, and the subsequent collapse of Soviet influence there in 1972, created a strategic imperative for U.S. diplomatic action, and the outcome was the meeting at Camp David. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 had so weakened the Palestinian national movement that President Reagan declared the outcome an "opportunity" for peace, which effectively removed Palestinian national rights from the active global agenda.

Having just embarked on a new cold war with the Soviet Union and on revolutionary nationalism, Reagan welcomed the opportunity to rearrange the strategic landscape of the Middle East. His plan, however, was thwarted by a junior ally with strategic designs of its own. The prompt and categorical rejection of the Reagan Plan by the Israeli cabinet, only a few hours after it was announced on prime television time, had simply sealed its fate. The plan's denial of sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza to both Israel and the Palestinians in favor of Jordan guaranteed Israel's quick rejection. The stillborn plan was thus shelved, but aspects of it were resurrected six years later in the Shultz Plan, which deferred the issue of sovereignty to final status negotiations. The Shultz Plan itself, also failed to impress Israel, whose Prime Minister Shamir declared it "unwelcome" in 1988, causing it to be shelved until the following year, when Baker began to revive it.

Baker's "opportunity" in 1991, however, proved to be more auspicious than Reagan's opportunity in 1982. The U.S. defeat of Iraq in 1991 was more decisive than the Israeli storming of Lebanon in 1982, and more damaging to the Palestinians, hence Baker's "opportunity," which produced Madrid. Although the Madrid formula was based on the principle of the exchange of territory for peace, in accordance with a speech by President Bush to the U.S. Congress on 6 March 1991, it was not made clear whether that exchange included the West Bank and Gaza or only the Golan Heights of Syria. In fact, the Madrid formula, through the separate negotiating tracks for Israel and the Arab states, as well as the interim arrangements for the West Bank and Gaza, had effectively enabled Israel to defer West Bank and Gaza sovereignty while it derived Arab state recognition and obtained a measure of normalization with the Arab world. In that sense, it was utilized by Israel as a cosmetic ploy to do no more than reorganize its occupation.

The second important common denominator of the four U.S. plans is that the roles of the protagonists in the "peace process" were always overshadowed by the strategic dimension of that process. Interest on the part of these protagonists has often lagged far behind that of the United States, thus creating a corresponding disparity between the pursuit of comprehensive peace and the search for comprehensive security. The parties to the conflict did not share Washington's diagnosis that the circumstances were propitious for peaceful relations. And while Israel said "no" to the Reagan and the Shultz Plans, and later renounced its own election plans in 1989 in order to avoid a territorial settlement, most of the Arab parties opted for negotiations, despite the adverse conditions, in order not to displease Washington.

Given all of that, it was not a coincidence that most of the previous U.S. proposals for peace had ended in failure. Camp David may have terminated the belligerency on the Israeli-Egyptian front, but it has fallen short of establishing genuine peaceful relations between the two countries, let alone the comprehensive regional peace it promised to build. In fact, civil society in Egypt is the most vigorous of all in the Arab World in its opposition to normalizing relations with Israel on the basis of Oslo.

The U.S., however, pursued its objectives relentlessly, despite its rather isolated position in the world community, hedging its bets on favorable global or regional circumstances in the not-too-distant future. Help was extended by the unintended acts of two tragic figures: Mikhail Gorbachev and Saddam Hussein. The former had initiated the process which led to the demise of the Soviet Union. The fateful decision of Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait gave George Bush the green light to reshape the strategic landscape of the Middle East, terminate the existing Arab political order, and resolve the impasse in favor of Washington's Palestinian and Arab agenda.(20) It was a windfall for the U.S., a superpower then facing relative economic decline and sagging credibility, yet anxious to remain "number one."

The Gulf War had meant the destruction of Iraqi society, while it also spelled disaster for the Palestinian people, whose leadership decided in 1993 to acquiesce in the U.S. and Israeli agendas, which constituted a reformulation of old plans that excluded Palestinian self-determination and circumvented their national rights upheld by the international community. These rights are enshrined in numerous international declarations and UN resolutions. Even the "full autonomy" promised by Camp David is effectively excluded from the active peace agenda. The Palestinian people are now at a crossroad with limited options: either they insist on total Israeli withdrawal as the only path to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with an arrangement for sharing sovereignty in Jerusalem; or they accept a neo-apartheid system with Palestinian "autonomous zones," i.e., reservations and enclaves within a greater Israel. The first option is now unacceptable to Israel and to the United States, which, however, would not exclude a Jordanian alternative in which King Hussein rather than Arafat would be charged with the administrative chores while Israel enjoys sovereignty. Either way, a Jordan option or neo-apartheid, the Palestinians would be faced with having to surrender the basic rights recognized by the United Nations: the right of the refugees to return to their homes and property, the right of self determination, the right to struggle against the occupation, and their rights as civilians under occupation in accordance with the 1949 Geneva Convention. That Convention implies the nullification of all the unilateral and illegal measures undertaken by Israel in the course of the occupation, and continuing under the so-called autonomous rule of the Palestinian Authority.

The honorable alternative to all this is a binational state, which is more consonant with the territorial consequences of Oslo now prevailing on the ground. That, however is unacceptable to Israel and therefore to the U.S.

While these denials constitute the real Israeli agenda, under the Clinton Administration they have become effectively the U.S. agenda. The Clinton Administration has recently vetoed resolutions of the Security Council calling on Israel to refrain from grabbing Arab land, building settlements, and violating the rights of civilians under occupation. When these resolutions were sent to the General Assembly, the U.S. shared the "no" vote with only two member states: Israel and the tiny island of Micronesia. Under Clinton and Gore, Israel sets the content, the pace, and takes the lead. The U.S. simply follows.

CONCLUSION

Although containment lost its rationale with the disappearance of the Soviet State, the strategic dimensions of that policy have remained intact in order to assure U.S. hegemony. Also intact is Israel's role in that strategy. What we are seeing now, in fact, is the re-emergence of Israel as a super-regional policeman with a much broadened territory and a much expanded role.

Washington is currently promoting a new Baghdad pact-type military alliance in which Israel, which was deliberately kept out of the earlier Baghdad Pact (1955) to appease the Arabs, now occupies center stage with Turkey in second place, followed by Jordan and perhaps other Arab states in the future. Such an alliance would reinforce the current U.S. policy of dual containment against Iran and Iraq, and would also attempt to intimidate Syria and any others who dare oppose U.S. hegemony and normalization of U.S.-Arab relations outside the context of Security Council Resolution 242.

Israel's sphere of operations would be expanded even beyond that claimed by Ariel Sharon when he was defense minister in 1981. The Sharon Doctrine then claimed a sphere of influence that reached the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union in the North, the Horn of Africa to the South, Iran and possibly Pakistan (because of the revelations about an "Islamic bomb") to the East, and all of North Africa in the West. Now, Israel's strategic role would have an added economic dimension, the one that lies under Shimon Peres' vision for a "new Middle East." Stability, defined as the absense of war, a Pax Americana (not to be confused with a just peace) would provide a suitable environment to push America's globalization scheme.

What can the Arabs do in the face of this 30-year long record of U.S. uncritical support of Israeli lebensraum and complicity in a determined effort to deny basic human rights to the Palestinians and other Arab people? Is the situation so hopeless as to make their choices limited to accepting either U.S. or Israeli domination and Arab regime authoritarianism? The answer is clearly no. There are practical and honorable options, but they must be placed in the context of the structure of costs and benefits. The prevailing structure, which is heavy on benefits and short on costs would have to be altered, otherwise the "free ride" would continue. A policy will not change as long as the policy-maker is not made to pay a price for it. Washington's policy on settlements has gone from considering them "illegal" (under Carter) to an "obstacle to peace" under Reagan and Bush, to a mere "complicating factor" in the peace process under Clinton. In practical terms, Israel now has a green - not even a yellow light from Clinton's White House to build colonial settlements on Arab land, in defiance of almost unanimous disapproval by the world community. And yet, the Arab regimes have not only failed to raise the price for such complicity and defiance, but have also continued to pursue the process of normalizing relations with Israel, in full accordance with U.S. and Israeli dictates.

Clinton's U. N. ambassador, Madeleine Albright, who now heads the State Department, has decreed all U.N. resolutions on Palestine "contentions, irrelevant and obsolete" in 1994. And yet, the cost-benefit formula has been allowed by the Arabs to remain intact. Moreover, more than 20 million Iraqi citizens have been subjected to one of the most ruthless punishments ever delivered by the U.N. at the behest of Madame Albright. Together with 20 million Sudanese and 4 million Libyans, they are subjected to virtual country-arrest, a form of incarceration which constitutes collective punishment and denial of adequate food and medicine. In the face of this onslought, most Arab regimes have stood by as onlookers, while some of them are cheerleaders.

Altering the structure of costs and benefits means that Washington should not be allowed to continue its prejudicial and inhuman policies by default. It means that the Arab World needs to restructure its own policies in accordance with the dictates of self-respect, of national interests and reciprocal relations.

* This sections relies heavily on Chapters 1 and 2 in my The Obstucton of Peace (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995)

NOTES

1. See Cheryl Rubenburg. Israel and the American National Interest. A Critical Examination (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

2. See Donald Neff, Fallen Pillars, (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995); Stephen Green. Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With A Militant Israel (New York: Morrow, 1984); Paul Findley. They Dare To Speak Out (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1985).

3. See Noam Chomsky, Powers and Prospects. (Boston: South End Press, 1996); Chomsky. The Fateful Triangle (South End, 1993); Naseer Aruri. The Obstruction of Peace (Monro, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995); Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality In The Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995).

4. For a discussion of Clinton's Middle East Policy, see my The Obstruction of Peace, especially chapters 8, 11, 13; see also Avinoam BarYosef. "The Jews Who Run Clinton's Court," Maariv, 2 September 1994. For a discussion of Martin Indyk's own views on the Middle East, see his article in Foreign Affairs, December 1991.

5. See Shimon Peres. The New Middle East (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1995)

6. James Petras "U.S. Policy Towards The Middle East". Paper presented at the XIII Annual Convention of the AAUG. November 1980.

7. See, for example, Los Angeles Times, 3 June 1987; Mark Penn and Douglas E. Schoen. "American Attitudes Towards the Middle East." Public Opinion. May/June 1988, p.46; Gallup Organization. "A Gallup Survey Regarding the West Bank and Gaza Conflict Between Israel and the Palestinians." Princeton, NJ, 11 March 1988.

8. For Excerpts from Nixon's State of the World Message, see The New York Times, 4 November 1969.

9. Human Development Report 1944. Published for UNDP by Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 170.

10. Ibid.

11. Foreign Affairs, July 1947.

12. See the article by Samuel Huntington. "The Clash of Civilizations, " Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 22-49.

13. New York Times, 12 June 1966.

14. Newsweek, 17 February 1968.

15. Nixon's phrase during the presidential campaign. See the New York Times. 24 December 1969.

16. Ibid.

17. See my "The Recolonization of the Arab World." Arab Studies Quarterly, vol. XI, nos. 2 & 3 (Spring/Summer 1989), pp. 273-286.

18. For an analysis of the Reagan Plan, see Naseer Aruri and Fouad Moughrabi. "The Reagan Middle East Initiative." Journal of Palestine Studies. Vol. XII, no. 2 (Winter 1983), pp. 10-30.

19. See State Department Bureau of Public Affairs, "U.S. Policy In the Middle East," no. 27 (June 1988).

20. See the following articles on the regional and global significance of the Gulf War: Tom Naylor, "American Arms In The Persian Gulf." Canadian Dimensions (March 1991), pp. 34-37; James Petras, "The Meaning of The New World Order: A Critique." America (11 May 1991), pp. 512- 514; Noam Chomsky, "U.S. Gulf Policy" Open Magazine (18 January 1991) pp. 117; Noam Chomsky, "What We Say Goes: The Middle East In The New World Order." Z Magazine (May 1991) pp. 50-64; Naseer Aruri, "Human Rights and the Gulf Crisis: The Verbal Strategy of George Bush," in M. Mouchabeck and Phyllis Benes, Beyond the Storm. Brooklyn, New York. Interlink Publishers, 1991.

Naseer Aruri is Chancellor Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He is also a former president of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates. Active in Amnesty International USA and Human Rights Watch/Middle East, Dr. Aruri has served on both organizations' Boards of Directors.

So here we all are in the Tad Smith Coliseum (home of The Rebels) at "Ole Miss." Across the campus is the Thad Cochran Research Center. Soon to be inaugurated is the Trent Lott Leadership Studies program, which I gather will not be offered as a major. Both distinguished senators were cheerleaders here. Behind the coliseum is a graveyard- -a mass grave, really--containing almost 700 bodies from the slaughter at Shiloh. Across the campus is the Lyceum, which took James Meredith so long to penetrate, with the aid of more than 10,000 armed soldiers. Facing it is a memorial to the university's "Grays" with a "Go Tell the Spartans" inscription in Greek on its plinth. (Only one of that 1861 class survived to see it dedicated.) Though locals are now inclined to point out John Grisham's old mansion on the edge of town, pride of place yet goes to William Faulkner's Rowan Oak plantation home. His riding boots are still where he left them on the floor. Sacked as the town's postmaster (a good job, he used to say, but it put you at the beck and call of any sonofabitch who wanted a 2-cent stamp), Faulkner retained a supercilious gentility that got him known round the place as "Count No 'Count," before it was understood that there was money lurking in the keys of his creaky Underwood typewriter.

We are here--Jack Kemp, Michael Kinsley, Robert Kuttner, myself and others--to recognize a master of the supercilious and the genteel. Tonight sees the recording of the very last of William Buckley's Firing Line shows. It's been thirty-three years--the life-span of the alleged Jesus of Nazareth. Unlike that possible role model, Buckley has chosen to quit while people can still ask why (rather than simply, why not?). Though I can't say I always feel completely at home in Governor Fordice' s state, the hospitality and courtesy exceed the billing, and in any case, Buckley deserves some kind of a send-off.

If you go on Crossfire or Nightline or any other of a dozen gab shows, you will infallibly leave the studio with that oppressive sense of what Diderot brilliantly termed l'esprit d'escalier. It is on the way down the staircase that one thinks of the point one really ought to have made. And this is because on these awful programs the whole studio is rigged against the dialectic. The clock is running too fast, there are too many guests, the control room is shouting into the earpiece of the presenter, the assumptions of the topic reflect the needs of the consensus and the pressures of the ratings.

People ask why you don't see Noam Chomsky on the tube. It's not just flat-out bias so much as the fact that his views are literally unutterable in the time and format available. I did my first Firing Line in 1983 and swiftly learned that if I left the studio cursing at what I hadn' t said, it was my own fault. Chomsky once told me that during the war in Indochina, the best opportunity he had to give his views on the air was afforded by Buckley. (A repeat appearance was promised but did not materialize. Well, you can't have everything.)

A restrospective of old Firing Lines is shown as a warm-up for the crowd, and there we get to see the very young Jesse Jackson, the very furious William Kunstler, the very urbane J.K. Galbraith. None of them ever got such a chance to present their opinions on (let's say just for a laugh) MacNeil/Lehrer. Tonight it's two hours devoted to the dry-seeming but actually enthralling question of taxation and Internet commerce. Who else would risk such a thing? Buckley is more languid than usual, as perhaps befits the retiring honoree; it's difficult to believe that this is the same man who snarled so hatefully at Gore Vidal in Chicago in 1968--though mind you, that notorious lapse occurred on someone else's show, and there's no danger, no danger at all, that ABC would even risk such a confrontation today.

I thought I detected suspicious signs of mellowing in Buckley when I met him for a debate, last summer, at the Hoover Institution in Stanford. (The show was Uncommon Knowledge, chaired by Peter Robinson, and one hopes that this will now succeed Firing Line on public television.) The subject was 1968 in retrospect. I was first asked my views on the Vietnam War and invited to say if I would alter them in hindsight. I said my only regret, amounting to shame, was that I hadn't done more to oppose it. Buckley, asked the identical question, said that he now wished the United States had never engaged itself in Vietnam at all. The chairman, looking slightly discomposed, said, Well, you also opposed the Civil Rights Act in those days, didn't you, but you wouldn't say that today, would you? Oh yes, replied Buckley, for whom the phrase "no whit abashed" might have been invented, in point of actual fact he would, too. As our chairman's face filled with alarm, Buckley added that while he might not now oppose the act in the same way, he still felt on balance that it had brought more trouble than it was worth. Whew, I thought. For a moment there I feared we had a love-fest on our hands.

The cover of the New York Times Magazine for November 28 bannered an essay of extreme tendentiousness by Jacob Weisberg, thoughtlessly titled "The Rehabilitation of Joe McCarthy." Liberals of all stripes lined up to say that perhaps the Senator from Wisconsin had been right after all, and Ronald Radosh was given yet another chance to state that the Spanish Civil War was won by the right side. The only anti- McCarthy revisionist quoted was...William Buckley. As Weisberg put it in a clumsy sentence, he "now also endorses the contradictory stance of Whittaker Chambers, who thought McCarthy was too indiscriminate to do the cause of anti-Communism any good and thus deserving of repudiation." Repudiation, no less! And this form Joe McCarthy's oldest and fiercest partisan. I don't know whether Buckley has also modified his once- friendly view of fascism in Spain, but leave it to Radosh to pick up the flag that's too dirty for the right to carry anymore and fawn on Generalissimo Franco too. This entitles me to be sorry that there' s no more Firing Line on which I could tell him what a creep I think he is.

In order to consider the historical accuracy of Kennedy Miller's Vietnam we must first consider the capacity of that text to construct history.

Stuart Cunningham has already extensively addressed this issue (1987, 1988(a), 1988(b)). He refers to the way that narrative practices are used to construct this text into a quasi-historical record.

Cunningham suggests that Kennedy Miller's Vietnam successfully exploits the national image and sound archives for more than the mere recognition effect that they produce. Rather kennedy Miller's Vietnam actively engages us, as audiences, in the process of inscribing those archival documents into our own experience. Via a seemingly conventional, dramatized narrative, the power of the record of history is invoked.

Myth, Image, History and Reality

A measure of the adequacy of media theory (or of any social theory) is its capacity to relate its analyses back to the broader social world of which the media are merely a part: its capacity to relate image to reality, or actual historical events.

But just as filmic discourse is obvious to many as a construction, historical discourse is also a construction. However, the dominance or primacy of literate (over filmic or televisual) discourse is still evident in our greater readiness to accept the plausibility of (written) history over the representations of other media.

Film (or TV) is merely a new medium by which history can be constructed or represented. (Traditional) written historical discourse holds no monopoly on the power to represent historical reality. Just as a history book can be taken as a construction of history, so too can a TV series like Kennedy/Miller's Vietnam. For instance, Cunningham (1988,(a)) concludes that Kennedy Miller have offered 'many memorable representations of major determinants of Australian history', and that their Vietnam mini-series is 'the jewel in (their) crown'. In contemporary society it is film and TV that have come to carry those dominant societal myths that were spoken or written in previous societies. This is what John Fiske and John Hartley have called the bardic-story-telling-function of TV (1978). The three main aspects of this bardic function are to articulate the main lines of the established cultural consensus about the nature of reality; to implicate the individual members of the culture into its dominant value system; and to celebrate, explain, interpret and justify the doings of the culture's individual representatives in the world out there.

Philip Bell (1988) in an article titled Remembering Vietnam has suggested that '(nearly) all film and TV fiction (claiming) to be about Vietnam is typified by amnestic and ethnocentric qualities' - a nostalgic distancing from, rather than an exploration of, the historical and political conditions that produced the war. For Bell such 'sophisticated nostalgia is a form of cultural and political amnesia'.

However, Bell argues that Kennedy Miller's Vietnam, by its not inconsiderable treatment of the Vietnamese, 'offers a more complex, less clearly ethnocentric image of the war' but also that it nevertheless manages to 'keep "history" and "politics" at the level of background forces which are significant only in so far as they affect the family's humanity.'

In contrast, Cunningham believes that Kennedy Miller 'invite different responses' and 'reopen "old" discourses buried by the amnesia of a "managed" history'. (1988, (b)) (I will return to Cunningham's important analysis in more detail.)

Such contrary 'readings' are all the more reason to consider the historical veracity and political analysis of the reconstructions offered by such an impressive text.

The text

Kennedy Miller's Vietnam presents itself as an account of the movement of history in Australia from November 1964 to December 1972; from November 1964 with the introduction of conscription, and just before the Menzies Government decided to commit combat troops to Vietnam (April 1965), through to December 1972, when the Whitlam Government is elected, conscription is ended and so is the Australian commitment to the war.

As the mini-series progresses across its 10 hours of prime TV ratings time, there is considerable change - or growth - coming-of-age, or maturing, within the main characters and within the Australian nation, and within our knowledge of these eight years. We begin in 1964 with the Godard family together - they proceed to breakup or separate, but by the end of the 10 hours, when the family unit re-forms, we can see many historical references in their separate developments. The family is used as a metaphor for the Australian nation - it also comes apart or separates or self-destructs - so the Godard family is a metaphor for the journey Australia went on from 1964 to 1972.

The four family members act as symbolic and figurative, historical indicators of some of the social divisions within Australia over those 8 years. The father as the authoritarian and deceitful Government with its behind-the-scenes machinations.

The son as the immature and somewhat amoral youth, receptive to the arbitrary lessons of empirical experience. The mother as initially rather impotently subservient to the law of the father, but responsive to the rise of feminism.

The daughter as the potential of the new, distinctly female force, necessary for peace and positive humanitarian social change.

These 4 characters allow Kennedy Miller's Vietnam to cover many aspects of the war. But what kind of historical record does Vietnam build? What are the politics of the Vietnam War as presented by Vietnam?

Kennedy Miller's Vietnam publicity claimed: 'A nation at war; a family in conflict. A time of family change. The moving story of an Australian family caught up in the deep personal conflicts of the time.' The ending and resolution of Kennedy Miller's Vietnam is the re-forming of this family and analogously the extended family of Australia.

I believe the major weakness of Kennedy Miller's Vietnam in terms of historical accuracy is in this attempt to build a politics of national reconciliation around the metaphor of the nation as family.

The Historical Accuracy of Kennedy Miller's Vietnam

The happy ending - the resolution - is, I believe, largely the construction of Kennedy Miller. The Woodstock generation and the peace movement were only a passing phase in Western capitalist re-groupment. Let' s look specifically at several aspects of the reconstruction of history in Kennedy Miller's Vietnam:-

(1) Via the son Phil we directly see or experience the conflict itself - at the battlefront. Also via Phil, the Vietnamese themselves are introduced - initially Phil is like a tabula rasa - being inscribed with the empirical knowledge resulting from the experiences of a soldier for a neocolonial power - these neocolonial experiences of life and death give Phil a certainty about what he learns. Challenge to that certainty comes from the Australian anti-war movement, and also from the Vietnamese themselves - through the concluding speech by Le (Phil' s disabled friend's wife). Phil finally responds to the challenge by breaking away from his past knowledge as the Australian nation breaks away from the war. Kennedy Miller's Vietnam gives a variety of points of view - in contrast, say, to Oliver Stone's Platoon - which gives only one, (the US soldier). However the preferred point of view is that outside intervention was wrong - but a fairly comprehensive account of the complexities of the war is given.

(2) The politics of the war are mediated to us - the audience - via the metaphor of the Australian nation as family. The war is seen as a critical stage in the growth/ coming of age process of the nation. The rejection of the war is a sign of national maturity which involves suffering but also a healing - incarnated in Phil - but while there may be a resolution and a healing in Australian foreign policy and domestically, is an Australian solution possible in an interdependent world? Any adequate solution or resolution must involve Australia in recompensing and reconstructing Vietnam. But in the real world - off the TV screens - it's been hard enough for Australia to acknowledge its responsibility to its veterans; we are not even close to acknowledging our responsibilities for the suffering we helped impose on the Vietnamese people, and anyway, even now, in 1989, has a national reconciliation over Vietnam occurred?

(3) The presentation of Australian involvement: Kennedy Miller's Vietnam shows Liberal governments conniving to develop their paranoid, yellow peril, forward-defence strategy, based on kicking-the-communist-can. The Libs are shown to have connived not only to dupe the Australian public but also the US Government, and to have invited themselves into a war. So Western intervention, and specifically Australian, is shown to be wrong and unjustified: for example, Megan's final reply to Phil - 'it's not our war'.

(4) The adequacy of the representation of the war and the anti-war movement is questionable: Noam Chomsky has argued that in the US, both during the war and since, it has been difficult to gain a hearing for any principled opposition to US military intervention in Indochina. For instance he contends it is rare to find in the US media or scholarship, any acknowledgement of the US as the aggressor or the invader, (1979).

Kennedy Miller's Vietnam does show western intervention to be unjustified, but it doesn't go very far into the nature of the war e.g. civil war, war of aggression (by whom?) imperialist war? Kennedy Miller' s Vietnam doesn't explicitly present a principled opposition based on the right to self determination and the view that the west had no right to use force to intervene in the internal affairs of others. Also Kennedy Miller's Vietnam doesn't spell out a coherently principled opposition to conscription; either to this particular war, or to conscription in general. Given the history in Australia of opposition to conscription in both world wars, this is quite a lacuna. For instance, Serge's initial opposition to conscription is very pragmatic.

(5) Kennedy Miller's Vietnam is situated within a strong nationalism, even patriotism. It's only the nasty Yankee soldiers or the Vietnamese who commit atrocities, kill mindlessly and rape; Australian intervention - at least on the part of the soldiers - is portrayed as an attempt to help:- Australian aid is seen as benevolent, even the National Liberation Front (NLF) are embarrassed by it. The recent book edited by Maddock and Wright continues the denial that any atrocities were committed by Australian troops, (1987). How does this denial fit with the evidence of Australian involvement in the Phoenix Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assassination program? Could even the forced relocation of villagers be considered as some kind of war crime? During the Vietnam War there were attempts to reconstitute the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal by people such as Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre - most of us would agree that the My Lai massacre was a war crime, but what about the Phoenix Program? And what about the level of involvement of Australian soldiers as evidenced by Kennedy Miller's Vietnam? Under the recent euphoria of at last welcoming home 'our' Viet-Vets, what war crimes are buried? Kennedy Miller's Vietnam is important in resuscitating this issue - though the text is by no means consistent on this issue.

(6) Kennedy Miller's Vietnam acknowledges Vietnamese points of view, but not extensively; but still much more than nearly all US film/TV features do. As Terry Hayes, one of the Kennedy Miller scriptwriters put it: just as the metaphor for Australia is the family, the metaphor for Vietnam is the village - it becomes a VC base so the Australian soldiers burn it and relocate the villagers. How adequate is this metaphor? (or both metaphors?) Titling the series Vietnam is somewhat unfortunate; because the mini-series is not about Vietnam, but primarily a view of the effect of the war on Australia, and only secondarily a view of the war, from Australian points of view. For instance, Pauline Chan - who played Lien - claims the first draft of the script was mostly from the Australian point of view - she suggested they look behind, or inside, the doors of the village to bring the village alive, so they did. However, some of the Vietnamese cast claimed that both the South Vietnamese and the Australian soldiers were crueller than in the text, that they roughed up villagers, etc.

Most US films of the war hardly address the politics of the war - nor the point of view of the Vietnamese - rather they focus on the men who fought it, basically within the traditions of the war movie genre - macho/male films. Kennedy Miller's Vietnam is very different from, and much better than, most US features on the war.

This point leads to the conclusion that there is a need for films about the war, as told by its victims - Kennedy Miller's Vietnam touched on this, but not in enough depth e.g., the origins, history and development of the struggle first against the French, and then the US. We need to see the war through Vietnamese eyes.

Accordingly, there is also a need for films told by its hardcore critics - people like Chomsky who opposed the war on principle, and Michael Matteson (draft resister - a prime source for some of Serge's characterizations) who opposed conscription on principle.

Cunningham's Case

Firstly, there is a suggestion that some representations are inherently more valid than others. Cunningham insists that academic historians operate within a 'quite different (more valid? more accurate? more incomprehensible?) order of discourse' to mini-series, but also seems to question the sanctity of their position as 'keepers of the public past' (1988 (b) p. 184). While Fiske and Hartley's notion of the bardic function of TV does strongly undermine the dominance of academics as history tellers, Cunningham's case for mutually exclusive 'orders of discourse' needs to be established.

Secondly, Cunningham argues that the 'high commitment' of Kennedy Miller to the bardic function in their TV histories 'implies no one political or ideological position but a multiplication and historicisation of them' (my emphasis, 1988(b)p. 186).

While I do agree more with Cunningham than with Bell that there is a depth of historicisation achieved, the multiperspectivism that Cunningham claims is, I believe, more apparent than substantive, more nominal than consistent. As Jodie Brooks (1983) has argued with respect to Kennedy Miller's The Dismissal: ... the (bardic) models of narratorial intervention achieved... 'an unashamed spectacle offering security - the thrill of anticipation in the security of retrospection, and mastery - an incorporative voice-over claiming not only temporal control, but also spatial control...' Cunningham's claim for the attainment of multiperspectivism due to the complexity of the narrative structure begs the question. The four main family characters have somewhat separate narrative trajectories, but they do interweave with each other, and with the historical events within which they are set. The separate narrative paths derive from the family's breaking up, but they also come together as the family reforms.

There is a preferred reading of the historical record being offered to viewers. This reading is reasonably obvious. As Ronald Conway put it: '(Kennedy Miller's Vietnam) did not even bother to be even-handed and treat the entire South Vietnamese view of the war with the same gratuitous contempt as was done by the left and the dissenters 20 years ago...despite this obvious political bias...' (1987,p.61) Western intervention is shown to have been unjustified. There is a 'determining or meta-discourse' in Kennedy Miller's Vietnam which situates or subordinates the other discourses, (MacCabe, 1974). Phil's discourse, the insights deriving from his empirical experience of the war, are eventually out-argued by a combination of the discourses of the anti-war movement and the Vietnamese people (via Le).

History Telling - The Myths of Differing Political Interests

As Ina Bertrand has argued, Australian responses to the Vietnam War have been organized around varying mythic structures of heroes and villains, (1988).

The initial (early 1960s) myth was very clearcut. The villain was the communists (both Vietnamese, and also Soviet and Chinese); the victim was the South Vietnamese people; the hero was the USA, and Australia was a helper (to the hero).

Kennedy Miller's Vietnam suggests a very different, and less explicit myth: the villain is now the USA, and the Australian Governments that supported intervention; the victim is the Australian veteran and the Australian people (or perhaps the Vietnamese people in general? any room for the Australian draft resisters?); the hero is also the Australian veteran (or possibly the Vietnamese people); and the helper is the Australian people as they gain knowledge and maturity, and oppose western intervention (or possibly the anti-war movement?).

A fair reading of Kennedy Miller's Vietnam's mythic structure merely emphasises a reconciliation of the Australian people with each other, and in particular with the Australian Vietnam Veterans: 'a liberal humanistic concern' (Bell) or 'a radical humanism' (Cunningham, 1987). I believe a more accurate, non-ethnocentric humanistic text (let alone a radical text) would have emphasised the possibilities in parentheses.

The crucial question here concerns whose interests are served by these conservative or radical myths of reconciliation. Whose interests were served by the October 'Welcome Home' Vietnam veterans parade in Sydney?

In considering the reconstruction of history in Kennedy Miller's Vietnam I believe the (main) function of the seemingly fictional universe is to be referential - even if largely in a figurative way - and through a psychologizing of history. The measure of the adequacy of this mini- series as history is the connections the text establishes with discernible historical circumstances.

Figure 1 [Figure not reproduced] Noel Ferrier as Sir Robert

Figure 2 [Figure not reproduced] Mark Lee and Grace Parr

Figure 3 [Figure not reproduced] Conscript Phil Goddard (Nicholas Eadie)

REFERENCES

Bell, P. (1988) 'Remembering Vietnam', Current Affairs Bulletin, Vol. 65, No. 2, p. 16-23

Bertrand, I. (1988) 'From Silence to Reconciliation' Historical Journal of Film, Radio & TV, Vol. 8, No. 1

Brooks, J. (1983) 'Dismissing', NSWIT Media Papers, No. 19 (September).

Conway, R. (1987) 'Vietnam Revisited - Twice!' Quadrant, May, p.61- 2

Cunningham, S. (1987) 'Jewel in The Crown' FilmNews, May, p.8-9

Cunningham, S. (1988(a)) 'Style, form & History in Australian Miniseries' , Filmviews Vo.33 (Winter) p.30-37

Cunningham, S. (1988(b)) 'Kennedy Miller: 'House Style' in Australian Television' in Dermody, S. & Jacka, E. (eds) The Imaginary Industry.

Fiske, J. & Hartley, J. (1978) Reading Television.

Herman, E. & Chomsky, N. (1979) The Political Economy of Human Rights, Vols. 1 & 2

MacCabe, C. (1974) 'Realism in the Cinema: Notes on some Brechtian Theses' Screen (Summer) p.7-27

Maddock, K. & Wright, B. (eds) War: Australia & Vietnam.

SANCTIONS are a blunt instrument that can sometimes be useful. Used against Iraq, they forced its horrible dictator to disgorge nearly all his most lethal weapons. Ten years on, the perspective has changed. Saddam Hussein remains implanted in power without, for the past 15 months, any UN inspectors on the spot to discourage him from reinventing his nastiest toys. At the same time, sanctions have all but destroyed his country: its health and educational systems have collapsed; its infrastructure has rusted away; its middle classes have disappeared into poverty; its children are dying. A lot of people now conclude that a change of policy is needed.

The authors of this collection of essays--Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Howard Zinn, among others--will seem irredeemably parti pris to those who still believe that sanctions must be held steady, albeit with exceptions for humanitarian relief, until Iraq has come clean about the last globule of biological horror hidden away in a bottle in somebody' s fridge. Some of the writers do, from time to time, rant a bit. But much of it is good stuff: Mr Chomsky, for instance, describing how America's most favoured friend was suddenly transformed into the Beast of Baghdad. And if you believe that your country--the United States or Britain, which together have taken the strongest stand against ending sanctions--is responsible for the unnecessary deaths of some 150 children every day (a figure culled from UNICEF reports), a little ranting may be permissible.

The oil-for-food programme, passed by the UN Security Council in 1996, was supposed to rescue ordinary Iraqis from the deprivations of sanctions. Iraq is allowed to sell a certain amount of oil in exchange for ``humanitarian'' goods. Denis Halliday, an experienced UN hand, ran this programme for two years, but then resigned in disgust (as did his successor, a few weeks ago). Mr Halliday now writes forthrightly of ``genocide''. He and others describe how American and British representatives on the Sanctions Committee hold up everything they suspect, however remotely, to be of dual use. The list of suspect goods runs from heart and lung machines to wheelbarrows, from fire-fighting equipment to detergent, from water pumps to pencils.

Some of these points were confirmed this month by Kofi Annan, the UN's secretary-general, in his report on Iraqi sanctions to the Security Council. He revealed how far the oil-for-food programme still is from alleviating the Iraqi tragedy. Mr Annan has spread his criticism around but is particularly upset, first, by the dangerously dilapidated state of Iraq's oil industry and, second, by the Sanctions Committee's erratic delays in giving the go-ahead for the delivery of goods for hospitals: some $150m-worth of medicine and medical equipment is currently held up. At one time, outsiders were set in their views on Iraqi sanctions, seeing the situation in black or white. Now there is a large grey area, and an insistent question: are sanctions still the right policy? The authors document the impact of sanctions on the lives of ordinary Iraqis, and the arguments for change are pretty convincing. The undecided should pay heed.

Host: JUAN WILLIAMS Time: 3:00-4:00 PM

JUAN WILLIAMS, host:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Juan Williams.

Who is an intellectual in America at this turn-of-the-century moment? What are her or his credentials? Is a professor an intellectual? How about the scientists at the forefront of the high-technology movement that is reshaping the nation's economy? For generations past, being ranked as an intellectual was to be stamped as one of the Western world's leading figures. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was a leading intellectual, as well as a president and Founding Father. Henry Adams, although he never ran for office, was an eminent historian and part of the Adams political aristocracy that produced two presidents in the 1800s. In the 20th century, Albert Einstein held rank as an intellectual, but scientists are often not considered intellectuals because they do not usually take part in the political and cultural discussions of the day. Einstein's positions on nuclear energy, however, made him a public figure who was widely given the moral authority of an intellectual.

The term `intellectual' is historically associated with a post-World War II group of Socialist-leaning men and women writers, most of whom were Jews. This group was centered in New York and included people such as Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer. Their ideas made news and shaped the national debate on the Cold War. Then the Vietnam War divided them, as some of the former leftists joined with conservatives, who supported the war and felt America's democratic values were being unfairly attacked both at home and overseas.

In today's world, there is a new term, `public intellectual,' for people who discuss daily news events and social trends. Public intellectuals can be seen on the TV talk shows, the lecture circuit and read on the Internet. And they can be found here in Washington in one of the nearly 300 think tanks. In this role, they're usually aligned with conservatives or liberals as convenient supports for one policy position or another. But are they really continuing the intellectual tradition?

My guest this hour is Norman Podhoretz, whose latest book is "My Love Affair with America." He joins me here in the studio. Later in the program, we'll speak with the director of Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center about his mission to reconnect intellectuals with government. And we'll talk with a journalist who has written about the politics of the intellectuals of the last century. If you want to join the discussion, our number here is 1 (800) 989-8255. That's 1 (800) 989- TALK. Our e-mail address is totn@npr.org. Please include your name and where you're writing from.

Norman Podhoretz, nice to have you on TALK OF THE NATION.

Mr. NORMAN PODHORETZ (Author, "My Love Affair with America"): And it's a pleasure to be here, Juan.

WILLIAMS: How would you define an intellectual?

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well, in my day--I'm 70 years old now, so I go back to a time when the word was not so much of an honorific, as you suggested in your introductory remarks. In fact, it was often used as a term of derogation and denigration. And it was also used of a very limited number of people of a very special kind, what we called intellectuals. And when I was young and--the people called intellectuals in the decades prior to my advent on the scene tended, first of all, to be centrally interested in literature and the arts rather than politics or even philosophy.

Secondly, they tended to jump off from this interest in the arts into the much broader context out of which the arts emerged, which led them into a good deal of talk about society and the surrounding culture.

Thirdly, they tended to be very widely cultivated, extremely well- read. And to become a member, an accredited member of that group, you had to--obviously had no formal examination, but you were expected to have read most of the certainly major contemporary classics as well as to have read widely in the classics of the past. In fact, if you hadn't done so, you would have found most of the talk and the writing done by intellectuals almost incomprehensible because it was always very allusive and everyone thought it would be patronizing to identify a particular source or name, which is the common practice, say, in journalism. You know, the critic Lionel Trilling or something. So...

WILLIAMS: Right. Well, tell me, who was in this group?

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well, the people in my own day, you've mentioned some of them already--Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt. The central magazines for which they wrote were Partisan Review and, later, Commentary, of which I myself became the editor in 1960 and remained the editor for 35 years. They also tended to write articles in smaller literary quarterlies, such as the Kenyan Review or the Swanee Review(ph). They did a good deal of book reviewing. Actually, somebody once said that they specialized much more in articles than in books. They were- -if you want to use a sports metaphor, they tended to be sprinters rather than long-distance runners or milers.

But some of the other prominent personalities would have been Sidney Hook, who was a philosopher, but deeply involved in ideological politics; Philip Roth and William Phillips, who were the editors of Partisan Review, both of whom were literary critics as well as social critics. And one--you know, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick; Robert Lowell, a poet but also a critic; Saul Bellow was the preeminent novelist of this group; Delmore Schwartz, who was a poet, a short story writer and a literary critic all wrapped into one, also crazy.

WILLIAMS: And for the listeners' sake, let's say this time period is the 1950s? It's right after World War II?

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well, I'm telling you about a period that would stretch, in the case of the people I've just mentioned, from the mid-'30s up until the mid-'70s probably. Earlier, you had the quintessential intellectuals, who were people like H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippman, Randolph Bourne and so on. I mean, in other words, the people I talked about inherited a tradition that had been in an active mode for at least since the pre-World War I days.

WILLIAMS: And the contribution that they made as a group in that period that ran, as you describe it, from about the '30s through the '70s would, in large part, have to be that they stood on the forefront of sort of left-leaning politics in this country?

Mr. PODHORETZ: Yeah. That would be only one element of this. In a way, it's a pity I'm talking about this subject in connection with my new book, "My Love Affair with America," since my previous book, "Ex-Friends," was about all the people...

WILLIAMS: Right.

Mr. PODHORETZ: ...and what it was they were up to. It wasn't merely that they were left-leaning, though all of them were to one degree or another. It was that they had what I would call synthesizing intelligences. That is, they specialized--that word is itself a kind of oxymoron in this context--in seeing the connections among disparate areas of the culture. And that's a kind of perception that has increasingly been weakened for some reason and may even disappear. They were...

WILLIAMS: Well, let's stop right there. Why do you think there's been a weakening of people seeing patterns in the culture, in our politics? Has there been a weakening of the role for the intellectual in American life?

Mr. PODHORETZ: I think there has been, certainly as I would define the intellectual. One of the main reasons is the growth of specialization. In my day, specialists were, by definition, considered intellectuals. You mentioned scientists. Very few scientists would have been considered intellectuals. Virtually no contemporary politicians would have been considered intellectuals. The only politician of our era who would have been considered an intellectual, 'cause he actually is, is Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and perhaps Eugene McCarthy. If you knew him privately, he had all the stigmata, as you might say, of an intellectual.

WILLIAMS: But I'm thinking back, in my case, to my childhood reading about President Kennedy having these amazing dinners, at which he would invite intellectuals, leading intellectuals from around the country, to the White House. I don't hear of anything like that going on these days.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Yeah. Well, the Kennedy administration did help to legitimize and glamorize the whole idea of the intellectual, though some of the people who were most honored by the Kennedy entourage were not people who necessarily deserved it on the merits. But unquestionably Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was, you might say, the court historian of the Kennedy administration...

WILLIAMS: Right.

Mr. PODHORETZ: ...was and is an intellectual. So was and is John Kenneth Galbraith. So was and is his near contemporary Jacques Barzun, who at the age of 92 has just produced a 900-page book...

WILLIAMS: Holy smokes.

Mr. PODHORETZ: ...called "From Dawn to Decadence," which is even a best-seller.

WILLIAMS: Wow.

Mr. PODHORETZ: But the Kennedy people were, I think, relatively indiscriminate in their cultivation of what they called intellectuals. Some of them, I think, did not have a clear grasp of what an intellectual was. And I think, although more than any prior administration, the Kennedy White House did make an effort to honor intellectuals. It was not the most glorious of all moments, Camelot, so far as intellectuals were concerned.

WILLIAMS: Well, you know, just this Sunday on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times--I should say the Week in Review section--they ran a piece that pointed out that in both the Gore and Bush campaigns, there's an absence of any intellectual pillars of support for the candidates, that they don't reach out to intellectuals. In fact, it seems they celebrate the idea that they are not bookish people at all.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Yeah. Well, they like to do that, and politicians have always liked to do that. I mean, Abraham Lincoln liked to talk about, you know, being born in a log cabin and, `Aw, shucks, I'm just a country boy.' He was, in fact, an intellectual. But it's not true of Bush. I'm really not sure of Gore. Bush has spent an inordinate amount of time consulting with intellectuals, especially from New York. In fact, there's a joke going--well, used to go around New York, people asking each other, `Have you been on the Austin shuttle yet?' you know, meaning, `Had George W. sent for you yet?' And he' s made a great point of how much he's been influenced by certain books, one of them by Myron Magnet about the underclass--forgive me, I forget the names of the others. But he has made a show of having read several books and had his thoughts about policy shaped by them.

WILLIAMS: One of the things that really led to the ending of that intellectual cycle that you described, from the '30s to the '70s, was the notion that people--some of the intellectuals, yourself being the prime example--became conservative...

Mr. PODHORETZ: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: ...and, therefore, broke with your brethren.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well, I certainly broke with my brethren. I even wrote a book called "Breaking Ranks" about it. But that led to a kind of civil war within the intellectual community. It did not lead to the destruction of the intellectual life. It led to the destruction of a monolithic, or relatively monolithic, intellectual community. And what happened was that you had a proliferation, relatively speaking, of intellectual magazines that were now fighting with one another. You had the birth of The New York Review of Books, which was on the left, much more so than it is today. It's still liberal, but it was much more on the left in the '60s than it is today. Commentary, which had been on the left, in the first 10 years of my editorship, I pushed in a conservative direction, and we were--you know, The New York Review and Commentary were kind of like two armies battling each other.

WILLIAMS: Two titans, yeah.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Yes.

WILLIAMS: All right. We're gonna have to take a short break right now. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Juan Williams. When we return, we'll continue talking about the role of intellectuals in today's culture and political life. And we'll begin taking your calls at (800) 989-8255. If you'd like to comment on the program, please write to us at TALK OF THE NATION, 635 Massachusetts Avenue Northwest, Washington, DC. The ZIP code, 20001.

At 21 minutes past the hour, it's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

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WILLIAMS: Welcome back to TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Juan Williams.

Today we're talking about public intellectuals. Do we admire them? Do we trust them? And do we want them in our government?

I want to welcome Lee Hamilton now to the show. Lee Hamilton is director of the Woodrow Wilson Center here in Washington. He joins us from phone--on phone, I should say, from Warrenton, Virginia.

Thanks for joining us, Lee Hamilton.

Mr. LEE HAMILTON (Director, Woodrow Wilson Center): Very pleased to be with you. Thank you.

WILLIAMS: I was gonna ask you what you thought about the relationship between government and intellectuals today. Does it exist?

Mr. HAMILTON: Oh, I think it does exist, although it's also true that politicians today want to display a common touch. And there is, I think, in American politics a fairly strong populist, even anti- intellectual feeling. I think politicians are sometimes kind of reluctant to admit that they are intellectuals. But having said that, I think intellectuals play a very important part in public life today. They provide a lot of fresh thinking on many subjects. You can't run for president today without consulting with a lot of intellectuals. Politicians generally are not original thinkers. They have to get their ideas from someplace else, from someone else. And they very frequently, at all levels, turn to the intellectuals for those ideas.

WILLIAMS: Well, I would disagree to a certain extent. I'm thinking that, in fact, they turn to the think tanks here in Washington, and it seems to me--with a bit of a cynical twist, I think--that they go to the think tanks to simply get support for positions that they already have, that they don't really go there with a spirit of intellectual exploration.

Mr. HAMILTON: Well, that may be true. I do think that the intellectual community has kind of split. The think tanks that you refer to have become very important actors in the Washington policy-making process, and you can see it in a lot of different ways. The conservative ideas put forward by Ronald Reagan, a lot of them came from intellectuals from The Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute or the American Enterprise Institute. Some of the more progressive or liberal thinkers have turned to Brookings Institution and to the Urban Institute. These scholars are very active. They testify, they meet with administration officials, they write influential opinion pieces.

So you have that community, if you would, of intellectuals, and then you have the academic community. They're resident at the colleges and universities and, to some extent, there's kind of a split between the two intellectual communities.

WILLIAMS: Well, that's what I was gonna ask about. Do you see any chance of reconnecting Washington with the academic intellectuals?

Mr. HAMILTON: Well, I think it happens. Most politicians will consult pretty carefully with intellectuals in their state. My guess is most senators, I know many members of the House, really cultivate contacts with the universities and the colleges in their districts and in their states for the purpose of giving them ideas about policy problems. The presidential advisers, some come from the think tanks but many come right out of the academic community. That's very frequent these days. If you walk through the halls of the White House under any administration, you'll find a lot of people in those important positions who have come from academia.

WILLIAMS: Well, we're joined here by Norman Podhoretz. And Norman Podhoretz was saying earlier that, in a way, the intellectuals in the past were people who were extraordinarily well-read in terms of the canons of literature, people who were involved in discussions of our culture. Do you see those people involved in helping, let' s say, the Clinton administration today as they go about world policy or social policy?

Mr. HAMILTON: Well, probably not so much. I think the politician today is looking for solutions, looking for options, if you would. A good politician today, I think, seeks out intellectuals to get a better sense of history, a better sense of context so that they understand the particular issues, and they look to the university, the intellectual community for that. I think that the intellectual today can make a significant contribution to the politician. They can remind a president or others that a certain policy approach was tried once, it didn't work or it did work. And they can give the reasons why it was successful or not successful. I think they are sometimes helpful in understanding or permitting the politician to understand the consequences of actions that may or may not be considered.

WILLIAMS: Well, now I wanted to ask you about the Woodrow Wilson Center, a place where I once spent a year when I was writing a book. You, as the head of the Woodrow Wilson Center, help to bring scholars and intellectuals from around the world to Washington, DC. What do you hear from them? Do they think this is an anti-intellectual atmosphere, or do they find it stimulating?

Mr. HAMILTON: I think most of the scholars--they're all post-doctoral people--find Washington an extremely stimulating community. You came, I think, as I recall, as a journalist to write a biography of Justice Marshall...

WILLIAMS: That's right.

Mr. HAMILTON: ...a few years back. But we have scholars of a great variety of disciplines coming into the Woodrow Wilson Center. We try to make it objective and non-partisan scholarly research. We let them do their own thing. And you probably recall that Woodrow Wilson was the only president that had a PhD. He was, without much doubt, an intellectual. And our mission at the Woodrow Wilson Center is to bring together the thinkers, if you would, and the doers, the scholars and the policy-makers and encourage them to engage in a dialogue about these difficult public policy issues.

WILLIAMS: Well, I guess the bottom line then, Lee Hamilton, is: Do the politicians come over and listen? Do they engage with the intellectuals?

Mr. HAMILTON: Well, we've had a long string of them coming in the last few months. Almost every policy-maker you can think of has been there. And let me give you a specific example or two. We had a high- ranking State Department official come in who has responsibility for environmental policy, and he said `Look, these are the very tough environmental issues in the world today. We don't know the answers to them. Give us a hand. Help us out.' And we've had a number of the top scholars in the country mixing with the policy people in intelligence and in Africa and the Middle East and a lot of other areas. We don' t have large meetings there. We'll have meetings anywhere from 20 or 30 people to 100 or 150 people. And we get a lot of interaction and a lot of stimulating dialogue.

Now what we don't do, we're not a think tank. We don't put out policy recommendations. We try to improve the quality of the dialogue on the premise that President Wilson had, really, and that was that the scholar can learn from the politician and the politician can learn from the scholar, and that both of them are engaged in a common enterprise.

WILLIAMS: Lee Hamilton, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center, thanks for joining us.

Mr. HAMILTON: Thank you.

WILLIAMS: Let's go to the phones now. Norman Podhoretz is still here with us. And we'll go to Daniel in West Palm Beach, Florida. Daniel, you're on TALK OF THE NATION.

DANIEL (Caller): Hi. Thanks for having me.

WILLIAMS: Delighted to have you.

DANIEL: I just have a couple things to say about think tanks, and I'm glad you mentioned The Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. They seem, in many things that I've seen, to be referenced heavily by the libertarians in their publications. And I know that think tanks also have a canon or a statement of principles they all follow. Is that true?

WILLIAMS: Well, I don't know if the ca--how would you describe it, Mr. Podhoretz?

Mr. PODHORETZ: No. Well, Cato is certainly a libertarian institution. Heritage is not a libertarian institution, though there may be a few libertarians there. It would call itself conservative in a broader sense. Libertarian is a much more precise designation. And both Cato and Heritage do have points of view. They're not necessarily party lines or monolithic, but they are points of view that are fairly strictly followed in the policy recommendations that those two think tanks issue. Whereas, the American Enterprise Institute is a much more mixed bag, for example, to name the third prominent think tank in Washington, which is, more or less, conservative. I did, if I may, want to take some issue with something that Lee Hamilton said.

WILLIAMS: Well, let me just...

Mr. PODHORETZ: OK.

WILLIAMS: ...finish up with Daniel. We'll come to it.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Sure.

WILLIAMS: Dan, did you have a question?

DANIEL: Yeah. Well, other than The American Enterprise Institute, are there any other think tanks that are out there that are, you know, basically independent that are just a bunch of intelligent people who get together and discuss issues and then issue statements?

WILLIAMS: Well, we heard about the Woodrow Wilson Center, but let me ask Norman Podhoretz how he'd respond to Daniel. Thanks.

DANIEL: Well, The Woodrow Wilson Center I don't think of as a think tank.

WILLIAMS: No, it's not a think tank.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well, there's The Brookings Institution, though it tends to be liberal, but people do get together and talk. And that' s true, also, at The American Enterprise Institute. It's also true of The Hoover Institution at Stanford, California. And I would say it's also true, to some extent, of The Manhattan Institute in New York.

WILLIAMS: New York. Now let's go to your--what you wanted to say earlier when you said you...

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well...

WILLIAMS: ...had a point disagreement with Lee Hamilton.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Right. Well, to use an inelegant phrase, policy wonks are not, in my judgment, intellectuals. I mean, they are very valuable and they have a valuable contribution to make, but they are not what I mean by intellectuals, nor do I think that politicians now in office or, for that matter, running for office, benefit much from intellectuals. Intellectuals are generally engaged, as someone once said, in a fight for the future. And the present has already happened. And, in fact, most politicians, especially those in office, read very little, they have very little time to think, and they bring with them the intellectual capital they've accumulated over the years, which means that they have been influenced, to the extent that they've been influenced at all by intellectuals, by those of the past, of their youth. So people like me, especially when I was younger, were focusing much more on the coming generation than on the one that was already in office.

WILLIAMS: All right. Let's go to Moji(ph) in Tucson, Arizona. You' re on TALK OF THE NATION.

MOJI (Caller): Hi. Well, I've a couple of comments. One is Alex de Tocqueville, the French philosopher-historian who made some deep observations about American society, I believe he said that America will never produce the kind of intellectuals that older cultures are able to or do, because the intellectual has to make a living, which makes him, you know, inevitably influenced--or hopefully not subservient- -to money or power.

WILLIAMS: In America.

MOJI: In America, in particular.

WILLIAMS: And, therefore, America would never be a country that was distinguished with a--or given to a wealth of intellectual life.

MOJI: The kind of figures that would transcend history.

WILLIAMS: Right.

MOJI: And, you know, I--coming from the Old World, I sense a certain affinity to that statement.

WILLIAMS: So you think America is rather anti-intellectual.

MOJI: Well, it's not anti-intellectual. I guess because of its history, which is rebellion against the aristocracy of the Old World, there is a populism here that right now is being manifested through the public media, being forever dumbing down.

WILLIAMS: All right. Let's see what Mr. Podhoretz has to say. Thanks for your call.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well, the statement the caller attributed to Tocqueville sounds more like it came from Marx than from Tocqueville. Tocqueville did say that Americans tended not to dwell too much on ideas, that they were practical people and busy. He didn't say they were subservient to the forces of wealth and power.

WILLIAMS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Marx did say something like that, and not just about American intellectuals. And I agree that Tocqueville was very profound in his observations of this country, but I also suspect that Tocqueville would have recognized many of the people I've talked about and many others as genuine intellectuals in the European mode.

WILLIAMS: Let's go to Ted in Cleveland, Ohio. Ted, you're on TALK OF THE NATION.

TED (Caller): Yes, very interesting topic. I think one of the reasons you've seen the decline of the public intellectual is that around 1970 a tremendous counteroffensive was launched on the part of putative intellectuals of the Catholic right and others to really try to reinstitute the authority, on one hand, of the church and to shore up and support the prevailing orthodoxy of the free market. So what we've gotten now in the 21st century here, ironically enough, is a reassertion of traditional religion with regard to the influence of the religious right on politics, on the one hand; and a reassertion and even celebration of market values. Now both of those influences, obviously, are anti- intellectual at their core, in the sense that intellectualism is an extension of knowledge, a questioning of the status quo. So it is, ironically, the right-wing so-called intellectual that has led to the paucity of thought and the current climate of anti-intellectualism in...

WILLIAMS: Are you pointing a finger at Mr. Podhoretz?

TED: Yes, I am.

WILLIAMS: Oh, OK.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well...

WILLIAMS: I thought that was leading somewhere, but go ahead.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well, that was a very articulate statement full of errors and false assumptions. I mean, for one thing, the Catholic right has always been against the free market and still is against the free market.

TED: William F. Buckley...

Mr. PODHORETZ: There are Catholics who believe in the free market, but the Catholic right has traditionally seen the free market as an unfortunate institution.

WILLIAMS: Ted says what about William F. Buckley?

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well, William F. Buckley...

TED: I'm talking about The National Review.

Mr. PODHORETZ: William F. Buckley is a Catholic, but he is not `the' Catholic right. And the conservatives in the Vatican have a better claim to that designation than William F. Buckley. I, myself, celebrate the virtues of the free market, and so have many intellectuals in the past. The idea that there's a contradiction here would then deny the term intellectual to such thinkers as David Hume, John Locke, Adam Smith and I could name 20 others, all of whom--and Thomas Jefferson, incidentally--all of whom saw the free market or what they call property as the essential foundation of liberty in any society. So I think it's simply wrong to posit a contradiction between celebration of the values of the free market and the intellectual.

WILLIAMS: Tell us a little bit, before you go, just briefly about your new book, "My Love Affair with America."

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well, "My Love Affair with America" makes the assertion that this country represents one of the supreme achievements of human civilization in that it has resulted in a society in which more liberty and more prosperity are shared by more people than any other human community known to history.

WILLIAMS: We're going to take a short break right now. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Juan Williams. I want to thank Norman Podhoretz, who has to leave us now. Norman is a senior fellow at The Hudson Institute, and his new book is called "My Love Affair with America." When we return, we'll continue talking about intellectualism in America, and we'll take more of your calls at (800) 989-8255.

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WILLIAMS: At 40 minutes past the hour, it's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

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WILLIAMS: Welcome back to TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Juan Williams.

Tomorrow at this time, we'll be talking about a new study that suggests politicians are ignoring a large and potentially influential voting bloc, parents. We'll be taking a look at what's on the minds of parents today and asking if such a diverse group can really wield meaningful political clout in this year's presidential race. That's this time tomorrow.

Today we're talking about the decline of intellectualism in America. Do we esteem big doers more so than big thinkers? And how has the Internet, that engine of vanity press, functioned as a venue of ideas? My guest for the rest of the hour is David Laskin. He wrote "Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals." He joins us by phone from Santa Fe, New Mexico. If you want to join the conversation, our number here is (800) 989-8255. David Laskin, thanks for being with us on TALK OF THE NATION.

Mr. DAVID LASKIN (Author, "Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals"): Oh, it's my pleasure. I love your show.

WILLIAMS: David, tell me a little bit about your book.

Mr. LASKIN: Well, Mr. Podhoretz actually described a lot of the figures who are in my book. I talk about this group of intellectuals, and I think he did a very good job of defining who and what they were. But my focus is really on the women of the group. Hannah Arendt was one of them. Mary McCarthy was another, Elizabeth Hardwick. They were the core people--Diana Trilling was also in this book. And I talk about their role as both intellectuals in their own right and as wives and mothers, in some cases, and how they managed to pursue both of those in an era before feminism. And I also talk about the fact that they all, interestingly enough, opposed feminism, even though you would think it would be in their interest. So it really gets into the heart of the political and cultural turmoil of that era, basically from the late Depression until 1970 is basically when I stopped. I'm talking about this group of New York intellectuals with the focus on the women.

WILLIAMS: You know, we have several e-mails here that indicate that people generally think there is an anti-intellectual climate in the country. For example, here's an e-mail from Tom Orth in Beaverton, Oregon, and he says that intellectuals were killed by political correctness, and he says that there's often now the case that you must hold the view that, you know, everything is politically correct or you aren' t an intellectual, be it gun control, abortion or a host of other issues. There is no debate.

Mr. LASKIN: Well, you know, I think that's a really interesting point. And listening to your show made me think about the fact that the sort of cultural wars that began in the '70s and that I think we're still fighting, in some ways, I do think that that undermined the intellectual climate. I think the emergence of the neo-conservatives out of this New York intellectual group and the persistence of some in liberalism, my feeling is even though there are strong intellectual and political currents in both these groups, I think our discourse has been impoverished partly by political correctness and whatever its opposite is, political incorrectness. I think intellectual discourse has become increasingly antagonistic and politically charged not in the positive way that I think Lee Hamilton was talking about where you get a flow of ideas from the academy or from public thinkers into politics, but more kind of a name-calling and labeling and poll taking and pulse taking. So my sense is that, yes, political discourse has suffered from that kind of cat-calling from both sides, and I'd like to see a new kind of intellectual emerge. And I'm hoping maybe the Internet will help that along.

WILLIAMS: Well, we have another e-mail here from Tom Holman(ph) in Iowa City, Iowa, and he asked about Robert McNamara. He remembers reading about him in "The Reckoning" by David Halberstam. And Tom Holman of Iowa City asks, `Are intellectuals necessarily visionaries? Do they have a grasp of reality or do they live in a world apart from the rest of us?' How would you respond, David?

Mr. LASKIN: I would say visionary is an excellent word. And I also agreed with what Mr. Podhoretz said about thinking to the future. And I think maybe part of why a lot of people are not that interested or plugged into intellectual discourse today is because we are so mired in the battles of the moment. I would like to get more of a visionary and idealistic and less ideological spin in the intellectual community. I've been reading a wonderful book by a philosopher and a classicist named Martha Nussbaum where she talks about how much we can learn from poets. And she mentions Walt Whitman in particular in a political sense. And Whitman says we should look not to presidents but to poets for our vision of humanity. And, obviously, it doesn' t translate quite so neatly into policy the way you might get out of some of these think tanks, but I do think it's something that the person in the street might get more interested in political discourse if we had more vision in there.

WILLIAMS: Well, here's an e-mail from Pamela Bumstead, who writes to us that because she has a PhD, `I have been told by federal employers that they would not hire me because I might leave. I might just take some academic work. Or they thought I was thinking about what I was doing, as opposed to just doing it.'

Mr. LASKIN: Yeah. You know, I have a masters degree from Oxford University in England. And I must say when I hit the job market in New York City, everyone said, `Well'--I was trying to get a job in publishing, and they said, `Well, we think you're going to be such a snob, because you've been reading all these high-falutin books and, you know, you've got your head buried in middle English and, you know, romantic poetry. I don't think you're going to be able to relate to the marketplace,' which is, obviously, what publishing is, at least in part, about. And it was very discouraging for me. I thought: Gee, I've got--you know, I've been encouraged for the last six years of my life, at that point, to think great thoughts and read great thoughts, and suddenly I'm told, well, that doesn't play in the marketplace. And, you know, I thought the caller who talked about Tocqueville actually was on to something. I think the difficulty of earning a living if you're a pure intellectual without party affiliation has really made it difficult for people to work in that way. I think you don't get paid for having vision; you get paid for having a kind of vision that funnels into policy very neatly and funnels into a think tank very neatly. So I don't know how to remedy that, and I' m not going to take the Marxist route, per se, but I think it's something worth thinking about.

WILLIAMS: All right. Let's go to Seth in Manhattan. Seth, you're on TALK OF THE NATION.

SETH (Caller): Hi. Thanks a lot for having me on. I've been listening to the talk. It's been very interesting. My question is actually for Mr. Laskin. It goes along with what we've been talking about as far as the changing face of the intellectual. And I guess my question is like maybe the doers in the next 50 or 100 years will become the thinkers and that the changing face of American society is one that is incorporating pragmatism and practicality as the philosophy that drives policy, as opposed to something that's far removed from what' s actually happening.

Mr. LASKIN: I agree with you. I think that's a good point. You know, one of the most inspiring speeches I heard recently--oh, I guess it really wasn't a speech; it was a talk. But it was by a poet named James Fenton, the English poet. And he talked about experiences traveling in South Asia and really traveling all around the world, but that in particular, and how that he began to think about that and he wrote a series of articles about it. And then he began--he also talked about folk poetry and even nursery rhymes and how he then began to be able to put all of those, I think--I like your word fragmentation- -all those fragments together into his current poetry. So it had a political strand that he formed not by reading but by traveling in a war-torn region. We had this sort of deep, mythological, cultural, something that's all hardwired into us from our childhoods of nursery rhymes and then his own poetic vision. And he began to read some of the poems that he had written that came out of them, and they were both very beautiful, but very politically enlightened, I thought, and they really made you think. And I do think that this sense of fragmentation is a way that we're going to be able to put new pieces together and get a new synthesis, eventually.

WILLIAMS: Let's go to Brandon in Boston. Brandon, you're on TALK OF THE NATION.

BRANDON (Caller): How you doing?

WILLIAMS: Fine, thanks.

BRANDON: All right. I just wanted to add a couple of points, but I wanted to talk about the death of intellectualism as tied to, you know, a robbing of the imagination of American youth. And the question I would ask is: Would Norman Mailer be the Norman Mailer we talk about if he had a PlayStation at six years old?

WILLIAMS: What an interesting idea? You mean that that would have robbed him of the opportunity of reading and developing sort of intellectual depth.

BRANDON: Exactly. I mean, I've dealt with like lots of young kids, 'cause I'm a--I'm actually in graduate school at Boston University now. And I'm working in the film program, and sometimes I get the opportunity to talk to young kids, you know, who are interested in film. And all their ideas come from things like pretty much video games and nothing from books, put it like that. And I'm beginning to see that there's this overwhelming hedonistic thing that goes on with young kids where their imagination is robbed at a very young age. And without imagination, you know, you're not going to be questioning- -you know, asking the big questions.

WILLIAMS: So undergraduates, as well as, you know, high school...

BRANDON: Undergraduates as well.

WILLIAMS: Everybody--in that group, what you see is they are on the decline in terms of their intellectual strength.

BRANDON: I think that the roots of intellectualism, which is imagination, is being like wiped out at a very young age.

WILLIAMS: David, what would you say?

Mr. LASKIN: Well, that's an interesting point. I mean, I can appreciate that, and, as a writer, I certainly worry about the decline of literary culture. But I also feel that maybe we need to wait a little bit longer and see how these new strands play out. I mean, I don't think we're going to have a future in which PlayStations will replace books and music and film will replace discourse. I mean, I think these are going to be more valuable strands that will take their place. This is kind of a funny story, but I have kids of my own, and I do spend a lot of time driving around listening to their music, some of which I can't stand. But every now and then, I hear a hip-hop song that is as moving to me as a Walt Whitman poem. And I think, `OK, open your mind. Don't categorize culture necessarily. And let each strand take its place.' I agree. I think if your whole exposure to reality is through a PlayStation, you're going to be pretty warped, but I don't think that's true for most kids. And I think that they will come up with things that we may not recognize as culture or maybe not even as culturally valuable, but I think we all share common human experiences. And I have faith that we will eventually be able to incorporate these strands into a humane culture.

WILLIAMS: For those of you who are just tuning in, let me say that you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

Let's go to Jackie in Melrose, Massachusetts. Jackie, you're on TALK OF THE NATION.

JACKIE (Caller): Hi.

WILLIAMS: Hi.

JACKIE: I think television has been a great destroyer of the respect for intellectualism. They present so few of them, and it's such a big influence in all of our lives. When they have a very important topic discussed, they always bring in just the journalists. Journalists David Broder and George Will, Mark Shields, they're the people they bring in for all of these serious discussions on what's going on in the world and in our lives and culture. And how often do you ever hear Noam Chomsky? I don't agree with the man who called in and said that we don't raise intellectuals in this country. We have, but we don't give them a very prominent place. And Chomsky's given a prominent place all around the world. He speaks all around the world, but how often do you hear him or Howard Zinn, another great intellectual and historian, on any other program so people can get acquainted with them?

WILLIAMS: Well, why do you think that is?

JACKIE: I think because they prefer to have popular, cutesy people who are well known, already well established. And they use them over and over and over again--George Will...

WILLIAMS: All right.

JACKIE: ...and David Broder and Pat Robertson. They do bring in Doris Kearns Goodman, who is kind of cute, you know? And she's cute and pleasant and light.

WILLIAMS: Goodwin, yes.

JACKIE: They don't bring--how often do they bring in Jacques Barzan? I only saw him once, and he was marvelous on--it was on C-SPAN interviewed by that man, Lamb, on his new book.

WILLIAMS: Brian Lamb. But, you know, C-SPAN has people who are authors on constantly.

JACKIE: That's the only program that ever has them on. How many people have that? They don't even have cable television, some of them. But if they'd only bring them on programs like "The Jim Lehrer News Hour" every night, and a lot of people who are interested in what's going on in the world and curious would be interested in hearing some other voices instead of the same ones over and over again.

WILLIAMS: Good point, Jackie.

JACKIE: But that's a great man, Noam Chomsky. I hope you have him on sometime, because I've heard him speak several times, and he is charming and, of course, brilliant.

WILLIAMS: All right. Thanks for your call, Jackie.

JACKIE: Thank you.

WILLIAMS: Let's go quickly to Bill in San Jose. Bill, you have to be brief, 'cause we're running out of time.

BILL (Caller): Yeah, I guess I would just challenge really the whole conversation. I think that there's a high level of intellectualism in the United States today. And I think that what is perceived as intellectual is definitely defined by the times, but changes in retrospect as time goes on.

WILLIAMS: All right. Well, let me see what David Laskin thinks. Thank you very much for your call, Bill. David, would you say, in fact, that you think we have, as you just heard from Bill, that we have a strong intellectual currency in America at the turn of the century?

Mr. LASKIN: I do. I mean, I think it's a lot stronger than people give it credit for. I think if you look at the proliferation of book discussion groups all over the country, you see people are reading, are discussing books in a very engaged, high-level way. We haven' t talked much about the Internet, and a lot of what's on the Internet is, obviously, fairly low level, but you can connect with people on everything. You can make all sorts of communities, all sorts of connections, some of which are very high level. And you can get a discourse among like-minded people who have read and thought about the same things. And that's a terrific avenue, which I think will also be incorporated in the future where we do--again, to get back to that word fragment- -we're going to put these fragments together in ways that are going to be calculably more valuable than anything we've imagined. I hope. That's my hope anyway.

WILLIAMS: All right. That's all the time we have for today. I'd like to thank all of you who called and especially Norman Podhoretz, author of "My Love Affair with America"; Lee Hamilton, director of The Woodrow Wilson Center, and David Laskin, author of "Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals." In Washington, I'm Juan Williams, NPR News.

Out of these troubled times...a new world order can emerge... free from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. (George Bush, speech to the US Congress, 9 September 1990)(1)

THE SEARCH FOR WORLD ORDER. FROM THE BALANCE OF TERROR TO THE TERROR OF IMBALANCE

Humanity's search for order(2) - norms and structures conducive to more or less harmonious co-existence - is not new. The search for order in the Middle East is attested to by the deluge of divine revelations in the Holy Land. The Judaic, Christian and Islamic messages are all quintessential attempts and quests for universal peace, justice and order. Expounders of Christian and Islamic orthodoxies continue to be the bearers of the universalistic ideals inherent in both faiths. St. Thomas Aquinas' idea of a universal community bound together by Christianity is one example. Similar universalistic ideals are articulated in the Qur'an: "Humankind, we have created you from a single pair of a male and female and we made you into tribes and peoples (communities) that you might get to know one another."(3)

Yet for all their unrelenting and perennial search for order, Middle Easterners, perhaps more than most other peoples, have historically tended to experience more disorder than order. Even ideals and beliefs which Middle Easterners exported to Europe (via Christianity) where used against them in the Crusades and then the consecutive European colonial expeditions of the 19th Century under the guise of missions civilisatrices. The kernel of the problem is that:

(i) However sound their supporting ideologies may have been, most, if not all, past international orders have been structurally flawed owing to lingering and inveterate parochialisms - national, cultural, economic and ideological. This is also true of the post-W.W.I international order which established the sanctity of what Richard Falk calls the "Westphalian template of sovereign states"(4) (which was boosted by President Wilson's support for colonized peoples, rights for self- determination), and of the post-World War II order with its East-west ideological split. Any past order can be said to have been, by definition and by practice, nothing less than the universalization of hegemonic particularisms.

(ii) The movement toward universalistic ideals, norms, structures and codes of behavior has been vitiated by the inherently lingering and unfettered particularisms of competing nation-states. Nation-states, aided by international law and transnational agencies, have proliferated since the 1950s, a date coeval with decolonization, becoming the universalistic norm of social organization.

(iii) Whatever the outward permutations of the distribution of power ratios, consecutive international orders have also carried a degree of disorder, at least in the eyes of the dissatisfied. The imposition of a hegemonic particularistic order, usually masked by universalistic norms and structures, remains, by dint of marginalization of the powerless actors, wanting with regard to legitimacy, justice, equality, peace and universalism. In the Arab and Islamic Middle East, the crises of legitimacy, justice, equality and peace are closely associated with the notion of global disorder.

(iv) As in previous orders, power continues to be understood in a cultist sense. The guardians and guarantors of order have been those actors who dispose of quantitative and qualitative military superiority, although economic might is fast becoming a significant variable.

What are the characteristics of the unfolding global disorder or of the so-called "New World Order"? Although the notion of global disorder is generally associated with the waning and eventual collapse of the former Soviet Union, for Arabs it is coeval with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent UN-mandated, mostly Arab-funded, US-led forces' 43-day sustained and devastating bombing campaign that led to the "liberation" of Kuwait.

Two mutually reinforcing factors are at the core of the unfolding global disorder. Firstly, the former Soviet Union's disintegration has left a power vacuum, the corollary of which has been a movement from bipolarity to unipolarity. In other words, the asymmetries resulting from the absence of the former Soviet Union's balancing role can be said to have, inter alia, spawned a situation akin to a terror of imbalance. If bipolarity found equality in power balance and, later on, in its balance of terror variant (MAD), the post-Cold War world is lacking in such a balance. Not only is unipolarity undesirable, but also continuous blind faith in military means to maintain a modicum of world peace defeats the very purpose of peace. Secondly, the dissolution of the former Soviet Union has led to a greater US preponderance in world affairs, giving her a freer hand to meddle in the South and within the United Nations.

ILLUSIONS OF A NEW WORLD ORDER

From the outset George Bush's proclamation of a "New World Order" has, in the eyes of many Arabs, portended adversity. The historical divide following the second Gulf War could not have been wider. What is hailed in the West as a victory is by most Arab accounts a defeat, or what Mohamed Hasanayn Heikal calls "illusions of triumph".(5) The US has finally cast aside the "Vietnain syndrome", and since the Soviet Union's dissolution the American Right has declared "the end of history"(6) and the triumph of capitalism and liberalism. While many Arabs find consolation in Kuwait's restored sovereignty, they are still pained by the devastation, the divisiveness, and the moral, material and environmental(7) defeat brought about by the war. Arab- American scholar, Naseer Aruri, sees the war effort leading to the Coalition's victory in terms of a "recolonization of the Arab world" .(8) Hence,

The justification for the Gulf war was self-evident to most Americans and Britons, but less so to Arabs, including many in countries which supported the Coalition. President Bush emerged with his image enhanced, but most Arabs found it hard to share the West's euphoria.(9)

In the same vein, for many Arabs, the West's notion of world order leaves much to be desired. Disorder, akin to a kind of ordered chaos, is the order as far as they are concerned. The Arab term al-la nidam(10) conveys absence of order and imparts the idea of al-fawda (disorder, chaos). The Arab perspective tends toward disowning the "New World Order" for two interconnected reasons. Firstly, Arabs, like many other peoples, yet again find themselves on the periphery of such an order. As such the "New Order", being like its predecessors designed in Westem chancelleries and presidential palaces, is not expected to be more favorable. Former Arab League observer at the UN, Clovis Maksoud notes:

This new global order was basically an order defined and determined by the Western part of the globe. The Southern part of the globe, whose input, aspirations and rights are not yet factored into this new order ... began to sense that perhaps the globe is solely defined as the North. But the South, which represents the majority of mankind . . . began to sense its disenfranchisement and potential dispossession.(11)

Secondly, disorder is associated with unpredictability, paralysis and inefficiency. Thus little or no confidence is held in the existing global system, especially with regard to solving unresolved Arab problems:

In the light of this disorder, it is impossible to forecast either the future of world peace or of the global system. By disorder it is meant the explosion of problems that the institutional and organizational apparatuses of the existing international system are unable to solve.(12)

It is generally accepted that George Bush's proclaimed New World Order is little more than a reincarnation of the old order. What is new in Southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights, Gaza and the West Bank? What is new in the regional imbalance of power where nuclear Israel conquers and rules? Even with such historical developments started by the Madrid Peace talks, through to the Oslo-Cairo agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, the Israeli-Jordanian Peace Treaty, and the Israeli-Syrian negotiations over the Golan Heights, much remains unchanged. What about the imbalances associated with wealth and deprivation? Arabs cannot understand how a New World Order can be prefaced by the disorder unleashed by high-tech violence on an ancient Arab center of civilization (Babylonian and Abbasid). The promised "principles of justice and fair play"(13) of the New World Order are yet to materialize. Accordingly, Arab contempt and suspicion persist.

TRENDS OF DISORDER

If balanced is a correlate of order, then imbalance and contradiction are correlates of disorder. The second Gulf War has not only heralded a new stage of uncertainty in the Middle East, but has also acted as a harbinger of trends antithetical to the highly-principled proclamations associated with the New World Order, and to international trends of democratization and disarmament. In this section four major contradictory trends are examined.

Contradiction 1: The persistence of Western direct and indirect support of authoritarianism in the Arab Middle East betrays the democratic claims and practices of the guardians of the New World Order.

The Gulf War was not fought under the banner of democracy. Yet the Bush administration was quick to demonize Saddain Hussein and the authoritarian practices of his mukhabarat (police) state. Like Nasser during the 1956 Suez crisis,(14) Hussein was likened to Hitler. Such a comparison is far-fetched and would not pass the test of objectivity. Hussein's technologically-dependent Iraq cannot be compared to Hitler' s industrialized Germany. While it is certain that the latter's actions were motivated by imperialist ambitions, racism and notions of Aryan supremacy, it cannot be safely assumed that the former was driven by illusions of Babylonian grandeur or ethnic superiority.(15) And Hussein's murderous record is no match to Hitler's calculated genocide. While the leader of Iraq was not a Hitler, he certainly was a leader with megalomaniac instincts, and a dictator that the West originally supported against a "bigger evil" - Iran - conveniently choosing to overlook his regime's human rights violations. And again, in 1990, it was only for the sake of convenience that the West chose to take notice of Halbaja and the gassing of Kurds and other atrocities against the Iraqi people. This point has not been missed by Noam Chomsky:

The US is one of the major violators of the principles now grandly proclaimed .... George Bush warms of appeasing aggressors and clutches to his heart the Amnesty International (AI) report on Iraqi atrocities (after 2 August), but not AI reports on El Salvador, Turkey, Indonesia, and the Israeli Occupied Territories.(16)

More than four years have passed since the West's "triumph" in the Gulf. Yet as far as human rights and democratization are concerned there has been nothing to celebrate for either Arabs or the guardians of the proclaimed New World Order. In fact, despite encouraging democratic gains in Jordan and Yemen,(17) the trend has generally been one of persistent authoritarianism - a trend which is antithetical to the so-called global democratic revolution. Many Arabs have pinned high hopes on this global transformative process, and many among the intelligentsia have been crying for a response to it.(18) However, the Western response to Arab democratization has been less than enthusiastic.

A number of crucial points explain why the West would rather put the question of Arab democratization on the backburner:

(i) The West will not tolerate the fall or overthrow of friendly Arab regimes, especially those sitting on vast oil reserves. One shah' s fall is one too many. The West will, in accordance with its interests, guarantee the survival of friendly regimes even when they are unelected and autocratic. Such protege regimes, being almost invariably representatives of international capitalism and ruling without the input of a democratic opposition and virtually free from societal and constitutional restraints, engage unhindered in concessionary (military facilities and low oil prices) and beneficial deals with the West (subsidization of the Westem military industrial complex and petrodollar recycling).(19) The West is no beacon of democracy in the Middle East.(20) The nonchalance toward democracy, which besmirched the U.S. messianic role and international reputation, led many Arabs to conclude that the U.S. commitment is not to democracy or human rights but to the status quo. Pro-Western authoritarian Arab regimes permit the US far more leverage and patronage than would be possible through Arab democratic regimes.(12) The Arab members of the U.S.-led coalition were no democratic models, and were motivated by self-interest.(22) Arab (and non-Arab) conspiratorial theorizing regards oil as the motivating factor for the Western members of the coalition.(23)

(ii) The execution of a war with devastating human,(24) financial and environmental(25) consequences resulted in the restoration of a Kuwaiti autocratic oligarchy. This stands in sharp contrast with the West's tough stance against to despots elsewhere (such as in Haiti). A sense of deja vu is strong with regard to this double standard, expressed in Jeanne Kirkpatrick's distinction between "bad" and "good" dictators.(26) The October 1992 elections restored parliamentary life in Kuwait. Yet women and badw (stateless Arabs) remained excluded. By excluding them, the patriarchal Sabahs have in fact reneged on the promise to increase political freedoms made in the Kuwait Popular Congress held in October 1990 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.(27) This exclusion is unconstitutional. Article 29 of Kuwait's constitution insists on the "equality of citizens before the law," according all "rights and duties" regardless of sex, race or religion. The witch-hunt that took place after Kuwaiti independence was restored went almost unnoticed in the corridors of power in Western capitals. Thousands of Arabs were made to pay for a minority's collaboration with the Iraqi invaders. State torture, killing, deportation and confiscation of property were committed against innocent workers who helped develop Kuwait. Many of the victims were Kuwaiti-born. Similarly, human rights violations by key Western allies (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco) drew little criticism except for the perfunctory treatment given in the U.S. State Department' s annual country reports.(28) In these countries, the personalized nature of Arab politics has made democratic initiatives inherently tentative or retractable, especially when the rules, procedures and ends of the democratic game clash with the rulers' interests.(29)

A classic case of Western confusion and disinterest with regard to Arab democratization was the U.S. response to the cancellation in January 1992 of the results of Algeria's first multiparty parliamentary elections. The initial response, read on 13 January by White House spokesperson Margaret Tutwiler, was clearly supportive of the coup, describing it as "constitutional". The following day, seeking to alleviate the damage and embarrassment caused by the previous statement, Tutwiler announced to a startled media that the U.S. would not comment further on the constitutionality, or lack thereof, of the Algerian military takeover.(30) Western governments know where their interests and sympathies lie - certainly not with Arab democratization. According to one Western commentator, "by neither criticizing nor approving the Algerian army's action, Western countries cloak their real attitude - that democracy is fine up to a certain point."(31) The idea is that "sovereign" Algerians cannot be allowed to elect Islamists (supposedly anti-democratic) who appeared on the verge of winning a majority. It is, however, quite acceptable for Western citizens to vote into office leaders (supposedly democratic) who, if need be, are prepared to go to war and bomb cities back to the Stone Age in the name of the national interest. A clear case of this double standard is the vigor with which U.S. leaders have pursued the restoration of democracy in Haiti. As Edward Said puts it:

For two generations the United States has sided in the Middle East mostly with tyranny and injustice. No struggle for democracy, or women' s rights, or secularism and the rights of minorities has the United States officially supported.(32)

(iii) Not only is democracy perennially quarantined when dealing with Arab autocracies, but also with the United Nations. The convenient "hijacking" of the UN Security Council(33) by a minority of powerful interests goes against the majoritarian democratic principle. As a result, the credibility of both the UN and the proposed New World Order are at stake. Malaysia's Prime Minister, a vociferous critic of the inequitable international system, expresses disillusiomnent with the international body. He questions the logic of the global push for democracy within national units but not among them:

In the United Nations we are equal, but five are more equal than the rest .... Seven countries on their own lay down the laws which affect adversely the economies of others. A few nations on their own have taken it upon themselves to determine the New World Order.(34)

This is the sort of democratic deficiency that facilitates belligerence. Were it not for such deficiency, Western powers would not, as Richard Falk observes, have been able to "turn the [UN] ... into an instrument legitimizing a war that could and should have been avoided".(35) Responsibility for the fact that the war was not avoided lies equally with the totalitarian nature of Ba'athism and Hussein's personalist rule. The Iraqi dictator placed himself in the difficult position whereby his endeavors for conditional withdrawal from Kuwait could not be reconciled with the coalition's demand for an unconditional withdrawal. Even if Hussein is to be assumed "insane" as was proclaimed in many Western circles, it was impossible for him not to have foreseen the consequential destruction to his country by the formidable firepower arrayed against Iraq. Accordingly, Iraq's search for a way out must not be overlooked. David Campbell cites the myriad of Iraqi proposals, made both directly and through third parties, to avoid a military confrontation.(36) However, the desire of the U.S. and its allies to avoid war must be questioned. Ramsey Clark showed that the destruction of the Iraqi military machine was one of three definite goals motivating the coalition' s pursuit of the military option.(37) What logical explanation exists for the U.S. rejection of the Soviet initiative which finally secured Iraq's agreement to an unconditional withdrawal? Confusion about this did not even escape the American military: "As one of Schwarzkopf' s officers observed, `the Soviets [were] talking about getting us exactly what we asked for, and we summarily turned them down.'"(38)

Contradiction 2: The international community's juggling of double standards stands in contrast to the New World Order's "principles of justice and fair play".(39)

In the Middle East, the underdogs (Kurds, Palestinians. . . ) of the embattled and stillborn New World Order balk at any suggestion of justice. The bitter experiences of the past have not been encouraging. They have become the "football" of high diplomacy. The September 1993 Israeli blitzkrieg into Southern Lebanon has only reinforced their cynicism. Arabs, and the Lebanese in particular, wondered how could such repeated flagrant transgression of international law and the UN Charter, which caused so much dislocation (nearly 300,000 Muslim Shiites fled their homes) and death (more than 100 civilians), go unpunished?(40) In short, many of them still ask: Why has the international system that many Arabs supported in 1991 against one fellow Arab country (Iraq) on behalf of another (Kuwait) consistently failed to support them?

The "victim syndrome" is deeply entrenched. Arabs almost invariably view themselves to be first in line when punishment is meted out and last when justice is distributed. The examples are numerous. Crippling embargoes are in place against Libya and Iraq. Libya is punished (UN Resolution 731 of January 1992) for failing to hand over two of her nationals to stand trial in Europe or the U.S. for their alleged role in the December 1988 Lockerbie Pan Am airliner disaster, and her alleged bombing in 1989 of a French UTA plane over Niger. Iraq is punished (through a series of UN resolutions, with 678 - which sanctioned the use of force - being still the most controversial) for continuous violation of UN resolutions, including suspected partial non-compliance with those concerning the destruction of all her chemical and nuclear weaponry capabilities and installations.

Inconsistencies with, regard to conflict resolution are conspicuous, for little or no distributive justice has been forthcoming. Resolutions 242 and 338, the terms of reference most commonly cited, yet least important,(41) for addressing the Palestinian question, remain unfulfilled. Although much hope has, in certain circles, been pinned on the 13 September 1993 Israeli-PLO mutual recognition and Declaration of Principles (DOP) and the subsequent peace talks, thus far little progress has been made as evidenced by the difficulties surrounding many aspects of Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and Jericho.(42) Many Palestinians reject the DOP on the grounds that it lends itself to manipulation by the U.S. and Israel and is designed to serve their interests rather than those of the Palestinians. They assert that a genuine peace can only be achieved through recognition of their rights as stipulated in the UN Charter and various UN resolutions. Resolution 425, the legal framework for Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon, remains only ink on paper.(43)

Inversion of international norms and values is exemplified in the lack of political will to respond with the same zeal toward anti-Arab aggression. No punitive action or compensation was ever considered when in February 1973 Israel shot down the Libyan Arab Airlines Boeing 727 over occupied Sinai, killing all 104 passengers on board.(44) Former U.S. President Reagan described as legitimate the Israeli raid on the Tunis PLO headquarters in October 1985. That Tunisian sovereignty was violated and more than 70 people were killed did not seem to matter much. America's April 1986 bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi from British bases was not without wide sympathy amongst Western governments.

Most recently, the bombing of Iraq for her alleged plot to assassinate former U.S. President George Bush has baffled many Arabs. First, Kuwait, which investigated the alleged plot has a credibility problem. John Macarthur's Second Front(45) is living testimony. Second, Bush has not been killed. Third, why should the attempt on the life of a private American citizen spur state action by excessive means against another? A covert operation to kill Saddam Hussein is known to have been contemplated as one American option for ridding Iraq of her tyrannical leader. Arabs could not help noticing how the case of fellow Arab League member, Somalia, in which swift retaliation by the U.S. followed warlord General Aideed's killing of Pakistani troops, presented a stark contrast to UN and U.S. inaction in Bosnia.(46)

Contradiction 3: Continuous increases in armaments and violence do not bode well for the proclaimed peace of the embattled New World Order.

The end of the Cold War is least conspicuous in the Middle East where historical protagonists still view one another with suspicion. This situation has not been helped by the Western arms suppliers who scramble continuously for petrodollars in the lucrative Middle Eastern arms bazaar.(47) Recently, for instance, the British Tornado Company has been saved from closure by a Saudi contract to purchase 70 of its jet fighters. In general, the trend in the Middle East to arm and rearm is antithetical to the more or less downward global trend of military expenditures.(48) While total Middle Eastern military expenditures have fallen slightly, mostly because of the UN embargo on Iraq, the oil-rich states have increased theirs. Two factors are central to this increase: ". . . costs accrued in the war against Iraq [and paid to the Coalition - especially the U.S.] ... and new arms purchases."(49) The Saudi increase is staggering: It jumped from nearly U.S. $15 billion in 1990 to more than 26 billion in 1992 - an 80 per cent increase.(50) The irony is, as the Gulf experience shows, that the billions squandered by the conservative monarchy and the other Gulf quasi-states have not enhanced their security or their self-defense capabilities. Nor will the Saudi's attempt to build a small but fast "high tech" army(51) spare them dependence on the American protective umbrella, which accords with Washington's strategy "to build shared security arrangements in the Gulf".(52) Kuwait entered into a bilateral security agreement with the U.S. in 1991.(52) The other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, except Saudi Arabia, have since followed suit. The Saudis have, however, openly welcomed U.S. involvement in the Arab peninsula as vital for "international trade, balance of power, and oil flow".(54) U.S. involvement in the area will entail "the prepositioning of heavy military equipment in Kuwait".(55)

Simply put, the Arab World cannot be expected to be immune to the heightened state of militarization that characterizes international relations despite "peace-speak". The strategic connectedness between liberal democracy, with its inherently materialistic ethos, and military industrial complexes paradoxically stands to defeat any notion of peace that challenges the West's own notion of self-serving peace equated with outright cultural, economic and military preponderance. Hence, it is no surprise that "the liberal democratic `peace' may be tied to the very tendency of hegemonic leadership to successfully organize and incorporate, above all, liberal democratic states in a strategic-militaly order."(56)

Arabs are very suspicious of the American military entrenchment in the region. Haymanah (hegemony) over Arabs and their oil resources are thought to be the coveted prize of the U.S. strategy.(57) It is hard to presage how the proclaimed New World Order could be "more secure in the quest for peace" with such grand-scale militarization, and narrow and mono-dimensional understandings of security. The tragedy in all of this is the probability that millions of Arab petrodollars will be invested to produce more arms to maim and kill human beings, many of whom will happen to be Middle Eastern children.

Money inserted at one end generates technopower that inflicts one- sided destruction on the other. . . . The "New World Order" will attempt to deepen the vulnerability of the entire non-Western world to Nintendo war, both by widening the technological gap . . . and by increasing the control and surveillance over Third World acquisitions of any weapons that threaten the invulnerability of the West.(58)

In fact it is this kind of Nintendo war that Arab analysts believe has left the Arab World at a critical three-way disadvantage. The destruction of Iraqi capabilities is believed to have tilted the regional balance of power in favor of i) Iran, ii) Turkey, and iii) Israel, with the latter. further widening her competitive edge.(59) According to this analysis, Arabs are left vulnerable to external threats to their water and oil resources, and remain divested of any bargaining power with regard to the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.(60)

One aim of the U.S. four-part strategy is to stem the proliferation of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The destruction of Iraqi capabilities has thus far been the only undertaking in this regard. Arabs lament this as favorable to Israel. Despite arms control being on the Arab-Israeli peace talks agenda there is no expectation amongst Arab observers that Israel will freeze its nuclear program, as Egypt has done since 1986,(61) or destroy her nuclear arsenal. While Iraq is forced to destroy its mass destruction capabilities, no safeguards have yet been put in place to compel an Israeli non-use of her nuclear weapons against Arabs in future confrontations. For Arabs the leeway given to Israel in this respect is hypocritical. In the early 1970s the U.S. knew of, but chose to ignore, Israel's acquisition of an atomic bomb.(62)

In the Middle East more arms has always meant more violence. This is reflected in the upward spiral of violence and counter-violence visible today within and between national units. The impasse of liberalizing Arab authoritarianism accounts for state violence and Islamist counter- violence in Egypt and Algeria.(63) The latter has increasingly moved toward a praetorian polity reversing the early trend of the state' s shrinkage and society's expansion. In both Iran and Turkey, the Kurdish minorities are exposed to high forms of state brutality and cultural suppression. This has been met by violent resistance from a number of Kurdish groups. In northern and southern Iraq, Kurds and Shiites respectively continue to suffer from state reprisals against what is seen by the ruling clique in Baghdad as Western-instigated treason in the aftermath of the second Gulf War. In Israel the "iron fist" policy continues to be employed against Palestinians. Violence between Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has not subsided despite the DOP. An unabated war of attrition goes on between the Muslim north and the Christian-animist south in the Sudan(64) and between Moroccan troops and separatist Sahrawis in the Western Sahara.

Violence, or the potential for it between states in the region persists. In the Arabian peninsula, Saudi Arabia has recently advanced a territorial claim against Yemen.(65) This claim is seen as expressive of the monarchy' s displeasure with both Yemen's anti-war stance (which is translated in Riyadh as a pro-Iraqi stance), and her incipient democratization which is feared for its future contagious spill-over effects throughout the traditionally authoritarian monarchies. Relations between Saudi Arabia and another oildom, Qatar, a fellow GCC member, have ebbed to their lowest point because of a border dispute. Further fissures in Arab ranks are evident in the "cold" response in the GCC capitals to Iran's renewed designs on the United Arab Emirates-owned islands of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tumbs, whose final status has remained inconclusive since 1971. In 1993 Iran unilaterally canceled the 1971 agreement that stipulated future joint exploitation of the islands' gas and oil resources.(66) Israel's recent incursion into Lebanon and its occupation of a "security zone" in the country's south and other Arab territories does not bode well for sustainable peace in the area. Hamas (67) and Hizballah (Party of God) remain committed to armed struggle against Israel. Nor has the Iraq-Kuwait border dispute been settled even with Baghdad renouncing territorial claims inside Kuwait. The promise of new peace, like that of a New World Order,(68) looks at this juncture to be "phoney".

Contradiction 4: The open proclamations of the "worldliness" and " universality" of the New World Order contradict its hidden ethnocentric and racist underpinnings.

Arrogance is at the heart of this contradiction. It is the kind of arrogance that finds expression in jingoism. The visionaries of the New World Order are no doubt mostly, if not all, men. And their vision seems to have been largely informed by what feminists have referred to as "militarized masculinity", with its emphasis on violence as the primary means of ensuring order.(70) As noted by one feminist analyst, "The military is the distilled embodiment of patriarchy." (71) Their arrogance is, to a great measure, the by-product of the military victory in the Gulf. Such arrogance was not visible after the Vietnam war. And the messages of "grandeur" stem from the glory of that victory, a Christian God, and His self-assigned "missionaries" of peace and order with their superior scientific-technological culture. Falk captures the essence of these messages pointing out the inherent racism in them, which is evident in: i) "the assumption that God is on the side of the better technology"; ii) the wide belief that "military technology is the real test of civilization"; and iii (the tendency "to associate the evil `other' with non-white, non-Christian peoples" .(72)

The monopoly over claims to Godliness and civilization have produced xenophobic reactions in both East and West. There is a wide perception amongst Muslims that with the death of communism, Islam is being demonized, unnecessarily making it the West,s new ideological foe.(73) For Muslims in general, and Islamists in particular, this directly threatens their cultural relevance and freedom. Cultural relevance is equated with identity and existence. Muslims and Arabs have been historically vulnerable to territorial and political division. They have not, however, been divided culturally, owing to Islam's relative resilience to cultural hegemony. Prominent Islamist leader Rachid al-Ghannouchi defines this resilience as the "acceptance of modernity but within the framework of the values of Islam."(74) Islamists oppose wholesale modernization. This stems from lingering suspicion of a process Muslims first encountered through colonial and neo-colonial experiences. For Islamist analysts, the West fears Islam,s stand against oppression and for social justice, and its rejection of the laissez faire ethos that condones pillaging and exploiting the resources and disrespecting the cultures of the powerless.

Muslim concern with cultural relevance in the context of the New World Order is tremendous. Western media domination and a one-way flow of Western information to the Islamic world through sophisticated communication technologies is seen as a kind of cultural "tele-crusade" . Islamists fear this media domination propagates "social norms, ways of life, and behaviors in a way that renders the indigenous culture inferior and second-class".(75) The five Western media giants (Time Warner Inc., USA; Bertelsman, Germany; Murdoch's News Corporation Ltd, Australia-USA; Hachette-SA, France; and Capitol Cities/ABC, Inc., USA)(76) have spread their tentacles worldwide. A West is absent. This media monopoly and the lack of a two-way information flow, combined with the frequently negative portrayal of Islam and Muslims by the Western media, has, in the eyes of many Islamists, helped "tarnish the image of Islam,"(77) and largely packaged it as inherently anti- democratic.

The association of Islam with violence is one example of such negative imagery - the "green peril scenario".(78) Robin Wright speaks of the return of "jihad" (holy war).(79) This is unhelpful reductionism. Jihad is a legally, politically and socially complex concept, a thorough explanation of which is beyond the scope of this paper.(80) Broadly speaking, however, holy war is one of two forms of jihad. Al-jihad al-asghar (lesser jihad), holy war, is not as important as al-jihad al-akbar (greater jihad) - spiritual, political, social, economic and intellectual forms of struggle. Islamists engage in one or both struggles. Electoral politics as forms of (greater jihad) - have given way in Algeria to lesser jihad where the state and the outlawed (Islamists engage one another violently. In Egypt, al-Jama'a al-Islamiyyah (the Islamic Group), being excluded from politics, is visibly engaged in lesser jihad, and without the moderate Muslim Brotherhood's legalization as a political party, things could get worse. In Lebanon, Hizballah has abstained from anti-state/society lesser jihad except against Israel, but engaged in greater jihad through the domestic political process. Hamas does the same in occupied Palestine. In Tunisia, although the banned Harakat al-Nahdha (Renaissance Movement) is coming under increasing pressure to engage in lesser jihad against Ben Ali's regime, its exiled leader, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, remains committed to greater jihad.(81)

There is a growing feeling amongst Islamists that the wide crackdown on Islamist movements throughout the Middle East aims at combating Islam as a political ideology and a medium of liberation from dependent authoritarianism. Western governments certainly appear to condone the crackdown. Western governments, their protege Arab regimes, and Israel are all accused of forming an anti-Islamic power triangle.(82) An Israeli Defense Force-authored document, available at the Israeli Embassy in Canberra, lends credence to this scenario. The 13-page document, entitled "The Danger of Islamic Fundamentalism: Background Material", is a good example of the negative imagery cited in Islamist circles. Amongst many things, it claims that the most prominent assassination in 1992 was that of the Copt spiritual leader, Faraj Foudah, who was considered to be one of the leading opponents of the extremists in Egypt." Faraj Foudah was never a Copt. He was a Muslim and his full name was Mohamed Faraj Foudah. Foudah was a leading secularist, hardly a "spiritual" leader. The document also fails to point out that Islam is not a monolith: Islamic movements are neither homogeneous nor are they united. While some engage in anti-Copt, anti-tourist, anti-West violence, they engage in anti-Muslim violence, too. The warring Islamists of Afghanistan are instructive in this regard. Other Islamists reject violence. The ballot, not the bullet, is their preferred modus operandi. Thus: To ignore these facts and claim that all Islamic movements are "fundamentalist". . . [and] against the West, is a gross misrepresentation of reality. Those who insist on it are either misguided or prisoners of a Cold War mentality.(83)

LOOKING AHEAD

The trends and imbalances of disorder are clearly manifest in the Middle East. Arresting and redressing them requires such vital human traits as trust, care, tolerance, mutuality, reciprocity, equality, honesty and reconciliation. For this, human beings do not need a New World Order. Rather, the New World Order requires these qualities in human beings for it to be orderly. As regards the trends identified above they can be dealt with through:

i) Stressing the importance of democratic values and procedures for state-society relations, and state-state relations. This has relevance for minorities, for gender relations, for civil society, for governance, and for power (a positive sum game as distinct from a zero sum game) in the Middle East. It also has relevance for the UN and genuine representation and operation. Societies, not just states, should be involved in the UN.(84) Any gains for democracy are gains for peace. However, it should also be noted that no democracy is complete without economic democracy, which has relevance for equity and justice. Australia, the aspiring "clever country", could play a role by promoting, while not imposing, democracy and human rights abroad. The "clever country's" potential is not limited to sheep and wheat.

ii) Distributing justice to the dispossessed Palestinians and other aggrieved peoples in the region through peaceful means. This has relevance for self-determination which is in essence a democratic norm. Strength and impartiality of the UN are essential if justice is to take hold.

iii) Demilitarizing the Middle East. This has internal and external relevance. Internally, many Middle Eastern polities cry for demilitarization. The military belongs in the barracks and not in government. Regional authoritarianisms are closely linked to militarized polities. Externally, demilitarization would mean confidence-building Measures between historical protagonists. The civil economies would benefit from the freeing of huge and badly-needed financial and human resources currently monopolized by the military. Demilitarization also has relevance for non-violence. A reconceptualization of security is needed so as to encompass economic, environmental and spiritual dimensions. One proposal for lasting security is the emphasis of "community-sponsored and guaranteed security" and its indigenization to make it the shared business and enterprise of Middle Easterners, not outsiders.(85) Another possibility is a Conference on Security and Cooperation in the Mediterranean/Middle East.(86)

iv) "Delinking Islam and terrorism,"(87) and concentrating on the common bonds that connect peoples of various faiths and backgrounds, and accepting cultural differences. And no bond is greater than the human one. This has humanist relevance. For human beings happen to be Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or Hindu. They are not Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Hindu who happen to be human beings.

However desirable the above vision may be, the reality is one of persistent disorder. Unless self-determination, democracy, and a culture of nonviolence and accommodation between and within communities and states are fostered, the gap between what should be and what could be will remain too wide to warrant optimism about deconstructing the foundations of disorder and reconstructing the foundations of order in the Middle East.

NOTES

(1.) As quoted in Thomas H. Henriksen, The New World Order: War, Peace and Military Preparedness (Stanford: Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 1992), p. 1. (2.) The notion of "World Order" - globalism, worldism, universalism - is a conceptualization that has gained both comprehensiveness and wide circulation since World War I and II, the bloodiest chronicles in human history. The notion, however, appears to have had roots in ancient sacred and secular thinking. The Marxist ideal of an internationally-united proletariat transcending eventually- withering nationalism and nation-states is one example. Hedley Bull cites many others, such as the Kantian universalistic tradition and the Grotian/internationalist tradition. See The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1990), chapter 2. (3.) Qur'an, 49:13. Universalistic sentiments are also articulated by, for instance, the medieval Arab poet, Abu al-'Ala al-Ma'arri, who deems religion to be divisive. Another, Muhi al-Din Ibn Arabi, expresses more or less identical views intimating that love for humankind is his religion. (4.) Richard Falk, "World Order Conception and the Peace Process", in Elise Boulding, ed., Building Peace in the Middle East: Challenges for States and Civil Society (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, (1994), p. 190. (5.) Mohammed Heikal, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the Gulf War (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992). See also Earl H. Tilford, Jr., "The Meaning of Victory in Operation Desert Storm: A Review Essay", in Political Science Quarterly, 108, 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 327-331. (6.) See, for instance, Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin Books, 1992). (7.) See "Tchernubeel al-Khaleej" [The Gulfs Chernobyl], in Al-Hawadith, 5 April 1991, pp. 14-15. (8.) Naseer Aruri, "The Recolonisation of the Arab World", in Middle East International, no. 385, 12 October 1990, pp. 18-19. (9.) Heikal, Illusions of Triumph, p. 7. (10.) See, for instance, "Usuliat fi kulli makan. . . Limada?" [Fundamentalisms everywhere... Why?], in Al-Shuruq, no. 54 15-21 April 1993, pp. 12- 21. (11.) Clovis Maksoud, "The Healing Process Begins", in American- Arab Affairs, no. 35 (Winter 1990-91), p. 56. (12.) Muhammad al-Sayyid Sa`id, Mustaqbil al-Nidam al-'Arabi Ba'da Azmati al-Khaleej [The Future of the Arab Regional System in the Aftermath of the Gulf Crisis] (Kuwait: Alim al-Ma'rifa, 1992), p. 242. (13. Richard K. Herrmann, "The Middle East and the New World Order", in International Security, 16, 2 (Fall 1991), p. 42. (14.) Eden changed his mind and "wrote to Eisenhower that he [did] not think Nasser a Hitler, but that the parallel with Mussolini [was] close". See Ritchie Ovendale, The Middle East Since 1914 (London: Longman, 1992), p. 75. (15.) See Robert Springborg's criticism of the Hitler thesis, "Selling War in the Gulf', in St. John Kettle and Stephanie Dowrick, eds., After the Gulf War: For Peace in the Middle East (Leichardt, Sydney: Pluto Press, 1991), pp. 26- 43. (16.) Noam Chomsky, "The U.S. and the Gulf Crisis", in Haim Bresheeth and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds., The Gulf War and the New World Order (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1991), p. 19. (17.) Since reunification in 1990, Yemen has slowly but progressively liberalized polity and society. Jordan's incipient democratization was inaugurated in the November 1989 elections. Further democratization initiatives saw the introduction of the National Charter, a supplement to the constitution, enshrining rights for both the citizenry and the Crown. In 1993, party politics were resumed with the legalization of political parties for the first time in nearly 30 years. The November 1993 elections produced a pluralist parliament. (18.) Suad al-Sabah, "al-Thawrat al-Thalatha" [The Three Revolutions], in Ash-shiraa', no. 421, 16 April 1990, p. 32. (19.) Saudi Arabia is a classic example. The stationing of the Coalition troops on her soil contrasts with the Kingdom's long- standing reluctance to grant such concessions. In the mid-1950s and the early 1960s the U.S. deployed strategic bombers at Dhahran to deter Soviet and Egyptian aggression scenarios. See C. Madison, "Mastering the Game", in National Journal, 3 November 1990, p. 251. The U.S. had no problem securing funds from the Saudis for "Desert Shield", with King Fahd reported to have told visiting James Baker that "his government [would] pay all the monthly in-country costs of the U.S. troops...." See details in W. Mossberg and P. Truell, "Arab Allies of the U.S. Promise Billions to Help Cover Pentagon's Expenses", in The Wall Street Journal, 10 September 1990. The pliancy of the Saudis encouraged U. S. legislators to make further requests through George Bush - namely, the reduction of oil prices (whatever happened to market forces?!). See "Senators Call on Saudis to Reduce Oil Prices", in East Asia/Pacific Wireless File 193, (U.S. Information Service) 4 October 1990, p. 19. (20.) Recall that the U.S. was behind the overthrow of the Mossadeq Government in August 1953. (21.) For instance, Jordan suffered greatly, with her U.S. aid suspended, as a result of her anti-U.S.-led forces' deployment stance, and her favoring of a diplomatic solution to the crisis. These stances were, in great measure, influenced by a democratically-elected Lower House and an anti-war public opinion. Tim Niblock observes that Arab states which opposed the coalition forces' deployment were those in which democratic initiatives were being taken (Jordan, Yemen, Algeria). See his article, "The Need for a New Western Arab Order", in Middle East International, no. 385, 12 October 1990, p. 17. (22.) Dina Haseeb and Malak S. Rouchdy illustrate this, pointing out the pecuniary motives of Egypt (which also applied to Syria). See "Egypt's Speculations in the Gulf Crisis: The Government' s Policies and the Opposition Movements", in Bresheeth and Yuval-Davis, eds., The Gulf War, pp. 70-79. (23.) Sami Yousif, "The Iraqi-US War: A Conspiracy Theory", ibid., pp. 51-69. Still on the subject of conspiracy, according to Mohamed Heikal Libya's strongman, Qaddafi, believed in a conspiracy telling former Algerian leader, Chadli Benjedid, " I am haunted by a feeling that it's all arranged." (I.e., Saddam Hussein was implementing a U.S. plan). See Illusions of Triumph, p. 21. (24.) See, for instance, Ramsey Clark, The Fire this Time: US. War Crimes in the Gulf (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992). See also Needless Deaths in the Gulf, War: Civilian Casualties During the Air Campaign and Violations of the Laws of War (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1991). (25.) For a detailed report on environmental damage associated with the Gulf War, particularly concerning the use of chemical weapons, see Sue Mayer and Paul Johnson, Chemical Weapons and Their Effects on the Environment, Greenpeace Environment Briefing (London: Greenpeace, February 1991). See also Andrew R. G. Price, Possible Environmental Threats from the Current Gulf War (York: University of York, 1991). (26.) Noam Chomsky, referring to a similar convenient distinction, notes: "It is fashionable to distinguish between `authoritarian' and `totalitarian' regimes.... A regime is `totalitarian', hence the essence of evil, if it restricts `economic freedom', a term that does not refer to the freedom of workers or communities to control production, but rather to the freedom for private business. .. to conduct its affairs without constraint. If it does not restrict the freedom to invest and exploit, a state is at worst `authoritarian'. This distinction has little relation to the concern of the regime for the welfare of the population." See his Towards A New Cold War (London: Sinclair Browne Ltd, 1982), p. 6. (27.) A popular joke underscores the rulers' slowness to respond on Kuwaiti women's demands for enfranchisement. It states that the quickest decision the amir has ever made was to escape Kuwait on the eve of the Iraqi invasion. (28.) For details of human rights violations in these countries, see country reports in Huquq al-Insan fi al-Watan al-Arabi [Human Rights in the Arab Homeland] (Cairo: Arab Human Rights Organization, 1992 and 1993). (29.) For examples of Arab democratic reversals and breakdowns see Larbi Sadiki, Progress and Retrogression in Arab Democatization (East Jerusalem: PASSIA, 1992). A shorter version of this monograph can also be found in Journal of Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, 1, 1 (September 1993), pp. 80-103. (30.) East Asia/Pacific Wireless File 009, 14 January 1992, pp. 14-15. (31.) Jim Hoagland, "Washington's Algerian Dilemma" , in The Washington Post, 6 February 1992. Another excellent article is by David Ignatius, "Islam in the West's Sights: The Wrong Crusade?" , in The Washington Post, 8 March 1992. For the U.S. response with regard to the restoration of democracy in Haiti, see "Restoring Democracy in Haiti: Persistence and Patience", State Dispatch, 3,8 (24 February 1992), pp. 132-133. (32.) Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. 363. (33.) For details of how the Security Council was manipulated to secure resolutions to use force against Iraq, see Keith Suter, "The United Nations and the Gulf Conflict", in Kettle and Dowrick, eds., After the Gulf War, pp. 56-66. Arab suspicion of, and frustration with, the UN are articulated by `Abd al-'Alim Mohamed Abd al-'Alim, "Al-Umam al-Muttahida wa Harb al-Khaleej" [The United Nations and the Gulf War], in Qira 'at Siyasiyyah, 2, 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 101-119. (34.) In UN Chronicle (March 1992), p. 29. (35.) Richard Falk, "Reflections on Democracy and the Gulf War", in Alternatives, 16 (1991), p. 267. (36.) David Campbell, Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narratives of the Gulf War (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1993), pp. 62-64. See also Michael McKinley, ed., The Gulf War: Critical Perspectives (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994). (37.) Clark, The Fire This Time, p. 61. (38.) Campbell, Politics Without Principle, p. 63. (39.) Richard K. Herrmann, "The Middle East and the New World Order", in International Security, 16, 2 (Fall 1991) p. 42. (40.) From author,s interview with visiting Lebanese Parliament Speaker, Nabih Birri, 27 September 1993, Canberra. (41.) For instance, what ever happened to such resolutions by the General Assembly such as 181 (November l947) which recommends "a plan of partition with economic union"; 194 (December 1948) which, inter alia, resolves the right of return for Palestinians; 273 (May 1949), which in deciding Israel's admission to the UN, calls on the Jewish state to "unreservedly ... undertake to honor" Resolutions 181 and 194 "from the day it becomes a Member of the United Nations", 3236 (November 1974) which "reaffirms the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine, including: a) the right to self-determination .... b) the right to national independence and sovereignty"; and " reaffirms also the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return. . ."? What is the fate, for instance, of Security Council resolutions 298 (September 1971) confirming the illegality of Israel's actions "to change the status of the City of Jerusalem, including expropriation of land and properties [and] transfer of populations and legislation aimed at the incorporation of the occupied section. . ."; 605 (December 1987) and 607 (January 1988) which deplore Israel's human rights violations in the Palestinian and Arab lands it occupies reaffirming the applicability of the Geneva Convention's provisions under the section on the "Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949" to those occupied lands? (42.) For instance, Dr. Nabil Sha'ath, Minister for Planning and Economic Cooperation in the Interim Palestinian Authority (Gaza/Jericho), and chief Palestinian negotiator with Israel, projects an optimistic view that downplays the difficulties in the implementation of the agreements resulting from the DOP. This stands in contrast with the cynicism expressed by Dr. Raji Sourani, Director of the Gaza Centre for Rights and Law, the Gaza Affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, and by Yosef Ben-Aharon, former Director-General of the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and Head of Israel's Delegation to the Peace Talks with Syria. The author spoke with all three men who gave seminars at the Australian National University on 20 September 1994, 15 November 1994, and 30 November 1994 respectively. (43.) For a critical view of Western double standards regarding ignored UN resolutions on Arab questions see Abderrahmane Bensid, "The Maghreb and the Gulf Crisis", in American-Arab Affairs, no. 35 (Winter 1990-91), pp. 27- 32. (44.) Muhammad Amin Bwisir, son of the late Libyan Foreign Minister who was killed in that incident, has since IN@ begun legal proceedings through Egyptian courts to seek compensation from Israel. His argument is that a just world order should deal with and punish Israel the way it has Libya. See Tareq Hassan, "Al-Irhab al-Israili Amam Mahkamat Janoub al-Qahira" [Israeli Terrorism Before South Cairo's Court], in Rose El-Youssef, 3 March 1992, pp. 12-13. (45.) John R. Macarthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992). (46.) Arabs have their inconsistencies too. While most Arabs, bar those from the Gulf states, opposed the U.S.-led involvement in the Gulf, today they would like to see similar involvement in Bosnia. It is also ironic that the most prominent "fundamentalist" leader, the blind cleric Shaikh `Umar Abd al-Rahman, sought exile in the United States, of all places, where he resided in Brooklyn. This constitutes a major contradiction with his anti-Western and anti-American stances. (47.) The fallout from the revelations of Western arms transfers to Iraq continues. For an insight into the British example, see Richard Norton-Taylor, "Waldegrave Blamed for Iraqgate", in Guardian Weekly, week ending 19 December 1993, p. 1; pp. 10-11. (48.) According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Centre (SIPRI), this downward trend is due to major cutbacks by the USA, the former USSR, and countries in Central and Eastern Europe. See SIPRI Yearbook 1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 189. See also Yahya M. Sadowski, Scuds or Butter? The Political Economy of Arms Control in the Middle East (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1993). (49.) Refer to SIPRI Yearbook, 1993, p. 189. (50.) Ibid. See table of world military expenditure, p. 260. See also William D. Hartung, "Relighting the Middle East", The New York Times, 20 September 1991. For details of American-Saudi arms deals from which the U.S. was expected to reap some U.S. $20 billion for the 1991-92 period alone, see The Military Balance: 1991-92 (London: Brassey's, 1992). An excellent contribution to this debate is made by Said K. Aburish. He ably establishes the nexus between oil and power in the arch-conservative monarchy, observing, for instance, that the only two sectors that have enjoyed budgetary increases over the past five years have been the Ministry for Defence and the Royal Household. See his The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud (London: Bloomsbury, 1994), especially chapter 1. (51.) Patrick E. Tyler, "Gulf Security Talks Stall Over Plan for Saudi Army", The New York Times, 13 October 1991. (52.) Herrmann, The Middle East and the New World Order, p. 47. (53.) Eric Schmitt, "US and Kuwait Sign Pact on Troops", New York Times, 20 September 1991. For details of Arab reaction to the Kuwait-US pact, see Joseph A. Kechichian, Political Dynamics and Security in the Arabian Peninsula through the 1990s (Santa Monica: RAND, 1993), pp. 86-88. (54.) See Qira" at Siyasiyyah, 3, 3-4 (Summer/Fall 1993), p. 192. (55.) Kechichian, Political Dynamics and Security, p. 86. (56.) Robert Latham, "Democracy and War-making: Locating the International Liberal Context," Millenium: Journal of International Studies 22 (Summer 1993), p. 164. (57.) Munir Shafiq, "Al-Istratijiyyah al-Amirikiyyah wa Atharu al-Nidam al-'Alami al-Jadid `ala al-'Alim al-'Arabi' [The U.S. Strategy and the Effects of the New World Order on the Arab World], in Qira'at Siyasiyyah, 2, 1(Winter 1992), pp. 5-24. (58.) Falk, "Reflections on Democracy and the Gulf War", pp. 270-271. (59.) Abd al-Fattah al-Rashdan, "Al- Nidam al-Duwali al-Jadid wa Atharuhu `ala al-Nidam al-'Arabi' [The New World Order and its Effects on the Arab System], in Qira'at Siyasiyyah, 3, 1 (Winter 1993), p. 108. (60.) Ibid. (61.) Ali E. Hillal Dessouki, "Strategic Balance and Disarmament in the Middle East," in E. Boulding, ed., Building Peace in the Middle East, p. 201. At a meeting in Cairo in early February, the Damascus Declaration States (Egypt, Syria and the six Arab Gulf states) criticized Israel's exemption from nuclear inspections, arguing that this is incompatible with the quest for peace in the region. They want international pressure to be brought to bear on Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel has never declared her nuclear status, although she is reported to possess installations for the manufacture and storage of some 300 nuclear weapons. (62.) For further details on this point, and the "unraveling of the nonproliferation regime in the Middle East" see Samuel S. Kim, The Quest for a Just World Order (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 124-126. (63.) See Larbi Sadiki, "Islamists Fight the Secular State", The Canberra Times, 3 August 1993. (64.) See Larbi Sadiki, "Sudan Seeks Help", in The Observer, 1, 3 (December 1994), p. 21. (65.) See Larbi Sadiki, "Why Yemen is at War", in Current Affairs Bulletin, 71, 3 (October/November 1994), pp. 41-43. Also by the same author, see "Why Yemen Matters", in Asia-Pacific Defence Reporter, 21, 4/5 (October/November 1994), p. 18; p. 27. (66.) For a summary of these conflicts, see "The Fire Next Time", in The Middle East (January 1993), pp. 9-10. (67.) Author's interview with Ibrahim Ghosha, Hamas spokesman, 5 June 1994, Amman, Jordan. (68.) Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "What New World Order?", in Foreign Affairs, 71, 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 83-96. (69.) Paul Hirst, "The World Order, The Phoney Peace" , in New Statesman and Society, 3, 117 (7 September 1990, pp. 12-14. (70.) See Simona Sharoni, "Gender Issues in Democracy: Rethinking Middle East Peace and Security from a Feminist Perspective", in E. Boulding, ed., Building Peace in the Middle East, pp. 99-109. See also Carol Cohn, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals" , in Linda Rennie Forcey, ed., Peace: Meanings, Politics, Strategies (New York: Praeger, 1989), pp. 39-72. Feminist discourses present alternative visions and conceptions for a more just and harmonious world order. Some contributions to these discourses include V. Spike Peterson, ed., Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992); Nira Yuval Davis and Floya Anthias, eds., Woman- Nation-State (London: Macmillan, 1988); Anne Tickner, Gender in International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); and Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Bases and Beaches: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London: Pandora, 1990). Also Evelyne Accad, Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1990), especially pp. 160-164. (71.) Rita Whalstrom, "The Challenge of Peace Education: Replacing Cultures", in Elise Boulding (ed.), New Agendas for Peace Research: Conflict and Security Reexamined (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1992), p. 173. (72.) Falk, "Reflections on Democracy and the Gulf War", pp. 268-272. (73.) Adel Mahdi, "Al- Nidam al-Duwali al-Jadid wa Aatharuhu `ala al-Wath' al-'Arabi al-Islami' [The New World Order and its Impact on the Arabo-Islamic State of Affairs], in Qira`at Siyasiyyah, 1, 2-3 (Spring/Summer 1991), pp. 5-25. (74.) Rachid al-Ghannouchi, "Islam and the West: Realities and Prospects", translated by Azzam Tamimi, unpublished paper delivered at Westminster University, London, 1993. (75.) Hassan Elhag Ali, " The New World Order and the Islamic World", in The Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 8, 3 (1991), p. 465. (76.) Ibid. (77.) Al-Ghannouchi, "Islam and the West", p. 4. (78.) A fine article criticizing Western Islamophobia is by Leon T. Hadar, "What Green Peril?", in Foreign Affairs, 72, 2 (Spring 1993). (79.) Robin Wright, "Islam, Democracy and the West", in Foreign Affairs, 71, 3 (Summer 1992). (80.) One of the best references for explaining the different meanings of jihad can be found in M. Mazzahim Mohideen, "Islam, Nonviolence, and Interfaith Relations", in Glenn D. Paige, Chaiwat Satha-Anand and Sarah Gilliatt (eds.), Islam and Nonviolence (Honolulu: Matsunaga Institute for Peace, University of Hawaii, 1993), pp. 137-143. Also see Fazlur Rahman, Islam (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 37, and John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 32-33. (81.) Interview with Rachid al-Ghannouchi, 15 April 1993, London. (82.) Ibid. (83.) Amin Saikal, "Islamic Fundamentalists, `Now Under Every Bed'", The Canberra Times, 9 March 1992, p. 9. (84.) A. See, for instance, Paul Ekins, A New World Order: Grassroots Movements for Global Change (London: Routledge, 1992). See also Keith Hindell, " Reform of the United Nations", in The World Today, 48, 2 (February 1992), pp. 30-33. (85.) See "The Commission Document on Peace Building in the Middle East" in E. Boulding, ed., Building Peace in the Middle East, p. 49. (86.) Ibid. (87.) Fred Halliday, "International Relations: Is There a New Agenda?", in Millenium, 20, 1 (1991), pp. 57-72.

When assessing the myriad changes in the mass media of the East- Central European(1) states in general and the Czech Republic in particular, it is instructive to review some of the basic differences existing between North American and European nations' media systems. The intent is not to dwell at length on such an exercise, yet a comparative approach should prove helpful in exploring and understanding more clearly the U.S. perspective toward the ongoing transformation in the mass media field of the Czech Republic and, indirectly, in the media landscapes of other East-Central and East European states.

For the focus of this study is on different cultures, especially East-Central Europe's changing media cultures. Due to the complex histories of the states involved, their media cultures differ greatly from North America's established and dominant popular culture. Especially significant in this respect is the last half of the 20th century, which has witnessed an explosion of information and communication technology and the onset of what Brzezinski calls "...a `technetronic' society: a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially and economically by the impact of technology and electronics...."(2) The latest phenomenon in this proliferation is the development of the information super highway. Furthermore, culture for the East-Central and East European peoples, including ethnicity, heritage, values, language, history and religion in some cases, is all that sometime remains for national identity purposes following a half century or more of Communist Party rule and societal, including media, orchestration.(3) For the Soviet-imposed style of government, with its method of centralized planning, negated, or at least reduced the potential to various degrees, of political development, cultural evolution and economic growth among the former East bloc states. A prominent example of this stagnation is former Czechoslovakia between 1969 and 1989, the two decades following the Soviet-led invasion of the now-defunct Warsaw Pact. This is particularly pronounced when compared to the evolution and growth, particularly in the economic sector, occurring in some western and Asian countries during the same time period.(4)

Prior to the onset of World War II, former Czechoslovakia, for example, had been a parliamentary democracy and "among the ten most developed countries in the world."(5) This level of development, notably in the economy, had declined by the end of November 1989, following more than 40 years of Communist rule that prescribed and adhered to until the its end a command or centralized economy.

A main and important difference between European and U.S. mass media systems is the fundamental concept, or theory, that drives them and establishes their relationship to the society which, purportedly, they serve. Although some North American journalists and media instructors tend to continue proclaiming and discussing the theory of social responsibility (or its variants) as a dominant force directing U.S. media,(6) the theory is running up against the wall of practiced commercialism and the profit motive. McQuail has termed this variant concept the "political- economic media theory."(7) Herman and Chomsky, meanwhile, say the media operate under the influence of the "propaganda model" which focuses on the existing

inequity of wealth and power and its multilevel effects

on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes

by which money and power are able to filter out the

news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the

government and dominant private interests to get their

messages across to the public.(8)

The authors go on to say that the model's primary ingredients are specific filters(9) which focus the bases for discourse and interpretation, define newsworthiness and denote the nature of what essentially are propaganda campaigns. The result is the media's domination by the elite and marginalization of dissent so "that media news people...are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news `objectively' and on the basis of professional news values."(10)

An important reason for the growing gulf between the social responsibility concept/theory and practice, whether in broadcasting or in print, is the lament among journalists that accountants (or bean counters, ) as opposed to editors and editorial managers, increasingly are assuming the decision-making functions in editorial offices and radio and television stations across the land.(11) This is especially noticeable in television, where the ubiquitous Nielson ratings system is paramount, and assignment editors, program directors and station managers bow to it as to a god, frequently relinquishing their proclaimed responsibility of not only informing, but also enlightening and educating their respective audiences.(12)

The question of media's social responsibility was raised by Pope John Paul II during his Denver visit in August 1993 for World Youth Day. The pontiff charged the U.S. media, among other national institutions, with taking responsibility for helping to reduce the evident and destructive violence in American society:

The question which must be asked is, `Who is responsible?

Everybody must be willing to accept their

[sic] part of this responsibility, including the

media...which in part seem to become more aware of

the effect they can have on their audiences. I repeat once

more: including the media.(13)

The U.S. media's dependence on primarily advertising revenue for survival, with the exception of a small public broadcasting sector, makes the privately owned U.S. communication media largely a market- driven or one-dimensional mass communication system. In a capitalist society, where media institutions are businesses with a need to generate profit, social responsibility has a delicate relationship with the bottom line...."(14) The media decision-makers, therefore, be they journalists or accountants, structure programming and news agendas within the framework and according to the influence of the five filters identified by Herman and Chomsky. For, "...media really produce audiences, in the sense that they deliver audience attention to advertisers and shape the behavior of media politics in certain distinctive ways." (15)

The dependency, especially by commercial radio and television stations, on advertising makes the connection between freedom of the press and the economic politics of media symbiotic. The media want to attract "...audiences with buying power, not audiences per se; it is affluent audiences that spark advertiser interest today ...."(16) Thus, advertisers generally avoid programs "...with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the `buying mood'." Rather, they want light entertainment closely aligned "...with the spirit of the primary purpose of program purchase - the dissemination of a selling message."(17) Competition for the advertising dollar makes commercialism a predominant factor and the news-editorial product its subservient adjunct. The subservience tends to increase as circulation or market share of a given medium decreases.

The largely commercial or private media system stands in opposition to the dual system (private/commercial and public) existing in many European states, such as France, Germany and Spain, where the public media - radio and television - play a far greater role through its larger saturation base than in the United States. Not being dependent on ad revenue, but instead on public license fees and government subsidies in some cases, public broadcast media are in a more favorable position than private media to not only inform but also to enlighten and educate their audiences.

Another perceived difference is the anti-intellectual nature of the U.S. media, reflecting a similar trend that continues to characterize American society.(18) The anti-intellectual trend is affecting the relationship between mass communication education and the journalistic field. Moreover, it directs television programming, and the news and information content of the U.S. mass communication industry.

During a conference on international news held during February 1993, an executive editor of one of Denver's two regional daily newspapers expressed the view that, "Frankly, if you know how to cover a fire, you can go on to cover a famine, or a war, or a trade negotiation, or an energy debate or an environmental debate." The editor went on to confront his critics, "What you're being asked today, frankly, is to reinvent journalism by people who are critical of it, and I say you haven't yet understood it [journalism]."(19)

But reinventing journalism, or at least restylizing it to more effectively meet current societal and global needs, is what some media critics are proposing. An example of such advocacy are the writings of Galtung and Vincent in their book, Global Glasnost, in which they propose that consciousness and education of not only media consumers but also journalists focus on one basic problem:

"...the more global the problem, the more we need a

new global journalism. Clearly something has to be done

about these massive biases; biases probably so massive

that news can be better predicted knowing the socio-cultural

context than knowing actual events.(20)

In view of the above statement, and the executive editor's expressed opinion concerning rudimentary journalistic skills needed to cover international events, minimal attention is being paid to training U.S. correspondents in the history, economics and politics of the country or global region to which they are assigned. Again, it is a question of finances for U.S. media organizations, because training takes time and time means money in the capitalist world. There are exceptions, of course. Newspapers such as The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have a history of individual correspondents with sound knowledge of the languages and backgrounds of the countries or regions they were assigned to cover. But such individual correspondents are the exception rather than the rule in the education and training of U.S. journalists.(21)

The U.S. media, being primarily regionally oriented as opposed to the national flavor of European media, especially print, leave many population centers hard-pressed to gain a meaningful and balanced (as opposed to a crisis-oriented) view of international affairs. The emphasis by American media on provincialism and ethnocentrism continues, despite the expanding trend toward globalism in trade and information transfer.

What happens in Uganda or Indonesia - or Iraq - has

global meaning and often sends repercussions around the

world, in part because these events are reported. More

importantly, a much greater degree of interdependence

among all people and nations has developed. Americans,

perhaps, are much slower than others to recognize

this.(22)

Many American readers, listeners and viewers continue to be deprived direct access to the handful of news organizations, some already named above, that maintain their own foreign news bureaus. Although wire services, such the Associated Press, churn out news reports around the clock, comparatively few of them trickle onto the pages of community and city dailies, or are aired by local television and radio station. By the time the news reports do appear, their length has been reduced to make them mostly incomprehensible to local readers and viewers. There exists a special need in today's plugged-in, hooked-up world for people to understand not only the who and what of an international event, but particularly the why and the how of it, its consequences and the historical context within which the event is couched. Such reporting, more prevalent among the European nations' mass media, can lead to a broader understanding of the cross-cultural continuity of the human experience. As one U.S. veteran television anchor has observed:

We [the media] can break away from the preoccupation

of Americans with Americans and deliberately seek and

show the world context of our lives beyond the horizon

of Japanese cars, Korean steel, and Taiwanese

Clothing.(23)

And, suggesting a lack of the historical perspective in U.S. reporting, he goes on to propose looking "within each story for traces of other events, past and present, for connections, for the webbing of human experience."(24) For the historical context is vital to understanding an event, particularly an international one, and realizing its potential or actual consequences for the local media consumer. Although it can be justifiably argued that the ever-increasing access to the Internet is helping the American public to have a greater appreciation for the global cultural experience.

Due to mounting problems in the economy and social welfare system, U.S. media, especially the small public sector, have begun to educate their audiences about the successful health care coverage in The Netherlands, for example, or Germany's technologically advanced and successful tool-making firms. More of such explanatory reporting is needed, because the predominant diet of news and information continues to be negative and crisis-oriented, with happy talk and a few "bright" news items thrown in for good measure.

Martyn Lewis, chief presenter of BBC's evening television news, created major waves among British media circles, but hardly a ripple in the United States when he lectured in this country, after he criticized television news in general, and Britain's TV news venue in particular:

I am not suggesting we squeeze out the negative.... I am

simply arguing for positive stories to be given a fair and

natural hearing when the day's news agenda is being

discussed. We are so wrapped up in this diet of negativity

that we have lost sight of what should be the

Excalibur of television journalism, our shining

sword - our duty to reflect in a visible way the full spectrum of

changes that are taking place to shape our country and

our world.(25)

North American journalists may be aware of, but in the haste of their daily work neglect, their social responsibility of not only informing but also enlightening and educating their respective audiences about the world around them in a balanced fashion. By not doing so, they are losing credibility and confidence among the media- consuming public.

The Transformation Process and U.S. Reactions

The above comparison and critique serve as a platform from which to address the study's principal topic of the North American perspective of the transforming media landscape in East-Central Europe. Following the collapse of communism, the U.S. media, especially the press, were full of reports and analyses about events occurring in the region. Concomitantly, news and journalist organizations, and numerous mass communication schools and departments at leading universities began programs to help former East bloc journalists and their new or reorganized news organizations. Repeated missions and workshops, such as those organized by the Cox Center at the University of Georgia, Columbia University and University of Missouri's School of Journalism, for example, were held in capitals such as Prague and Warsaw.(26) There was an intense interest on the part of U.S. journalist and mass communication educators to help their colleagues in East-Central Europe. But then two major events occurred that influenced a change in attitude and interest in East-Central and Eastern Europe, including its mass media, among some sectors of the American public and the press.

The first event was the Gulf War. Literally within hours of the onset of fighting by the united, international force launched by the efforts of then President George Bush, Europe's post-Communist states were returned to obscurity by the U.S. media. Since the Middle-East war, foreign reporting from East-Central and Eastern Europe has reverted to its usual style of highlighting crises, as i`. the case of Bosnia, and the nationalism-motivated fighting that continues in and among some of the former Soviet republics. In retrospect, the attack against Iraq was a plateau, or turning point, in reporting about events occurring in East-Central Europe. U.S. audiences had been drawn to a new crisis by their media, and the ongoing transformation and democratization of East-Central European states had become history in a media culture in which immediacy and "the here and now" predominate.

The other issue, which pertains more specifically to the transforming mass media in East-Central European states, was that North American media managers and media "experts" visiting the region discovered there was a dual media system developing in some of the former East bloc states as already existed in parts of Western Europe. This meant the coexistence of private and public sectors in broadcasting, especially radio at first, and the rapid growth of an independent press.

The duality became clear when former Czechoslovakia became the first among the former East bloc nations to adopt and implement a new broadcasting law(27) at a time when some of the neighboring countries to the East merely began confronting the issue of transforming their broadcast and other media to reflect post-Communist political realities and changing economic conditions. The architects of the law provided for both sectors of Czechoslovak broadcasting - private and commercial.

Since the demise of communism, there has been a positive reaction in the United States and among other industrial nations to the democratization process and press freedom that has supplanted the propaganda-oriented and controlled media of the communist past. But there also have been voices of concern raised in North America about the status of public, or government-supported, broadcasting as positioned against the development of a commercial broadcasting sector.

There is the continued distinct feeling that the transforming mass media in East-Central Europe will need and should receive assistance until they are on a more solid financial footing. "The evolution of a free press in the emerging democracies of Europe will require decades of nurturing and sustained assistance from the public and private sectors of sister democracies."(28) This includes stable industrial nations not only in Europe and North America, but also in other parts of the globe such as Australia and Japan.

In the case of Romania, Bulgaria and some of the former Soviet republics, meanwhile, there is the belief that press freedom would taken a stronger hold practically and legally with the passage of media laws. That is the reason for the seeming pressure applied by professional and academic institutions among Western industrialized nations against the above-named states to pass new mass media legislation, as opposed to, say, the Czech Republic, where press freedom, despite the absence of a new press law, has been for all intense and purposes achieved.

Allen H. Neuharth, former chairman and executive officer of Gannett Co., wrote in reference to East-Central Europe following a visit to the region.

There is a mindset - even among media people here

[United States] and abroad - against "foreign" investors.

That's wrong. There are no longer any foreigners. We

are all neighbors now. The free-enterprise systems and

free-press systems in our various nations and continents

can continue to compete, of course. But we must all

collaborate. We have more in common, especially in the

area of press freedom, than we have differences.(29)

He also expressed the hope that Americans will show their vital interest "in helping to promote freedom of all kinds in Eastern Europe - especially freedom of information...in the broadest sense: news, advertising, education, entertainment."(30) An accompanying hope, in the spirit of Allen Neuharth's statement, must be that international investors in the former Communist bloc, whether in media or other concerns, will emphasize collaboration rather than exploitation and, also, will respect the cultural integrity and historical experience of each of the countries involved in the transition process.

And there are signs that this exploitation has reared its ugly head in the media field where North American interests are involved. The reference is to the commercial channel (TV-NOVA) in the Czech Republic which, according to one of the license condition, was required to begin broadcasting in early February, 1994,(31) a condition the television channel fulfilled.

There was a growing concern among the Czech managers as zero day approached, because the task of creating a new commercial television station, without much experience, was formidable. During an interview with one of the managers of the future commercial station, the feeling expressed was one of optimism about success in the commercial broadcasting field, and that the station will be profitable(32) as long as the North American advisers leave the station's personnel alone. The source for the expressed concern about interference was a question raised by one of the advisers when shown a prospective programming schedule: "And where's the time slot for the baseball games?"(33) While baseball is played in the Czech lands, the game is a minor sport and cannot compete in public interest to soccer, ice hockey or even to cycling.

The feeling on the part of the Czech broadcasting managers of wishing to be removed as far as possible from the North American advisers is understandable, because far too few of such consultants have a true grasp of the East-Central European mentality. They lack knowledge about the various cultures involved, the role of history and tradition, or understand the existing television culture, without advertising or western-style of programming, that had developed since television as a mass medium was introduced in the region during the early 1950s.

Those are issues which U.S. education on all levels - from elementary schools to the universities - must face squarely in the immediate future. And that is to inculcate a global awareness among American students in order to make them aware that in the post-Communist era, where economics and international trade have replaced political and ideological concerns, provincialism and ethnocentrism are obsolete traits. They are obliged, in the spirit of cooperation and humanism, to reach out to the rest of the global community and to teach, and learn, from other cultures. Specifically, for journalists of the former East bloc states the transfer of knowledge can provide "some ideals of free, responsible, and financially stable media..., while for North American trainers or educators, exposure to the fledgling democracies "offers and opportunity to critically evaluate their own culture." (34)

A former U.S. ambassador to Japan, the late Edwin Reischauer, believed a proper countermeasure to U.S. provincialism is to change individuals through a drastic reshaping of the education system. For U.S. education, he said, "...is not moving rapidly enough in the right direction to produce the knowledge about the outside world and the attitudes toward other peoples that may be essential for human survival within a generation or two."(35) And the media, in their role of being socially responsible to their society, are obliged to help in creating the new attitudes and a global presence.

A reflection of the ethnocentrism and provincialism that continue to prevail in some U.S. media circles - the feeling that the U.S. model is the only answer - is a statement by a former Radio and Television News Directors Association president. He lamented that too many U.S. tax dollars and volunteer energy are spent in helping East-Central European state broadcasters compete unfairly against commercial broadcasters. He continued:

If we are serious about supporting the development of

private radio and television in Eastern Europe, we must

insist that nothing more be done to encourage the improvement, or

even survival, of state broadcasting. Our goal should be the rapid

elimination of state controlled broadcasting and its replacement by a

private, commercial system similar to our own.(36)

The former official advocated the use of "...our considerable economic and political leverage to force the issue of private broadcasting and press freedom."(37) In using this style of language, reminiscent of the Cold War rhetoric, he seemed oblivious of factors crucial to the transformation process, of the various cultures involved and, perhaps most important, the development and existence of a different media culture among East-Central European states.

If the United States, or any other industrialized nation, chooses to "insist" and force, rather than assist and support, according to existing internal economic and social conditions, the implementation of commercial broadcasting on the former East bloc states, it will be doing the same as the former Soviet Union did during the latter half of the 1940s when the Communists forced the mass media of the East bloc states to fall under state control. Moreover, economic conditions, which differ widely in the region, are such that, despite the considerable expansion of the private sector during the past five years in states such as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, continue to be disadvantageous in supporting broadcasting, especially commercial television, without substantial support from industrial states. It will take several years before enough local capital, discounting foreign investments, exist to develop and support commercial television on a major scale.

Another factor to consider is that Poles, Czech, Slovaks or Hungarians may not wish to have the type of commercial television system and programming which Americans watch daily as a matter of fact, and which have shaped their mass culture. That is to say that international investors should honor and respect the historical experiences, respective cultures and traditional values of these countries when advising them about media systems, programming, advertising, media laws and policies. Strong-handed and economically or politically motivated tactics, such as proposed by adherents of the wholesale transfer of the U.S. media model, are not only insensitive to the individual nations involved in the transformation process, but may also be counterproductive. Memories of past misdeeds, inflicted under the guise of Marxism-Leninism from the opposite geographical direction, are still too fresh in the minds of the affected peoples.

From Prague to Bucharest, Warsaw to Sofia,

parliaments are contemplating a smorgasbord of constitutional

options offered by western democracies. Yet each of

these countries, with its unique history and cultural

heritage, will chart a path quite different from that

forged after the American Revolution.38

The statement may be self-evident to East-Central European audiences, but it needs to be articulated again and again as long as the Cold War mentality continues to linger and western media managers and experts continue to proselytize their media models in East-Central and Eastern Europe without regard to the states' historical experiences, cultural integrity and long-held traditions and values.

Perhaps the managers and experts should take heed of the expressed view of Czech President Vaclav Havel, who told the 45th World Press Congress of the International Federation of Newspaper Publishers in May 1992:

It is said that the press is the seventh power. I do not

know which number it is, but a superpower it is. It

carries a great deal of responsibility for our common

faith.... In a way the press - as part of the information

and communication system of today's civilization - is the

soul of humankind. I say this because I want to highlight

the importance of the press, the importance of its freedom,

intelligence and responsibility.(39)

Conclusion and Comments

In the end the question that arises and should be confronted is: For whose ultimate benefit, and at whose eventual expense, are the proselytizing efforts about converting the mass media to primarily a commercial as opposed to maintaining a dual (private and public) system being made? It is no secret that the great "American Century" is coming to a close. Japan and Germany have become formidable competitors in the global market, with the latter particularly favorably situated in East-Central Europe as a major trading partner and investor. One reason for Germany's favorable position is the historically dominant role it has played in the region. Another issue is its strategic position in the European Community, into which the Czechs, along with some of its former East bloc neighbors, are seeking membership.

The formation and reformation of media policies by the East-Central European states will continue for years to come, until a new generation of decision-makers - journalists, media managers, parliamentarians, jurists and telecommunication experts, among others - emerges. These men and women, who will have grown up and matured during the post- Communist era, will be free of the ideological, civil and economic constraints and mental hang-ups into which their parents were born. Hopefully, the new generation will also have experienced a degree of political and economic stability, and the emergence of a pluralistic society divorced from the totalitarian past and not so dependent on the industrial/capitalist nations as they are today.

The new generation of lawmakers and leaders will have experience on their side, both from internal practices and those acquired by some of them abroad, upon which to draw in drafting media laws and formulating communication policies which effectively and realistically reflect their respective societies' requirements and needs.

In the meantime, however, policy makers will continue to struggle with their task, depending on the good will of their affluent friends within the global community, their own consciences and existing economic, political, social and professional conditions. It is the period of transition that must be bridged toward greater stability, the creation of a more steady political-economic platform than now exists upon which to continue constructing responsible and socially effective media policies and media systems.

Above all, however, such a steady platform, supported by pillars of a strong and stable economy and pluralistic political system, will help the Czech Republic and other East-Central European states in the preservation of their national cultures, traditional values and the humanism and civility for which they paid so dearly and waited so many years to fully regain. Moreover, they will be in a stronger position to develop and preserve, on their own terms, their media systems which may rightfully be termed, in Havel's words, "the soul of humankind."

NOTES

(1.) "East-Central Europe" is a term used by Elizabeth Pond and includes Poland Hungary and Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia) as well as the former East Germany prior to unification, but excludes the Balkans. "East Europe" or the "East bloc," meanwhile, is used in this article to designate, prior to the end of 1989, the Soviet Union and all its client states west of its border. See Elizabeth Pond, Beyond the Wall: Germany's Road to Unification (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1993) p. 295. Also see the "Introduction" in Jurgen Steiner's European Democracies, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1991), pp. 1-5.

(2.) Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking Press, 1970) p. 9.

(3.) Tomasz Goban-Klas, The Orchestration of the Media: The Politics of Mass I Communications in Communist Poland and the Aftermath. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994.)

(4.) Good examples are Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan in Asia and most West European states.

(5.) Pond, Beyond the Wall, p. 70.

(6.) See, for example: William A. Hachten, The World News Prism: Changing Media of International Communication, 3rd ed. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1992), especially Chapter 2; Fred Siebert et al., Four Theories of the Press. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1956;) Denis McQuail, Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London Sage Publications, 1987), especially Chapter 3; and James W. Redmond, The Sowing of the Dragon's Teeth (or How the Success of American Network Affiliate Television in the Past is Contributing for its Current Decline) [unpublished Master's Thesis] University of Colorado, Boulder, 1989.

(7.) McQuail, Mass Communication Theory, p.64.

(8.) Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. (New York: Pantheon, 1988), p. 2.

(9.) Herman and Chomsky identify the filters as: (1) concentrated ownership of media, (2) advertising, (3) reliance on government-provided information, (4) disciplining of media and (5) anti-communism as a national religion and control mechanism.

(10.) Ibid.

(11.) See, for example, Richard Reeves (Universal Press Syndicate) "The End Of An Era In Journalism," [Boulder] Daily Camera, June 26, 1987, p. 8A.

(12.) A study based on content analysis during April 1994 of four commercial TV stations (three network affiliates and one independent outlet) serving Colorado's Rocky Mountain Region revealed that, on average, 33.3 percent of news programs were filled by commercials, while 37.5 percent of newscasts were devoted to crime and war stories. Rocky Mountain News, May 23, 1994, p. 9D.

(13.) The Denver Post, Aug. 15, 1993, p. 1.

(14.) Redmond, The Sowing of the Dragon's Teeth, p. 21.

(15.) McQuail, Mass Communication Theory, p. 65.

(16.) Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, p. 16.

(17.) Ibid, pp. 17-18.

(18.) See, for example, Sinclair Lewis's "Nobel Prize Address," in William T. Stafford .(ed.), Twentieth Century American Writings (New York: Odyssey Press, 1965), pp. 105-116. The speech is filled with references to the low status to which literature and the arts, with the noted exception of architecture and film, have been relegated in American society. Lewis also outlines some of the existing paradoxes, and the plight of artists in their society. Despite its vintage, the thoughts expressed by Mr. Lewis in his address continue to bold true.

(19.) Clifford May, executive editor, Rocky Mountain News, member of Panel B "Setting the International Affairs Agenda: Who Decides? Who Cares?" of a symposium, Covering the International Affairs Agenda: Mass Media and Public Life, University of Colorado, Boulder, Feb. 4, 1993.

(20.) Johan Galtung and Richard C. Vincent, Global Glasnost: Toward a New Information and Communication Order? (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 1992), p. 17.

(21.) For an excellent critique of the U.S. media's international coverage, especially as it pertains to the Third World, see William A. Dorman's "Peripheral Vision: U.S. Journalism and the Third World, " World Policy Journal, 3:3 (Summer, 1986), pp. 419-45.

(22.) Hachten, The World News Prism, p. xvi

(23.) John Hart, "TV's Identity Crisis," World Monitor, Vol. 1, No. I (October, 1988), p. 12.

(24.) Ibid

(25.) Martyn Lewis, "The Distorted Mirror of TV News - A Bias Against Fairness?" Ralph L. Crosman Memorial Lecture, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder, April 29, 1993.

(26.) A good discussion of such programs is contained in: Ekaterina Ognianova "Farewell to Parachute Professors in East-Central Europe, " Journalism and Mass Media Educator, 50:1 (Spring 1995), p. 35.

(27.) Sbirka Zakonu federalni shromazdeni Ceske a Slovenske Federalni Republicky, c. 468, 30, rijna, 1991 (Collection of Laws of the Federal Assembly of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, No. 468, October 30, 1991).

(28.) Roslyn A. Mazer, "Exporting A Free Press," The Quill (Special Edition), October 1991, p. 17.

(29.) Allen H. Neuharth, "U.S. Media Should Explore Opportunities in Eastern Europe," presstime, March 1991, p. 33.

(30.) Ibid.

(31.) Appendix to License No. 001/1993 License Conditions (programme and other) English translation of original Czech version supplied to author by Dr. Colin Sparks University of Westminster, London, England. (Author has copies of original document and two different English translations in his possession.)

(32.) As anticipated by some of its Czech managers, TV-NOVA proved financially successful during its first year of operation. According to PRNewswire of March 31, 1995, the Czech commercial station posted a $7 million profit margin, after interest and taxes, for the calendar year 1994.

(33.) Interview with Petr Sladecek, department chief of Acquired Programs, Ceska Nezavisla Telvizni Spolecnost, June 24, 1993, in Prague, Czech Republic.

(34.) Ognianova, "Farewell to Parachute Professors in East-Central Europe," p. 35.

(35.) As quoted in Hachten, The World News Prism, pp. 6-7.

(36.) David Bartlett, Monday Memo," Broadcasting, Sept. 23, 1991, p. 10.

(37.) Ibid. It is pertinent to note that on Nov. 7, 1991, with the adoption of Laws No. 483 and No. 484, Czech Television and Czech Radio ceased to be state-owned or operated media and became, instead, public entities. See Frank L. Kaplan, Jan Jirak and Milan Smid, "The Broadcasting Law: First Step in Defining a Media Policy for the Czech Republic" in Al Hester and Kristina White, eds., Creating a Free Press in Eastern Europe (Atlanta, GA: James M. Cox, Jr., Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research, University of Georgia, 1993), pp. 341-372.

(38.) Mazer, "Exporting A Free Press," p. 17.

(39.) Vaclav Havel, "The Role Of The Press In A Global Society," excerpted in Freedom Forum Annual Report (Arlington, VA: Freedom Forum, 1992), p. 30 [emphasis added].

Frank L. Kaplan, Author's Note: Research for the article was facilitated by an International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) grant, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities and U.S. State Department. Additional funding was provided by the University of Colorado's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. None of these organizations is responsible for views expressed in the study.

The so-called "Mozart effect" is one of the most publicized recent examples of our ongoing preoccupation with intelligence, a subject that not only refuses to go away but continues to raise whirlwinds of controversy. The largest such controversy, of course, surrounds The Bell Curve (1994), by the late Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. A mountain of essays and books purporting to refute that work and its conclusions grows and grows to this day. But now we also have the magnum opus of Arthur Jensen,(1) a leading figure in IQ research and, like Herrnstein and Murray, a favorite target of academic liberals, as well as a posthumous volume by another leading IQ researcher, Hans Eysenck.(2) So it is a good moment to look again at what we know, what we do not know, and what we think we know about this vexed subject.

In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray set out to prove that American society was becoming increasingly meritocratic, in the sense that wealth and other positive social outcomes were being distributed more and more according to people's intelligence and less and less according to their social backgrounds. Furthermore, to the extent that intelligence was not subject to easy environmental control, but was instead difficult to modify and even in part inherited, genetic differences among individuals, Herrnstein and Murray posited, would contribute significantly to their futures.

The evidence for this thesis came largely from an analysis of data compiled in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), an ongoing federal project that tested over 10,000 Americans in 1980, with follow- up interviews regularly thereafter. Each participant completed the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT)--which, like any diverse test of mental ability, can be used as a measure of intelligence--and was then evaluated for subsequent social outcomes (including high-school graduation, level of income, likelihood of being in jail, likelihood of getting divorced, and so forth). As a rule, a person's intelligence turned out to predict such outcomes more strongly than did the socioeconomic status of his parents. This relationship held for all ethnic groups; indeed, when intelligence was statistically controlled, many "outcome" differences among ethnic groups vanished.

Herrnstein, a professor of psychology at Harvard with an impeccable reputation for scientific integrity, died of cancer just a week before The Bell Curve arrived in bookstores. This in itself may have had something to do with the frenzy of the public response. Had Herrnstein lived to participate in the debate, critics might have found the book harder to malign than it became when Murray, whose training was not in psychology but in sociology, was left to promote and defend it by himself.

Not that Murray, the author of Losing Ground (1984) and a vocal critic of the liberal welfare state, failed to do so energetically. But his lack of credentials as a hard scientist, and his overabundant credentials as a scourge of liberalism, made him a tempting target for an attack that was itself motivated as much by political as by scientific differences, and that was almost entirely focused on a side-issue in the book. That side-issue was differences in intelligence not among individuals but among groups--and specifically between whites and blacks--and the degree to which those differences might or might not be explained genetically. So heated, and so partisan, was the furor at its peak that even President Clinton was asked about the book at a press conference. (He had not read it, but disagreed with it nonetheless.)

But the overreaction to what was in essence a moderate and closely reasoned book would also not have surprised Herrnstein in the least. If anything, it was a replay--actually, a more civilized replay--of what had happened to him after he published his first article on intelligence in the Atlantic in 1971. That article, entitled "IQ," besides bringing to public attention several points raised by Arthur Jensen in a 1969 paper in the Harvard Educational Review, offered a more speculative version of the argument that would be fleshed out and documented with NLSY data in The Bell Curve 23 years later.

Just as with The Bell Curve, only a small portion of Herrnstein' s 1971 article dealt with differences among groups, and only a portion of that portion dealt with possible genetic influences on those differences; and, just as with The Bell Curve, these were the passages that received the greatest attention. In his article, Herrnstein concluded that "although there are scraps of evidence for a genetic component in the black-white difference, the overwhelming case is for believing that American blacks have been at an environmental disadvantage" (emphasis added). This did not stop one Nathan Hare from writing in response that "one would think that the pseudo-scientific generalizations surrounding race and IQ had long been put to rest. But the ghoulish die hard." Nor did it keep students at Harvard and elsewhere from putting up posters accusing Herrnstein of racism and calling him "pigeon-man" (in reference to his animal-learning research). His lectures were filled with protesters, and his speeches at other universities were canceled, held under police guard, or aborted with last-second, back- door escapes into unmarked vehicles. Death threats were made.

People often react most defensively when challenged not on their firmly held beliefs but on beliefs they wish were true but suspect at some level to be false. This is the psychology behind the controversy that ensued after "IQ" in 1971 and The Bell Curve in 1994.(3) On each occasion intemperate articles were written (some by the same people, barely updated), and the most strident positions were taken by those least qualified to comment on the science.(4)

By now, five major books have been published in direct response to The Bell Curve. Two of them, though critical, are within the bounds of reasonable discourse. Thus, Intelligence, Genes, and Success (1997), edited by four professors from the University of Pittsburgh who seem opposed to the book's public-policy conclusions, offers a fairly balanced range of scholarly views. On the sensitive question of heritability, what is especially notable is that the argument takes place mainly at the margins; although some of the book's contributors contend that the heritability of intelligence fills within a range lower than the 40-80 percent given by Herrnstein and Murray, that range is in every case much greater than zero.

A tougher line is taken in Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (1996), written by six Berkeley sociologists. This book addresses Herrnstein and Murray's main argument--that intelligence is an important determiner of social outcomes in America. To their credit, the authors do some old-fashioned hard work, reanalyzing the NLSY data and even making one correction that strengthens The Bell Curve's conclusions. But their main effort is to show, by adding variables other than parental socioeconomic status to the mix of factors predicting outcomes, that intelligence is not as important as The Bell Curve claims. Murray has since responded to this argument in a pamphlet entitled Income Inequality and IQ (published by the American Enterprise Institute); there, by considering only the NLSY data from sibling groups, within which parental background is by definition equal, he is able to show that intelligence still has very strong effects.

The conclusion one may reasonably draw from these two books, and from Murray's response, is that while intelligence may matter more or less than family background, it certainly matters, and that if it is not entirely heritable, it is heritable in some degree. It is useful to bear this in mind when considering the other three books, for one would scarcely know from reading them that such a view has any reputable backing at all. Though a few chapters in Measured Lies (1996), the most vituperative and scientifically irrelevant of the five volumes under consideration, attempt data-based argumentation, most settle for sarcasm, self-righteousness, and name-calling. And then there are The Bell Curve Debate and The Bell Curve Piers (both published in 1995); the former is an anthology of historical documents and reviews, mostly negative, which the editors rightly claim represent the general trend among responses to Herrnstein and Murray's book; the latter is a set of essays, also mostly negative, that originally appeared in a single issue of the New Republic when The Bell Curve was first published, with a few similar pieces added for effect.

According to its back cover, The Bell Curve Wars "dismantles the alleged scientific foundations... of this incendiary book." Since, however, the vast majority of those commenting on The Bell Curve in the anthology's pages have little or no scientific authority, whoever wrote those last words probably had in mind the single entry by the Harvard zoology professor Stephen Jay Gould. That essay, entitled "Curveball," was originally published in the New Yorker and appears both in The Bell Curve Wars and The Bell Curve Debate, occupying the first position in each. In it, Gould repeats many of the same accusations of racism and attributions of political motive that he made in his 1981 book, The Mismeasure of Man, written in response to the earlier controversy sparked by Jensen and Herrnstein.

Within the social-science community and the academic world in general, Gould's critique has been widely accepted as the canonical demonstration that the concepts of intelligence and its heritability are at best nonscientific and at worst racist and evil. (For instance, all of the contributors to Measured Lies who cite Gould's essay do so approvingly, if we count the one who asserts that it does not go far enough.) Indeed, so well has The Mismeasure of Man endured that in 1996 its publisher reissued it with a new introduction and appendices, including the ubiquitous "Curveball," but left the main text essentially unrevised.

Gould charges that the craniometrists of the 19th century, and later intelligence researchers as well, operated from racist assumptions, and implies that on those grounds their work should be ignored or even suppressed. Insofar as the charge is meant to include figures like Herrnstein and Murray, it is absurd as well as malicious. But even in those cases in the past in which racist assumptions can indeed be demonstrated, the proof of the pudding remains in the eating, not in the beliefs of the chef. Useful science can proceed from all sorts of predispositions; nor--it seems necessary to add--do the predispositions of scientists always point in the same direction, especially where discussions of human nature are concerned.

Before World War II, for example, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, presumably basing herself on her observations of non-Western cultures, wrote: "We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions." Later, Mead admitted that what forced this conclusion was not the data she had collected but the political goals she espoused: "We knew how politically loaded discussions of inborn differences could become .... [I]t seemed clear to us that [their] further study ... would have to wait upon less troubled times." As the shoot-the- messenger responses of Gould and others show, the times may still be too troubled for the truth.

But what about Gould's main scientific contention--that, as he puts it in his 1996 introduction to The Mismeasure of Man, "the theory of unitary, innate, linearly rankable intelligence" is full of "fallacies" ?

The theory that Gould is attacking usually goes under the name of general intelligence. Its advocates, practitioners of the hybrid psychological-statistical discipline known as psychometrics, argue simply that while individuals differ in their abilities in a wide range of intellectual realms, a relationship exists among these variations that can be attributed to a common factor. This common factor is what the psychometricians label general intelligence, or g.

A brief example will illustrate the evidence they adduce for this proposition. Suppose a group of students takes a set of ten, timed mental-ability tests, five based on verbal materials (such as choosing antonyms) and five based on spatial materials (such as drawing paths through mazes). Each student will receive ten scores, and each student will have a unique profile of scores, higher on some tests than others.

Now suppose we correlate mathematically the students' scores on the five verbal tests. We will probably find them positively, though not perfectly, correlated--that is, the score on one will predict reasonably well the scores on the others. With the aid of a statistical procedure known as factor analysis, we can examine the pattern of these positive correlations and infer that they can be explained by the existence of a common factor, the most logical candidate being the "verbal ability" of the students who took the tests. Analogous results would likely occur if we factor-analyzed the set of five spatial tests.

What if we combined all ten tests in a single analysis, looking at all the possible correlations? Most likely we would find separate verbal and spatial factors at work. But those factors themselves will almost always be correlated. A superordinate, or "general," factor- -g--can then be extracted to account for the commonalities across all the tests, though this factor will be revealed more by some tests than by others; such tests, known as "highly g-loaded," are taken as especially good measures of general intelligence.

To the extent that it is not simply political, the debate that followed The Bell Curve and "IQ," and that lies at the heart of Gould' s critique in The Mismeasure of Man, is over the very existence and coherence of general intelligence. Each side has made the same points over and over, and each side believes it has refuted the other side' s arguments. The reason this is so is that the two sides proceed according to different definitions of intelligence.

The psychometric camp, which includes Herrnstein and Murray, Jensen, Eysenck, John Carroll (whose 1993 treatise, Human Cognitive Abilities, offers the most extensive factor-analysis of mental tests), and most psychologists who have traditionally studied the topic, hold to a conception of intelligence that closely matches what common sense and the dictionary tell us the term means. The opposing side, which sports a more eclectic set of disciplinary backgrounds and prides itself on a more sophisticated and inclusive perspective, divides human abilities into broad classes--logical, spatial, interpersonal, verbal, etc.--and labels each class an "intelligence." The two sides then proceed to talk past each other.

Scientists make bad dictionary writers and worse philosophers. Their main skills are in constructing experiments and generating explanations for what they observe. Neither of these endeavors requires agreement on what the words involved "mean" in any deep or absolute sense, only on ways of converting the elements of the theory at issue into operations that can be carried out in an experiment and repeated later if necessary. Measurement is the most important such operation; as Kelvin pointed out long ago, without a way to measure something it cannot be studied scientifically.

This is why the oft-repeated phrase, "intelligence is nothing more than what intelligence tests measure," is, as an objection, merely a tautology. The truth is that as long as intelligence can be reliably Measured--it can be, with a variety of tests--and validly applied- -it can be, to predict a variety of outcomes--it is intelligence. If we suddenly started calling it "cognitive ability," "cognitive efficiency," or even "the tendency to perform well on mental tests, " it would still have the same scientific properties. Nothing about the natural world would change.

One way to test the schemes of the proponents of "multiple intelligences" would be to apply research techniques that might (or might not) suggest a role in them for general intelligence. But this is an exercise the advocates of multiple intelligences tend to rule out of consideration a priori. Thus, as Howard Gardner correctly notes in Frames of Mind (1983), there is good evidence that different parts of the brain are responsible for different abilities. However, when at a recent seminar a member of Gardner's research group was asked how abilities in the various intelligences are measured, the swift response was, "We don' t measure them."

The reason is obvious: any reasonable system of measurement would produce a set of scores whose correlations could be calculated, and the pattern of those correlations would likely reveal a common factor- -in other words, g--accounting for some fraction of the total variation. Gardner's theory is very popular in educational circles these days, as is the idea, espoused by Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence (1995), that skill at managing one's own emotions and interpreting those of others is very valuable to social interaction and success in life. Surely both of these ideas are correct, as far as they go. But neither one of them addresses intelligence in a complete way.

Another criticism of the notion of general intelligence is that it is based on factor analysis, an indirect procedure that deals with the structure of tests rather than the nature of the mind and brain. This is a point raised with special vehemence by Gould. In The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability, Arthur Jensen shows that the objection is without foundation.(5)

The g Factor is a deep, scholarly work laden with hundreds of tables, graphs, and endnotes, some of them with tables and graphs of their own. It is balanced and comprehensive, summarizing virtually all the relevant studies on the nature of intelligence and demolishing most of the challenges and alternative explanations of the major findings. (It is not, however, an easy book for nonspecialists to read, which is why we are also fortunate to have Hans Eysenck's much more accessible and even entertaining Intelligence: The New Look.)

In refuting Gould's point, Jensen demonstrates that mental-test scores correlate not just with one another but with many measures of information-processing efficiency, including reaction time (how quickly you can press a button after a light flashes), inspection time (how long two separate line-segments must be displayed for you to judge accurately which is longer), and working-memory capacity (how many random items of information you can remember while doing something else). Jensen also reviews the many direct biological correlates of IQ, such as myopia (a very heritable condition), brain electrical activity, estimates of nerve-conduction velocity (the speed at which brain cells communicate with one another), and the brain's metabolism of glucose. Even brain size, the study of which is richly derided by Gould, has been found with modern imaging technology to correlate with IQ.

These chapters, among the most impressive in Jensen's book, put general intelligence as a psychological trait on a more solid foundation than is enjoyed by any other aspect of personality or behavior. They also speak persuasively to the issue of its heritability, the argument for which becomes more plausible to the extent that intelligence can be associated with biological correlates.

One can go farther. To Stephen Jay Gould and other critics, belief in the heritability of intelligence is inextricably--and fatally-- linked to belief in g; destroy the arguments for one and you have destroyed the arguments for the other. But as Kevin Korb pointed out in a reply to Gould in 1994, and as Jensen affirms here, the g factor and the heritability of intelligence are independent concepts: either hypothesis could be true with the other being false. In some alternate reality, intelligence could be determined by wholly uncorrelated factors, or for that matter by wholly environmental (i.e., nonheritable) factors. It is simply less of a stretch to imagine that a general factor both exists and is somewhat heritable, since, as Jensen shows, this combination describes our own reality.

Still another line of attack used by the detractors of g is to point to studies allegedly showing that intelligence is easy to change (and, therefore, a meaningless concept). Arthur Jensen raised a firestorm three decades ago when he asked, "How much can we raise IQ and scholastic achievement?" and answered: not much. This brings us back to the Mozart effect, which purports to do in ten minutes what years of intensive educational interventions often fail to accomplish.

The Mozart effect was first shown in a study by Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky that was reported in the British journal Nature in 1993. It is difficult to determine their experimental procedure with precision--their article was less than a page in length--but the essentials appear to be as follows. Thirty-six college students performed three spatial-ability subtests from the most recent version of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. Before one of the tests, the students spent ten minutes in silence; before another, they listened to ten minutes of "progressive-relaxation" instructions; and before still another, they listened to ten minutes of Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K. 448). The subjects performed the tests in different orders, and each test was paired with equal frequency against each listening option. The results, when converted to the scale of IQ scores: 110 for silence, 111 for relaxation, and 119 for Mozart.

"Mozart makes you smarter!" said the press releases as new classical CD's were rushed to market. A self-help entrepreneur named Don Campbell trademarked the phrase "The Mozart Effect," published a book by the same name, and began selling cassettes and CD's of his own, including versions designed specially for children. Frances Rauscher testified before a congressional committee and gave many press interviews.

What was wrong with this picture? The article in Nature did not give separate scores for each of the three Stanford-Binet tasks (necessary for comparative purposes), and it used dubious statistical procedures in suggesting that listening to Mozart enhanced overall "spatial IQ" or "abstract reasoning." Nor did the researchers analyze separately the first task done by each subject, to rule out the possibility that prior conditions may have influenced the Mozart score. Finally, they claimed that the effect lasted for only ten to fifteen minutes, but gave no direct evidence; since the subjects were apparently tested only immediately after each listening episode, there was no way to see how this interval was calculated.

In an attempt to reproduce the finding that classical music enhances "abstract reasoning," Joan Newman and her colleagues performed a simple experiment: each of three separate groups comprising at least 36 subjects completed two separate subsets of Raven's Matrices Test (a good measure of g) before and after listening to either silence, relaxation instructions, or the Mozart-effect sonata. All three groups improved from the first test to the second, but by the same amount; in other words, Mozart was of no particular help. In another experiment along the same lines, a group led by Kenneth Steele asked subjects to listen to ever-longer strings of digits and repeat them backward; it, too, found no benefit from prior exposure to Mozart. Other independent tests reported similar failures or equivocal results.

In response to these experiments, Rauscher and Shaw have considerably narrowed the scope of their original findings. They now concede that the post-Mozart increase in spatial performance occurred on just one of the three Stanford-Binet tasks, while on the others, varying the listening condition made no difference. According to their revised estimate, only "spatiotemporal" tasks, which require the transformation of visualized images over time, are affected by complex music, not spatial ability or reasoning in general.

Unfortunately, however, neither Nature nor any journal of similar stature has given space to the follow-up experiments, most of which have been reported in Perceptual and Motor Skills or other low-prestige journals that many psychologists never read. And the media have of course moved on, leaving the babies of Georgia with state-sponsored gifts and the public with the vague idea that if ten minutes of music can "make you smarter," then IQ cannot signify very much.

Similarly feeding this mistaken impression are other recent examples of brief treatments affecting performance either negatively or positively on IQ-type tests. Thus, the researchers Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson told one group of black undergraduates at Stanford that a difficult verbal test would diagnose their abilities and limitations, and another group that their answers would be used only for research on verbal processing. In four separate experiments, students did worse under the former conditions than under the latter. Analogous results have been obtained with Asian female students in math tests: stressing to them that the test measures the abilities of their sex reduces their scores (women typically do worse than men in math), but stressing that it measures the abilities of their ethnic group increases their scores (Asians typically do better than other groups). But as Jensen points out, in such cases we are dealing with a stereotype about group differences that serves to increase or decrease test anxiety. That performance goes down when anxiety gets too high is a common enough finding in testing research, and says nothing about g.

What all these experiments do illustrate is that the human brain is a dynamic system whose functioning can change quite quickly. But this is not the same thing as changing intelligence itself. A few weeks of Prozac or another modern antidepressant can radically alter a person's behavior, but we still accept that his basic identity has not changed--he is still the man we knew before. Intelligence, too, is a stable characteristic of a person's behavior across a wide range of situations. He will be able to perform a task much better in one context than in another, with special training than without; but he is still the same person, and his intelligence is also still the same, Although the Mozart effect was promoted as though it were bad news for The Bell Curve and IQ, it is not.

And neither, finally, is the much-talked-about "Flynn effect." Over the past 50 years, the average score on intelligence tests has risen about three points per decade. This means that we are all getting smarter--indeed, the average adult of 1998 is, psychometrically at least, smarter than 84 percent of the population was in 1948.

The Flynn effect is named after James Flynn, who has been studying it for over fifteen years (although the phenomenon had been noted as early as the 1930's). In a chapter of a new book, The Rising Curve: Long-term Gains in IQ and Related Measures,(6) Flynn notes that gains are occurring steadily in every country sampled, mainly in the West and the industrialized parts of Asia, though their size and specific nature varies in different cases. He believes the start of the increases coincided with industrialization in the 19th century, though the data are of course less reliable the farther back one goes. What he does not know is why the gains have been occurring, and the other contributors to The Rising Curve can offer only tentative theories at best.

Psychologists, like all scientists, prefer to test their theories with controlled experiments, but such experiments cannot be performed when the phenomenon to be explained is occurring throughout the world continuously over time. The difficulty in comparing times is that many things have changed with the times: the items on IQ tests are different; education is different; nutrition is better; airplanes, cars, radio, television, movies, computers, and the Internet have been invented; society has become more permissive and also more rewarding of risk-taking; testing is more widespread and people are more accustomed to being tested; birth rates are lower; and so on. Encompassing all of these time-correlated variables, the change in what might be called our cognitive environment has been simply tremendous over the past 150 years. The most relevant factors here are probably better nutrition- -a topic Eysenck studied at the end of his career--plus greater, more diverse, and more complex stimulation of the brain by our everyday experiences.

Evidence of such a dramatic environmental effect on IQ scores should reinforce skepticism concerning a genetic basis for group differences. But, in any case, psychometric theory makes no claims about average or absolute levels of intelligence within or between populations, and behavioral genetics allows for complex environmental influences on traits that are still significantly heritable. And so, again contrary to popular belief, the concept of general intelligence remains as sound and as meaningful as ever, Flynn effect or no.

Having withstood many attacks, will the psychometric study of intelligence survive? Alas, not necessarily. In a pattern reminiscent Of an earlier episode in the annals of modem psychology, the impact of Stephen Jay Gould's critique has been reinforced by the lack of a forceful response to it by psychometricians themselves, leaving the impression even within psychology at large that general intelligence has been routed.

Just as Gould, a paleontologist, has chided psychologists for misunderstanding genetics, so, in a review of B.E Skinner's Verbal Behavior in 1959, the linguist Noam Chomsky chided behavioral psychologists for misunderstanding language. Like Gould, who has caricatured and ridiculed the notion of general intelligence and the factor analysis used to document it, Chomsky caricatured the tenets and methods of behaviorism, which argued that the task of psychology is to measure only behavior and to explain it only in terms of environmental and genetic causes, without referring to what goes on inside the head.

It took eleven years before a leading behaviorist, Kenneth MacCorquodale, answered Chomsky; the reason none of his colleagues had bothered to reply earlier, he explained, was that they found Chomsky's arguments simply uninformed and irrelevant to the work they did. In the meantime, however, Chomsky's review was widely read and subscribed to by the new wave of cognitive psychologists who were building a framework for psychology that remains dominant today.

Gould's book seems to have had a similar effect on young intelligence researchers. Although Jensen and several others did review The Mismeasure of Man very negatively at the time it appeared, like MacCorquodale they replied in obscure journals read mainly by their own supporters. Thanks in part to Gould's influence (and, of course, to the outrage directed against Jensen and Herrnstein in the 70's), the most popular new theories in the 1980's came to minimize the role of general intellectual ability in favor of other factors, to posit multiple "intelligences, " and to give little attention to heritability. Now Eysenck, one of the heroes of psychometrics, and Herrnstein, one of its leading supporters, have died, Jensen and Carroll are approaching the end of their careers, and the psychometricians risk going into the same sort of extended bankruptcy proceedings as the behaviorists before them.

The great irony is that this is occurring just as the field of behavioral genetics has begun to thrive as never before. One of its most striking successes has been to document, through the convergence of numerous family and twin studies, the heritability of intelligence. Now researchers have been able to identify a specific gene whose variations are associated with differences in intelligence. This is a crucial step in building a complete theory of intelligence that can explain individual differences in biological as well as psychological terms. But the new generation of cognitive scientists, who focus on characteristics of the mind and brain that are common to everyone, are not too interested in differences among people, while the psychometricians, who stand to be vindicated, have been sidelined on their own playing field.

The most basic claim put forth by Herrnstein and Murray was that smart people do better than dumb people. What is so troubling about that? We rarely encounter an argument over the fact that beautiful people do better than ugly people, or tall people better than short ones, though each of these propositions is also true. Is an intellectual meritocracy less just or moral than a physical one?

The answer, unfortunately, is that whenever intelligence is said, "race" is heard; whenever race is said, "genetics" is heard; and whenever genetics is said, "inferiority" is heard--even though these issues are not necessarily connected in any way. When I mentioned to friends that I was writing an article on intelligence, many were surprised, and some wanted to know why. I can only imagine how Herrnstein was treated by his colleagues during the last 25 years of his life. The public protests may have bothered him less than the fact that people in his own community never thought of him in the same way again: he had disturbed a pleasant conversation by bringing up unpleasant facts.

Since The Bell Curve, intelligence is stronger than ever as a scientific concept, but as unwelcome as ever as an issue in polite society. It would be reassuring to think that the next twenty years, which promise to be the heyday of behavioral genetics, will change this state of affairs. But if the past is any guide, many more phony controversies lie ahead.

(1) The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability. Praeger, 672 pp., $39.95.

(2) Intelligence: The New Look. Transaction, 232 pp., $29.95.

(3) For Richard J. Herrnstein's account of what happened after he published his Atlantic article, see his "On Challenging an Orthodoxy, " Commentary, April 1973. For Charles Murray's account of the later controversy, see his "The Bell Curve and Its Critics," Commentary, May 1995 and subsequent letters, August 1995.--ED.

(4) In the case of The Bell Curve, a special committee set up by the American Psychological Association to report on the basic science eventually backed all of the book's main claims, as did an open letter signed by several dozen of the nation's most qualified intelligence researchers.

(5) Jensen's work should not be confused with another of almost the same title, The g Factor: General Intelligence and its Implications, by Christopher Brand. This provocative but worthy book was published in the United Kingdom early in 1996 and was withdrawn within two months, after negative media coverage and a frenzy reminiscent of the early 1970's. The publisher, Wiley, also canceled the book's distribution in the United States before any copies went on sale. Brand has since been fired from his teaching position at Edinburgh University, and has yet to find a new publisher.

(6) Edited by Ulric Neisser. American Psychological Association, 400 pp., $39.95.

Christopher F. Chabris, here making his first appearance in Commentary, is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard specializing in cognitive neuroscience. He is at work on a book about the chess-playing machine Deep Blue and artificial intelligence.

Alas, when it comes to one of the most important issues of our day- -the overarching power of global corporations--no one author seems up to the task.

So I sat down with two new anthologies on the subject, Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama, edited by Kevin Danaher (Common Courage) and The Case Against the Global Economy, edited by Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (Sierra Club Books).

Despite the inherent flaws of the species, these anthologies are worth reading. The Danaher book is the breezier of the two. It features short chapters from some of the leading leftwing thinkers in the field, including Ralph Nader, Richard Barnet, John Cavanagh, Robin Broad, Jerry Mander, Kirkpatrick Sale, and Jeremy Rifkin.

The introduction by Noam Chomsky sets the ideological framework. Chomsky notes that the vast majority of the American public already understands that big business has too much power. But this hasn't changed the way the mainstream media cover the issue. As Chomsky tartly observes, "The new broadened spectrum of responsible debate now extends from those who believe that the rulers of the private economy should ruthlessly seek profit, to the other extreme, where it is felt that they should be more benevolent autocrats."

A few other contributors write with particular zest. I enjoyed Kirkpatrick Sale's diagnosis. He says our society is suffering from "technophilia, " "consumptivitis," and "giantism."

But I cringed when Ralph Nader and Russell Mokhiber, just five pages apart, both said that societies "rot from the top down." More attentive editing would have spared me that double dosage of cliche. (A few too many typos--including one on the second line of the introduction- -also get in the way of the presentation.)

Still, Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama gives you all the facts you need about runaway corporate power: the maldistribution of wealth and income; corporate welfare; corporate crime; the failures of GATT, NAFTA, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund; the assault on the environment; and the tawdry triumph of technology.

And best of all, it doesn't content itself with issuing indictments. It goes on to offer hope, not just in theory but in practice--what Danaher calls "the globalization of grassroots democracy."

The Case Against the Global Economy covers much the same ground, and with some of the same authors, though the list of contributors includes more Native-American, international, and Third-World voices. It's a deeper book, pitched to a more academic audience, and so it is littered with polysyllables.

But the book has two major strengths.

First, it gives a comprehensive view of the problems of corporate power and free trade, and goes beyond Danaher's anthology to include a discussion of the food supply and the patenting of life forms. It also provides two corporate profiles, one on G.E. and the other on Wal-Mart.

Second, it shows in detail some of the ways people can build alternative economies. Wendell Berry has a typically cogent chapter on the need for conserving community. He says we have a two-party system, but he cuts it differently: "One is the party of the global economy; the other I would call simply the party of local community. The global party is large, though not populous, immensely powerful and wealthy, self-aware, purposeful, and tightly organized. The community party is only now coming aware of itself; it is widely scattered, highly diverse, small though potentially numerous, weak though latently powerful, and poor though by no means without resources." He also issues seventeen commandments for local community members to live by. Here's number one: "Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?"

Other chapters offer advice on community-supported agriculture, the potential of local currency, cross-border organizing, and the use of state charters to control corporations.

The editors say these are "steps toward relocalization"-- another good idea in search of a better slogan.

Alas, when it comes to one of the most important issues of our day- -the overarching power of global corporations--no one author seems up to the task.

So I sat down with two new anthologies on the subject, Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama, edited by Kevin Danaher (Common Courage) and The Case Against the Global Economy, edited by Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (Sierra Club Books).

Despite the inherent flaws of the species, these anthologies are worth reading. The Danaher book is the breezier of the two. It features short chapters from some of the leading leftwing thinkers in the field, including Ralph Nader, Richard Barnet, John Cavanagh, Robin Broad, Jerry Mander, Kirkpatrick Sale, and Jeremy Rifkin.

The introduction by Noam Chomsky sets the ideological framework. Chomsky notes that the vast majority of the American public already understands that big business has too much power. But this hasn't changed the way the mainstream media cover the issue. As Chomsky tartly observes, "The new broadened spectrum of responsible debate now extends from those who believe that the rulers of the private economy should ruthlessly seek profit, to the other extreme, where it is felt that they should be more benevolent autocrats."

A few other contributors write with particular zest. I enjoyed Kirkpatrick Sale's diagnosis. He says our society is suffering from "technophilia, " "consumptivitis," and "giantism."

But I cringed when Ralph Nader and Russell Mokhiber, just five pages apart, both said that societies "rot from the top down." More attentive editing would have spared me that double dosage of cliche. (A few too many typos--including one on the second line of the introduction- -also get in the way of the presentation.)

Still, Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama gives you all the facts you need about runaway corporate power: the maldistribution of wealth and income; corporate welfare; corporate crime; the failures of GATT, NAFTA, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund; the assault on the environment; and the tawdry triumph of technology.

And best of all, it doesn't content itself with issuing indictments. It goes on to offer hope, not just in theory but in practice--what Danaher calls "the globalization of grassroots democracy."

The Case Against the Global Economy covers much the same ground, and with some of the same authors, though the list of contributors includes more Native-American, international, and Third-World voices. It's a deeper book, pitched to a more academic audience, and so it is littered with polysyllables.

But the book has two major strengths.

First, it gives a comprehensive view of the problems of corporate power and free trade, and goes beyond Danaher's anthology to include a discussion of the food supply and the patenting of life forms. It also provides two corporate profiles, one on G.E. and the other on Wal-Mart.

Second, it shows in detail some of the ways people can build alternative economies. Wendell Berry has a typically cogent chapter on the need for conserving community. He says we have a two-party system, but he cuts it differently: "One is the party of the global economy; the other I would call simply the party of local community. The global party is large, though not populous, immensely powerful and wealthy, self-aware, purposeful, and tightly organized. The community party is only now coming aware of itself; it is widely scattered, highly diverse, small though potentially numerous, weak though latently powerful, and poor though by no means without resources." He also issues seventeen commandments for local community members to live by. Here's number one: "Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?"

Other chapters offer advice on community-supported agriculture, the potential of local currency, cross-border organizing, and the use of state charters to control corporations.

The editors say these are "steps toward relocalization"-- another good idea in search of a better slogan.

Noam Chomsky's book The New Military Humanism: Lessons From Kosovo, ably demonstrates how far we've come and, inadvertently, suggests how far there is to go. Chomsky contends that almost everything you have read or heard or seen on television about Kosovo has been a partial truth or outright falsehood. For a general readership such an assertion would seem like fiction, as if Animal Farm were actually our controlled society. And Chomsky goes further, asserting that after NATO's war for Kosovo the malicious use of American power has become, more than ever before, the dominant fact of international politics. He writes, "It could be argued, rather plausibly, that further demolition of the rules of world order is by now of no significance, as in the late 1930s. The contempt of the world's leading power for the framework of world order has become so extreme that there is little left to discuss." The scope and audacity of Chomsky's critique stagger the imagination. To call it radical practically misses the point. On the one hand we have the established media, the respectable community of foreign affairs analysts, the government--and on the other, Noam Chomsky. Assuming he is right, or even partly right, a question begs to be asked: How is it possible for things to be so out of kilter? Alternatively, what sets Chomsky's critique apart from common conspiracy theories?

Chomsky rather sensibly assembles a thick file of facts, carefully documented in endnotes, to buttress his assertions. He weaves these into a highly persuasive big picture of media and government shenanigans. So far, so good. But clearly he is not writing for those who are not already interested in his ideas. He meanders, he repeats himself, he overindulges his sarcastic streak and he doesn't organize his arguments, at least not so you'd notice; Chomsky needed an editor to impose more discipline. The reader might imagine herself scouring a beach with a metal detector looking for nuggets--of which there are plenty. And when it comes to the "How is this possible?" question, Chomsky assumes the reader's more than casual familiarity with his voluminous past writings, in particular Manufacturing Consent (co-written with Edward Herman). In any case, he completely ignores the magnitude of the problem. Marxists, or anarcho-syndicalists--which may describe Chomsky's political leanings--or other Old Left activists may shrug this question off, thinking it answered a thousand times before. Others are left with a vague and ultimately quite unsatisfying impression that somehow it is simultaneously in all these individuals' (reporters, editors, producers, publishers, experts, government officials, military officers, etc.) self-interest to deceive the world while behaving badly.

What's missing is a novelist's eye and ear for individual moral dilemmas that have aggregated onto a grand scale, because what Chomsky has gotten ahold of, perhaps without realizing it, is the question of evil. Individually, the people Chomsky criticizes, or many of them, are not only acting out of self-interest but also know that they are doing something wrong. Lying to the public is wrong, their small, insistent voices of conscience tell them. Arbitrarily killing innocent people is wrong. Hatemongering in an attempt to vilify an entire people (the Serbs) is wrong. When reporters or analysts or government officials do these things, they also must work to suppress their voice of conscience. Evil, in other words, doesn't need horns and a tail, just a bureaucratically structured environment that helps convince people of their false selves. Some notion of morality, or whatever you wish to call it, must enter the equation; otherwise Chomsky's masterly descriptions of group psychology gone haywire don't provide any exit. No morality, no choice, no redemption. No reform. We will all be stuck living in Animal Farm forever!

As an example of Chomsky's reasoning, we might look at the issue of how many Albanians were killed by Serbs, taking advantage of reports that have appeared in the press since the book was published, as well as material available to Chomsky at his time of writing. This morbid issue of the death toll, by the way, is not one Chomsky tackles head on, but its reportage by government and media conforms perfectly to his thesis. As he says,

It is unusual for the resort to violence to be supported with argumentation so feeble. One might conjecture that advocates of the escalation of atrocities in Kosovo [e.g., bombing] recognized at some level that constructing a justification posed some non-trivial problems. That might account for the outburst of virulent race-hatred and jingoism, a phenomenon I have not seen in my lifetime since the hysteria whipped up about 'the Japs' during World War II, vermin who must be crushed- -unlike the Germans, fellow humans who had strayed.

On March 18, the day the Rambouillet talks broke down, David Scheffer, the State Department's ambassador at large for war crimes issues, proclaimed that "we have upwards to about 100,000 men that we cannot account for" in Kosovo. Depending upon the sophistication of the press organ involved, this statement was variously construed as a warning or, as the New York Daily News put it in a headline the next day, 100,000 KOSOVAR MEN FEARED DEAD. The specter of mass murder critically supported public acceptance of NATO airstrikes, which began less than a week later, on March 24. After two months of bombing, the Yugoslav regime was still, to the Administration's deepening chagrin, in the fight. By this time there were increasing murmurs of discontent in the press regarding the effect of NATO airstrikes on unmistakably civilian targets. Ambassador Scheffer stepped to the plate again in mid-May, calling for "speedy investigations" of war crimes (by Serbs) while now noting that "as many as 225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59 remain unaccounted for." Several wire services quoted him on different days as saying that "with the exception of Rwanda in 1994 and Cambodia in 1975, you would be hard-pressed to find a crime scene anywhere in the world since World War II where a defenseless civilian population has been assaulted with such ferocity and criminal intent, and suffered so many multiple violations of humanitarian law in such a short period of time as in Kosovo since mid-March 1999." It was a profoundly ignorant remark, of course, but what's important is that the Administration's laserlike focus on allegations and innuendoes of genocidal acts securely established the legitimacy of continued bombing for an at-that-time unknown, perhaps lengthy period.

Helpfully sensing that Washington--Scheffer and a battalion of like- minded flacks--had gone too far out on a limb, in June and July the British started publicizing their reduced estimate that 10,000 Albanian Kosovars had been killed. For whatever reason that number stuck in establishment circles. In fact, however, it appears to be still too many. The actual number is probably somewhere in the low thousands.

In mid-July sources from the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo, known as KFOR, were telling the press that of 2,150 bodies found by peacekeepers only 850 were victims of massacres. Nevertheless, still eager to bolster the Serb=devil argument, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, in an address to the Council on Foreign Relations on July 26, poignantly mentioned "the village of Ljubenic, the largest mass-grave site discovered so far from this conflict, with as many as 350 bodies." Berger may not have been aware that the Italian in charge of the site, Brig. Gen. Mauro Del Vecchio, had told the press several days earlier that the exhumation had been completed at the site and that seven bodies had been found. All press mention of Ljubenic ceases after that point.

On September 23 El Pais, a mainstream Madrid paper, reported that Spanish forensic investigators sent to Kosovo had found no proof of genocide. The team, which had experience in Rwanda, had been told to expect to perform more than 2,000 autopsies in one of the areas worst hit by fighting, but it found only 187 bodies to examine. No mass graves and, for the most part, no signs of torture. And when on October 10 other investigators announced that no bodies had been found in the Trepca mine complex, long rumored to contain as many as 700 corpses, skepticism burst into the open. First out of the gate was a Web site called Stratfor.com, a sort of wannabe Jane's Intelligence Review, which in a long article concluded that "bodies numbering only in the hundreds have been found," while taking care not to judge the final outcome prematurely. Though it raised the right questions, Stratfor' s estimate was too low because of sloppy research, something symptomatic of much of its work. It was, nevertheless, widely cited. The debate raced around the Internet, popped up in Alexander Cockburn's November 8 Nation column (which was recycled as an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times), found space in another author's opinion column in the Amsterdam De Volkskrant and then emerged as a very lengthy news story in the Sunday Times of London. The Sunday Times added an interview with the head of the Spanish team, Emilio Perez Pujol, who was "disillusioned" by the "war propaganda machine." Pujol says the death toll may never exceed 2,500.

Until recently the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia kept out of the debate, except indirectly in late August when it was quick to deny the figure of 11,000 dead that Kosovo's UN civilian administrator, Bernard Kouchner, was then touting. But on November 10 Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor for the ICTY, reported to the UN Security Council that its investigators had found 2,108 bodies at 195 sites, out of 529 reported locales. Del Ponte cautioned that it was an interim figure and that evidence of grave tampering did exist; Ljubenic and Trepca sites made notorious in press reports were found not to contain masses of bodies. A State Department draft report still set the number of likely Kosovar Albanian deaths at " over 8,000."

Investigators have probably cherry-picked the most likely large mass graves. Serbian forces probably did truck some bodies to Serbia for disposal in, for example, smelters. But could that have been more than a couple of thousand, without leaving a trail of evidence that has so far not appeared? The press has reported on most of the larger graves that KFOR has found. And we know that several thousand Albanian Kosovars were taken to Serbian prisons during the war, are still being held and are gradually being accounted for. Given the number of ICTY- identified sites and the tribunal's findings so far, a reasonable guess of the Albanian dead lies somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000.

By the standards of its own humanitarian argument, Chomsky points out, NATO accomplished nothing or less than nothing. Largely in response to NATO bombing, Serbs killed a few thousand Albanian civilians; to even the score NATO killed a few thousand Serb civilians while, incidentally, clocking Yugoslavia's economic infrastructure. Chomsky ridicules the notion that bombing was meant to stop the Serbs' forcible expulsion of Albanians or that it did anything but accelerate the process--although these expulsions, which were televised around the world, did generate support for NATO's bombing campaign. Chomsky lambastes Administration claims that without bombing, the Serbs would have committed more and worse atrocities. He provides important corrections to conventional wisdom regarding the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's monitoring mission in place before the bombing, underappreciated by Washington, and he documents Serbia's eagerness to seek a negotiated settlement that would have included a substantial international armed presence. He also notes, as have several others, that Rambouillet set up a pretext for bombing, but then he goes on to describe, as only a handful have, how it may well not have been the bombing that led to a settlement but rather a significant change in US demands, a more than face-saving compromise that shifted ultimate responsibility for deciding Kosovo's political future from NATO to the UN. Most thoughtful critics of the war--Michael Mandelbaum's article this fall in Foreign Affairs comes to mind--unfortunately missed this point, which is essential to understanding not only recent history but also the ongoing dynamics of Serb-NATO exchanges.

Chomsky speculates that Washington initiated the NATO war in order to boost NATO's credibility, not in a positive sense but as an arch- demonstration of power. Serbia, Chomsky writes, "was an annoyance, an unwelcome impediment to Washington's efforts to complete its substantial takeover of Europe." Furthermore, "as long as Serbia is not incorporated within U.S.-dominated domains, it makes sense to punish it for failure to conform--very visibly, in a way that will serve as a warming to others that might be similarly inclined." The theme of a rogue superpower serves as the basis for many illuminating comparisons regarding US abuse of power, directly or by way of clients, in Vietnam, Laos, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, Palestine, East Timor, Iraq and Turkey, to name a few. Given, for example, that US actions have steadily encouraged the Turks to persecute the Kurds, it would be inconsistent, Chomsky argues, indeed irrational, to give any credence at all to a general claim that US policy is guided by benevolent humanitarian impulses, and the same holds for any such claim about Kosovo. One by one his examples could be debated separately according to the exigencies of circumstance; taken together, they form a damning indictment.

In today's world the flip side of high-tech bullying is a mad scramble among small states to acquire weapons of mass destruction for their own protection. Proliferation, Chomsky points out in an extended aside, will be one of many unpleasant aftereffects of NATO's war. With some embarrassment, one wonders whether, after the North Koreans sell their missiles and the Russians their bombs, Washington will reconsider the gusto with which it launches military operations.

A less tangible but no less important logical consequence of NATO' s unprovoked assault on Yugoslavia is the dangerous precedent this sets for international law. Chomsky says that

in the real world, there are two options: (1) Some kind of framework of world order, perhaps the U.N. Charter, the International Court of Justice, and other existing institutions, or perhaps something better if it can be devised and broadly accepted. (2) The powerful do as they wish, expecting to receive the accolades that are the prerogative of power.

This is quite right. More specifically, what the world has now is, on the one hand, the Westphalian system as it evolved after 1648, with its core insight that sovereign states must mind their own business when it comes to each other's internal affairs, and, on the other, the notion that some doctrine of moral imperatives (or the illusion of such) may justify intervention. The two views are mutually exclusive, notwithstanding recent efforts by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and others to meld them. Even the systems of discourse these paradigms employ to justify themselves operate on entirely different levels. The Westphalian view is pragmatic, rational, concerned with avoiding war; humanitarian interventionism is quasi-religious, unapproachable except through belief. Choosing between them depends upon how one feels getting out of bed. Except now the world learns that it doesn' t have much of a choice--we're taking a giant leap backward, some 350 years.

One can, perhaps, define modernity as the evolution of the awareness and appreciation of individuality. In this matter, "humanitarian intervention" represents a significant leap backward. Arguing, in extreme form, not only a right but a duty to intervene, it rejects the gray area of international humanitarian law that applies to individuals, as practiced, say, by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Neutrality is out, while co-belligerency is in. The first to suffer will be individuals who otherwise may have had recourse to some limited, painstakingly created international protections. It's worth recalling that the humanitarian interventionist argument has its modern roots in the Biafra crisis of the late sixties. Francophone groups in particular, and those who would form Doctors Without Borders, argued that aid agencies had to take sides. France, of course, wanted to take sides, in part to secure lucrative oil-lifting rights. For its own reasons the United States decided to take sides in Yugoslavia. The trend is clear enough: We are moving from somewhat successful efforts to moderate or defuse violence, efforts based on enlightened notions of individual rights, toward approving and channeling violence for group ends.

But let's face it, most people who observed the Kosovo conflict didn' t suspect they might themselves be victims of a massive government and media disinformation campaign. Moreover, a theoretical or comparative argument wouldn't have seemed particularly persuasive coming from the initiated, who themselves rightly remain puzzled about whether or how to vest abominable government misbehavior with a collective conscious volition. No, the thing that got people's attention was that those articulating the policy seemed to enjoy just a little too much the misery they were causing. The twitchy rantings of US Gen. Wesley Clark, the NATO supreme commander. The snide egoism of Madeleine Albright's amanuensis, Jamie Rubin, and his puckish NATO counterpart, Jamie Shea. What a cast of characters! What an extravaganza! A small group at the pinnacle of power set out capriciously to destroy a small country, succeeded and relished every minute of it. The public recognized the smell of evil. How many kids, indeed, did NATO kill?

In fact, there was quite a lot of disent brewing about the war. Even the mainstream media voiced doubts. Chomsky barely mentions this, doesn't make anything of it and maybe wasn't aware of it except unconsciously in a feeling of reproach: the public coming to the right conclusions for the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, there were hopeful signs of a nascent antiwar movement, one that could have taken to the streets in large numbers if the war had continued. This suggests that establishment power has real limits, that the public has a moral sense of fair play- -you could have read that into news from Seattle lately, too. People knew that Kosovo was not an immaculate mistake: The war sprang from a series of bad decisions, and different decisions could have cut it off. There was a way out, after all.

Chomsky's splendid critique demands attention for many reasons, but above all for the questions in it he already thinks answered. How could this happen? Can't we devise laws to regulate properly the conduct of foreign policy? Why do intelligent people in the press tell one another lies? How do we know, really, when we're doing something wrong? Chomsky, described by the science writer Martin Gardner as a "mysterian" --that is, one who believes we never will have answers to explain human consciousness or the creative powers of the human mind--may think not all these questions are worth asking; that only macro-policy and global effects deserve investigation. True, by their nature, questions of practical ethics have no definitive answers. Human beings will continue asking them, though, because we know from experience that in different historical times and places asking about the right moral procedure leads to better and better approximations of the truth, and because it is in our genes to be very afraid of what may happen if we don't.

George Kenney, who writes frequently on foreign affairs, resigned from the State Department's Yugoslavia desk in 1992 in protest over Bush Administration policy in the region.

THE NEW MILITARY HUMANISM: Lessons From Kosovo. By Noam Chomsky. Common Courage. 199 pp. $15.95.

To begin with we would like to stress that for media teachers in particular this is a must see film. It is moreover a film which can be used in the class room to both inform students about how the media operates and also to provide a basis for meaningful classroom discussions around a range of important topics. It is above all else a useful introduction to the work of Noam Chomsky, one of the best of contemporary thinkers and commentators on society, and in the range and depth of his concern for the oppressed people of the world truly one of the good guys.

There is however a down side to the film. At 167 minutes it's simply too long, though it is available in 3 x 55 minutes format. In addition the film at times struggles to overcome the abiding problem of documentaries- -that of the endlessly talking head. Some of the efforts to do this are brilliant, witty, and appropriate such as the comparison of the coverage of the Cambodian and East Timorese tragedies in the American Press. Cambodia received much more attention and this point is brought out by rolling bundles of newsprint across a gym floor. The bundle representing the Cambodian coverage keeps rolling and rolling.

However some of the "effects" don't work. The Faurisson affair for instance is compared to a storm in a tea cup by the device of placing a newspaper report of the incident in a cup. Yet the Faurisson affair was by no means a trivial matter. Chomsky defended Faurisson's right to free speech even though the latter was denying the existence of the Nazi holocaust. Chomsky's actions were exploited both by Faurisson and Chomsky's many enemies. But the refusal to allow the state to decide what is acceptable discourse is crucial to the anarcho-syndicalist politics that Chomsky espouses.

Another small point is that the film is so determined to draw attention to itself as a film that it often avoids providing the kind of information that more straightforward documentaries customarily do. Thus the various critics and commentators interviewed and shown speaking are not identified. For those of us who like to know whom we are hating [or admiring] this can be a particularly frustrating exercise.

But these remarks are not intended to take away from the achievement of the film and its relevance for media studies. However to grasp the importance of the film Manufacturing Consent and Chomsky's ideas one has to take account of the contemporary situation in the field of media and cultural studies. Here developments within the philosophy of science have been of particular importance -especially the collapse of the old positivist view of science as the discovery of facts and the process whereby the individual scientist simply observes, records, and accumulates knowledge of the world through sense experiences. The pendulum has now swung to acknowledging the social basis of knowledge. The scientist is no longer simply regarded as exploring the world and providing us with a mirror of it, but his/her role in the construction of knowledge is now recognised.

This break from the epistemology of positivism in part led to the extreme reaction of the post-structuralists. Influenced by Nietzsche' s view that "truth is a mobile army of metaphors", they danced joyfully all over any notion of truth. In the process they also killed off concepts such as propaganda, ideology and the possibility of any meaningful or rational resistance to power.

Cultural studies was I believe particularly vulnerable to this assault on truth and related concepts because we deal with the relationship to reality of camera work, editing, mise en scene etc. For example much of the early work in film and Media Studies emphasised the role of the media in the "mediation" of reality. Quite rightly we opposed and continue to do so naive claims that the media provides us with a "window on the world". However from here it has proved only a short step to talk of the "construction" of reality, which has opened the way for unbridled relativism and even solipsism. In the process, and I will return to this point, we lost the notion of an advantage point from which we could criticise the products of the media in particular and society in general.

This situation has been further complicated by the continued existence of a positivist world view alongside post-structuralist thought. They have as it were divided the academy between them. The former remains encamped in the sites of real power-science, law, medicine, while the latter carnivals merrily through the humanities doing dirt on the efforts of those who have attempted to build a critique of society. In the process the post-structuralists have depoliticised, demoralised and disoriented a whole generation of students. However, though in cultural studies we may feel that the post-structuralists are overwhelming us, it is vital to understand that behind them is the real enemy-the positivists, the "new" realists who have begun to move in on cultural studies with their realpolitik, and their Machiavellianism and their policy mongering.

It is to Chomsky's perpetual credit however that he has refused to give up the pursuit of the truth. Instead with relentless zeal and scholarship he has patently exposed the propaganda/lies of successive American administrations. The result has been his exclusion from the mass media and continued official attempts to discredit him. Chomsky' s own views on the eclipse of notions such as the truth are particularly relevant.

"Now, with regard to the matter of truth, that's an interesting story. In the natural sciences, for example, no-one hesitates about talking about truth and among ordinary people nobody hesitates either. I mean, if you asked me whether it's raining outside, where I am speaking, I could go out the window and decide yeah, it is and then I'll tell you, yeah, it's true, it's raining outside and nobody batts an eyelash; but among people who regard themselves as sophisticated, you're not supposed to talk in these terms, you're supposed to question the notion of truth and you're supposed to deny that we can ever find out the fact about anything.

"Well, you know, there is a point hidden behind this. The point hidden behind this is something that's almost a truism and that is that your point of view on the world is going to be very much coloured by the framework in which you approach things. If you're an honest person and have any kind of self awareness, you're always going to be questioning this thing and so on. Those truisms lie in the background but they by no means should lead us to question the belief that we're trying to find out the truth about the world whether you're doing physics or whether you're looking at foreign policy or anything else, and in fact the expansion, the modification of this truism about the impact of perspective and culture and belief on perception and understanding, the modification of that to a denial of the urge for objective reality, that's a tremendously effective propaganda weapon. It incapacitates fully anyone who accepts it. Of course, wealthy and powerful people and privileged people and those, you know, who are in controlling positions, they're never going to accept but they're quite delighted to have everyone else accept it. For example, if the left, so-called, and the popular movements, if they were to accept this, they would therefore incapacitate themselves and nothing could be more ardently wished on them by those who have power. So this [denial of the ability to uncover objective reality] ...has just swept the west and ... it' s part of the ideological triumph of the status reactionaries. The right wing ... has brought the left of the popular movements to accept this self-destructive, incapacitating doctrine which does have elements of significance and truth behind it but these have been distorted [and now for the popular movements the denial of the urge to uncover objective reality]... has actually become a weapon of self destruction [which has helped bring about] incapacitation. [Boyd & MacLennan 1993]

The above quotation clearly underlines a key aspect of Chomsky's approach to society in general and the media in particular. He constantly refers to the political context and that context is conceptualised in class terms. Within Chomsky's schema we have ruling elites at the top and beneath them a political class who by and large secure the continuing domination of the elites. At the very bottom of this hierarchy is the vast majority of ordinary citizens who are not meant to have any part in the political process. These people are to be kept preoccupied with other things.

The role of the media according to Chomsky's & Herman's Propaganda Model is to secure the loyalty of the political class to the status quo and to distract ordinary citizens. Chomsky & Herman distinguish between the "major media", or "the agenda setting media" and the " true mass media". The former is aimed at the political class which is expected to participate in some kind of management. The latter caters for the majority of ordinary citizens who are outsiders in terms of the political process. It is the aim of the "true mass media" to keep them that way.

We must be careful here to distinguish between how the model functions and any effects it might have. Chomsky and Herman are extremely anxious to avoid giving the impression of a simple top down model where the views of the ruling elites are relayed to the passive masses below. Indeed such a notion is very far from their intentions. Central to Chomsky's political beliefs is a view of ordinary people which affirms their intrinsic decency and capacity to see through the webs of lies that are spun around them.

In this context Chomsky points out, with some pleasure we suspect, evidence that confirms that the more educated classes who have been subjected to more propaganda are often more ignorant.

"...take say the Indo-China war ... Media coverage of the Indo-China war had a very marked effect on the educated classes. They almost totally accept the propaganda. So, ...the discussion and debate over the Indo-China war within educated sectors is restricted to an extremely narrow spectrum. Either it was a noble cause and we should have fought harder to win or it was, as the most extreme critics put it, our blundering efforts to do good which by 1969 had become a disaster. That's Anthony Lewis, New York Times, at the very outer limits of dissent.

"On the other hand, the general public has a completely different view since the late 1960's and running right up until the present. I was reading polls on this where in 1990 about 70 percent of the public, general public, describes the war as not a mistake but fundamentally wrong and immoral. Now that's a position that is almost never expressed by the mainstream and it indicates that even with all the unremitting propaganda for 30 years it has been impossible to swing the general public around to the position that is adopted almost reflexively by the educated sectors." [ibid]

The word "propaganda" itself has had an interesting history. It is first used in 1622 to describe the work of Catholic missionaries. From here it was generalised to the spreading of ideas not simply religious ones. Gradually it acquired the negative character of the distortion of the truth and the propagation of lies. However, within cultural studies with the decline of interest in truth, the concept of propaganda lost its critical force and clarity.

The concept of class has had if anything a worse fate. It is fair to say that "class" is the great unmentionable not only of cultural studies but in the media generally. A typical case here is the media coverage of the recent strike in Burnie, Tasmania. The only time that the word class appeared is in the term "under-class". The model of society operating here appears to be "under-class and "no-class". [MacLennan, 1992]

For Chomsky the abandonment of the concept of class "is an effort to try to deny the existence of class differentiation. However, this reaches extremes in deeply indoctrinated societies like the United States and perhaps Australia ... but in the United States it's dramatic. So, for example, there are only two sectors of the system of discussion and discourse in which terms like class are permissible. One is in internal government documents and the other is in the business press, which is vulgar marxist. I mean, if you read the business press or business communications ... they read like Maoist pamphlets except that all the values are different. They talk about class all the time but the general public is not allowed to think about class." [Boyd & MacLennan, 1993]

It is crucial to grasp here that Chomsky places such emphasis on class because he sees class oppression as central. This puts him at odds with certain sections of the popular movements, but makes his views very attractive to some old Marxists.

Equally upsetting are Chomsky's humanism and his commitment to the Enlightenment. We have been through a period of violent anti-humanism where to label someone a "humanist" is to damn them forever from intellectual company. Similarly some academics have succeeded in convincing themselves that the Enlightenment is the worst thing that befell humanity. But, as we have said, an optimistic view of human potential underlies all of Chomsky's work and we would argue that such a view is essential for emancipatory politics in general and good pedagogy in particular. Likewise with the Enlightenment, we need to struggle not for its abandonment but for deepening and democratising it until it becomes a socialist Enlightenment.

Another area of vital importance to media teachers where Chomsky is out of step with current thinking is in the conceptualisation of the notion of power. At present Foucault's positive model of power [Foucault, 1975, p174] dominates and it has even been used to provide the philosophical basis for the "policy" approach to media studies. According to the Foucault model power is everywhere; in effect it constitutes the social. So there can be no thought of a resistance to power from outside it. There is no Bastille to be stormed for the very act will merely set up another regime of power. Emancipatory movements inevitably become regimes of power. Resistance is allowed for within the Foucauldian scheme of things. But this resistance to avoid becoming totalitarian in its turn must remain local [i.e. ineffective].

As with the abandonment of the concept of truth so the abandonment of a negative concept of power has direct political consequences. As Dews points out "If the concept of power is to have any critical import, there must be some principle, force or entity which power "crushes" and whose release from this oppression is considered desirable." [Dews, 1987, p162]

So if we move from a critical stance on the concept of power to a metaphysical one where power is everywhere, the possibility of an emancipatory transformation of society becomes an impossibility. There are then two main courses of action. We can indulge in ludic despair and vanish up our own theories within the academy, or we can adapt the most shamelessly reformist attitude towards the "real world" and the horrible beauty of a policy approach to cultural studies is born.

It does not need us to point out that both these positions have been dominant in media and cultural studies for some time. Once again Chomsky' s views form a very interesting contract. On the positive concept of power he argues:-

"As to those who achieve a level of emancipation becoming oppressors, I mean, people may say that, but I don't think anybody believes it. So, for example, I've never heard anyone say "let's go back to slavery" because when slaves became free they became oppressors. If you really believe that doctrine, that's a position you ought to hold, or ... let's eliminate parliamentary democracy, because when you extend the franchise to achieve some level of parliamentary democracy, you just have a new class of oppressors. So let's go back to feudalism. I mean, if people really believe what you're saying, those are the conclusions they ought to draw, or for that matter, let's have Hitler's Germany. After all that's just one system of power. There are other systems of power, like the Australian parliament. So that is just two different systems of power. I mean, if people really believe that, let them say it, but they don't really believe that. What they do is come out with these abstract doctrines, which they can't possibly believe, and they're simply used as methods of undermining popular struggle. So, nobody says - "look, our system of domination and control is illegitimate" . What they're saying is, "your system is illegitimate". If you want to extend freedom and democracy to broader sectors, and to reduce authority and domination throughout the society, that's illegitimate. That's the claim that lies behind this, ... I don't see how we could even begin to take that seriously." [Boyd & MacLennan, 1993]

To conclude then we would like to reiterate our endorsement of Manufacturing Consent. It is a very accessible introduction to Noam Chomsky's thought. This thought is at variance with much that passes for contemporary theory and for the media teacher in particular that is its guarantee of lasting value.

Figure 1 [Figure not reproduced] Above: Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, the directors of Manufacturing Consent. Right: Noam Chomsky

References

Boyd, J. & MacLennan, G. [1993, forthcoming] The political thought of Noam Chomsky- an Interview.

Dews, P. [1987] Logics of Disintegration: Post Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, Verso, London.

Foucault, M. [1975] Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Penguin, London.

MacLennan, G. [1992] The Burnie Mill Dispute and the Media: Class Conflict or Collective Catastrophe?, unpublished paper.

Fuzzy shapes and faded colours set against an ominously dark background. That's the way America looks as we cross the mid-point in another election year. Bill Clinton is a little-respected but not altogether unlikeable leader, with the good fortune to have a Republican opponent with all the charm of a muzzled attack dog. This year's elections offer the narrowest philosophical difference between two major party candidates since 1920, when the bland Democrat James M Cox was trounced by the crooked Republican Warren G Harding.

It ought to be a good time for the left. Newt Gingrich is discredited and disparities between rich and poor are reaching the proportions of the robber-baron era. And there is indeed some bustle of activity at the margins -- the formation of a new labour party, Ralph Nader' s possible presidential candidacy as a Green, the success of the progressive New Party in a few local and state races -- but all this is making only the slightest ripple on the surface of mainstream politics.

Over recent decades the left's role in American politics has been confined to cooking up new theories and critiques that social movements or liberal Democrats might serve to the public, usually in small portions. While this niche appears to offer access to power and a path to concrete political accomplishments, it also accounts for the left's marginality. It's not that the ideas promoted by the US left are necessarily faulty. Indeed the contemporary feminist and environmental movements rose largely out of America before sweeping the world, especially northern Europe, where they scored more substantial political gains than at home.

The failure of the American left stems in large part from its isolation and specialisation as an intellectual institution rather than a true movement that rubs shoulders with people from all walks of life. Leftist thinkers can look radically out of sync with the concerns of average people -- an assertion repeated over and over in Republican Party ads, but one that nonetheless cannot be dismissed as just partisan propaganda.

These are among the conclusions coming from a series of interviews I did with six sharp-eyed political observers from the left. I asked them what it would take to make progressives a potent political force during the next two decades, in America and around the world

All of these figures have ties to the progressive movement, but not always as loyal followers. Their rebukes of current left tactics and their visions of successful strategies are grounded not in abstract idealism but in close examination of personal experiences and strong attachments to the communities they call home, from Iowa to Uruguay. I chose each of them because in ten years of editing the American magazine Utne Reader-- a sort of alternative press Reader's Digest- - they impressed me as among the most interesting and most creative political thinkers, as well as the most willing to reach beyond conventional wisdom. Although mostly intellectuals themselves, they've made careers of attending closely to the pulse of modern society -- taking seriously the yearnings, fears, and sensibilities of everyday people.

These thinkers point to community and ecology as the direction for the left. This means more than just formulating new economic theories and environmental regulations; it means working to create a culture that cares about the vitality of people's home towns and the health of the earth. It's time to set aside abstract ideals long enough to figure out how things really work in our neighborhoods, our countryside, our homes and around the globe. The left needs to find practical ways to promote human comfort over institutional efficiency, local needs over global reach, quality-of-life over economic growth, democratic participation over corporate rule, spiritual wonder over cold materialism, and community values over market strictures.

The collapse of communism vividly illustrates the error of worshipping hierarchy, industrial production, technology, managerialism and programs implemented on a gigantic scale -- a lesson the directors of transnational corporations somehow missed. Perhaps that's not surprising because the international business class, with its unbridled power and unquestioning faith in a particular economic theory, represents almost a mirror image of the Politburo and gosplan chiefs, except with the market -- not Marx as its God destined to fail. The new world order -- as devised by Margaret Thatcher, the World Trade Organisation and corporate elites -- works against the interests of most people on the planet. That's why a newly revitalised left, unencumbered by rigid theories and focused instead on enriching the fabric of people's everyday lives, will find a place for itself in the political picture.

"Marx. Lenin. Shakespeare. Aristotle. The Bible. Plato. Freud. Chomsky. Hegel. Cicero.

Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist and US foreign policy critic, ranks as the most quoted living thinker (and eighth overall) according to a 1992 tabulation of sources from the previous 12 years in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, which keeps track of journals and scholarly work. He also comes out on top among current intellectuals in a survey of the Social Sciences Citation Index performed by the MIT library.

Chomsky's intellectual output and influence are so vast, reports Michel Albert, publisher of Z magazine, that when Albert visited Poland in 1980 the Poles thought there were two Noam Chomskys at work in America -- one in linguistics and one in politics.

So why is it that we rarely hear from him on television, op-ed pages or any other mainstream source of news and opinion? We don't even hear of him. Chomsky stands out not only as America's most quoted intellectual but as our leading political dissident. What he says so challenges the conventional thinking about America's role in the world that it's far safer for Ted Koppel and newspaper editors to ignore Chomsky than to answer him.

In linguistics Chomsky turned the field upside-down with his revolutionary theory that human language skills are innate, not learnt. We are all born with an ability for language, he says, which is then shaped by the sounds we hear as toddlers to become English, or Finnish, or Kurdish. Chomsky's theories help explain why you can immediately understand sentences that you've never encountered before, and they also imply that humans have a natural instinct for creative expression. The years prior to the publication of his 1957 book Syntactic Structures are sometimes looked upon in the field of linguistics as BC -- Before Chomsky.

In the 1960s, outraged by the Vietnam war, Chomsky began to broaden his study to include foreign policy. He blasted the usual liberal line that Vietnam was a tragic mistake committed by well-meaning but misguided policy makers. In Chomsky's view the war amounted to a US invasion of South Vietnam under-taken, like all US foreign policy, not in a spirit of democratic idealism but out of naked self-interest.

But when the war wound down Chomsky did not. He continued to condemn US actions in the Middle East, Central America and the Caribbean, as well as the propaganda system in place at home to justify these atrocities. It was then that he disappeared from the mainstream public debate; his political books went unreviewed and his articles were accepted only in small alternative publications.

In assessing the state of America today Chomsky goes back to the 1930s, when "the United States more or less joined most of the advanced industrial societies in providing some kinds of rights for working people. There was real fury about this in the business community."

Business, especially the labour-intensive manufacturing sector, counter- attacked against these "social democratic type modifications in the social structure" with a massive propaganda campaign, which really hit its stride in the 1950s. "It targeted everything: the entertainment industry, the media, the churches, recreation programmes, there was just nothing left. They were quite clear about what they were doing -- fighting the everlasting battle for the minds of men and seeking to indoctrinate people with the capitalist story. By the end of the 1950s unions had been severely weakened, the media had been very much weakened."

Then along came the protests and social reforms of the 1960s, and the business sector grew "concerned over what was called the crisis of democracy. The crisis was that democracy was beginning to function."

Another corporate counterattack on workers' rights and social programmes was launched in the 1970s and, aided by economic changes such as the internationalisation of the economy and the spiralling increase in speculative capital, it has continued right up to the present.

"This is a long-term process," Chomsky notes. "It basically never changes. The United States is more of a business-run society than others. The US is extremely weak in healthcare, in daycare, in allowing parental leave. Right across the board the US has very weak social- support systems. They have been declining sharply since the 1970s for the usual ideological reasons. Business is very class-conscious, so it is always fighting a class war. People just won't face that society is run by private tyrannies. Modern corporations are about as totalitarian as any human institution has been in history."

As an example of the power of business and its propaganda, Chomsky points to the widespread view that America is no longer a rich nation. "The business press is just ecstatic and euphoric about the extraordinary flow of capital that's going into the coffers of corporations. They just have had their fourth consecutive year in double-digit profit growth in Fortune 500 companies. The idea that these are lean times, the `we-are-going-to-have-to-cut-back' message is total nonsense. The country is literally awash in capital. It's just going into a small number of pockets. The idea that we have a big burden of welfare payments is ridiculous. The US is quite miserly by international standards. Deficit-cutting is simply an instrument for attacking the poor."

But the lessons of history aren't all grim in Chomsky's view. "In the 1920s it also looked as though the business victory was total, " he notes. "Labour was practically destroyed."

Then came the 1930s, the rise of labour unions, and the social reforms that he feels Americans must now fight vigorously to save.

How do we do that? "The answer is to rebuild civil society," Chomsky replies. "American society is now remarkably atomised. Political organisations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There's been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics.

"People here should do what they did in the Haitian slums, where it was possible to construct grass-roots organisations that enabled the democratic system to function. They forged a very lively and vibrant civil society. To talk about bringing democracy to Haiti is a joke. We should look there and find out how it worked. It works when people get organised and are willing to work together and have a sense of solidarity and are willing to put aside their own immediate personal issues for a broader concern.

"As far as the left is concerned," he continues, "I think we should listen to what the right is saying. For example, one of the major Congressional initiatives now is what they call `defunding the left' ."

And guess who is the left? -- Catholic charities, because of priests and nuns working in poor communities, and the American Association of Retired People, because it had a small programme to help elderly people get jobs. "That's the left," Chomsky notes. "In fact, anyone who's trying to do anything for human beings is the left. That's sort of right, when you think about it."

Next week: Jay Walljasper interviews the poet, essayist and feminist Susan Griffin, and Bill McKibben, author of the bestseller "The End of Nature"

(1992) 2 videocassettes. 95/72 min. $79: public libraries; $249 for schools and universities ($199 until July 1, 1994). Necessary Illusions (dist. by Zeitgeist Films). PPR. Color cover.

On June 18, 1992, Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick's Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media received a standing ovation at the 39th Sydney Film Festival in Australia. In the popularity poll, it nudged out such works as Wild Wheels, Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice, Color Adjustment, and Brother's Keeper. Since then, the film has gone on to garner numerous awards and has had a considerable theatrical run throughout the world. That's a lot of attention for a film about a man who rarely appears in the popular media (which is, incidentally, the windmill that Chomsky has tilted against for the past three decades). An M.I.T. professor, Chomsky is arguably the only noted linguistic scholar who also happens to be a prominent radical dissident. His ideas have earned dismissals from novelist Tom Wolfe ("rubbish"), Nightline producer Jeff Greenfield ("whacko" ), and a much more personal rejection from conservative intellectual William F. Buckley, Jr. ("I'd smash you in the goddamn face"). A relatively quiet (but insistent), unprepossessing man, Chomsky has written some 30 books (in the rather divergent fields of linguistic theory and political activism) and has spoken to scads of college audiences-where people's brains have yet to be set in concrete. Filmmakers Achbar and Wintonick have done a remarkable job of capturing the major strains of Chomsky's thought and sharing those ideas through a wide variety of modes: interview clips, dramatic reconstructions, humorous segues, even a bit of animation. At times, it's too much; there are moments where the style unnecessarily competes with the substance, and Chomsky' s statements become lost in the very chopped-up soundbite editing which he himself so admirably decries throughout. But this is really a minor consideration compared to the video's benefits. Chomsky's commentary on media propaganda, his comparison of the mostly unreported genocide in East Timor and the widely reported killing fields story in Cambodia (the former warranted some 20 inches of coverage in the New York Times while the latter landed a whopping 1,175 inches), and his analysis of the indoctrinary aspects of sports, provide excellent flexing for the mental muscle. In fact, if there were exercise videos for the brain, Noam Chomsky might be the Jane Fonda of the genre. Not for the weak of mind, Manufacturing Consent is highly recommended, and is sure to be popular amongst vigorous investigators of the social and political dynamics of our changing world. (R. Pitman)

In journalist David Barsamian's account, the threat to public broadcasting began with President Nixon, who was infuriated by the 1970 documentary "Banks and the Poor," which exposed banking practices harmful to the poor in urban areas (7). That documentary also alienated many in Congress because it listed 133 senators and House members with bank holdings or who served on banks' boards of directors. In 1972, Nixon vetoed CPB's authorization bill, after which the chair, president, and director of PBS resigned; then Nixon signed it. The consequences of Nixon's veto still cripple public broadcasting today. It motivated CPB to seek bureaucratic safety: authority and funds were diversified downward, corporate underwriting was secured as a new source of funding, and documentaries about big power were reduced in quantity and softened in criticism. (See Engelman; Hoynes; and particularly Stone; they offer fuller accounts of Nixon's veto and its consequences.)

After an interlude of support by the Carter administration, public broadcasting again faced political and economic pressures, this time from the Reagan administration. Reagan cut funding, and Helms, Buchanan, and others attacked program content. They condemned Vietnam: A Television History as being too critical of the United States; The Africans as too critical of colonialism and imperialism; Days of Rage, on the Intifada, as too critical of Israel; and Bill Moyers's The Secret Government, about the Iran-Contra scandal, as un-American (Barsamian; Bennett; Engelman; and Hoynes). This handful of documentaries became the focus for a general attack on "Left" public broadcasting.

CPB, PBS, and NPR responded to the pressure on content. PBS rejected The Panama Deception, which criticized President Bush's invasion of Panama for its secrecy, violation of international laws, and the killing of many Panamanians. Ostensibly to arrest President Noriega for drug running, according to the film and other critics (see Chomsky's works; Lee and Solomon; Parenti's works; and Sharkey), the invasion was actually to establish a government more amenable to U.S. economic and military interests. It rejected Deadly Deception, which exposed General Electric for poisoning the earth, water, and air with radioactivity and covering it up; Manufacturing Consent, which gave the public access to Noam Chomsky's opposition to the U.S. corporate state; and Rights and Wrongs, the series on human rights hosted by Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Frontline diluted its documentary on Rush Limbaugh (Barsamian 8). By then, public television was being laughed at by some as "safely splendid" and " blandly grand," as "the animal channel" and "coffee table TV" - as an occasional escape, like commercial television (Aufderheide, "A Funny"; Lapham).(1)

Recently, Senator Dole and Speaker of the House Gingrich supported the abolishment of federal funding for public broadcasting. Barsamian (and Hoynes) believes that their desire to terminate public broadcasting is motivated by ideology and economics. He states that the current, Republican-led attack follows repeated ones from the right wing on allegedly leftist public television and supports "expanding corporate power specifically by extending its control over valuable frequencies occupied by the hundreds of PBS and public radio stations" (8). Senator Larry Pressler demanded of CPB: "How many NPR staff have previously worked for Pacifica stations?" (Barsamian 9). As the five subscriber- supported Pacifica stations are left-leaning, his attack had a McCarthy- like tone. Pressler backed off when confronted by constituent support for public broadcasting in his home state of South Dakota (see Ivins).

The political, congressional, and budgetary threats are compounded by a particularly religious, fundamentalist minority who perceive public broadcasting to be inimical to U.S. traditions and to what they believe U.S. citizens hold dear. For example, Don Wildmon, head of the American Family Association, in defense of family values, attacks all programs he perceives to be pornographic, such as Tales of the City, a series about gays, and Tongues Untied, a film about the racism and homophobia that homosexual black men face daily (Hoynes; Nicolino; Rich). Wildmon also blocked the distribution of the documentary film on censorship, Damned in the USA (Boxerman). An example of total hostility to public broadcasting is Thomas Sowell, a syndicated columnist based at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Sowell angrily accuses public broadcasting of attacking the family, the free market, and U.S. history in general; of presenting "only the Sierra Club line" ; of purveying "the left-wing and counterculture bias"; of fraudulently appropriating the honorific "public" when the networks are "far more attuned to what the average American wants"; of calling itself noncommercial when it is thoroughly commercial (i.e., the pledge drives, the Kermit the Frog dolls); and of "spitting in the face of the people who pay the bills" (4B). In his article he recommends terminating the CPB and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.

The above arguments and motives are intensified by the immense profits to be made by corporations if public broadcasting is broken up and sold off, as Barsamian noted. Rupert Murdoch and other broadcasters met privately with House Republicans to urge "privatization" (Sadler). Here's why: The federal government holds a 10-year lien on public broadcasting facilities built with grants from the Commerce Department. In Z Magazine, Russell Sadler states:

If these stations cease broadcasting because of lack of money, the federal government can take over the property, issue the licenses to private operators, and sell the lucrative studio and transmission facilities to their campaign contributors. (13)

But why would businessmen want the licenses? Why would the licenses be lucrative in the age of cable, satellite transmission, and fiber- optic cables? Currently, "there are no television frequencies available, especially the more lucrative VHF channels 2-13" (Sadler 12). Thus, public channels possess premium value now, and, most important, they will be immensely more valuable in the future as the new compression technology becomes available. Sadler states:

Murdoch's satellite television service has recently demonstrated a revolutionary transmission technology that compresses signals eight to one. Stripped of technobabble, that means within a decade it will be possible to transmit eight separate digital broadcast signals on television channels that can only transmit one now. If existing television stations can deliver 30 or more channels of home entertainment into the Top 150 American television markets, it will drastically alter the economics of cable and telephone industries. (13)

Many rationales support the Republican campaign to eliminate public broadcasting, but the enormous profits to be made by private owners are surely not the least powerful of motives. The Public Broadcasting Self-Sufficiency Act of 1996 makes privatization possible by allowing the auction of vacant, noncommercial television channels (the sell- off made palatable to public broadcasters and their supporters by proposing to use the money to establish a trust fund for public broadcasting).

The attack on public television comes not only from people who want to profit from it or to affirm established power, or from those who wish to restrict programming to more traditional values. Individuals such as Noam Chomsky, George Gerbner, Edward Herman, William Hoynes, and Michael Parenti disapprove of public broadcasting because they want it to live up to the ideals expressed in the first Carnegie Commission report Public Television (1967). Public Television defined public television as "all that is of human interest and importance which is not at the moment appropriate or available for support by advertising" (Bennett 4). It particularly wanted an alternative to commercial broadcasting. The 1967 Carnegie report argued that a public system can help us see America whole, in all its diversity; provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard; and serve as a forum for controversy and debate. It and its sequel, The Public Trust (1979), stressed the inadequacy of commercial broadcasting in a democracy: "The power of the communications media must be marshaled in the interest of human development, not merely for advertising revenue" (12).

The desire of the authors of the report was to have one broadcasting network for controversial content: "the problems and the triumphs of American life" in all its diversity - as a possible example, for challenging the political ideologies of the two main parties. Congress' s two-party structure necessitates debate, but because the two parties share many assumptions and convictions (and corporate money), they seldom or never confront certain perspectives and problems. For example, both parties accept or support secrecy (Curry); the immense military budget (Korb; "The 1997"); invasions and interventions of sovereign nations such as Libya, Guatemala, Grenada, and Panama (see Chomsky); the subversion of the United Nations through frequent violations of international laws and the refusal to pay our share; and the influence of corporate money and refusal to enact meaningful campaign reforms (see Chomsky's and Parenti's works, and my "Control").

Obviously, a broadcasting system that focuses on the suppressed or underreported aspects of national government, which the watchdog Project Censored has reported for over a decade (see my "Control"(2)), would serve our democracy well. But how to acquire it, when such truth-telling scrutiny inevitably offends ruling power? For example, even Burns' s documentary about the Civil War "could not ever have been broadcast on commercial television," wrote former advertising executive Earl Shorris. Because commercial television is "the most tightly encapsulated market-driven system" in the United States, it would not show a program about the hard truths of war, even when those were displaced to the past (211). Therefore, perspectives about present power machinations - with slants such as dangers in the workplace, workers' organizations, corporate welfare, control of information by owners and advertisers, interlocking directors of corporations and banks, monopoly profits, and U.S. invasions of weak countries for oil or a canal, or to distract the populace and grab popularity - would offend business interests and sponsors and would not attract a large audience; that is, they would repel corporate sponsorship with both the examination of corporate behavior and the lower Nielsen ratings that ensue from programs containing complex social analysis.

The Carnegie Commission report of 1967 called for public broadcasting to contribute to an ideal democratic education that both transmits and examines a nation's history and culture. This can only be accomplished if public broadcasting can transmit the full culture truthfully - not only as an accurate and complete conduit for our best values and a challenge to those values lest they lose their vitality, but as a critic of the corruptions of power. Early and present proponents of public broadcasting have supported this. Broadcasting controlled by the need to sell products fails to represent, in the words of the Task Force on the Future of Public Television, "many of the values we hold dear, such as excellence, creativity, tolerance, generosity, responsibility, community, diversity, and intellectual achievement" (Quality 4), as well as the values hostile to the plutocratic marketplace.

According to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, "The greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, continued, and dishonest - but the myth - present, persuasive, and unrealistic" (n.p.). Public broadcasting was conceived as potentially our culture's lie detector and sham-myth detective, our cultural truth teller, in contrast with ratings- and dollar-driven commercial broadcasting. Because a democracy needs realistic, accurate, thorough knowledge for an informed, participating citizenry, the failure of public broadcasting to provide regular network- quality critiques of power has caused critics such as Janine Jackson to agree with the Republican budget slashers. If it cannot fulfill its mission to examine the nation, then public broadcasting should die (Lapham).

The ideal model for public broadcasting is that of the intellectual as defined by Edward Said in Representations of the Intellectual. He states that intellectuals "should be the ones to question patriotic nationalism, corporate thinking, and a sense of class, racial, or gender privilege." Also, he believes the public at large does not oppose the intellectual, as much as the "insiders, experts, coteries, professionals who . . . mold public opinion, make it conformist, encourage a reliance on a superior little band of all-knowing men in power." The true intellectual speaks truth to power and resists the blandishments of money or specialization.

The mission of public broadcasting was originally envisaged to provide a voice for political groups that may not be heard on commercial broadcasting - the United States in all its political diversity: not only the white male officials on Nightline and MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. The recent, antidemocratic decision by the Presidential Debate Commission to restrict the debate to the Republican and Democratic candidates represents the opposite of the Carnegie Commission's commitment to a forum of public debate. According to its mission, PBS should offer access to all candidates on state ballots. Currently, PBS has several weekly shows for investors, but not one that offers the perspectives of working people, consumers, or environmentalists. An alternative format would give the conflicting perspectives full participation. For every Business Week in Review there should be, for example, an Environment Week in Review led by a group such as Greenpeace. A possible model for PBS to follow is the Netherlands system, where various political spectra (socialist, conservative, etc.) have their own publicly supported system - that PBS should break down into several systems rather than one.

And finally, the Carnegie-proposed mission of public broadcasting urged access for individuals in communities that may otherwise be unheard. People advocating this model resemble adherents to the Study Circles programs, a national organization of grassroots discussion, who anticipate a "great experiment in connecting local democracy to higher levels of policy" ("No Room," 1). Public broadcasting could be an important agency of this experiment, as Bill Moyers showed during his series of grassroots discussions during the last presidential campaign, "Listening to America":

One of the most famous arguments for the establishment of Congress was, "no room can hold them all." That is, the Founding Fathers felt that in a country as large as America, elected representatives would be needed to relay citizen voices to national policy makers. But the Founding Fathers also recognized that for representation to be meaningful, ordinary citizens must have a strong public voice and an active role in their own governance. . . . To reconnect citizens with state and even national policy making[,] emerging statewide circle programs are building on the principles of successful community-wide programs. ("No Room," 1)

The Study Circles adherents perceived a "devolution revolution" in the making: "At the same time that state-wide study circle programs are being designed to channel citizen ideas upward, some state and federal policies are being devolved to regional and local levels" ("No Room," 1).

This, grassroots and upward perspective resembles what proponents of public or civic journalism advocate, as defined by Jay Rosen:

The underlying principle is as follows: Politics is public property. It ought to be grounded in the concerns of citizens, not the machinations of professionals. Unless it produces a useful dialogue about problems and choices, people will quit listening, which is bad for democracy and for the press. But ending its complicity in politics-as-usual, helping people regain a civic identity and respecting our need for serious discussion, journalists might contribute to democracy's repair and regain some public trust. (10)

Rosen cites the National Issues Convention held in Austin, Texas, 18-21 January 1996, to illustrate what he means. Four-hundred-and- fifty-nine citizens gathered for three days for small-group discussions with political candidates, and PBS televised parts of the convention during prime time. This is only one of the many forums occurring around the country (see Schaffer and Miller).

But this democratic structure must avoid program mediocrity. If PBS distributes its limited funds downward to the stations, high-quality news and investigative programs cannot be afforded, and Americans will not possess the critical information about power essential to effective citizenship.

Because of greed and the agendas of various groups, the Public Broadcasting Service is beleaguered as never before. Everyone seems against it - except the 17 million viewers who watch it at least weekly via 537 member stations. (Although PBS reaches only about 2 percent of households with television during prime time, one-third of the public watches it sometime during the week). Many of those viewers staunchly support the superlative programs for children, which successfully educate, and the equally high-quality science programs that, at least indirectly, counter pseudosciences such as creationism and astrology.

Journalist Pat Aufderheide, often a stringent critic of public broadcasting, perceives its value as an alternative to commercial media:

Every day, public radio and television demonstrate what advertisers won't pay for: quality children's programming, classical music, blues, bluegrass, investigative reporting and public forums. They contribute to public life in quiet ways. For instance, public television stations serve 90 percent of the nation's schools and may become the schools' only hope for being part of an "information superhighway." ("Will, " 20)

Above all, public broadcasting offers the only hope to extend democratically "the spectrum of opinion past what advertisers like" (Aufderheide, "Will," 20).

NOTES

1. NPR has escaped much of the angry opposition inspired by PBS - perhaps because NPR costs less and is more widely demographic than PBS; perhaps, too, the visual nature of television raises emotions. The differences between PBS and NPR need study.

2. See the bibliography in this issue for a thorough list of sources to consult.

WORKS CITED

Aufderheide, Patricia. "A Funny Thing is Happening to TV's Public Forum." Columbia Journalism Review (Nov.-Dec. 1991): 60-63.

-----. "Will Public Broadcasting Survive?" Progressive (Mar. 1995): 19-25.

Barsamian, David. "Right-Wing Take-over of Public Broadcasting." Z Magazine (Apr. 1995): 6-8.

Bennett, James R. "Control of the Media and the First Amendment." Quarterly Journal of Ideology 17 (June 1994): 104-15.

Boxerman, Burton. "Film Censorship under Attack." St. Louis Journalism Review (June 1992): 5.

Carnegie Commission. Public Television: A Program for Action. New York: Bantam, 1967.

-----. A Public Trust: The Report of the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting. New York: Bantam, 1979.

Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. Ed. Peter Wintonick and Mark Achbar. Montreal/New York: Black Rose, 1994.

-----. Deterring Democracy. London/New York: Verso, 1991.

-----. World Order, Old and New. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

-----. Year 501: The Conquest Continues. Boston: South End, 1993.

Curry, Richard A. An Uncertain Future: Thought Control and Repression during the Reagan-Bush Era. Los Angeles: First Amendment Foundation, 1992.

Engelman, Ralph. Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1996.

Hoynes, William. Public Television for Sale. Boulder: Westview, 1994.

Ivins, Molly. "A Fox with an Ideological Agenda." Arkansas Democrat- Gazette 9 Feb. 1995: 6B.

Jackson, Janine. "If PBS Can't Be Reformed, It Should be Replaced." Extra! (Sept.-Oct. 1994): 25.

Korb, Laurence. "The Indefensible Defense Budget." Washington Post National Weekly Edition 17-23 July 1995: 19.

Lapham, Lewis. "Adieu, Big Bird." Harper's (Dec. 1993): 35-43.

Lee, Martin, and Norman Solomon. Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media. New York: Lyle Stuart/Carol, 1990.

Nicolino, Donna. "PBS Denies Funding after Religious Right Pressure." Extra! 7 (July-Aug. 1994): 20.

"The 1997 Military Budget: A Ticking Time Bomb." The Defense Monitor 25 (Apr.-May 1996): 1-8.

"'No Room Can Hold Them All': Statewide Study Circle Programs Propose a Solution to a 200-year-old Problem." Focus on Study Circles 7.3 (1996): 1-2.

Parenti, Michael. Against Empire. San Francisco: City Lights, 1995.

-----. Inventing Reality: The Politics of the News Media. New York: St. Martin's, 1993.

-----. Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment. New York: St. Martin's, 1992.

Quality Time? The Report of the Twentieth-Century Fund Task Force on Public Television. New York: Twentieth-Century Fund Press, 1993.

Rich, Frank. "The Plot Thickens at PBS." New York Times 17 Apr. 1994: sec. 4, 17.

Rosen, Jay. "Take Back the Campaign." Nation (19 Feb. 1996): 10.

Sadler, Russell. "Murdoch, PBS, and Congress." Z Magazine (Apr. 1995): 12-13.

Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage, 1996.

Schaffer, Jan, and Edward Miller, eds. With Staci Kramer. Civic Journalism: Six Case Studies. Washington, D.C.: PEW Center for Civic Journalism, 1995.

Sharkey, Jaqueline. Under Fire: U.S. Military Restrictions on the Media from Grenada to the Persian Gulf Washington, D.C.: Center for Public Integrity, 1991.

Shorris, Earl. A Nation of Salesmen: The Tyranny of the Market and the Subversion of Culture. New York: Norton, 1994.

Sowell, Thomas. "Subsidizing the Counterculture." Arkansas Democrat- Gazette (30 Jan. 1995): 4B.

Stone, David. Nixon and the Politics of Public Television. New York, Garland, 1985.

WORKS CONSULTED

Bennett, James R. Control of Information in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport: Meckler, 1987.

-----. Control of the Media in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1992.

-----. "The Public Broadcasting System: Bibliography of Criticism." Journal of Popular Film and Television 15.2 (1987): 85-92.

Cotton, Ian. The Hallelujah Revolution: The Rise of the New Christians. Amherst: Prometheus, 1994.

Day, James. The Vanishing Vision: The Inside Story of Public Television. Berkeley, U of California P, 1995.

"Firms Weigh Buying Pieces of Public TV." Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 25 Jan 1995: 4A.

Gerbner, George, Hamid Mowlana, and Herbert Schiller, eds. Invisible Crises. Boulder: Westview, 1995.

Herman, Edward. Triumph of the Market. Boston: South End, 1995.

Herman, Edward, and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy and the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

JAMES R. BENNETT is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is the compiler of the bibliographies Control of Information in the United States (1987) and Control of the Media in the United States (1992).

Framing the Falklands War: Nationhood, Culture and Identity

Edited by James Aulich Open University Press Buckingham, 1992, pp 150, RRP paperback $35.00

The Falklands War gave concrete expression to the political rhetoric of the eighties and helped shape particular notions of national identity. This book examines the tensions between historical needs and the telling of the story of the war, and engages the problem of how symbolic significance could be seen to outweigh historical importance in both Britain and Argentina.

Framing the Falklands War is a multi-disciplinary in approach and addresses the ways national mythologies found expression in news, fiction, fine art, photography, graphic satire and film. Its breadth of scope encompasses analyses of cultural products as diverse as Charles Wood's television film Tumbledown, Steve Bell's cartoon If, Jack Higgins' thriller Exocet, and the war art of Linda Kiston.

Adult Comics: An Introduction

Roger Sabin Routledge, London 1993, pp321 RRP paperback $27.00 Distributed by The Law Book Company Ltd.

Adult comics are part of the cultural landscape in a way that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. In this first survey of its kind, Roger Sabin traces the history of comics for older readers from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. He takes in the pioneering pre-First World War titles, the underground 'comix' of the 1960s and 1970s, 'fandom' in the 1970s and 1980s, and the boom of the 1990s (including 'graphic novels' and Viz). Covering comics from the United States, Europe and Japan. Adult Comics addresses such issues as the graphic novel in context, cultural overspill and the role of women.

By taking a broad sweep Sabin demonstrates that the widely-held notion that comics 'grew up' in the late 1980s is a mistaken one, largely invented by the media.

The Technique of Film and Video Editing

Ken Dancyger Butterworth-Heinemann, USA, 1993, pp332, RRP paperback $59.00

The Technique of Film and Video Editing provides a detailed, precise look at the artistic and aesthetic principles and practices of editing for both pictures and sound. Through in-depth analyses of dozens of films and videos, both classic and current, the reader will understand how careful editing for pace, clarity, continuity, and sound affect the ultimate success of the sequence. The reader will also understand the primary goal of the editor, namely to develop a narrative continuity for the visuals and sound of the film or video and to distill those elements to create dramatic emphasis.

Topics include

. the influence of the documentary, popular arts, television, and theatre on current editing practice

. editing techniques that are most successful in action, dialogue, comedy, and documentary sequences

. aesthetic and practical principles on which to base creative editing decisions

. lessons learned from the work of the masters, such as Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean

The Technique of Film and Video Editing highlights for the reader the history, theory, and aesthetics behind film and video editing.

Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema

Edited by Steven Cohan & Ina Rae Hark Routledge, New York, 1993, RRP paperback $29.95 Distributed by The Law Book Company Ltd.

Screening the Male challenges the traditional understanding of the male's position in Hollywood cinema. Gathering together thirteen original essays by scholars in the US, UK, and Australia, as well as Steve Neale's ground-breaking article on male spectacle, this collection looks beyond the seemingly unassailable monolithic understanding of the 'masculine' which has previously dominated most film criticism.

Ranging from Valentino to Schwarzenegger, from the musical to the horror film, from close readings to 'queer' readings, the essays all differ in their critical method and historical focus. But whatever their specific interest, each essay holds a strong concern with issues that film studies has repeatedly linked to the feminine without considering how they relate as well to the masculine: spectacle, masochism, passivity, masquerade and, most of all, the body as it signifies gendered, racial, class, and generational differences.

Demonstrating that Hollywood's representation of the male and his masculinity deserves the same kind of critical attention devoted to the problem posed by the female and her femininity, Screening the Male will interest scholars, students, and fans of cinema who want to understand the textual complexity and cultural purchase of male imagery on the screen.

Constructivism in Film The Man with the Movie Camera: A Cinematic Analysis

Vlada Petric Cambridge University Press, UK, paperback 1993, RRP $45.00

Constructivism in Film examines the radical experiments of early Soviet filmmakers, with special emphasis on the relationship of Constructivist film to contemporary literature, painting, architecture, and design. Surveying the socio-political aspects of the Constructivist movement as well, Vlada Petric then analyzes in detail the most important silent film produced during this era, Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera (1929).

"Constructivism in Film is a landmark book in film studies. It is a companion reader meant to cause the viewer to return to Vertov with keener eyes, or in Vertov's words, "Film Eyes," to see previously hidden patterns of structure and levels of subdued meaning. As such, Petric has written not a work of criticism, but of appreciation." Thomas Cooper, Journal of Film and Video

Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation

David Breskin Faber and Faber, USA, 1992, RRP $22.95

"David Breskin uses the interview as a precise critical tool, directing his subjects toward a full revelation of their most intimate creative desires. With judicious questioning and a relaxed, unawed manner, Breskin leads his filmmakers beyond their conscious intentions, into that inner zone of personal fantasy and psychodrama where art begins. His book is gripping, astounding, and frequently uproarious." - Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune

Over a two-year period, David Breskin interviewed seven of contemporary film's greatest directors. The resulting dialogues prove remarkable for their breadth and depth - for their wealth of biographical and critical detail, and their relentless inquiry into the obsessions of these filmmakers. Whether addressing the relationship of politics to art, the role of women in their films, or the methods of their madness, Inner Views unveils the intersections of life and work that make these men such powerful auteurs. Radically abridged versions of these interviews appear in Rolling Stone Magazine, where they met great acclaim.

"David Breskin has transcended the normal limitations of the Q & A format. Instead of stilted interrogations, which so often occur when a journalist sits down to question a subject, these interviews are fascinating, enlightening, revelatory conversations. Breskin probes where no man thought to probe - he has a genius for the previously unobserved insight. In each interview, from Francis Coppola to Tim Burton, Breskin shows how the creative process is informed by character; how instinct, conflict, and vision result in art." - Lynn Hirschberg, Vanity Fair.

Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies

Noam Chomsky Pluto Press, London, 1989, RRP $ Distributed in Australia by Naroca Press

The Watergate affair and the Indochina wars fostered a belief that the media have a crusading role to play in exposing the truth about ITS institutions at home and abroad.

In Necessary Illusions Naom CHOMSKY explodes this myth, demonstrating that in practice the media in the developed world serve the interests of state and corporate power. He argues that the deciding factor is the choice of topics and the way in which issues are highlighted: while individual journalists often meet high standards of professionalism in their work, exhibiting courage, integrity and enterprise, it is the commercial interests of the major corporations that decide what we view, hear and read.

CHOMSKY demonstrates that the major media corporations sell their product - audiences - to their market the advertisers. By appealing to wealthy audiences they are able to push up advertising rates. It is, not surprising therefore, that the picture of the world they present reflects the perspectives and interests of the sellers, the buyers and the product.

In doing so a climate is created in which any opponents of the status quo become, by definition a subversive. Conformity has become the easy way to privilege and prestige, as we head towards a society in which no one will dare question what the state determines.

Rigorously documented. Necessary Illusions continues Chomsky's tradition of profoundly insightful indictments of US foreign and domestic institutions and tears away the veneer of propaganda that portrays the media as the servant of free speech and democracy.

Eyewitness World Press Photo 1993

Thames and Hudson, London, 1993, RRP 29.95

Every year since 1955 an international jury has met in Holland under theauspices of the World Press Photo Foundation to choose the world' s finestpress photographs. Universally recognized as the definitive competition forphotographic reporting, this has been described by Michael Rand of The Sunday Times Magazine as 'the International photographic contest'.

The pick of international visual reportage from 1992-some 180 picturessubmitted by photojournalists, press agencies, newspapers and magazinesthroughout the world - is brought together for the The World Press PhotoCompetition 1993, the 36th contest in the series. Selected from over 19,000images of the highest quality, taken by more than 1,900 photographersrepresenting over 80 countries, each shot encapsulates the year's historicdramas. Showing all walks of life, portraying private happenings as well asheadline news, they make up a mosaic of time on the wing.

Media Teaching

Dan Fleming Blackwell, Oxford, 1993, RRP paperback $39.95

Media Teaching provides a fresh contemporary approach to media education which will be welcomed by all students and teachers of the media. Dan Fleming's text not only charts a detailed map of contemporary media studies but also shows how a busy teacher can move around this map. The text is supported by a wide range of examples, from the classroom, from the media itself, and from other texts. It should become an indispensable resource for teachers of media studies and those engaged in media education across the curriculum.

Dan Fleming bases his text on both wide teaching experience and a broad knowledge of contemporary media research, to provide a clear theory of learning that is grounded in actual classroom work. His approach is characterized by an argument for a more learner-centred perspective on media teaching. Covering not only the concepts and the structure of the media, Fleming offers teachers and lecturers a coherent account of the key issues and essential skills of media teaching.

Media Teaching will be essential reading for all teachers of media studies, film studies, communication studies and for those undertaking elements of media education across a range of curriculum contexts.

Australian Cultural Studies Reader

Edited by John Frow and Meaghan Morris Allen & Unwin, Australia, 1993, RRP paperback $24.95

Cultural Studies has emerged as a major force in the analysis of cultural systems and their relation to social power.

Ranging from readings of the micropolitics of everyday life and popular culture to the study of gender, race, ethnic and class identities and of the institutions that organise our sense of time, space and place, it cuts a path across a number of the traditional disciplines of knowledge.

This anthology, edited by two of Australia's leading cultural critics, brings together some of the most exciting work that has been done in Australian Cultural Studies in recent years. Representing a distinctive national tradition, these essays move between high theory and detailed readings of localised cultural practices.

This is a work that makes an important contribution to the process of redefining the role of the humanities and social sciences in contemporary Australian culture.

The Good, The Bad and The Unacceptable: The Hard News About the British Press

Raymond Snoddy Faber and Faber, London, 1992, RRP Hard Cover $40.00, paperback $16.95

Have journalists changed since Ben Jonson denounced them as 'dishonest swindlers'? Are sex, sensationalism, bias, inaccuracy and forgery fundamental to journalistic scoops? Is the invasion of privacy simply the price we have to pay for a free Press? And why are British journalists, under the threat of sweeping legislation, being given one last chance at selfregulation?

In The Good, the Bad and the Unacceptable, Raymond Snoddy, Financial Times media correspondent and former presenter of Channel 4's controversial Press series Hard News, puts the British newspaper industry under scrutiny. He interviews proprietors, including Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black; journalists from both tabloid and quality newspapers; and media victims. He recounts notorious cases past and present, and discusses issues ranging from cheque-book journalism to the Calcutt committee, from circulation warsto the reporting of issues such as AIDS. Provocative and entertaining, The Good, the Bad and the Unacceptable makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate on Press standards.

Briefly I feel that an initial dimension of the problem can be grasped if we think of the opposition -- the creation of the truth versus the discovery of the truth. The point becomes clearer perhaps if we make the analogous move to the creation of knowledge versus the discovery of knowledge. We have now of course set sail on the seas of epistemology and [implicitly] ontology. This is the domain of the philosophy of science -- not a discipline that media teachers have traditionally seen as of overriding relevance. Yet I believe I can demonstrate that many of the problems that have beset us lately are capable of being solved by recent work in that field.

Of particular importance is the collapse of the old positivist view of science as the discovery of facts and the process whereby the individual scientist simply observes, records, and accumulates knowledge of the world through sense experiences. The pendulum has now swung to acknowledging the social basis of knowledge. The scientist is no longer simply regarded as exploring the world and providing us with a mirror of it, but her role in the construction of knowledge is now recognised.

This break from the epistemology of positivism led to the extreme reaction of the post-structuralists. Influenced by Nietzsche's view that 'truth is a mobile army of metaphors', the post-structuralists danced joyfully all over any notion of truth. In the process they also killed off concepts such as propaganda, ideology and the possibility of any meaningful or rational resistance to power.

Cultural studies was I believe particularly vulnerable to this assault on truth and related concepts as we deal with the relationship to reality of camera work, editing, mise-en-scène etc.. For example much of the early work in Film and Media Studies emphasised the role of the media in the 'mediation' of reality. Quite rightly we opposed and continue to do so naive claims that the media provides us with a 'window on the world'. However from here it has proved only a short step to talk of the 'construction' of reality, which opened the way for unbridled relativism and even solipsism. In the process, and I will return to this point, we lost the notion of an advantage point from which we could criticise the products of the media in particular and society in general.

This situation has partly been brought about by the continued existence of a positivist world view alongside post-structuralist thought. They have as it were divided the academy between them. The former remains encamped in the sites of real power -- science, law, medicine -- while the latter careers merrily through the humanities demoralising and disorienting a whole generation of students. So while in cultural studies we may feel that the post-structuralist are overwhelming us, behind them is the real enemy -- the positivists, the 'new' realists who have begun to move in on cultural studies with their realpolitik, and their Machiavellianism and their policy-mongering.

In this conjuncture, I repeat, that what we need in cultural studies in particular and in the humanities and social sciences generally is a philosophy of science which will enable us to steer between the commonsense of the positivist world view and the wild relativism of the post-structuralist. Just such a philosophy is now available, I would argue, in the work of Roy Bhaskar.

Again it is impossible to do justice to the range and complexity of his philosophy of 'transcendental realism'. But one step is of crucial importance. Bhaskar separates out the domains of ontology [being] and epistemology [knowledge] and insists that they are not reducible one to the other. The realm of being, Bhaskar advocates, must be conceived of as only 'contingently, partially and locally humanised [Bhaskar, 1989,p 182]. Moreover it consists of transfactually active and potent structures [ibid p. 25].

Knowledge on the other hand is socially produced and as such transient. Here it is important to grasp that while through epistemology we come to know the world 'fallibly and variously' [ibid], we can nevertheless make distinctions between beliefs and select those which better explain reality. Science may be an epistemological and therefore social exercise but it does have a progressive cumulative character [ibid p 11]. So it is possible to get to know reality. As Bhaskar stresses we may only be able to approach reality through knowledge, but that does not mean we can only know knowledge. [ibid p 188] Similarly truth may be a product of epistemology and therefore social, but we can judge it by its relationship to reality.

I would like to look now at short excerpts from two films. I believe that these excerpts raise in a concrete fashion what I have touched on above.

Excerpt 1, (right) The Deer Hunter, Excerpt 2, (left) Culloden

Now these are, I think you will agree, disturbing pieces of cinema. To begin with there is the formal difference of fiction/feature film and docu-drama. The Deer Hunter with its customary Hollywood editing, cinematography, and American acting style is surely a classical piece of realism and a powerful one at that. By contrast Watkins' text Culloden is an innovative mixture of self-reflexive and Brechtian techniques. However the piece we have just seen has the fairly traditional documentary voice-over detailing in a precise way the 'meaning' of the visuals.

I have chosen these two films because they affect me greatly and I have seen them many times. Cimino's film drives me to fury while Watkins' still brings me close to tears. Both texts, I would argue make a claim to truth though in differing ways. Culloden uses the historian John Prebble's book of the same name to back up its claim to veracity, while less obviously and honestly Deer Hunter, while not overtly claiming to be a piece of history, employs the techniques of realism to suggest that what it shows is true.

Yet I believe that all journalists and historians of the Vietnam war have agreed that the key emotional motif in Deer Hunter, that of the playing of Russian Roulette, was in fact not practised among the Vietnamese. As far as I am aware, no one has emerged to challenge the Prebble/Watkins account of the happenings at Culloden.

We must be careful here not to believe that the difference between the two texts is simply a case of fiction film versus documentary [even a hybrid form like docu-drama]. It is true though that both texts employed actors, albeit amateurs in the case of Culloden, and consummate professionals in that of The Deer Hunter. Nor at a more complicated level is the difference between the texts simply that Cimino got his facts wrong and Watkins got his right. I would maintain rather that although the matter of the Russian Roulette motif is not a trivial one the vital difference between the films is the explanations they offer of history and historical events through the narratives they construct.

Let us consider The Deer Hunter first. It opens, as is well known with a long wedding sequence which constructs the tightly-knit organic community/collective/family. Several members of this community are then plopped in hell, in Vietnam. We are offered a series of improbabilities of varying levels of importance. Artistic licence/dramatic necessity requires the friends to be fighting together. Again the same imperatives dictate that they arrive among the enemy in a small combat group a tactic adopted only by Special Services units.

Something more than dramatic necessity have their Vietnamese captors subject one of the 'family' to water torture. Again as with the Russian Roulette motif there is absolutely no evidence that any American POWs were treated in this manner. I will consider the concept of factual- based evidence later, but wish for the moment to point out that here we have the Vietnamese constructed as the Othercruel, confining [water cage] and callously indifferent to life [Russian Roulette]. It is worth noting in this context that while Cimino's portrayal of the Vietnamese as Other is uniquely nightmarish, most American films on Vietnam continue to portray the Vietnamese in the same way.

At this juncture I would like to emphasise that the untruth of Cimino' s film lies primarily not in its dramatic manipulation of events, but in the explanation it proffers of American involvement in Vietnam. We are given quasi-mythical structures heavily overlaid by emotion. These structures can be summarised thus:-

Once upon a time there was a nice happy family. Some nice boys from that family left it to go abroad. They fell in with the Other and were treated horribly, but some of them succeeded in returning home and now the family though very damaged is repairing itself by singing the family song.

Caricatured like this the inadequacies of the text are surely obvious, but it must be stressed that the manoeuvres it attempted were successful. The film may only offer us prescientific mythical and emotional structures by way of explanation but the American public were satisfied as the history of Reagan's and Bush's presidencies shows all too well.

Culloden does of course serves a totally different purpose, but ironically it is in this area that the film earned most of its criticism. Thus Colin MacArthur, while acknowledging that the 'impulse of Culloden was an extremely generous and progressive one', argued that the film failed to provide an adequate explanatory basis for the battle and subsequent massacres. [MacArthur 1981 p295] The concepts which are seen as priding such a basis are mode of production, uneven development, colonialism and imperialism. These are of course drawn from the Marxist tradition. These concepts form a model which views incidents such as the battle of Culloden and its aftermath as an episode in the clash between the feudal mode of production, here in the Highlands of Scotland, and the emerging capitalist order in England.

Now MacArthur's may seem yet another instance of leftist knit picking and perpetual begrudging. Culloden is after all a truly great film. Nevertheless I'm inclined to accept that it fails to provide us with the conceptual structure that would both explain the experience of the battle and also enable us to generalise that explanation and experience to other historical moments -- most notably, in recent times -- Vietnam.

To sum up the comparison between The Deer Hunter and Culloden, the former stakes its claim to truth through the formal means of cinematic realism and through the folktale-like structures that it offers as an implicit explanation of America's experience in Vietnam. Culloden by contrast gives us a wealth of facts about the battle. What it only partially succeeds in doing is to incorporate these details within an explanatory framework which would help us to understand fully the historical moment and the underlying structures that have given rise to it and countless other similar massacres. The Deer Hunter then gives us the Big Lie, while Culloden makes a sincere but flawed attempt to present the truth.

Before leaving Vietnam I would like to use some newsreel film from the war to introduce a discussion of facts and evidence. This topic was given relevance recently by the Rodney King tape, and incidentally it was amusing to listen to the tortured convoluted efforts of some post-structuralists attempting to incorporate this text within their relativistic theory of the social construction of reality.

Vietnam War Newsreels (see pictures on pages 22, 23 and 27)

The first point I would make is that it was images like this that turned me and millions of others against US intervention in Vietnam. It was also film like this that made the Pentagon determined that we would never see anything similar from Grenada, Panama, or Kuwait.

Secondly I feel that the power of the film we have just seen is due to its relationship to real events. The film may be an object of knowledge and therefore socially constructed but its relationship to the real object [the tortured prisoner, the burning girl, etc] is a true one, and to repeat this truth gives the film its political power. The vexed question of proof or how we can know that it is true can of course only be determined empirically and collectively.

I am conscious here that but for the theoretical excess of post-structuralism the above would appear embarrassingly obvious. However in this context it is vital, as Bhaskar stresses, that having established the possibility of facts that we do not proceed to deify and naturalise them. Facts Bhaskar argues are real and we are not free to invent them, but they belong to the realm of epistemology and are discovered through theoretical paradigms and are historically specific social realities. [Bhaskar p61] The danger here is that, if as in empiricism-positivism, we see social reality as consisting of facts as things rather than as social objects, then we will not be able to transcend the facts to grasp the social structures that underlie them.

I would now like to proceed to a brief examination of the concept of propaganda with specific reference to the work of Noam Chomsky. The word 'propaganda' itself has had an interesting history. It begins in 1622 to describe the work of Catholic missionaries. From here it is generalised to the spreading of ideas not simply religious ones. Gradually it acquires the negative character of the distortion of the truth and the propagation of lies. However with the decline of interest in truth it loses its critical force and clarity and is more or less abandoned.

It is to Chomsky's perpetual credit however that he has refused to give up the truth-propaganda opposition. Instead with relentless zeal and scholarship he has patently exposed the propaganda/lies of successive American administrations. The result has not only been his exclusion from the mass media and official attempts to discredit him, but also a wealth of very accessible material in terms of style and presentation. As media teachers we owe it to our students to direct them to Chomsky' s work and invite them to engage with it critically.

Before leaving the concept of propaganda I would like to examine a fine little piece that I used recently with my media studies students. It is from the Oxford Annual For Scouts, 1928. The New Recruit by Peter Blundell

The camp-fire was ending. The bamboos of the jungle fluttered in the clammy Borneo night breeze, ghostly in the glare of the blazing resin torches. These torches, however, were not blazing so fiercely as the bosoms of the chief members of the Pandaka Scout Troop, now assembled round the fire. They had a fire, for in this respect Borneo imitates the custom of cooler climes. They did not need a fire, especially at the present juncture; no, certainly not.

'You call yourselves Scouts,' continued the good-humoured looking, tall youth in a uniform adorned with many badges. 'Why not prove it by obeying orders instead of trying to upset things?'

'Who says we are trying to upset things?' asked a fat Chinese, also much badge-decorated.

'I do. You've been doing it, Ang Hok, ever since I took over the command from you.'

'I have not,' said the other sulkily.

'You're jealous, I suppose. Well, you'd better put your jealousy in your pocket, for it won't do you or anyone else any good. I've been appointed leader and I'm going to lead.

Now, then, you chaps, what do you say?' he asked, with a disarming smile. 'Is it going to be friends or enemies?'

He held out his left hand, Scout fashion, to Ang Hok. But the Chinese glowered and obstinately turned his head away.

Horace Agar smiled a little tight smile, and shrugged his shoulders. A terrible lot of chaps to deal with, these.

Had he known what he was in for, he told himself, he would never have taken over the command. It was crooked work he was up against. Ang Hok and one or two more of the wealthy Chinese shopkeepers' sons were poisoning the troop against him. Well, he had tried kindness and it had not succeeded.

'Now he would try the other thing.

Orientals, so he had heard, usually mistook kindness for weakness. He'd let them see that they could not cold shoulder him out of the command.

'Now understand, all of you,' he said firmly, standing erect in the torchlight, 'I'm going to put up with no more nonsense. You fellows will have to toe the line, and if you haven't got sufficient decency to understand the Scout feeling, I'm going to knock it into you, beginning at our very next meeting. I'm fully qualified. I've been appointed leader of this troop by headquarters, with the approval of my father, the Governor, and I intend to lead.'

'How can you lead?' objected the fat, overfed Ang Hok. 'You do not know nothing about this countly. What would you do suppose' -- he tittered- 'suppose head-hunters attack us?'

'A good deal better than you would, from what I know of you,' said Horace coolly. 'I'm not afraid of any head-hunter breathing, nor is any other Britisher...'

He turned on his heel and disappeared into the darkness....

Horace Agar, sublimely unconscious of what was in store for him, walked home, took his watch over the hen, got to bed, and spent the next few hours in dreamless sleep. Pong, his servant, woke him at the usual hour next morning. He drank the tea that Pong had brought and ate two of the bananas.

Then, still clad in his highly ornamental pyjamas, he went down to the yard, as was his custom, to give the third banana to Yub.

Pong was a Dyak; Yub was an orang-utan. Of the two Horace preferred Yub. He considered him quite as intelligent and nearly as handsome as Pong...'

My students were initially shocked and outraged by the racism of the piece. However I argued that while the racism was essential, they needed to go beyond it to grasp the nature of the project of which the story was a part. That project was of course the construction of a ruling mentality and of the training of cadres to carry out the ruling.

The New Recruit is remarkable in that it acknowledges in dramatic form the tensions inherent with much of British colonialism. Thus there are four social groups within the text: the white ruling class [Horace Agar], the potential rival ruling class, in this case the Chinese Merchants [Ang Hok] plus their 'half-caste' allies [De Sousa], and the 'passive' native Dyaks [Pong].

The propaganda nature of the piece is firstly that it presents a metaphor for British rule as one of trying to mould the disparate and ungrateful groups into a team. The reality was of course that the British attempted to keep the various groups as divided and as hostile to each other as possible. Racism was never incidental to British colonialism. It was the vital means.

The second aspect of the propaganda that is worth commenting on is the justifications offered for British rule. They are briefly that the British are better looking, speak better English, and are natural rulers in that their skin is white and their upper lips are stiff.

It is important to be clear that the passage is not simply racist. We are also dealing here with the doctrine of Social-Darwinism. Moreover while the story of Jack may appear comical and dated, we should remember that in Chomsky's terms it is propaganda aimed at the educated or political classes among British youth and that whole generations of them grew up on this diet and many went forth to the colonies to lead the 'ugly, dumb,' ungrateful and intractable natives. [Incidentally as someone born in Ireland I would like to point out that you have here the explanation of the origin of Irish jokes -- the Irish being a particularly intractable and ungrateful people].

I would like now to attempt to illustrate the concept of ideology by turning to a section of the media which has received very little attention from media experts. I refer to the economic columnists. They constitute a small but powerful section of the Australian intelligentsia and they have I believe played a key role in the construction of what passes for common sense today. They are of course the economic rationalists that Michael Pusey has helped identify for us.[Pusey, 1991]

Long ago Marx said of their predecessors the economists of the 19th century that instead of 'disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize-fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad intent and the evil of apologetic' [Marx, 1974, p25] Today the economic apologists for the free market system are similarly characterised above all by their rampant pragmatism and uncritical acceptance of the status quo. They suggest nothing so much as an inversion of Marx's famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach to the effect that-

'The economists have only changed the world in various ways. The point is however to interpret it.'

Most media teachers are not of course economists and so are wary of tackling the kind of material produced by the economic correspondents. But a little daring and a little digging can produce some gems. Consider the following extract from an article by Brisbane's own Terry McCrann.

Recession brings benefits for corporate mainstream: [Terry McCrann, Courier Mail, Brisbane]

McCrann's article describes how big business ['corporate Australia' ] is doing very well 'despite the recession or perhaps precisely because of it.' Big business has cut costs and rationalised. Now it is emerging from the recession ready to invest and to start making big money. There is a problem however...

'The one big snag is where those investments will be made. We can' t assume it will be in Australia. The money and the jobs will go where it makes sense. States like Victoria are not intrinsically excluded from major manufacturing investments for instance. They can exclude or include themselves. And indeed, big corporate Australia is still spending money through the recession. The big three companies that reported yesterday outlayed some $1.4 billion between them last year. Yet less than half was spent in Australia.'

I have underlined what I believe are the two key phrases, where it makes sense' and the 'we' of 'We can't assume...' The 'sense' in question [or rather unquestioned] is the kind of sense that has given us 11% unemployment. It also attempts to suggest that there is a universal sense which covers all sections of Australian society. In reality what we have here is the sense of the capitalist class.

Similarly the 'we' posits a seamless social unity, an imaginary Australia where social inequalities and tensions are magically dissolved. In this piece and a great deal like it we are confronting a writer who works from and reproduces a set of 'concepts which are 'vital for the system', and yet can be shown to be epistemologically incoherent' [Dews, 1987, p. 190]

McCrann and his ilk are perpetrating, in my opinion the true 'trahaison des clercs' of our time and their work deserves much more scrutiny than it has hitherto received. I acknowledge again that the task is a daunting one for the media teacher but even a little glance can sometimes show that the emperor is very scantily clothed indeed.

To conclude this paper I would like to deal with the concept of power and the way it has been developed within cultural studies by the followers of Foucault. I am thinking particularly of the paper Tony Bennett delivered at the recent cultural studies conference in Toowoomba. There he used Foucault's positive model of power [Foucault, 1975, p. 174] as the philosophical basis for 'policy' approach to cultural studies. According to the Foucault model power is everywhere; in effect it constitutes the social. So there can be no thought of a resistance to power from outside it. There is no Bastille to be stormed for the very act will merely set up another regime of power.

As with the abandonment of ideology so the abandonment of a negative concept of power has direct political consequences. As Dews points out 'If the concept of power is to have any critical import, there must be some principle, force or entity which power 'crushes' or ' subdues' and whose release from this repression is considered desirable' .[Dews, p. 162]

So if we move from a critical stance on the concept of power to a metaphysical one where power is everywhere, then the possibility of an emancipatory transformation of society becomes an impossibility. The way then, by a happy coincidence, becomes open for the most shameless reformism, masking itself as 'policy', suitably enlightened of course.

A similar manoeuvre to the one carried out by Bennett can be seen in the Australian Left Review's recent reception of Pusey's work. The frontline assault on Pusey was led by the Foucauldian Denise Meredyth. Predictably using 'new' [sic] theoretical insights she attempted to discredit Pusey's epistemological basis. The second wave of the assault, again predictably, was carried out by the pragmatists and policy pedlars who advocated, believe it or not, as a solution to Australia' s economic woes another period of austerity and economic rationalism. [see MacLennan, 1992]

In conclusion I feel that for media studies to face the future it must paradoxically be returned to its original impulse. We must conduct the relentless criticism of all there is. To do this we need the concepts that I have attempted to illustrate. We must also base our work on a philosophy which eschews both the entrenched common sense of positivism and the theoretical excess of post-structuralism. The fate of such a project will inevitably be that it will seem a luxury we cannot afford. But in these days the price of what we allegedly can afford has become very high indeed.

This article is an edited version of a paper presented at the Facing the Future: National Media Education Conference held in Perth in October 1992.

Figure 1 [Figure not reproduced] Above: Suspected Viet Cong, photograph by Eddie Adams. Right: Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan decides that the suspect is guilty and passes sentence.

Figure 2 [Figure not reproduced] Left: scenes from The Deer Hunter, starring Robert De Niro, directed by Michael Cimino

Figure 3 [Figure not reproduced] Left: After the battle of Culloden the British troops were ordered to pacify the Scottish Highlands which was a euphemism for kill anyone you find. To avoid the English the Highlanders hide in the hills where many died from exposure or were found and killed by the British.

Figure 4 [Figure not reproduced] Above: The 9 year old girl has ripped off her burning clothes as the children tried to outrace the horror. South Vietnamese forces coming down the road behind them, had called for air support that day, June 1972. Tow Skyraiders had attacked, but one dropped its flaming naplam on South Vietnamese troops and civilians instead. Photo by Huynh Cong 'Nick' Ut.

References

Bhaskar, Roy [1989] Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, Verso, London.

Chomsky, Noam [1991] Deterring Democracy, Verso, New York.

Dews, Peter [1987] Logics of Disintegration: Post Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, Verso, London.

Foucault, Michel [1975] Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Penguin, London.

Herman, E. S. & Chomsky, N. [1988] Manufacturing Consent, Pantheon Books, New York.

MacArthur, Colin [1981] Historical Drama in Bennett, Tony et al. [eds] Popular Television and Film, Open University Press, London, pp 185- 188.

MacLennan, G. Abandoning The Struggle, ALR July 1992, p46.

Marx, Karl, [1974] Capital Vol 1, Progress Publishers, Moscow.

Pusey, Michael [1991] Economic Rationalism In Canberra: A Nation-Building State Changes Its Mind, CUP, Melbourne.

Now that the holidays are over, shall we talk again of unpleasant things? Shall we delve into made-up history, ugly personal and professional associations and vile apologetics on behalf of bloody-minded political leaders? Why, by all means. Let us discuss, for example, Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. Admittedly, these two men are not quite household names. And I wouldn't be writing about them at all were it not for the fact that just before the holidays, our international editor quoted extensively from a British writer who praised Said and Chomsky as credible, reliable experts on the Middle East. Robert Fisk praised them so lavishly, in fact, that some readers might actually be left with the idea that serious people take these two men seriously. It is important to set the record straight.

Fisk would have us believe that Said is merely ``a brilliant Palestinian academic'' at Columbia who is beset by a hostile ``Jewish lobby'' demanding his dismissal for the sin of telling the truth about Palestinian oppression. In fact, the professor is a former confidant of Yasser Arafat and former member of the Palestinian National Council who has spent decades celebrating the most extreme anti-Israeli activity and trumpeting the most virulent propaganda. A professor has every right to be an ideologue, of course. The question being asked these days by Said's critics is whether a professor also has a right to be a fraud. For years Said portrayed his family as victims of Israeli aggression, a claim that provided poignant resonance to his politics. Unfortunately for Said, an Israeli scholar finally decided to look into his story, which collapsed into rubble at his touch. For what Justus Reid Weiner discovered (and reported in a September 1999 article in Commentary magazine) was that Said had not grown up in east Jerusalem, as he'd maintained. He was not driven from his neighborhood with his family before the 1948 war and displaced by Jews. He had not regularly attended St. George's School there, as he nostalgically insisted; indeed, there is no record of his having been enrolled at all. His stories of an idyllic childhood uprooted from ``a beautiful old house'' by Israeli imperialism were, in all important respects, fabrications. His family had lived in luxury in Cairo, and his only knowledge of Jerusalem was based upon visits there. It is not merely professional advocates for Israel who find Said' s phony story disturbing. The student-run Columbia Spectator has published articles critical of the professor, including one (``Said' s Shameful Summer: Rocks and Terrorists,'' Sept. 14, 2000) on his inflammatory behavior during a trip to Lebanon last summer. It seems that Said - remember, Fisk's impeccable source on Mideast affairs - was photographed hurling a rock across the Israeli border in a gesture of contempt. The student commentary noted that Said also met with a leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah, whom Said praised for his ``no bull---- style.'' Which brings us to Chomsky, a linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whom Fisk described as ``one of the most profound philosophers of our age.'' Profound is certainly one way to describe Chomsky's views. Sinister might be another. This is a man who has spent the better part of a long professional life preaching a paranoid vision in which world affairs are manipulated and exploited by dark and powerful forces - mainly corporations in league with U.S. military power, the news media and other mainstream institutions. In Chomsky's warped view, the role and motives of the United States (and Israel) are always suspect. Even this country's long face-off with the Soviet Union, an empire responsible for no fewer than 20 million deaths, is reduced by Chomsky to a squalid economic venture. When the Cold War was over, for example, Chomsky pronounced that it had been about ``the demand that this huge region of the world (the Soviet Union) once again become what it had been - an area of resources, markets and cheap labor for the West.'' Such moral blindness by the professor is not unique. After rising to popular notice for his opposition to the Vietnam War, Chomsky spent years raising doubts about the magnitude of Khmer Rouge crimes in Cambodia. As late as 1979, four years after the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh and other cities, Chomsky was still wondering whether the bloodbath that ensued, in which more than 1 million Cambodians were exterminated, shouldn't be understood as akin to ``France after liberation, where a minimum of 30-40,000 people were massacred within a few months with far less motive for revenge and under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the U.S. war in Cambodia.'' Thus far, Chomsky may sound like nothing more interesting than another fringe extremist of particularly loathsome views. But it gets worse. Indeed, the darkest blight on Chomsky's record is his weird willingness - weird, because he is Jewish - to associate himself with the Holocaust denial movement. Some years ago, he signed a petition on behalf of Robert Faurisson, a notorious French Holocaust denier, which referred to Faurisson's research ``findings'' as if they were worthy of respect. Chomsky also wrote a preface to a book by Faurisson, and published a work of his own with these ``revisionists.'' Chomsky emphatically rejects any suggestion that he shares Faurisson' s views. Still, his dealings with neo-Nazis are intricate and longstanding, and are documented by Werner Cohn in his monograph, Partners in Hate, Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers (http: / / wernercohn.com / Chomsky.html). Cohn, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, reveals that Chomsky has even claimed to discern nothing intrinsically anti-Semitic in Holocaust denial. Meanwhile, as Cohn also points out, Chomsky uses the Third Reich as a club with which to beat Israel. In his book The Fateful Triangle, Chomsky refers 12 times to Hitler. ``In each case,'' Cohn says, ``some Jewish action is said to be like Hitler's or some attribute of the state of Israel or the Zionist movement reminds Chomsky of Hitler.' ' ``Much nonsense is sometimes written about the alleged fallacy of `guilt by association,' '' Cohn observes. ``True, if Chomsky happened to be associated with Faurisson . . . in a tennis club, that particular association would not make him a neo-Nazi. But in fact we saw that Chomsky justified Faurisson's Holocaust-denial, we found Chomsky publishing his own books with neo-Nazi publishers, we saw him writing for a neo- Nazi journal, we saw that the neo-Nazis promote Chomsky's books and tapes together with the works of Joseph Goebbels. It is this complex of anti-Semitic activities and neo-Nazi associations, not his professed ideas alone, that constitutes the Chomsky phenomenon.'' Perhaps it is now time to ponder the ``Fisk phenomenon,'' too. To wit: What do you suppose inspires a journalist to praise the likes of these two men?

Within the larger world, these two are respected

Later Lacan scandalised everyone during a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by his answer to a question from Noam Chomsky. "We think we think with our brains," said Lacan. "But personally I think with my feet. That's the only way I really come into contact with anything solid. I do occasionally think with my forehead, when I bang into something. But I've seen enough electroencephalograms to know there's not the slightest trace of a thought in the brain."

Chomsky concluded that the lecturer must be a madman. Elisabeth Roudinesco' s biography affords an excellent opportunity to ponder whether Chomsky was right about Freud's most celebrated French follower.

Jacques Marie Emile Lacan was a phenomenon of the extraordinary intellectual life of France which grew up during the late 1960s. Until then a virtual nonentity within the international psychoanalytic movement, he was suddenly elevated to the rank of maitre a penser at the age of 65 with the appearance in France of Ecrits, a large volume of his papers on psychoanalytic themes. In these writings Lacan described himself as Freud's true heir, a claim credulously and eagerly accepted by many Parisian intellectuals. But some early readers were puzzled. In the first place Lacan's work appeared to be a chaotic amalgam of the ideas of Hegel, Saussure, Levi-Strauss and many others which bore only a nominal resemblance to the original theories of Freud. In the second place (and it was this which made it difficult to pin down his divergence from Freud) Lacan's writings were frequently opaque to the point of incomprehensibility. Even Lacan's own followers will often readily admit they find large portions of his work quite unintelligible. As a magazine advertisement put it shortly before his death in 1981: "January 1980. There are thousands of people who do not understand Lacan. In 1950 there were only 20 or 30."

Lacan became notorious not only for the obscurity of his prose but also for the shortness of his treatment sessions. Latterly these sessions lasted between three and ten minutes; one patient reportedly paid [pounds]110 for a session, which lasted barely a minute and was conducted at the entrance to his apartment through a door just ajar. Yet though Lacan has been widely denounced as an "intellectual terrorist", his reputation survives and the dustjacket to this book calls him "one of the foremost intellectuals of the century".

Roudinesco herself was once a member of his inner circle and her portrait of Lacan is a kind of embarrassed hagiography, imperfectly disguised as a contribution to psychoanalytic pluralism. But although in this gloomy church of a book she achieves no critical perspective on the Master, sufficient light is cast by the candles she reverently sets before her subject to enable us to make out the human being behind the saintly statue.

Lacan, even by Roudinesco's all but doting account, was a tyrant by the time he was ten, "wilful and domineering, constantly asking [his parents] for food or money or presents on the grounds that he was the eldest". Brought up in an atmosphere of stifling religiosity, he rejected God and set out to become a psychiatrist only to fall under the influence of a series of tyrannical teachers whose vast confidence was in inverse proportion to their actual understanding of human nature.

Lacan seems above all to have been one of those intellectuals who had become completely unhinged from their own emotional life and from ordinary relationships. The tragic predicament of such people is that, driven by feelings of insecurity and emptiness, they mistakenly conclude that intellectual truths can be an adequate substitute for emotional warmth. Craving distinction, and imagining that abstract formulations alone can fill the void they feel within them, they develop a voracious appetite for such "truths", anorexically judging their goodness by the degree of difficulty or abstraction they possess. Like a starving man who compels others to eat the diet of stones he believes has saved him, they give abundantly of their poverty out of a genuine conviction that they are enriching others.

Lacan's own need to feed on the stones of difficult intellectual truth was certainly not satisfied by his reading of Freud. In an intellectual culture that was both anti-German and anti-Semitic, and therefore deeply suspicious of psychoanalysis, he took upon himself the project which others had started - that of creating a distinctively "French" version of psychoanalysis which would reflect the Cartesian spirit and be both more rigorous and more cerebral.

Progressively he pushed psychoanalysis into the realm of almost complete philosophical abstraction, marrying it improbably with ideas drawn from Jakobson, Saussure and Levi-Strauss and declaring that the unconscious was structured like language. This allowed psychoanalysis to be part of one of the most powerful of all 20th-century intellectual currents - structuralism. In 1964 Louis Althusser, already established as a charismatic Marxist ideologist, ended a period of immersion in structuralist thought with an article entitled "Freud and Lacan" in which he paid homage to the latter. The article transformed Lacan's intellectual fortunes almost overnight.

The publication of Ecrits soon followed and from this time his texts were pored over and expounded by Althusser's students and colleagues at the Ecole Normale Superieur. Lacan's Paris seminar gained a sudden access of prestige and became, said one commentator, "a glittering socio-intellectual occasion" - an abstruse secular mass which those who saw themselves as intellectual revolutionaries, and wished to be initiated into the deeper mysteries, felt compelled to attend.

Why did so many submit to Lacan's ideas? First, it must be said, his words did contain all kinds of fractured meanings which, rotated in the kaleidoscope of structuralism, appeared both fascinating and profound. But more important was the power of his personality, first projected in his seminars and then in his writings. Didier Anzieu, a former follower, condemned Lacan for keeping his students tied to an "unending dependence on an idol, a logic or a language, by holding out the promise of fundamental truths to be revealed but always at some further point, and only to those who continued to travel with him".

Jacques Brosse, in his review of Ecrits, wrote: "The whole, let us say so immediately - is overwhelmingly impressive, because it is impenetrable. It is above all to be feared that in the face of an obscurity this aggressive, intellectual snobs, who are masochistic by nature, will forge a success for J Lacan without having read him."

These words come close to the heart of the Lacanian phenomenon. The urge towards self-humiliation in front of an ineffable wisdom is one of the most significant elements in our religious tradition. Mysteries have always been more powerful than explanations, and cerebral, abstract mysteries (laced intermittently if not with sex, at least with its linguistic shadow) are the most potent of all. Lacan, more than any modem intellectual, stumbled on a way of exploiting this aspect of our cultural psychology.

The ultimate emptiness of the mysteries which Lacan expounded in his seminars, and of Lacan's entire intellectual enterprise, is perhaps best conveyed by his last big project - in which, having already reduced human psychology to a series of pseudo-algebraic linguistic equations, he set out to discover the mathematical formulae (or "mathemes") to which he believed all human psychology could be reduced. As equations, ratios, arrows and diagrams of complex knots covered the blackboard in the three-day meeting on mathemes which took place in 1976 many members of Lacan's audience felt guilty at understanding nothing or very little of something that, as one of them put it, "everyone seems to feel is so crucial".

Roudinesco does not report this seminar. But she does record one of the very few observations of Lacan which might be regarded as an insight: "Psychosis is an attempt at rigour. In this sense I would say that I am psychotic. I am psychotic for the simple reason that I have always tried to be rigorous."

It is tempting to accept Lacan's own words at face value and to find in them the definitive answer to Chomsky's question - the lecturer who thought with his feet was indeed a madman.

But it would be better to recognise that Lacan reacted to his personal predicament in the only way he could. Having rejected God and conceived a passionate hatred for his family and his origins, his life's project became that of turning himself into a god before whose ineffable wisdom others would prostrate themselves. To the extent that we have done just this, it is the sanity of our intellectual culture as a whole, and not only that of Lacan, which needs to be questioned.

Richard Webster is the author of "Why Freud Was Wrong: sin, science and psychoanalysis" (HarperCollins, 1995)

Shannon Brownlee; 06-15-1998 Size: 24K Reading Level: 12.

Inside a small, dark booth, 18-month-old Karly Horn sits on her mother Terry's lap. Karly's brown curls bounce each time she turns her head to listen to a woman's recorded voice coming from one side of the booth or the other. "At the bakery, workers will be baking bread," says the voice. Karly turns to her left and listens, her face intent. "On Tuesday morning, the people have going to work," says the voice. Karly turns her head away even before the statement is finished. The lights come on as graduate student Ruth Tincoff opens the door to the booth. She gives the child's curls a pat and says, "Nice work."

Karly and her mother are taking part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, run by psycholinguist Peter Jusczyk, who has spent 25 years probing the linguistic skills of children who have not yet begun to talk. Like most toddlers her age, Karly can utter a few dozen words at most and can string together the occasional two- word sentence, like "More juice" and "Up, Mommy." Yet as Jusczyk and his colleagues have found, she can already recognize that a sentence like "the people have going to work" is ungrammatical. By 18 months of age, most toddlers have somehow learned the rule requiring that any verb ending in -ing must be preceded by the verb to be. "If you had asked me 10 years ago if kids this young could do this," says Jusczyk, "I would have said that's crazy."

Linguists these days are reconsidering a lot of ideas they once considered crazy. Recent findings like Jusczyk's are reshaping the prevailing model of how children acquire language. The dominant theory, put forth by Noam Chomsky, has been that children cannot possibly learn the full rules and structure of languages strictly by imitating what they hear. Instead, nature gives children a head start, wiring them from birth with the ability to acquire their parents' native tongue by fitting what they hear into a pre-existing template for the basic structure shared by all languages. (Similarly, kittens are thought to be hard-wired to learn how to hunt.) Language, writes Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist Steven Pinker, "is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains." Chomsky, a prominent linguist at MIT, hypothesized in the 1950s that children are endowed from birth with "universal grammar," the fundamental rules that are common to all languages, and the ability to apply these rules to the raw material of the speech they hear--without awareness of their underlying logic.

The average preschooler can't tell time, but he has already accumulated a vocabulary of thousands of words--plus (as Pinker writes in his book, The Language Instinct,) "a tacit knowledge of grammar more sophisticated than the thickest style manual." Within a few months of birth, children have already begun memorizing words without knowing their meaning. The question that has absorbed--and sometimes divided--linguists is whether children need a special language faculty to do this or instead can infer the abstract rules of grammar from the sentences they hear, using the same mental skills that allow them to recognize faces or master arithmetic.

The debate over how much of language is already vested in a child at birth is far from settled, but new linguistic research already is transforming traditional views of how the human brain works and how language evolved. "This debate has completely changed the way we view the brain," says Elissa Newport, a psycholinguist at the University of Rochester in New York. Far from being an orderly, computerlike machine that methodically calculates step by step, the brain is now seen as working more like a beehive, its swarm of interconnected neurons sending signals back and forth at lightning speed. An infant's brain, it turns out, is capable of taking in enormous amounts of information and finding the regular patterns contained within it. Geneticists and linguists recently have begun to challenge the common-sense assumption that intelligence and language are inextricably linked, through research on a rare genetic disorder called Williams syndrome, which can seriously impair cognition while leaving language nearly intact (box, Page 52). Increasingly sophisticated technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging are allowing researchers to watch the brain in action, revealing that language literally sculpts and reorganizes the connections within it as a child grows.

The path leading to language begins even before birth, when a developing fetus is bathed in the muffled sound of its mother's voice in the womb. Newborn babies prefer their mothers' voices over those of their fathers or other women, and researchers recently have found that when very young babies hear a recording of their mothers' native language, they will suck more vigorously on a pacifier than when they hear a recording of another tongue.

At first, infants respond only to the prosody--the cadence, rhythm, and pitch--of their mothers' speech, not the words. But soon enough they home in on the actual sounds that are typical of their parents' language. Every language uses a different assortment of sounds, called phonemes, which combine to make syllables. (In English, for example, the consonant sound "b" and the vowel sound "a" are both phonemes, which combine for the syllable ba, as in banana.) To an adult, simply perceiving, much less pronouncing, the phonemes of a foreign language can seem impossible. In English, the p of pat is "aspirated," or produced with a puff of air; the p of spot or tap is unaspirated. In English, the two p's are considered the same; therefore it is hard for English speakers to recognize that in many other languages the two p's are two different phonemes. Japanese speakers have trouble distinguishing between the "l" and "r" sounds of English, since in Japanese they don't count as separate sounds.

Polyglot tots. Infants can perceive the entire range of phonemes, according to Janet Werker and Richard Tees, psychologists at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Werker and Tees found that the brains of 4-month-old babies respond to every phoneme uttered in languages as diverse as Hindi and Nthlakampx, a Northwest American Indian language containing numerous consonant combinations that can sound to a nonnative speaker like a drop of water hitting an empty bucket. By the time babies are 10 months to a year old, however, they have begun to focus on the distinctions among phonemes of their native language and to ignore the differences among foreign sounds. Children don't lose the ability to distinguish the sounds of a foreign language; they simply don't pay attention to them. This allows them to learn more quickly the syllables and words of their native tongue.

An infant's next step is learning to fish out individual words from the nonstop stream of sound that makes up ordinary speech. Finding the boundaries between words is a daunting task, because people don' t pause . . . between . . . words . . . when . . . they speak. Yet children begin to note word boundaries by the time they are 8 months old, even though they have no concept of what most words mean. Last year, Jusczyk and his colleagues reported results of an experiment in which they let 8-month-old babies listen at home to recorded stories filled with unusual words, like hornbill and python. Two weeks later, the researchers tested the babies with two lists of words, one composed of words they had already heard in the stories, the other of new unusual words that weren't in the stories. The infants listened, on average, to the familiar list for a second longer than to the list of novel words.

The cadence of language is a baby's first clue to word boundaries. In most English words, the first syllable is accented. This is especially noticeable in words known in poetry as trochees--two-syllable words stressed on the first syllable--which parents repeat to young children (BA-by, DOG-gie, MOM-my). At 6 months, American babies pay equal amounts of attention to words with different stress patterns, like gi-RAFFE or TI-ger. By 9 months, however, they have heard enough of the typical first-syllable-stress pattern of English to prefer listening to trochees, a predilection that will show up later, when they start uttering their first words and mispronouncing giraffe as raff and banana as nana. At 30 months, children can easily repeat the phrase "TOM-my KISS-ed the MON-key," because it preserves the typical English pattern, but they will leave out the the when asked to repeat "Tommy patted the monkey." Researchers are now testing whether French babies prefer words with a second-syllable stress--words like be-RET or ma-MAN.

Decoding patterns. Most adults could not imagine making speedy progress toward memorizing words in a foreign language just by listening to somebody talk on the telephone. That is basically what 8-month-old babies can do, according to a provocative study published in 1996 by the University of Rochester's Newport and her colleagues, Jenny Saffran and Richard Aslin. They reported that babies can remember words by listening for patterns of syllables that occur together with statistical regularity.

The researchers created a miniature artificial language, which consisted of a handful of three-syllable nonsense words constructed from 11 different syllables. The babies heard a computer-generated voice repeating these words in random order in a monotone for two minutes. What they heard went something like "bidakupadotigolabubidaku." Bidaku, in this case, is a word. With no cadence or pauses, the only way the babies could learn individual words was by remembering how often certain syllables were uttered together. When the researchers tested the babies a few minutes later, they found that the infants recognized pairs of syllables that had occurred together consistently on the recording, such as bida. They did not recognize a pair like kupa, which was a rarer combination that crossed the boundaries of two words. In the past, psychologists never imagined that young infants had the mental capacity to make these sorts of inferences. "We were pretty surprised we could get this result with babies, and with only brief exposure, " says Newport. "Real language, of course, is much more complicated, but the exposure is vast."

Learning words is one thing; learning the abstract rules of grammar is another. When Noam Chomsky first voiced his idea that language is hard-wired in the brain, he didn't have the benefit of the current revolution in cognitive science, which has begun to pry open the human mind with sophisticated psychological experiments and new computer models. Until recently, linguists could only parse languages and marvel at how quickly children master their abstract rules, which give every human being who can speak (or sign) the power to express an infinite number of ideas from a finite number of words.

There also are a finite number of ways that languages construct sentences. As Chomsky once put it, from a Martian's-eye view, everybody on Earth speaks a single tongue that has thousands of mutually unintelligible dialects. For instance, all people make sentences from noun phrases, like "The quick brown fox," and verb phrases, like "jumped over the fence." And virtually all of the world's 6,000 or so languages allow phrases to be moved around in a sentence to form questions, relative clauses, and passive constructions.

Statistical wizards. Chomsky posited that children were born knowing these and a handful of other basic laws of language and that they learn their parents' native tongue with the help of a "language acquisition device," preprogrammed circuits in the brain. Findings like Newport' s are suggesting to some researchers that perhaps children can use statistical regularities to extract not only individual words from what they hear but also the rules for cobbling words together into sentences.

This idea is shared by computational linguists, who have designed computer models called artificial neural networks that are very simplified versions of the brain and that can "learn" some aspects of language. Artificial neural networks mimic the way that nerve cells, or neurons, inside a brain are hooked up. The result is a device that shares some basic properties with the brain and that can accomplish some linguistic feats that real children perform. For example, a neural network can make general categories out of a jumble of words coming in, just as a child learns that certain kinds of words refer to objects while others refer to actions. Nobody has to teach kids that words like dog and telephone are nouns, while go and jump are verbs; the way they use such words in sentences demonstrates that they know the difference. Neural networks also can learn some aspects of the meaning of words, and they can infer some rules of syntax, or word order. Therefore, a computer that was fed English sentences would be able to produce a phrase like "Johnny ate fish," rather than "Johnny fish ate," which is correct in Japanese. These computer models even make some of the same mistakes that real children do, says Mark Seidenberg, a computational linguist at the University of Southern California. A neural network designed by a student of Seidenberg's to learn to conjugate verbs sometimes issued sentences like "He jumped me the ball," which any parent will recognize as the kind of error that could have come from the mouths of babes.

But neural networks have yet to come close to the computation power of a toddler. Ninety percent of the sentences uttered by the average 3-year-old are grammatically correct. The mistakes they do make are rarely random but rather the result of following the rules of grammar with excessive zeal. There is no logical reason for being able to say "I batted the ball" but not "I holded the rabbit," except that about 180 of the most commonly used English verbs are conjugated irregularly.

Yet for all of grammar's seeming illogic, toddlers' brains may be able to spot clues in the sentences they hear that help them learn grammatical rules, just as they use statistical regularities to find word boundaries. One such clue is the little bits of language called grammatical morphemes, which among other things tell a listener whether a word is being used as noun or as a verb. The, for instance, signals that a noun will soon follow, while the suffix ion also identifies a word as a noun, as in vibration. Psycholinguist LouAnn Gerken of the University of Arizona recently reported that toddlers know what grammatical morphemes signify before they actually use them. She tested this by asking 2-year-olds a series of questions in which the grammatical morphemes were replaced with other words. When asked to "Find the dog for me," for example, 85 percent of children in her study could point to the right animal in a picture. But when the question was "Find was dog for me," they pointed to the dog 55 percent of the time. "Find gub dog for me," and it dropped to 40 percent.

Fast mapping. Children may be noticing grammatical morphemes when they are as young as 10 months and have just begun making connections between words and their definitions. Gerken recently found that infants' brain waves change when they are listening to stories in which grammatical morphemes are replaced with other words, suggesting they begin picking up grammar even before they know what sentences mean.

Such linguistic leaps come as a baby's brain is humming with activity. Within the first few months of life, a baby's neurons will forge 1, 000 trillion connections, an increase of 20-fold from birth. Neurobiologists once assumed that the wiring in a baby's brain was set at birth. After that, the brain, like legs and noses, just grew bigger. That view has been demolished, says Anne Fernald, a psycholinguist at Stanford University, "now that we can eavesdrop on the brain." Images made using the brain-scanning technique positron emission tomography have revealed, for instance, that when a baby is 8 or 9 months old, the part of the brain that stores and indexes many kinds of memory becomes fully functional. This is precisely when babies appear to be able to attach meaning to words.

Other leaps in a child's linguistic prowess also coincide with remarkable changes in the brain. For instance, an adult listener can recognize eleph as elephant within about 400 milliseconds, an ability called "fast mapping" that demands that the brain process speech sounds with phenomenal speed. "To understand strings of words, you have to identify individual words rapidly," says Fernald. She and her colleagues have found that around 15 months of age, a child needs more than a second to recognize even a familiar word, like baby. At 18 months, the child can get the picture slightly before the word is ending. At 24 months, she knows the word in a mere 600 milliseconds, as soon as the syllable bay has been uttered.

Fast mapping takes off at the same moment as a dramatic reorganization of the child's brain, in which language-related operations, particularly grammar, shift from both sides of the brain into the left hemisphere. Most adult brains are lopsided when it comes to language, processing grammar almost entirely in the left temporal lobe, just over the left ear. Infants and toddlers, however, treat language in both hemispheres, according to Debra Mills, at the University of California--San Diego, and Helen Neville, at the University of Oregon. Mills and Neville stuck electrodes to toddlers' heads to find that processing of words that serve special grammatical functions, such as prepositions, conjunctions, and articles, begins to shift into the left side around the end of the third year.

From then on, the two hemispheres assume different job descriptions. The right temporal lobe continues to perform spatial tasks, such as following the trajectory of a baseball and predicting where it will land. It also pays attention to the emotional information contained in the cadence and pitch of speech. Both hemispheres know the meanings of many words, but the left temporal lobe holds the key to grammar.

This division is maintained even when the language is signed, not spoken. Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima, a wife and husband team at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., recently demonstrated this fact by studying deaf people who were lifelong signers of American Sign Language and who also had suffered a stroke in specific areas of the brain. The researchers found, predictably, that signers with damage to the right hemisphere had great difficulty with tasks involving spatial perception, such as copying a drawing of a geometric pattern. What was surprising was that right hemisphere damage did not hinder their fluency in ASL, which relies on movements of the hands and body in space. It was signers with damage to the left hemisphere who found they could no longer express themselves in ASL or understand it. Some had trouble producing the specific facial expressions that convey grammatical information in ASL. It is not just speech that' s being processed in the left hemisphere, says MIT's Pinker, "or movements of the mouth, but abstract language."

Nobody knows why the left hemisphere got the job of processing language, but linguists are beginning to surmise that languages are constructed the way they are in part because the human brain is not infinitely capable of all kinds of computation. "We are starting to see how the universals among languages could arise out of constraints on how the brain computes and how children learn," says Johns Hopkins linguist Paul Smolensky. For instance, the vast majority of the world's languages favor syllables that end in a vowel, though English is an exception. (Think of a native Italian speaking English and adding vowels where there are none.) That's because it is easier for the auditory centers of the brain to perceive differences between consonants when they come before a vowel than when they come after. Human brains can easily recognize pad, bad, and dad as three different words; it is much harder to distinguish tab, tap, and tad. As languages around the world were evolving, they were pulled along paths that minimize ambiguity among sounds.

Birth of a language. Linguists have never had the chance to study a spoken language as it is being constructed, but they have been given the opportunity to observe a new sign language in the making in Nicaragua. When the Sandinistas came to power in 1979, they established schools where deaf people came together for the first time. Many of the pupils had never met another deaf person, and their only means of communication at first was the expressive but largely unstructured pantomime each had invented at home with their hearing families. Soon the pupils began to pool their makeshift gestures into a system that is similar to spoken pidgin, the form of communication that springs up in places where people speaking mutually unintelligible tongues come together. The next generation of deaf Nicaraguan children, says Judy Kegl, a psycholinguist at Rutgers University, in Newark, N.J., has done it one better, transforming the pidgin sign into a full-blown language complete with regular grammar. The birth of Nicaraguan sign, many linguists believe, mirrors the evolution of all languages. Without conscious effort, deaf Nicaraguan children have created a sign that is now fluid and compact, and which contains standardized rules that allow them to express abstract ideas without circumlocutions. It can indicate past and future, denote whether an action was performed once or repeatedly, and show who did what to whom, allowing its users to joke, recite poetry, and tell their life stories.

Linguists have a long road ahead of them before they can say exactly how a child goes from babbling to banter, or what the very first languages might have been like, or how the brain transforms vague thoughts into concrete words that sometimes fly out of our mouths before we can stop them. But already, some practical conclusions are falling out of the new research. For example, two recent studies show that the size of toddlers' vocabularies depends in large measure on how much their mothers talk to them. At 20 months, according to a study by Janellen Huttenlocher of the University of Chicago, the children of talkative mothers had 131 more words in their vocabularies than children whose mothers were more taciturn. By age 2, the gap had widened to 295 words.

In other words, children need input and they need it early, says Newport. Parking a toddler in front of the television won't improve vocabulary, probably because kids need real human interaction to attach meaning to words. Hearing more than one language in infancy makes it easier for a child to hear the distinctions between phonemes of more than one language later on.

Newport and other linguists have discovered in recent years that the window of opportunity for acquiring language begins to close around age 6, and the gap narrows with each additional candle on the birthday cake. Children who do not learn a language by puberty will never be fluent in any tongue. That means that profoundly deaf children should be exposed to sign language as early as possible, says Newport. If their parents are hearing, they should learn to sign. And schools might rethink the practice of waiting to teach foreign languages until kids are nearly grown and the window on native command of a second language is almost shut.

Linguists don't yet know how much of grammar children are able to absorb simply by listening. And they have only begun to parse the genes or accidents of brain wiring that might give rise, as Pinker puts it, to the poet, the raconteur, or an Alexander Haig, a Mrs. Malaprop. What is certain is that language is one of the great wonders of the natural world, and linguists are still being astonished by its complexity and its power to shape the brain. Human beings, says Kegl, "show an incredible enthusiasm for discourse." Maybe what is most innate about language is the passion to communicate.

Chimpanzees cannot talk, not least because their larynx ­ as in all other mammals except us ­ is high in the throat and serves as a valve to stop water running down their windpipes as they drink. Only humans have a larynx slung low, where it can resonate (the voice box), to produce something more than a grunt or a miaow. So those who have investigated the putative linguistic skills of chimps, beginning with Robert Yerkes in the United States in the 1920s, have typically tried to teach them American sign language.

The results have often been impressive. In particular, in the late 1970s, Allen and Beatrix Gardner claimed that their protégé Washoe knew more than 100 signs and could string them together into simple sentences. Here, surely, was primordial language skill. Yet Herbert Terrace, of Columbia University, New York, an erstwhile supporter of the Gardners, now says that Washoe and her fellow linguists merely picked up cues from their investigators, like clever Hans, the famous counting horse.

But there is a more fundamental issue, first articulated properly by Noam Chomsky, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the 1960s. B F Skinner, who carried the behaviourist flag through the middle decades of this century, argued that people learn language in much the same way that circus elephants learn to pirouette: they associate particular sounds with particular circumstances and are rewarded when they get the connection right. Language, in short, is simply a special application of general mental ability.

But this "model", said Chomsky, does not fit the facts. Children learn their own languages within a few years ­ Cantonese, Geordie or Morningside, it makes no difference ­ at a time when their general cognitive skills are primitive; they cannot learn arithmetic, for example, at that stage of life. They learn the local language, furthermore, with minimal cues: from almost random sentences coming from all angles, they infer the extraordinarily subtle underlying rules ­ imperatives, subjunctives, the whole shooting match.

Although these rules are not made explicit until secondary school, when children already speak perfectly, by the time children do learn to think clearly, they also lose the ability to pick up new languages. So language, said Chomsky, cannot simply be a subset of general learning. Children must be born with a customised "language module" in their brains in which rules of grammar are already embedded and into which vocabulary is slotted. Further, all the many thousands of human languages in the end prove to have a similar "deep structure" ­ subject, object, verb, conditional clauses; this grammar is universal.

Many, since, have offered elaborations. Terence Deacon, in his admirable The Symbolic Species, suggested that languages and brains have co- evolved, with the languages self-selected for user-friendliness. Chomsky himself refuses to acknowledge that his putative language module could have evolved at all by Darwinian means, though many feel that this position is downright perverse. All in all, though, Chomsky's view holds the day: language skill, whatever it is, seems to be special. It must have evolved (pace Chomsky) by borrowing pre-existing, more primitive skills. But human beings don't and can't learn language simply by applying a general ability to think to the particularities of words.

Many animals produce sounds of their own that symbolise aspects of the world at large and are effectively "words". They may learn human words, too. The mahouts of Asia expect their elephants to learn scores of commands in the course of their working lives. The Rumbaughs' star bonobo, Panbanisha, apparently knows thousands of words. Clever animals, such as bonobos, can join words together, apparently expressing novel thoughts. But virtually everything that animals do in the way of language can be explained in behaviourist terms. They learn to associate sounds or signs with objects and actions, just as a dog associates the rattle of the lead with walkies; and some, such as the Gardners' chimp Washoe, will shuffle combinations of signs until they receive the required reward, as in "drink, fruit, want" ­ which looks like a sentence of a kind.

Animals seem, in short, to be doing precisely the thing that Chomsky said humans do not do: applying general cognitive skills to collections of words. The putative language module, with syntax already built in and allowing infinite flexibility, is lacking ­ one of the few human skills that really does seem to be exclusively human. Animals cannot speak like us; it's just that the clever ones can use other skills to produce a plausible imitation.

Such ingenuity is impressive, however, even if it is not true language; and this raises another issue. René Descartes proposed in the 17th century that thinking depends on words, and since animals don't verbalise, they can't think. Philosophers, scientists and slaughtermen went on believing him for the next 300 years, vindicating appalling cruelties by impeccable Gallic logic.

Science needs measurement, and since we cannot measure the thoughts of animals ­ if they have any ­ we must be content to measure their behaviour. So the behaviourists set out to explain what animals do, treating them as if they were simply automata with not a thought in their heads.

Not till the 1980s was it finally proved beyond doubt that although a clockwork toy may emulate a worm or do a fair imitation of an ant, it could never match a pig or a chimpanzee. Such creatures really do work things out and make decisions, guided by their emotions, just as David Hume suggested we do. The much-despised anthropomorphism could thus give deeper insight than the apparent rigours of behaviourism. The task, as Terrace said, circa 1984, "is to explain how animals think without human language".

Today serious biologists have growing respect for the thoughts and emotional depths of animals. At the very least, the Atlantan bonobos must reinforce this respect. To some, too, including me, it has long been self-evident that we should afford "rights" to animals. Each individual agrees to take seriously the things that are important to other individuals, and "rights" is a shorthand way of expressing this general principle.

Some moral philosophers suggest that there can be no rights without responsibilities; but such conditional clauses are purely arbitrary ­ written in to enable philosophers to put their cats out at night with a clear conscience. We should be prepared to afford "rights" to others without any quid pro quo. We should be good to chimpanzees not because they might resemble us but simply because they are chimpanzees and, as such, like dogs or pigs or anything else that breathes and is aware, should be deemed worthy of respect.

ADDED MATERIAL

Colin Tudge is a research fellow at the Centre for Philosophy at the London School of Economics

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.

Contrary to the implications of Christopher F. Chabris's "IQ Since The Bell Curve" [August], sciences--including psychology--operate and progress in more than one way. Mr. Chabris focuses on the study of intelligence as it has been carried out over the past century by psychometricians--psychologists interested in the measurement of abilities and traits. His evidence and conclusions follow from the psychometrician' s tools of the trade: paper-and-pencil tests, delivered in settings remote from daily practice (typically classrooms or testing laboratories), often timed, and loaded heavily with items that are linguistic, logical, or spatial in nature. Individuals trained in this tradition--many of whom make a living from administering such batteries of tests-- are reluctant to consider alternative definitions or assessments of intellect. Often reviewing the data from a scientifically conservative perspective, they tend to emphasize the unitary (rather than the pluralistic) aspects of intellect, and the hereditary (rather than the environmental) explanations of individual differences in intelligence.

Fortunately, over the last two decades, the study of intelligence has become much more varied in terms of definitions, approaches, sources of data, and tentative conclusions. Mr. Chabris mentions my theory of multiple intelligences, developed over the last twenty years. He does not, however, mention that my theory grew out of an entirely different source of data. Rather than creating and administering short- answer tests, I surveyed evidence from a wide range of sciences. Abilities gained credibility as candidate intelligences to the extent that they fulfilled various criteria: the presence of areas in the brain that serve particular functions and processes; the existence of people, like prodigies or savants, who exhibit particular strengths or weaknesses in different areas; relevant evidence from evolutionary psychology, cross-cultural experiences, and psychological experimentation. My initial list of intelligences included seven: the language, logic, and spatial abilities recognized by other psychologists, and also musical, bodily, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences. After a decade of further research in this area, I believe that there is firm evidence for an eighth, or naturalist's, intelligence, and some evidence for a ninth, or existential, intelligence.

From the perspective of most psychometricians, I have committed two cardinal sins. First, I did not define my intelligences on the basis of test correlations, but rather out of a synthesis of information and data gleaned from the biological, cultural, and psychological sciences. This is a perfectly valid scientific approach--it just runs counter to what American psychometricians have done.

My second sin is hesitancy about creating a battery of tests of different intelligences. This is not a hesitation on principle. I am interested in the nature of the different intelligences, and I am curious about the extent to which they do or do not correlate with one another. Contrary to what Mr. Chabris maintains, I have actually been involved in research that has sought to assess the intelligences of young children; three volumes on this research, Project Spectrum, will shortly be issued by Teachers' College Press. Nor do I, nor do individuals associated with me, when asked how abilities in the various intelligences are measured, respond that "we don't measure them," as Mr. Chabris claims. We are, however, hesitant to endorse instruments that we feel are inadequate.

Assessments of multiple intelligences should fulfill two criteria. First, they need to be direct and as natural as possible--the assessment should not occur through a paper-and-pencil instrument. Thus, a good measure of interpersonal intelligence should examine how individuals actually interact with and evaluate one another--not how one answers questions about such encounters. Second, they need to survey an intelligence in some detail. Whether we are dealing with spatial, musical, or interpersonal abilities, each of these has many facets, and we should not be satisfied with a one-shot assessment of a single facet.

Personally, I have seen my theory of multiple intelligences misused by teachers who apply quick-and-dirty assessments and then label children as "spatial but not linguistic" or vice versa. On political grounds, I am disturbed by such maneuvers. However, on scientific grounds, it will certainly be possible some day to assess the various intelligences and to determine the extent of their correlations and also the heritability of each of them.

Graduate School of Education Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts

Claude S. Fischer:

Christopher F. Chabris's defense of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve reminded me of Senator George Aiken's 1966 proposal on the Vietnam war: "Declare victory and withdraw." Mr. Chabris' s declaration of victory on behalf of Herrnstein and Murray includes errors small and large. On the small side--but of personal importance to my colleagues and me--Charles Murray was trained in political science, not in sociology.

On the more substantial side, there is, for example, Mr. Chabris' s misrepresentation of the report by the American Psychological Association' s special panel on The Bell Carve, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, " which appeared in the February 1996 issue of the American Psychologist. The committee did not "[back] all of the book's main claims," as Mr. Chabris asserts. Despite its strained effort to be fair to all sides, several of the panel's conclusions undercut central assertions in The Bell Curve. Here are a few examples:

* Psychometric intelligence appears as only one of a great many factors that influence social outcomes.

* Intelligence-test scores ... account for about a quarter of the variance [in school achievement]. They are somewhat lower for job performance, and very low for negatively valued outcomes such as criminality.

* Schooling itself changes mental abilities, including those abilities measured on psychometric tests. This is obvious for tests like the SAT, ... but it is almost equally true of intelligence tests themselves.

* It is clear ... that ... differences [in IQ scores among racial groups]--whatever their origin--are well within the range of effect sizes that can be produced by environmental factors.

And on the theory that black/white differences are due to genetics: "There is not much direct evidence on this point, but what little there is fails to support the genetic hypotheses."

Another example of Mr. Chabris's errors is his treatment of the book I and five other sociologists wrote, Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (Princeton, 1996). Although he credits us with "hard work," he understates our findings. We not only show, with the same survey data Herrnstein and Murray used, that social circumstances outweigh test scores in predicting life outcomes, we also show that the so-called intelligence test used in that survey was basically a measure of school performance (and thus heavily determined by teaching) and that in no way could intelligence explain historical changes in, nor cross-national patterns of, economic inequality. Furthermore, Mr. Chabris implies that there was only one other critical "scientific" response to The Bell Carve besides our own. This is incorrect. There are at least two other monograph-length studies that refute The Bell Curve--Dickens et al., Does the Bell Curve Ring True? (Brookings); and Knapp et al., The Assault on Equality (Praeger, 1996)--as well as many scholarly articles that do the same.

Mr. Chabris retreats, finally, to asking how anybody could challenge Herrnstein and Murray's "basic claim ... that smart people [i.e., high scorers on school achievement tests] do better than dumb people." Well, if that were all The Bell Curve was about, then the brouhaha really was a "phony controversy," as Mr. Chabris claims. But this is disingenuous. The reason The Bell Curve made a splash lies in its assertions that differences in intelligence explain growing economic inequality--they do not; that differences in intelligence explain racial inequality--they do not; that intelligence, because it is genetic in origin, is largely immutable--it is not; and that, therefore, there is nothing that can or ought to be done to ameliorate inequality-- also, as history clearly shows, untrue.

Department of Sociology University of California Berkeley, California

James R. Flynn:

Christopher F. Chabris says much that needs saying. I have little sympathy with those who reject the plausibility of a concept of general intelligence, or deny that IQ often measures something that behaves much like it. And I have no sympathy with those who wish to discourage research on intelligence of the kind done by Arthur R. Jensen, and a positive antipathy to those instrumental in suppressing Christopher Brand's book on intelligence. Still, I have two reservations.

First, the "Flynn effect," or massive IQ gains over time, causes more problems for IQ-based theories of intelligence than Mr. Chabris acknowledges. No doubt there have been tremendous environmental changes over the past 150 years. But it is not clear what tremendous change occurred between 1972 and 1982 in Holland to boost IQ scores on Raven' s Matrices Test (a good measure of general intelligence, or g) the equivalent of eight IQ points. The notion that IQ gains over the last 80 years are intelligence gains would mean that in 1918 a majority of people suffered from mental retardation (see my essay, "IQ Gains Over Time," in The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Matters, edited by Ulric Neisser).

Second, Mr. Chabris's moderate account of The Bell Curve robs it of much of its dramatic impact. The meritocracy thesis of Herrnstein and Murray says nothing less than this: that every step toward the abolition of privilege and inequality of opportunity takes us toward a frightful semi-caste society--one in which genes for intelligence are so correlated with class that lower-class children have virtually no hope of bettering their lot. That should depress Right and Left alike. I have attempted to show that genes for IQ are no more correlated with class today than they were 50 years ago, and that evolution toward such a society is unlikely rather than certain (see my article, "Group Differences: Is the Good Society Impossible?," Journal of Biosocial Science, 1996). The Bell Curve posits an America with both a huge and hopeless underclass and an elite class so potent as to constitute a threat to our democracy. How the children of these two classes are to compete on a basis of equality is not explained.

University of Otago Dunedin, New Zealand

Jack Kaplan:

The argument that IQ tests are valid measures of intelligence rests ultimately on the mathematically complex subject of statistical factor analysis, and therefore cannot be fully understood by people who lack technical training. But common sense should convince any reasonable person that something is fishy.

A typical intelligence test asks a variety of questions, many of which are of the type one learns to answer in school. For example, if you take a Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale test, probably the leading IQ test currently in use, you will be asked to define words; to answer factual and comprehension questions; and to do simple arithmetic problems.

An old version of the test, no longer in use, includes the following questions: what is the meaning of the word "reluctant"?; name three kinds of blood vessels; why does the state require people to get a license before they get married?; a coat that normally sells for $600 is reduced by 15 percent during a sale--what is the price of the coat?

Maybe I am missing something, but it seems perfectly plain to me that the likelihood of answering such questions correctly is heavily affected by, among other things, the quality and quantity of the education one receives as well as by one's intelligence.

In fact, it seems obvious to me that how well a person does on an IQ test depends on a variety of factors besides intelligence: education, reading habits, experience with and attitudes toward taking tests, upbringing, and mental and physical health, to name a few.

Intelligence is difficult to define precisely, but we can all agree that it refers to intellectual ability as opposed to intellectual achievement. No one, so far as I know, thinks that physical ability can be reliably measured by having people tested on a variety of physical skills--running, jumping, swimming, doing push-ups, etc.--and then doing a factor analysis of the results. Why should intellectual ability be any different? Count me among those who regard the study of intelligence as more pseudo-science than science.

Department of Mathematics Quinnipiac College Hamden, Connecticut

Kelly P. Ambrose:

Christopher F. Chabris succinctly restates the case that g, the general intelligence factor, exists and is measurable, but, like so many who have addressed this topic, he does not appear to appreciate the limited significance of that finding. For perspective, one merely has to turn a few more pages in the same issue to Joseph Epstein's article, "The Old People's Socialist League," in which one finds George Orwell's line that "there are certain things one has to be an intellectual to believe, since no ordinary man could be so stupid."

Mr. Chabris describes the Herrnstein and Murray theory that America is becoming "increasingly meritocratic," and without blinking concurs that this would cause "wealth and other positive social outcomes" to be "distributed more and more according to people's intelligence." The presumption is that intelligence can be the supreme coin of a merit market. Yet nowhere is this so, not even in academia.

In The Bell Curve, Murray and Herrnstein, perhaps inspired by some of the recent computer-industry fortunes, proposed that the time has come when high SAT's will be the path to and the justification for earthly power, a new order to be sustained by mating trends. Consider how perfectly this vision conforms to a "revenge-of-the-nerds" scenario, for in it not only do those with prodigious IQ's rate respect, but they get the girls! Will they also be the most popular kids in high school?

Efforts to deny g simply enable IQ theorists to put off the day when they must finally answer the question: so what? It must be understood that what is being measured when one measures g is a gradation of consciousness, and that human consciousness is a gift of such enormity that any difference between some g and a lot of g is relatively minor: the "dumb people" Mr. Chabris writes of actually possess a greatness in the scheme of things that the term "dumb people" does not quite capture.

The study of g ought never to have as its goal a social, economic, or--God help us!--political exaltation of intelligence. It should, rather, seek to place its abstractions in the real world and to increase the capacity of individuals to wrench, from whatever level of g they have, the fullest possible enjoyment of the banquet set before us.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Jeff Hittenberger:

In "IQ Since The Bell Curve" Christopher F. Chabris writes:

The most basic claim put forth by Herrnstein and Murray was that smart people do better than dumb people. What is so troubling about that? We rarely encounter an argument over the fact that beautiful people do better than ugly people, or tall people do better than short ones, though each of these propositions is also true.

What a simple world Mr. Chabris and his heroes inhabit. Just as people can be classified by a unilinear measure of height, so they can be classified by unilinear measures of intelligence and beauty- -with the tall, smart, beautiful "doing better" than the poor, short, dumb, and ugly.

Though Mr. Chabris does not mention the word "eugenics," he captures its spirit. He has a very poor knowledge of history if he does not understand the revulsion this kind of argument creates.

Monterey County, California

Ian J. Deary, Peter G. Caryl, and Elizabeth J. Austin:

Christopher F. Chabris's well-informed article is in many ways welcome. We believe that it might help in the public understanding of a much misunderstood and maligned area of research and hope that the article will be read widely. For those of us who are researchers in the field, however, Mr. Chabris offers a doleful prediction: though we win all the intellectual battles, we shall lose the war. Why? Because, he suggests, up-and-coming researchers are dissuaded from studying intelligence differences by the bad press the field has received from a series of high-profile attacks, including Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man and the responses to Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve.

But we think the propaganda war on intelligence differences need not be won; in fact, one should not even engage in the contest, for two reasons. First, it takes place outside the realm of scientific discourse; its weapon is rhetoric and its shield is public ignorance. Winning such a war would not equate with being correct, which is all that should matter in science.

Second, within the relevant scientific community, the debate over the importance of traditional-style research into human intelligence differences is nonexistent. The authoritative and disinterested report of the American Psychological Association, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns," concluded that: (1) the psychometric structure of intelligence differences attracts broad scientific agreement; (2) intelligence differences are highly stable, moderately heritable, and predictive of important life outcomes; and (3) intelligence differences are beginning to be understood in terms of the brain's biology.

Such a consensus on the facts will go much further in convincing new researchers to work in the area than will locking horns with IQ' s detractors by writing impassioned articles in intellectual magazines. Perhaps Mr. Chabris's article is itself a sign of this consensus, since he is an outsider who has been won over to the value of the area after having apprised himself of the facts.

Department of Psychology University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Christopher Brand:

I was grateful for Christopher F. Chabris's kind reference to what he calls my "worthy" book, The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications, and his detailing of its publishing--or should I say de-publishing?--history. The book was first published in the United Kingdom in 1996 and then was withdrawn, as Mr. Chabris puts it,

after negative media coverage and a frenzy reminiscent of thee 1970's. The publisher, Wiley, also cancelled the book's publication in the United States before any copies went on sale. Brand has since been fired from his teaching position at Edinburgh University, and has yet to find another publisher.

In his article, Mr. Chabris asks whether the psychometricians in academia could have done more to make their case better known. The question is a good one, especially since even new books on intelligence by Arthur R. Jensen, Richard Lynn, J. Philippe Rushton, Michael Levin, Gunnar Adler-Karlsson, and the late Hans Eysenck are available mainly from mail-order houses, and for the most part the general public has access to them only via libraries.

The problem has not, in fact, been a lack of publication, even in prestigious journals. Let me give a brief list here: Tom Bouchard' s study of intelligence in separated identical twins, finding 75-percent similarity, was published in Science in 1990; the work of my Edinburgh colleagues and myself on the essential connection of IQ with "mental- intake speed" was put to readers of Behavioral & Brain Sciences and the Lancet, and to international experts at a conference in Berlin; my evidence that "fast-track learning" works without hindering lower- IQ children appeared in Intelligence, as well as in my book; my criticisms of the environmentalist idea that the achievements of geniuses result chiefly from hard work appeared in the British journal of Developmental Psychology.

So the problem is not a scarcity of published material. Rather, it is the case that psychologists are frightened to admit that race differences in IQ are substantially heritable. In the public debates over The Bell Curve in the U.S., it is noticeable that psychologists have contributed little.

In recent years anyone who speaks out in the media or in academia against egalitarianism puts his job on the line, as I found out to my cost at Edinburgh University.

My own review of America's leading psychological critics of IQ today will appear shortly in Personality & Individual Differences, but Mr. Chabris will find that it makes no difference. The social- science faculties of the English-speaking world have become the parade grounds of neo-Stalinist egalitarians. These desperate environmentalists will not read what Commentary recommends; and they keep discipline in universities by censorship, intimidation, and sacking.

Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Kevin Korb:

I want to thank Commentary for publishing the interesting discussion of the IQ debate by Christopher F. Chabris. The article makes a variety of points that need making, particularly concerning how Stephen Jay Gould and others committed to an extreme environmental interpretation of intelligence have managed to smear the scientific study of intelligence with the epithet of racism, and by a remarkable variety of fallacious arguments. I have done my small part to expose the errors in my 1994 article in Cognition and am happy to see others joining in.

I would, however, like to take issue with one point put forward by Mr. Chabris. He suggests that there is a strong analogy between the suppression of the science of intelligence by extreme environmentalists and the earlier suppression of behaviorism by cognitive psychologists. I do not believe this analogy has any merit. It is, rather, the behaviorists who have spent much of their energies in this century suppressing the scientific study of cognition, personality, and consciousness. It is only in the current decade, for example, that journals devoted to the serious investigation of consciousness have appeared (e.g., Consciousness and Cognition and Psyche).

Behaviorists, as Mr. Chabris mentions, responded to Noam Chomsky' s 1959 critique of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior by labeling it uninformed and irrelevant. Those behaviorists, however, were wrong. Chomsky's work has led, through extension and reaction, to a rich science of linguistics, while Skinner's work on verbal behavior has led to nothing. This is not due to political suppression but to the paucity of theoretical tools available to behaviorism with which to account for linguistic phenomena, as Chomsky himself detailed in 1959.

Skinner's own reaction to Chomsky was extraordinary. In 1970, he wrote:

I published Verbal Behavior in 1957. In 1958 I received a 55 page typewritten review by someone I had never heard of named Noam Chomsky. I read half a dozen pages, saw that it missed the point of my book, and went no further.

Skinner had neither the wit nor the integrity to confront his critics squarely. It would be good to hear that today's environmentalists, like Gould, were different, but I doubt that they are; to take just one example, Gould has never responded, either publicly or privately, to my critique of his work.

School of Computer Science and Software Engineering Monash University Clayton, Victoria, Australia

Frances H. Rauscher:

After reading Christopher F. article, I am compelled to comment on his discussion of the so-called "Mozart effect" and on some popular misconceptions about it. The "Mozart effect" is a term coined by the media to refer to the studies by Gordon Shaw and myself on the enhancement of spatial-temporal performance after listening to music.

First, let me note that listening to ten minutes of a Mozart sonata is not going to make one smarter, thereby doing, as some have claimed, "in ten minutes what years of intensive educational interventions often fail to accomplish." Our studies with undergraduates found a short-term (10-15 minute) improvement in spatial-temporal performance, after exposure to complex music, compared with listening to minimalist music, relaxation instructions, British trance music, or an audiotaped story, or with performing the tests in silence. Short-term memory, as well as other areas of spatial reasoning, was not affected. This work has been replicated in other laboratories.

Second, my testimony before a congressional committee that Mr. Chabris mentions was not in response to these Mozart studies. I testified about the benefits of including music in the core curriculum, based on our (and others') studies with preschoolers and kindergartners in which we found long-term improvement in spatial-temporal abilities after music instruction, not simply listening to music.

The human brain is extremely plastic in the early years, with new neural connections being made very rapidly, partly as a function of experience and learning. While listening to music may influence task performance by inducing some sort of neural priming, neuroanatomical changes as a function of active involvement in music may account for the enhancements found in children. In other words, music involvement may be an experience that influences neural connections that are also relevant to spatial-temporal abilities. Similar effects of this type of influence on the adult brain are not likely to be found. We are currently performing studies with rats to help determine the possible neurophysiological changes brought about by musical enrichment.

All this suggests that the human brain has a remarkable capacity to change; it is not a static entity, and an individual's capacities are not fixed at birth. While one's genetic code may determine one' s potential intelligence, I believe that early experience determines whether that potential will be reached. All told, the relative contributions of nature and nurture are not yet known.

Department of Psychology University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Wisconsin

Kenneth M. Steele:

In Christopher F. Chabris's article, which I read with interest, I noted his account of the Mozart effect, in which he mentions an experiment of mine. His description, however, misses one point that is related to the general issues raised in the article.

My experiment used a "backward-digit-span" task, which means that the subject is given a sequence of digits (e.g., 4-3-1) and asked to report them back in reverse sequence (1-3-4). This simple task occupies a central point in the controversies about intelligence. Arthur R. Jensen began his work with the assumption that differences in school performance were explained by cultural differences, and he chose the digit-span task as a culturally-neutral measure of intellectual performance. It was persistent group differences in performance with the backward-digit-span task that led him to his current views. At present, many researchers (like Jensen) view backward-digit-span performance as a measure of g. For an appreciation of both the nature and difficulty of the task, a reader could ask a friend to recite the bar-code number from a magazine and then the reader could repeat the sequence backward.

Mr. Chabris's history of the Mozart effect, in which he details the problems with the original short article in Nature by Frances H. Rauscher and Gordon Shaw, is accurate. But short reports in Nature are supposed to be followed up by more detailed studies in specialized journals; this has not happened. Instead, the authors published a follow-up report in Perceptual and Motor Skills, which, as Mr. Chabris notes, is a "low-prestige [journal] that many psychologists never read."

In Nature, Rauscher and Shaw reported that they had combined the performance from three different tests because performance among tasks was well-correlated. In their article in Perceptual and Motor Skills, however, they show the uncombined results from that experiment and indicate that the effect occurred with only one of these tasks. This is an attempt to account for the failure of other researchers to replicate their original experiment. But in fact the two reports of the same experiment contradict each other.

Mr. Chabris further suggests that an account of the failure to replicate the Mozart effect will never appear in a prestigious journal of psychology. In this he may be correct. Recently a paper of mine on a Mozart effect experiment was rejected by a prestigious journal, with an explanation similar to that of some colleagues of mine who told me that following up on a bogus study was a waste of time.

Let me suggest here that there are two current disciplines of psychology: academic and popular. One is found in university libraries and the other is found in the chain bookstores. Academic psychologists are very skeptical of the Mozart effect, and for good reason. But it is a loss to the commonweal when they refrain from analyzing the claims of popular psychology, thus allowing it to control public policy.

Department of Psychology Appalachian State University Boone, North Carolina

Myron Coplan and Roger D. Masters:

Christopher F. Chabris is correct in stating that "many more phony controversies lie ahead" in the nature/nurture dispute. Neither side is entirely right or entirely wrong. We all know that a tall boy has to have tall genes, a good diet, sunshine, and plenty of practice to get to be a good, tall basketball player. Who doubts that alcohol in the blood of a pregnant woman raises the risk of bearing a neurologically impaired child?

Nurture advocates deny the demonstrated facts of behavior genetics, but the nature side forgets that even identical twins often differ due to subtly different in-utero environments. But some of the most important factors have been generally ignored by academics on both sides of the controversy.

Lead and manganese are neurotoxins that influence brain development. These heavy metals damage brain structures, interfere with normal neurotransmitters, and reduce cognitive competence and impulse control. Taking over twenty conventional factors into consideration, industrial pollution is associated with significantly higher rates of criminal violence (see our article, "Environmental Pollution, Neurotoxicity, and Violence," in Environmental Toxicology, edited bye. Rose, 1998).

More recently, in a study we conducted of all communities in Massachusetts, we discovered that the use of silicofluorides in water treatment increases the lead in children's blood and, as a consequence, increases rates of violent crime. In general, where silicofluorides are used, we find that crime rates are doubled.

There is no end to the nature/nurture issues these considerations invoke. Here is an example. Calcium, which is released from a pregnant woman's bones, is required for fetal neural and bone development. Exposure to lead in the environment (paint dust, water from lead plumbing, soil) raises the potential of lead entering the gastrointestinal tract, from which it can cross into the bloodstream. Once in the blood, especially if the diet is low in calcium, iron, and other essential minerals, lead is absorbed in the bones and in the developing brain. Little wonder that studies have consistently shown that lead or manganese absorption is associated with attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, and lower IQ.

These effects are worse for blacks, who are six times as likely as whites to have levels of lead in their blood over 25 [micro]g/dL. Not surprisingly, according to national Health and Nutrition Evaluation Surveys, blacks' intake of calcium is only about three-quarters that of whites. But, as a study in Baltimore and Philadelphia sponsored by the Abell Foundation shows, providing school breakfasts has remarkable effects in improving students' performance and behavior. No wonder that the most effective part of Head Start programs (to the chagrin of some ideologues) was probably its nutritional component.

We cannot change genes (yet). And, as the failures of the last generation have shown, it is just as hard to change schools and teachers, not to mention the entire socioeconomic system of the United States. But we did get lead out of gasoline, and a good school breakfast is relatively cheap and effective to deliver to the poor. Maybe it will be easier to clean up the water supplied to our inner cities than to clarify the intellectual debates that professors love so much.

Intellequity Technology Services Natick, Massachusetts

Dartmouth College Hanover, New Hampshire

Richard J. McNally:

Christopher F. Chabris's excellent article provides an informative analysis of post-Bell Curve scholarship on cognitive ability. Two issues warrant further comment. First, he mentions a seminar in the Harvard psychology department during which a member of Howard Gardner' s research team discussed educational applications of the theory of multiple intelligences. When I asked the speaker how she and her colleagues measured the different intelligences, I was startled when she replied that they do not measure them. Because measurement is integral to psychology, it would seem desirable to develop reliable and valid quantitative indices of the distinct intelligences postulated by this interesting theory.

Second, cognitive ability is related to certain mental disorders as well as to various social problems. Intrigued by Herrnstein and Murray's work, my colleagues and I tested whether cognitive ability predicts the severity of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in Vietnam combat veterans (see our papers in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1998, and the American Journal of Psychiatry, 1995). After controlling statistically for the extent of combat exposure, we found that the lower a veteran's pre-combat IQ score, the more severe were his PTSD symptoms today. Thus, higher cognitive ability may protect against the development of chronic PTSD symptoms following exposure to horrific events.

Department of Psychology Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts

John B. Carroll:

It was gratifying to see the article by Christopher F. Chabris supporting the idea that there are indeed important differences among people in IQ or general intelligence, with which I heartily agree. In the article, Mr. Chabris mentions my book Human Cognitive Abilities (1993) and notes that it "offers the most extensive factor-analysis of mental tests." But I regret that he was not able to include a full discussion of my three-level theory that includes not only general intelligence at the apex of a hierarchy but also a set of broad abilities like general reasoning and spatial ability at a second-order level, and a set of perhaps 50 or 60 special abilities, like native-language vocabulary and even "absolute pitch" possessed by some musicians and others. Thus, my theory straddles the two sides of the argument about whether there is only one general intellectual ability or a multiplicity of abilities.

Mr. Chabris rightly notes that Stephen Jay Gould's critique of general intelligence "has been widely accepted." But by whom and on what basis? It has long irked me that so many otherwise reputable social scientists subscribe to Gould's statements about mental abilities. In his writings, Gould has a wondrous way of sounding like a scientist who has carefully studied factor analysis--the statistical procedures used to identify varieties of individual differences--and has discovered certain fatal flaws in it. But he is wrong, both in his claim that the notion of general intelligence cannot be supported by factor analysis and in his belief that factor analysis can say something about the hereditary basis of mental ability (see my article in the January- February 1995 issue of Intelligence).

Quite apart from Gould's views, I have also been bothered by the reluctance of many social scientists and others to accept the idea- -or in fact the scientific finding--that variations in people's mental abilities may at least be partly founded on genetics. I find it odd that while most people acknowledge the partially genetic basis for many physical diseases and psychological disorders, they regard it as distasteful and unacceptable to think about cognitive ability in terms of genes. We can regret that genes affect many aspects of our lives, but it is more rational to accept this fact and think about ways of helping people (children and adults) to overcome the limitations that may be imposed on them by adverse genes.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Irving Louis Horowitz:

Christopher F. Chabris's article is both informative and courageous. I do not write to take issue with its substance but simply to make a small but important correction: Hans Eysenck's book, Intelligence, is not a posthumous volume, as Mr. Chabris says, but one that was completed in its entirety before his death. While this may appear as nitpicking, there is a tendency to treat posthumous work as a lesser, even inauthentic, effort. Having sat with Eysenck through the final stages of manuscript preparation, I can assure Mr. Chabris and Commentary readers that Intelligence is not only "accessible and entertaining" but entirely authentic.

Transaction Publishers Rutgers University Piscataway, New Jersey

Malcolm James Ree:

"IQ Since The Bell Curve" makes several significant points about the importance of general intelligence. If anything, Christopher F. Chabris errs on the side of not making the case strongly enough. Empirical studies by numerous researchers have shown intelligence to be the most influential factor in occupational performance in all jobs and as having significant influence on most other areas of life. Intelligence has been shown to be positively related, among other things, to eminence, creativity, moral reasoning, income, motivation, practical knowledge, and motor skills. By contrast, an equally broad category that includes such things as impulsivity, truancy, accident-proneness, racial prejudice, and authoritarianism has been found to have a negative correlation with intelligence.

The critics of intelligence should conduct empirical studies rather than just reporting anecdotes and offering examples. Finally, although this is a highly technical issue, it should be noted that general intelligence is the factor that contributes the most to verbal, spatial, and mathematical ability.

Department of Psychology St. Mary's University San Antonio, Texas

Neil Seeman:

I am greatly indebted to Christopher F. Chabris for injecting considerable equanimity and good sense into the ideologically polarized debate over the measurability of human intelligence. Since the publication of The Bell Curve, detractors of this ground-breaking work have been motivated by the most vicious manifestations of academic jealousy and, as Mr. Chabris tells us, shocking scientific disingenuousness.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Arthur R. Jensen:

Christopher F. Chabris displays a keen perception of the current state of affairs related to The Bell Curve and the so-called "IQ controversy." Among the article's remarkable features is the fact that it provides the first public recognition that, with notable exceptions, the community of specialists in psychometrics has been shamefully negligent in defending its science and what it knows to be true about the g factor, or general intelligence, the existence of which is firmly established by massive evidence and is contradicted by virtually none. The only important direction now left for further research on the nature of g is to go directly into the human brain itself. Research has already revealed a number of anatomical and physiological brain correlates of psychometric g. This evidence, in addition to the high heritability of g, suggests it is a biological as well as a psychological phenomenon.

Therefore, it is probably puzzling to the general reader that Mr. Chabris, who is working in cognitive neuroscience, should tell us that his friends were surprised by his writing an article on intelligence. This is not surprising, considering how g has been generally ignored by cognitive neuroscientists.

Entirely aside from the politically-correct prejudice that surrounds research on intelligence, there is another reason why researchers in cognitive neuroscience have generally paid so little attention to the g factor: the failure to recognize the important distinction between the essential design features of the brain (the main interest of neuroscientists), which show distinct modules and specific localization of functions for various distinct cognitive functions, on the one hand, and individual differences in the speed and efficiency with which these functions operate (the main interest of psychometricians and differential psychologists), on the other. But I would argue that both of these facets are proper subject matter for brain research. I suggest as a heuristic hypothesis that the design features of the brain--its neural structures and functions--that are necessary for the many distinct processes that enter into information-processing, or intelligence (such as attention, perception, discrimination, generalization, learning, memory, language, thinking, problem-solving, and the like) are essentially the same for all biologically normal Homo sapiens, i.e., those free of chromosomal and major gene anomalies or brain damage.

Correlated individual differences in the functioning of these various information processes are a result of other quantitative biochemical and physiological conditions in the brain, most of them highly heritable, that are separate from the brain's essential design features, or "hard-wiring," but are, as it were, super-imposed on all of them in common, and affect the overall speed and efficiency of their functioning.

A methodology for discovering these physical conditions responsible for the existence of psychometric g is explained in my recent book, The g Factor, along with examples of individual variation in the several different quantitative anatomical and physiological conditions that are found to cause various distinct cognitive functions to be correlated and hence to result in the wide range of individual differences in general ability.

Professor Emeritus Educational Psychology University of California Berkeley, California

Charles Murray:

Christopher F. Chabris's pessimism about IQ's future may easily be right, but here is an alternative scenario. The key is his point that "people often react most defensively when challenged ... on beliefs they wish were true but suspect at some level to be false." I think the level in question is shifting closer and closer to the surface. The science of the IQ controversy is too one-sided for serious scholars to be unshaken by it, no matter how passionate their ideological preferences. And there is the matter of everyday experience: can anyone who spends his life in one of America's leading universities doubt that Richard J. Herrnstein and I were correct about cognitive stratification?

Now assume--and it is a high-probability assumption--that in the next two decades behavioral genetics comes down on the side of the classic psychometric view of intelligence. Arguments that IQ is not substantially heritable disappear. Arguments that g is a statistical artifact disappear. A hodge-podge of politically-correct allegations about IQ are discredited. Add this kind of evidence to the cognitive dissonance that already nags at many of the IQ critics, and you have the stuff of an explosion in the received wisdom about intelligence.

Ironically, the genetic story will not have much effect on our state of knowledge about the relationship of IQ to social and economic outcomes--the topic of The Bell Curve. But the psychological effect of the genetic story on members of the academy is likely to be profound. I confess to a hankering to be around to see it.

Burkittsville, Maryland

Christopher F. Chabris

I am gratified by the range of responses that "IQ Since The Bell Curve" stimulated, and I thank everyone who wrote. I am especially pleased with the correspondence that avoids rehashing past debates and instead discusses methods and trends that may characterize the future of intelligence research. I will say more about these matters later on, but let me begin by addressing the mistakes I have been accused of making.

Despite Howard Gardner's protestation that none of his associates would deny measuring the "multiple intelligences" his theory proposes, one of his co-authors in fact made this denial in my presence, as Richard J. McNally corroborates. Mr. Gardner's influential theory has often been interpreted as claiming that seven or, we now learn, eight or nine domains of basic cognitive abilities are independent of one another in all respects, and that there is thus no such thing as general intelligence. Since this hypothesis contradicts mainstream theory so directly, it cries out to be tested. Mr. Gardner's letter recognizes that need, and it is good to hear that his new research will be published "shortly." But the fact that, fifteen years after the theory itself appeared, we have yet to see the empirical support for it illustrates more plainly than any seminar discussion the reluctance of multiple-intelligence advocates to put their ideas to the test.

In any event, I am troubled by the path suggested by Mr. Gardner' s criteria for fair assessments of multiple intelligences. Each ability, he says, has "many facets," all of which need more than a "one-shot assessment" before an overall assessment can be arrived at. But do these facets themselves have facets, just as intelligence itself has seven or more facets? If too many facets of too many things must be measured too many times (per person!), the whole process becomes unworkable, and the theory behind it ultimately loses its scientific value for lack of testability. True, sciences operate and progress in many ways; but the most important way is by comparing theoretical predictions with empirical facts.

As Claude S. Fischer and others have pointed out, Charles Murray received his doctorate in political science, not in sociology as I implied, and I apologize to all concerned. More pertinently, Mr. Fischer takes me to task for neglecting two anti-Bell Curve works. Since one has not yet been published and an advance copy was not forthcoming from its publisher, I can comment only on The Assault on Equality. In its outlook and in the thrust of its analysis, it is similar to Mr. Fischer' s own book; like the final paragraph of Mr. Fischer's letter, attempts to refute an exaggerated form of almost every assertion of The Bell Curve, though in a more sarcastic, denigrating tone and with decidedly less careful attention to accuracy. It should be read by anyone who needs an extended example of the "paroxysms of denial" (the phrase is Arthur R. Jensen's) with which some critics have responded to IQ research.

In his letter, Mr. Fischer claims that I misrepresented the American Psychological Association's post-Bell Curve report on intelligence. I am happy that he has chosen the APA report as his battleground since, as Ian J. Deary and his colleagues relate, it does indeed endorse the scientific concept of general intelligence and the major methods used to study it. Mr. Fischer, by contrast, recites several quotations from the report that he believes "undercut central assertions" of Herrnstein and Murray.

Let me reply by saying that, first, it is true that "intelligence appears as only one of a great many factors that influence social outcomes," and certainly this is a "main claim." But, just as certainly, it does not contradict The Bell Curve, which did not, as Mr. Fischer seems to imply, say that intelligence was the only predictor of social outcomes. A look at its many graphs comparing the effects of intelligence and socioeconomic status shows that each has an effect, the issue being which effect is larger.

Second, it is also true that little of the total variation in social outcomes is accounted for by variation in intelligence. Again, however, far from contradicting The Bell Curve, this part of the APA report actually cites the book's own results in presenting its conclusions. Mr. Fischer implies that if a predictor--in this case, intelligence- -accounts for only a "small" proportion of the variation in an outcome (say, less than one quarter), it must not be very important. But what is a reasonable baseline against which to compare the effect of intelligence? Or, to put it another way, how large an effect should surprise us?

Given the myriad factors and circumstances that influence people' s lives over the course of decades, it is remarkable that scores on a single test should explain even 5 percent of their differences in job performance or criminal behavior, not to mention the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder studied by Richard J. McNally or the many qualities listed by Malcolm James Reel An effect much smaller than 5 percent was considered large enough to interrupt a major biomedical study on the grounds that it would be unethical to continue denying to anyone the "tiny" benefit from the medication involved; the benefit was a reduction in heart-attack risk and fatality, and the medication was aspirin.

Mr. Fischer's other points are similarly problematic. He hears The Bell Curve saying what he wants to hear, not what it actually says, and so he mistakenly hears the APA report contradicting it. His own response, one might say, like that of many others, has been to "declare victory and withdraw."

James R. Flynn, who noticed the Flynn effect but did not coin the term--in fact, Herrnstein and Murray coined it in The Bell Curve-- asks whether, given the large gains in IQ test scores over the past 80 years, we would consider most adults of the World War I era to be mentally retarded by today's standards. It is a better question than he seems to think. An average 1918 adult might indeed score very low on one of today's IQ tests; confronted via time-travel with today' s culture and technology, that same adult might be so bewildered and confused that full adjustment could never occur. But in any case, such rhetorical arguments and thought-exercises cannot, by themselves, yield an explanation of what has and has not changed about human cognition and the environments in which it occurs, and we need such an explanation before we can understand the meaning of Mr. Flynn's "effect."

Jack Kaplan argues that intelligence tests do not measure intelligence because individuals with more or better education will usually do better at answering the questions. (The same argument is made by Mr. Fischer and his colleagues with reference to the particular test used in Herrnstein and Murray's analyses.) But this assumes, ironically enough, that intelligence is a trait that cannot be affected by education. If we follow Mr. Kaplan's logic to its conclusion, we shall soon be holding that intelligence must be determined completely by genetic and prenatal factors--something it is safe to presume he does not believe.

Psychometric conceptions of intelligence commonly give roles to both "fluid" intelligence, loosely corresponding to the ability to process information in novel ways, and "crystallized" intelligence, or the stored knowledge and methods that assist in problem-solving. Both are associated with general intelligence, but they influence one another as well, and develop differently across an individual' s life span. Perhaps Mr. Kaplan considers only fluid intelligence to be "true" intelligence, but it is not possible to separate "intellectual ability" completely from "intellectual achievement." Even if we considered only measures of fluid intelligence as predictors of job performance and other outcomes, the results would probably not differ greatly, since fluid intelligence is the strongest component of general intelligence.

Kelly P. Ambrose stresses the importance in life and in society of factors other than intelligence. The point is undeniable, and it is not denied by psychometric theorists, who are fully aware that whatever intelligence does not predict must be explained by all sorts of other traits and contexts and their interactions, as well as by an almost infinite succession of virtually random idiosyncratic circumstances that are beyond analysis. This does not mitigate the fact that intelligence is often the single best predictor of who will succeed or fail in a given occupation or situation.

Because I noted that people with certain characteristics do better than people without them, Jeff Hittenberger accuses me of eugenicism. It is hard to imagine a more fallacious inference, but people who simply state empirical facts are accused all the time of harboring noxious and veiled policy goals. Indeed, this subtle form of guilt by association can even transcend generations. Thus, a recent letter to the New York Times from one Stephanie Olson claimed that "the National Socialist party in Germany drew upon the work of American scientists like ... Dr. Arthur Jensen, who argued for the genetic inferiority of minorities." As it happens, Jensen was ten years old when Hitler came to power.

Mr. Hittenberger might profit from rereading the paragraph in my original article that followed the one he quotes. As I wrote there, "whenever intelligence is said, `race' is heard; whenever race is said, `genetics' is heard; and whenever genetics is said, `inferiority' is heard--even though these issues are not necessarily connected in any way." To this I can now add, regrettably, that whenever the subject of human differences is addressed, "eugenics" will be cried in reply.

Ian J. Deary and Christopher Brand, though they inhabit the same city, might as well live on different planets. Mr. Brand's planet, unfortunately, has a much less hospitable climate. Since his book was "de-published" and he was fired from the faculty of the University of Edinburgh, he has been merely waiting--literally on tables. Mr. Deary is rather more fortunate: in his world of science, where Mr. Brand used to live and where he did important work relating mental-processing speed and other correlates to g, the enterprise of intelligence research continues apace.

Arthur R. Jensen and Charles Murray ask what will happen next in this field, but offer different answers. Lamenting the neglect of individual differences by cognitive neuroscientists, Mr. Jensen suggests that they are confused about the distinction between those mechanisms of the brain that implement particular functions common to all human beings and those properties that cut across such "modules" and give rise to overall speed and efficiency, or general ability. It is true that cognitive neuroscientists are more interested in comparing people with monkeys and rats than with other people, but I believe this tendency owes more to a simple lack of interest than to any misunderstanding on their part.

Cognitive neuroscientists are in fact uniquely equipped to write a crucial chapter in the behavioral-genetic story of intelligence. Genes are linked to behavior by the brain, where the genes are expressed and the behavior is originated. I alluded in my original article to the work of an international research team led by Robert Plomin of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, which recently discovered that one variant of a specific gene is found more frequently in high-IQ children than in average-IQ children. Thanks to the Human Genome Project, we also know that this same gene codes for a protein known as "insulin- like growth factor-2 receptor." What we do not yet know is how this protein is involved in the sequence of events that leads to mental functioning--in particular, which areas or properties of the brain are influenced by the protein, how and when it influences them, and how they in turn influence cognition.

Discovering such multilevel chains of causation is beyond psychometrics, but it is the defining goal of cognitive neuroscience. Until we do discover them, the relationship between genetics and behavior will remain as mysterious as the eerie similarities between identical twins that are traditionally used to document it.

Ironically, it may turn out that to develop a cognitive understanding of the genetics of intelligence, neuroscientists will depend on the very individual differences they have heretofore ignored. As the Plomin group's research shows, linking specific genes to specific brain functions requires finding people who differ in each and measuring the associations among those differences. A reconciliation of the psychometric and cognitive approaches to intelligence would be a wonderful legacy of the welcome entry of genetics into psychology.

In "IQ Since The Bell Curve," I predicted more phony controversies even as our understanding of human cognitive abilities expands in the coming years. Charles Murray disagrees, forecasting a long-awaited and sudden acceptance by academics and the public of the overwhelming evidence for the reality and heritability of intelligence. Such an outcome would, in a sense, vindicate Richard J. Herrnstein and himself, and we can only hope things turn out that way.

When Bart Simpson responded[sup1] to Bush by saying "Hey, we're just like The Waltons. We're an American family trying to survive the Great Depression", I was reminded of why I am a fan of the show. It epitomised all that is fun and cheeky, yet also dark and subversive, about the show. It was a reminder of what it meant for TV culture, and for commentary about American society, when The Simpsons was the first show for a long time to outrate The Cosby Show, where the upwardly-mobile Huxtable family had dominated the U.S. sitcom ratings for almost a decade. It was the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s. I could understand writer Bob Ellis' enthusiasm for the show when he commented that " it's so good to see Marxism alive and well and rating on American television" (The Australian 18/9/93)

It was thus surprising to find Gary MacLennan describe The Simpsons as a show based upon "the middle class myth of the reactionary working class totally supporting the aims of the ruling class". (MacLennan 1993/4) Even allowing for the idea that popular cultural texts are open to a range of potential readings, this seems a particularly misleading and unhelpful interpretation of the show. It not only fails to clarify what it is about the program that "works"-it has, after all, rated highly in most countries in which it has been screened- but also provides a curious and somewhat atavistic interpretation of the concept of class in contemporary popular culture. I will elaborate upon these points briefly, before considering in more detail some aspects of the show and implications an analysis of it may present for the teaching of media studies.

The important point which MacLennan does recognise in The Simpsons is that it clearly foregrounds issues of class. Through the character of Homer Simpson, we are presented with a structural analysis of class in American society: Homer has a dead-end job in the nuclear power plant, few prospects, little job security or satisfaction, and a vindictive and tyrannical boss. Unlike most television programs, where the main characters are either self-employed, work in a co-operative and egalitarian work environment, or where work is never an issue, class relations in the workplace are central to the show. We know who the bosses and the workers are. The episode which MacLennan discusses, where the nuclear plant boss Burns runs for Governor to halt an enquiry into why a three-eyed fish was caught by Bart in a river near the plant, neatly encapsulates the manner in which the dynamics of class power work through the show. Another episode which I will discuss below, where Homer leads the plant workers on a strike against Burns' moves to abolish their dental plan, indicates a capacity for resistance which MacLennan's one-dimensional presentation of class and ideology in the show neglects.

We also are presented with the Simpson family as being working class in a cultural sense. They eat meat loaf, watch tenpin bowling on TV, go to truck races, and have trouble making ends meet. It is important to emphasise here that the viewer "knows" that the Simpsons are working class, not because viewers have a thorough knowledge of the cultural habits of the American working class, but because they are represented to us as working class through our knowledge as viewers of American working class sitcom families. Through the Simpsons, we can trace a genealogy of representation which includes Roseanne and her family, Archie and Enid Bunker from All In The Family, Fred and Wilma Flintstone, and the founders of this tradition, Ralph and Alice from The Honeymooners. Even if these traces do not resonate with the viewer, as they would not with many young viewers of the show, we can recognise the Simpsons as working class by comparing them to their neighbours: the god-fearing, middle class, punctilious and thoroughly tedious Flanders family. If kids like Bart have an attitude problem, it may be in part because they recognise the Flanders children as representing that to which they cannot aspire, as the literature on class socialisation has often noted.

This is far too pessimistic a reading of the fate of the Simpson family. In fact, the show is often based around how they, a relatively powerless group, can win "small victories" over the more powerful. But it is an important corrective to the notion that The Simpsons misrepresents the nature of the working class. Perhaps it does, in that it presents "class" through a set of mediated cultural and televisual codes (eating meat loaf, watching tenpin bowling, being bored and dissatisfied with one's job, hating school) that viewers understand, whether or not it holds to actual working class experience, however that may be defined or characterised. It may not, however, in the sense that MacLennan' s criticism (MacLennan 1993/4:47) of the conclusion to the three-eved fish episode that the working class (Homer) played no role in the defeat of the owning class (Burns) may in fact be closer to the money than he would like to admit. Michel Foucault has pointed out repeatedly that power operates through, rather than over, populations (eg. Foucault 1989), and in the U.S. the success of the Republican Party in the 1980s was built upon the votes of the "Reagan Democrats"- sections of the white working-class male population-in a political context where the white American working class has typically channelled all its industrial energies into higher pay for their jobs, rather than challenging the distribution of power in the workplace (Davis 1984). Indeed, in the Bush/Simpsons exchange discussed earlier, Homer's response was to dumbfoundedly plead that he "voted for that guy last time".

The Simpsons can of course be read in a lot of different ways. Homer Simpson can be read as a travesty of the working class (as MacLennan reads him), as a mediocre father-figure (as children may read him), as a dumb white guy (as minority audiences may read him), and as a dumb male vastly inferior to Marge and Lisa (feminist readings). He may represent the crisis of patriarchal authority, the limit-point of the suburban consumerist utopia, the negation of all those wise father-figures from the Dad in My Three Sons to Cosby, or the crisis of the traditional working class in deindustrialising and socially polarising post-Fordist America. He is also one of the great comic creations of American popular culture.

It is wrong to say that Homer is blasé about American consumer culture. He is in fact positively euphoric about every pleasure it alleges to offer, seeking a kind of jouissance from everything from Duff Beer to baldness cures, from bowling balls to new running shoes, pizzas and theme parks. There is no utopian possibility Homer cannot conceive having access to if only he had access to the right commodity. A limitless desire to consume without producing. A marketer's dream. Willy Loman without the work ethic. As a result he is overweight, drinks too much, watches too much TV, is grouchy with his family, and is in imminent danger of a heart attack.

The rest of the Simpson clan share Homer's enthusiasms to a lesser extent, but can see the limits of Homer's hedonism. Marge is in the most obvious dilemma. A talented and intelligent young woman with a developing feminist consciousness, she has made the mistake - as her sisters continually remind her - of marrying below her potential social position, and is now grimly determined to hold the family together, even if at considerable personal cost. In many episodes, however, Marge draws a clear line of what is no longer acceptable, and in one episode considered having an affair with a gigolo from the bowling alley in order to spite Homer.

Bart and Lisa present an intriguing set of possibilities. Bart could very easily go the way of his father, yet he is also acutely aware of the limitations of his dad as a role model for adult male life. Although he likes Homer, he holds little of the respect for him that could once upon a time be taken for granted from children in TV sitcoms. Bart's ethos is one of survival in the here-and-now, from the likes of his schoolteachers, the school bullies, and occasionally the police: he will confront the future when it comes. Lisa is perhaps the show' s most complex character. A naturally gifted child, her skills - as a student and as a musician - are continually being thwarted by her father's negligence, the teachers' demand to conform, the disruptive antics of her brother, and her anxieties about her looks and her popularity. About Maggie we know little, except that she has seen far too much for an 6-month-old child.

The Simpsons works brilliantly as children's television, and it is not hard to see why. Unlike many officially-sanctioned children's shows, which continually remind children of their subordinate status to adults, The Simpsons presents its adult characters as childlike creatures. It constitutes the "blurring of childhood and adulthood" that Joshua Meyrowitz has described as characteristic of a TV-dominated culture where there are no longer spaces where adult behaviour can be kept from children, and socialisation into the norms and literacies of the culture can no longer be kept to the incremental gradations possible in a print-dominated era (Meyrowitz 1986: Ch. 13). At the same time, it presents the adult world as threatening, yet impossible to escape from. Virtually all of the adult characters in the show- Burns and his assistant Smithers, Marge's sisters, Principal Skinner, the police, Moe the barman, psychopathic babysitters, dentists, the local Minister, Mayor Quimby-present threats to Bart and Lisa, as they often do to Marge and Homer. Perhaps the only non-threatening character to the children is Homer's father, whose advanced years are seen as having reduced him to a thoroughly childlike status. Rather than presenting a world where "God does indeed look after drunks, little children and the USA" (MacLennan 1993/4:47), Springfield presents a world where narrative closure is very provisional indeed, and threats are deferred rather than eliminated.

The other thing that The Simpsons is about is of course television. It is literally a TV show about characters who watch too much television. The famous opening credits to the show perhaps illustrate this best. As McKenzie Wark has observed, the opening is a take on The Flintstones - "the modern stone age family" who raced off to the drive-in - with a postmodern twist (Wark 1992). The opening presents the family members racing from various oppressive public environments (work for Homer, school detention for Bart, music classes for Lisa, and shopping for Marge and Maggie) to the apparent sanctity of home, where they can sit on the couch and watch TV. Upon arriving home, however, something always happens; the couch eats them, someone falls off, a circus begins in the lounge room, they fall through the floor. The critical space for the Simpsons is the "virtual space" between themselves and the TV screen; it socialises the children and it constitutes the "outside world" and their means of interpreting it.[sup2] This is, moreover, a world of multichannel cable TV, with its often obscure mix of home shopping programs, Mexican sitcoms and "reality television".

The Simpsons is a deeply intertextual program. Its scriptwriters know that its viewers have watched a lot of television, and it offers a treasure-trove of signifiers and referents from other popular cultural texts, which its viewers can observe on the basis of the cultural competencies they have acquired through television and other forms of popular culture. Sometimes these references are obvious, as with the cartoon show Itchy and Scratchy, an ultra-violent parody of the Tom and Jerry cartoons[sup3], or the parody of TV news anchormen presented by Kent Brockman on the "Smartline" program. Others, such as Principal Skinner's occasional bitter diatribes about how the Government sold out soldiers like himself in the Vietnam War, are less obvious. And then there are the downright obscure references beloved by cultural studies academics and others who spent too much time on computer bulletin- boards, such as the fact that Marge's maiden name (Bouvier) is also that of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, or the way in which the family doctor is based upon Bill Cosby's Cliff Huxtable character. The show is also deeply aware of itself and its own place in contemporary culture, and is seen by some writers as characteristic of "postmodern" television (Collins 1992).

The episode I wish to consider in detail begins with such a reference, with Homer and Bart watching a video where a fiendish plot to put a new "smart drug" on the market is foiled by the action hero McBain (complete with cropped blond hair, huge muscles and ludicrous mock- German accent), who emerges out of an ice sculpture and proceeds to shoot everyone at the table except the villain who poisons him with a salmon puff. As the villain cackles maniacally, Bart turns to Homer in a concerned way, but it assured that no-one in the real world could be that bad. There is then a cut to Burns maniacally cackling about the disappearance of the union representative, who has in fact been buried on a football field. Burns is considering renegotiating the union contract with the workers, and reminiscing about how his grandfather maltreated workers at the turn of the century, before unions were formed. Inspired by this memory, he vows to take back the dental plan from the nuclear power workforce.

The plot then moves to the dental surgery, where a tyrannical dentist threatens the children. He explains to Marge that Lisa needs braces, and uses a computer simulator to show that, without braces, she will turn into what Bart helpfully terms "a freak". Marge and the children return home to tell Homer of this, who reassures her that, with the dental plan won during the last strike, they will not be affected. He then attends the union meeting, where Burns' contract, which proposes abolishing the dental plan for a free keg of beer at union meetings, is accepted. While waiting for a beer, Homer ponders the connection between the dental plan and Lisa needing braces, before realising that if the dental plan is abolished, then they cannot afford Lisa' s braces. He becomes union representative and begins negotiations with Burns.

Negotiations with Burns are unsuccessful, since on the first occasion Homer believes Burns is trying to seduce him, and on the second (after Homer is taken away by hired goons), his need to go to the toilet is taken as rejection. Meanwhile, Lisa has received a hideous set of braces, as this was all that could be afforded without coverage under a dental plan. Homer leads the workers into a strike, and they picket the nuclear power plant, as Lisa sings a song about the strike with the lines "So we'll march day and night by the big cooling tower. They have the plant, but we have the power." After Burns and his assistant Smithers attempt unsuccessfully to run the plant themselves, Burns, Homer and "chatshow mainstay Dr. Joyce Brothers" appear on the program Smartline to discuss the strike. After host Kent Brockman introduces Homer as a "union kingpin" and asks him whether trade unions are " lumbering dinosaurs", Brockman informs Homer that the producer has told him not to talk to him any more.

Burns then shuts off power to the city, leading to widespread looting, but this does not deter the strikers, who join hands outside the plant and sing the song with Lisa. At this point Burns offers Homer a deal, where the dental plan is retained as long as Homer steps down as union rep. As Homer dances on the carpet making chicken noises, Burns muses that perhaps Homer "wasn't the brilliant tactician he thought". The show ends with Lisa getting new braces and telling a joke at the dental surgery which causes everyone to laugh, the dentist realising the gas has been left on, and everyone continues laughing.

The episode captures a number of the aspects of The Simpsons which make it an interesting, unusual and even provocative show. While some may complain about how unions and workers are represented at some points, with references to links to organised crime and a general herd mentality pervading the union meetings, it is unusual in the context of American television that unions are represented at all, and are presented as necessary organisations with legitimate grievances against rapacious employers. Further, the show makes clear the extent to which employers will go in breaking strikes, including bribery, thuggery and blackmail of the general public. Most interestingly, the show also makes it clear that the mass media is very clearly biased towards the interests of the employer in such instances.

Elements of the show's intertextuality are also to be found in this episode. As well as the reference to Schwarzenegger films and the comment on late-night news programs, there are also allusions drawn to 60s TV shows such as Get Smart and Batman, to the more recent Batman films, and to psychedelia such as the Beatles' Yellow Submarine cartoon film. The episode also refers to the program itself, blurring the reality/fiction line and presenting episodes as if they occur in real time and in real places. At one point, when Burns is trying to remember who Homer Simpson is, Smithers reminds him that Homer supported his campaign for Governor, saved the plant from meltdown, that Burns ran over his son, and that Homer's wife painted him in the nude, referring to plotlines in previous episodes.

It must be said that The Simpsons. poses a challenge for the dominant models of media studies. MacLennan's class-based critique presumably draws its inspiration from the observation made by Noam Chomsky, Herb Schiller and others that the mass media are controlled by major corporations, and that they present an ideological world-view that is consistent with their own corporate interests (Chomsky and Herman 1988; Schiller 1984). Yet I have indicated that The Simpsons. cannot be adequately understood in terms of this model of ideological control. Indeed, it may well present a view of the world which is at odds with the dominant corporate interests.

The problem The Simpsons presents for the "industrial" approach is the difficulty it faces in reconciling the idea of a program with a subversive, almost leftist bent, with its being a cultural flagship of Rupert Murdoch's global media empire, centred on his FOX Network in the U.S.. It provides an interesting mix of the radical and the popular, yet it owes its existence to the marketing strategy of the best known conservative media baron in the English-speaking world. Murdoch has himself commented on the irony of this in interviews, arguing that The Simpsons does not present the world as he sees it, but adding that you have to admit it is funny. Perhaps more importantly, from Murdoch's point of view, it also rates, and thus attracts advertising revenue to his networks.

The irony is that there is no problem in reconciling this apparent contradiction, as long as it is recognised that, for Murdoch, political concerns are clearly subordinate to the organisation's profitability. In the U.S., the key to FOX's strategy to become the fourth national free-to-air broadcaster, and to win audiences from the powerful "Big Three" U.S. networks, was to target audiences under 25, considered by advertisers to be a desirable demographic group to capture, but generally shunned by the major commercial networks, who feared that programs appealing to this group would be alienating to older audience groupings. In Australia, the TEN network runs it at 6pm against the news programs, gambling on the observation that at that time of evening, children often dictate the family's viewing patterns, at least in one-TV households.

At first glance, approaches derived from textual studies should be able to provide greater insights into The Simpsons. The show is intensely televisual, appropriating recognisable elements from the whole history of film and television, as well as constantly referring back to its own status and history. It also has programs and cartoons within its own cartoon program, and has at times presented itself as the centre of debates about television. The classic instance of this was the episode where Marge Simpson took up a protest against excessive TV violence after seeing Itchy and Scratchy and its effects on young Maggie's behaviour.

The Simpsons is therefore very much suitable to analyses of media texts which stress bricolage, intertextuality and the scope for a plurality of readings on the part of differently-situated television audiences (eg Fiske 1987). Yet the point about The Simpsons is that these are not "aberrant decodings" which contrast to a "preferred reading" of the text, but are in fact the preferred reading the producers themselves have constructed. This is not to say that different audiences will not read the show differently, but rather to draw attention to the element of auteurism in the program's construction, where the producers offer the viewer the opportunity of a kind of postmodern treasure hunt, rifling through the show for elements of pastiche, irony and intertextuality.[sup4] This has the added advantage, to return to industrial considerations, of giving the show an appeal which goes beyond its target pre-teen audience to embrace older viewers, not least students and teachers of media studies, cultural studies and postmodernism!

The Simpsons have been described as the "postmodern nuclear family" (Work 1992). The blurring of lines between culture and its forms of representation, its textual strategies, and the idea of the American dream gone away all point in such directions. Yet The Simpsons does not come from the Baudrillardian school of postmodernism which sees society, meaning and ethics as having imploded into a "black hole" with the dominance of the mass media (eg. Baudrillar 1992). The show is in fact very much concerned with questions of ethics and justice, albeit in a quite different way to their usual treatment in American situation comedy. Interestingly, a recent survey of primary school children found that they considered The Simpsons to be the most realistic program on TV after the news (Howard 1993).

A useful framework for understanding the ways in which power and resistance operate through The Simpsons comes from Michel de Certeau's notion of "making do" in everyday life, and the ways in which the "power of the weak" can manifest themselves (de Certeau 1984). The Simpson family, and particularly Bart and Lisa, are presented as having to deal with power structures, technologies, economic forces and mediascapes which are beyond their overall control, but where they can achieve small victories on the run, like Homer's successful resolution of the strike against the odds in the episode discussed above. As de Certeau notes, however, these are gains which can only be savoured briefly by the less powerful, just as the poaching of fragments of the discourse of The Simpsons by its fans remain a murmur, barely audible, but loud enough to have discomforted both American Presidents and Australian Prime Ministers.

While this is not the great clash of conflicting forces which some media analysts are seeking from popular television, The Simpsons provides a cultural mud-map to suburban life from the bottom up, and an ingenious piece of subversive comedy from within the belly of the beast of prime- time network television. It also illustrates the considerable possibilities for social commentary, and for the presentation of ways of thinking otherwise, arising from what was thought to be the most bonal of genres, children's cartoon comedy. In terms of the "practical tasks of education" about media and society, The Simpsons provides an excellent program to analyse in some detail, both for "how it works" as television, and "what it says" about contemporary society and culture.

Notes

[sup1]The thought of "Bart Simpson" responding to a campaign speech of the US President is itself intriguing.

[sup2]Mary Ann Doane has drawn attention to the importance and the interchangeability of the "virtual spaces" of the freeway, the shopping mall and television, as crucially formative of subjectivity in modern urban culture (Doane 1990).

[sup3]Paul Keating's campaign in 1992 for the TV networks to introduce tighter program classification standards resulted from his watching this cartoon with his children on a Sunday evening.

[sup4]A similar process can be found in the rock band U2's "ZOO TV" concerts and videos, which compel the viewer to "become postmodern" in order to comprehend the presentation. See Terry Flew and Stephanie Pfennigwerth, "Theory Will Eat Itself", Metro, No. 95, Spring 1993.

References

Jean Baudrillard, "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media" in Mark Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Canbridge: Polity Press 1992).

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent (New York: Pantheon 1988).

Jim Collins, "Television and Postmodernism", in Robert Allen (ed.), Channels of Discourse, Reassembled (London: Routledge 1992).

Mike Davis, "Why the US Working Class is Different", New Left Review, No. 124, July/August 1984.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1984).

Mary Ann Doane, "An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall and Television", in Patricia Mellencamp (ed.), Logics of Television (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press 1990).

John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Routledge 1987).

Michel Foucault, "Film and Popular Memory" in Foucault Live (New York: Semiotext 1989).

Susan Howard, "How Real is Television: Modality Judgements of Young Children", Media Information Australia No. 70, November 1993.

Gary MacLennan, "Class in Contemporary Popular Culture', Metro No. 96, Summer 1993/4.

"Portrait of an Anti-Hero", The Australian, 18-19 September 1993.

Herbert Schiller, Information and the Crisis Economy (Norwood: Ablex 1984).

McKenzie Work, "Homer's Odyssey", 21.C No. 8, Summer 1992.

Let us take the question of power; specifically the alliance within the text between Homer and Burns. Flew attacks my reading here citing Davis's remarks on the class collaboration of white American workers and also using Foucault on power. In effect, an attack employing a Marxist and then, a Foucauldian perspective. I will call the case derived from Davis "the-working-class-can-be-divided" argument and the one taken from Foucault, "power-is-everywhere. That these arguments are essentially contradictory seems to have escaped Flew's notice.

Let us deal with the more serious point first, that arising from Davis' work of course. I grew up as a Catholic in Northern Ireland, where the working class was and is divided along religious lines. The Protestant work force collaborated with British Imperialism and actively supported the repression and discrimination practised by the state against the Catholic working class. So I am reasonably familiar with the concept that Capital can divide the working class often employing collectivist strategies such as nationalism or religion. Generally Capital does seek to differentiate the working class and these divisions, as Clarke points out, are crucial to maintaining "the rule of money". (Clarke, 1988)

But it is crucial to go from these commonplaces to an acknowledgment that the working class as a class does not play a reactionary role in history. We can express this as the working class having a tendency to make good history. As an empirical/historical example I would argue that we should take as I did in my original article the worst case of mass reaction, namely that of German Nazism.

The working class were divided between employed and unemployed. The employed supported the Social Democrats while the unemployed followed the Communists. (Levine-Meyer, 1977) This division was essential to the success of Hitler, but despite that success the German Nazi Party came to power without recruiting large numbers of the working classes. The workers were the victims of Nazism not the supporters. Thus it is particularly galling to read Foucault prevaricating about the " desire of the masses for fascism". (Morris & Patton, 1979: 53) Now I know it may be unpalatable to many of the followers of the dregs of 68 but the historical truth is that the classes that were to play the role of reaction in Nazi Germany were the middle classes and the dispossessed peasantry. (Poulantzas, 1980; Sparks, 1980)

So what then of Homer Simpson? My objection, which the "working-class- can-be-divided" argument does not address at all, is that he is presented as a metonymic portrait. We are shown Homer not as an example of a section of the working class that collaborates but rather as a metonym of the class that collaborates. No where in the Three Eyed Fish episode is there any sign of any of the workers standing up to Burns.

However what of the Foucault case that power is everywhere? Let us first separate this out from the-working-class-can-be-divided. Capital divides the working class to maintain its power over that class as a whole.

However the situation is more complex than this. As Foucault's work on the productive or positive aspects of power shows, any analysis of the divisions among the working class must take into account the role of the working class in dividing itself. We are all familiar with the notion of demarcation disputes in the trade union movement for instance. However, such phenomena are of secondary importance when it comes to analysing the structural social position of the working class. The latter exist in an oppressive social relationship with the capitalist class. Despite fashionable talk of "contingency", the nature of the relationship between the workers and the capitalists determines largely the nature of working class politics for, as Geras (1994: 103) points out, as victims the working class are more likely to organise against this social relationship than the capitalists who are the beneficiaries.

However reading Flew's article shows that it needs to be repeated that despite the often obtuse and near mystical mumblings of Foucault, the power of the capitalist class is external to the working class or to put it another way it is power over the working class. This power guarantees the capitalists as individuals an inordinate share of the world's wealth and resources. In its abstract form the power of the capitalist class is upheld by the support of the state for the rule of money. The working class does not share in this power. It is alien to them. As such it can be confronted and can and will one day be broken.

Flew attacks my original article at just this point. He reads Foucault as saying that power works through and not over. It is interesting to note here that Falzon's recent defence of Foucault depends on his emphasising repeatedly that Foucault uses a concept of "power over" . (Falzon, 1993)

What is one to make of this confusion over power among the Foucauldians, for power is as McHoul & Grace point out a crucial concept within Foucault's thought? (1993:57) It is indeed unfortunate then we do not possess a detailed critique of the differing emphases it receives within Foucault's own writing. Dews has supplied us with just such a critique of Foucault's positions on truth. However with regard to power he is content to make the substantially political point that Foucault's positive model of truth does not leave us with any point of political purchase. Dews argues, correctly I believe, that an oppositional politics is impossible if there is no point outside power from which to attack power. (Dews, 1987)

In the absence of a detailed critique of Foucault's notion of power one can only point out that it is capable of differing interpretations and to be fair Foucault himself explicitly disavowed any claim to be advancing a theory of power. Here it is important to grasp as Knights puts it that:

Foucault's analysis is not a substitute for theories of domination and exploitation; it simply presents a conception of power and subjectivity that facilitates an understanding of how subjects voluntarily engage in practices which reproduce patriarchal and capitalist institutions. (Knights, 1990:327)

Fundamentally it is in Discipline and Punish that an analysis of the "development of techniques for the control of increasingly larger and more numerous human multiplicities". (Patton, 19:124) The period dealt with is roughly from 1760-1840, that is, the time of the growth of industrial capitalism. (Patton, 19:113) However the nature of the period does not lead Foucault to posit the capitalist class as the subject of this process of change in the regime of power. Instead we have the door left open for a move towards super idealism where power emerges as a social force in itself. The debt to Nietzsche's notion of the "will to power" is obvious and has often been acknowledged. What is less often commented on is the fact that Nietzsche's concept appears to be an instance of social biologism where the "will to power" is posited as some sort of universal. ("Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master." (Nietzsche, 1969:137)

Combined with this idealist hypostatisation of power is a kind of reductive materialism where the body, again thanks to Nietzsche, is posited as the "surface on which history is inscribed". (Patton, in Meaghan & Patton, 1979:117) The reductive nature of the materialism here must be emphasised not only because commentators like Patton have misread it as "materialism par excellence" (:117) but also because it has facilitated the dumping by Foucault's disciples of the concept of ideology and consequently the importance of ideas in the maintenance of the hegemony of the class power of the capitalists.

Nevertheless one must stress that as always with Foucault it is important where one puts the emphasis. Thus placing the accent on the productive or positive role of power leads or, perhaps we should say, enables one to ignore the repressive and exploitative functions of power and the fact that it can serve very specifically the interests of a particular social group. Similarly if we emphasise the "dispersed, heteromorphous and local procedures of power" we can forget that to use Foucault' s own words that "the class struggle...(remains) the 'guarantee of intelligibility' of certain grand strategies." (in Morris & Patton:55)

Foucault's work then seems to me to have led to a body of theory which is caught between the Scylla of idealism and the Charybdis of reductive materialism This is a crucial point because as Bhaskar points out "emancipation depends upon the untruth of reductionist materialism and spiritualistic materialism alike." (1989:114) Hence the numbing pessimism which may be Foucault's ultimate legacy.

An alternative way to look at the question of power is to see it as operating at the micro and macro levels. A useful analogy here is with macro and micro economics. Currently the Right is happiest dealing with micro economic questions such as work practices and productivity levels in particular industries. It is much less willing to discuss macro economic questions such as the distribution of wealth and the social irresponsibility of the capitalist class. (Desai, 1994)

Foucault's work has been primarily concerned with power at the micro level. This is of course perfectly legitimate. However with the excessiveness which is the true hall mark of the French intelligentsia and their avatars the concentration on "micro-power" has led to a virtual denial that power exists at the macro level. This has had disastrous consequences within the humanities in that ultimately it has depoliticised a whole generation of students.

However it has produced a body of social thought which by one of those happy coincidences is extraordinarily palatable to the wielders of macro power, namely the capitalist class and state officials. Here lies a possible explanation for the success within the US academy of what purports to be a radical body of thought, namely French Post Structuralism. It is also a reminder that we should not hold our breath while waiting for the US Government to deny a visa to a post-structuralist, or for the CIA to get sufficiently anxious about the political impact of the followers of Foucault to plan an assassination. The spectre of post-structuralism haunts no one it seems who wields state and class power, only us poor unfortunates who have to read it.

There is another aspect of Flew's use of Foucault that I wish to draw attention to. He employs what we might term the "Foucault says" approach. This reminds me strongly of the game I played as a child - "O'Grady says". We used to take turns at being "O'Grady" and making the rest of the gang follow our every order and whim. While we were "O'Grady" , we couldn't be contradicted; our every word was law. Well fugit irreparabile tempus unfortunately, but when I read sentences like "Foucault has pointed out repeatedly that power operates through, rather than over, populations.." (Flew:15) I am tempted to think that O'Grady lives.

But the "Foucault says" strategy positively pales by comparison with the home grown variety of "Bob Ellis says" as in I could understand the writer Bob Ellis' enthusiasm for the show when he commented that "it's so good to see Marxism alive and well and rating on American Television"...It was thus surprising to find Gary MacLennan describe The Simpsons as a show based upon "the middle class myth of the reactionary working class totally supporting the aims of the ruling class." (Flew:14)

What can I say? Gee! I feel all shook up. If I'd only known that " the writer Bob Ellis" (The Bob Ellis who blames the rise of Menzies on the Communist Party of Australia? The Bob Ellis who wouldn't recognise a True Believer if he fell over one?) had said The Simpsons was Marxist. Ah well, I obviously must be a lot more careful with my sources when I am doing a political analysis. I'll check with "the writer Bob Ellis" the next time, I write something about social class- I promise.

Now that I have been suitably chastened I wonder if it is a bit bold of me to point out that Flew has distorted my characterisation of The Simpsons by taking a quote out of context? What I actually said about the show was:

The Simpsons often makes quite strong satirical points but this is still a "family" show. There is for example little consciousness of the problems of urban decay, deindustrialisation, social inequality, racism and economic decline of the dimensions described by Mike Davis... This is the key absence in the text. As a portrait of contemporary USA The Simpsons is progressive but it is by no means revolutionary. That it is not so is due to among other things to its attitudes towards class.

Moreover in this episode Homer is shown as being a loyal and sycophantic supporter of Burns. Here we have the middle class myth of the reactionary working class totally supporting the aims of the capitalist class. The working class can indeed be conservative but they have never been mobilised on a large scale over a consistent period of time in the cause of reaction.

The example of The Strike episode that Flew discusses only makes the point about the class nature of The Simpsons even more strongly. This is if anything a clearer example of middle class prejudice against the workers. Repeatedly the herd mentality of the workers is emphasised and Burns loses the struggle with the workers because he cannot see how dumb they are.

Let us be absolutely explicit here. It is not a case of, as Flew says, that "some may complain about how unions and workers are represented at some points, with references to links to organised crime and a general herd mentality pervading the union meetings." (emphasis added:17) Quite simply this episode reeks with middle class prejudice against organised labour.

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings here. I feel like the person at the party who objects to the anti-gay jokes. Generally they are regarded as spoil sports. I too would like to simply wallow in the bricolage and intertextuality. After all intertextuality is the virtual reality of academics. But if we read anything about the history of organised labour in the USA we surely would feel that we owe it to the memory of the exploited and the murdered workers to do more than simply snigger at references to Godfather 2 and workers automatically sticking their hands in the air. Maybe Flew could leave off reading "the writer Bob Ellis" for a while and start with Brecher (1972) or Braverman (1974) or Bimba (1975) or Grob (1969) or Fawcett (1975). But is it just simply too "atavistic" to believe that "the unity of labour is the hope of the world" or is it that it has become unfashionable to even hope at all?

My objections here are political and indeed I make no secret of my opposition to the politics of Foucault and his followers. Fundamentally because their tactic of total deligitimation leads through the deligitimation of critique to what Roth terms "a return, dizzying, but a return nonetheless, to the status quo". (1992:119)

In this context Paul Veyne's recent piece on Foucault at the end of his life contains what I feel is a very significant anecdote. Veyne and Foucault were watching a televised report on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict when a partisan says "I want to win back the lands of my forefathers. This is what I have wanted since my teens; I don't know where this passion comes from, but there it is." Veyne claims that the side the man is on is "utterly unimportant". Foucault's reaction was equally instructive. He said apparently, "There we have it at last. Everything has been said, there's nothing more to say." (Veyne, 1993:4)

There is, on the contrary, a good deal more to say. If we resist the attractions of liberalism, for that is what the former gauchiste, Foucault, had fallen into here, we cannot fail to see that the Israeli- Palestinian conflict is marked by brutal Israeli exploitation of and dominance over the Palestinian people. There is a right side and there is a wrong side in this sorry situation. There is a side which is using lies and there is another which is desperately trying to tell the truth about the terror they are experiencing. (Chomsky, 1983)

But of course the radical chic of Paris have long since abandoned the notion of truth, contenting themselves with amoral, neo-Nietzschean, macho drivel such as:

"...a warrior is a man who can get along without truth, who only knows the sides taken, his and that of his adversary, and who has enough energy to fight without having to justify himself in order to reassure himself." (Veyne, 1993:2)

How the murderous proponents of Pax Americana must love this stuff! What is it if not a longing for the return of the 'blonde bestie' ?

Naturally it is much easier in conflicts like the Israeli-Palestinian one to retreat to liberalism and say that it is all about the "will to power". Such an attitude has a certain amount of superficial cleverness and the added advantage that no one knows what you are talking about and one's career is not threatened by opposition to the realities of American Imperialism.

To return to The Simpsons, Flew begins with an attempt to make the case that "The Simpsons must be a significant site of political contestation in American culture" (:14) by saying that George Bush dislikes it and even brought it into his election campaign. Now I accept that it is a badge of some honour to be criticised by the likes of Bush. I would ask though that we not get carried away here. To be opposed by Reagan and Bush one had only to be fairly normal. The truth is that we in Australia forget sometimes how loony, rabid and dangerous the USA Right actually is. Flew is much closer to a fair assessment of the political impact of The Simpsons when he talks of "small victories on the run". (:19)

These remarks are helpful because they enable us to locate Flew politically within what might be termed the Resistance School. Theoreticians of resistance have been dominant for some time now in fields such as cultural studies and educational sociology. Initially they produced a useful correction to simplistic functionalist models. (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) Much good work was done documenting that wherever there is oppression there is resistance and that people are never simply passive objects of schooling or the media. (Apple, 1982; Fiske, 1987; Tulloch, 1990; Gilbert & Taylor, 1991)

The great achievement of the Resistance School within Media Studies was to overthrow the notion of the masses as passive consumers of the mass-produced culture. However the alternative notions of the audience as "lively' or "creative" have only served to disguise the fact that despite all the strategies of resistance employed by the viewer, despite all the pleasure illicit and otherwise that the audience is capable of generating, despite all the quizzes and the prizes and the mayhem that Bart Simpson can generate, despite all Homer's scratching and burping, when we press the off switch the fundamental structures of our society remain unchallenged. The sad fact that the Resistance School overlooks is that resistance does not equal political transformation or emancipation.

We can do basically three things when the carnival of petty resistances has turned bitter as it inevitably does. We can simply accept that a fundamental challenge was never possible anyway and then retreat even further into inter-, sub-, and hyper- textuality, i.e. find another carnival. Or if we are really looking for thoughts in season, we can reshape our analysis so that it does not demand any embarrassing fundamental challenge to the status quo. The parameters of the Post-structuralist and the Policy Approaches should be apparent here. The third alternative is to begin to map out the articulation between acts of popular resistance and political analysis and praxis. A fundamental part of this strategy is and will remain what Engels termed the "relentless criticism of all that is". However it is crucial to grasp that the motor force of such criticism is the realisation that things should and can be better than they are.

While acknowledging the necessity to follow Engels' example I would like to be positive about The Simpsons. The moment where Lisa and her guitar revive memories of the struggles of the American Labor Movement is, as Flew rightly points out, a brave one. Likewise Madge' s serving of the three-headed fish to the capitalist Burns is an act of considerable moral courage.

It is of course significant as I tried to point out in my article that the brave acts come exclusively from outside the ranks of the workers, from the women. Again I read this as a contradictory statement. At one level it is admirably progressive in its construction of the role of women. This, as I pointed out in my original article, shows above all the influence of the women's movement, but I insist that it is also at the same time an essentially class based denial of the possibility of the working class playing a progressive role.

Perhaps I should also stress that I too am a regular watcher/fan of The Simpsons. My favourite moment of many is where Barney lies stretched out under the tap in Mo's bar, waiting for his heart to restart so he can steal more of the beer. Been there. Done that.

But again I have long since ceased to believe in the innocence of laughter. If I might be personal once more, the experience of watching a broadcast of the English comedian Ken Dodd telling Irish jokes in Belfast to British soldiers fresh from patrolling the streets of my native city was crucial here. Joke after joke about how lazy, stupid, treacherous, dirty and inhuman the Irish were. Each joke greeted with gale upon gale of laughter.

To end on a rather minor note, Flew, as befits perhaps a follower of Foucault, seems to think that Marxism cannot handle contradictions such as The Simpsons "comes from the belly of the beast". Flew makes much in his article of the contradiction between the content of the Simpsons and that fact that it is "Rupert Murdoch's flag-ship". There is also a reference to Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and a speculation that I might believe in the dominant ideology thesis.

Alas and alack. I feel like one who treads alone... Once upon a time folks from around these parts knew when the Owl of Minerva flew (Pardon me), and understood that Marxism especially in its Hegelian varieties was the science of contradictions. It is interesting to note in this context that Foucault reserves his most strident polemics not for Marx but rather Hegel. Against the latter, Foucault called for "thought without contradiction". (Bouchard, 1977:185) In Flew's case he seems to have succeeded all too well.

As for Chomsky, my objections to his propaganda model are that it tends to an over simplified analysis of the state. In effect Chomsky and Herman collapse the state into the capitalist class. But Chomsky is very careful to point out that his and Herman's model is not an effects model. So again Flew's criticism misses the mark.

So by way of a final restatement, I believe that our responsibility as teachers of popular culture is never to disparage the popular but neither is it enough simply to recount our pleasures or even to account for them. We also have to interrogate the popular, for often it is marred by prejudice. We must at the same time keep our eyes on the prize, namely a popular culture with a genuinely utopian dimension. For after all that has been said and done, the Realm of Freedom still beckons...

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