Berlin Wall comes down but myths still stand

Recently, the world celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Angela Merkel and Mikhail Gorbachev walked through a former border crossing on November 9th, 20 years to the day after the wall came down, thronged by adulant crowds. Commentators capitalized on the anniversary as an opportunity to generate endless syrupy combinations of the words ‘tyranny’ ‘liberty’ and ‘reflection,’ saturating the atmosphere with their appropriately reverant and triumphant iterations, ‘looking back’ through the distorted prism of propaganda.

One wall indeed came down, its brick and barbed wire dismantled by bulldozers and bare hands, its fall celebrated in the streets of Berlin and in homes across the world. A wall came down and the world rightly rejoiced the end of decades of oppression. Unfortunately, another remained, a wall stronger than the bricks built by Soviets, one whose guard towers still yet stand. This wall has not eroded or weakened with the passage of time, but rather, grown stronger, a testament to the endurance of propaganda, and to the readiness with which the Western world accepts convenient falsehoods.

This wall is a wall of myths.

Myths were actively cultivated during the Cold War as a barrier to objective analysis of the policies of the West. Soviet citizens, controlled by overt force, required only the crudest of propaganda efforts. Western citizens, though, were freer, and thus required a more sophisticated propaganda campaign. Noam Chomsky refers to the process as the manufacturing of consent. Thought control. Propaganda. Whatever the description given of the process, well developed systems were used to insure that Western minds were properly controlled, and vital topics were only discussed within a limited framework. Though not centrally coordinated like that of the Soviets, the Western propaganda effort effectively maintained the parameters of debate.

Central to the propaganda of the era was the Great Myth of the Cold War.

Within the consensus framework of thought, the Cold War was an ideological struggle between two implacable foes. Western States declared themselves ‘The Free World’ without any apparent sense of irony, placing the Soviet Union, by extension, firmly behind the ‘Iron Curtain.’

Our leaders warned that we were in a death struggle, with no less than our dearest freedoms at stake. Massive amounts of money were spent on weapons, with an ever escalating arms race resulting in the insanity of MIRVs and MAD, a world on hair trigger alert for nuclear annihilation.

The world stood ready to be destroyed, and few even questioned why.

Rather than examine the central claims of the Cold War to test their validity, Westerners, from policy makers to citizens, accepted them, everyone playing a part in the collective delusion of Cold War mythmaking. And though the Cold War never erupted into the world-ending calamity of nuclear confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact powers, flare ups were continual, with very real lives sacrificed to the myth in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan.

The Western world was free, our leaders declared, and the East was not. So we fought, and died, and killed. For Freedom! We were told it was freedom, a noble end, and most believed.

What thought was given to this claim that our leaders were deeply concerned with freedom, whether it be freedom at home or freedom abroad? What thought was given to democracy and struggles for independence? Was this claim analyzed?

If it was, then what of the tyrannies actively supported by the United States during this time? In Iran, the Congo (Zaire at the time), the Phillipines, and in countless other nations, the United States government supported dictators. We trained their secret police, we hosted their Generals at US State Dinners, and we sent bullets and airplanes to their militaries. Iran’s secret police, the SAVAK, were trained by the CIA and tortured thousands. In Zaire, the CIA played an active role in the assassination of reformer Patrice Lumumba and the rise to power of his successor, the corrupt dictator Mobutu, whose reign was notable for fraud and massacres. Ferdinand Marcos in the Phillipines stole billions and instituted martial law. These were our allies.

It this claim was analyzed, then what of the United States participation in overthrowing the democratically elected governments of Chile, Guatemala, and Iran? What of our role in denying the determination of the Vietnamese to select their own form of their government? If one of the central claims of the anti-Soviet propaganda was that we were fighting to preserve democracy, why did the US government have so few qualms about destroying it?

What of the carpet bombing and defoliants that burned, maimed, and mutilated the men, women and children of hamlets across Southeast Asia? Three million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians were killed. Seven million tons of bombs, more than were used in all of World War Two, fell on the countries of Southeast Asia.

What of support given by the United States to Suharto in Indonesia, the military aid and intelligence sharing with a government that slaughtered over 200,000 in East Timor, a slaughter that lasted from 1975 until the Clinton years without abatement?

The hypocrisy and cynicism of the Cold War myths are boundless.

It is a great testament to the power of these towering falsehoods that one can speak of the Cold War as an ideological struggle without being laughed out of the room. Certainly powerful forces were at play in the conflict between the Soviet Union and the West, but not the ones so readily referenced in mainstream analysis.

From 1939-1945, planners in the US State Department extensively researched geopolitical concerns, resulting in the production of a “Grand Area Plan.” The plan called for US control over significant portions of the world, specifically referencing Middle Eastern oil. The plan, in fact, called for control of most of the world’s resources, if possible. Following the end of World War Two, and the emergence of a dominant American economic system, these aims seemed within grasp to American planners.

Unfortunately, the Soviets were in need of these same materials. Western governments realized that Soviet control over said resources would make them impenetrable to Western development and exploitation, as the Soviet model of development was drastically different from that of capitalist systems. Two massive economies, two different worldviews, finite resources…the resultant conflict was all but inevitable.

The governments of both West and East alike sought to cloak their naked grabs for control of resources in the cloth of ideological propaganda. Had the governments of these nations stated baldly in the language of realpolitik that control over Middle East oil and African minerals were the reasons for their disagreement, citizens may not have been so accepting of the great myths of the era.

Oil is not as appealing an object of defense as Freedom.

The Soviets were the perfect foil for the West, and we the perfect foil for them, a fictionalized enemy whose widely perceived and greatly exaggerated external threat could be referenced to justify oppression at home. By pointing to the East, towards the Great Red Menace, our leaders could claim that their energies were focused on protecting us from the nuclear armed hordes, and any number of domestic priorities could be safely ignored. Soviet leaders could reference Western Imperialism and Capitalist Plots with some basis in reality to justify their curtailment of liberties., their paranoia.

Labor movements could be crushed. Racism could continue. Hungary could be invaded. Soviet and Western leaders alike readily pointed outwards as a handy way to excuse their own crimes. Everyone was happy with the arrangement, excepting, of course, the hundreds of millions who suffered as a result.

But neither side was eager to give up the myth, with Soviet and Western governments alike justifying their actions by pointing to the other. The great ruse continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the United States was left without a credible foe.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, US military spending was exorbititant without explanation. The cries to restructure society along more peaceful lines grew louder, with people demanding the billions previously spent on tanks and fighter jets be reallocated to schools and roads.

But myths as strong as the ones of the Cold War do not die easily. They change, perhaps, but do not die.

Though September 11th was indeed a tragedy, the call to an eternal world war against terrorism was not the only course of action available to US policymakers. Traditional analysis, in fact, favored a concerted criminal investigation rather than bombing and invasion. Police work rather than creating martyrs.

It was not to be. New times require new heroes and villains to fill the pantheon. Now the mortal threat is ‘terrorism.’ Osama Bin Laden the new boogeyman, a totem, a symbol, filling his place in the new mythology.

Terrorism is the new Communism, and we reorient ourselves around new dangers.

There are dangers to the American people from extremists, to be sure, but concern for the lives of the American people has never been of central concern to the powerful men and women who decide policy.

The abuse and criminality of the Iraq war spawned and continues to inspire new recruits to extremist organizations, according to American intelligence agencies. Drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan kill civilians and create massive opposition. The people of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and America declare that they do not want war. Yet war continues. A war the people do not want is fought for democracy building.

So terrorism’s myth is like that of the Soviets, a convenient justification for pre-determined policies, an ideological cover for the ugliness beneath.

Our infrastructure crumbles, homes are foreclosed, and real unemployment reaches sixteen percent. The United States spends as much as the rest of the world combined on weapons, maintaining over seven hundred military bases around the world, on all continents except Antarctica, and this is declared to be all for our ‘defense.’

The myth continues.

Stripped of the cloaks of ideological justifications, the reasons for bloodshed and conflict are the same now as they were then: control over finite resources and the domination of a world economy by force.

The jungles of Vietname and the Congo have been replaced by the steppes of Central Asia and the bullet riddled buildings of Baghdad. The young men of America are no longer drafted against their will, but pulled into the military with offers of free health insurance, housing, and money for college, an increasingly enticing prospect given the economic devastation wrought by decades of governmental neglect. Our quest for Freedom, Truth, and the American way continues. Now, it is Muslim Terrorists who stand in our way, and not those damned Communists.

There are new myths, and new symbols, new appeals.

Those who make the ultimate sacrifice are perhaps the most potent symbol of all, their deaths held up frequently by myth makers, appealed to, eulogized, but never truly honored. Their deaths are cause for reverence, if they are on our side, cause for slim consideration if they are on the other. Either way, their deaths are not truthfully represented, and we do them a dishonor when we fictionalize their stories. We do them a dishonor because we hide their sacrifices behind a wall of myths.

On the other side of that wall is truth. If these walls are taken down, and realities analyzed, perhaps there will be fewer bombs, fewer bullets, fewer wars, and fewer bodies to bury. In order to reclaim the present we must reclaim history.

I, for one, am ready to tear down that wall.

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