(c) Copyright 1998: Graham L. Strachan
Noam Chomsky has shown how the Western media ‘manufacture consent’, mould public opinion to suit the agenda of the ruling elites, and the governments they put into and keep in power. But the role of the media goes beyond that. It extends to the manufacturing of a particular view of the world, an elite-sanctioned false ‘reality’ tailor-made for the masses. This is achieved by withholding factual information which contradicts the ‘politically correct’ view, using labels without precise definition, and by adhering to certain ‘authorised’ versions of historical events which are frequently not borne out by the facts.
It is interesting to observe just such a false ‘reality’ in the process of being manufactured: the so-called ‘Third Way’ President Clinton and his counterpart across the Atlantic, Britain’s Tony Blair, are trying to invent with the aid of Western academics and the media. It’s supposed to be a ‘middle road between Communism and Capitalism’, a post-Cold War synthesis that will ‘lead the world into the 21st centuury’. But the very notions of Capitalism and Communism were manufactured realities in the first place. Cold War ideology had it that they were the two great opposing political ideologies of history. The former (at least in the West) was supposed to represent democracy, free markets, and human rights, while the latter stood for tyranny, central economic planning and control, and the suppression of dissenting viewpoints. It was all made to be readily digestible. In fact it was nonsense.
For a start, Communism was never a social system at all, but a political MOVEMENT. There is a social system called ‘communism’, which literally means people living in communes (barracks), with no private ownership of property, no government, and everything shared out on the principle ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’. Communist ideology insists that tribal man originaly lived in such a state (primordial communism), but there is no evidence for it. Apart from religious sects like the Essenes at the time of Christ, monks in medieval monasteries, and a few hundred failed attempts by small communities down through the ages, there has never been a communist society. The Israeli kibbutz qualifies, but that’s not the sort of Communism Clinton and Blair are talking about in relation to the ‘Third Way’.
The Communism they are talking about, which was supposed to have existed in the USSR, is again a false reality manufactured by the Western media. The social system in the USSR, indeed the social system installed by Communists wherever they seize power is, and always has been, Socialism. The initials ‘USSR’ stood for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Article 1 of the USSR Constitution stated: “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a socialist state....” Article 4: “The Soviet state and all its bodies function on the basis of socialist law....” The Russian Communists didn’t get it wrong. If anybody understood that Communism was a revolutionary movement and not a social system they did. They always called their system Socialism. So does Cuba’s Fidel Castro. So do the Chinese Communists.
So did Karl Marx. In his ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ (1875), he made it clear that communism was a long way down the track, after the State had withered away. “[Only] in a higher phase of communist society after....the division of labour has vanished....after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of productive wealth flow more abundantly....[only then would distribution be] ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’”. In the meantime the people were to have Socialism, with ‘equal liability of all to labour’. Who does not work, does not eat.
Article 14 of the USSR Constitution stated: “The state exercises control over the measure of labour and consumption in accordance with the principle of socialism: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work’.” As for the State withering away, somebody asked Stalin when that was going to happen. He answered that the State was being strengthened in preparation for its withering away, and if that sounded like a contradiction, such was the nature of the Dialectic. The promise of the communist utopia was bait, in other words. What the Russians got was Socialism, and that must be what occupies the Left-hand side of the ‘Third Way’ ledger.
Why did the Western media persist in calling the social system in the Communist bloc ‘Communism’ instead of Socialism? They did it to manufacture a false reality: to protect the reputation of another form of Socialism which existed in the West....so-called ‘Democratic Socialism’, socialism by stealth, socialism achieved through the ‘permeation’ of existing political institutions by members of organisation such as the Fabian Society, in order to influence the policies adopted by those institutions towards socialism.
Democratic Socialism itself was based on a lie: that Socialism could be implemented peacefully through the ballot box. The implication was that if the voters didn’t like it they could vote it out again. That was a hoax. Since Socialism does not permit private ownership of property, it cannot be ‘democratic’ in the sense of allowing a choice of political Parties. This is not a matter of ideology, but of logistics. It would be impossible to have a two Party system of genuine democracy, for example, under which the state nationalised all property including business when the Socialists were voted into power, then sold it all back to the people again when they were voted out. The intention of Democratic Socialism was (and still is) to be democratic just long enough to gain power. Then it will declare the ‘end of history’ and entrench itself forever, enforcing its politically correct speech and thought on everybody, and being just as tyrannical as its Marxist revolutionary counterparts.
The other problem for the media reality-makers was the tendency of Socialism to produce ‘deviationists’, like Hitler and Mussolini. Journalists papered over this problem by making out that Socialism’s aberrations were much further removed from their socialist roots than they really were. Accordingly National Socialism, in the form of Fascism and Nazism, was portrayed as the very opposite of Socialism. That too was nonsense. The term Nazi stood for National Socialist Workers Party. Hitler didn’t get it wrong, any more than the Soviets did. Both Hitler and Mussolini were socialists and their respective policies were nationalist variants of socialist policies, which were strictly internationalist. The so-called ‘far Right’ was ‘far Right Socialist’, far Right Left, not Conservative as the media did their best to make out.
Hitler’s Nazi Party started out as a radical anti-capitalist party. But Hitler knew what Lenin had known: that every socialist Party wanting to seize power, whether through the ballot box or by revolution, needs money. Hitler got it from the same place Lenin and the Bolsheviks did: from the international bankers [see Professor Antony Sutton, ‘Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler’ (1976)]. When Otto Strasser accused Hitler of wanting to strangle the socialist revolution ‘for the sake of legality and a new collaboration with the bourgeois parties of the Right’, Hitler retorted angrily, “I am a Socialist”, and he meant it. It was just that he had to get his money from the Finance Capitalists. Everybody has to. That’s the way the world is organised. [See also Alan Bullock, ‘Hitler: a Study in Tyranny’, pp.156-7].
Mussolini too was a committed socialist, who wrote articles for left-wing magazines from an early age. By 1903 he was preaching revolution, the class struggle, and the abolition of private property. He claimed to have met Lenin, and was coached in socialism by revolutionary socialist, Angelica Balabanoff. While he was editor of the socialist newspaper ‘Avanti’ between 1912-14 he had a portrait of Karl Marx on the wall of his office, and believed in the central teachings of the Communist Manifesto. When he was finally expelled from the Socialist Party for ‘deviationism’, advocating nationalism and involvement in World War II, his parting words were, “You cannot get rid of me because I am and always will be a Socialist.” [See Denis Mack Smith, ‘Mussolini’].
The perception in the West that Socialism is a ‘more fair and just system’, that it is even worth salvaging to become part of a ‘Third Way’, is also a manufactured reality. When evidence started to leak out of the Soviet Union that socialism was producing social inequality, slave labour and brutality, the Western media manufactured the idea that the problem was ‘Stalinism’, not Socialism. That too was a lie. The rot had set in long before Stalin, in the days of Lenin himself. As the documentary series ‘The Spirit of Freedom’ (SBS TV 1995) showed, the Gulag Archepeligo slave labour camps began in Lenin’s time, well before Stalin. In 1918 there were 3, by 1920 there were 8, by 1922 there were 56, and by 1923 the year before Lenin's death there were 65 slave labour camps in the USSR. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out in his essay ‘The West’s Betrayal of Civilisation’ (1976), slave labour was not a distortion of the Socialist ideal, it was part of the programme.
Solzhenitsyn also warned that the West had been seduced by the ‘misty phantom of socialism’ into believing that it stood for justice. This belief, deliberately cultivated by the Western media, had enabled Europe to turn a blind eye to the annihilation by the Soviet regime of 64 MILLION of its own people. Said Sozhenitsyn, “There is not even a single precise definition of socialism which is generally recognised: all we have is a sort of hazy shimmering concept of something good, something noble.” He charged the West with being hypnotised by it, failing to see the danger in it, and having lost the will to defend itself against it. He was right. The West is about to salvage this rotten system and make it part of the ‘Third Way’.
When it comes to the Right-hand side of the ‘Third Way’ ledger the manufactured reality is equally false. For a start, Capitalism is supposed to be Capitalism, but that’s not true either. There are two sorts of capitalism: private enterprise (entrepreneurial) capitalism, and Finance Capitalism, which includes Big Business financed on credit extended by banks. American writer Gary Allen in his book ‘The Rockefeller File’ (1976) described the difference this way (at p.105): “A distinction must be drawn between competitive free enterprise, the most moral and productive system ever devised, and cartel capitalism dominated by industrial monopolists and international bankers. The difference is crucial: the private enterpriser operates by offering products and services in a competitive free market, where consumers have numerous choices offered to them, while cartel capitalists use the government to force the public to do business with them. These corporate socialist-fascists are the deadly enemies of competitive private enterprise.”
Professor Antony Sutton agrees. In ‘Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution ’ (1981) he says, “The financiers...could by government control...more easily avoid the rigors of competition. Through political influence they could manipulate the police power of the state to achieve what they had been unable, or what was too costly, to achieve under the private enterprise system.” And later (p. 17), “Monopoly capitalists are the bitter enemies of laissez-faire entrepreneurs....” So as oils ain’t Oils, capitalism ain’t Capitalism. But through the technique of labelling, the Western media can brush over the crucial difference.
In the book ‘Globalisation: Demise of the Australian Nation’ (1998), I show that due to the application by globalising governments of false versions of ‘free market’ and ‘free trade’ economic theories, nationally-based free enterprise is being deliberately destroyed and replaced by global Monopoly Capitalist ownership and control of the world’s resources. The Capitalist component of the ‘Third Way’ will not be free enterprise Capitalism, it will be Big Business/Finance Capitalism, something proving itself to be just as oppressive economically as Socialism is politically. The synthesis of these two oppressive systems is being sold to the public as the political ‘way ahead’ for the 21st century.
Are Finance Capitalism and Socialism even compatible in a Third Way? How real is the proposed reconciliation between the formerly irreconcilable? Again Professor Sutton is helpful. In ‘Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution’ he says, “....one barrier to mature understanding of recent history is the notion that all capitalists are the bitter and unswerving enemies of all Marxists and socialists. This erroneous idea originated with Karl Marx and was undoubtedly useful to his purposes. In fact, the idea is nonsense. There has been a continuing, albeit concealed, alliance between international political capitalists and international revolutionary socialists....to their mutual benefit.” Later he says, “....the totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market for monopoly capitalists.”
So that’s to be the ‘Third Way’: the Socialists and the Monopoly Capitalists, united against the ordinary, productive people of the world, and both looking to the international bankers to finance their nefarious plans for global control and enslavement. This explains why, now that the Cold War is over and Capitalism has won, there is any need for a ‘Third Way’ at all. Why not just have Capitalism? Not on. Obviously a deal is being struck struck between the Stealth Socialists and Finance Capitalists, and the ‘Third Way’ is the ideological formalisation of that pact, the new ‘social contract’. The Capitalists are to have the economic control, while the Socialists can have the social control, which is what both wanted all along anyway. The ordinary people of the world will live in a vise, copping it from both sides, and struggling to scratch out a living and a bit of happiness along the way. Perhaps the youth sense the misery and drudgery it promises, and that’s why they are suiciding in ever increasing numbers.