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Winter 2001/2

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Issue 42

You Are Being Lied To: the Disinformation guide to media distortion, historical whitewashes and cultural myths
Russ Kick (ed.),
Disinformation, 2001, $19.95,
ISBN 0-9664100-7-6.
Available from
http://store.disinfo.com.

Phil Edwards

I once sat in on an interesting conversation between two well known writers on the underside of politics. At one point, one of them alluded disparagingly to one of the scruffier areas of the conspiracy fringe - UFOs, maybe. The other reacted immediately: 'Oh, you don't want to go there!' The first agreed enthusiastically, and a kind of double-act developed:

'Mind control?'
'Don't want to go there!'
'Remote viewing?'
'Don't want to go there!'
'Hilda Murrell?'
'Don't want to go there!'

After a couple of minutes of this there weren't many places where you would want to go; I think the Kennedy assassinations and the Wilson plots were still fair game, but that was more or less it. Anything which had been written about by anyone irrational or obsessive - or merely intellectually disreputable - was off-limits. Let the conspiracy loons have their conspiracy theories; what we do is parapolitics.

I don't use green ink myself, and I'm fairly sceptical about most of the areas I've just mentioned although I never did understand what was so loonish about the murder of Hilda Murrell. Having said that, I don't believe it's possible to draw a firm line between conspiracy theory and parapolitics. According to the 'Louie, Louie' theory of rock music, however deep and abstruse rock musicians may appear now, you can be sure that they started by banging out three chords and yelling something meaningless. Similarly, I'd be willing to bet that most of today's parapolitics researchers began by having their minds blown by some scruffy and intellectually disreputable conspiracy theory. (I know I did.)

The worst part of the 'conspiracy theory'/parapolitics' split is that the line is drawn in the wrong place - it doesn't even correspond to a split between good and bad conspiracy theory. There is good and interesting crop circle research out there; there is garbage being written about assassinations. You can't tell in advance.

Which brings me to Russ Kick's vast and sprawling collection - 400 large format pages, 65 pieces by 55 contributors. No loon material here: no New World Order, no alien abductions, no faked moon landings. Instead, there are pieces on media control and political scandals and cover-ups and the rewriting of history. It gets a bit weird towards the back, with one piece proclaiming 'a sentient universe' and another challenging evolution (from a Hindu perspective), but mostly it looks thoroughly respectable.

The misgivings start with Kick's Introduction. What's a lie?

'For the purposes of this book, the definition of "lie" is an elastic one. Sometimes it means an outright falsehood told in order to deceive people ... Or it can be a "lie of omission" ... Sometimes the lie can be something untrue that the speaker thinks is true......In yet other cases, particular erroneous beliefs are so universal...... that you can't pinpoint certain speakers in order to ascertain their motives; it's just something that everyone "knows".'

And how do you undermine a lie?

'As a wise soul once noted, all you need to do is find a single white crow to disprove the statement "All crows are black". The contributors to this book are pointing out the white crows.'

In other words, you don't need to have the whole picture to know when it's being distorted:

'The first step is to realize that the "answers" that are being handed to us on a silver platter - or, perhaps more often, shoved down our throats - are often incorrect, incomplete, and usually serve the interests of the people promoting those so-called answers.'

So, if you're told something which you believe to be untrue - or you're not told something which you do believe to be true - You Are Being Lied To. Come to that, if someone else believes things which you don't - or if everyone else believes things which you don't - You Are Being Lied To. You're being lied to because certain people think that letting you know the truth would be against their interests. And how do you know this is going on? Because of that white crow: you've seen (or you believe you've seen), a piece of evidence which goes against what you've been told - or what you haven't been told - or what some other person believes. You know you can recognise the truth when you see it; you know you've seen the evidence; so you know that what you believe is the truth, and anyone saying otherwise is lying to you.

Spelt out like this, this is a bizarre world view, but it's surprisingly common. Its best-known exemplar is probably Noam Chomsky's 'propaganda model' of the media, which has the dubious merit of supplementing its critique of individual journalists with such a range of economic, political, institutional and cultural forces as to put it effectively beyond disproof ('the predictions are well confirmed', Chomsky writes here). Its great virtue is to divide the world into two parts: those who lie and those who tell the truth. Lies (meaning statements, omissions and received opinions that you don't agree with) are spread by liars; liars have interests which those lies serve. Thus David McGowan finds a series of discrepancies in early news stories about the Columbine shooting - most of which simply suggest that nobody could believe two people could create so much havoc - and proceeds directly to debating whose interests would be served if the shooting was a state massacre:

'Many right-wingers would have you believe that such acts are orchestrated - or at the very least rather cynically exploited - as a pretext for passing further gun-control legislation........ And there is reason to believe that this could well be a goal. It is not, however, the only - or even the primary - goal......The true goal is to further traumatise and brutalise the American people. This has in fact been a primary goal of the State for quite some time.'

More prosaically, Russ Kick identifies differences between successive versions of stories on the Associated Press news wire, announcing in one case that 'there can be absolutely no doubt that a story was changed to protect the powerful' (by changing one sentence between two versions) and asking:

'Who called the AP in the intervening hour and got them to yank those fourteen words?'

The trouble is, there's no reason to suppose that anyone did. (A Chomskyan analysis would sail over this hurdle - self-censorship is central to the propaganda model - but at the cost of stretching the concept of 'lie' (or 'propaganda') to breaking point.) Kick doesn't even suggest that some kinds of change are being made more than others:

'Overall, the changes are usually made for legitimate reasons. But a few of the changes are highly suspicious and certainly are of benefit to those in power.'

On its own, one white crow may look 'highly suspicious'; statistically, it's noise.

On the other side of the fence, there are the people who expose these anomalies, discrepancies and revisions, providing glimpses of the truth - yourself included, of course. Entirely different standards of evidence apply here. As long as you're challenging received wisdom, it seems, you can say pretty much what you like. Richard Metzger, interviewing someone called Howard Bloom, asks why it is that all Arabs want to kill Jews; Bloom explains that it's not all Arabs - it's all Moslems. Clarifying the Northern Irish situation for an American audience, Marni Sullivan declares that 'the dissent generated by Catholic and Protestant differences is only a small factor', reveals that 'Sinn Fein does not know or govern the actions of the IRA' and describes the Troops Out Movement as representative of the opinions of 'English civilians' (source: a poll carried out by the Troops Out Movement). More trivially, Earl Lee's critique of (American) school textbooks includes the daft assertion that Gulliver's Travels is the original source for the expression 'a piece of ass'. You are being lied to, indeed.

The insistence on dividing the world into truth and lies also mars some quite good pieces of research. George Smith demonstrates that the mainstream media have fallen for some spectacular computer hacker and virus myths, then struggles to find interests which are served by this gullibility and attempts to fit the - very real - ILOVEYOU virus into the same framework. Jonathan Vankin describes how US elections can be fixed on the basis of exit polling, then suggests that we're unlikely ever to find out whether this is happening or not:

'There are very few elections that qualify as major upsets any more. ... As for turncoat conspirators, if the conspiracy works there are no turncoats. A good conspiracy is an unprovable conspiracy.'

(Note the extra twist to the argument: if there are no discrepancies, it simply shows that the lie has been imposed effectively.)

There is some good stuff in here: Preston Peet on CIA drug-running, Barry Chamish on the murder of Yitzhak Rabin and Cletus Nelson on the Oklahoma City bomb are all well worth reading, as are pieces by Jim Hogshire, Norman Solomon and Gary Webb. But the best pieces in this book are the ones which are least affected by the white crow world view which Kick champions. Conspiracy theory, however green the ink it's written in, is based on critical thinking; you hear everyone out, you weigh everything up and - if you'll pardon the expression - you trust no one. Every source has something to tell you, very few of them are simply lying through their teeth and nobody's telling you the whole truth - arguably nobody can. Yourself included.

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