BY ALISON DELLIT
"I hate to disappoint your readers", an earnest David Barsamian told Green Left Weekly on November 6, "but most Americans are not genetically ignorant. For people to believe that Iraq is about to attack them, that they are surrounded by enemies, it takes systematic use of propaganda."
Barsamian was referring to the startling fact that most US voters falsely believe that Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq by invading US forces. As the director of Alternative Radio in the US, Barsamian has spent much of his life fighting to get truth heard in the face of one of the world's most powerful propaganda machines.
The child of Armenian refugees, Barsamian launched himself into radio in 1978, despite having no formal training or background in media. Now, the hour-long Alternative Radio program is broadcast across the US, and in many other countries, including Australia. Barsamian has co-authored books with such left intellectuals as Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Howard Zinn and Edward Said.
GLW spoke to Barsamian during his whirlwind 10-day tour of Australia. His passion for dissident media, and his contempt for the corporate-run media, were palpable.
"Media plays a crucial role in manufacturing dissent. In mobilising support for a war, for example", he said. "All aggressive states, all conquering nations use the rhetoric of peace to cover their aggressive designs.
"If you're the president of the United States, you cannot go to the American people and say that we are going to attack a country and remove its oil and enrich ourselves and control the world economy. People would go 'What? I don't own any oil.'
"But if you say it is for peace, that we will be able to live without war, then, oh, who's against peace? So up is down and the sun rises in the west. You just repeat the same things over and over again until people believe it."
Barsamian was at pains to point out that the Iraq war was based on lies — in particular, the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. "Iraq was cooperating with the [UN] weapons inspectors. Iraq posed no threat to the US, no threat to Australia. Why was it attacked? You don't have to have a PhD to figure it out. If Iraq had bananas and mangoes instead of oil, would it have been attacked?"
Barsamian throws terms like imperialism around with confidence. Raised by survivors of the 1915 Armenian genocide, he also spent years in India as a young man and has developed a savage critique of the US role in world politics.
Calling Israel a " kind of land-based aircraft carrier" for the US, he listed off rapid fire the US bases maintained in the oil-rich regions of the world.
To understand imperialism, he said, it is only necessary to watch the film The Godfather. "At the beginning, when the man kisses the Don's hand, the deal is struck. If you obey, you'll come under his love, if you don't...
"And the godfather has capos, like sub-commandants. That's what [British PM] Tony Blair is, that's what John Howard is, that what's [Israeli PM] Ariel Sharon is. The US doesn't want to clean up all its shit — it'll leave it up to the capos, because they know their neighbourhood best. But if things get really out of control, then the US will come in. It's what's called 'local cops on the beat'.
"There are winners in imperialism: Shell, ExxonMobil, British Petroleum and ChevronTexaco are four of the biggest companies in the world. Halliburton and Bechtel have got billions of dollars in contracts to reconstruct the Iraq that the US military destroyed. So the American people pay twice: first we pay to bomb the country and then we pay to rebuild it.
"How do you pull this off? By keeping people in a state of fear. By constant use of propaganda telling people that they are in great danger and must trust to big brother."
Unlike some visiting US activists, Barsamian had followed and engaged with local political discussion, pointing out that workers across the developed capitalist countries are having similar experiences — attacks on trade unions, cuts to public broadcasting and mass privatisation of public assets.
"The state starves public entities of money, and then says 'they're slacking off, they're just tossers' and justifies privatisation. So now in South Australia, where I just visited, there is a huge uproar about electricity costs, because it is privatised, and there is about to be a 25% price increase.
"On the other hand, you have the militarism, and a huge increase in state power, in the punitive aspects of the state — punishing not nourishing.
"Really existing capitalism requires massive state intervention, in the military and in sectors such as agriculture, where US grain producers are so heavily subsidised they can dump their grain into Third World countries and undercut the local farmers. Imagine this, rice from the US is cheaper in the Indian market than locally grown rice.
"You can count the tens of thousands being killed by bombings and occupations by imperialism, but the invisible deaths caused by economic policies, how do you count those?"
He also commented, however, on the paucity of alternative media in Australia, in comparison to the "lively dissident network" of radio stations in the United States, praising "the few" alternative media outlets, such as stations such as Sydney's 2SER and Melbourne's 3CR, which did keep going, as well as Green Left Weekly. He was horrified by the high price of books in Australia.
But Barsamian is anything but pessimistic. When he first started in radio, people like Chomsky were struggling to be heard. Now, he pointed out, they were like "rock stars". "Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Tariq Ali, John Pilger, Robert Fisk are all getting huge, unprecedented audiences now. They are packing out huge venues. Due, I think, to the disconnection and sense of unease.
"It's like the media and government has made all these promises, but then not kept any. People know something is wrong, many are just not sure what. You can't lie to people all the time and not expect them to suspect that something is up.
"There are two contradictory currents in the US, going in opposite directions. One is the chauvinistic, flag-waving jingoist that forms the core of Bush's support.
"And then you have those who want a different United States. They don't want the US to be the international bully, the rogue state that violates international law. They are going in the obvious direction. The big decision will be next year [the 2004 presidential election] — if we don't have regime change, it's quite likely there will be a series of more aggressive wars.
"But like in Australia and Britain, in the US the official opposition is just Bush-lite."
Barsamian was a supporter of the Greens presidential candidate Ralph Nader's campaign in the 2000 election. Despite emphasising several times that Bush must be defeated at the polls, he was also scathing of the US electoral process. Real change, Barsamian argued, would come from "the bottom up".
In response to a question about the role of left intellectuals, he said that they could be "catalysts", but that the "Leninist leader model of struggle is flawed".
"We need to have icons", he said, "for emotional as well as intellectual reasons. But we need grassroots movements. We can only do that through education, through media, through global cooperation. We're seeing this on an unprecedented scale. February 15 this year saw millions of people mobilising — the largest demonstrations in the history of the world.
"You need to ask, what can I do here, in Marrickville or Adelaide? It's a lot of work to be effective. It takes a lot of dedication, of perseverance because there are a lot of obstacles. But if I had listened to the people who told me it was too hard, I would never have done the whole thing with radio. If African Americans had listened, they'd still be in chains. Things have evolved, and that just shows power of grassroots movements."
[Alternative Radio can be heard on Bay FM in Byron Bay, 2XXFM in Canberra, 3CR in Melbourne, Gippsland FM, and 2SER in Sydney. For more information, visit <http://www.alternativeradio.org>].
From Green Left Weekly, November 26, 2003.
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