About the Author:

Noam Chomsky is a renowned linguist, philosopher, and political activist. He is one of the most influential figures in the field of linguistics, for developing the theory of generative grammar. Chomsky is also a vocal critic of US foreign policy and an advocate of social justice. He wrote many books and articles, among which Syntactic Structures (1957), Manufacturing Consent (1988), and Hegemony or Survival (2003).

Propaganda’s Role

Noam Chomsky delves into the significant role media plays in shaping politics and democracy. He contrasts two views of democracy: the ideal, where the public actively participates to open and unbiased information, and the prevailing one, where elites control information and decision-making. Chomsky highlights historical instances like World War I, where U.S. government propaganda transformed a pacifist population into fervent war supporters, demonstrating the power of media manipulation.

Intellectual Elites Managing Society

Chomsky highlights the influence of intellectual elites in manipulating public opinion, drawing parallels with Leninist ideas. Figures like Walter Lippmann and the Dewey circle intellectuals believed in “manufacturing consent” to align the public with decisions they might otherwise oppose. This suggests that a small, enlightened elite should guide the ignorant masses toward the common good, as they don’t have the ability to help themselves. Lippmann argued that a specialized class should manage society while the general public remains passive spectators. This leads to the controlling of public perception and the suppressing of real democracy.

The Mechanics of Propaganda

Propaganda in democratic societies serves a role similar to coercion in totalitarian states by ensuring that the masses remain passive and distracted, allowing a narrow group of elites to maintain control and serve the interests of private power. Chomsky explains how the public relations industry, which grew significantly during World War I, was designed to ensure public subordination to business interests. He provides examples like the “Mohawk Valley formula,” used by business leaders to turn public opinion against striking workers. This strategy proved effective, as it played on the inherent biases and fears of the public, aligning their sentiments with those of business interests. The use of propaganda to break strikes and stifle labor rights demonstrates the lengths to which the elite would go to maintain their dominance.

Foreign Interventions and Public Relations

Chomsky examines how public relations tactics have been used to justify foreign interventions. He details the 1954 Guatemalan coup, where the United Fruit Company ran a successful campaign to justify the U.S. overthrow of a democratic government. By creating misleading narratives and instilling fear, the campaign manipulated public perception to support U.S. actions abroad while marginalizing domestic opposition. The so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” exemplified public reluctance towards military action, which the elite aimed to overcome by fostering respect for martial values and revising historical events to fit their agendas. This manipulation of history and public sentiment was crucial in maintaining support for the elite's foreign and domestic policies.

Shaping Public Consciousness

Chomsky argues that the public relations industry effectively shapes public consciousness to align with elite interests, achieving control not through overt force but through sophisticated manipulation of information and values, which marginalized meaningful democratic participation. He points out how the media often portrays world events with little resemblance to reality, to support elite agendas, ensuring the public remains distracted and unable to organize effectively against their control. Chomsky's critique underscores the need for greater awareness and resistance to these manipulative practices to reclaim genuine democratic participation.

The Flourishing of Dissident Culture

Despite efforts to control public opinion, dissident culture has flourished since the 1960s, particularly against the Vietnam War, with significant protest emerging years after the U.S. began bombing South Vietnam.  Chomsky highlights the emerging movements which witnessed further expansion like environmentalism, feminism, and anti-nuclear activism. These movements were unique and significant because they didn't just protest from a distance but deeply involved themselves in the lives of suffering people worldwide, which have broadened public understanding and empathy. These movements challenge the status quo and foster public skepticism towards power and propaganda. For example, the feminist movement has significantly influenced public attitudes towards military force, with women showing more restraint and skepticism compared to the past, when it comes to using force.

The Future and Parade of Enemies

Chomsky warns that to distract from domestic issues, elites will continue creating external enemies. He provides historical examples, such as Hitler demonizing Jews and Gypsies, and the U.S. fabricating threats like international terrorists, narcotraffickers, crazed Arabs, and dictators like Saddam Hussein. Each new threat served to terrify the population, keeping them compliant and distracted from domestic issues. Chomsky suggests that Cuba could be the next target in this cycle of creating and destroying enemies to maintain control. This strategy involves illegal economic warfare and possibly a revival of international terrorism, similar to past operations against Cuba and Nicaragua.

Selective Perception and Media Bias

The media's selective coverage of human rights violations reveals its role in manufacturing consent. Chomsky contrasts the extensive coverage of Armando Valladares' memoirs about torture in Cuba with the silence on Herbert Anaya's torture in El Salvador. This selective perception ensures that certain narratives dominate while others are suppressed, maintaining the illusion of a benevolent foreign policy. Similar bias is seen in the lack of coverage of Israel's occupation of Lebanon despite Israel’s violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 425. Not to mention Indonesia's invasion of East Timor which resulted in approximately 200,000 deaths, also received minimal attention despite substantial U.S. support for the aggression. The media's selective coverage reveals a skillful system at manufacturing consent, highlighting atrocities that serve its narrative while silencing those that do not.

The Gulf War as Propaganda

The Gulf War exemplifies how propaganda shapes public perception. Chomsky explains how the U.S. framed its military action against Iraq and Kuwait as a principled stand against aggression, ignoring similar U.S. actions. He points out the media's failure to inform the public about Iraq's withdrawal offers and the effectiveness of sanctions, contributing to a perception that military action was the only solution. This manipulation led to a collective acceptance of narratives that serve the interests of those in power.

During the war's coverage, significant voices were conspicuously absent, particularly the Iraqi democratic opposition, a courageous group primarily composed of educated professionals living in exile. However, the U.S. government ignored their pleas for support while they were allied with Saddam Hussein. After the invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. turned against Saddam, yet the media failed to include the perspectives of the Iraqi opposition, who were against both Saddam and the war, highlighting a systemic exclusion of dissenting voices.

Additionally, the stated reasons for war were not sincerely upheld by the U.S., yet these contradictions went largely unchallenged in the media. As the war commenced, public opinion polls indicated significant support for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict over military action. However, the media failed to inform the public that Iraq had already proposed a withdrawal from Kuwait in exchange for addressing the Arab-Israeli conflict—a proposal ignored by the U.S. government. This lack of information contributed to a perception among the public that they were isolated in their views.

The portrayal of Saddam Hussein as a monstrous threat poised to conquer the world further exemplifies propaganda at work. Despite Iraq's lack of industrial capacity and support during the Iran-Iraq War, the narrative painted it as a powerful aggressor. This exaggeration mirrors the earlier demonization of figures like Manuel Noriega, who, while a minor player compared to other U.S. allies, was also portrayed as an imminent danger requiring military intervention.

Chomsky concludes that the choice between living in a genuinely free society or succumbing to a form of self-imposed totalitarianism rests on the ability of individuals to question the information presented to them and demand accountability.

The term “Secularism” has historical roots dating back to the religious wars in Europe that erupted in the 17th century and the emergence of the modern nation-state, where power shifted to the civil state away from the domination of the church.

The late scholar Dr. Abdel Wahab El-Messiri, in his encyclopedia “Partial Secularism and Comprehensive Secularism,” differentiates between two approaches to understanding secularism. Some restrict it to the separation of religion from politics and the economy, meaning the separation of religion from the state. This type of secularism does not oppose religious and moral principles but does not wish to involve them in worldly affairs subject to experimentation.

There is also comprehensive secularism, which strictly tries to neutralize the relationship between religion and values in various life aspects. It believes that only materialism can explain phenomena and that the material is the center of the universe. This concept developed through eras with the rise of the nation-state, European colonialism, increased production, the erosion of intermediate institutions like the family, the spread of value-free utilitarian thought, a shift towards rampant consumerism, and finally to the post-modern era with the spread of multinational corporations and phenomena such as sexual deviance, the nuclear family, and the misuse of science in medical and research fields.

The secular state, with its educational, entertainment, and media institutions, has reached the human conscience, infiltrated dreams and behavior, and undermined what remains of religious or even human morals!

When Socialism and Liberalism Met

El-Messiri points out the essential material essence of Western philosophies, despite surface differences. The Soviet Union, deeply entrenched in comprehensive communism, quickly adopted liberal values and American goods obsessively upon its fall. Meanwhile, the United States, which still allowed freedom of belief and Protestant religious propaganda, fell deeply into secularism and atheism due to the expansion of industrialization, urbanization, and the commodification of everything, including humans—a process known as “Americanization.” This resulted in the widespread prevalence of McDonald's, Pepsi, hamburgers, sexual advertisements, war movies, the American lifestyle, and songs and literature linked to the grim reality rather than ideals, despite its inherent racist bias against the Third World, Arabs, and Muslims specifically.

Globalization has literally dismembered the world and its people with its colonial advance, the emergence of Westernized elites in the Third World who rule through oppression, supported by Western (democratic secular) countries, or through phenomena like Nazism and Zionism that dismantled Polish, Russian, and Jewish humans in Europe, and Palestinians in our Arab East. Thus, the history of secularism cannot be separated from the history of modern Western colonialism.

Between Nazism and Zionism!

Modern secularism is an expression of the disappearance of values and the sacred from human life, and the glorification of commodities and materialism alone, leading to “the computerization of everything,” as El-Messiri describes. He links what happened to European Jews, who were treated as obsolete parts to be eliminated and transferred to Eastern countries, with what the Zionists, supported by America, are doing today by displacing and exterminating Palestinians.

El-Messiri also connects Nazi concentration camps and gas chambers with the persecution, extermination, and imprisonment faced by Palestinians today at the hands of the Zionist Nazis of our time. This is done by cold-blooded employees who believe these systematic steps are necessary for the security of “Israel,” the offspring of Western colonialism; from their perspective, it is a rational matter unrelated to emotions or history, which they simply erase to let the Darwinian theory of the fittest prevail.

In his famous book “Modernity and the Holocaust,” Polish-born British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman links modernity with the fall of values, with increasing relativism and the absolute religious truth, leading to a focus on the body and the absence of any standard in human behavior. Instead, there is an instrumental rationality concerned only with procedures, not ends, just as the Nazis sought to exterminate the mentally and physically disabled through “euthanasia” before moving to gas chambers to suffocate the Jews, considering them all useless categories!

Some have linked the secular Turkish forces during the rule of Erbakan to this tendency, as they staged a military coup against the people's choice of a moderate Islamic party, the Welfare Party. Here, the secular forces became the greatest adversary of democracy, turning into a fascist secularism until the balance of moderation was restored later.

El-Messiri highlights an important aspect: the impact of Western pragmatic thinking on Arab political elites over the past decades. With it, the Palestine cause shifted from being a matter of land taken from its rightful owners and given to Jews who committed horrific massacres and destruction to reclaiming the borders of 1967. We began to concede little by little, and the discourse changed after the Camp David Accords, taking an economic rather than an Arab nationalist form, until the hope became a ceasefire on innocent people and halting the expansion of settlements.

If we contemplate “Israel,” we will see it as merely a practical application of Western imperialism, which has always exterminated millions and plundered their resources in Africa and Latin America for its interests. Zionism is a secular Darwinian movement that turned Jews and Palestinians into utilitarian materials to achieve its goals, just as it did in Vietnam, Bosnia, Chechnya, and all the roles led by American intelligence.

Secularism from Within

Secularism never carried the dream of peace, justice, and equality as it claims. The French Revolution was a period of sacred violence, Napoleon's armies brought nothing but destruction and death to Eastern countries, as did the British Empire, which plundered the resources and enslaved the people. The Bolshevik Revolution produced Stalin in Russia, and thus were the secular regimes around the world.

El-Messiri, in his encyclopedia, dedicates sections to miserable models produced by secularism, such as the Singaporean hero (transformed into a production hero and a greedy consumer market), the Thai hero (transformed into a sexual force that can be marketed), and finally, the hero by Zionist standards, where sheer material brute force devoid of any value decides to exterminate the other in its camps.

Colonialism, by the logic of “transfer”—meaning a person who believes in moving and has no loyalty to culture or place—created pockets loyal to it in all its former colonies. It moved Chinese people to Malaysia, Jews to Palestine, and Jews also to Argentina, thus moving the human surplus it did not want to achieve its interests.

The idea of transition and instability evolved to include even the human gender. A man could become a woman and vice versa, and the call for free choice of partner emerged, with men marrying men and women marrying women. Thus, humanity fell into the swamp of deviation from any value or instinct.

Comprehensive secularism reduced humans to raw materials, cheap labor, and guaranteed markets for the benefit of the stronger and superior race in its biased colonial view. It encouraged the division of the world into small nation-states, then further divided them and stirred up prejudices to maintain its dominance. Meanwhile, it raised consumption rates, increased market demand, and spread Americanization, ending the uniqueness of cultures and the individuality of humans. It encouraged the idea of immediate gratification of desires outside traditional systems. At its core, America denies humanity and sanctifies materialism. Our duty is to confront secularism with a comprehensive project expressing our open, civilized, and authentic Arab-Islamic identity and instilling it in future generations.

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