Photographic artwork by Kris Saknussemm
In 18th-century England, a Sunday-afternoon outing could mean a visit to the local insane asylum, Bedlam being only the most famous of them. For a penny, a family could watch the antics of the inmates put on display for their amusement, then go home, have dinner, and enjoy the rest of the day off.
In 20th-century America, you could, on a less regular basis but with enough notice to pack a lunch and attend church services, watch a lynching. Afterward you could have your picture taken standing with the wife and kids beneath the charred corpse. For a small fee, the photographer would make postcards of the photo for you to send to your loved ones. And, if you were into collecting mementoes, body parts of the dead man were available the next day in local shops at a reasonable price.
In 21st century Israel, you can, during one of the assaults on Gaza, put a few camp chairs and a basket lunch into the trunk and drive out to some high ground near the fence surrounding Gaza and watch the Israeli air force bomb the shit out of men, women, and children.
Good, clean fun. No discretion, never mind shame, required. The things crazy people did could, after all, be pretty funny. And you weren't crazy and in danger of ending up in a Bedlam. And the Black man tied to a stake and then having his lips, ears, and nose cut off before being flayed, burned alive, and then hanged from a nearby tree, was just a nigger, and one who had looked the wrong way at a white woman, to boot. And the fun in Gaza takes place at a safe distance from Israel, a kind of fireworks display, only better because vile people, barely human, were and still are being crushed and burned alive in the flames and smoke.
When I was briefly in the Air Force ROTC, our instructor, a former bombardier in one of the B-17s and -25s that rained death on the cities of Germany, told us he shook so badly when he was siting the target below, he could barely see. Another veteran who also flew in those raids on Hamburg and other cities largely populated by, as we like to say, "innocent civilians," said he kept imagining the young children in the buildings below clinging to their mothers as the bombs began to explode nearer and nearer, crying, "Mutti! Mutti!"
Abraham Lincoln and some companions crossed the Potomac River and climbed up to a rooftop to watch the battle of Antietam. He wasn't there for the show alone. A commander-in-chief has an obligation to keep an eye on how the military operations he has ordered are proceeding. Even so, the spectacle that day was of lines of young Americans in blue uniforms facing lines of young Americans in gray uniforms, killing each other.
And so it goes, as WW-II veteran and prisoner of war Kurt Vonnegut often interjects into his narrative Slaughter House Five.
Today we can watch mass murder live on our computer screens, or if we prefer, hear it denied by press secretaries or condemned by protestors in abstract terms like "genocide," "war crimes" and "ethnic cleansing." We listen to public figures debate the relativity of one mass murder to another—the uniqueness of the Nazi's versus the mass slaughter of Armenians, Cambodians, Tutzis.
During the war the US waged in the 1840s to wrest Texas from Mexico, Henry David Thoreau described the typical Vermont family man, his stomach full following a long day's work, ensconced in his easy chair, reading disapprovingly about the ethnic cleansing of Texas in his newspaper and then falling asleep. Thoreau also cited condemnations by his neighbors against the institution of slavery, for which they, as Vermonters, felt no responsibility but profited by.
Under International Law, a series of codified prohibitions which the US Senate has ratified as a treaty, thereby making it as legally binding as the Constitution, a nation which aids and abets another nation in violation of those prohibitions is a co-belligerent. In other words, a nation that arms and otherwise supports a nation waging an unjust war is equally guilty as offending nation itself. And, since International Law respects the right of a nation being attacked or occupied illegally to respond with military force, the US is, legally, as appropriate a target for attack as is the state of Israel.
The campaign being waged to defend, or even praise Israel for its murders in Gaza is unlike anything in recent memory. The deep influence of pro-Israel Jewish organizations and American Zionists, till now seen as just another lobby like the NRA, has been exposed as an enormously influential force in American society. Miko Peled, son of the leading general of the 1967 war between Israel and its neighbors, points out that the Zionist lobby's influence is not limited to the halls of Congress and the White House. It extends down to state, municipal, and even local levels like school boards and PTAs.
The recent expulsion of three university presidents for their supposed anti-Semitism for not properly policing pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses is just the visible tip of a campaign influencing public opinion from grade-school textbooks all the way up to major media. Harvard recently fired its president for supposedly not doing enough to protect Jewish students. The university has attempted to replace that fired president with the head of its Jewish studies department. Peter Beinart, professor at New York's CCNY and an Orthodox Jew, tells us the mega-donors to Harvard and other universities have responded with outrage. They did so because most American scholars of Jewish studies, including the one at Harvard who specializes in the relationship of Judaism to Zionism, do not think anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic. Alan Dershowitz, long-time unconditional apologist for Israel and dependable hit-man against pro-Palestinians like Norman Finkelstein, has called for the abolition of all Jewish studies departments in the nation.
But Beinart says there is a deep divide between Zionist mega-donors along with their Zionist comrades in big Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and scholars of Jewish history who see no valid connection between anti-Semitism and Zionism. Beinart also points out that there is a generational divide among Jewish Americans on the issue. Older ones tend to support the state of Israel almost unconditionally, while younger American Jews do not want to be associated with that apartheid nation and do not want the world to think they do.
President Woodrow Wilson was faced with a dilemma during the early days of the first world war. He had campaigned in 1914 on a promise not to "send American boys" to fight a war Europeans should settle. But US banks had billions of dollars in debt owed them by Great Britain and France. If Germany won the war, repayment could be delayed or refused. Also, American shipping helping supply French and British forces had come under attack.
Wilson's problem was that America was in no mood to get involved in a European conflict. Also, a large percentage of the US population was of German descent. German Americans had been a significant force in the abolitionist movement and helped put Abraham Lincoln in the White House. They occupied high positions in the cultural scene of the nation. Wilson would have to galvanize public opinion on a massive scale if he wanted to get Americans to accept the deployment of troops to fight Germany.
His solution was the Creel Commission, a body entrusted to wage a nationwide public-relations campaign to mold US attitudes, including mass media (mostly newspapers at that point) and the deployment of 50,000 agents whose job was to speak to local organizations like business clubs, religious congregations and schools all across the country. Everything German became verboten. Orchestra conductors lost their jobs, the teaching of the German language was prohibited, street names like Hamburg Avenue became Wilson Avenue, sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage." And, yes, internment camps much like the ones into which Japanese American were forced to live during the second world war were set up. Lynchings occurred.
The Creel campaign was pervasive and granular. Libraries were scoured for seditious books. People with German last names were surveilled (including Jewish Americans). It was a campaign not unlike the one carried on at the deepest grassroots level by today's most powerful lobbying groups. Wilson's campaign, in fact, is the origin of the public relations/advertising industry as we know it, imitated ever after not just by our own government and Madison Avenue but by the most monstrous actors of the 20th and 21st centuries.
To aid the effort to get America into the war, the British cut the undersea cable between Germany and America, ensuring Americans only got news, meaning propaganda, that aided the cause of changing American attitudes toward Germany: Belgian nuns were being raped and their breasts cut off. Babies were being skewered on German bayonets. Posters appeared with graphic images of these atrocities across the US.
Sound familiar?
The organized molding of public opinion toward a political aim was not original to Wilson. It was employed by the Federalists during the campaign to get the states to ratify the constitution in 1787-89. It became a science, though, thanks to Wilson's deliberate use of it to send troops to support France and Britain during World War I. In 1920 Walter Lippmann published a book called Public Opinion, still worth reading today. In it Lippmann makes the argument for the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a well-informed elite. The mass of the people, he wrote, do not have the knowledge or the judgment to make decisions about great issues of state. They must be allowed, though, to believe they do through the illusion of electoral democracy.
There was nothing new in Lippmann's book (it's available online at gutenberg.org). The same ideas could have been, and in fact were, propounded openly by Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and the other so-called Founding Fathers. And that was how the nation was run for the 140-odd years between the Constitution's ratification and Lippmann's book.
It still is.
