***

The New World did not become known either for its equality or its education, either for its Justice or its Knowledge. The democratic program of ongoing agrarian reform which was to bring all men equality, power and influence, was replaced by a moneyed aristocracy with a greater concentration of wealth, power and influence than had been held by any previous aristocracy. The democratic program of education was to give men insight and understanding of the society into which they are bom and did not make, and thus to give men knowledge of the means by which they can change their society and, if they find it unacceptable, “to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”[184] But instead, education was fitted to the needs, not of society, but of the aristocracy, and men were “educated” to be loyal and diligent servants of capitalist “bosses.”

The liberal democrats of 1788 had swallowed their objections to the Constitution when they were promised a bill of rights. The Bill of Rights was appended to the Constitution, and is still there. On this Bill, which was added as an afterthought by security-holders anxious to collect their fortunes, rests the entire case of American “civil liberties.” And yet, if there is no social justice, if men are neither taught the meaning of human equality nor educated in the means of instituting it, such a bill of rights can never be more than an afterthought.

The first amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”[185] But Congress need make no law respecting or prohibiting any of these things if the aristocracy of paper and patronage exerts a prohibitive control over them. Thus only one pan of the first Amendment was realized, and that was the provision for the “free exercise” of religion or irreligion. And this is undoubtedly a great acliievement—for the eighteenth century. There have been no religious wars in the United States, nor mass persecutions of religious minorities. However, the nineteenth century saw no more religious wars were in Europe either, for by that time the type of religious intolerance for which Europe will forever be remembered had, by and large, declined (until the twentieth century revival of religious persecution in Nazi Germany). American achievements in official religious tolerance should not be underestimated, but the unofficial survival of American religious bigotry should not be forgotten. What is more, the hatred was not removed but transferred: the racial bigotry’ of Americans, legalized in many states, has been surpassed only by the barbarians of Nazi Germany and the European marauders of Africa.

It was the provision for untrammeled communication, written into the Bill of Rights as freedom of speech and of the press, that gave hope to the democrats and promise to America. Even if security-holders constituted the government, even if education was controlled by the rich, could not an atmosphere of free discussion unseat the aristocrats in power and enable the democratic experiment to continue? Jefferson expressed such a hope. “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, which we trust will end in establishing the fact that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be to leave open to him all the avenues of truth. The most effectual hitherto found is the freedom of the press.”[186] However, if “the avenues of truth” are clogged, if the public is uneducated, or rather dis-educated into ignorance, mediocrity and servility, as well as uninformed or misinformed by the press, then the democratic experiment cannot continue, for there will be no democratic public to effect it. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”[187]

To eighteenth century democrats, freedom of speech and of the press meant that all the “avenues of truth,” the media of communication, would be free—open and available—to all men; not “free” for some and closed to others. Clearly, a press that is “free” only for those who have the power to control it is not a free press. The kings and tyrants of Europe, the wealthy noblemen of England, the Czars of Russia, had always been “free” to express themselves as they saw fit. But if the press is open only to the apologists for Czarist oppression, and closed to those who want to abolish Czarist oppression, it is not a free press—it is precisely the clogged type of press the democratic experiment was to abolish from the American continent.

Democrats rejected the species of communication where a few men speak and the rest merely listen. Democracy meant that each would have access to the ears of all. Each man’s written thoughts would be as prominently distributed and as widely available as any other man’s. The press would be open to every man who could express himself truthfully and coherently. To be available to all, the press must be supported by all. And if the press is socially supported, this means that no man and no group of men can have monopoly over it. If the press is socially supported and freely available to all, it obviously cannot be bought. If the press can be bought, it will be bought by those who can best afford to buy it, and will be most readily available to those who have a lot of money; such a press will not be equally available to all men.

Where there’s freedom of speech and freedom of the press, there cannot be “dangerous ideas.” There can be imaginative and unimaginative, original and trite ideas, but no “dangerous” ones. The advocacy of public sabotage, misery and oppression for the sake of private aggrandizement and power is dangerous, but it is not an idea. In a democratic society, the man who advocates personal gain at public expense would be greeted as a lunatic, since he expresses, not reasoned conclusions, but an irrational will to dominate over and enthralled other men—such a man expresses the type of irrationalism which twentieth century Freudian Psychoanalysts are frantically trying to justify. Fraud, slander and deception are not ideas, and a well-informed, well-educated democratic society had best greet them with indifference. Excessive punishment of the perpetrators of fraud and deception invariably does more harm than good, since punishment is next of kin to oppression, and once the spreading circle of oppression is irjven a foothold, it swells like a cancer and overruns all of a society’s institutions. Fraud and deception thrive on ignorance; to cope with them, a democratic society would seek, not to repress fraud and deception, but to abolish ignorance. Clearly the maintenance of a healthy body, not the endless consumption of medicines, is the best way to prevent disease. In a democratic society, a truthful and original idea well expressed cannot be “dangerous.” At the outer limit, it can be unpopular. But an unpopular idea, if it has value, will quickly gain popularity, and when it gains popularity and approval, a democratic public will experiment with it and enact it. Democrats envisioned a society where men would continually experiment with social arrangements and institutions in order to fulfill the needs of the human being and enlarge his intellect, imagination and understanding. The limits beyond which the experiment could not trespass were “certain unalienable rights” among which are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”[188] In an undemocratic society, the problems of a democratic society seem insurmountable, and the ideals unattainable. To a blind man, it is hard to grasp that others can see. In an undeveloped society beridden with poverty and hunger, the elimination of disease appears to be an insurmountable problem; there are difficulties at every turn; each solution reveals new problems; each victory is accompanied by countless defeats. Yet in a society where poverty and hunger are on the way to being abolished, many of the “insurmountable problems” disappear; men suddenly find that the maintenance of cleanliness is not impossible; the elimination of disease suddenly seems a reasonable expectation. To shed ideals because they seem “unattainable” is cowardly; to condemn the abolition of disease because its problems seem “insurmountable” is to offer apologies for those interested in maintaining disease. Perhaps perfect physical and social health of human beings will never be attained, but perfection is merely a guide, not a state of affairs; perfection is a standard, a measure by which directions and tendencies can be judged. One who gives up a problem because of its difficulties, instead of seeking the causes of the difficulties, is a coward. Human physical health will not be approached, and the abolition of disease will seem “insurmountable,” so long as poverty and hunger exist. Social justice, honesty and knowledge will seem “unattainable,” so long as privilege and inequality exist.

A press cannot at the same time be a Business; a free press would be a social function socially supported, as free as air to every individual. If wealthy and powerful men control the press, and if wealth is required for access to it, then a free press cannot exist. Whatever their personal virtues, the members of a group will judge ideas in terms of their own interests. They will judge “good” those ideas which are favorable to their interest, and “bad” those ideas which are antagonistic to their interest. What’s more, if ideas threaten to abolish their interest on the ground that it is oppressive to other men, the men in control will always judge such ideas “uninteresting” and often “dangerous.” If thieves supported and ran a press, they would not encourage writings that exposed theft; they would lack interest in writings that condemned theft; they would suppress as “dangerous” writings that urged the abolition of theft. If the press is owned and controlled by one class of men, it cannot be a free press. The virtues of the men who control it are irrelevant. If one group of men acquired a monopoly over the world’s air, bottled it, and sold it to the world’s inhabitants, air would not be free, no matter how “good” or how “evil” the men who controlled it. A press that is not socially supported and as easily available to all men as air, is not a free press.

Yet the phenomenon that calls itself a “free press” in the United States is neither supported nor run by society, nor is it available to all men. Newspapers, publishing houses, printing establishments are not social functions in the United States; they are all “privately owned.” In other words, the press is the “private property” of businessmen, and it is run for financial profit. The bulk of support of American newspapers comes from advertising. Poor men don’t advertise. Only the rich advertise. The biggest and wealthiest corporations have the greatest wealth and power to advertise. Advertisement supports the newspaper. If the newspaper publishes ideas unfavorable to corporations, the corporations will not support it. Such papers will die. The only papers that survive will be those that are favorable to the rich men who support them. But this is not a free press. The rich constitute only a fragment of the population. A press supported by an aristocracy of wealth is no more “free” than a press supported by a king, a czar, or an aristocracy of title and superstition. Nor is the United States press equally available to all men. The rich man who owns a newspaper has the power to hire his own staff. Only a very unusual rich man will pick men whose important ideas differ from his own; only a very unusual hired man will dare to disagree significantly with his employer’s ideas. The outcome will be that the owner and his staff will provide readers with the same system of ideas. Such a newspaper is a corporation; and the interests of the newspaper owners are the same as the interests of the owners of other corporations. The rich men who own the newspapers express themselves through the editorial columns; they set the policy, the “line”; they limit the range of ideas expressed in their newspapers; they define the purposes, the goals, of the press. The readers of such newspapers will get an undiluted view of how the rich interpret the world: ideas antagonistic to the corporate aristocracy of wealth will be suppressed: they will be relegated to the “little magazines” which are not widely distributed, are not prominently displayed, are not readily available to all men, are at times totally unavailable to most men. The United States press is the press of the rich, and though the rich differ from each other on many topics, from grasshoppers to plays, there are many things they all hold in common, among which are the sanctity of private property, the obligation of debts, the inviolability of wealth and privilege, the necessity to suppress insurrections, and “the imprudence of democracy...”[189]

An excellent illustration of the workings of the American “free press” is an article written by Leo Huberman in the New York Daily Compass on May 5, 1952. In the article, Huberman quoted a renowned nineteenth century newspaperman, John Swinton, who “had been managing editor of the New York Times and assistant editor of the New York Sun under Charles A. Dana; from 1883 to 1887 he published his own paper.”[190] Huberman quoted a statement Swinton made to a group of editors at a banquet in his honor. The nineteenth century editor and publisher told his fellow editors: “There is no such thing in America as an Independent press, unless it is in the country towns.

“You know and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.

“I am paid $150 a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with—others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things—and any of you who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.

“The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread.

“You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an ‘Independent Press.’

“We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

The Daily Compass, the newspaper in which Huberman’s article was published in 1952, no longer exists. It “died” shortly after Huberman’s article appeared in it. The Daily Compass had hired radical democrats, socialists, liberals, and other independent-minded writers, manv of them antagonistic to the society of corporate wealth, and it had allowed the men to express themselves. But the Daily Compass did not get support from the corporate rich whose plunder many of its writers attacked; it did not get the required Advertisements. Huberman wrote a sad prediction of the Daily Compass’ collapse in the same article. “Our highly-praised freedom of the press... means freedom for very rich men to own newspapers and give the public a picture of the world through their eyes, the eyes of Big Business. No law makes the press unfree in the United States. None is needed. Working men haven’t the money to buy and run daily newspapers. Rich people have. Therefore the news we get is slanted, distorted, suppressed—against the poor and for the rich.”

A newspaper with a staff that runs against the grain of the corporate aristocracy must seek support from that very aristocracy in order to survive. To express themselves in the United States, men who are opposed to wealth and privilege must seek aid from a wealthy man who betrays the interests of his own class. Poor men—workers, students, intellectuals, artists—cannot possibly support a newspaper as well equipped and staffed, as widely circulated, as prominently displayed, as the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Daily News, the Daily Mirror, etc. The fact that there have often been rich men in the United States who supported newspapers that analyzed and exposed wealth, privilege and property, does not mean that the United States press is free: it merely means that men whose ideas differ from the official line must, in order to express themselves, seek the patronage of rich men who betray the interests of their class. In the France of Louis XV, Voltaire and Rousseau had to seek the patronage of noblemen in order to have the leisure to write and the wealth to publish. But Louis XVs France is not known for its free press. The American revolution of 1776 could hardly have taken place if, to acquaint their fellow countrymen with their views, the American revolutionaries had needed to seek King George’s permission to publish their views, King George’s support to print them, and King George’s influence to distribute them.

In a democratic society, concrete and complete information would be so important that the dissemination of frauds, lies and deceptions would not be permitted. Scientists recognize such a principle in their own “field,” and they become justifiably indignant when someone “fakes” an experiment and sabotages years of study and research by supplying his fellow scientists with false and deceptive data. Yet outside their “fields,” American scientists are creatures of the corporate society: the wellbeing of physics, or chemistry, is far more important to them than the wellbeing of human life. The principle which scientists value so highly in their “fields” is flaunted in their society. Swinton told the editors, “I am paid $150 a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with—others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things—and any of you who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.” Not only does the newspaperman in the corporate society suppress his own views. “The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon..,”[191]

In order to “lie outright, to pervert, to vilify” most effectively, a unique institution has been invented and highly refined in the United States: the institution of Advertising, supplemented by the so-called “Public Relations Field.” In advertising, self expression plays no role whatever, concrete information is withheld, complete information is suppressed. Advertising is a vast system of organized lying, perversion, villification, whose sole purpose is to sell the products of corporations by any means whatever. Corporations hire the advertizers to create in people the desire to buy the products the corporations make. In other words, the corporations themselves create the “needs” they fill. This type of plunder is unique in human history. The advertising man lies, deceives and defrauds in order to sell the products of his employer to a public that does not need them. The ad man and the public relations man do this for money; they are hired to deceive men for the financial gain of their employers. The ad man sells his imagination to the task of inventing slogans and his intellect to the task of defrauding men.

In the United States, the expenditure for advertising greatly exceeds the expenditure for education, for cultural and artistic ennoblement, for intellectual growth. According to an observer, “by 1951 the American people were spending $6,548 million a year on ads, a billion and a half more than on education. By 1956 the advertising expenditure reached about ten billion, and it now seems to he growing at the rate of around a billion a year.”[192] The obvious result is that “the good people of these colonies”[193] are thoroughly ignorant of the workings of the corporate world in which they live, but vastly informed on the “brand names” of the corporate products and gadgets. Some vivid illustrations are cited by Harvey O’Connor in The Empire of Oil. The book’s frontispiece quotes the New York Herald Tribune’s description of American economic ignorance, with specific reference to oil ignorance. “There is no country in the world which has the body of technical doctrine regarding petroleum in all its aspects which is possessed in the United States. There is no country which is so thoroughly geared to the power supplied by petroleum. Yet, thanks to the mixture of unsupported argument, official reticence and sheer hypocrisy which befog the subject, there can be few peoples so poorly informed of the global implicadons of oil production and distribution as the Americans.’’[194] This world-renowned American ignorance does not depict a low level of intelligence; it illustrates who owns and runs the instruments of communication, education, manipulation. Big corporations, like the oil companies, can buy the ideas and opinions of millions of men. As O’Connor points out, “Radio and TV are admirably attuned to the needs of such corporations. For one thing, there is no back talk from the listeners, and, at the moment of the broadcast, no competition for the listener’s ear or eye. As only those with millions can sponsor such programs, there is little likelihood of radio and TV listeners absorbing incorrect ideas. In the American way, the corporations foot the bill for the nation’s entertainment and information and can properly call the piper’s tune. Here there is little need to bow before the shibboleths of objectivity for it is frankly a commercial proposition, even if draped in terms of public service.”[195] The outcome is that, while “there can be few peoples so poorly informed of the global implications of oil production and distribution as the Americans,” there can be few peoples so well informed in the deceptions inculcated into them by the corporations’ advertizers. A small but significant illustration with reference to oil shows that though Americans may not believe their advertizers, they nevertheless follow like docile sheep the paths laid out for them. According to a Readers Digest article cited by O’Connor, Americans spend $200 million a year on “premium” and “Ethyl” gasolines which are advertised as “the best” on the ugly billboards that line the nation’s highways and despoil what is surely one of the world’s most varied and beautiful natural landscapes. Each citizen dutifully internalizes the message on the billboards; each can tell his neighbor many technical and philosophical reasons why “Ethyl” is “best.” And yet, “President Reese H. Taylor of Union Oil summarized the situation for his cohorts: we are steering clear of the rash of gasoline additives described everywhere in newspapers and on billboards. Our research boys gave all of these so-called wonder chemicals a thorough going- over. They find that the wear and tear on motors, the deterioration of valves, and so on, resulting from the use of such additive-fortified gasolines more than discounted the benefits, if any. We found there was no substitute for good gasoline.” Car owners obey the billboards and pay a great deal extra for the gas in the tank with the “tetraethyl lead.”And yet, “...According to the continuing survey of the DuPont company, main supplier of tetraethyl lead ... a third of the regular gasoline sampled had as much or more lead than the premium, and two samples of premium had no lead whatsoever!”[196]

This abysmal ignorance of human potentialities and social institutions, wedded to a fictitious knowledge of things, is clearly a revival of superstition on a grand scale—a superstition far deadlier than feudal religious superstition precisely because of its non-religious content and its inhuman purpose. The ad men create the “image” through which Americans see the world. The content of the “image” inculcates fear, hatred, envy, and a never-ending desire to buy the products peddled by the corporations.

The result is an ignorant, superstitious, manipulated population of docile men and women who spend their working hours making gadgets they have not chosen to make and do not control, and spend their leisure hours buying the gadgets and returning to their corporate masters the incomes they got for making the gadgets. This cycle of purposelessness and human irrelevance has its toll, for apparendy the creative intellect, the human imagination, the sense for truth, cannot be completely obliterated. The population of men whose humanity is suppressed is a population of anxiety-ridden men constantly seeking outlets for repressed passion, repressed imagination, repressed hatred. The advertizers are aware of this objecdess anxiety of the American people—and the advertizers have learned to manipulate the very fear and anxiety they have themselves so largely created for the purpose of serving their corporate employers yet more effectively. A typical report of an advertizers’ “Council” outlines a campaign in which the disease created and maintained by corporate advertising will be manipulated by corporate advertising. The Report reads:

“The rationale for the campaign was along the following lines. More people than ever seem to be suffering from an outraged sense of justice, a feeling of inadequacy, a delusion that the world is down on them and that they are trapped by their jobs, their marriage problems, their financial situation, etc. These emotional conflicts and frustrations are leading to both a conscious and an unconscious search for peace of mind.

“Some of the manifestations of this are evident in increased church attendance, in an unprecedented demand on professional psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, clergymen, marriage counselors and even in the sale of tranquilizer drugs.

“...people who go to psychiatrists for help, in most cases are not seeking any change in themselves, but rather are looking for comfort, reassurance and advice.

“That is one side of the climate in which [the product] must be sold.

“The other side, of course, is that a mass audience is more apt to be moved by cheerful promises than by pointing a finger, no matter how truthfully, at its problems, conflicts and sore spots.

“The human animal is basically happy. People acquire tensions. They learn fears—it isn’t part of their basic makeup. The prophets of doom complain that no one will listen to them. Why? Because no one wants to listen to them.

“Now, these two conflicting points of view in the average American’s makeup can be reconciled. The catalyst is humor— humor combined with a completely new promise about the benefits of [the product] in the idiom of today.

“Pursuing this total concept led naturally into an examination of the various conditions of tenseness to which all are subject from time to time…

“The list of such frustrations in the vernacular of everyday American living is practically inexhaustible....”[197]

The report also says that “nothing short of boldness could hope to penetrate the consciousness of the American public.”[198] And all this is for the sale of the almighty Product. To sell the products from which the corporate rich reap their fortunes, all the means that money can buy are used: psychologists, sociologists, educators, theologians, writers, philosophers. The appeal is made, not to understanding, but to emotions and fears; the advertizer’s aim is not to resolve, but to exploit for their maximum profit, the problems and tensions of human beings. Millennia of human thought, study, classification, analysis and discovery are here put to the service of multiplying the wealth of the rich. The drastic effect of advertising on intellectual and artistic activity has been pointed out by Leo Marx: “...perhaps the most subtle and elusive product of advertising is the attitude it engenders toward all activity of mind.

“In recent years Americans have speculated endlessly about the anti-intellectualism of our people, and about the apathy, confusion and alienation of youth. Yet it is a curious fact that in such discussions the influence of advertising, one of the most powerful value- creating instruments in world history, seldom is mentioned. Almost from infancy our children are exposed to the teachings of the ad man. He instructs them in the essential meaninglessness of all creations of mind: words, images, and ideas. The lesson is that they have no intrinsic importance, that they are merely instruments of manipulation. It is often said that, after all, advertising does no harm because no one really believes it. But of course that is precisely the point. In treating man as consumer we succeed in debasing what is most distinctively human.”[199] When the imagination becomes a means for selling goods, when ideas become cliches about merchandise, when art becomes illustration of “items” and brand names, then the human mind is thoroughly degraded, and becomes superfluous.

In the corporate society, the public is converted into a mass. The “people,” who were to control the press, have become its victims. The press is not merely unfree; it has ceased to be a means of communication, it is a means of mass manipulation. The degraded American “public” is not a democratic public. A mass of uninformed men bombarded with a fragmented world view, with only one organized theme cannot exert control over human affairs. A population of mis-educated men stormed with an infinite array of uninterpreted, irrelevant, sadistic detail designed to arouse desire and hatred, cannot possibly hold intelligent opinions on important public issues. Such a population does not rule, it does not constitute a “public”; it constitutes a mass—a controlled, systematically manipulated mass.

As advertising spreads, the ad-man mentality penetrates all facets of corporate life. The twentieth century American is not concerned with developing himself as a human being, but rather with “selling” himself. The time which other men spend enlarging their intellectual, artistic and imaginative faculties is spent by Americans in the acquisition of techniques of “self-selling.” The content and quality of a human being cease to matter; all that counts is the label, the clothes, the fake smile.

The most glaring, as well as the most drastic, place where the ad-man mind has penetrated is the American government. Armed with weapons that could instantaneously incinerate all living humanity as well as all man’s past achievements, the American government has become increasingly preoccupied with maintaining an “image” of competence and responsibility while pursuing an incompetent, irresponsible, and lunatic policy.

The official “image” depicts an America which is neither capitalist, nor corporate, nor hierarchic, and it is couched in terms that are familiar to the “average man.” The result is illustrated by a New York Times article describing a digest “jointly sponsored by Yale University and the Advertising Council”:

“That the American economy is uniquely dynamic, that it has produced the highest standards of living, more widely spread, than the world has ever seen before, that it has come closest to a democratic, classless society and that this has come about through a fantastic increase in productivity made possible through greater mechanization—all this is well known to Americans, even though often but dimly understood abroad. ‘People’s capitalism’ is increasingly used as a name for our economic system.”[200]

(In fact, the name “People’s Capitalism” is not “increasingly used” because the Advertising Council greatly overestimated its glamour. Using as a model the term “People’s Communism,” the Advertising Council neglected to find out how much of the world’s population supports “People’s Communism” not because of the glamourous sound of die words, but because of the quality of the dispensation, the degree of improvement in the human condition.) Since capitalists want neither to change their dispensation nor to legislate themselves out of existence, and since advertising experts are hired to juggle words and not to improve the reality underneath, they must continue to confine themselves to manipulating the Image. And the manipulation goes to fantastic lengths. During the Great Depression, the concept of “capitalist exploitation” was introduced into American thought by left-wing critics.

When the critics became respectable members of the New Deal administration, the term “exploitation” was dropped from the American vocabulary, and the System was known by the half-respectable title of “capitalism.” When the Nazi War broke out and the System had to be defended, “capitalism” was replaced by the ultra-respectable tide of “free enterprise.” During the whole period, the highest corporate capitalists had been steadily consolidating greater power and control over the government. When, after the war, corporation-men replaced purged left-wingers, “free enterprise” became simply “freedom,” and during the reign of John Foster Dulles, the capitalist countries as well as the feudal military dictatorships became “The Free World.” This process is known as “face-lifting.” Hitler’s Propaganda Minister could hardly have done better. By 1960 there was no more capitalism. Only Freedom. Capitalists were so impressed by this manipulation of words they thought that by giving capitalism the name “freedom” they had thereby made it attractive to all the world’s population. According to the New York Times,

“Fifty leading United States business men presented ... a ‘declaration of economic freedoms’ to offset Communist propaganda at the United Nations…

“The freedoms listed in the declaration were freedom of competitive private enterprise; choice of occupation; voluntary organization for private enterprise; contract; property ownership; freedom to produce, buy or sell; competition; trade; money, that is, a sound currency.”[201]

At the time of writing this book, Cuba was invaded. The ad-man deceptions by which the American people were “informed” of this invasion bore a lurid similarity to the Nazi German accounts of their “liberation” of Europe. For years the American “free press” had supplied its readers with barely a mention of the atrocities, the brutality, the misery in Cuba under the dictator Fulgencio Batista and his administration of sugar planters, hired killers, and gamblers. Americans knew nothing about the oppression entailed in the fact that American corporations owned and operated Cuban sugar, land, electricity, telephones, and indirectly, armed forces. When revolution swept across Cuba and gained increasing support until most of Cuba’s six million people were behind it, thus enabling it to rid Cuba of the planters’ regime and the powerful army by which Batista had ruled, the American people were given an “image” of a coup d’etat in which a few hundred men had “overthrown” a few hundred other men. When the Cuban revolutionary’ government made education and culture available to men who had never seen a book and gave land and work and food to men who had never before been able to think or work because they suffered from chronic hunger diseases, the American people were told by their “free press” that Cuba was “going Communist,” and they were shown pictures of sad, wealthy landowners whose innumerable acres of land had been given to thousands of landless peasants. And when the Cuban government expropriated the American corporations whose huge profits had come from the raw materials and the cheap labor of a few million starving Cubans, the American people were told the familiar atrocity stories about priests and nuns which constitute the American “reading public’s” knowledge of the non-capitalist part of the world. The American people were told virtually nothing of the reforms instituted by the Cuban revolution, of the housing, the education, the culture, the food which became available to Cubans—to some for the first time in their lives. They were told nothing of the enthusiasm of the Cuban people, of their revolution’s ideals, of their plans. The American press, which daily consumes entire forests, directed itself to the constant repetition of charges that the Cuban Government was Communist, that it was “extracontinental,” that it destroyed Inter-American Unity, that it undermined the Monroe Doctrine, and—when the “image” was “sold”—that it should be overthrown. When Cuba’s Foreign Minister charged, at the United Nations, that the United States Government’s Central Intelligence Agency was planning an invasion of Cuba, the press “explained” the charge to its readers as “outrageous,” and as nothing more than a part of “Cuba’s hate-America campaign.” Yet in mid-April 1961, Cuba was invaded. Now the American newspaper readers were told that “Cubans” were liberating Cuba from “Communist Terror.” At the same time, the American people were told that, though the United States Government had “sympathy” for the invaders, it was not giving them any aid; and they were also told that neither the United States nor any of its Latin American allies were allowing their territory to be used for the invasion: the “Cuban” invaders had presumably been holding their breaths under water off the Cuban shore while waiting for their chance to “liberate” Cuba. And then the American press, on the authority of the “Cuban Revolutionary Council,” reported in front page banner headlines a sequence of events that was to lead to the “liberation” of Cuba by the “Cuban Freedom Fighters.” The stories released to the press by the “Cuban Revolutionary Council” told that the Cuban people were about to rise against their government, they told that Cuban fliers had defected from the Cuban air force, they told of landings, and of victories. The day victory was to be proclaimed, the “liberators” were in the sea. The “Cuban Revolutionary Council” announced, and the press dutifully reported, that Fidel Castro had flown Russian Migs (fighter planes) and driven Russian tanks against the helpless “Freedom Fighters.” The invasion failed. And suddenly the American press, with a few significant exceptions, became piously silent about the “liberation” of Cuba. One of the exceptions was the New York Times, which continued to run articles on Cuba until the American President reminded a conference of important newspapermen that the publication of information embarrassing to the United States Government was not one of the tasks of the Free Press. The Times revealed, though not in banner headlines, that “As has been an open secret in Florida and Central America for months, the C.I.A. planned, coordinated and directed the operations that ended in the defeat on a beachhead in southern Cuba...”’[202] The “Cuban Revolutionary Council,” it turned out, had not been in charge of the invasion. “On the day the anti-Castro forces landed in Cuba members of the Cuban Revolutionary Council were kept incommunicado by the Central Intelligence Agency in an old house near Miami…

“The effect of not taking the Revolutionary Council leaders into confidence was to keep them from having any role in directing the landings...”[203] The reports supposedly issued by the “Cuban Revolutionary Council” about the landings, the fighting, the impending victory, the defections, the Russian Migs, had all come from the office of Lem Jones Associates, Inc., of Madison Avenue, New York—an advertising firm.[204] The invaders, it turned out, had not sprung from the sea, but from bases in Florida, in Louisiana, in Guatemala, and in United States-controlled Swann Islands in the Caribbean. The leading “Freedom Fighters” were those who regularly carry on the C.LA.’s world-wide cloak-and-dagger operations. “A Filipino guerrilla specialist was in charge of some of the training. He was assisted by five or six instructors who are believed to be Slavs, perhaps Ukrainians, and who were assisted by interpreters.”[205] The “defector” from the Cuban air force turned out to have flown an American plane with a Cuban insignia painted on it. “When... one of the pilots who landed in Miami described himself as a defector from the Cuban Air Force, his picture, published in local newspapers, was promptly identified here [in Miami] as that of a Lieutenant from the Guatemalan camp. He has vanished.”[206] And the “Russian Migs,” which filled Americans with fear, frenzy and hatred, turned out to be “United-States-built T-33 jets flown by the Castro pilots.”[207] By way of “explanation” of the furor raised by the front page scare-headlines about the Migs, the writer briefly commented: “It is thought that some of the insurgents, when surprised by these T-33 jets, believed they were Soviet-built Migs.”[208] The “free press” of the United States did not tell its readers that the source of its “facts” on the Cuban invasion was a Public Relations firm on Madison Avenue, New York. But the “free press” did tell the American people, repeatedly and emphatically, that the Cuban government had “betrayed” the Cuban revolution.

“Alas! is it true, that ages are necessary to understand, whilst a moment will suffice to invent, an imposture?”[209]