Nicholas von Hoffman: Hoax

I read Nicholas von Hoffman's Hoax: Why Americans Are Suckered by White House Lies (paperback, 2004, Nation Books) shortly after it came out, by which point is argument that the Iraq war was a trumped up fake was already taking flak from insurgents. Still, it is worth emphasizing that Bush picked the weak link in his Axis of Evil to roadtest his doctrine of preëmptive war.

First chapter ("The Big Lie"), first paragraph, and then some (pp. 1-2):

The frightening shark swimming with toothy grin in a giant aquarium does not see the human faces looking in from the other side of the glass. The shark is in a world of its own, with its own reality. Like the shark, Americans don't see the people outside the glass. It is as though America is in a 3,000 mile wide terrarium, an immense biosphere which has cut it off from the rest of the world and left it to pick its own way down the path of history. By the time the American army stepped into Iraq, the difference in world view between the United States and everybody else had grown to the size of he hole in the atmosphere over the South Pole.

A fanciful explanation for the two realities is that the United States is the continent-wide set for a large scale reenactment of the movie The Truman Show. The plot of that movie has the well-intentioned but naive hero go about his daily life without any suspicion that he is, in fact, in a gigantic soap opera. His hometown is actually the set for the TV show and from earliest childhood he has been manipulated and controlled by the producer and the director. The enthusiastic acceptance by the American multitudes of teh Iraqi stuff-and-nonsense coming out of the White House would be understandable if we all are living on a stage set in a village called Freedom Island threatened by a town called Evil Axis.

Americans believed, as they usually do when their government and their television tell them something, but the rest of the world laughed every time George Bush or Colin Powell or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld thought up yet one more scary reason to invade Iraq. The ill-constructed, clumsy untruths were surprisingly crude for people who have had years to practice the craft of mass deception, and they had only to speak their latest falsehood to be cheered by their countrymen and disbelieved by non-Americans everywhere.

On body counts (p. 16):

When the losses were totaled up, the numbers revealed that the United States lost more troops at the hands of Sitting Bull at the Battle of Little Big Horn than it did at the hands of Saddam Hussein in Gulf War III.

The American biosphere (p. 17-18):

As nation after nation -- Arab, among some other nations, excepted -- has given up the death penalty, America, though it once toyed with the idea of abolishing it, has taken it up again with a zeal not seen since the early part of the 20th century. Then-Governor Bill Clinton broke off campaigning in New England in 1992 to fly home to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a half-wit to propitiate popular opinion. If not with relish, then with general approbation, Governor George Bush saw hundreds of his own people into the Texas death-operating room where the condemned are killed with chemicals but not in the whole manner of Saddam Hussein. Elsewhere a close career connection with the taking of life would exclude a politician from attaining the highest offices; in the United States it is a recommendation.

On memory and the self (pp. 49-50):

If a public opinion survey were to ask a question like "Would America ever drop the bomb first?", count on it, a healthy fraction of the respondents would say, "Never did, never will." Regardless of whether the Unitd States should or should not have dropped the atomic bomb on two Japanese cities, there is a part of the population who do not know it happened, and if told about it, will soon not know it happened again. Dropping atomic bombs has no place in the American gestalt. Every time the event is written on the national conscience the palimpsest of memory wipes it out and writes some good deed of the heart in its place. From the outside looking in, you might say it was a case of disassociative political morality.

(p. 75):

If it were not self evident, Machiavelli would have laid down a rule saying that you do not get to pick the boss of the other side. You do not even want to pick the other side's boss, because he will not be able to carry out the bargain you strike with him for the simple reason that he will have no support among his own people. Tot he Americans he is a responsible leader, to his people he is a Quisling.

For a quarter of a century the Americans and the Israelis have been looking tor replace Yasir Arafat, surely a less than loveable character, with an acceptable (to them) substitute. He is not, we were told, a "suitable partner for peace." But that is so much tail chasing. The only suitable partner for peace is he who can make a deal and make it stick. Slobodan Milosovic did that in Yugoslavia. Mass murderer or not, he made the deal and the guns fell silent.

(p. 92):

How the people in government thought they could get away with some of their whoppers is past imagining. After the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, talk started getting around that there were post-bomb deaths caused by radiation. The government immediately denied it and the head of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves, pronounced that, "This talk about radio-activity is so much nonsense." What was the point of that one? And how long did they think they could get away with it? So much high level lying is purposeless, done from habit. How else to explain the line of half-baked, nutty, next-day-refutable lies coming out of the Bush White House about weapons, terrorists, plans, and intentions?

On invading Iraq (pp. 105-106):

Convention holds that a war demands two armies in some form of organized combat, be it ever so brief. What the reporters were involved in was a Boy Scout jamboree during which hostile persons, mounted on Bactrians or riding with grenade launchers in the back of pickup trucks, would, from time to time, hurl their darts at the Humvees in which the chem suit-clad Americans rode in extreme discomfort. This is not a war. To the correspondents who had covered Bosnia or Kosovo and knew of war, it should have been obvious that thee was no army in Iraq other than the American one, which was zooming through the desert more or less unopposed. The reporters who had read books describing war and "the crunch of the enemy's artillery" might have noted that no such crunches were to be heard, an observation which in its turn might have led to the thought that, whatever else they were involved in, it was not a war. The mathematically gifted among the journalists should have noticed there were more traffic fatalities than lives lost in combat -- a sign to drive slower and tone down the copy. [ . . . ]

Back home under the dome the generals and politicians lengthened their strides and set their jaws tighter as befits heroes and leaders, while the media outdid itself in praise of history's greatest war machine. In the list of one-sided conflicts, the American victory in Iraq was right up there at the top with Mussolini's conquest of Ethiopia in 1936 or Stalin's flattening Latvia in 1939. The red, white, and blue yahoos in the media and out of it hailed this passage of arms as the last step in America's recovery from the Vietnam Syndrome, a white liver disease which had afflicted the nation since the peanceniks, the Reds, and the cowards had betrayed the army in the field and forced the United States to agree to a shameful peace. Until Vietnam, America was the country which liked to say that it had never lost a war (Korea was called a tie ball game), but now Uncle Sam was back and he was big. Even Bill Clinton's confused and ignominious withdrawal from Somalia after a brief firefight in Mogadishu was rewritten into another stanza in the Marine anthem when Hollywood gave the country Blackhawk Down.

(pp. 110-111):

Americans have a sub-abysmal record in regards to teaching other peoples how to live properly, starting with Indians or Native Americans. The white men have killed them, but hardly tamed them, or turned them into cheap imitations of their white selves.

Von Hoffman then goes on to Japan ("The Japenese concluded that if they were going to be forced at gun point to have congress with 19th centuryimperialism, they must get themselves a war fleet like the Americans'"), Haiti, Cuba, the Philippines, Mexico, and so on to Iraq.

(p. 175):

If a person stands next to a large wasp nest and repeatedly hits it with a stick, the person could consider what happens next an unprovoked wasp attack, if the person is so self-entranced that the person cannot discern cause and effect. Outside the dome, the person will be viewed with astonishment, consternation and, if the performance continues, with fear. As this puzzling individual goes on destroying the home of the now-maddened insects, they come at the person with suicidal fury, but he, as angered by the wasps' treatment of him as they of him, does not retreat even as his face is disfigured by venomous bites. He stands his ground killing his tormenters and being stung by them.

posted 2007-07-15