[Marxism] Cockburn and St.Clair on Gary Webb

["Charlie Parks" <jcparks5550@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The editors of Counterpunch have very graciously reprinted the chapter on
Gary Webb from their book Whiteout on today's online edition of
Counterpunch. A very revealing read, particularly for those who (like me)
don't already own Whiteout or Webb's The Dark Alliance.  This chapter, on
the media's response to The Dark Alliance series, shows the mainstream press
bearing its ruling class colors all over the place.  Most revealing,
perhaps, Cockburn and St.Clair quote the Washington Post's president,
Katherine Graham, as assuring CIA recruits in 1988 that

<< "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the
general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy
flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets
and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.">>

Fellow readers of Chomsky will recognize a marked similarity between this
position and that of Samuel Huntington in his Trilateral Commission report,
The Crisis of Democracy, written in the mid-70s, which concludes that the
crisis of democracy is not that there isn't enough of it--that policy makers
and elected officials aren't responsive enough to the popular will, for
example--but rather that there's *too much* of it, evidenced in the civil
rights, feminist and anti-war mobilizations of the previous decade. This
"excess" of democracy prevents the ruling class from carrying out its
foreign policy objectives with the requisite efficiency and efficacy.
Chomsky's discusses this in his chapter on the Carter administration, which
of course was drawn almost entirely from the Commission, in Radical
Priorities, and goes on remind readers that Huntington's
position--Huntington himself being an old-school New Deal Democrat--reflects
the "ideology of the *liberal* wing of the state capitalist ruling elite."
(A typical, highly effective Chomskyan rhetorical strategy: show how the
position of the liberal extreme of America policymakers is still utterly
reactionary). The same could be said of the response of the Post, the Times
and the rest of the liberal press to Webb's series.--CP

http://www.counterpunch.com/webb12172004.html



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