Harry Targ
(This essay was written in 2022 just after President
Gustavo Petro spoke at the United Nations. In 2023 he spoke again. He later was
interviewed by Amy Goodman and elaborated on the perspective of the Global
South about peace, justice, and the threat to human survival. https://youtu.be/6-6Ni7jbi3U?si=CdPsWUWWOTFFUsDw)
Insights from Social Science
A
long time ago the eminent political scientist Murray Edelman wrote a book
entitled The Symbolic Uses of Politics. In it he postulated that
most people experience the political world not through concrete reality but
through emotional symbols. For example, the classic way in which people relate
to their political institutions is through the flag of their nation. Americans
viewing the flag see images of men in combat fighting for freedom or men and
women standing in line waiting to vote for their preferred political
candidates. A colorful cloth with stars and stripes gets transformed in our
consciousness into a rich, glamorized history even when the emotive images
are in direct contradiction to people’s lives.
In addition, Edelman suggests the ways in which the emotional symbols get
embedded and reinforced in the consciousness of peoples by borrowing from anthropological
writings on myth and ritual. Myths are networks of emotional symbols that
collectively tell a story that explains “reality.” Rituals reinforce in
behavior the mythology of public life. We need only reflect on the pledge to
the flag that opens elementary and secondary school class sessions in rich and
poor communities alike or regular meetings of AFL-CIO labor councils.
Edelman pointed out that emotional symbols (he called them “condensational”)
provide the primary way people connect with the world beyond immediate
experience. The extraordinary complexity of the modern world is reduced to a
series of powerful symbols such as the threats of “international communism” or
“terrorism.”
Media analyst Todd Gitlin, wrote about “media frames;” that is the ways in
which media construct the symbols and myths that shape information about the
world. Print media shapes what we read, who are regarded as authoritative
spokespersons, and what visual images shape our thinking about countries,
issues such as war and peace, trade, investment, and the global climate.
Television emphasizes visual images rather than words. Whatever the media form,
points of view are embedded in the words and images communicated.
Writers such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Michael Parenti, and Robert McChesney accept implicitly Edelman’s counsel that people experience the world indirectly and usually in emotional form. They also assume, as does Gitlin, that what we read, see, and hear about the world is framed for us. They go further to suggest that what Marx called the “false conceptions about ourselves” in symbols, myths, rituals, and frames are usually the product of ruling class interests.
How the Washington Post Sees the World
Charles
Lane, “Migration’s ‘Root
Cause’ is Latin American Socialist Dictatorship,” Washington Post, September 21, 2022, wrote about the migration
this year of 200,000 Cubans. He also pointed out that such migrations over the
years have involved thousands of fleeing Venezuelans: “The exodus is thus a tremendous compliment to
the United States and other democratic capitalist countries. We should
appreciate it.”
For Lane, the “root cause” of such migrations, of course, is communist dictatorship, a pattern of people fleeing their home countries because of dictatorship and failed economies. Lane may have been aware of the declassified State Department document, “The Decline and Fall of Castro,” quoted in a speech by Senator Patrick Leahy, February 7, 2022, that US policy’s purpose was “denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.” Cuba became the model for applying economic sanctions against governments which the US tried to bring down.
Today US sanctions have been levied against more than 20 countries. And in most cases, while citizens of these countries suffer, most remained committed to their governments and/or reject United States intervention. And Cuba, despite Lane’s dismissal of it as a dictatorship, has remained a beacon of hope, a model of economic and political development for the Global South. Health care is free, education is free. Cubans in their communities discuss and debate issues and vote on key constitutional changes. Most recently this is illustrated by the national vote on a proposed new Families Code to give legitimacy and rights to all kinds of families and children. And paradoxically virtually every country in the world (except for the US and Israel) condemns the US economic blockade.
And in another editorial statement on the Chinese “challenge” to the United States the author writes: “In just over 40 years, the People’s Republic of China has arisen from the political chaos and poverty of the Mao Zedong era to become a powerhouse on the world stage. Its unmistakable clout is intensifying its rivalry with the United States over which country will dominate the global order and, crucially, which system will stand as the world’s political and economic model: the authoritarianism and state capitalism of China, or the liberal democracy and market-oriented economy of the United States.” Thus, the media frame is global competition between authoritarianism and “state capitalism” versus markets and democracy (Dexter Roberts, “At Stake in the U.S.-China Rivalry: The Shape of the Global Political Order,” Washington Post, September 22, 2022).
And the Washington Post and other corporate media usually reflect a common agenda. For example, from a Washington Post editorial, May 21, 2016:
“HARDLY A day goes by without evidence that the liberal international order
of the past seven decades is being eroded. China and Russia are
attempting to fashion a world in their own illiberal image…This
poses an enormous trial for the next U.S. president. We say trial because no
matter who takes the Oval Office, it will demand courage and difficult
decisions to save the liberal international order. As a
new report from the Center for a New American Security points out,
this order is worth saving…”
But How Others See the United States: The Powerful Voice of the New President of Colombia Gustavo Petro
Recently elected president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro made a powerful presentation at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly on the plunder of the Global South by the Global North, a portrait markedly different from the view of the “liberal international order” repeated over and over again by the corporate media and foreign policy spokespersons of the United States. Petro’s major points concluded the following:
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THE WORLD IS DIVERSE IN ITS LANDS, LIVING THINGS, AND PEOPLE
“I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth.
There is an explosion of life there. Thousands of multicolored
species in the seas, in the skies, in the lands…I come from the land of yellow
butterflies and magic. There in the mountains and valleys of all greens, not
only do the abundant waters flow down, but also the torrents of blood. I come
from a land of bloody beauty.”
BUT THE WORLD ALSO IS A VIOLENT PLACE
“The jungle that tries to save us, is at the same time, destroyed.
To destroy the coca plant, they spray poisons, glyphosate in mass that runs
through the waters, they arrest its growers and imprison them. For destroying
or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin Americans are killed and two
million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America. Destroy the plant that
kills, they shout from the North, but the plant is but one more of the millions
that perish when they unleash the fire on the jungle. Destroying the jungle,
the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by States and businessmen. The cry
of scientists baptizing the rainforest as one of the great climatic pillars is
unimportant.”
AND THE CAUSE OF THE VIOLENCE? THE GREED OF THE GLOBAL NORTH
“For the world’s power relations, the jungle and its inhabitants
are to blame for the plague that plagues them. The power relations are plagued
by the addiction to money, to perpetuate themselves, to oil, to cocaine and to
the hardest drugs to be able to anesthetize themselves more. Nothing is more
hypocritical than the discourse to save the rainforest. The jungle is burning,
gentlemen, while you make war and play with it. The rainforest, the climatic
pillar of the world, disappears with all its life.”
AND THE VICTIMS? LAND AND PEOPLE
“Coca and the peasants who grow it, because they have nothing else
to grow, are demonized. You are only interested in my country to spray poisons
on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are
not interested in the education of the child, but in killing its jungle and
extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison
is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.”
AND THE PURSUIT OF POWER IS TO MAKE UP FOR THE EMPTINESS OF
CONSUMER SOCIETY
“These are the things of world power, things of injustice, things
of irrationality, because world power has become irrational. They see in the
exuberance of the jungle, in its vitality, the lustful, the sinful; the guilty
origin of the sadness of their societies, imbued with the unlimited compulsion
to have and to consume. How to hide the loneliness of the heart, its dryness in
the midst of societies without affection, competitive to the point of
imprisoning the soul in solitude, if not by blaming the plant, the man who
cultivates it, the libertarian secrets of the jungle.
According to the irrational power of the world, it is not the
fault of the market that cuts back on existence, it is the fault of the jungle
and those who inhabit it. The bank accounts have become unlimited, the money
saved by the most powerful of the earth will not even be able to be spent in
the time of the centuries.”
THE CULPRIT? MONEY AND UNBRIDLED CONSUMPTION
“The culprit is their society educated in endless consumption, in
the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows the pockets
of power to fill with money. The culprit of drug addiction is not the jungle,
it is the irrationality of your world power. Try to give some reason to your
power. Turn on the lights of the century again. The war on drugs has lasted 40
years, if we do not correct the course and it continues for another 40 years,
the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose from
fentanyl, which is not produced in our Latin America. It will see millions of
Afro-Americans imprisoned in its private jails.
The Afro-prisoner will become a business of prison companies, a
million more Latin Americans will die murdered, our waters and our green fields
will be filled with blood, the dream of democracy will die in my America as
well as in Anglo-Saxon America.”.
THE EXCUSE FOR DESPOILING NATURE AND MAKING PERSONS EXPENDABLE
“They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the
21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars
have served them as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have
shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.
If you observe that the peoples are filling up with hunger and
thirst and migrating by the millions towards the north, towards where the water
is; then you enclose them, build walls, deploy machine guns, shoot at them. You
expel them as if they were not human beings, you reproduce five times the
mentality of those who politically created the gas chambers and the
concentration camps, you reproduce on a planetary scale 1933.”
LATIN AMERICA (AND THE WORLD) MUST UNITE AGAINST THIS SYSTEM OF
GLOBAL ECONOMIC AND MILITARY POWER
“If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the
revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate money to weapons
than to life, then reduce the foreign debt to free our own budgetary spaces and
with them, carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the planet. We can
do it if you don’t want to. Just exchange debt for life, for nature. I propose,
and I call upon Latin America to do so, to dialogue in order to end the war. Do
not pressure us to align ourselves in the fields of war.
It is time for PEACE.
Let the Slavic peoples talk to each other, let the peoples of the
world talk to each other. War is only a trap that brings the end of time closer
in the great orgy of irrationality.
What Does All This Mean
for Peace and Justice Activists
There are lessons to be
learned by analyzing significant narratives of the contemporary world order. First,
narratives are inextricably connected to the position from which the narrative
comes. Is the narrative one disseminated by spokespersons of the wealthiest
country in the world or from a spokesperson from a poor and marginalized
country, for example? Second, narratives often reflect the interests of
the powerful, economically, politically, and militarily (such as Washington
Post writers) or those who speak for the interests of most nations and
peoples (such as the President of Colombia). Third, these narratives
have consequences. They justify policies that may or may not be in the
interests of humanity. They may justify violence, plunder of resources, the
exploitation of workers or they may envision a future of greater equality and
the satisfaction of human needs. Finally, as Edelman, Gitlin, and others
suggest, our understanding of the world is often controlled and manipulated by those
in power. Today the dominant symbols, myths, and media frames from the Global
North must be challenged. And President Gustavo Petro has contributed
eloquently to this task.
