Australians tend to be more plain spoken than Americans because Aussies live in a more secure, higher trust society.
Most of the lies that Americans tell these days are exactly what you would expect in a diverse low-trust litigious society. Such fibs were less common 60 years ago.
* Boast about your work ethic (Americans have fewer worker protections and less social welfare than any other first world people). Americans are more vulnerable to loss of job, loss of health insurance, and loss of safety than other rich nations. Yanks must work hard to live in a low-crime neighborhood while Aussies can take this luxury for granted.
* Pretend to align with the mission statement of your employer.
* Pretend to be racially and sexually blind (as opposed to noting that different groups have different gifts). For example, you talk about bad neighborhoods and bad schools rather than about the bad people that make neighborhoods and schools dangerous. You don’t reveal how much you hate certain groups because they are a source of distress in your life rather than joy. In many social settings, you display guilt about racism, sexism, homophobia and other fake sins.
* Act as though your hero system doesn’t invalidate competing hero systems (for example, the claims of Judaism & Christianity are contradictory).
* Pretend that America is the product of its amazing founding documents and ideas rather than noting that its founding documents and ideas are overwhelmingly the products of Anglo-Saxons and that the systems that they started in America are not equally suited for all groups.
* If you are a bloke, you must pretend that you enjoy the company of women you don’t want to bang. Blokes must play down their desire to hang out with men like themselves.
* Pretend that you see people as individuals rather than as members of groups.
* Play down how much of what you say and do is false but necessary to reduce the chances of litigation (such as you don’t apologize when you cause an accident).
* Play down the the high amount of discrimination you practice to have a good life.
* Pretend to care about out-groups and in the horrible things your ancestors did to out-groups.
* Pretend that you are not repulsed by fat people, weak men, and by other groups that might fill you with instinctive loathing.
* Pretend that you support small government and states rights when you simply don’t want to subsidize out-groups.
* Pretend that you care about the plucky foreign people who are celebrated cause of the moment (such as Ukrainians or Israelis or Palestinians or Africans).
* Pretend that there are important leaders of various victimhood groups (blacks, Jews, gays, trans, Mexican-Americans, etc) who deserve our respect.
* Pretend that there is a LGBTQ community when in fact the various components of this community have nothing in common with each other.
* Pretend that what unites as Americans is more important than what divides us (sometimes true but usually not).
* Pretend that George Floyd was a great man.
* Pretend that the president is ipso facto worthy of respect when he’s always a politician who’s more worthy of skepticism than deference.
* Say that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.
* Minimize your protest that your professor and TA can’t speak a type of English you can understand.
* Deny that you own a gun.
* Deny that different groups have different interests.
Six ‘Big Lies’ About America
THE culture of a free society be comes seriously corroded when lies circulate freely as truths; when an unsupported assertion is accepted as a statement of fact rather than as something to be proved, when the line between possibility and certainty becomes invisible.
In political discourse, one expects lies and half‐truths; politicians are not, after all, philosopher‐kings. In culture, however, when lies begin to be accepted as worthy of debate by our enormously powerful social critics and literary intellectuals a crisis in values follows. Culture cannot long withstand perversions of truth. When culture becomes politics, revolutionary politics in particular, there can be no criterion for truth and its inseparable companion, rationality, for then every man is his own judge of truth with the right, if he so chooses, to force his truth on the refractory. As Andre Malraux once wrote: “The path that leads from moral reasoning to political action dead selves.”
America today is a country about which more lies are told by Americans than were ever dreamed of in Moscow, Peking or Havana…
What is new is that lying through the perversion of language or distortion of visible fact is now widely accepted as normal, so long as these derelictions are created by “progressives” around “progressive” issues. Take a little lie: the misuse of the phrase “underground press” to de scribe the left‐radical‐counterculture newspapers, all of which are obtain able on most 42d Street newsstands or on street corners from the East Village to Haight‐Ashbury. The phrase “underground press” formerly de fined publications which had to circulate secretly, from hand to hand, because they were against a repressive government, against a ruthless establishment, determined to punish publishers of such publications. There was an underground press in Czarist Russia, as there is one today in Communist Russia. An underground press existed in France during the Nazi occupation. It didn’t sell at any kiosks in Paris any more than a samizdat paper, like Chronicle of Current Events, sells at kiosks in Moscow.
I. America is either already a Fascist country or on the road to Fascism.
THIS is all agreed, among the social critics I am discussing, but there is some dispute as to how soon before American Fascism becomes real Fascism. This isn’t as absurd as it sounds. After all, if a polemicist announces over the radio, television, in a newspaper or magazine or in a best‐selling book that America is a Fascist country, it might be considered zany to make such a statement. So you get around this problem in rationality by distinguishing between “Fascism” and “real Fascism,” without ever making it clear what the distinction might be.
Charles Reich in “The Greening of America” tells us that America is at “the brink of an authoritarian or police state.” He tells us that “to day [in America] both dissent and efforts at change are dealt with by re pression.” The Harvard Crimson a few months ago announced with dramatic precision that America will be living under “real Fascism… before three years are over.” Prof. Herbert Marcuse has said that “as far as I’m concerned, one can speak with complete justification of an incipient Fascism” in America. A few sentences later in the same interview he disclosed the existence in America of “preventive Fascism.”
Prof. Philip Slater of Brandeis has written that “liberals will be given the choice, during the next decade or so, between participating in some way in the new culture and living under a Fascist regime.” Mel. Wult, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, has as his formulation sentences like: “Though we are not yet a Fascist state in general …” or, “Though we are not now police state in general…”
The usefulness of this charge that America is now or is about to go Fascist is that it is such a Big Lie that no evidence is needed to prove it; or better yet, everything is evidence, whatever is handiest. Recently the handy evidence was found, of all places, in Prime Minister Trudeau’s Canada, following last fall’s assassination of the Quebec Labor Minister by terrorists. Trudeau’s “police‐state” measures meant —I heard this charge made in a lovely Central Park West cooperative apartment—that America was next. You didn’t have to prove that Trudeau’s decrees were Fascist; the mere declaration that they were Fascist meant there was no need to prove they were. What is more, to call them Fascist was to imply that these decrees were permanent and that, therefore, Canada had embarked on the road to Fascism. Thus, a cor respondent for The New Republic, writing from Montreal as a self described “draft‐refusing” American, said: “The morning of Oct. 16… the country chosen as a refuge and whose government all praised for its tolerance had suddenly, without warning, become a police state.”
And since America Is Canada’s overbearing next‐door neighbor and since Canada dare not sneeze with out first obtaining America’s imperial permission, be assured that Fascism’s next stop is America.
THUS by constant reiteration that America is pre‐ or proto‐Fascist, America becomes Fascist and all the scholarly qualifiers, like “incipient” or “preventive” or “not yet a Fascist state in general” get blurry and redundant. In this atmosphere, any unpleasant or awful event in America can be transformed into living documentation that we now live in Amerika. Such demonology can so easily turn a doubtful future into the undoubted present—I think, there fore it is. This sort of “noncognitive” cognition was ably defined by George Lukacs, the eminent Hungarian Marxist: “It is the Stalinist tendency to exclude everywhere so far as possible any sort of mediating concepts and to bring into direct connection the crudest matters of fact with the most abstract theoretical positions.”
Take this question: Does anybody really think that President Nixon, Vice President Agnew and Dr. Kissinger would dare impose a Fascist regime on America or that they are contemplating such a coup d’etat? There are intellectuals who regard it as highly reactionary or at best naive to ask such a question, since it implies there is possible doubt as to such a conspiracy. Not to believe that the nation’s leaders, the Pentagon and the military‐industrial coin plex are planning a Fascist takeover is to demonstrate that one has been brainwashed into a state of political cretinism. And to demand some proof of such conscious (or “unconscious”) plotting is to place oneself solidly in their were I to argue that Fascism means something specific or were I to suggest that there is a huge difference between being a Republican incumbent President desperately anxious to be re‐elected and being an “incipient” Fascist, the grudging concession might be: “Well, maybe Nix on hasn’t got there yet, but give him time and you’ll see.” While it is permissible to add up every act of injustice in America as proof of the existence of Fascism, to use a similar “ethical calculus” about other countries, where acts of injustice are systemic, not episodic, to prove their “Fascism” would be impermissible.
The more scholarly and objective way to pin the “Fascist” label on America is to blur the distinction between this country and the U.S.S.R. For example, the historian Howard Zinn has written: “When the United States de fines the Soviet sphere as ‘totalitarian’ and the West as ‘free,’ it becomes difficult for Americans to see totalitarian elements in our society, and liberal elements in Soviet society. Moralizing in this way, we can condemn the Russians in Hungary and absolve ourselves in Vietnam.”
Let Zinn’s Russian peers try to organize a Moscow version of a “March on Washington,” or demand an end to Soviet occupations of foreign territory or an end to discrimination against ethnic minorities and he’ll see the difference between “totalitarian elements” in America and totalitarian elements in the Soviet Union. But Zinn knows all this—and still he’ll keep repeating this same old equation about: U. S. totalitarian elements = Soviet liberal elements.
The greatest purveyor of the canard about Fascist America is the mythopoeic Professor Marcuse, whose phrases, “repressive tolerance” and “the democratic educational dictatorship of free men,” remind me of Robespierre’s defense of the Terror: “The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.” When one begins to turn culture into revolutionary politics, the rhetoric of para dox is a most useful weapon, like the New Left phrases “creative disorder” (i.e.—pre venting a pro‐Vietnam war meeting from taking place at Harvard) or “creative vandal ism” (i.e. — destroying 10 years of a professor’s research notes during a building occupation). In the same category is Tom Hayden’s description of student revolutionaries as “guerrillas in the field of culture.”
II
America is guilty of genocide.
IF one argues that genocide is something like what happened at Auschwitz or Katyn Forest, the argument shifts: America is guilty of cultural genocide, ethnic genocide, psychic genocide—all of which are ipso facto as bad as physical genocide. If it is argued that China’s over whelming of Tibet, Stalin’s seizure of the Baltic countries and the dispersal of their populations, and Soviet counter revolutionary invasions of East Germany, Hungary, Po land and Czechoslovakia might be considered acts of cultural or ethnic genocide, and that the Kremlin’s sup pression of Russian intellectual life is metaphorical genocide, the retort be that all this is “cold war” propaganda. If the debater is too young to have experienced the cold war, the answer may be: “So what? Russia is bad but America is worse.”
III
The Bomber Left in America is a moral force.
THE Bomber Left may be guilty. But the guilt is pardonable because (1) America is a violent country, (2) violence is the Bomber Left’s agonizing answer to the need for a moral response to America’s counter revolutionary refusal to “change”* and (3) nobody, except by accident, ever gets hurt during a bombing. So the bomb becomes an abstraction destroying another abstraction: a computer center at Wisconsin (where a student was killed); a faculty club at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where a custodian was killed; a hall at Pomona College, Claremont, Calif., where a secretary was blinded and otherwise severely injured opening a time bomb package. Political frustration ascribed to the Bomber Left usually evokes among avant‐garde social critics deep sorrow; a similar indulgence for the “Goldwater Right” is unthinkable; any violence arising out of despair on the “Wallace Right” is, by avant garde convention, backward looking and contemptible. Violence on the Bomber Left* is an aberrant yet progressive step toward the New Jerusalem. Thus Bomber Left violence becomes nonviolence while Bomber Right violence (where is it?) becomes Fascist violence. The Bomber Left is made up of victims of American society; the Bomber Right is American society.
IV
The American worker is a “honky,” who revels in racial discrimination, imperialist wars, Fascism, anti‐intellectualism, “blind” anti‐Communism and other political blood sports.
INSTEAD of producing a race willing and capable of serving High Culture, these latter‐day industrial troglodytes, say the critics, have created a disgusting life style far inferior to the thousand dollar‐hi‐fi‐stereo‐Fiat‐Spider Triumph ‐ “Easy Rider” ‐ acid head ‐ Progressive Labor ‐ pot life style of their opposites. Surprisingly, these same critics, while condemning the dollar imperialism of the American worker, find it in tolerable that there should be any poverty in America. Presumably should this poverty be finally eliminated, the newly affluent workers would then become in the eyes of their putative liberators— such as Marcuse, Oglesby, Reich, Dowd — reactionary, racist, imperialist and puritanical honkies impatient to hard hats.
This lie about the American worker is an old elitist one which goes back to Alexander Hamilton, who said: “Take mankind in general, they are vicious.” This contempt was more recently expressed by Prof. Andrew Hacker of Cornell, who was absolutely ecstatic that he could announce America’s approaching “terminal hour.” Its doom was inevitable because even if America “could end poverty and bigotry, diffuse its pyramids of power, and sup press its imperial tendencies, there is no reason to believe that such a society would contain a greater quotient of talented people.” He also announced that “the egos of 200 million Americans have expanded to dimensions never before considered appropriate for ordinary citizens.” As George Orwell said in another connection, “You have to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: No ordinary man could be such a fool.”
V
Our political system is an utter fraud, particularly the two party system.
THIS lie is generally circulated by American academicians who insist that a one‐party state is not to be condemned out of hand, that if the one‐party system has a “socialist” cachet, it might even be a useful modernizing vehicle. I am not suggesting there is anything particularly sacred about a two‐party or multiparty state, nor that such a state is beyond reform. What I am arguing is that a one‐party state is a far greater threat to freedom than a two‐party or multiparty state.
VI
America is on the way down while other countries are on the way up.
ALL the countries of the world, particularly those which go by the name “revolutionary” or “people’s democracies,” are privileged, apparently, to have their faults and virtues judged by the standards of history. America, according to the critics we are discussing, is the one country which may be judged by the standards of sociology. This double standard of judgment, of course, makes it impossible ever to grant America the benefit of the doubt or the credit for good intentions.
To view a nation through history is to allow the possibility of a melioristic future. To judge a nation by sociology is to inhibit comparison of its hopeful present with an in glorious past. To believe that anything can improve here without a violent revolution (I insist on the adjective “violent” since everybody to day is for revolution, especially President Nixon) is, according to these critics, to demonstrate a benighted chauvinism. What this adds up to is that whatever America does, for whatever reason, America is wrong.
Unlike the other 143 countries in the world, only America is to be judged by the exacting and unattainable standards of a Utopia. If there is full, high‐wage employment in America for a decade, then capitalism is merely buying off the workers so that they won’t rebel. When unemployment comes, that’s the real capitalism. If — so goes this view — the Gross National Product rises and consumer income with it, it merely reflects the materialism of American civilization. If the G.N.P. falls slightly, it’s the beginning of the end, thank God. If President Nixon loses two Supreme Court nominations and one SST vote, it doesn’t mean much because, after all, has anything really changed? It’s better to vote for Nixon than for Hubert Humphrey because, as President, Nixon will bring Fascism to America much faster than a practitioner of “repressive tolerance” like Humphrey, and then…. (The same political strategy in Weimar Germany was expressed by the German Communist party as “Nach Hitler, kommen wir”: After Hitler, we will come). Besides, whatever Nixon does as President would be no worse than anything Humphrey might do.
Racism, tribalism, communalism and religious hate burden India, Pakistan, Sudan, Japan, Ceylon, Australia, Britain, Yugoslavia, Algeria with its Berbers, Spain with its Catalans and Basques, Latin America and its Indians, the U.S.S.R. and China and their repressed minorities, and on and on. The world crackles with hate, with racial and nationalistic passions — but only America, in the view of the critics we have been following, is racist. (What distinguishes America from the rest of the world is that we, its citizens, happen to be ashamed of our racism, while most everybody else is busy explaining the rationale of racial and religious discrimination and why it’s impossible to abolish it overnight.)
THUS, having neatly caricatured the country and most of its 200 million inhabitants, we can all await the revolution, we intellectuals, we culture critics, we who have helped bring the Day of America’s Judgment nearer.
Amerika — Fascist, genocidal, materialistic, violent, paranoid, honky, insensitive, undemocratic, counterrevolutionary, hopeless… did ever a country since Nazi Germany so deserve to be utterly destroyed?
