I was struck anew by the role of Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, in reviewing the history of the United Fruit Company overthrow in June, 1954 (through the Eisenhower Administration) of the democratically elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, who took office in 1951.
This is a very under appreciated episode in modern history, and a highly important precedent for the way political debate is now conducted in America today.
In some ways, nothing has changed, except that the overthrow of Central and South American countries that proceeded through the '50s, '60s and '70s with their ensuing nightmares, have now given way to greater self determination and social democracy. Ironically, it is the US that may face the pigeons coming home to roost in the form of having to live through the nightmare that the multinational corporations foisted on our cousins to the south. That is, if we fail to fully appreciate history.
Edward Bernays’ uncle was Sigmund Freud and he grew up around figures like Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich and other originators of the science of psychology. Reich’s best contribution was the concept that entire societies had a psychology. He had to run from Germany in the ‘30s for trying to warn the world about the growing mass madness there.
Bernays had the inspiration that, instead of studying psychology, you could use it to manipulate the mass mind and sell stuff to make lots of money. When he came to America, he became famous for being one of the founders of the Madison Avenue complex that created a whole new consumer economy, particularly after WWII.
By the ‘50s he began to use this magic in the service of politics. United Fruit was a company that had created a large-scale fruit business, largely selling bananas from Central America. For nearly half a century they had been able to have their way. So when the people in Guatemala elected a president who would negotiate better terms for Guatemala with the company, raising the portion of taxes they paid, emphasizing labor interests in better wages, and buying back land for Guatemalans to cultivate, the company decided to opt for overthrow. Bernays’ set out to prove that something like public opinion and the US government could be moved through a PR attack and this could set up favorable conditions for regime change.
For several years, Bernays met privately with key opinion leaders like the publisher of the New York Times and progressive Senator Robert LaFollette. He sent out blizzards of canned articles, Op Eds, letters, reports, etc. to fill in the information gaps about Guatemala with his PR line. This was that the Guatemalan government was being taken over by communists interested in establishing a foothold on the American continent. It didn’t matter that largely, the Indian population of Guatemala had a communal tradition going back into the mists of time and this was the way subsistence agriculture was conducted traditionally. Anthropology was irrelevant to politics. It didn't matter that the people of Guatemala had voted in favor of negotiation with a foreign entity that was making life harsh for many people.
When the New York Times sent reporters down to check out what was going on, they saw the landscape through Bernays' PR filter and reported accordingly, which furthered what we today call “framing the issue” for a public and a Washington leadership that otherwise was in total ignorance.
In only a few years, this had Congress going and Eisenhower ordered the CIA to conduct a coup to overthrow Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, in favor of a military figure that was recruited by the CIA, Castillo Armas. This set in motion an astounding degree of carnage in many countries across the hemisphere with reverberations we are still seeing today, although we may not know that what we are seeing is historically connected.
Direct Line to Today
What is relevant today is that the testbed for what we are seeing in American politics now, particularly Republican politics, is in various efforts to promote an economic model that should sound familiar. The essence of it is very limited government, fewer taxes for the wealthy, privatized services like Social Security, fewer social services overall, unregulated free market capitalism, and especially free rein for multinational corporations. Today's promoters of these policies use virtually identical language, including grinding against the legacy of FDR.
There is a direct line between Edward Bernays and Karl Rove and the Tea Party’s financial backers. The essence of what still works is that truth is relative. Academics might debate what is or is not really true. What matters in politics is what works to cause a powerful sense of urgency to rush to action, based in whatever triggers the most intense emotional reaction.
It could be that the rise of myriad "think tanks" over the years has not only served to promote these messages in the media and in the whole American political debate, it has probably prevented thinking. Probably by design, as well as by default.
No real intellectual vigor has been coming out of all those right wing "think tanks" to address the real problems that face the world, and instead they seem to be bent on drawing the shades over any window into reality - because realism tends to go against entrenched special interests.
The reason that progressives don't "do" think tanks very well is that they are essentially a right wing invention, based on the psychology of conformity. People who need organizational structure and regimentation also need "The Word" handed down from above. Progressives don't like it when some genius or some authority body of some sort hands something down. This is the strength of the progressive movement.
I sometimes think there will be a coming together for progressives in a realization about what is going on, when the bunch of us are lined up against the wall to be shot. But actually, the constant searching around for the way out of the current conundrums, rejecting conventional wisdom, is the only possibility for the future.
We owe it to all our cousins who really were lined up against the wall and shot to be well informed.
The way of conformity leads to a United States that fails to learn the lessons from the economic experiments foisted on the people of Central and South America and becomes victim to the Really Bad Monster Pigeons coming home to roost. Imagine a right wing man on horseback that is convinced that Pinochet had it right in Chile, after Allenda was overthrown.
Really it shouldn't take much imagination to see seeds of such a possibility in the right wing rhetoric of today, warmed over as it is from the days when the multinationals proved ruthless enough to countenance the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of people, and then brazen enough to cover it up with skilled PR and buying up the media.
For more reading on this, check out:
Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine which summarizes the Guatamalan coup, and reviews the economic policy experiments of Milton Friedman's Chicago School of Economics in Central and South America along with the use of torture and murder to force the adoption of these policies.
Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer's Bitter Fruit, which focuses on the Guatemalan coup and details various aspects, including the role played by Bernays.
Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow, which summarizes fourteen government overthrows by the US during the past century and a half.