In 1961 my father traveled from the Vancouver suburb of New Westminster to the small Washington State border town of Bellingham to join the United States Air Force. He was twenty-four. Being that his initial examination results were unusually high, he was asked to travel to McCord Air Force Base in Tacoma to participate in further testing. The Air Force believed that he might be predisposed towards navigation, and wanted to determine whether or not he would be useful at SAC (Strategic Air Command) in a B-52 navigation role.
At the time he was a British citizen, a landed immigrant in Canada, but the United States viewed the country of birth as that of origin with regards to immigration. Being that my father was born in India, and the Indian waiting list was rather extensive, his journey towards joining the US Air Force was considerably slowed. By the time they were able to sort out his immigration he was married, had a career, and was in the neighborhood of thirty years old.
In later life I asked him why he wanted to join the US Air Force and he responded by saying that he had always had a romantic fascination with flying and, with the US being the power it was, favoured the American military over that of Canada or Britain. In retrospect, it’s rather ironic being that he was sent to Canada from England by my grandparents at the age of seventeen to avoid National Service, which would have delayed the family’s intended move to Canada. No matter, he turned down the Air Force’s offer once they were able to ensure his immigration and remained in Canada. His passion for military history, on the other hand, was something that he kept quite alive in the decades that followed, a passion that would influence my own interest in history, primarily that of the twentieth century.
When I was a teenager I picked out a worn and creased paperback novel from the shelves my father’s rather massive collection of books and started to read it. I had no idea what it was about; I had simply been attracted to its title for years, having looked up at it whilst playing on the floor in the basement. The author of the novel was Joseph Heller, and it was his 1961 masterpiece Catch 22. Until that day I had always believed in what one might call ‘the honourable sanctity of warfare’. That a greater, purer intent dwelled alongside its horrors, somehow transcending them and providing ubiquitous justification for the necessary unleashing of the evil that lays sleeping within us. I was too young to fully appreciate why my own grandfather refused to tell me about his involvement in World War II, or really examine why several of my great uncles became lifelong alcoholics following the war. I was oblivious, like most children that ‘play war’ in the bushes and forests of their neighbourhoods, to what war really was. Even worse, to how truly propagandized we are, despite the fact that we claim ourselves at liberty.
Like most people of my age group, in school I was bombarded by a highly mythologized history that went to great lengths to lend credence to Cold War necessity. I was well aware of the massive sacrifices made by the Soviets during the Second World War but still viewed them as I was taught to view them, as inhuman, unfeeling – as the enemy. Even more, that those political ideologies that had played a role in the rise of the Soviet State were counter to the positive development of just and peaceful societies.
Catch 22 provided me with the first of many awakenings. Its acerbic prose led me to spend a considerable amount of time deconstructing the realities of societal power groups. I quickly came to view organized government and most political ideologies as little more than enablers. No matter their core principles, all of them are susceptible to co-option by small, elite groups intent on fostering within them belief systems that support not only their own survival, but also the growth and influence of their power base. The highly romanticized aggression of the twentieth century is based on clashes of ideologies, not clashes between the elite power groups within various societies, even though they have been wholly responsible for the development of the aggressive policies that have ultimately led to war. In short, publics did not go to war; the elite power groups whose agendas required public obedience manufactured their support.
While many believe that the use of fear is a crucial tool of influence, the ability to control information is far more powerful (not to mention a rather important part of the use of fear as a motivator). With the ability to control information comes the ability to mould historical perspective and ultimately promote the necessity of a power structure within a society, even in political systems in which mass public participation determines political leadership. Education, which is often viewed as a key element in challenging the influence of a power group, is only as useful as how infected its curriculum has become by the misinformation fostered by those that control the flow of information to a populace. If one is educated to support the status quo, the belief in change is limited, no matter how impassioned the individual might be. Ultimately, the individual is unable to fully disassociate himself or herself from the illusionary perfection commonly found at the historical base of their society. Of course, if a return to the core principles of an ideology is possible, so too is its repeated co-option.
We live in a hyper-information age. The sheer volume of information available to people is so enormous that it has become extremely easy to dilute public awareness and the effectiveness of public action. Where the majority used to suffer from a lack of education and information, they now labour under the illusion of educated awareness drowned in excessive, diluted information. Awareness has been transformed from something externally denied to something willfully denied.
A decade after reading Catch 22 I found myself examining my own susceptibility to supporting historical mythologies and the power groups responsible for their prominence. The Cold War offered ample opportunity for many to blindly buy into an ambiguous animosity. Westerners were just as manipulated as those in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, both receiving their information from their respective controlling power groups. People, who, given the chance, would have probably opted to simply shake hands and get on with life, were kept in a state of constant anxiety and aggression because of the information fed them. Actions during The Cold War (military, covert, or otherwise) were defended and bolstered by the media, which helped perpetuate the myth of public polarization rather than conflicting agendas amongst the world’s power elite. Subsequently, the global public grew accustomed to the idea of sides, of political black and white, and became more reliant on the necessity for a clearly defined ‘negative’, or enemy. In the end, the more intelligent of the two forms of information manipulation prevailed, that being the one that operated under the guise of free expression.
The War On Terror provides an excellent example of why the framework of information manipulation employed during The Cold War is one of the most successful in history. With a clearly defined, yet distant enemy, the ease with which diluted information is distributed drastically increases. Unlike extreme cases of propaganda, such as the methods employed by the National Socialists in Germany in the 1930’s, manipulation that is enabled by the existence of a ‘free press’ is devastatingly effective long term. As long as we believe that the fourth estate is intact, the effectiveness of misinformation will sustain. Not until corporate interests are abandoned will the fourth estate function as it’s supposed to. Even then, the information provided by those willing to properly scrutinize the power structure will be marginalized and radicalized by a mistrusting public who will have an entire lifetime worth of misinformation to unwittingly base their distrust on.
Joseph Heller was a B-25 bombardier. My father would have navigated B-52’s had he been born somewhere other than in Pune. Had that happened he may very well have helped murder Vietnamese people by carpet bombing North Vietnam in an attempt to usher a new elite into power in that country. In the end, there probably wasn’t much difference between someone like my father and your average Vietnamese person, save their language and religious inclinations. Were one to have car trouble and need a jump, there’s a good chance the other would stop to offer him a hand. But instead of it being that simple, we find ourselves living in a world in which the calculated madness of a few requires the many to convince themselves mad just to avoid the hardships of being sane.