[Firestarter]

Lippmann - responsible men and ignorant public

Walter Lippmann (1889 – 1974) is one of those legendary journalists that helped shape our wonderful political system.
Lippmann wrote policy papers for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and was research director for the board of inquiry of US president Woodrow Wilson after World War I.

Lippmann defined the Utopian classed society by dividing it into the largely ignorant “public” that is steered by a special “governing class”, who decide what is good for the “national interest”.
This class of “responsible men” should control government to serve the interests of private power and wealth. For the “manufacture of consent”, the “public” should believe that it is exerting “democratic” power but in reality it´s really (only) the “responsible men”. This truth should never be revealed to the “public”, who “wouldn’t understand”.

In “Public opinion” (1922), Lippmann wrote:

Democracy, therefore, has never developed an education for the public. It has merely given it a smattering of the kind of knowledge which the responsible man requires. It has, in fact, aimed not at making good citizens but at making a mass of amateur executives. It has not taught the child how to act as a member of the public. It has merely given him a hasty, incomplete taste of what he might have to know if he meddled in everything.
The result is a bewildered public and a mass of insufficiently trained officials. The responsible men have obtained their training not from the courses in “civics” but in the law schools and law offices and in business. The public at large, which includes everybody outside the field of his own responsible knowledge, has no coherent political training of any kind.

These critics have seen that the important decisions were taken by individuals, and that public opinion was uninformed, irrelevant and meddlesome. They have usually concluded that there was a congenital difference between the masterful few and the ignorant many.

Lippmann called the notion of a public competent to direct public affairs a “false ideal” and compared the political savvy of the average man to a theater-goer walking into a play in the middle of the third act and leaving before the last curtain.

Walter Lippmann explained that the role of a journalist is really shaping public opinion by transmitting propaganda from policymakers.
For Lippmann, the “function of news” is to paint a subjective version of the truth ton influence how men act.

At the end of the 1920s, Lippman became skeptical of the “guiding” class (that he had helped shape!).
In “The Public Philosophy” (1955), Lippman argued that the intellectual elites were undermining “democracy”: https://rogerjhardy.wordpress.com/2015/0...democracy/
(http://archive.is/V1s0f)


In the following paper, Noam Chomsky writes after the end of the “Cold War” on Walter Lippmann.
Chomsky rightfully assumes that the end of the Soviet “threat” won´t bring an end to the imperialist oil wars, but that these will probably even intensify.

The US has never respected “international law” but relies on the “threat of force rather than diplomacy” as you can see from the meddling in affairs of Southeast Asia, Central America and the Middle East.
In this “New World Order”, the US maintains a “near monopoly of force”, with no “contestant for that role”.

George Kennan (head of the State Department policy planning staff) explained that in Latin America, as elsewhere, the “protection of our resources” must be the main concern of US foreign policy.
This naturally includes the need for “police repression by the local government”. According to Kennan in general it´s better to have a “strong regime” than a “liberal government”.
In 1948, Kennan wrote in a “top secret” document:

We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population…
In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…
We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction…
We should cease to talk about vague and…, unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

Noam Chomsky – The struggle for democracy in a changed world (1991): http://www.roape.org/050/02.html
(http://web.archive.org/web/2019091414283...f/5002.pdf)


I´ve posted on Operation Condor to install fascist dictatorships in Latin America here: https://www.lawfulpath.com/forum/viewtop...t=10#p5950