Manufacturing Consent and Wartime Propaganda

Manufacturing Consent and Wartime Propaganda describes how crisis can become a contest over what the public is permitted to see, explain, and support. In Noam Chomsky’s account, wartime consensus is made not simply by suppressing information but by selecting frames: media and intellectuals may converge around official power, while structural explanations and opposition are sidelined. The process is powerful, but never total; public opinion remains divided, and resistance can interrupt the political uses of fear.

Media, Elites, and Crisis

Chomsky rejects the idea that American news coverage after the September 11 attacks was wholly uniform. He says European impressions may have been shaped by attention to The New York Times and public radio and television, and points to a Times article acknowledging that New York opinion differed from the paper’s presentation. The newspaper reported that the drums of war were barely audible in the streets and that calls for peace outnumbered demands for punishment, even near an outdoor memorial to those killed. Chomsky distinguishes a broad desire to find and punish those responsible, if they could be identified, from an aversion to indiscriminate attacks that would kill many innocents.

That distinction complicates the appearance of national unanimity. Chomsky describes immediate reactions of shock, horror, anger, fear, and a desire for revenge, but says public opinion was divided and countercurrents developed quickly. In his view, the presence of those currents matters because a crisis does not dictate a single response: grief and a demand for accountability can coexist with resistance to retaliatory violence.

He nevertheless identifies a recurring institutional pattern. In times of crisis, major media and intellectual classes tend to rally around those in power and encourage the public to mobilize behind the same cause. Chomsky says this tendency was especially intense during the NATO bombing of Serbia, approaching hysteria, and sees the Gulf War as following the same pattern. His concern is not merely that particular arguments prevail, but that the authority of media and intellectual institutions can make alignment with state policy appear to be the natural public response.

Framing Responsibility and Dissent

Chomsky challenges explanations that attribute hostility toward the United States chiefly to globalization or cultural hegemony. He calls that account convenient for Western intellectuals because, he argues, it diverts attention from the policies that shaped the choice of the World Trade Center as a target. He asks whether the 1993 bombing of the same building, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, or the actions of Afghan fighters supported by the CIA can plausibly be explained by anxiety about globalization. His counterpoint is that criticism of U.S. policy was voiced not only by people outside elite circles, but also by affluent and privileged Middle Easterners who otherwise supported the United States.

The competing explanation he criticizes appeared in a New York Times editorial on September 16, which attributed the attackers’ actions to hatred of Western values such as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism, and universal suffrage. Chomsky argues that this framing treats U.S. conduct as irrelevant and offers a comforting story of innocence. In his view, accepting it can increase the risk of further atrocities by obscuring the political conditions that opponents identify as grievances. He also cautions against romanticizing the attackers: he says members of Osama bin Laden’s network were no more concerned with globalization than with the poor and oppressed whom they had harmed, and describes their stated campaign as a holy war against repressive, corrupt, non-Islamist regimes and their supporters.

The book’s account of propaganda includes silences as well as explicit claims. Chomsky observes that U.S. obstacles to information are often less a matter of direct government censorship than of conventional self-censorship; he considers coverage at the time better than usual, not uniquely constrained. He also cites a Wall Street Journal report that Arab analysts linked anti-American feeling to Washington’s disregard for human rights in officially pro-American countries such as Saudi Arabia. Chomsky says serious attention to such criticism was scarce, and that interviews with bin Laden and reporting from Afghanistan available through Al Jazeera were little used. For him, what receives attention—and what is left out—helps define the boundaries of public explanation.

Propaganda, Mobilization, and Historical Warning

Chomsky frames the danger of propaganda through the First World War, an example distant enough, he says, to examine without the same immediate passions. He argues that neither side was fighting a noble war for the highest purposes, yet soldiers on both sides marched eagerly toward mutual slaughter, encouraged by intellectual classes and political forces across the spectrum. Some of the few who challenged the war’s claimed nobility, including Rosa Luxemburg, Bertrand Russell, and Eugene Debs, were imprisoned.

He attributes the transformation of a pacifist United States into a violently anti-German society to Wilson’s propaganda agencies and the enthusiastic support of liberal intellectuals. Many of the stories used to justify vengeance, he notes, had been fabricated by the British Ministry of Information. The historical parallel is a warning about how propaganda can convert outrage into consent for violence, not a claim that the outcome is unavoidable: Chomsky insists that popular struggles of recent years have had civilizing effects and that people need not rush into catastrophe simply because authorities urge them to do so.

The same contested dynamic appears in his discussion of the protests against globalization. Chomsky anticipates that terrorist atrocities could set back protests around the world, which had not begun in Seattle. He says hard-line and repressive forces on different sides could exploit the attacks to accelerate militarization, reverse social and democratic advances, shift resources toward narrower interests, and weaken democracy. But he does not present these developments as certain victories: he expects resistance and doubts that the effort will succeed beyond the short term.

From Public Consent to Government Policy

Chomsky argues that governments respond to powerful domestic interests, though popular currents exert influence too, even in harshly authoritarian societies and especially in democratic ones. In the United States, he expects officials to use the crisis to advance a larger agenda: militarization, including missile defense and the militarization of space; weakening social-democratic programs; diverting attention from globalization’s damaging effects, environmental problems, and health insurance; and transferring more wealth to fewer people, including through the removal of corporate charges. He also identifies subordination of society as a means of curtailing public debate and dissent.

The political mechanism, as he describes it, depends on the conversion of fear into authority. After September 11, he says, democratic societies introduced measures to discipline their populations and enacted unpopular laws under the pretext of fighting terrorism. The atmosphere of fear and demands for patriotism could be translated, in practice, into pressure for the public to remain silent while officials pursued their program. Chomsky says the Bush administration used the opportunity to pursue policies against the majority of the U.S. population, including future generations, while serving the narrow interests of large corporations that dominated the administration.

His analysis extends beyond domestic policy to the international consequences of a crisis narrative. Chomsky says governments used the attacks to establish or intensify repressive policies: Russia joined the counterterrorism coalition in hopes of gaining room to continue atrocities in Chechnya, and China did so for similar reasons. Turkey offered troops for the new U.S. phase of the war on terror, while its prime minister cited U.S. support for Turkey’s campaign against its Kurdish population, a campaign Chomsky describes as exceptionally brutal and materially enabled by American arms. He also says Israel saw the attacks as an opportunity to intensify its repression of Palestinians with stronger U.S. backing. Across these cases, counterterrorism language could bring very different state agendas under one legitimizing frame.

Strategic Power and the Limits of Consensus

Chomsky identifies the establishment of major U.S. military bases in Central Asia as a significant consequence of the Afghanistan war. He connects those bases to the expansion of U.S.-dominated multinational corporations and the effort to control the region’s substantial resources, as well as to the strategic encirclement of the world’s most important energy resources in the Gulf. Before the war, he says, the most secure U.S. base aimed at the Gulf was Diego Garcia; with the new bases, intervention would be easier if Washington considered it appropriate.

He reads the Bush administration’s new phase of the war on terror as an opportunity to consolidate an already overwhelming military advantage and promote global dominance, repeating in several respects the Reagan administration’s earlier war on terror. As an illustration of the posture, Chomsky recounts that Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urged U.S. officials to attend to Arab reactions to Washington’s strong support for Israeli repression. A senior official reportedly replied that the United States was far more forceful than during Operation Desert Storm, so Abdullah could understand what Afghanistan demonstrated about American capability. A former military official summarized the intended message as a show of firmness that would command respect and prevent further opposition.

Chomsky treats the strategic purpose of the Afghanistan bombing as an inference, not as a conclusion established by access to secret documents. He says it is reasonable to imagine that the consequences were calculated and that the main objective was to warn the world about what the United States could do to those who failed to follow its rules. He compares this interpretation to the NATO bombing of Serbia, whose stated purpose, as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton explained it, was to ensure NATO’s credibility. The comparison illustrates his broader claim that public justifications such as counterterrorism or alliance credibility may coexist with a strategic effort to demonstrate power.

The argument does not end with a claim that public consent has been secured once and for all. Chomsky says the basic international problems largely remained, even as September 11 brought changes likely to have serious and unpleasant consequences. His recurring contrast is between the speed with which fear can be organized into a mandate for military and political action and the persistence of countercurrents: peace appeals, criticism of official explanations, popular struggles, and resistance to policies imposed in the name of security. Manufacturing consent is therefore both a description of institutional power and a warning about a political process whose outcome remains open.