Media

What the Media Wants You to Believe

By George Schmidt

George Schmidt's words of wisdom live on.

Substance is reprinting my short book “The American Federation of Teachers and the C.I.A.” in its original form (save for an increase in page size and an increase in price) after several years of renewed interest in it.

I was at first pleased—but surprised—to find that intelligent and committed people were still interested in this brief study nearly a quarter century after it was researched and written. Looking back on the 26 years we have been publishing the teachers’ newspaper Substance in Chicago, however, it should not have been as surprising as it first seemed to me. There is the same connection across generations now as there was when my generation struggled to locate and learn the history of American radicalism during the Orwellian brainwash of the early 1960s.

Those who grew up, as I did, in the working class towns of industrial America during the 1950s were cut off from our past, often by our own parents. We were denied access to the legacies of protest and militancy that had a long and honorable tradition in the United States of America. The unions had been built by others. Civil rights was for rich college kids and black preachers. Feminism was not for our mothers or sisters. And woe betide our brothers (or sisters) if their sexual preferences deviated from the “Leave it to Beaver” orthodoxies of the mass media—or the even more viciously policed barriers to love erected by the Archbishop of Newark.

Our histories were not our own. Born in places like Elizabeth, New Jersey, and raised in Linden, New Jersey, we were supposed to view militant labor radicalism, the anti-war movement, civil rights activism, feminism and the vast poetries and potentials of human affection as something alien and subversive. The outsiders who practiced such things were not welcome on our block, or on Broad Street in Elizabeth, or on Wood Avenue in Linden. The people who wrote books about us were not our neighbors.

The children of American workers were not supposed to think subversively about the reign of American capital, either at home or abroad. The propagandists who brought that world view to the minds of children like myself 50 years ago are still working today. This little book is about some of them, and how they do their work among teachers. The people who tell America how to think about itself today are telling us that those industrial places where most of us live are rendered realistically in the media. They tell us that “The Sopranos” is a better way to understand white working class people from Elizabeth, New Jersey, than other methods. Certainly no one is to go to the area and walk through downtown Linden, Rahway, Elizabeth, or Freehold and visit our high school classrooms, gyms and sports fields. Brainwashing is a long discussion for a different time, but it is quite relevant to why we are reprinting this little book about one union at one moment in history.

In order to make people do what they want, any ruling class first has to make people think that a certain way of viewing the world is the only way. Conversely, in order to act more clearly and liberate ourselves, we have to develop critical thinking skills quite different from the ones presently sanctioned in our schools. We have to counter many of the official lies. As one character says in the movie Platoon—“Free your mind and your ass will follow.”

Maintaining the slavery of people’s minds is one of the main jobs of every ruling class. This involves a twofold dialectical process of suppressing (or distorting) the truth and of elevating banal fictions about persistent facts. Together today, these activities are called “Public Relations,” in politics, “Spin.” They are always lies in the service of power. There have been some changes in the tactics used to suppress the truth since this little book was first published, but not in fundamentals.

Propaganda still parades everywhere as “news.” The law is still invoked to suppress dissent. It’s still expensive (albeit perhaps not as physically dangerous) to publish and speak the truth about those who run the world. One of the things accomplished by the end of the Cold War was the unleashing of thousands of trained propagandists on the rest of the world. No longer in the employ of the governments that fought the Cold War, these men and women offered themselves for employment to the highest bidder.

Truth, again, was to be the first casualty. A dozen examples could be offered on any single day. In July 2001, anyone who paid careful attention to the media could read that the deceased owner of Newsweek was a heroine of free speech and a free press. We could then turn to the pages of Newsweek and read that protesters who threw things at police should be shot dead with a bullet in the head. This “They are only getting what they deserve” version of reality has its roots as old as history itself. Less than a week after dozens of peaceful activists from around the world were hospitalized by the brutality of Italian security forces (now led by fans of Benito Mussolini), most of us were supposed to believe that the dissidents got what they deserved.

Those who confronted official lies have long known that the liars usually are better funded and more polished than those who try to bring out unpleasant truths. Gone with the Wind is still more widely read and profitable today than The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. How does all this relate to the republication of a little book written a few years after the last American C.I.A. operative was pulled out of Vietnam (or disgracefully left behind to the not-so-tender mercies of the victors in that terrible conflict)? Our monthly teachers’ newspaper Substance bridges a few generations in the annals of critical reporting. Founded the year Saigon was liberated and Vietnam reunited, Substance has continued publishing continuously since. We have been around from the days of the Killing Fields to the years of the Battle of Seattle, the insanity of the “anti-drug” war on the poor in Colombia, the vicious official brutality of Genoa, and the daily attacks on the poor in all of the largest cities in the United States of America. And we came under attack, too, from the same people.

As readers of Substance know, in January 1999 the “Testocracy” sued me for $1 million and suspended me from my 30-year teaching job in Chicago’s inner city. Officially, the “Chicago School Reform Board of Trustees” sued us for a million dollars for “copyright infringement.” In January 1999, Chicago public schools CEO Paul Vallas (praised nationally for his fictitious “miracle” in the city’s public school system), with the full support of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (the man whose brother ran Al Gore’s election campaign) began the process of legal maneuvering against us. That maneuvering led to my termination as a public school teacher at the August 2000 meeting of the Chicago Board of Education. Still pending is the claim that our act of publishing facts entitles the Chicago Board of Education to get $1 million from us.

What was our crime? Publishing a handful of dumb tests that Chicago had just forced its high school students to take. Our crime was publishing facts that didn’t jive with the official version of The Truth. It’s been difficult to face off once again against the thugs who rule Chicago today. The assault on my career and the newspaper I edit has also provided me with an opportunity. It has given me the chance to meet a new generation of activists and to have some time away from the daily demands of classroom teaching to study and understand the movements that are growing today.

One of the strange highlights of the past three years was arriving in June 1999 at a conference of the Rouge Forum and Whole Schooling Institute at Wayne State University in Detroit. We had been invited there by people in Detroit who had heard about our struggle in Chicago over the Internet. My wife Sharon and I had driven from Chicago to Detroit and were late. As we walked up to the sign-in table, I was asked, “Who are you?” “I’m the guy who wrote that little book,” I said. Displayed among the literature near the registration table were a number of photocopies of “The American Federation of Teachers and the C.I.A.” I was told that people in Detroit had been reading the book as part of their study of the forces once again arrayed against the rights of the majority of people. Many, I was told, had thought the person who wrote the book was dead or out of political life. In fact, we had remained in the politics of Chicago and its schools, while others had gone elsewhere. We had stayed at the grass roots while others found that their “movement” pasts could be brokered into quite comfortable presents and futures.

Rereading “The American Federation of Teachers and the C.I.A.” 23 years after we first sold it at the 1978 convention of the American Federation of Teachers, I am glad for several things. Reading the accounts of the C.I.A. speaker Irving Brown at the 1977 AFT convention still gives me chills. I am glad that the facts we reported then still stand up now. I am glad to have worked with thousands of men and women who had the courage to oppose U.S. imperialism—both abroad and in our own cities—during those decades of the 1960s and 1970s—and beyond. I am proud that I can tell my sons what I did to halt the terrors of white supremacy during the century when it was at its most vicious.

It has been an honor to work with those who continued to oppose the atrocities of the “system”—even in the sugarcoated forms that were being prepared then (and which would be unleashed after the Reagan presidency began in 1981) and the cloying, trendy seductiveness of the “New Democrats” who ascended to power under Bill Clinton.

A great deal has happened since 1977 and 1978, when this book was researched and written. Most notably, for those interested in the topic covered in this book, was the collapse of Soviet-style Communism and its replacement by a brand of rapacious capitalism, often led by criminals and former intelligence operatives, throughout the former Soviet Union and across what was once called the “Eastern Bloc.” There have been attempts by the U.S. business press to present the nastiness of privatization and the “free market” in Russia as something unique, as if it stems from a Slavic gene.

Even a brief but honest history of capitalism in its various national inceptions shows that the abstract “market” preached by professors is really closer to the drive-by version practiced in places as diverse as Moscow, Manila, Los Angeles, Chicago, Santiago or Mexico City. 

Who are they kidding?

Capital bares its fangs behind the apologetics of those who abstractly preach about “free markets” and a “free world.”

This little book is about what one American trade union did during one period in its history. Why is it relevant today? I would argue that the international corporate capitalism practiced by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency during its Cold War heyday is the predecessor to the “globalism” that is generating a new generation of protest today.

Similarly, the class collaborationism of many trade union leaders is part of that process of subordinating people across the planet to the global reign of unbridled capital.

The saga of the American Federation of Teachers and its subordination to the agendas of America’s corporate leaders continues today in the union’s reluctance to support militant trade union organizing throughout the United States and, especially, in those nations were working people are most clearly the victims of globalization.

The American Federation of Teachers today is also the main union supporting the corporate drive—led by those we call the “Testocracy”—to subordinate the desires of the majority of people for democratic public schools to the agenda of the ruling class.

Just as during the Cold War, we are presented with “accountability” for the majority of people while those who run things are only accountable to themselves.

The growing international protest movements against “globalization” and the vicious attacks on these movements—and especially on their leaders—are nothing new in the ongoing struggle between capital and the majority of humanity. Hopefully, the republication of this small book will help to put some of the less visible portions of the history of our struggles into perspective. During the coming years, much more will need to be published about these issues. The republication of “The American Federation of Teachers and the C.I.A.” is meant to provide people with one additional tool for understanding the facts of history, rather than the glib generalizations which serve only those who wish to abuse humanity and the history we are all creating.