Harry Targ
Reality and Appearance
…the most important contradiction of all [is] that between reality and
appearance in the world in which we live (David
Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Oxford
University Press, 2014, 6).
In David Harvey’s opening chapter “On Contradiction,” the author refers to Karl Marx’s discussion of narratives about life that are distortions of reality. He quotes Marx: “If everything were as it appeared on the surface there would be no need for science.” He interprets Marx’s admonitions as requiring us to “get behind the surface appearances if we are to act coherently in the world.” (Harvey, 6)
How the world is framed; Spokespersons from the Hegemponic Power and the Global South
(The
essay below was originally written in 2022 just after President Gustavo Petro
spoke at the United Nations for the first time In 2023 he spoke again. He later
was interviewed by Amy Goodman and elaborated on the perspective of the Global
South about peace, justice, and the threat to human survival. https://youtu.be/6-6Ni7jbi3U?si=CdPsWUWWOTFFUsDw)
After his recent speeches in September, 2025 at the United
Nations and his appearance at a rally for Palestine, the United States revoked
his visa. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9jv8kne7no
The peace and justice movements in the US (and elsewhere) must connect our struggles against fascism at home with imperialism worldwide and link our visions with those in the Global South who have engaged in struggles against imperialism for years and years (close the bases, stop the bombings, end the genocide against Gaza, end the Cuban blockade, stop the aggression against Venezuela, end deportations etc. etc.). And we must show how these campaigns are inextricably connected to huge military budgets, inadequate healthcare and education, climate disasters, racism, and patriarchy. This is tough stuff but necessary.
Insights from Social
Science
A long time ago the eminent political scientist Murray Edelman wrote a book entitled The Symbolic Uses of Politics. In it he postulated that most people experience the political world not through concrete reality but through emotional symbols. For example, the classic way in which people relate to their political institutions is through the flag of their nation. Americans viewing the flag see images of men in combat fighting for freedom or men and women standing in line waiting to vote for their preferred political candidates. A colorful cloth with stars and stripes gets transformed in our consciousness into a rich, glamorized history even when the emotive images are in direct contradiction with people’s lives.
In addition, Edelman suggests the ways in which the emotional symbols get
embedded and reinforced in the consciousness of peoples by borrowing from
anthropological writings on myth and ritual. Myths are networks of emotional
symbols that collectively tell a story that explains “reality.” Rituals
reinforce in behavior the mythology of public life. We need only reflect on the
pledge to the flag that opens elementary and secondary school class sessions in
rich and poor communities alike or regular meetings of AFL-CIO labor councils.
Edelman pointed out that emotional symbols (he called them “condensational”)
provide the primary way people connect with the world beyond immediate
experience. The extraordinary complexity of the modern world is reduced to a
series of powerful symbols such as the threats of “international communism” or
“terrorism.”
Media analyst Todd Gitlin, wrote about “media frames;” that is the ways in which
media construct the symbols and myths that shape information about the world.
Print media shapes what we read, who are regarded as authoritative
spokespersons, and what visual images shape our thinking about countries,
issues such as war and peace, trade, investment, and the global climate.
Television emphasizes visual images rather than words. Whatever the media form,
points of view are embedded in the words and images communicated.
Writers such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, and Robert McChesney accept
implicitly Edelman’s counsel that people experience the world indirectly and
usually in emotional form. They also assume, as does Gitlin, that what we read,
see, and hear about the world is framed for us. They go further to suggest that
what Marx called the “false conceptions about ourselves” in symbols, myths,
rituals, and frames are usually the product of ruling class interests.
How the Washington Post Sees the World
Charles Lane, “Migration’s ‘Root Cause” is Latin American Socialist Dictatorship, Washington Post, September 21, 2022 wrote about the migration this year of 200,000 Cubans from the island. He also pointed out that such migrations over the years have involved thousands of fleeing Venezuelans: “The exodus is thus a tremendous compliment to the United States and other democratic capitalist countries. We should appreciate it.”
For Lane, the “root
cause” of such migrations, of course, is communist dictatorship, a pattern of
people fleeing their home countries because of dictatorship and failed
economies. Lane may have been aware of the declassified State
Department document, The Decline and Fall of Castro,” quoted in a speech by
Senator Patrick Leahy, February 7, 2022 that US policy’s “purpose
was “denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages,
to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the]
government.” Cuba became the model for applying economic sanctions
against governments who the US tried to bring down.
Today US sanctions have
been levied against 39 countries. And in most cases, while citizens of these
countries suffer, most remained committed to their governments and/or reject
United States intervention. And Cuba, despite Lane’s dismissal of Cuba as a dictatorship,
has remained a beacon of hope, a model of economic and political development
for the global south. Health care is free, Education is free. Cubans in their
communities discuss and debate issues and vote on key constitutional changes.
Most recently this is illustrated by the national vote on a proposed new Family
Code to give legitimacy and rights to all kinds of families and children. And
paradoxically virtually every country in the world (except for the US and
Israel) condemns the US economic blockade.
And in another editorial statement on the Chinese
“challenge” to the United States the author writes: “In just over 40 years, the
People’s Republic of China has arisen from the political chaos and poverty of
the Mao Zedong era to become a powerhouse on the world stage. Its unmistakable
clout is intensifying its rivalry with the United States over which country
will dominate the global order and, crucially, which system will stand as the
world’s political and economic model: the authoritarianism and
state capitalism of China, or the liberal democracy and market-oriented economy
of the United States.” Thus, the media frame is global competition
between authoritarianism and “state capitalism” versus markets and democracy
(Dexter Roberts, “At Stake in the U.S.-China rivalry: The Shape of the Global
Political Order,” Washington Post, September, 22, 2022).
And the Washington Post and other
corporate media usually reflect a common agenda. For example, from a Washington
Post editorial, May 21, 2016:
“HARDLY A day goes by without evidence that the liberal
international order of the past seven decades is being eroded. China
and Russia are attempting to fashion a world in their own illiberal
image…This poses an enormous trial for the next U.S. president. We say trial
because no matter who takes the Oval Office, it will demand courage and
difficult decisions to save the liberal international order. As a
new report from the Center for a New American Security points out,
this order is worth saving…”
But How Others See the United States:
The Powerful Voice of the New President of Colombia Gustavo Petro
Recently elected president of Colombia Gustavo Petro made a powerful presentation at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly on the plunder of the Global South by the Global North, a portrait markedly different from the view of the “liberal international order” repeated over and over again by the corporate media and foreign policy spokespersons of the United States. Petro’s major points concluded the following:
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THE WORLD IS DIVERSE IN ITS LANDS, LIVING THINGS, AND
PEOPLE
“I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on
Earth.
There is an explosion of life there. Thousands of
multicolored species in the seas, in the skies, in the lands…I come from the
land of yellow butterflies and magic. There in the mountains and valleys of all
greens, not only do the abundant waters flow down, but also the torrents of
blood. I come from a land of bloody beauty.”
BUT THE WORLD ALSO IS A VIOLENT PLACE
“The jungle that tries to save us, is at the same time,
destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they spray poisons, glyphosate in mass
that runs through the waters, they arrest its growers and imprison them. For
destroying or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin Americans are killed
and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America. Destroy the
plant that kills, they shout from the North, but the plant is but one more of
the millions that perish when they unleash the fire on the jungle. Destroying
the jungle, the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by States and
businessmen. The cry of scientists baptizing the rainforest as one of the great
climatic pillars is unimportant.”
AND THE CAUSE OF THE VIOLENCE? THE GREED OF THE GLOBAL
NORTH
“For the world’s power relations, the jungle and its
inhabitants are to blame for the plague that plagues them. The power relations
are plagued by the addiction to money, to perpetuate themselves, to oil, to
cocaine and to the hardest drugs to be able to anesthetize themselves more.
Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse to save the rainforest. The
jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you make war and play with it. The
rainforest, the climatic pillar of the world, disappears with all its life.”
AND THE VICTIMS? LAND AND PEOPLE
"Coca and the peasants who grow it, because they have
nothing else to grow, are demonized. You are only interested in my country to
spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in
exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing
its jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that
absorbs the poison is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the
atmosphere.”
AND THE PURSUIT OF POWER IS TO MAKE UP FOR THE EMPTINESS OF
CONSUMER SOCIETY
“These are the things of world power, things of injustice,
things of irrationality, because world power has become irrational. They see in
the exuberance of the jungle, in its vitality, the lustful, the sinful; the
guilty origin of the sadness of their societies, imbued with the unlimited
compulsion to have and to consume. How to hide the loneliness of the heart, its
dryness in the midst of societies without affection, competitive to the point
of imprisoning the soul in solitude, if not by blaming the plant, the man who
cultivates it, the libertarian secrets of the jungle.
According to the irrational power of the world, it is not
the fault of the market that cuts back on existence, it is the fault of the
jungle and those who inhabit it. The bank accounts have become unlimited, the
money saved by the most powerful of the earth will not even be able to be spent
in the time of the centuries.”
THE CULPRIT? MONEY AND UNBRIDLED CONSUMPTION
“The culprit is their society educated in endless
consumption, in the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that
allows the pockets of power to fill with money. The culprit of drug addiction
is not the jungle, it is the irrationality of your world power. Try to give
some reason to your power. Turn on the lights of the century again. The war on
drugs has lasted 40 years, if we do not correct the course and it continues for
another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of
overdose from fentanyl, which is not produced in our Latin America. It will see
millions of Afro-Americans imprisoned in its private jails.
The Afro-prisoner will become a business of prison
companies, a million more Latin Americans will die murdered, our waters and our
green fields will be filled with blood, the dream of democracy will die in my
America as well as in Anglo-Saxon America.”.
THE EXCUSE FOR DESPOILING NATURE AND MAKING PERSONS
EXPENDABLE
“They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered
in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil.
Wars have served them as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars
have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.
If you observe that the peoples are filling up with hunger
and thirst and migrating by the millions towards the north, towards where the
water is; then you enclose them, build walls, deploy machine guns, shoot at
them. You expel them as if they were not human beings, you reproduce five times
the mentality of those who politically created the gas chambers and the
concentration camps, you reproduce on a planetary scale 1933.”
LATIN AMERICA (AND THE WORLD) MUST UNITE AGAINST THIS
SYSTEM OF GLOBAL ECONOMIC AND MILITARY POWER
“If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for
the revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate money to
weapons than to life, then reduce the foreign debt to free our own budgetary
spaces and with them, carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the
planet. We can do it if you don’t want to. Just exchange debt for life, for
nature. I propose, and I call upon Latin America to do so, to dialogue in order
to end the war. Do not pressure us to align ourselves in the fields of war.
It is time for PEACE.
Let the Slavic peoples talk to each other, let the peoples
of the world talk to each other. War is only a trap that brings the end of time
closer in the great orgy of irrationality.
What Does All This Mean
for Peace and Justice Activists
There are lessons to be
learned by analyzing significant narratives of the contemporary world
order. First, narratives are inextricably connected to the position
from which the narrative comes. Is the narrative one disseminated by
spokespersons of the wealthiest country in the world or from a spokesperson
from a poor and marginalized country, for example? Second, narratives
often reflect the interests of the powerful, economically, politically, and
militarily or the interests of most nations and peoples. Third,
these narratives have consequences. They justify policies that may or may not
be in the interests of humanity. They may justify violence, plunder of
resources, the exploitation of workers or they may envision a future of greater
equality and the satisfaction of human needs. Finally, as Edelman,
Gitlin, Chomsky and Herman, and others suggest our understanding of the world
is often controlled and manipulated by those in power. Today the dominant
symbols, myths, and media frames from the Global North must be challenged
Code Pink
A Washington Post editorial correctly
asserted that the old name, The Department of War, more accurately describes
what the agency of the US government does than the cold war euphemism, the
Department of Defense, a renaming in 1947. The editorial points out that our
use of words becomes embedded in our collective consciousness such that we
begin to incorporate ideology in our thinking.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/09/05/war-department-defense-trump-rebrand/
However, President Trump’s dicta to rename the Department
of Defense to the Department of War has a deeper meaning as well. The same week
he unilaterally renamed the instrumentality of US imperialism to clearly call
it “war,” he ordered an attack on a Venezuelan "ship", killing those
on board, claiming with no evidence that the vessel was shipping drugs to the
United States. This attack was supported by the “Defense Department’s” placing
of other ships in the Caribbean and implicit military threats against the
government of Venezuela. And, of course, the United States has been arming and
funding “war” in the Middle East. And we know that in the name of “defense” the
United States has placed some 900 bases around the world and has authorized
almost a trillion dollars for more “defense,” or more accurately “war,” in the
future.
But along with peace movement reminders of the escalating
US war-making capacity, and naming it as such, attention must also be addressed
to war-making at home. Agents of the US government, along with the FBI, such as
ICE and the National Guard, have begun to make war on the American people. ICE
agents and soldiers have occupied and attacked communities within the United
States such as in Los Angeles, and as we reflect, threaten to send military
troops to Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans and elsewhere. Most of the war-makers
are being sent to locations in which majorities of voters are Democrats, and the
mayor of these cities are African American.
In short, the United States government is making war on
targets outside the continental United States and against people within the
United States.
If ever in US history there is a need for the forces of
peace and justice to unite it is now. The renaming of the Department of
Defense, as the Post admits, is a frank admission of what the
project and vision of the Trump administration is, to make war on people
everywhere.
And we in peace and justice movements to the contrary
should remember Che Guevara’s humanistic alternative perspective:
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