A Curtain of Ignorance
China: How America Is Deceived
by Felix Greene
London: Jonathan Cape, 340pp. hb
1965
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Before there was Noam Chomsky tearing apart the
U.$. government's mouthpiece media, we had Felix
Greene writing as Chomsky would consistently for
decades. In 1964, Chomsky was starting to oppose
the war in Vietnam, but in the same year, Greene
published a book tearing apart the media's China
coverage. A Curtain of Ignorance has an eery,
classic quality to it. Absolutely devastating to
the Amerikan media cabal of the 1930s to 1960s,
Greene's book is also a model for what is happening today.
Curtain of Ignorance is both eery and classic, because it shows that how Amerikans operated even 70 years ago when it came to war and Third World countries has not changed much. China, Vietnam, Iraq--the Amerikan attitude was very similar in each case. True, in this 1965 book, there are brief hints that Greene might as well have been a military intelligence official, with his concern over how Amerikan public opinion had been misdirected by the media to such an extent that the military and government itself had an inaccurate picture of China. He concludes how information is key to democracy. Nonetheless, 99.9% of this book is about how Amerikans come to conclusions about other countries and how they find themselves manipulated by the State Department and loyal servants in the media. There were innumerable bald-faced lies told by the State Department and loyal media that were believed over and over again by a gullible Amerikan public. The two sources of occasionally accurate information that Amerikans received are military intelligence and the business press. Most of the business press was hostile, but occasionally business writers too pragmatic in their concern for business, clients and partners had to notice that China was doing good business with those willing to deal with her. Greene did not say so, but it were as if the bulk of the damage came from the Liberal Arts graduates, educated enough to know which way their masters wanted the news to spin and "whose side" their news stories would be seen as on, but not educated enough to have the overall picture of whether Mao was relatively successful compared with other Third World leaders facing similar problems. Some of the lies that the public swallowed from the State Department included that the Soviet Union under Russia had incorporated fully one-third of China. Bungled headlines, doctored photo "evidence" and repeated stories of famine and economic collapse are all here. 95% of what bourgeois "scholars" are saying today about the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) today, Felix Greene tried to nip in the bud in 1964. Something that Greene adds is the media and governments angle that we do not hear much about today-- namely all the military and political posturing concerning a possible Guomindang (KMT) invasion of the Mainland from Taiwan. It is abundantly clear that Chiang Kai-shek needed stories of famine in China in order to foment unrest for his plans of returning to the Mainland in the midst of "collapse." The Amerikans obliged. Greene was actually in China in the worst year of the Great Leap. His British passport said good for all countries, while his Amerikan passport (as a dual citizen of the united $tates and England) restricted him. In fact, Greene details how it was the united $tates that prevented journalists from travelling to China even when China granted visas starting in 1954. The whole scam about the freedom to travel and freedom of the press that supposedly exists in the United $tates-- Felix Greene blew it apart as a myth 40 years ago. What we see today with the concentration of the media is not something "new." It is not "globalization" today, as if the media did not have imperialist motivations in 1964--40 years ago.
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