Date: Sun Dec 14 08:50:06 2014
How Reagan Enforced US Hypocrisy
December 14, 2014
>From the Archive: To understand why many right-wingers are so defensive
about offensive U.S. acts, even waterboarding and anal rape, you must look
back to the Reagan years when "moral equivalence" became an accusation
against applying universal standards to the U.S., as Robert Parry wrote last
March about Ukraine.
By Robert Parry
Official Washington's hearty disdain for anyone who cites U.S. hypocrisy
toward the Ukraine crisis can be traced back to a propaganda strategy
hatched by the Reagan administration in 1984, dismissing any comparisons
between U.S. and Soviet behavior as unacceptable expressions of "moral
equivalence."
This "moral equivalence" concern stemmed, in part, from the prior decade's
disclosures of U.S. government misconduct - the Vietnam War, CIA-sponsored
coups and other intelligence abuses at home and abroad. In that climate of
heightened skepticism, U.S. journalists felt it was their job to show some
skepticism and hold U.S. officials accountable for their behavior.
For President Ronald Reagan, that meant journalists taking note of his
administration's support for terrorism by the Contra rebels in Nicaragua and
for death-squad-tainted governments slaughtering civilians in countries such
as Guatemala and El Salvador.
So, to counter this P.R. problem, Reagan administration officials developed
a propaganda "theme" that, in effect, asserted that the U.S. government
should not be held to the same human rights standards as the Soviet
government because the United States was morally superior to the Soviet
Union.
According to documents released earlier this year by the Reagan Presidential
Library in Simi Valley, California, the Reagan administration established a
"Moral Equivalence Working Group" in 1984 reporting to Walter Raymond Jr.,
who had been a top psychological warfare specialist at the CIA before being
moved to Reagan's National Security Council where he oversaw a wide-ranging
program of domestic and foreign propaganda.
Though the working group's core complaint was something of a straw man,
since it would be hard to find anyone who equated the U.S. and USSR, the
Reagan administration made clear that anyone who continued to apply common
moral standards to the two governments would be accused of "moral
equivalence."
This framing proved effective in tarring U.S. journalists and human rights
activists as, in essence, Soviet apologists. The "theme" was most famously
expressed by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick at the
Republican National Convention in 1984 when she decried anyone who would
"blame America first."
Link to the Present
As an Associated Press reporter in the 1980s, I encountered this "moral
equivalence" attack line when I questioned State Department officials about
their hypocrisy in applying strict human rights standards to Nicaragua's
Sandinista government while excusing far more serious abuses by the Contras
and other U.S. allies in Central America.
Neocon intellectual Robert Kagan, who then was a senior official in the
State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America, warned me
that I was edging dangerously close to the line on "moral equivalence."
Ironically, Kagan's wife, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs
Victoria Nuland, is now at the forefront of U.S. support for the Ukrainian
coup, which relied on neo-Nazi militias to overthrow a democratically
elected president, though the official U.S. narrative is that this was a
"democratic" uprising. [See Consortiumnews.com's "
<http://consortiumnews.com/2014/02/23/neocons-and-the-ukraine-coup/> Neocons
and the Ukraine Coup."]
Over the past three decades, the argument against "moral equivalence" has
changed little, though it has morphed into what is now more commonly
described as American "exceptionalism," the new trump card against anyone
who suggests that the U.S. government should abide by international law and
be held to common human rights standards.
Today, if you make the case that universal rules should apply to the United
States, you are accused of not embracing America as an "exceptional"
country. As a result, very few mainstream observers in Official Washington
even blink now at the U.S. government taking contradictory positions on
issues such as intervening in other countries.
Invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are "justified" as are drone strikes and
aerial bombardments of countries from Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia to Libya.
It's also okay to threaten to bomb Syria and Iran.
Supporting the overthrow of sovereign governments is also fine - for the
United States but not for anyone else. Just during the Obama administration,
the U.S. government has backed coups in Honduras, Libya and now Ukraine.
U.S.-endorsed secessions are okay, too, as with oil-rich South Sudan from
Sudan.
Yet, when the geopolitical shoe is on the other foot - when Russia objects
to the violent overthrow of Ukraine's duly-elected President Viktor
Yanukovych and, as a result, supports a secession referendum by Crimea on
whether its citizens want to join the Russian Federation - Official
Washington cries out in moral outrage.
Suddenly, we see mainstream American journalists searching for some clause
in Ukraine's constitution that prohibits secession, though these journalists
had no problem with the violation of the same constitution's procedures for
impeaching a president, rules ignored by the coup regime with barely a peep
from U.S. news outlets.
Framing the Debate
This ever-shifting moral playing field was defined by the Reagan
administration's propagandists in the mid-1980s, coincidentally in the
iconic year 1984, according to documents at the Reagan Library. I found in
Raymond's files a "concept paper" for a conference to address "moral
equivalence," attached to a memo dated Sept. 4, 1984. The paper read:
"The Moral Equivalence Working Group . has for some time been examining ways
to counter the common (and for US, very damaging) concept of the 'moral
equivalence of the superpowers,' i.e., the notion that there is no moral
distinction to be made between the US and the USSR, particularly in the
areas of foreign and military policy. . Moral equivalence is a particularly
insidious problem because it permeates almost every level of public
discourse both at home and abroad."
The "concept paper" offers no specific examples of anyone actually engaging
in this "moral equivalence" - that is, saying the United States and the
Soviet Union were morally equal - but it insists that the problem is
widespread among elites and could be detected when people, for instance,
compared the U.S. invasion of Grenada to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The paper reads:
"This is not to suggest that moral equivalence is in fact a majority
perception. There is reason to believe that it is primarily an elite problem
and that the broad mass of people has a sounder instinct on the inherent
moral differences between the US and Soviet systems. However, given the
dominance of morally equivalent thinking among elites, particularly in the
media and in academia, public resistance to moral equivalence is provided
with little informational or intellectual support."
The paper then proposes a high-level conference sponsored by the
neoconservative Center for Strategic and International Studies with the goal
of analyzing "the Moral Equivalence misconception" and devising ways "to
combat the problem" including addressing "intellectual fashion and ways to
have an impact on it."
Over the intervening three decades, these U.S. government's propaganda
efforts against holding the United States to the same moral standards as
other countries have proved remarkably successful, at least within U.S.
opinion circles.
It is now common for mainstream journalists to accept the principle of
"American exceptionalism" in both implications of the word: that the United
States is a wonderfully exceptional nation and that it is exempted from
international law.
Indeed, it is rare for anyone in mainstream journalism to assert that the
United States should conform to international law, i.e. respecting the
sovereign borders of other countries. Yet, the same opinion leaders express
outrage when Russia intervenes in Ukraine in the wake of a
neo-Nazi-spearheaded coup on Russia's border.
No longer do mainstream U.S. journalists and academics try to apply the same
rules to Washington and Moscow. The "problem" that Reagan's team detected in
the 1980s has been solved. Today, American hypocrisy is the accepted "group
think."
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories
for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest
book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in
<https://org.salsalabs.com/o/1868/t/12126/shop/shop.jsp?storefront_KEY=1037>
print here or as an e-book (from
<http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Stolen-Narrative-Washington-ebook/dp/B009RXX
OIG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350755575&sr=8-1&keywords=americas+stolen+narrat
ive> Amazon and
<http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/americas-stolen-narrative?keyword=americas+
stolen+narrative&store=ebook&iehack=%E2%98%A0> barnesandnoble.com). For a
limited time, you also can order Robert Parry's trilogy on the Bush Family
and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The
trilogy includes America's Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer,
<http://consortiumnews.com/2014/06/25/continuing-parrys-3-book-offer/> click
here.
<https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ronaldreagan-40.jpg>
President Ronald Reagan.
President Ronald Reagan.
(image/jpeg attachment: image003.jpg)