If you have been watching TV recently, it is very likely that you will have seen the new TV ad from the Pfizer drug company for their erectile dysfunction drug, “Viagra” – an ad campaign produced in conjunction with a print ad in Golf Magazine. And if you have seen this television ad, it is very likely that you will have heard the catchy jingle which runs throughout the ad, although it is likely that this jingle will have passed below the threshold of most viewers’ radar: a Latin music beat accompanying the repeated phrase, “Viva Viagra!”. (A more recent TV commercial in this ad campaign, aired shortly after I began this essay, the previous Hispanic music beat being replaced by country western guitars and singing cowboys.)
This ad campaign, “Viva Viagra!”, is merely one example of the process by which traditional grass roots and popular revolutionary motifs, images, and ideas are inverted and subsumed to a new purpose – usually on behalf of the marketing arm of manufacturers and corporations. In this case, the “Viva” traditionally associated with such phrases as “Viva the revolution!” or “Viva Cuba!”, is here applied – not to a peoples’ revolutionary movement or a call to popular solidarity in Latin America – but to a propaganda campaigns for a pharmaceutical product for the treatment of male impotence. The mass appeal of the phrase is thereby reversed, and something which had been previously used to unite, to organize, and to mobilize, is here applied to a product solely designed for personal/individual enjoyment – aside from Pfizer, which obtains its profits collectively.
Other, earlier examples of this propagandic process of inversion/reversal include a Verizon television ad of 2001, in which the traditional hand-sign for “peace” is subsumed under the Verizon company rubric, and used instead to represent a letter “V” for Verizon. This commercial included an image of two punks with spiked hair and leather jackets approaching two people in business suits on a city street in slow motion, the punks smiling at the businessmen and giving them a “V” sign. The intended message is clear – the traditional meaning of the peace sign being inverted and altered into an affirmation of Verizon’s company trademark, as well as a broader assertion of the peace movement’s supposed acknowledgment of business community’s power and ascendancy.
A similarly broad assertion can be found in Burger King’s ad campaign of the late 1990‘s, which featured the campaign slogan “You’ve got to give the people what they want!!!”, and which utilized imagery of protest signs being waved up and down before a black background, ostensibly conveying “the peoples’ demands.” Save that here, the “demands” of “the people” refers only to the ordering options of customers with regard to special toppings on their hamburgers. A form of popular protest – in this case demonstrating with signs inscribed with the peoples’’ demands – has here been replaced with the customer service desires of hypothetical consumers, thereby subverting a method of popular protest via the findings of corporate marketing research.
Another Burger King ad, this one from the mid-1990’s, utilizes a similar process of polemical inversion, this one featuring a Cowboy (interestingly, one of the current President Bush’s favorite public personas), pictured standing before a montage various shots of ostensibly patriotic American vistas, including the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, an amber field of grain, an Apollo rocket taking off, desert mesas and horses out West, fireworks, and the White House – all with patriotic music ranging from “Stars and Stripes Forever” to Revolutionary War fife-music playing in the background.
The ad, which essentially consists of a monologue by the Cowboy, begins with the Cowboy giving a military salute, then addressing the viewer by saying, “You’’re an American. That means you’ve got the right to play Bingo, the right to Monster Truck Rallies, and the right to big juicy burgers. So what happens – Someone slaps a low price on a fried little burger and calls it a deal? That’s Un-American. You have the RIGHT to go to Burger King; the right to get a Whopper, flame-broiled, not fried; and the right to get that Whopper any size you want, with fries and a drink, starting at just a $1.99. It’s all right there in the Constitution. Look it up….. ”
Here, the basic Constitutional rights of Americans themselves- secured via the revolutionary defeat of the English crown in the American Revolution- are replaced by the consumer rights offered to the public by a major corporation. The right to vote, to free assembly, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – often cited by progressive and revolutionary groups attempting to realize the Constitution’s idealistic promises – are here inverted into the mere right to buy.
This process of polemical inversion and reversal – the process by which an opponent’’s ideas and methods are utilized in an opposite form in order to undermine the opponent’s own polemical position – is a basic component of propaganda and the propagandic process. An very early example of this process of polemical inversion and reversal is discussed by Biblical scholar Robert Eisenman, in his study of the polemical battle between Pauline theology and Jamesian theology in the Early Christian church. According to Eisenman, many of the features of the New Testament which most people are familiar with today, were actually created by Roman propagandists as a point-for-point polemical response to the xenophobic, anti-Roman revolutionaries operating in Judea in the first century A.D. According to Eisenman, for example, the figure of Judas Iscariot – a zealot who killed himself by throwing himself off a cliff after his supposed 'betrayal' of Jesus – is actually an inverted caricature of Jewish zealots like those at Masada, who were said by 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus to have killed themselves en masse rather than capitulate to the Romans. The familiar idea, meanwhile, that Jesus and his followers were “peaceful fishermen” on the sea of Galilee, Eisenman suggests, is actually an inverted caricature of zealot boatmen like “Jesus son of Sapphias,' who, according to Josephus, ''poured out' their blood until ‘the whole sea of Galilee ran red’” at the hands of Roman fighters.
The architect of this anti-zealot polemic, Eisenman argues, was Saint Paul, who was the author of most of the epistles of the New Testament, and whom Professor Eisenman reveals to have been one of the greatest and most effective propagandists in history. As Paul himself put it: “…I have made myself a slave to all so as to win over as many as possible. (…) To the weak I became weak, to win over the weak. I have become all things to all, to save at least some. (…) Do you not know that the runners in the stadium all run in the race, but only one wins the prize? Run so as to win.” Indeed, the extent of Saint Paul’s success, and that of his followers, can be gauged by the fact that many of the polemical inversions of the New Testament are now taken by most people, not only to be historical fact, but sacred history.
It is perhaps not surprising, then – given the radical Christian underpinnings of the much of the reactionary right – that many of its propagandists perpetuate many of the same means and methods in the polemics of the present day. One characteristic example of this process of propagandic inversion can be found in the March 11, 2004 column of radical Christian pundit Rich Lowry, in which he discusses the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. According to Lowry, the sado-masochistic practices depicted so graphically in the Abu Ghraib photographs – and so familiar to those who know anything about human rights violations and prison abuse in totalitarian regimes around the globe – had less to do with militarism run amok, and the predictable violations of law attendant upon an Imperialistic invasion and occupation, than with too much freedom of speech and sexual expression back home – what Lowry calls the seeping into the military of “some of the poison of America‘s civilian culture.' Writes Lowry, “…in Abu Ghraib and its aftermath we see some of the seamy undercurrents of America magnified in a horrifying fashion – in particular, (…) the ubiquity of pornography, and a cult of victimhood.” In America, Lowry goes on, “…pornography is a $10 billion-a-year business (…) If they [the American soldiers] had done this stateside in different circumstances, they might be very rich and perhaps even up for an Adult Video Award.”
For Lowry, in other words, the real enemy is not a military which makes prostitution, sexual abuse, and pornography a way of life for thousands of women both abroad and at home, but rather a civilian culture which values intellectual and sexual freedom. In the process of making this assertion, Lowry ignores the extent to which big business benefits from the sex industry, and in the process obfuscates the way in which his argument blurs the clear distinction between rape – which occurred at Abu Ghraib- and sexual consent, as it is exercised by consenting adults in America‘s supposedly “poisonous“ civilian culture at home. Whether Lowry means that the victims in the Abu Ghraib photographs are mere subscribers to this “cult of victimhood” which Lowry decries in his essay, Lowry unfortunately does not say – but he implies that they are, Lowry attempting to tar the victims of America’s program of torture abroad with the brush of America’s “poisonous” culture of freedom.
The disingenuousness of both Lowry’s essay, and his general method of reasoning, is revealed by Lowry’s warped characterization of Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction in the same essay. Lowry writes: “Consider the iconic film of the 1990’s, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. It includes a scene of the rape of a man imprisoned and kept as a sexual slave, which prompted laughs in theaters. The victim, ‘The Gimp’, became a figure of fun (…) Cruelty, Tarantino tells us, can be fun.” Lowry’s summary of this scene, however – much like his intentional misinterpretation of the sources of cruelty in the photos taken at Abu Ghraib, utterly misrepresents both the facts and the intent of Tarantino’s film.
In this scene, a corrupt boxer, played by Bruce Willis, has just escaped from a hit man sent to kill him, played by John Travolta. Thinking he has gotten away “scott free“, Willis is shocked to suddenly be confronted with the very gangster, played by Ving Rhames, who had sent the hit man against him in the first place. Willis’ bad luck continues, as suddenly both he and Rhames find themselves being held prisoner by a trio of racist, sadistic, Southern degenerates: a racist policeman; his partner in crime; and a third, masked man, dressed in black leather bondage-gear, who is kept chained in a box. The humor in this scene, of course, derives solely from turn toward the surreal and the unexpected which Bruce Willis’ flight from the hit man has suddenly taken, and the contrast which his current, surreal predicament presents with his belief – just a few moments earlier – that he was “scott free.” Lowry’s attempt to rewrite Tarantino’s script, and present Pulp Fiction as a paean to or a justification for sadomasochistic cruelty, is thus very revealing – especially as Lowry here, just as in his rewriting of the script of Abu Ghraib, ignores the implicit critique which Tarantino is making against the often racist, corrupt, and sadomasochistic aspects of both American authority and American law enforcement, a system which Tarantino here criticizes as being no more elevated than such sadomasochistic American serial killers as Henry Lucas and his partner Otis Toole. One can easily understand why Lowry would find such an argument troubling, and why he would try to either rewrite or obscure it.
Lowry’s turning of common sense on its head, however, and his reversal and inversion of traditional semantic meanings, reaches its apotheosis in his January 8, 2008 column discussing the book Liberal Fascism, in which Lowry approvingly describes how, “Jonah Goldberg (a colleague of mine) demonstrates…that fascism was a movement of the left and that liberal heroes like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were products of what Goldberg calls ‘the fascist movement’ in America early in the 20th century.”
Leaving aside the question of whether Woodrow Wilson is a leftist “hero” or not, Lowry’s Orwellian inversion of language reaches further heights when he calls the word “fascist” the “f-bomb of American politics (…), routinely hurled by the left at conservatives” – Lowry here seeking to associate leftism with bomb-hurling terrorism (thereby ignoring the right wing-fundamentalist nature of most of the terrorist jihadi organizations), even while he forgets that earlier “f-bomb” hurled by the right-winger Dick Cheney at his liberal opponents on the floor of Congress. Ultimately, however, Lowry’s labored attempts to philosophically associate the rise of Nazi militarism with Socialism’s aims to “mobilize and organize” society are not only unconvincing, they are also untrue. Lowry, for instance, pointedly ignores the role played by right-wing German militias in rise of nazism during the inter-war period, as well as the connections and support which the nazis had from right-wing conservatives in England, France, and America.
Lowry’s argument, too, that “….anti-Semitism isn’t an inherently right-wing phenomenon – Stalin’s Russia was anti-Semitic”, is deeply flawed, as well – Lowry ignoring the basic fact that Socialism, by definition, believes in and fights for the idea of the equality of all races and cultures. If Stalin’s Russia was anti-Semitic, then its anti-Semitism existed in contradiction to its leftism. Right-wing philosophy, however – whether radical or conservative – with its ultimately nationalistic and militaristic basis, admits of no such inherent contradiction. If Stalin was an anti-Semite, it means only that Stalin was NOT a good leftist or Socialist – which is hardly an adequate criticism of Socialism itself.
Whatever Lowry and his colleague Jonah Goldberg have to say, too, regarding the supposed fascistic origins and underpinnings of the bourgeoisie democracy of Roosevelt and Wilson, it could scarcely be more acute than the Noam Chomsky’s earlier critique of the authoritarian aspects of the liberal/pragmatic democracy of Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter, not to mention the Communist party’s much earlier, much more acute critique of the non-interventionist alliance between bourgeoisie democracies and the growing threat of the fascist states in pre-WWII Europe. Indeed, fascism has never had a more staunch opponent than Communism, a fact of which the fascist regimes of Europe in Germany, Italy, and Spain were very much aware, given the number of Communists which were later condemned to the concentration camps of right-wing/fascistic regimes.
It was the Communists, for example, who first saw the dire significance of the fascist rebellion in Spain, who realized that it prefigured the coming all-out fascist assault on all of European culture, and who rallied there to defend the values of freedom and democracy on European soil. As George Dmitirov observed in 1935, “Why do the German fascists, those lackeys of the bourgeoisie and the mortal enemies of socialism, represent themselves to the masses as 'Socialists,' and depict their accession to power as a 'revolution'? Because they try to exploit the faith in revolution and the urge towards socialism that lives in the hearts of the mass of working people in Germany.”
Ultimately, these latest right-wing attempts on the part of Rich Lowry and various other pundits to confuse the facts of history, and identify socialism and Communism with nazism, demonstrate nothing other than the basic bankruptcy of ideas which characterizes the radical right. Eight years of the second President Bush, instead of leading to the workers’ panacea, the high national security, and the high moral perfection which right-wing pundits have long predicted, have instead led only to the exposure of the secret aims and tendencies of the radical right, and the natural results of right-wing policies: unending war, financial instability, failure to enforce environmental and industrial regulations, trampling of civil rights, and rampant profiteering on the part of the capitalist class. It remains to be seen whether, as in the case of Saint Paul, the caricature created by the right wing and their pundits will supplant the truth, and a fantasy be accepted by future generations as reality.
