Edward S. Herman’s Life and Work – Part 5

Ed’s work on terrorism, demonstration elections, and the assassination attempt on the pope

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in their 1979 joint effort, called out the myth that Jimmy Carter was a “human-rights” president.  Carter presided over the biggest proportional genocide since the Nazis.  Chomsky later noted Zbigniew Brzezinski’s bragging about baiting the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan.  Carter was handpicked for the presidency by David Rockefeller, who was anything but a human-rights advocate.

Ronald Reagan became president, aided by the October Surprise operation, for which the evidence has been increasingly amassed, although Carter could have readily avoided the entire situation.  Reagan ditched Carter’s human-rights slogan for escalating the Cold War with red scares and fighting terrorists.  Reagan began his political career with red-baiting, as did Nixon, so it was a natural play for Reagan. 

Anti-terror rhetoric was reaching a fevered pitch in the media when Reagan assumed the presidency.  Claire Sterling published The Terror Network in 1981, in which she argued that the Soviet Union was running a global terror operation.  In their The Washington Connection, Noam and Ed devoted a chapter each to “benign” and “constructive” terror.  In 1982, Ed published a rebuttal to Sterling’s book with The Real Terror Network.  Ed began The Real Terror Network with the dictionary definition of terrorism: “a mode of governing, or of opposing government, by intimidation.”  Western governments simply defined their own terror operations out of existence, and reserved the term to describe enemy regimes or non-state actors.

Ed showed, with his usual statistical rigor, that terror operations mounted by Western states and their client regimes inflicted death tolls more than an order of magnitude greater than that of enemy regimes and non-state actors.  When Western terror operations could no longer be denied, they were described with euphemisms in the Western media such as maintaining “security” and “stability.”  Ed wrote at length on the media’s enabling role for national-security-state terror operations.  The USA was Terror Central on Earth, but its terror operations were simply ignored or given Orwellian euphemisms.  The terror operations in Latin American client states of the Reagan administration were legendary, which Ed and Noam wrote about in Manufacturing Consent.

Because Ed and Noam were Americans, they felt a duty to expose American crimes, and because they were Jews, they felt a duty to expose Israeli crimes.  Ed wrote at length about Israeli terror operations, in both The Real Terror Network and his 1989 The Terrorism Industry, written with Gerry O’Sullivan.  They wrote about how Israel killed more than 20 times as many people as Palestinian terrorist acts did, but Israeli terror was defined out of existence.  They noted how Israel’s violence was primarily offensive in nature, and they quoted Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, who frankly wrote that Israel’s prodigious crimes were its “sacred terrorism.”  Ed would have been very active, writing about the genocide in Gaza, if he were alive today. 

In 1984, Ed published Demonstration Elections with Frank Brodhead.  Ed defined demonstration elections as electoral farces that were intended to deceive Americans that nations that the USA intervened in were models of democracy.  The illusion was achieved by slaughtering opposition candidates and by many procedural irregularities.  But the mainstream media could be counted on to portray the fraudulent elections in glowing terms.  Conversely, the media would always denigrate elections in enemy nations, even when they were deemed fair by independent observers.  Those flagrant double standards were examples of Ed’s chutzpah. 

In 1986, Ed and Frank published The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection, which was about the assassination attempt on the pope, which the American media tried to pin on the Soviet Union.  Claire Sterling led the propaganda effort, but that entire Soviet connection disintegrated in the courtroom.  There was never any credible connection to the Soviet Union and, in fact, the connections of the assassin to the CIA were impressive.  When the conspiracy case collapsed in the courtroom, the Western media quietly folded its tents.  Ed and Frank wrote that not only were there no repercussions in the media for reporting such flimsy allegations, but even after exposure, the myths can still live on in the West.