YOU’VE BEEN CONNED – MULTICULTURALISM
Part One – American Cultural Imperialism
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| They don’t make them like that anymore. Slim Pickens rides a nuclear bomb in Stanley Kubrick’s satirical film Dr Strangelove. |
What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?
Monty Python1 fans will know that the question
prompted many answers. The Romans spread
their culture all over Europe, the Middle-East, and North
Africa . One thousand years
later, the British did the same all over the world. The Romans and the British had lots of things
in common. They believed that might was
right. Their empires ruled by
force. They did not care whom they
trampled over. Foreigners could
assimilate or perish. Resistance was usually
wiped out, and lots of people got killed.
Commerce was the driving force.
It provided wealth for Roman and British rulers. Any benevolence was incidental. Their installations, which included roads, ports,
and forts, were built for their military movements and for their trade.
Shortly after the end of the Second World War,
people in Britain and Japan started
to hear the phrase American Cultural Imperialism (ACI). Cultural Imperialism refers to the spread of one culture at the expense of other cultures; it is usually driven by differential economic or political influence. ACI
has been described as the phenomenon of American media, fashion, and food
dominating the global markets and shaping the cultures and identities of other
nations.
Most ordinary people did not understand it. As far as they knew, America had no
culture and it had no empire. They did
not realise that the USA now
owned two empires; they had conquered the Japanese Empire, and they had bought
the British Empire . Those empires contained vast areas of land,
but the USA
were not interested in capturing territories; they were interested in capturing
markets. Japan
and Britain
would serve as the vanguard for The New Centurions2.
Marshall McLuhan3, who was a Canadian
communications theorist and educator, explained ACI in his book ‘Understanding Media’. He
said: ‘In
a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a
means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in
operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to
say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any
extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our
affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.’
McLuhan sounded like a conspiracy theorist but his exposé
was factual. He described the usual content
of a medium, which could now be an email or text message, as a juicy piece of meat
carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. He meant that we usually focus on the
obvious, but we miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced
subtly, or over long periods of time. In
retrospect, we realise that there were some unanticipated consequences or
effects of our new ways of doing things.
When personal computers became a possibility, who
could have predicted virtual-reality and ‘gaming’,
which now occupy excessive amounts of people’s time? People have become dependent on new technology. The majority of people who live in the First World 4 say they could not live without their
smart-phones. Consumers remain on permanent
standby while they are connected to their electronic-devices; they cannot
ignore time-and-date-stamped electronic messages.
Noticing change is the key. McLuhan always thought of a medium in the
sense of a growing medium, like the fertile potting soil into which a seed is
planted, or the agar in a Petri5 dish. In other words, a medium is anything from
which a change emerges, and its message is the new emergent culture.
Some sort of change or culture emerges from everything we conceive or create, so all our inventions, innovations, ideas and ideals are media in the McLuhan sense. Television, computers, and other electronic disseminators of information may be regarded as extensions of us, and they shape styles of thinking and thought in new ways, whether in sociology, art, science, or religion.
Some sort of change or culture emerges from everything we conceive or create, so all our inventions, innovations, ideas and ideals are media in the McLuhan sense. Television, computers, and other electronic disseminators of information may be regarded as extensions of us, and they shape styles of thinking and thought in new ways, whether in sociology, art, science, or religion.
The beginning of ACI can be traced back to 1776
when twelve North American colonies declared independence from Britain. Their revolution divided the population into
three roughly equal groups. The
loyalists wanted to remain under British rule.
The Republicans wanted independence.
The rest did not care because they knew that they would have to pay
taxes to somebody; if not King George it would be President George.
The medium was not the parchment on which the
declaration was written; it was the Minuteman6 who pledged to take up arms at a
minute’s notice. The message was not the
‘snivelling’ and feigning declaration;
it was ‘Manifest Destiny7’,
ACI, ‘American Exceptionalism8’,
and ‘A New World Order9’.
On April 12th,
1945, Harry S. Truman became president of the USA , which was still at war with Japan . He inherited three strategic options which
might persuade the Japanese government to surrender: invasion, inducement, and
nuclear attack.
The US had recently invaded the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa; the latter battle was ongoing and it was becoming costly; the US would eventually suffer 80,000 casualties in the two battles. Invasion of mainland Japan
might involve a lengthy, brutal campaign which might cost hundreds of thousands
of American lives and millions of Japanese.
On May 8th,
just after the war in Europe ended, Truman
tried the ‘inducement’ option. He asked the Japanese government to surrender
unconditionally. He explained that the
military leaders would have to go, but the Japanese people would not be
punished. He did not mention the
Japanese Emperor, Hirohito. The American people blamed Hirohito for
the war. They wanted him removed, and
possibly tried and hanged. The Japanese
people venerated their emperor, so their government rejected the offer.
In July, Truman,
Stalin, and Churchill met at Potsdam in Germany . They invited Japan to surrender unconditionally
or face ‘prompt and utter destruction.’
Japan again rejected their offer, so
Truman authorised the use of atomic bombs.
On August
6th, a B-29 ‘Superfortress’
long-range bomber called ‘Enola Gay’ took off from the Marianas
Islands Hiroshima , which was a Japanese military port,
and a city of 343,000 inhabitants.
The flash
of the explosion was seen by a reconnaissance plane 170 miles away. Those in
the Enola Gay reported that a black cloud rose over Hiroshima to a height of 40,000 feet. Aerial photographs showed that the combined
heat and blast had pulverized everything in the explosion's immediate vicinity. The entire centre of the town had disappeared
except for the skeletons of three concrete buildings. Spontaneous fires had completely burned out almost
4.4 square miles, and had killed about 80,000 people, and had injured more than
70,000 others.
A Japanese
news agency reported the explosion: ‘Suddenly a glaring light appeared in the
sky. In seconds thousands of people were
scorched by a wave of searing heat.
Others lay writhing on the ground screaming in agony. By evening the fire began to die down. There was nothing left to burn. Hiroshima
had ceased to exist.’
On August
8th, the U.S.S.R. declared war against Japan
and invaded Manchuria .
On August
9th, another B-29 dropped a more sophisticated atomic-bomb on the
smaller city of Nagasaki . It devastated 1.8 square miles and created a
considerable crater. About 40,000 people
were killed, and similar numbers were injured.
On August 10th,
the Japanese government agreed to the surrender terms of the Potsdam Declaration on the understanding that the
emperor would remain as sovereign ruler. The Allies agreed. Hirohito was allowed to retain his throne, but
he was made subject to the authority of the commander of the Allied occupation
armies, General Douglas MacArthur. Japan would be
stripped of its sprawling empire.
Other recipients included Belgium , Denmark ,
France , Greece , Italy ,
Luxembourg , Netherlands , Portugal ,
and Germany . The Plan persuaded those countries to act
collectively rather than independently.
Most of them joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949 and
all of them are current members of the European Union.
Clement Atlee’s post-war Labour government knew
that strings were attached to all that American money, and they knew that Britain risked becoming a vassal of the USA , so they tried desperately to preserve Britain ’s
independence. Their heroic, flag-waving,
last stand happened in the summer of 1951 at The Festival of Britain. The date was the hundredth anniversary of the
Great Exhibition which had symbolised Britain ’s
economic supremacy during the 19th century. Following the industrial
revolution, Britain
had been ‘the workshop of the world’.
The Festival was centred on London ’s South Bank10 .
It intended to celebrate Britain ’s
history, achievements and culture. It
promoted the best in contemporary British art, design and technology, and it
envisioned an optimistic and progressive view of Britain ’s future.
It also intended to endorse and re-construct Britain ’s national identity through
the exploration and re-affirmation of ‘Britishness’. The ‘Lion
and the Unicorn’ pavilion contained exhibits which were supposed to
symbolize the main qualities of the British national character: realism,
strength, independence, and imagination.
The Festival ran for five months; it was extremely popular, and it made
a profit, but the new Conservative government, which was still led by Winston
Churchill, considered the Festival to be a piece of socialist propaganda. The Conservatives levelled the Festival site
and they removed nearly all trace of it.
The British electorate had inadvertently voted for the erasure of
British culture and British customs and British traditions.
How I learned to stop worrying and
love the bomb
The Second
World War had created a cultural vacuum and the US believed
only they had the moral standing and the means to fill it. The Japanese knew that they had lost the war,
but the British believed that they had won the war. The Japanese were ready to try something
new. The British remained steadfast. The sun had set on both their empires.
From the
beginning, many people thought that the atomic bombs had changed the world in a profound way, one that left them
with a feeling of foreboding. They
knew that mutually assured destruction was a real possibility, and they were
not reassured by talk of ‘nuclear umbrellas’, or electricity which was too
cheap to meter.
Stanley Kubrick’s film ‘Dr. Strangelove’ (1964), ridiculed the ineffective safeguards which
were supposed to prevent nuclear war.
Many people believed that the film was accurate enough to take seriously. Its doomsday scenario was played
out by remote, disturbed and frustrated warmongers whose fingers were poised menacingly
over the missile buttons.
Yet Japanese and British consumers
were getting used to American mixed messages.
Contradictory values and ideologies meant variety and freedom of
thought. American culture was available
‘off the shelf’ and people could pick-and-choose or take-it-or-leave-it. Consumers were getting used to the caveat: ‘let
the buyer beware’, and voters were getting used to politics which forced them
to take ‘the good with the bad’. The implication
was always the same: ‘You bought it’, or ‘You voted for it’, so ‘You are to
blame for it’.
McLuhan proposed that the ‘content of any medium’
is always another medium. People noticed
changes in their society and culture, which were the effects of a new medium and
which indicated the presence of a new message.
The medium was ‘American Cultural
Imperialism’ and the message was ‘The
American Dream’; it was descending all over Japan
and Britain
like radioactive fallout, and it would contaminate their cultures for decades.
NOTES
1) Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a
surrealistic, comedy-sketch show, which ran on BBC TV between 1969 and 1974.
2) ‘The New Centurions’ is a modern American classic novel written by Joseph Wambaugh.
2) ‘The New Centurions’ is a modern American classic novel written by Joseph Wambaugh.
3) Marshall McLuhan published his book
‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ in 1964. It introduced his paradoxical aphorism
‘The medium is the message.’
4) First World - 'western' capitalist economies. Second World - 'eastern' communist economies. Third World - 'southern' poor economies.
5) Petri Dish - a small shallow dish of thin glass or plastic with a loose cover used especially for cultures in bacteriology.
5) Petri Dish - a small shallow dish of thin glass or plastic with a loose cover used especially for cultures in bacteriology.
6) Minuteman - a member of the republican revolutionary militia; US intercontinental ballistic missile which carried thermonuclear warheads during the 1960s and 1970s.
7) Manifest Destiny was a 19th century doctrine in which theUS
7) Manifest Destiny was a 19th century doctrine in which the
8) American Exceptionalism is another conjecture
in the compilation of American Folklore and Mythology which was started by
Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers and Freemasons. It claims that the US is inherently different from
other nations because it has a unique mission to transform the world; that
mission makes it superior over other nations.
It also claims that the US
is a uniquely free nation which is based on democratic ideals and personal
liberty.
9) A New World Order was the astonishing
response of US ‘war hawks’ to the end of the cold war.
10) South Bank – This arts complex was built next to the river Thames in Lambeth.
Green Swipe thanks the following sources:
1) Mark Federman, Chief Strategist, McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology
http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article mediumisthemessage.htm
2) 20th Century London
3) Ecyclopaedia Britannica
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Conned’ – Multiculturalism Part Two – The American Dream
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