Herbert I. Schiller - Revival: Communication and Cultural Domination

1. Afterword
   Chile: Communications Policies of Reform and Counterrevolution

1. Afterword
   Chile: Communications Policies of Reform and Counterrevolution

At one time or another in its preparation, different parts of the manuscript were read by Eqbal Ahmad, Esther Cohen, Tran Van Dinh, George Gerbner, Cees Hamelink, Mark Lushington, Karl Ola Nilsson, Kaarle Nordenstreng, Dallas Smythe, and Tapio Varis. Their comments helped to clarify many points.

As in the past, I leaned heavily on the constructive criticism, which generally transcended familial loyalty, of Anita, Dan, and Zach Schiller.

The interest and enthusiasm for the themes in this book shown by my students and associates in the Mass Communications Seminar at the Institute for the Science of the Press at the University of Amsterdam in 1973-74 and spring 1975 made me feel that the work was worth pursuing. In addition, the Institute itself provided a supportive atmosphere for writing and research.

My gratitude is due also to friends and colleagues in the International Association for Mass Communication Research who, without necessarily sharing my views, have in recent years offered me a friendly forum. The internationalism thus provided has been, for me, enormously self-sustaining.

Finally, Arnold Tovell's recommendations encouraged me to give the work a coherent form. Brenda Collins generously typed drafts of some of the chapters.

H.I.S.

The attainment of political independence by more than ninety countries since the Second World War has directed attention to the conditions of economic helplessness and dependency that continue to frustrate the development of at least two thirds of the world's nations. Two and sometimes three decades of disappointing efforts to extricate themselves from dependency have begun to provoke serious reappraisals in many lands about the entire concept of development.

Though the economic measures of domination control of capital and markets and of the infrastructure of international finance are increasingly well understood, the cultural-communications sources of power are just beginning to be faintly perceived. The forces that influence consciousness are decisive determinants of a community's outlook and the nature and direction of its goals. Thus, communications and the flow of messages and imagery within and among nations especially between developed and dominated states assume a very special significance. What does it matter if a national movement has struggled for years to achieve liberation if that condition, once gained, is undercut by values and aspirations derived from the apparently vanquished dominator?

For this reason, attention in many nations is beginning to focus on the sources, character, and content of the communication stream that passes between nations and on the flow that is generated inside national states. It is hardly surprising that most of these flows still reflect and bear the mark (in some places more clearly than in others) of old imperial connections. In any case, they almost always reveal aspects of command-and-obey relationships.

But if the dominated are slowly awakening to the importance of the cultural-communications component in their struggle for meaningful existence and independence, the dominators are no less alert to its significance. Indeed, their awareness may be outpacing that of their victims. There are compelling reasons for this.

Profound changes have occurred in the command of global power in the last ten years. The American empire has suffered heavy setbacks. Its inability to overcome the National Liberation Front and the People's Democratic Republic of Vietnam was perhaps its greatest defeat and the source of many of its current and future troubles.

The disastrous effects of the war in Vietnam on American capitalism have been far-reaching. At home, the entire political process has become suspect. Inflation and resource misallocations, attributable in part to the concealed (from the people) costs of the war, continue to destabilize the economy and to create further dangerous economic inequalities in the society. Internationally, rival centers of capitalist strength, though themselves in crisis, have benefited from the strains on the United States economy. American hegemony is increasingly disputed; and, especially in the formerly colonial (Third World) countries, opposition to continued economic domination intensifies.

Facing these already considerable but still developing crises, American managers of empire have been pressed to improvise and accommodate. To be sure, they have resisted fiercely any encroachments on the core of their power the euphemistically labeled multinational corporations, whose worldwide plant and facilities now exceed $160 billion in market value.

Yet, limited in the application of military force by countervailing power and confronting multiplying challenges in many hitherto hospitable areas, American imperialism has been developing complementary, if not alternate, strategies and instrumentation for safeguarding its unstable and increasingly menaced global positions. The ideological sphere receives ever more attention.

Assisted by the sophisticated communications technology de veloped in the militarily oriented space program, techniques of persuasion, manipulation, and cultural penetration are becoming steadily more important, and more deliberate , in the exercise of American power. In addition, the accumulation of fifty years of domestic marketing expertise is now let loose on the world at large.