Last Sunday, we watched the 60 Minutes episode Jihadists And “The Narrative” . In this segment, Lesley Stahl and her main guest, Majid Nawaz, met with students from Peshawar & Swat for a One Day Workshop for Tackling Extremism in Pakistan. The objective was to change their minds about the narrative that America is out to destroy Islam.
In this meeting, Lesley Stahl found out how difficult it is to speak with people whose minds are made up. One student stood up and said ” I have a question regarding 9/11″. Lesley said to the student “So you are telling me that Al Qaeda didn’t do 9/11. Is that what you are saying?” The student said “Al Qaeda was created by the CIA.”. Lesley Stahl told her audience the student was saying that the CIA told Osama Bin Laden to attack on 9/11.
Lesley asked the student “We attacked our own Pentagon and the World Trade Center to have the justification to go into Afghanistan. Do you really believe that?” Many students replied “yeah”. After a short exchange, another student said “give us one single reason to love America and we will forget about the millions of reasons to hate America”
Lesley described her efforts as blowing into the wind. “It is almost like Don Quixote,” she said, “tilting at windmills”. This was an eye-opening segment. She was not speaking with illiterate, poor nomads, but with college students with a good command of English.
But in a sense, Lesley Stahl should not have been surprised. Pakistani society, especially the North West Frontier Province or Pashtunistan, has been fed a steady diet of the anti-American narrative. The people of Pashtunistan and Pakistan have seen their standard of living deteriorate over the past decade, their avenues of forward progress blocked and their homeland subject to drone attacks by America. No one in Pakistan is ready to concede that their own leaders are responsible for their misery. No one in Pakistan is ready to believe that their own people were capable of executing a brilliant attack ten thousand miles away on the mighty America. That is simply not possible, they think. It must be the CIA that orchestrated the attack.
The diet of anti-American narrative has been fed to them by their own government, by their own local politicians and by their own media. The 60 Minutes clip shows how deeply a narrative can get lodged into the hearts and minds of people so as to become their belief system.
This we could believe and understand. But we could not believe what we saw and heard two days later in Washington DC and through out the American media including CBS, the network of Lesley Stahl. We saw the same sweeping narrative, the same reaction, the same conviction and the same brainwashed minds that we saw in Pakistan in the 60 Minutes segment.
We saw the elected representatives of the American people subject Goldman employees to a vituperative, abusive interrogation for over ten hours on Tuesday, April 27. The Goldman folks must have felt just like Lesley Stahl did in Pakistan. It was as if they were blowing into the wind, like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. It was as if Congressman Levin, Congresswomen Collins, Maccaskill and their colleagues had turned into the students from Pakistan’s borderlands before our eyes. We could imagine a congressman asking Lloyd Blankfein like the Pakistani student “give us one reason to love Goldman Sachs and we will forget about the million reason to hate Goldman Sachs”.
The narrative in this case is that Wall Street destroyed American Housing and Goldman Sachs was the leader of Wall Street in the war against American Housing. The American Television Media went on a rampage after the Congressional hearing and heaped accusations on Goldman Sachs.
This anti-Wall Street, anti-Goldman narrative has sunk deeply into the hearts and minds of the American people. On Wednesday, April 28, CNBC showed a viewer’s email in their segment called Shorting the American Dream . The email said:
- “I can’t sell my house at all. I want to, but there are no customers here. I lost about $70,000 in the market. Who did this to me? Goldman Sachs did.”
The anti-Wall Street narrative was sold to the American Public by President Obama in the first few months of his Presidency, at the height of his popularity. His coterie of politicians jumped on the bandwagon. Because of their efforts, this narrative was accepted by an American society reeling from foreclosures and massive losses in the value of their homes and stocks. They wanted to know who had done this to them. President Obama pointed at Wall Street and that made sense. After all, no one fits the bill like the brilliant Goldman Sachs. No one understands how Goldman Sachs made profits while everyone lost massive amounts of money. How did Goldman win while Lehman, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac went under? Goldman Sachs must be the new witches of Salem. They can do what honest Americans cannot.
The American Television Media readily accepted this narrative as dogma. It proved as irresistible to them as the anti-America narrative proved irresistible to the Pakistani Television Media. If there is anything MSNBC, CNN and Fox can agree on, it is the guilt, the fraudulent inhumanity of Goldman Sachs and their Wall Street cohorts. Juan Williams said on Fox “Fabrice Tourre (of Goldman) was ripping off widows & orphans”. Mr. Williams was not just speaking as an individual but as the Guest Host of The O’Reilly Factor, the conservative show on Fox.
Juan Williams was blatantly wrong. Fabrice Tourre was dealing with very sophisticated large institutions that had bought over $15 Billion in similar products from other firms. No individual investors were involved, let alone widows or orphans. The buyers were European Banks. But Mr. Williams was not going to let truth come in the way of his fire and brimstone.
At the other end of the media spectrum is Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN. We used to consider Sanjay Gupta as a thinking person’s anchor, a thoughtful, intelligent man who would weigh the evidence before passing judgement. But Dr, Gupta proved to be worse than Juan Williams. In his role of Guest Host of CNN”s AC360, Dr. Gupta took the discussion about Goldman to a new low by encouraging his guest to make ridiculous comparisons to Enron.
No one in America is ready to believe that the housing collapse resulted from bursting of America’s housing bubble, from America’s love affair with debt, from America’s spending binge, from the habits developed by American consumers over years to spend far more than they earned and from their complete ignorance of basic finance. No one in America pauses to think how badly American education has failed them and how Americans can graduate from college or high school without even the most basic knowledge about managing their own finances.
It is much easier to believe in the narrative that some one must have deceived the American people and made them poor. That someone is Wall Street and its number one villain Goldman Sachs. No one in mainstream American Television cared to ask why Goldman Sachs would want to destroy the American Housing market and the American economy. The most cursory glance at a long term Goldman chart would show that Goldman’s stock is much much higher when the American economy is strong and much much lower during recessions.
In a way, Pakistani society has been more sensible than American society. The villain they have created is America, a foreign entity. No one in Pakistan believes that any Pakistani individual or company is responsible for Pakistan’s problems.
Unfortunately, American society has cast an all-American firm as its villain, a firm that is today the global symbol of American intelligence. By demonizing Goldman Sachs, American Society is demonizing itself and telling the entire world that America’s Wall Street damaged the world. Osama Bin Laden must be laughing in his cave. American society is doing his job for him and spreading his message.
The real lesson for America is to take a close look at Pakistan. Their narrative has gone on for a few years. From their example, we can see how a poisonous narrative damages an entire society. The poison seeps through the minds and takes away the burden of individual responsibility. It removes the necessity of coming out of the quagmire with new education, smart tactics and sheer hard work. Rebuilding requires a sunny optimism and an open heart. A poisonous narrative simply sends a society on a downward trajectory.
We think the story of Pakistan’s narrative should be a warning to American Society. No other society on earth has the intelligence, knowhow, the physical resources that America has. America can step into the bright light of tomorrow if it can summon its will to reject the darkness of today’s poisonous narrative.
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