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government collusion: the bending of regulations and legislation advantageous to a few ‘big mates’. 23 In the East Timor section I have documented how the interests of the Keating government and its principal media ‘mate’ converge in the promotion of the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia as ‘stable’ and ‘moderate’ while the truth of the regime’s genocide in East Timor is suppressed and obfuscated.
    This presents good journalists in Australia and all over the world with an increasingly familiar dilemma. How can they pursue their craft without serving such concentrated power? And once having enlisted and taken on the day-to-day constraints of career and mortgage, how do they remain true to a distant notion of an ‘independent’ press?
    Some journalists try their hardest, maintaining high standards in mostly uncontroversial fields. Others believe they can change the system from within, and are forced out. Others are unaware of their own malleability (I was), or they become profoundly cynical about their craft. Echoing the fellow travellers of Stalin’s communist party, they insist, as one Murdoch editor once told me, ‘I can honestly say I have never been told what to put in the paper and what to take out of it’. 24 The point was that no one
had
to tell him, and his paper reflected the unshakeable set of assumptions that underpin Western power and prejudice, including those that would lead us, to quote Nicholas Rothwell, into ‘a social and even ideological transformation . . . in the image of a radical philosophy’.
    I have attempted throughout the book, to show how closely censorship in the old communist world compares with that in the West today and that only the methods ofenforcement differ. I am reminded of a story recounted by the writer Simon Louvish. A group of Russians touring the United States before the age of
glasnost
were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that all the opinions on the vital issues were the same. ‘In our country’, they said, ‘to get that result we have a dictatorship, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. So what’s your secret – how do you do it?’ 25
    In the section ‘Tributes’ I express my admiration for Noam Chomsky, whose formidable analysis has helped many of us to identify how they do it. It was Chomsky who understood the nature of the ‘delusional system’ of one-doctrine democracy and the sophisticated manipulation of public opinion, using the ‘free’ media.
    The results of this manipulation are often historic. When President Kennedy declared in the early 1960s that there was a ‘missile gap’ with the Soviet Union, his message was carried without question by the Western media, and the nuclear arms race accelerated. In fact, the opposite was true: America was well ahead in missile development. 26 When President Johnson unleashed American bombers on North Vietnam in 1964, he did so after the media had helped him sell to Congress a story that communist gunboats had ‘attacked’ US warships in the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’. There was no attack, no ‘incident’. ‘Hell,’ Johnson is reported to have said in private, ‘those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.’ 27 Thereafter the American invasion was legitimised, millions of people were killed and a once bountiful land was petrified.
    In manipulation on such a scale, a vital part is played by an Orwellian abuse of conceptual thought, logic and language. In Vietnam, the indigenous forces resisting a foreign invasion were guilty of ‘internal aggression’. 28 In the Gulf the slaughter was described as one in which ‘a miraculously small number of casualties’ was sustained. 29 In Russia today, anti-Yeltsin democrats opposing ‘free market