ABSTRACT
Most Americans would cringe at the thought that they have repeatedly fallen victim to big lies told by their government. In fact, they would probably instinctively point out that the manipulation of people through big lies only occurs in totalitarian, fascist governments such as Hitler's. Literacy for cultural reproduction uses institutional mechanisms to undermine independent thought, a prerequisite for the Orwellian "manufacture of consent" or "engineering of consent". This chapter reviews the Gulf War as an example of how questions of literacy and ideology can be used to separate events from their historical contexts. This fragmentation serves to create a self-serving history that feeds the recontextualization of a distorted and often false reality, leading (sometimes) to a specialization of barbarism ipso facto. In other words, the high-tech management of the Gulf War celebrated technical wizardry while it dehumanized the tens of thousands of people who were victims of specialized technical prowess.
