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Date: Wed, 3 Jan 1996Sender: •••@••.••• (Fred Baube[tm])
Subject: Re: cj#373> Valis "Establishment a dirty fighter"
> From: •••@••.••• (Richard K. Moore)
> Subject: cj#373> Valis "Establishment a dirty fighter"
>
> Those in power seem to get by with pitiless behavior (as in Desert Storm)
> under the guise of "firmness". But those out of power who take a
> "pitiless" tack are labelled "terrorists" and are successfully isolated by
> the media.
As near as I can tell, the term "terrorism" is used to mean
"terror as used against the status quo".
Terror in support of the status quo is described by other
terms, depending upon whether it's our "friends" or our
"enemies" who are doing it.
More speculatively, and relating back to the Doublespeak
glossary, one might argue that if one accepts the defini-
tion of terms as used by (say) the New York Times, words
like "terrorism", "democracy", "freedom", "liberation",
and "oppression", then one is inexorably led to the same
policy recommendations.
A nifty little story on this theme is "Babel-17", a sci-fi
tale wherein the protagonist endeavors to learn the enemy's
"battle language", and it winds up "reprogramming" him ..
/fred
--
F.Baube(tm) * Did you ever notice that the bullets
GU MSFS '88 * always seem to fly from Right to Left ?
#include <disclaimer.h>
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Date: Wed, 3 Jan 1996
Sender: •••@••.••• (Alan Dawson)
Subject: Re: cj#373> Valis "Establishment a dirty fighter"
•••@••.••• (Richard K. Moore) wrote:
>Some very successful political leaders (ML King & M Ghandi) made good use
>of the notion of reaching out to what is best in "enemy" consitiuencies
>(appealing to their better values), and thereby split the oppostion. To be
>sure, the media was less tightly managed in those days, and that makes such
>outreach more difficult today.
I always find this last comment amazing, not to mention brutally
unimaginative.
How many people do you think Martin Luther King could send a message
to at one time -- let alone, say, your father or grandfather who
didn't have the leadership/following of King or Ghandi?
You do not think India's (and England's) media was tightly managed
in the late 1940s. Why do you think this? You figure people in
Ghandi's time could talk to more people than *you* can talk to. Why
do you think this?
You can talk to thousands -- minimum, thousands -- of people at ONE
time in a "newspaper" *you* control and you find this tightly managed
and difficult. Why do you find this?
If you feel (for some reason that I don't even begin to understand)
that you have to route around the tightly managed media of today --
why don't you just go and do it instead of commenting on a call for
someone to do it? It's not hard to route around this managed media; I
just did it (and so did you).
You make it sound like an excuse, but it's not.
... If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.
- •••@••.••• (Alan Dawson)
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I fully agree that the kind of communication we're carrying on right here
is the ultimate (or near to it) of freedom, and can reach "thousands".
But in terms of mass political consciousness, this is peanuts. The
politically potent messages go out over TV and mass-ciruclation print
media. They reach multiple millions, not thousands. In the case of MLK,
the mass media treated him pretty well, with many of his speeches receiving
live national coverage. He reached thousands of times more people than any
email list I know of (and it was multimedia, not just text.)
I don't know how UK media handled Ghandi, but I got the impression his
message got around OK, although I'm sure it was ridiculed by the pundits of
the day.
My sense is that the mass media is controlled in a more subtle and
effective way than it has been in the past, but I don't think I could prove
this easily. I will share some anecdotal thinking, however:
Back in Vietnam days, when coordinated protests were held across
the country, the media reported them. The media distorted the events, lied
about the number of participants, and discounted the breadth of the
constituency: but the nation was told that sizable protests were underway.
But in Desert Storm days, I saw a much different scenario. We held
a massive anti-Storm march in San Francisco -- easily 100,000 strong. The
media lied about the numbers, but that wasn't new. What was new was the
trickery of how it was covered. The local evening news reported the march,
and I got the impression San Francisco was the only place where a protest
occurred. Later, as I talked to different friends, I found there had been
many protests in different locations. By reporting each event only
locally, that dissipated the energy that might have led to a better
organized protest movement, while giving the impression that protest
reporting was not being suppressed.
Meanwhile the mainstream "coverage" of Storm mesmerized the
nation's viewers in a way I'd never before seen. It felt like an
intravenous tap had been implanted in the nations brain, and anything could
have been poured in -- certainly suppression of the First Amendment would
have gone over without a murmer, but of course there was no need -- the
public acquiescense in the party line was deafening.
IMHO,
rkm
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Posted by Richard K. Moore (•••@••.•••) Wexford, Ireland
•••@••.••• | Cyberlib=http://www.internet-eireann.ie/cyberlib
Materials may be reposted in their entirety for non-commercial use.
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