Let's Face It- The State Has Lost Its Mind: John Pilger

[chlamor]

Let's face it - the state has lost its mind

By John Pilger

05/12/05 "New Statesman" - - In 1987, the sociologist Alex Carey, a second Orwell in his prophesies, wrote "Managing Public Opinion: the corporate offensive". He described how in the United States "great progress made towards the ideal of a propaganda-managed democracy", whose principal aim was to identify a rapacious business state "with every cherished human value". The power and meaning of true democracy, of the franchise itself, would be "transferred" to the propaganda of advertising, public relations and corporate-run news. This "model of ideological control", he predicted, would be adopted by other countries, such as Britain.

To many who work conscientiously in the media, this will sound alarmist; it is not like that in Britain, they will say. Ask them about censorship by omission or the promotion of business ideology and war propaganda as news, a promotion both subtle and crude, and their defensive response will be that no one ever instructed them to follow any line: no one ever said not to question the Prime Minister about the horror he had helped to inflict on Iraq: his epic criminality. "Blair always enjoys his interviews with Paxo," says Roger Mosey, the head of BBC Television News, without a hint of irony.


<snip>

The monumental paranoia is almost beside the point. Bush was lowering the threshold. The American military can go anywhere, attack anything, use any kind of weapon in pursuit of its latest, most dangerous illusion: the "simmering resentment" and the "gathering violence". Unreported is the military coup that has taken place in America: the Pentagon and its civilian militarists now control "policy". Diplomacy is "finished . . . dead", as one of them put it. Andrew Bacevich, soldier, conservative and professor of American military strategy at Boston University, says that Bush has "committed the United States to waging an open-ended war on a global scale".

Britain, with its profound understanding of imperialism, is a pioneer of this new danger. In 1998, the Blair government's Strategic Defence Review stated that the country's military priority would be "force projection" and that "in the post-cold war world we must be prepared to go to the crisis rather than have the crisis come to us". In 2002, Geoff Hoon became the first defence secretary to declare that British nuclear weapons could be used against non-nuclear nations. In December 2003, a defence white paper, Delivering Security in a Changing World, called for "expeditionary operations" in "a range of environments across the world". Military force was no longer "a separate element in crisis resolution". Almost a third of public spending on research now goes to the military - far more than is spent on the National Health Service.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8821.htm

[enough]

1. This is so right on that it's almost unbearable to read.

[silverweb]

2. Terrifying.

And disgusting.

This is what our nation has become. This is the machine the neocons want to feed with our children.

To borrow a line from Malloy, "Have I said yet tonight how much I hate these people?"

:grr:

[chlamor]

3. Are you familiar with Alex Carey?

Chomsky cites him as an enduring influence. I would recommend listening to or reading some of his work. It is chilling in that you can see how what he is states has come to pass and how this 'Democracy' is in fact a total mirage with layers of Propaganda that aren't so self evident to even the astute observer.

[silverweb]

4. No, I'm not familiar with him.

Yet. He sounds like someone I should get to know.

I only have one of Chomsky's books, too, I'm sorry to say. I've wanted to read so much more of his work, as well.

On the other hand, lately I've been reading more fiction just as an escape to get away from what we're facing every day. Sometimes it's just too much, too overwhelming, and I feel myself starting to lose my grip and get depressed.... *sigh*

I'll definitely look Carey up, though. Thanks for the referral!

:hi:

[chlamor]

5. Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda

For those of you who are interested in this topic and listen to Internet radio, I'd strong recommend the following radio programme:

TUC Radio: Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda
available at: http://www.radio4all.net/index.php


Summary: The people of the US have been subjected to the most costly, unparallelled, 3/4 century propaganda effort by corporations in order to expand corporate rights, limit democracy and destroy the unions. This is the history From WWI to Reagan.

Notes: When Noam Chomsky dedicated his book "Manufacturing Consent" to the memory of Alex Carey, he said that the Australian sociologist would have written the definitive history of propaganda in the US, had he lived to complete his work. The 20th century, Carey says, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. Carey's unique view of US history goes back to World War I and ends with the Reagan era.

http://www.resist.com.au/comments/c1338.asp

You can find an audio presentation at www.tucradio.org

[silverweb]

7. Thanks, chlamor.

I don't get to listen to much radio -- can't even often manage to listen to a whole Malloy replay -- but I do read a lot. I googled Carey and got a lot of good information to sift through.

That one quote that Chomsky used about the main achievements of the 20th Century is dead on target!

[jpgray]

6. Pilger's hard on the BBC, but what we have is actually much worse

Blair has to be able to hit and fade with Paxman, but we don't let a single person of even his mainstream ferocity near our president or other public figures. The Daily Show did a bit on the contrast between our "town hall meetings" and the UK's. If they've fallen far into the propaganda democracy, we've fallen much farther.

[triguy46]

8. Well said.