Vituperation Void 2

2 comments

1. George Smith

   April 24, 2013 at 11:47 am

   This much we do know: the enemy is definitely not well-funded, expertly trained clans of wild-eyed terrorists from foreign lands. 
   Good line. I’ve been saying it for years, among other things. The only thing left out is that the hating is pushed by the industry of fear, the collusion between the majority of the media and the national security megaplex to create a mythology that feeds business interests. You simply cannot go against it and have a career. People have been conditioned in the environment. They expect to be told of nefarious plots by people working to kill and bring down America, as if such a thing could be done from outside, because they have been steeped in a silly mythology. The real world is too complicated to explain against it, such a cohort cannot except these guys were lumps, the survivor a stoner, the latter who figured out how to make crude bombs.
   William Shirer had something now very pertinent to say about this in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when he commented on what had happened to the German citizen’s ability to think critically after years of controlled media.
   I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state … It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsification and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons.
   This isn’t Nazi Germany. But we have a controlled media, industry and government that has created a similar encapsulated environment of delusion. The GOP has the most extreme version but, literally, we are all subject to a media environment where basic truth and reality is almost totally unwelcome. Things are bad because of this. You can’t have leadership and progress in a place where facts are poison.
   It’s why Ted Nugent, someone who writes a column on who to hate, every week. He makes up some cocamamie drivel and gets reposted all over the mediasphere and a surprisingly large number of people applaud. This week it’s recommending the shot up survivor be publicly hanged in 60 days because he was a jihadist and, while we’re at it, get rid of all the Islamic students in the country on visas, too. And if this is not done it is because the president  is a well known America hater.  

    
2. Frank

   April 24, 2013 at 9:30 pm

   Well said.

    

   One of the fundamental needs of the politics of hate is someone to hate.  Politicians and pundits can gin up an enemy at a moment’s notice and a new one every cycle.