The incident in which a mentally disturbed man shot and killed thirty-something people at Virginia Technical University earlier this week is certainly not the "worst" shooting massacre in US history.
Any "news" source which reports the incident as such is contributing to a conspiracy of disinformation. You are being lied to. The facts as reported are false.
The dubious pride of place for most innocent victims of a shooting rampage (in North America) should undoubtedly go to any number of planned mass murders of indigenous people or Americans of African descent.
What you consumed as news was not news. It was entertainment. It was not entertainment. It was whatever it takes to shift product between commercial breaks. It was not that. It was propoganda.
Period.
We are not the consumers of the media, we are the product.
---Kevin Danaher, 10 Reasons to Abolish the IMF & World Bank
Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
---Derrick Jensen, Endgame
It is not the television that is lying to you. Who is lying to you?
1 comment:
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal
literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities:
the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did
not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western
capitalist democracies -- the development of a vast mass
communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the
true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less
totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account
man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
.... Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only
those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can
hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures.
A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their
time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable
future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of
sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy,
will find it hard to resist the enroachments of those who
would manipulate and control it.
In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most
part on repetition, suppression and rationalization -- the
repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as
true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be
ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which
may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. As
the art and science of manipulation come to be better
understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn
to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions
which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea
of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the
maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of
democratic institutions.
Aldous Huxley
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