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Thursday, 31 May 2018

How the people who control America manufacture our consent to their rule

Comment: These are the kinds of people infecting academia and teaching students how to interpret the world; "experts" and "teachers" who should be ashamed at their sycophancy toward this repellent individual.

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Eric Zeusse
Washington's Blog 

Modern dictatorship, as Walter Lippmann pointed out in 1921 about “the manufacture of consent,” is the “creation of consent” and “is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic,” so that we now have artificial ‘democracy’, which George Orwell prophetically allegorized in his 1949 novel 1984. But here is the real version of it, today:

On May 26th, a youtube was posted titled “TIME Editor Literally Admits He’s For Gov. Propaganda!” It’s about, and discusses this: Richard Stengel, who was a former Managing Editor of TIME magazine (2006-2013), and then the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy (2014-2016), had hosted, on April 20th, at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a Workshop for College and University Educators — in other words, for professors — and this workshop was titled “Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News”. Stengel and his panel of ‘experts’ were teaching these professors how to recognize ‘Fake News’, and Stengel made clear there that it’s whatever violates America’s “master narrative.” (Truth-falsity has nothing to do with it, he and they were teaching.)

After a lot of unquestioning questions from his academic audience, and only near the very end of the entire workshop, an unidentified attendee asked a questioning question: 

Q: I’m going to kind of go against the grain here and challenge us to … think about the media cartels, which control and dominate the way that the discourse is shaped. Is that not fake news in certain ways? … So for example, I’ll talk about the events in Gaza three weeks ago. Every American — every mainstream American and world outlet wrote a title that said, “Palestinians killed” or “die in clashes with Israel.” There were snipers, hundreds of feet away, shooting at unarmed demonstrators, but every major newspaper outlet — or every major news outlet called it clashes. No one calls that fake news.

So there’s a question here about how we are defining and what merits our attention as fake news that we need —

STENGEL: So just to — so a — so give me — give examples of the master narratives that existed — or still exist that maybe need to be questioned.

Q: American master narrative about — what is it — destiny — manifest destiny. American narrative about entitlement to American land despite American — Native Americans’ presence and the massacres against them. The denial of the continuing aftermath of slavery that is continuing to be a part of American mainstream media and mainstream consciousness. 

[The invited panel of ‘experts’ then answered with irrelevancies. Finally, Stengel came in with:] 

STENGEL: So I’ll — you will be the last question, but I just want to weigh in on that for one second. So there’s another word for master narratives. It’s called history. 

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