http://mediekritik.lege.net/

[Leif Erlingsson]

Finns det egentligen någon nytta med att människor vet vad som i själva verket pågår? Det kanske bara är jobbigt? Vad tycker du?

[Leif Erlingsson]

Nationalencyklopedin säger att en nyhet är det bara om den gjorts känd. Annars är det en hemlighet. Men vad är det om 1% av befolkningen känner till den men 99 % inte?

[Leif Erlingsson]

Är den sublime ledaren klok och rättrådig?

Länk till denna sida: http://mediekritik.lege.net/viewtopic.php?p=106#106

Efter att ha tagit del av nedanstående intellektuella material (jag vet att det är mycket subversivt att ägna sig åt intellektuella sysslor, att jag verkligen inte borde ägna mig åt sådant men snälla, låt mig leva!) så har jag funderat att det är landets (sublime) ledares uppgift att bestämma vad som är bra för landet och folket och att därefter medelst propaganda forma den allmänna meningen och opinionen i enlighet med detta. Men om detta ska bli bra så förutsätter det givetvis att den (sublime) ledaren är klok och vis och har förstått allt rätt. Jag själv ställer mig tvivlande. Jag är en tvivlare. Detta är givetvis djupt subversivt. Kritiskt tänkande tillhör de degenererade intellektuellas domäner. Motargumentation är nästintill förräderi. Medborgarens ansvar är att vara lojal till sina ledare, inte att ifrågasätta. Ifrågasättande är nästintill förräderi. Det är FARLIGT. Jag tror att vår justitieminister Thomas Bodström var inne på detta i en radiodebatt med Åsa Lindeborg, där han sa något om att det var HON som var farlig. Och det var hon ju givetvis, genom att IFRÅGASÄTTA det enhetliga allmänna opinion som måste finnas.

I P1 morgon tisdagen den 2 augusti 2005, började kl. 07:21, sa nämligen justitieminister Thomas Bodström (2 minuter och 25 sekunder in i det 9 minuter långa inslaget) angående kritiken från Åsa Linderborg mot hans förslag om ökad övervakning av vanliga medborgare att "det som just nu, i den här debatten, är största faran, det är personer som Åsa Linderborg, som sitter och hittar på, som jämför terrorist-bekämpning med utvidgat samarbete med Hitler, som hon gjorde i gårdagens artikel". Och så är det ju givetvis, eftersom hon därmed subversivt ägnar sig åt att ifrågasätta den av den (sublime) ledaren beslutade allmänna meningen och opinionen. Det Åsa Linderborg - och tidigare jag själv också - inte har förstått är ju att det inte är hennes plats som en passiv "folket" - statist i statens storslagna "opera" att ifrågasätta den store regissörens beslut, att så oenighet och, hemska ord, demokrati bland de övriga statisterna. Demokrati leder till oordning. Parlamentaristisk demokrati är dessutom per definition rutten eftersom den inte representerar folkets röst, som är densamma som den sublime ledarens. Således är man en folkfiende - Åsa Linderborg är en folkfiende - genom att förorda demokrati. Att hon ändå i sitt förvirrade tillstånd gör just detta måste ha något att göra med att hon har uppfattat sin roll som historiker som att hon har ett ansvar för att tydliggöra nutida skeenden utifrån historiska dito. Det är sorgligt som hon gör, att hålla fast vid demokrati. FASCISMEN REGERAR!
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Några utdrag översatta till svenska ur introduktionen sidan 3-4 till professor Randall L. Bytwerks "Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic" följer. Därefter den engelska orginaltexten som de är hämtade från.

Jacques Ellul definierade termen "propaganda" brett. "Propaganda är en uppsättning metoder använda av en organiserad grupp som vill åstadkomma ett aktivt eller passivt deltagande i dess gärningar från en massa av individer som psykologiskt är förenade genom psykologisk manipulation, och inordnade i en organisation." [Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 61.]
...

Propaganda är det oundvikliga resultatet av den växande makten av teknik och metod, av ett irreversibelt flöde av teknologi. Den hjälper regeringar att framgångsrikt hantera medborgare medvetandegjorda av moderna medier. Medborgare kan inte bara ignoreras längre, men inte heller kan regeringar tillhandahålla fullständig information i varje ämne som är relevant för deras medborgare eller följa skiftande allmänna meningar inom en mångfald av ämnen. Mitt i all förvirring och förändring så hjälper propaganda medborgare att komma till tillfredsställande förklaringar om världen runtomkring dem.
...

Engelsk och dessutom mer komplett orginaltext följer. Därefter citat från Umberto Eco av några axiom som alla typer av fascism tycks vara överens om, först på svenska, sedan på orginal engelska tillsammans med en nyskriven artikel.

Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic ( Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series, Michigan State University Press, http://msupress.msu.edu/ )
[Professor of Communication at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan] Randall L. Bytwerk

Introduction pp 3-4, excerpt:

The approach I use in this book comes from the work of Jacques Ellul. He defines the term broadly: "Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulation and incorporated in an organization." [10: Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 61.] Ellul sees propaganda not only in its obvious manifestations (for example, mass meetings, newspapers, and posters) but also in the wider social context. It includes education, the arts, public behavior, and the whole panoply of modern technique and method. It is the totality of means by which humans are persuaded to accept the powers that be and depends not only on telling people things but also on securing their cooperation, persuading them to behave in ways that support the system and reinforce desired attitudes.

Ellul views propaganda as more than the mere attempt of political leaders to manipulate followers: "The propagandee is by no means just an innocent victim. He provides the psychological action of propaganda, and not merely leads himself to it, but even derives satisfaction from it. Without the previous, implicit consent, without the need for propaganda experienced by practically every citizen of the technological age, propaganda could not spread. There is not just a wicked propagandist at work who sets up means to ensnare the innocent citizen. Rather, there is a citizen who craves propaganda from the bottom of his being and a propagandist who responds to this craving." [11: Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 121.] In other words, propaganda fills needs both for propagandists and propagandees.

Propaganda is an inevitable result of the growing power of technique and method, of an irreversible flow of technology. It helps governments deal successfully with a citizenry made aware of events by modern media. Citizens cannot simply be ignored any longer, but neither can governments provide full information on every subject relevant to their citizens or follow shifting public opinion on a multitude of issues. In the midst of confusion and change, propaganda helps citizens come to satisfying explanations of the world around them.

Ellul argues that all modern propaganda is essentially similar, regardless of their democratic or totalitarian makers. However, totalitarian systems expect far more of propaganda than do democratic societies. Although not expecting instant results, they hope that, with time, propaganda will help to mold a different type of human being, the prerequisite to the utopian futures they envision.

The word "propaganda" has its origin in religious persuasion. ...

END QUOTE

Den i USA välkände och högt respekterade Lewis H. Lapham citerar i ärevördiga gamla "Harper's Magazine", October 2005, pps. 7-9, "Living in a Fascist State" Umberto Eco från en 10 år gammal essä (nedan) där det uppställs en uppsättning axiom som alla typer av fascism tycks vara överens om. Bland de mest notabla är, skriver Lewis H. Lapham - i min egen översättning:

• Sanningen avslöjas en gång och endast en gång.
  
• Parlamentaristisk demokrati är per definition rutten eftersom den inte representerar folkets röst, som är densamma som den sublime ledarens.
  
• Doktrin överrider förnuft, och vetenskap är alltid misstänkt.
  
• Kritiskt tänkande tillhör de degenererade intellektuellas domäner, de som förråder kulturen och traditionella värderingar.
  
• Den nationella identiteten tillhandahålls av nationens fiender.
  
• Motargumentation är nästintill förräderi.
  
• För evigt i krig så måste staten regera med rädslans instrument. Medborgare agerar inte; de spelar den stödjande rollen av "folket" i den storslagna opera som är staten.

Som Lewis H. Lapham skriver så publicerade Umberto Eco denna essä för tio år sedan, när det inte var lika lätt som det senare har blivit att se fascismens kännemärken i en amerikansk regerings handlingssätt. Men läs hela artikeln - den är MYCKET läsvärd. Att hävda att USA inte skulle vara fascistiskt är antingen djupt okunnigt eller djupt hycklande. Men då ledande svenska medier tycks vara än mer medlöpande än de amerikanska så kan man fundera på om inte även - eller ännu mer - Sverige är en fasciststat. Och om vi inte kommer att fortsätta med VÅRA lik i garderoben långt efter att USA (och tidigare Tyskland) har gjort sig av med sina?...

Original: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article10710.htm

Living in a Fascist State

On message

"But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then Fascism and Communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land." -Franklin D. Roosevelt, November 4, 1938

By Lewis H. Lapham

10/21/06 "Harper's Magazine", October 2005, pps. 7-9 -- -- In 1938 the word "fascism" hadn't yet been transferred into an abridged metaphor for all the world's unspeakable evil and monstrous crime, and on coming across President Roosevelt's prescient remark in one of Umberto Eco's essays, I could read it as prose instead of poetry -- a reference not to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or the pit of Hell but to the political theories that regard individual citizens as the property of the government, happy villagers glad to wave the flags and wage the wars, grateful for the good fortune that placed them in the care of a sublime leader. Or, more emphatically, as Benito Mussolini liked to say, "Everything in the state. Nothing outside the state. Nothing against the state."

The theories were popular in Europe in the 1930s (cheering crowds, rousing band music, splendid military uniforms), and in the United States they numbered among their admirers a good many important people who believed that a somewhat modified form of fascism (power vested in the banks and business corporations instead of with the army) would lead the country out of the wilderness of the Great Depression -- put an end to the Pennsylvania labor troubles, silence the voices of socialist heresy and democratic dissent. Roosevelt appreciated the extent of fascism's popularity at the political box office; so does Eco, who takes pains in the essay "Ur-Fascism," published in The New York Review of Books in 1995, to suggest that it's a mistake to translate fascism into a figure of literary speech. By retrieving from our historical memory only the vivid and familiar images of fascist tyranny (Gestapo firing squads, Soviet labor camps, the chimneys at Treblinka), we lose sight of the faith-based initiatives that sustained the tyrant's rise to glory. The several experiments with fascist government, in Russia and Spain as well as in Italy and Germany, didn't depend on a single portfolio of dogma, and so Eco, in search of their common ground, doesn't look for a unifying principle or a standard text. He attempts to describe a way of thinking and a habit of mind, and on sifting through the assortment of fantastic and often contradictory notions -- Nazi paganism, Franco's National Catholicism, Mussolini's corporatism, etc. -- he finds a set of axioms on which all the fascisms agree. Among the most notable:

The truth is revealed once and only once.

Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten because it doesn't represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader.

Doctrine outpoints reason, and science is always suspect.

Critical thought is the province of degenerate intellectuals, who betray the culture and subvert traditional values.

The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies.

Argument is tantamount to treason.

Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear. Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of "the people" in the grand opera that is the state.

Eco published his essay ten years ago, when it wasn't as easy as it has since become to see the hallmarks of fascist sentiment in the character of an American government. Roosevelt probably wouldn't have been surprised.

He'd encountered enough opposition to both the New Deal and to his belief in such a thing as a United Nations to judge the force of America's racist passions and the ferocity of its anti-intellectual prejudice. As he may have guessed, so it happened. The American democracy won the battles for Normandy and Iwo Jima, but the victories abroad didn't stem the retreat of democracy at home, after 1968 no longer moving "forward as a living force, seeking day and night to better the lot" of its own citizens, and now that sixty years have passed since the bomb fell on Hiroshima, it doesn't take much talent for reading a cashier's scale at Wal-Mart to know that it is fascism, not democracy, that won the heart and mind of America's "Greatest Generation," added to its weight and strength on America's shining seas and fruited plains.

A few sorehead liberal intellectuals continue to bemoan the fact, write books about the good old days when everybody was in charge of reading his or her own mail. I hear their message and feel their pain, share their feelings of regret, also wish that Cole Porter was still writing songs, that Jean Harlow and Robert Mitchum hadn't quit making movies. But what's gone is gone, and it serves nobody's purpose to deplore the fact that we're not still riding in a coach to Philadelphia with Thomas Jefferson. The attitude is cowardly and French, symptomatic of effete aesthetes who refuse to change with the times.

As set forth in Eco's list, the fascist terms of political endearment are refreshingly straightforward and mercifully simple, many of them already accepted and understood by a gratifyingly large number of our most forward-thinking fellow citizens, multitasking and safe with Jesus. It does no good to ask the weakling's pointless question, "Is America a fascist state?" We must ask instead, in a major rather than a minor key, "Can we make America the best damned fascist state the world has ever seen," an authoritarian paradise deserving the admiration of the international capital markets, worthy of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"? I wish to be the first to say we can. We're Americans; we have the money and the know-how to succeed where Hitler failed, and history has favored us with advantages not given to the early pioneers.

We don't have to burn any books.

The Nazis in the 1930s were forced to waste precious time and money on the inoculation of the German citizenry, too well-educated for its own good, against the infections of impermissible thought. We can count it as a blessing that we don't bear the burden of an educated citizenry. The systematic destruction of the public-school and library systems over the last thirty years, a program wisely carried out under administrations both Republican and Democratic, protects the market for the sale and distribution of the government's propaganda posters. The publishing companies can print as many books as will guarantee their profit (books on any and all subjects, some of them even truthful), but to people who don't know how to read or think, they do as little harm as snowflakes falling on a frozen pond.

We don't have to disturb, terrorize, or plunder the bourgeoisie.

In Communist Russia as well as in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the codes of social hygiene occasionally put the regime to the trouble of smashing department-store windows, beating bank managers to death, inviting opinionated merchants on complimentary tours (all expenses paid, breathtaking scenery) of Siberia. The resorts to violence served as study guides for free, thinking businessmen reluctant to give up on the democratic notion that the individual citizen is entitled to an owner's interest in his or her own mind.

The difficulty doesn't arise among people accustomed to regarding themselves as functions of a corporation. Thanks to the diligence of out news media and the structure of our tax laws, our affluent and suburban classes have taken to heart the lesson taught to the aspiring serial killers rising through the ranks at West Point and the Harvard Business School -- think what you're told to think, and not only do you get to keep the house in Florida or command of the Pentagon press office but on some sunny prize day not far over the horizon, the compensation committee will hand you a check for $40 million, or President George W. Bush will bestow on you the favor of a nickname as witty as the ones that on good days elevate Karl Rove to the honorific "Boy Genius," on bad days to the disappointed but no less affectionate "Turd Blossom." Who doesn't now know that the corporation is immortal, that it is the corporation that grants the privilege of an identity, confers meaning on one's life, gives the pension, a decent credit rating, and the priority standing in the community? Of course the corporation reserves the right to open one's email, test one's blood, listen to the phone calls, examine one's urine, hold the patent on the copyright to any idea generated on its premises. Why ever should it not? As surely as the loyal fascist knew that it was his duty to serve the state, the true American knows that it is his duty to protect the brand.

Having met many fine people who come up to the corporate mark -- on golf courses and commuter trains, tending to their gardens in Fairfield County while cutting back the payrolls in Michigan and Mexico -- I'm proud to say (and I think I speak for all of us here this evening with Senator Clinton and her lovely husband) that we're blessed with a bourgeoisie that will welcome fascism as gladly as it welcomes the rain in April and the sun in June. No need to send for the Gestapo or the NKVD; it will not be necessary to set examples.

We don't have to gag the press or seize the radio stations.

People trained to the corporate style of thought and movement have no further use for free speech, which is corrupting, overly emotional, reckless, and ill-informed, not calibrated to the time available for television talk or to the performance standards of a Super Bowl halftime show. It is to our advantage that free speech doesn't meet the criteria of the free market. We don't require the inspirational genius of a Joseph Goebbels; we can rely instead on the dictates of the Nielsen ratings and the camera angles, secure in the knowledge that the major media syndicates run the business on strictly corporatist principles -- afraid of anything disruptive or inappropriate, committed to the promulgation of what is responsible, rational, and approved by experts. Their willingness to stay on message is a credit to their professionalism.

The early twentieth-century fascists had to contend with individuals who regarded their freedom of _expression as a necessity -- the bone and marrow of their existence, how they recognized themselves as human beings. Which was why, if sometimes they refused appointments to the state-run radio stations, they sometimes were found dead on the Italian autostrada or drowned in the Kiel Canal. The authorities looked upon their deaths as forms of self-indulgence. The same attitude governs the agreement reached between labor and management at our leading news organizations. No question that the freedom of speech is extended to every American -- it says so in the Constitution -- but the privilege is one that musn't be abused. Understood in a proper and financially rewarding light, freedom of speech is more trouble than it's worth -- a luxury comparable to owning a racehorse and likely to bring with it little else except the risk of being made to look ridiculous. People who learn to conduct themselves in a manner respectful of the telephone tap and the surveillance camera have no reason to fear the fist of censorship. By removing the chore of having to think for oneself, one frees up more leisure time to enjoy the convenience of the Internet services that know exactly what one likes to hear and see and wear and eat. We don't have to murder the intelligentsia.

Here again, we find ourselves in luck. The society is so glutted with easy entertainment that no writer or company of writers is troublesome enough to warrant the compliment of an arrest, or even the courtesy of a sharp blow to the head. What passes for the American school of dissent talks exclusively to itself in the pages of obscure journals, across the coffee cups in Berkeley and Park Slope, in half-deserted lecture halls in small Midwestern colleges. The author on the platform or the beach towel can be relied upon to direct his angriest invective at the other members of the academy who failed to drape around the title of his latest book the garland of a rave review.

The blessings bestowed by Providence place America in the front rank of nations addressing the problems of a twenty-first century, certain to require bold geopolitical initiatives and strong ideological solutions. How can it be otherwise? More pressing demands for always scarcer resources; ever larger numbers of people who cannot be controlled except with an increasingly heavy hand of authoritarian guidance. Who better than the Americans to lead the fascist renaissance, set the paradigm, order the preemptive strikes? The existence of mankind hangs in the balance; failure is not an option. Where else but in America can the world find the visionary intelligence to lead it bravely into the future -- Donald Rumsfeld our Dante, Turd Blossom our Michelangelo?

I don't say that over the last thirty years we haven't made brave strides forward. By matching Eco's list of fascist commandments against our record of achievement, we can see how well we've begun the new project for the next millennium -- the notion of absolute and eternal truth embraced by the evangelical Christians and embodied in the strict constructions of the Constitution; our national identity provided by anonymous Arabs; Darwin's theory of evolution rescinded by the fiat of "intelligent design"; a state of perpetual war and a government administering, in generous and daily doses, the drug of fear; two presidential elections stolen with little or no objection on the part of a complacent populace; the nation's congressional districts gerrymandered to defend the White House for the next fifty years against the intrusion of a liberal-minded president; the news media devoted to the arts of iconography, busily minting images of corporate executives like those of the emperor heroes on the coins of ancient Rome.

An impressive beginning, in line with what the world has come to expect from the innovative Americans, but we can do better. The early twentieth-century fascisms didn't enter their golden age until the proletariat in the countries that gave them birth had been reduced to abject poverty. The music and the marching songs rose with the cry of eagles from the wreckage of the domestic economy. On the evidence of the wonderful work currently being done by the Bush Administration with respect to the trade deficit and the national debt -- to say nothing of expanding the markets for global terrorism -- I think we can look forward with confidence to character-building bankruptcies, picturesque bread riots, thrilling cavalcades of splendidly costumed motorcycle police.


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