The best way to describe this article is to give you little bits of it.
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/kingdom-of-lies/
From the article:
I am a subject in a kingdom of lies. At 57, I have grown up with decades of untruth — advanced for the purposes of purported social unity, the noble aim of egalitarianism, and the advancement of a cognitive elite in government, journalism, the arts, and the universities.
Alger Hiss really was a communist operative, albeit an elegant and snooty sort of one. The Rosenbergs were tag-team spies. Noble Laureate Rigoberta Menchu did not really write her own memoir. I admire the lives of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, even as I sensed there were large areas of their biographies that simply could not be disclosed and that the censorship was apparently for our own good. I know that if I did what Eliot Spitzer did I would not be hosting a TV show....
But then for some reason I sensed that a murderous, camouflaged Fidel Castro killed more innocents than a murderous, gold-braided Augusto Pinochet. I accepted that we were to be silent about the former’s crimes since his ends were said to be good, while the latter’s crimes were for the bad — though economists of no particular political affiliations have shown that Chileans escaped poverty and dictatorship while Cubans were, and are still, plagued by both.
I also have a sense, although it has never been quite so ordered by the Ministry, that a nut burning a bible is either artistic expression or a proper antidote to centuries of repression and so to be either applauded or ignored; but a nut burning a Koran evokes decapitations and murder and does so quite understandably — although I am never told quite why. Does it involve liberal paternalism and condescension: millions of Muslim radicals are captives of emotion and ignorant and thus not “like us,”so we must create much different standards for “them” that we don’t apply to others? We as adults laugh when symbols of Christianity are defaced in thousands of incidents; they as children naturally and understandably kill when one Koran is burned by one silly wannabe minister? Or is the Ministry’s fear that when Christ is satirized in a cartoon, no bomb shows up at the editorial office; when Mohammed is so caricatured, two do — and that because reporters are said always to be brave and publishers principled we cannot just admit to that?
The media is our ministry of truth of the Oceania brand: one day Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventive detention, Predators, the Patriot Act, and Iraq were bad; then one day in January 2009 I woke up and heard of them not all. I then recognized that they were now either good or at least necessary — or perhaps sinister IEDs of a sort left behind by the nefarious Emmanuel Goldstein administration, now too dangerous to even touch.
****There is also a link to an interesting biography about Ghandi embeded near the beginning of the article.****
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/kingdom-of-lies/
From the article:
I am a subject in a kingdom of lies. At 57, I have grown up with decades of untruth — advanced for the purposes of purported social unity, the noble aim of egalitarianism, and the advancement of a cognitive elite in government, journalism, the arts, and the universities.
Alger Hiss really was a communist operative, albeit an elegant and snooty sort of one. The Rosenbergs were tag-team spies. Noble Laureate Rigoberta Menchu did not really write her own memoir. I admire the lives of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, even as I sensed there were large areas of their biographies that simply could not be disclosed and that the censorship was apparently for our own good. I know that if I did what Eliot Spitzer did I would not be hosting a TV show....
But then for some reason I sensed that a murderous, camouflaged Fidel Castro killed more innocents than a murderous, gold-braided Augusto Pinochet. I accepted that we were to be silent about the former’s crimes since his ends were said to be good, while the latter’s crimes were for the bad — though economists of no particular political affiliations have shown that Chileans escaped poverty and dictatorship while Cubans were, and are still, plagued by both.
I also have a sense, although it has never been quite so ordered by the Ministry, that a nut burning a bible is either artistic expression or a proper antidote to centuries of repression and so to be either applauded or ignored; but a nut burning a Koran evokes decapitations and murder and does so quite understandably — although I am never told quite why. Does it involve liberal paternalism and condescension: millions of Muslim radicals are captives of emotion and ignorant and thus not “like us,”so we must create much different standards for “them” that we don’t apply to others? We as adults laugh when symbols of Christianity are defaced in thousands of incidents; they as children naturally and understandably kill when one Koran is burned by one silly wannabe minister? Or is the Ministry’s fear that when Christ is satirized in a cartoon, no bomb shows up at the editorial office; when Mohammed is so caricatured, two do — and that because reporters are said always to be brave and publishers principled we cannot just admit to that?
The media is our ministry of truth of the Oceania brand: one day Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventive detention, Predators, the Patriot Act, and Iraq were bad; then one day in January 2009 I woke up and heard of them not all. I then recognized that they were now either good or at least necessary — or perhaps sinister IEDs of a sort left behind by the nefarious Emmanuel Goldstein administration, now too dangerous to even touch.
****There is also a link to an interesting biography about Ghandi embeded near the beginning of the article.****
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