I heard a terrifying radio report this afternoon. Apparently, the United States, under the leadership of President Bush, using the excuse of the war on terror, has been following the exact same path that Peru took in the 1990's while fighting their indigenous terrorist groups. President Fujimori became a dictator, and used death squads, suspended civil liberties, destroyed freedom of the press and killed almost 70,000.
How do I know this, you wonder? I heard it on NPR radio.
Leonard Lopate is a talk show host on NPR and presented an interesting exercise:
The directors of two new documentaries on Peru describe how the country's democracy suffered in the name of fighting terrorism. Peru's Truth Commission found that between 1980 and 2000, over 69,000 people were killed in terrorist or government-sponsored violence. Pamela Yates, director of "State of Fear", and Ellen Perry, director of "Fall of Fujimori", join us.
Both film makers agreed they had made their documentaries, which were "objective" looks at what transpired in the 1990's in Peru when the Shining Path and Peruvian government fought a vicious war, as a cautionary tale for the current War on Terror. For all three participants, there were certain bed rock assumptions, things they unquestionably knew, which were so obvious that none of them thought to raise any doubts about them.
All the left/liberal memes which have become so familiar were mentioned, with the added fillip of fear, based on Peru's instructive experiences. Bush lied us into a war; he is trying to become a dictator; abu Graib and Guantanamo represent the American military; there was more but it was painful to hear.
The truly fascinating point they made was that they fully believed that Bush's America was directly paralleling Fujimori's Peru. In both cases, free speech was rapidly disappearing (though their example was Iraq, not America). They drew an equivalence between the news media being controlled by Fujimori, with all the news stories being vetted prior to publication in Peru, to the military paying some Iraqi journalists to publish particular stories. The parallels were ubiquitous. It seemed as if the absence of right wing death squads in America was either an oversight or just a matter of time.
I am certainly not averse to "slippery slope" arguments, but at a certain point, reality should have a role in our discussions. I do not expect that anyone who believes these three are merely describing objective facts to be able to participate in any kind of reasoned discussion. As so many have pointed out, if you believe "Bush lied" it is incumbent upon you to present some evidence in support of your theory; in the absence of evidence, true wisdom would support silence.
Psychoanalysts spend a fair amount of time trying to determine the psychological truth of the stories our patients tell us. We recognize that it is near impossible to construct or reconstruct an exact replica of historical reality. Memory is among the most plastic (subject to distortion in formation and recall) of all our mind's constructs. The question we often have to deal with is whether or not a "memory" is of an event or of a fantasy (and most commonly, how much has fantasy elaborated and distorted a memory.) In all such cases, the memory can have a powerful impact on the person's character and behavior, but the patient's job in therapy differs depending on the assessment of their past reality. A patient who was actually abused as a child must come to terms with all the various damaging effects such abuse had on them (and often continues to have on them in the present) as well as coming to terms with the meaning of such abuse to their significant relationships (parents, siblings, et al.) On the other hand, if a patient discovers their "memories" were more fantasy than reality, their job is to understand why they would need to invent such a construct and what role it has in their character. For those reasons, and others, having a fantasy of being abused as a child, even if initially a firmly held "memory", is very different from actually having been abused.
The worst abuse by the MSM of their roles as our society's sensory apparatus and as guardians of our free speech freedoms, is their abuse of the truth. By presenting opinions and feelings as facts, without even a cursory attempt at constructing a consistent argument, they are damaging our society's ability to reason from factual data. Feelings are not depictions of reality; they are depictions of how your experience of reality affects you.
NPR, the New York Times, the rest of their allies and accomplices in the media, are destroying their credibility by the day; by the time they realize what they have done they will have destroyed themselves. It would be sad if it weren't so dangerous.
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