If you believe that an enemy has devised a complicated, high tech, campaign to attack you and prevent you from becoming successful, and the evidence you muster fails to convince anyone else that this campaign actually exists, you will likely be sent to see someone like me and determined to be suffering from paranoid delusions.
However, what if you are able to convince a large number of people that you are revealing an accurate version of reality? The first point is that you would not be diagnosed as Paranoid. If the danger is real, your fears are appropriate. This would be true whether or not, in some fixed point of view which accurately renders reality, such a danger doesn't even exist!
This may seem contradictory. After all, a delusion is defined as a "fixed, false belief" yet there are many "fixed, false beliefs" which great numbers of people accept, find "proof" for, and react to on a daily basis.
It gets even worse when the "fixed, false belief" requires an aggressive response. As an example, let's posit that your teachers, parents, religious leaders, media, in fact, every important organ of authority in your culture, continually presents the message that some foreign group has the most vile and hateful intentions toward you and your people. Naturally, you will want to protect your people from such evil. Protestations by the enemy that they mean you no harm are constantly offset by "evidence" that they are lying.
How is anyone, including people who have no personal investment in the situation, to make sense of who's right and wrong and where good and evil lie?
One of the most important stories that is emerging from the interaction of the blogosphere and the MSM is the creeping awareness, more advanced in some than in others, that we can no longer believe what we see and hear, with our own (media mediated) eyes and ears.
The Media has long been our most important organ of perception. They have become more and more adept at telling stories and presenting viewpoints as they have honed their craft. They have probably never been able to present unadorned "reality" and news, but for much of my lifetime, they have at least attempted to present the news. Increasingly in the last 10-15 years, the contrast between news and stories has been blurred. However, only with the advent of the blogosphere has the tension between Media stories and reality become more apparent. Further, with the dawning awareness that the outcome of conflicts are, in part, and sometimes in whole, determined by who controls the story (information warfare), ferreting out closer approximations to reality by various persistent, often obsessive, bloggers, has become an important part of the war effort.
Neo-neocon points specifically toward yet another bogus "news story":
The Red Cross Ambulance Incident appears to have been an influential hoax, picked up by an uncritical, unthinking, and uninformed MSM and then disseminated around the world to great effect. It took blogger "zombie" a great deal of time and effort to deconstruct the story.
Meryl Yourish picks up on another story, which, while less obvious, is just as slanted, though apparently out of media laziness rather than overt hoaxing, in What’s wrong with this picture?
The news agencies are having a field day over the story that the IDF fired on a car full of Reuters reporters. They go into great detail about how the car was clearly labeled, blahblahblah, press, blahblahblah, and then you read, buried deeply in the AP article, these paragraphs:
The white sport utility vehicle was emblazoned with the Reuters logo and had “TV” and “Press” written on it in English, Arabic and Hebrew.
“This is a cold-blooded crime,” said Mohammed Dawdi, head of the local journalists union.
Capt. Noa Meir, an army spokeswoman, said the vehicle was the only one in the combat area, was driving suspiciously and came near Israeli forces during the nighttime raid.
The only words that matter are the ones in bold. It doesn’t matter how clearly the car was labeled. It was nighttime. And it was a battle zone. IDF troops fired on a car heading towards them in the middle of a battle.
As Meryl points out, at night, when a vehicle is speeding toward a battlefield in which you are being fired upon, and it is not one of yours, taking the time to read the writing on the vehicle in the dark is unwise and possibly deadly, yet that seems to be overlooked by those who are reporting on the events.
This is a relatively minor media transgression, an omission by under-emphasis if you will, but it is a part of a pattern of reporting that has rarely been high lighted in the past, yet has subtly, and sometimes pretty unsubtly, shaped our perceptions of the world we live in.
Marc Schulman suggests that reality can pierce the veil of fantasy in which so many in the West have been cosseted:
I just received an email from a cyberfriend living in Germany. Here's part of what she has to say:
There is a subtle atmospheric change here in Germany that I attribute to 1) the bombs found in the train stations, 2) the Guenter Grass SS confession, which has somehow empowered people to stand up to the anti-American, root-cause peace-now leftists, and 3) the Merkel government, which means that journalists don't have to suck up to the leftists as much. I can't point to specifics, but somehow the tenor of reporters has changed, as has the people who are being interviewed about the Islamofascist situation. There have been louder demands that moderate Muslims take a stronger stand against terrorism.
Neo-neocon, in her post I linked to above, points out the value of bloggers (mild, sub-clinical) OCD, and raises key questions:
And this tendency, marked in many bloggers, allows them to have uncovered a phenomenal phenomenon, to wit: the number of hoaxes perpetrated both on and by the media. From the debunking of the Rathergate memos to Pallywood to Green Helmet Guy to the present sordid and alarming story, the Red Cross Ambulance Hoax, it took the time and perspicacity available to bloggers to uncover some exceptionally disturbing--and historically influential--trends.
How long has this deception been going on? How much of world opinion has been formed by what amounts to deliberate lies, spread and perpetrated by either a naive or actively colluding media (I vote for naive, but others may differ)?
It is always extremely difficult for people to change their opinions; it is alway easier to alter new facts to fit into pre-existing belief structures, yet the accretion of detail and the occasional breakthrough of reality, is causing many in the West to question what they have long believed.
In partial answer to Neo's questions, I would suggest that the deception has been going on for a very long time, and a great deal of world opinion has been formed and distorted by such lies.
GM Roper has put together a post which dissects some of the founding lies upon which the Middle East Israel-Palestinian conflict rests. He has been involved in a discussion about the provenance of the Arab refugees:
The issue being discussed was the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians at the re-establishment of the State of Israel and the Arab treatment of Jews at the same time. I maintained at the time that while some 600,000 + Palestinians left Israel some 1,000,000 plus Jews were expelled from Arab lands.
Ahmed took umbrage at my characterization of the differences and claimed that I was being dishonest and historically ignorant. Woody, my blogging partner rose to my defense with the following:
"When G.M. gets back in circulation, he can take this up further with you. But, rest assured, he discusses issues honestly and intelligently. If you dispute his facts, then clear those up. If you dispute his honesty, then that "fact" of yours is wrong. [emphasis added]
Ahmed, will, I'm sure, be understanding if I disagree with his assessment. But he has a point of sorts, there is a lot of misunderstanding about what happened at the founding of Israel, what happened to both Jewish and Arab refugees and what the history says, especially since I'm being accused of being historically ignorant. Well, Ahmed, here are a few facts. You will, no doubt, dispute the source of these, but there are numerous citations to back up the quotes as you will see, some Israeli sources, some Arab sources and some United Nations sources, but all with substantial agreement that a substantial number of Arabs left the burgeoning state of Israel for a couple of reasons, but were not forced out at the point of a gun or by the evil Israeli IDF thugs in jackboots. So, lets begin the recitation shall we.
The Arab and Muslim world has for 60 years been taught that the evil Israelis threw the poor Palestinians off their land; this has justified the most egregious of terrorist crimes in the name of the oppressed. There is reason to believe that the conflict with the West can only escalate if the Muslim world continues to maintain their victim status in their own eyes. Many Westerners are allowing, indeed being forced to tolerate, an increasing amount of information that conflicts with their basic world view to penetrate their awareness, and eyes are opening. The next few years in this war may depend on the Muslim World being similarly forced to notice new sources of information.
Recent Comments