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Jyllands-Postens Flemming Rose gav sidste torsdag et læseværdigt opkog af
Robert D. Kaplans seneste essay i Policy Review. Her blot tre citater fra
The Media and Medievalism:

'To the extent that the left is still vibrant, I am suggesting that it
has mutated into something else. If what used to be known as the
Communist International has any rough contemporary equivalent, it is the
global media. The global media’s demand for peace and justice, which
flows subliminally like an intravenous solution through its reporting, is
— much like the Communist International’s rousing demand for workers’
rights — moralistic rather than moral. Peace and justice are such general
and self-evident principles that it is enough merely to invoke them. Any
and all toxic substances can flourish within them, or manipulate them,
provided that the proper rhetoric is adopted. For moralizers these
principles are a question of manners, not of substance. To wit, Kofi
Annan can never be wrong.'

'Because the media confuse victimization with moral right, American
troops in Iraq have had occasionally to contend with unsympathetic news
coverage, which in an age of mass media has concrete tactical and
strategic consequences. Last spring, I accompanied the first United
States Marines into Fallujah. After several days of intense fighting, the
Marines — reinforced with a fresh new battalion — appeared on the verge
of defeating the insurgents. A cease-fire was called, though, snatching
defeat from victory. No matter how cleanly the Marines fought, it was not
clean enough for the global media, famously including Al-Jazeera, which
portrayed as indiscriminate killing what in previous eras of war would
have constituted a low civilian casualty rate. The fact that mosques were
blatantly used by insurgents as command posts for aggressive military
operations mattered less to journalists than that some of these mosques
were targeted by U.S. planes. Had the fighting continued, the political
fallout from such coverage would have forced the newly emerging Iraqi
authorities to resign en masse. So American officials had no choice but
to undermine their own increasingly favorable battlefield position by
consenting to a cease-fire. While U.S. policy was guilty of incoherence —
ordering a full-scale assault only to call it off — the Marines were
defeated less by the insurgents than by the way urban combat is covered
by a global media that has embraced the cult of victimhood.'

'Jean-Paul Sartre in The Reprieve (1945) suggested that what separates
the well-off from the working class is that the latter simply don’t give
in. They fight as long as it takes, not because they are without doubts,
but because if they weren’t fighting, they would be occupied at other
hard, physical labor. As for the middle class and above, "Why should they
fight? They were waiting for nothing, they had all they wanted." Perhaps
that is why media elites imagine that everything that degenerates into an
actual struggle must ipso facto correspond to a scandal.'


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"Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely
helps them to deceive themselves." Eric Hoffer
Med venlig hilsen
GB