Thread: Disinformation Machines

We all know what facts are. We use them every day to state the basic quality of our lives. Take, for
instance, the train derailment in Glendale, California
that occured this past Wednesday. Ten people were
killed and many injured as a result of one suicidal
person intending to kill others while ending
himself. Depending upon the way it was reported, this
incident could have been emphasized as a major
catastrophy or regarded as just another multiple homicide, one
of many that occur every day in our nation. The severe
degree of pain suffered by the ten dead passengers
during the sudden derailment could have been
graphically and creatively described to stimulate
revulsion, compassion, or other emotions in the minds
of those reading and listening to the reports. But
those intentionally used adjectives and adverbs would
not be considered the facts about the event. They are
value judgments which would serve to conjure up
irrational thoughts and reactions which the bare-bone facts
may not support. Many variations on the theme of
mental illness could have been effectively used to
excite the impressionable public. Instead of
accurately blaming one lone derranged person for the disaster,
the state and federal governments could have used the
media to condemn and victimize a vast community of
people, the mentally impaired.

Political regimes have, for centuries, used colored
variations of facts to cause the masses to respond
positively or negatively to certain salient events and
issues. Just yesterday, President George W. Bush
conducted a news conference wherein he deemphasized a
helicopter crash in Iraq that killed 31 American
troops. He did this by not mentioning the awful event
during his spiel about the Iraqi elections to be held
this coming Sunday. Bush's political mentor, Karl
Rove, must have given the President such Machiavellian
advice about using propaganda effectively to create
illusions in the mind of the electorate. To date,
nearly 1,400 American GIs have been killed violently
in Iraq. Another 31 deaths not asociated with the
sporadic, yet consistent killings in the fourteen
uncontrollable Iraqi provinces might not be considered
as fuel for political dissent. This is what the Bush
Administration wants, a ploy to make the majority of
the American nation consider the deaths in Iraq a
small price to pay for an unnecessary and unjust war
that has turned into a debacle of major proportions.

There was, yet, another contemporary regime in history
that successfully used the process of disinformation,
the intentional changing or coloring of the facts to
create illusions of governmental propriety and to
place blame on the innocent, in order to sway national
opinion to their side. This particular nation was an
example of a politically diverse people desiring
freedom and liberty in the face of insurrection and
and economic turmoil.

When in the course of debate over military and
political correctness, a conservative leader rose in
the limelight of this particular nation to attract
quite a following. Soon the national legislature
acquiesced to the shrewd charismatic tactics of the
leader's political party. Soon after, this person
persuaded the national legislature to give him power
to preemptively invade other nation-states to
inculcate the type of government that would last for a
thousand years. Through a powerful ministry of
propaganda, this leader persuaded influential people
in the United States, like George Herbert Bush, that
what he was doing was in the best interest of the
world. His disinformation policies were so intensely
effective that he was considered Man of the Year by
"Time" magazine. But while other nations in the world
were gullibly gobbling up what they considerd as hard
facts about this daunting man of the people, this
ignominous charlatan was brutally killing millions of
jews and leading a nation of sheep down a road to
perdition. This man was Adolf Hitler.

Certain essayists have recently been bold enough to
assert that George W. Bush won the 2004 Presidential
Election through an effective use of the Republican
disinformation machine. Exit polls for Election 2004 have shown that
most of the literate electorate in the country
sincerely believed that Iraq posed a grave imminent
threat to the United States, that Saddam Hussain
possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that Iraq
was allied with Al Quida terrorists. These assertions
have been utterly disproven by the 9/11 Commission and other
independent sources. So, what does this mean to a
freedom loving, supposedly libertarian society of
Americans. I believe it means that any nation can be
led down a road to perdition if an uninformed
electorate allows it to happen. It was Thomas
Jefferson who quipped in the early 19th Century that, "a cultivated and informed mind
is best defense against tyranny." And his assertion is as true today as it was then.

while your points are valid and seem to be interesting, the way you've structured this makes it uncomfortable to read, so i didn't get very far before giving up...

i don't know if you wanted to go for a poetry-like look or what, but it doesn't work for this reader, at least... i'm an essayist myself, and believe in making one's writings accessible to as many readers as possible... i don't 'dumb down' my writing, but i do make it a comfortable and easy read, though what i have to say is usually far from people's comfort zone!

i did notice some problems with punctuation and syntax and some overlong sentences... you might want to consider a thorough proofread and structuring this in normal paragraphs...

hugs, maia

What you say may be true of contemporary essays, but the classic essays, such as John Stuart Mill's "Essay of Liberty," are without contemporary paragrahical form. While I could have separated the various supporting statements for the general thesis in separate paragraphs, the idea was not congruent with my notion of flowing assertion. But, granted, the syntax was a bit convoluted.

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