Randall Packer on Thu, 28 Oct 2004 18:24:14 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> The Ministry of Disinformation |
It's looking bad. With six days to go before the election, George Bush has locked up most of the "red" states and is now closing in on the "blue" states. Despite the fact that he is losing the battle on nearly every issue, from the War in Iraq to the home front, this completely failed President is gaining ground with the electorate. How is this possible? Disinformation. They have mastered it, they have redefined it, they have perfected the art of spinning events to suit their objectives. They have learned to play the media like a fiddle. When John Kerry calls them on 380 tons of missing weapons in Iraq (whoops!), enough to blow the entire planet apart many times over, they declare that Kerry is not paying attention to the facts. The facts! What does an administration that declared nuclear Armageddon from overblown CIA intelligence know about the facts! Who is calling the kettle black? No, deep in the heart of the Ministry of Disinformation, the Minister himself, Karl Rove, is concocting his latest propaganda cocktail. He's brewing up the next scene in this B movie of a Presidency that has done nothing if not thumb its nose in the face of reality. The frightening thing about all this, is the gullibility of the American people. They buy it. They believe him. They are going to vote for him and he may very well win this election and we are going to have four more years of a plot that seems to know no end to its thickening. The question is: can we survive four more years of disinformation? This quote from George Orwell speaks to the predicament we now find ourselves in, in which the government runs the country like its directing a reality TV show: "In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." There was never a better moment than now to declare that here in the seemingly distant space of our discussion lists and personal blogs, the revolution, in fact, has begun. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net