In his classic study, L'Amerique, the French Post-Modernist Jean Baudrillard highlights the eminently manupulable character of the mass-media, especially the internet. His basic point is that within the great wash of information with which we are inundated, it is ever more likely that we are subject to deception. This is not a paranoid rant. Few people, if any, are able to deal with, never mind critically process, so much information and so many opinions. I would add, that as the average person becones increasingly illiterate, and relies ever more upon sound bites and slogans, this situation will only intensify.
At least, that's how it feels here in the Holy Land. For example, in the past few days we've been inundated by campaigns to demonize the 6 day war: Amnesty International declares us to be collective war criminals. Dr. Yossi Beilin informs us that the Six Day War was the mother of all iniquity. (Funny, I thought that was the 1948 War.) Tom Segev's new study of the war blames Israel for the war, asserting that it was an act of manipulation by Eshkol to solve the domestic crisis that visited Israel in the mid-sixties ('Will the last person leaving Lod Airport, please turn out the lights?')
That's all we hear and see. Never mind that Amnesty couldn't give a damn about the people of Sederot. (Well, since Olmert, Livni, Peretz, the army and the Sheinkin crew don't; why should they?)
Never mind that Yossi Beilin is a bespectacled demagogue. (Can he really have forgotten that he government dug 10,000 graves during the period of waiting? Can he really have forgotten that the Arabs were aiming to finally wipe us off of the map?) Never mind that Tom Segev is a first rate propagandist with a PhD who's books have been excoriated by responsible historians. (Michael Oren, who wrote the critically acclaimed history of the war, told me last week that there are no Arabs in Segev's book. No Real Threat. No USSR. There are only Israeli machinations.)
To return to Baudrillard, all of this gives me pause and a chill.
Can we withstand this wave of de-moralizing propaganda? Can the anarchist, (self)-destructive elements in our society be prevented from eating away at the last bit of resolve and identity that remains ours?
I'm sad to say that I really don't know.
The answer stares you in the face - THe Shalem Center has been hijacked by "moderate" "centrists" - who are really leftists in disguise who have been influenced by all the propaganda. It supported the Disengagement, and all the folks such as Oren, Klein-Halevi and Atza-El supported Oslo and any "plan" that came after - and actively portrayed the opponents of any of these plans as "irrational right wing fanatics". Even Yoram Hazony - who had good intentions in setting up the center - abandoned the settlements and moved to Jerusalem in order to "appease" the elites the run the country and show that he is "moderate".
ReplyDeleteThe Shalem Center is a perfect example of the result you describe. How even people who are thinking educated individuals can be hijacked by the propaganda and agenda of the left. The Shalem Center is no longer a a neo-conservative think tank. It has been hijacked by Beilin's minions.
I remember a symposium in New York where Hazony begged the panel and the audience "Don't judge me by my headgear." When you're trying so hard to escape the image your yarmulke gives, it's perhaps inevitable that you'll abandon principle too.
ReplyDeleteJohn O'Sullivan, of National Review, once formulated a law: "Any organization not explicitly right-wing will, over time, become left-wing." (This is often true even for right-wing bodies as well.) Shalem always tried to be balanced and moderate, never coming out too strongly for one side or another. The result is to be expected.