Respect for ourselves guides our morals

Respect for ourselves guides our morals, respect for others guides our manners.

‒ Laurence Sterne.

The lack of logic in the thinking of my mainstream colleagues is one of the clearest signs of their scarceness of respect for themselves. A current example is their anti-Russian reporting. Not long ago, the local Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool claims under the headline 'Putin longs for old times. Why the old NATO promise still bothers the Russians’:

Yes indeed, there were certainly 'verbal' commitments made in February 1990 by, among others, the then US Secretary of State, James Baker, to his Soviet colleague Eduard Shevardnadze and to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachov. NATO would not move an ‘inch' further east after German reunification. But, and that's the rub, history changed right before your eyes and a lot of promises were made back and forth. And it was precisely this aspect that was not formally put on paper.

In short, the 'trick,' according to Het Parool, is that 'history changed right before your eyes.' The editors of this local newspaper, owned by a Belgian billionaire family, do not realize that this is a normal phenomenon, especially in our postmodern times. Moreover, the editors apparently do not know that even a 'verbal promise' is and remains an agreement, especially in this case, since Russia has been attacked from Europe three times, at the cost of tens of millions of civilian casualties. Het Parool neglects to mention this last point, because otherwise it would undermine its argument. This demonstrates once again how little self-respect this local newspaper has. It is not surprising that the circulation figures of Het Parool have plummeted from 324,000 to around 40,000 since 1945.

It is no exaggeration to say that this newspaper has been permanently wrong after the war, it was against every movement of renewal, against the activism of the communists, against Provo and what came from it, against the Vietnam protests, against the squatters' movement that tackled the housing shortage, against the gnomes and against the demands of the peace movement, against the Covid-protests, etcetera, but always in favor of the expansionism of the US and its NATO. An interesting question is therefore how a mainstream daily newspaper, even a local one, could be so ideologically oriented for more than three quarters of a century, while all that time claiming to report ‘objectively.' In line with the previous episode, I would therefore like to quote the French sociologist Jacques Ellul, who points out in his internationally acclaimed study Propaganda. The Formation Of Men's Attitudes (1965) that:

‘in our time, the conviction of democracy and its claim to inform people collide with the fact that propaganda follows an entirely different mechanism, performs a function entirely different from that of information, and that nowadays facts do not assume reality in the people’s eyes unless they are established by propaganda. Propaganda, in fact, creates truth in the sense that it creates in men subject to propaganda all the signs and indications of true believers. 

For modern man, propaganda is really creating truth. This means that truth is powerless without propaganda. And in view of the challenge the democracies face, it is of supreme importance that they abandon their confidence in truth as such and assimilate themselves to the methods of propaganda. Unless they do so, considering the present tendencies of civilization, the democratic nations will lose the war conducted in this area.’ 

In this context, the Czech-French author Milan Kundera points to the phenomenon of kitsch, where ‘the word kitsch refers to the attitude of someone who wants to please as many people as possible at any price. To please, you have to conform to what everyone wants to hear, to be at the service of ready-made ideas, in the language of beauty and emotion. He moves us to tears of self-compassion over the banalities we think and feel.’ He immediately adds the following warning: ‘On the basis of the imperative need to please and thus attract the attention of the largest possible audience, the aesthetics of the mass media are inevitably that of kitsch, and as the mass media increasingly encompass and infiltrate our entire lives, kitsch becomes our everyday aesthetics and morality.’

The horrific thing about the work of the Manichean opinion makers of the mainstream media is that they have set in motion a regression, because the majority of journalists and commentators ‘retain the conviction that one can set up a propaganda system that expresses the democratic character and does not alter the workings of democracy,’ Ellul explains. Although they realize that they are doing propaganda, they still believe that this only benefits democracy, even now, for example, in the Netherlands two Belgian families own the majority of newspapers, and making a profit is the main driving force. Moreover, ‘the monopolization of news agencies, of distribution and so on, is well known.’ It is also known that ‘while it may seem like you have limitless options, most of the media you consume is owned by one of six companies. These six media companies are known as The Big 6… the major outlets are almost all owned by these six conglomerates. To be clear, "media" in this context does not refer just to news outlets — it refers to any medium that controls the distribution of information. So here, "media'' includes 24-hour news stations, newspapers, publishing houses, Internet utilities, and even video game developers.'

https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/the-6-companies-that-own-almost-all-media-infographic/ 

The propagandistic simplism of the self-styled ‘free press,’ which has led to mass cultural deprivation, is in stark contrast to the complexity of the novel, with all its subtle layers. It is no wonder that Gustave Flaubert abhorred the simplism of journalism a century and a half ago. In 1866, the French author wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘You speak of the depravity of the press; it makes me so sick to my stomach that newspapers give me a downright physical disgust. I would rather read nothing at all than these detestable pieces of paper. But people do everything they can to make something important out of it. They believe in it and they fear it. That is the root of all evil. As long as reverence for the printed word is not eradicated, we will not make any progress. Instill in the public a love of the great and it will abandon the small things, or rather it will let the small things eliminate themselves. I consider it one of the happiest circumstances of my life that I do not write in newspapers. It does not do my purse any good, but it does my conscience good, and that is the main thing.’ Five years later, in a letter to George Sand, he stressed that ‘the whole dream of democracy consists in raising the proletarian to the level of stupidity of the bourgeois. That dream has already been partly realised. He reads the same newspapers and has the same passions.’

Flaubert’s view of the psyche of the modern masses exposed, among other things, the delusion that the Enlightenment would make foolishness disappear, an illusion that, according to Kundera, was ‘the greatest discovery of a century so proud of its scientific reason.’ After all, ‘folly does not fade away in the face of science, technology, progress or modernity; on the contrary, with progress it too advances!’ In short ‘Modern foolishness does not mean ignorance, but the thoughtlessness of ready-made ideas.’

How else can we explain the massive stupidity of the ‘corporate press’ that after Auschwitz and Hiroshima it is prepared to accept weapons of mass destruction that threaten the survival of all life on earth. How else can it be that threatening nuclear powers is seen as a kind of parlour game by the current generation of politicians and journalists? Kundera again:

‘Some eighty years after Flaubert had conceived his Emma Bovary, in the 1930s, another great novelist, Hermann Broch, would speak of the heroic efforts of the modern novel that resisted the wave of kitsch, but would eventually be crushed by it. The word kitsch refers to the attitude of someone who wants to please as many people as possible at any price. In order to please, you have to conform to what everyone wants to hear, to be at the service of ready-made ideas, in the language of beauty and emotion. He moves us to tears of self-compassion over the banalities we think and feel. After more than fifty years, Broch's core motto is now even more true. Due to the imperative need to please and thus attract the attention of the largest possible audience, the aesthetics of the mass media are inevitably that of kitsch, and as the mass media encompass and infiltrate our entire lives, kitsch becomes our daily aesthetics and morals.’

How else can it be that threatening nuclear powers is seen as a kind of parlour game by the current generation of politicians and journalists? Kundera:

An American insider of the totalitarian technocratic establishment, Daniel Ellsberg, 'America’s most famous whistleblower' and 'former military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers which helped end the Vietnam war' was also 'one of the main nuclear war planners' for 'the United States in the 1960s.' In addition to the 'Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg also copied documents concerning the American nuclear strategy, which his brother hid in a hill next to a garbage dump. However, during the tropical storm of 1971 the hill collapsed and the documents were lost.' Ellsberg nevertheless published his “reconstruction” of what was in those documents in 2017. A “former defense analyst,” he worked “for the U.S. military through the RAND Corporation think tank.” In late 2017, he said that “Eisenhower’s directed plan was for all-out war, in a first initiation of nuclear war, assuming the Soviets had not used nuclear weapons.”

Within the context described above, it is clear what disastrous role the 'con men' of Western news play. The most astute intellectuals realize this too. Kundera: 'Freeing the great human conflicts from the naive interpretation of a battle between good and evil, understanding them in the light of tragedy, was an enormous feat of mind; it brought forward the unavoidable relativism of human truths; it made clear the need to do justice to the enemy. But moral Manichaeism has an indestructible vitality. I remember an adaptation of Antigone I saw in Prague shortly after the second world war; killing the tragic in the tragedy, its author made Creon, a wicked fascist confronted by a young heroine of liberty.'

An American insider of the totalitarian technocratic establishment, Daniel Ellsberg, 'America's most famous whistleblower' and 'former military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers which helped end the Vietnam war' and was also 'one of the main nuclear war planners' was 'for the United States in the 1960s.' In addition to the 'Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg also copied documents concerning American nuclear strategy, which his brother hid in a hill next to a garbage dump. However, the hill collapsed during the tropical storm of 1971, and the documents were lost.' Ellsberg nevertheless published his "reconstruction'' of what was in those documents in 2017. A 'former defense analyst' he worked 'for the US military through the think tank RAND Corporation.' In late 2017 he said that 'Eisenhower's directed plan was for all -out war, in a first initiation of nuclear war, assuming the Soviets had not used nuclear weapons.

And that plan called, in our first strike, for hitting every city — actually, every town over 25,000 — in the USSR and every city in China. In the course of doing this there were no reserves. Everything was to be thrown as soon as it was available — it was a vast trucking operation of thermonuclear weapons — over to the USSR, but not only the USSR. The captive nations, the East Europe satellites in the Warsaw Pact, were to be hit in their air defences, which were all near cities, their transport points, their communications of any kind. So they were to be annihilated, as well… 325 million people in the USSR and China alone… a total of 600 million people. That was a time, by the way, when the population of the world was 3 billion. And that was an underestimate of their casualties — a hundred Holocausts… this was no hypothetical plan like Herman Kahn might have conceived at the doomsday machine that he thought up at the RAND Corporation as my colleague. This was an actual war plan for how we would use the existing weapons, many of which I had seen already that time.'

Of course, a genocidal attack would force the Soviet Union and China to launch a nuclear counterattack, with an estimated 600 million more civilian deaths. ‘The Banality of Evil,’ Hannah Arendt called this thoughtlessness, while Harry Mulisch wrote in his unsurpassed book The Case 40/61 in 1961:

‘Eichmann has definitively become history. What am I still talking about? People threaten people with annihilation, besides which the murder of the Jews will become a trifle, a memory from the good old days. And no American or Russian who, when ordered, will refuse to throw the bombs into the soft flesh of entire peoples — any more than Eichmann refused. What do we actually have to say about Eichmann? We, who threaten even the unborn: and this war against our offspring has been going on for sixteen years (since Hiroshima)! But that is no longer called “war” it is called a curse. Here man curses himself, his own children's children, from this speaks a hatred so fundamental, that we must fear, to have still overestimated man.'

'the night is warm and bright,

the earth smells sweet, the sky is full of starlight,

here we are,

waiting for the end,

the so called eternal gate,

we are all trying to find love,

before it is too late.'