Toronto Star: Who you calling docile?!

I was going to talk about Bill Maher's silly, transparently pro-Israel movie "Religulous" today (he claims to believe in nothing so we have to assume he's paid to defend both Israel and Obama), but the Toronto Star comes across as much sillier and equally obvious with its myopic trashing of China: Beijing's 'aim is to make people docile' - Propaganda apparatus is vast and scarily effective.

We're increasingly exhorted to believe that China is a monster (read that as a threat to western corporate world dominance) but we keep on buying their cheap products, not because we love China - although we haven't sufficiently learned to hate them either - but because our economy keeps getting worse and worse and jobs keep going elsewhere.

Quite a bind the multinational corporations have gotten themselves into. They take our jobs to foreign sweatshops, charging an arm and a leg for the products they pay peanuts to produce, and then they get upset when we buy Chinese.

Anyway, the Star is doing its bit for the power structure by demonizing the Chinese government, as if China had the corner on mind bending, and as if China is all that much different from what we're increasingly experiencing in North America.

For instance, a big to-do is made out of the Chinese teen who died at an internet addiction camp. We don't know what really went on there, but we do know it was operated as a business (if we can believe our own media) and is only rumoured to have received state funding, and the parents apparently voluntarily dropped the kid off for treatment, and also that if such a thing happened here it would be considered a criminal event, not an ideological one - the abuse scandals in church schools and day care centres being a prime example.

What the Star fails to tell us is that America is also developing internet addiction programs, and we all know that Canada is never far behind the US regarding what's in fashion and what increases the opportunity to invade its citizens' personal lives.

It's hilarious that the Star makes the Chinese out to be bad guys for firing the journalist who broke the story (if it happened, if we can believe our own media).  It certainly distracts from the fact that North American journalists are well aware of what they can and cannot report and still keep their jobs, and as a result are as docile and obedient as the Chinese are said to be, propping up the two-headed one party system that exists here.

It's disturbing that the Star doesn't seem to realize it is describing our own propaganda system when it quotes anonymous "scholars" who say that "aside from the People's Liberation Army – which is directly accountable to the Communist Party of China – there is no more powerful and important administrative branch than the sprawling, bureaucratic establishment known as the Central Propaganda Department."

Take a look and see what one of our own propaganda departments, National Defence, is up to.

... the DND stated that it provided the media with video and still photos from every major operation. As well, there were “thousands of communications products including issues and operations backgrounders, media advisories, news releases, speakers’ kits, Ministerial statements, media analyses, brochures, pamphlets and backdrops for exhibits” produced and distributed by the DND’s public affairs group.

As reported of China, DND's propaganda also extends to all levels of government to the point where municipal public service vehicles sport "Support our Troops" decals. Our governments via the media try hard to brainwash us, but they call it "Public Affairs".

Even, and maybe especially, the Israel Lobby tells the media "how stories should be laid out and what articles must be removed from websites". Oh sure, to appear balanced, you might occasionally see a columnist who is allowed to present a different viewpoint, but the overall effect is to sway public opinion according to the dictates of the power structure. And, as in China: "Those who flout the system can be fired." (They can sometimes be re-hired if enough fellow journalists get behind them and shame the media) - See this Google search result of media cannings).

Yeah, China is bad alright. But we're badder because we delude ourselves into thinking we have a democracy, in spite of the government deciding everything for us behind closed doors, putting on a show in the House that bears no resemblance to the collusion that goes on in secret, lying to us at every opportunity via the compliant media, confounding every issue to the point where people don't trust politicians period and only a few die-hard Conservatives trust the media, and a large percentage of the voters are too lethargic to even bother showing up at the polls on election day - because they know it's just going to be the same old same old, except maybe even worse.

Any differences in the comparison between China and North America are mere technicalities.

It's hard to take our media seriously when they are so patently obvious in their mission to mold our minds. Sometimes you just have to guffaw. The biggest yuk of all in the Star article on the docility of the Chinese is this:

Seasoned editors note that 90 per cent of Chinese papers are filled with entertainment and sports and lighter fare that the propaganda department couldn't care less about.

Take a gander at the Star's front page and see the headlines listed in the most prominent place and font on September 27, 2009:

Champ breaks Cdn record at waterfront marathon

News|Insight Sex: It's free, healthy and good for the soul

News|Ontario Hwy. 401 leaves trail of low tanks and aching bladders
Photo gallery: Highway rest stops to close

HealthZone|News The gospel of men's weight-loss according to Brooker
"I'm going to talk to you about rice cakes, which are very important to me," says Peter Rosenthal.

Sports|Hockey Wayne Gretzky exposed as more SoCal than local

Sports|Baseball 2009 Blue Jays Report Card
The Blue Jays' class of '09 will mercifully graduate in a week, heading to the golf course without a post-season pitch being thrown in anger for the...Jays stats  Jays depth chart

News|GTA Race, festival to close downtown roads

News|World Stowaway rat delays flight to Toronto

News|GTA It's hard for mayors to say goodbye
Photos: David Miller through the years

News|World Somalia's last, best hopes rest on 'unique' president

That last one reinforces the idea that people need to be led, and that there is such a thing as an uncorrupted leader in this day and age of profit above all else.

And then there's this propaganda piece, under the misnomer "Analysis", for extending Canada's mission in Afghanistan, consisting mainly of the obligatory two minutes of hate for "Al Qaeda" and "The Taliban" (our 21st Century Emmanuel Goldstein), and the usual "white" superiority treatise on how brown skinned people can't solve their own problems (ignoring completely that it's foreign exploitation that created the problems in the first place).  And guess for whom the concern is purported to be greatest - Pakistan, America's biggest partner in crime in that region.

It is also a not-too-subtle plug for Obama - "The One" the media currently endorse:

What a mess George W. Bush left behind when he failed to understand it was Afghanistan and Pakistan, not Iraq that engendered the greatest threat to the United States.

Here are a few results of searches on the issue of North American docility that expose the legitimate fears of North Americans about government and media efforts to render them mindlessly obedient:

Fluoride makes people docile

Television’s Docile Subservience to the Law

Law does not produce a landscape of equality: instead, it reproduces stratification. Thus, docility to the systems of law also means docility to injustice.

The Docile American, US-Canadian docility, etc.

=====

Synchronous emailed links that arrived as I was writing the above: (thanks to John)

G20: More lies, more deception

Curly, Moe and Larry got game

John comments: The power of propaganda ...
On September 21 Iran notified the UN Atomic group that they were building another group of centrifuges to increase their reserves of 5 % uranium for power production. This was done 18 months before they were going into production. This was well within the requirements required by the regulation.

The G20 waited till the meeting in Pittsburg to blow this up and accusing Iran of getting ready for atomic weapons. Below the results of a poll in Le Figaro this morning, with 79% in favour of increased sanctions
Yet when Israel is asked for allowing inspections in their plant,  the accuse everybody of antisemitism.

Question: Does one have to increase sanctions against Iran?
Le Figaro  Sept 27 2009
Faut-il durcir les sanctions contre l’Iran ?
Commentaires 157  Votants 28161
oui  77.69%   non  22.31%

=====

A little comic (sort of) relief: VIDEO - Air Farce: Harper, Ignatieff & Satan