Letters to the Editor
Kryptik
Published Letters: 47
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To Bill Owen - Fear and Manipulation
[Read the article: Lessons not learned]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Whose media?
Don't Americans know about used car salesmen?
What about ordinary, decent, human restraint?
Where was that?
1) The 'traditional media'. Cable and Network News, Newspapers, etc. After all, this was before the true advent of blog-influence.
2) Difference: Car Salesmen operate on trying to make you feel smart.
The war was sold on Fear and Revenge. Two much more powerful tools than ego-stroking. Boogeymen and convenient straw targets. By successfully inflating the threat of Iraq, conflating them with those who attacked us on 9/11, and effectively silencing those with valid objections, the shine of inevitability was placed on the war. Those who were for it were for it big and loud. Those who were against it either had no place to voice it, or simply gave up due to 'inevitability'.
3) Human restraint is all well and good, but if you don't have the power to implement it, then it's useless. The Administration convinced the most important people it needed to: Congress.
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Bill Owen - Take to the Street?
[Read the article: Lessons not learned]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Next time there is war planned, like the upcoming one in Iran, don't try to get "exposure" in the media. Take it to the streets. It's the only thing they listen to.
What makes you think people didn't?
The problem is that again, it was downplayed as much as possible. While they couldn't completely ignore them, they did two key things: 1) They consistently underreported the turnout (a tactic they continue to do). Where thousands become 'hundreds', and hundreds of thousands become 'thousands', in order to downplay the size, and thus the scope of such marches. 2) They characterized the marches by the most unsavory elements within the diverse crowd, usually focusing on anarchist or simply unruly idiots that clashed with police, and then using them as an example of the kind of people throughout the whole protest.
Blaming the media would be a cheap excuse, if they haven't consistently demonstrated that they were willing to do everything to muffle anti-war sentiment. Hell, they continue to do their best to to this day.
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Minimizing the voice of the opposition
[Read the article: Lessons not learned]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The point here, Bill Owen, is that you're doing what I exactly point out about what the media did and still tries to do: belittle the opposition by minimizing it. The fact that you're doing it post ipso facto doesn't matter, as it only serves to give an excuse for their support by saying "everyone else believed it then!"
And yes, there were some set in their opinion either way. But there were also those who were ambivalent and would not have taken a side either way if not for the fearful trumpeting of news organizations about the dire threat Iraq posed. The lack of another voice on the matter convinced many, that could easily have been convinced otherwise, that the threat was real and imminent, and that action was the only course.
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The Remarkable Hubris of the Wrong
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn points out one of the things that consistently frustrates me and dumbfounds me.
I mean...for those who got it wrong all the time to 1) dismiss the wrong done in the past, and then 2) insist that their way should still be the way things are done is just incomprehensible. There's a word for that: INSANE. Doing the same thing the exact same way on a consistent basis and expecting different results.
The doctor analogy is spot on, and I find it amazing no one seems to understand the fact that if you want to correct something, don't look to the people who got it wrong in the first place!
Yet, again, it seems like we operate on the most absurd wavelength of "the more wrong you were at the beginning, the more right you must be now."
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to Paul Dirks
[Read the article: The ongoing exclusion of war opponents from the Iraq debate]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's just happening so slowly that we don't notice. But many war opponents who were angrily and LOUDLY shouted down and ridiculed have now graduated to being ignored. (Anybody still talking about Natalie Maines?)
That's not graduating. That's regressing. You know the adage from Gandhi?
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then you win."
We've fallen back from the third step all the way to the first. Outright ignoring anti-war opposition to this amount of success bodes ill for us, since it's proving that no amount of public outcry can change our course if the Administration and its complicit allies want it enough.