language

And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died
Don McLean, “American Pie”, 1971

Thanks to the Gilets jaunes in France, a few astute social theorists are finally being heard on YouTube, despite mainstream resistance and diversion. They are finding words more lucidly than could be achieved in the absence of such revolutionary upheaval.

Any scanning of the headlines both in standard and critical postings, especially since the 2016 US elections, will suffice. In the interest of brevity, reference is made to almost any pages published concurrent with this remark.

How could a country win her fight against Western imperialism?  How could it become truly independent, if its people are fully conditioned, through the mass media and education, by the North American and European doctrines and world view?
Wherever I work and struggle in this world, I am always amazed, even shocked, by how powerful the Western tools of indoctrination are, how effective its propaganda is.

It is not only information that they need – in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it…What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves…what may be called the sociological imagination.
— C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959

Guest post by PRAVEEN VERMA If Prime Minister Narendra Modi were to write about the recent deaths of sewer workers in India, the headline would be: Some people attained moksha (nirvana) while experiencing spirituality, In his casteist book Karmayog, he wrote that manual scavenging is a spiritual experience, hence if some people die during cleaning … Continue reading Sewer Workers Deaths – The Meaning of Dalit for Bhartiya Janta Party →

Note From Media Lens

This is a slightly amended version of the foreword to the new Media Lens book, Propaganda Blitz – How The Corporate Media Distort Reality, published today by Pluto Press. Warm thanks to John Pilger for contributing this superb piece to our book.
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In my last blog post I argued that power in our societies resides in structure, ideology and narratives – supporting what we might loosely term our current “neoliberal order” – rather than in individuals.

After the floods comes the pestilence. Even as the rest of us are focusing all our energies on making sure that epidemics and sheer psychological trauma aren’t going to bring our people devastated by floods to the brink of their endurance, here is a bizarre person, a certain P C George, MLA from Poonjar, Kerala, … Continue reading How to Deal with Male Chauvinist Piorge: Ten Tips →

In Part 1, I talked about the power of social media giants and claims of “free speech” on their platforms. Again, I am referring just to the U$, as I am most familiar with the debate on “free speech” there. In the future I may expand this analysis to other capitalist countries.