Exposing Lies is Key to Poltical Base Buiilding

[Borba100@xxxxxxxxxxx]

In a message dated 09/10/2000 2:33:54 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
aabdo@xxxxxxxxx writes:


<<
 Chomsky is to be criticized, along with so many others for playing
 interminable games with data.      He is always trying to explain in
 outrageous amounts of detail, how in just ONE MORE PARTICULAR CASE,
 there is a media manipulation of information.       You seem to want to
 join him in this contest?
  >>

No,  I approach and analyze the media in an entirely different fashion from
Chomsky.  I don't want to dwell on that here, but soon (I still haven't had
time) I will finish the two text analyses I did of his stuff, and the
difference will be clearer.

Meanwhile, I am not in any contest.  I have nothing against the man
personally.  We had a very pleasant exchange of several emails last year and
prior to that (contrary to his opinion) we had never met.

But he has much influence and he is the rock to which the barnacles of Serb
bashing within the antiwar movement cling.  (Yee-ouch)

Aabdo everyone is brutal in war. That's true by definition, so isn't it
irrelevant?

For when the media puts forward SPECIFIC STATEMENTS to get ordinary people to
hate the citizens of a target country - a country the US wishes to take over
or attacks  - isn't it critical that, in order to help ordinary people learn
to think critically  (especially working people!)  - isn't it vital that we
expose those lies?

Do those of you who do mass work do that? expose lies?  My experience is,
it's best done with the least jargon possible (preferably none).  Jargon is
so often a matter of Showing the Flag - counter productive. The most radical
thing in the world is for working people to learn that they can see through
the lies of their betters!

Exposing lies has nothing to do with pacifism.  It is done by any serious
political movement.  Lenin talked said it was crucial in What Is To be Done.
It was the strength of the Bolsheviks, the most political of revolutionaries.
But any protest movement (e.g., serious union movement) must do it.  It was
the heart of the strategy of the US student movement from 1965-1969, and it
led to massive participation wherever it was applied.  People hate liars.
And people, even middle class people, are energized by learning to see
through the lies.

One of the best kinds of leaflets is just a list - Lie and Truth -- Lie # 1,
then some explanation of the lying position.  Then Truth, and you give the
answer.

People yearn for the truth. They KNOW something fishy is going on.

The Croatian fascists dynamited 10,000 homes - of Croatian antifascists and
Serbs.  But Serbia is full of - Croatian refugees, Roma refugees, Bosnian
Muslim refugees, Albanian refugees.  It is these distinctions, lied about in
the media, ignored or misrepresented by Chomsky, that are vital to explain.

<<
most of us who do not have
time to read tons of stuff about Milosevic and Yugoslavia.     We have
little time to try to figure out the situation in Kosovo or Indonesia,
the Caucasus or The Congo.      We are never going to even visit these
places, not even as vacations.      We just don't have 5-6 hours per
day, year after year.>>

It is NOT necessary to read 5 hours a day to know what's happening in
Yugoslavia. That's why we have Emperor's Clothes and other websites.

 I read that much because it;s my job. I (try to) uncover the slip-ups in
official accounts; I do research. That's a special task, not necessary for
everyone.  It's my job.  I enjoy it.  I have a sick mind.

Several of us who work with emperor's Clothes do that.  Right now, one
fellow, a retired Linguistics Professor, is studying some footage from
Australia in order to uncover lies and cause great political embarrassment to
a leading political commentator there.  We already know that they
mistranslated several statements by Serbian leaders.   Another person (a
linguistics graduate student - hmmmmmm?!? Is EVERYONE but me a linguist?) is
studying the newspaper accounts of supposed witnesses at Srebrenica (the
phony massacre).  It is amazing.  We will produce a chart with all the
amazing contradictions in their "testimony".  (One guy, supposedly lame in
one account is miraculously cured in another.  The power of fiction!)

This work provides the material you can read in Emperor's Clothes -
www.tenc.net - You can use the evidence we have uncovered to win over the
people you can reach without having to do all the research yourselves.  Take
it, rework it, use it to win people over.  It works.

Best regards,
Jared