Congressmen Seek To Lift Propaganda Ban

BuzzFeed ^ | May 18, 2012 | Michael Hastings

[thouworm]

“I just don’t want to see something this significant – whatever the pros and cons – go through without anyone noticing,” “ says one source on the Hill, who is disturbed by the law. According to this source, the law would allow "U.S. propaganda intended to influence foreign audiences to be used on the domestic population."

The new law would give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public. “It removes the protection for Americans,” says a Pentagon official who is concerned about the law. “It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.”

[Ohioan]

Your comments are both apt & significant.

I would only add this: Those whom you refer to as "liberals," who fall into the category of being "sincerely & honestly wrong," are among the victims of those who actively promote the war on reality, which is at the core of ideology that you & I both deplore. Here the only answer--that is to rescue such victims--is in challenging the false premises that are being instilled by a corrupt new Academic/Media orthodoxy that has focused the perspective of so many students in recent decades on a Collectivist/Egalitarian fantasy based on those false premises.

William Flax

[darrellmaurina]

I think we agree.

You're an Oberlin graduate. I'm sure you saw a wide variety of leftists there, ranging from people who wanted to be “openminded” to people who were hard-left Marxists and worse. I can't think of many places better to study the nuttiness of liberalism than the bowels of that beast...

[Ohioan]

Oberlin has a variety of Leftists, but in the era when I attended, the really "hard-left Marxists" went to Antioch in Yellow Springs, Ohio, not Oberlin. We had more of the Keynesians & CFR types.

In the early 1960s, I was invited to speak at Antioch, by a seven member YAF Chapter--the dissenters on a small campus of 850 or so with many hard Left types--some the children of known New York Communists. Being familiar with Leftwing thought patterns from my Oberlin experience, I applied the lesson from the fable of the Six Blind Hindus & the elephant, and said what I would have said to a Conservative Ohio audience, but in a reverse & somewhat scrambled order, with the result that you could hear a pin drop, as the c. 100 or so in attendance, had no clear idea where I was coming from for the hour & a quarter that I spoke.

A few weeks later, J.J. Kilpatrick, then still with the Richmond News Leader, with whom I had an extensive correspondence during the late 1950s & early 1960s, spoke there under the same auspices. But his only comment to me afterward, was how slovenly & dirty the students in attendance appeared. My experience with Oberlin Leftists had made me much less focused on that facet; but in Virginia, in that era, College students still dressed like young ladies & gentlemen.

(But do not get the wrong idea. While the Oberlin Leftist activist types were sometimes slovenly, the typical student was nothing like the Antioch Leftists in appearance. Among our plethora of Ohio colleges, Antioch was truly in a class by itself.)

William Flax