THE BBC IS JUST ONE FACE OF THE LOCKSTEP LEFTIST MEDIA

The mass media age may have increased our freedom of speech but our mass-mediated perception of reality has arguably stifled our freedom of thought. In times past people may have known only what was going on in their own neck of the woods but at least they knew it intimately, which perhaps provided some reality check. Also one community was relatively free from the influence of another. Not anymore. Now, thanks to the likes of the BBC you know so much more - and have an opinion on so much more.

Now you know that some brutal murders merit grief on a national scale whilst others deserve barely a passing mention. You know that jumping up and down at rock concerts will help to save the world from poverty. You know that man made global warming is threatening to destroy the planet and it's all the fault of capitalism. Just like you know that capitalism was virtually brought down on the stroke of midnight in 2000 by something called the Millenium Bug. Older people know that the world was very nearly overwhelmed in the 1970's by The Next Ice Age. You know that if you have ever stood next to someone smoking a cigarette it might one day kill you. Best of all you know what the most important thing going on in the world at any one time is because it is the thing that headlines the news. Thus has the mass media deluged people's consciousness with trashy certainties at huge cost to their freedom of spirit. Killing off The Age of Reason and replacing it with the Age of Feeling.

It is not even that the BBC and its like are deliberately trying to present a distorted perspective on current affairs or anything else. It is worse than that; the distortion is so embedded in media culture that it collectively fails to comprehend that there are other perspectives. The BBC and its hinterland of favoured contributors teems with champagne lefties, celebrity poseurs and assorted other have-your-cake-and-eat-it fellow travellers of the liberal establishment elite.

And it is a veritable honey pot for the not so big wide world of the arts and academia. The joke is that they all think of themselves as radicals and guardians of freedom. Funny business radicalism; the word suggests boldness, independent mindedness, freethinking. The reality is the opposite. It is a me- too mentality of fitting in with the prevailing ethos, often first absorbed during student days. I remember when I was at university in the 1970's, one or two lonely guys in tweeds and sports jackets flitting furtively across the psychedelic bead strewn quadrangle clutching their briefcases. I remember thinking those guys are the real radicals here. The thoroughly predictable `radical' offerings from the BBC in-crowd are invariably dripping with media establishment mythology and the depressing fact that the BBC is often hailed as a great bastion of intellectual independence merely demonstrates the overwhelming brainwashing power that the little box in the corner now has on our intellectual horizons.

The last half-century was so dominated by the spectre of the totalitarian state that no one foresaw what was really coming down the line. George Orwell partly saw the future that we now inhabit - but with one crucial difference. In his nightmare 1984, a political elite controlled the television in the corner of the room and used it to brainwash the citizenry. Whereas in the real post 1984 nightmare, a pervasive mass media - a cancerous organism out of the control of anyone, even its own media elite - brainwashes everyone, politicians included. It is not that anyone is actively trying to brainwash you; it is more that a powerful tendency to group-think is the very nature of mass broadcasting.

But the most insidious brainwashing happens at a more subtle level than this. The most insidious brainwashing lies in the power of storytelling. It is at this subliminal level that the great soft-left crusades - moral relativism and the cult of victimhood have been won. More than anywhere it is in radio and television film, drama and soap opera.

Try these tests next time you are watching your favourite BBC drama or Hollywood movie: If the characters happen to include - say - a white middle class guy and a non-white working class guy, who is going to turn out to have surprising hidden qualities and who is going to turn out to have a surprising hidden dark side? Or compare the proportion homosexual characters on your tv screen with that in your own real life. Try and find the drama where the `right wing' character turns out to be full of compassion and the `left wing' character full of bile or where the successful business executive turns out to be rather a nice chap. This sort of myth making has underpinned so much of Western story telling for at least fifty years now and has been more corrosive of freedom than any political regime.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Romney hits out at Dems: "Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney took aim at Democratic rivals on Sunday, calling them all unprepared to lead the country and comparing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's economic plan to that of Socialist Karl Marx. "It would be helpful to have a person leading the country who understands how the economy works and has actually managed something," the former Massachusetts governor told reporters after a Republican fundraiser. "In the case of the three Democratic front-runners, not one of them has managed even a corner store, let alone a state or a city." Romney targeted a recent economic policy speech by Clinton for special criticism. Clinton said "we have been an on-your-own society. She said it's time to get rid of that and replace that with shared responsibility and we're-in-it-together society. That's out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx."

Brand new Airbus fails: "The Jetstar plane whose engine failed and forced an emergency landing at Bali was just three weeks old, Jetstar has revealed. The plane was forced to make an emergency landing at Bali after an apparent engine failure after leaving Bangkok bound for Melbourne. It was diverted to Denpasar Airport at Bali. Jetstar spokesman Simon Westaway said the left-hand engine was shut down during the flight. ''It's a brand new plane, it's three weeks old off the production line at Airbus in Toulouse, France. ''We're, obviously, working on some contingencies for those passengers and and aircraft as we speak.'' Passengers onboard the flight have been told 'engine failure' was behind the forced landing. It's believed they're still on board the jet, because there's no one at the airport to help them disembark"

French told to be doers rather than pundits: "France is the country that produced the Enlightenment, Descartes' one-liner "I think, therefore I am" and the solemn pontifications of Jean-Paul Sartre and other celebrity philosophers. But, in the Government of Nicolas Sarkozy, thinking has lost its cachet. Proposing a tax-cut law last week, the Minister for Finance, Christine Lagarde, advised the French people to abandon their "old national habit". "France is a country that thinks," she told the National Assembly. "There is hardly an ideology that we haven't turned into a theory . This is why I would like to tell you: enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves." Citing Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, she said the French should work harder, earn more and be rewarded with lower taxes if they get rich"

Iraqis turning against Al Qaeda: "Fed up with being part of a group that cuts off a person's face with piano wire to teach others a lesson, dozens of low-level members of al-Qaeda in Iraq are daring to become informants for the US military in a hostile Baghdad neighbourhood. The ground-breaking move in Doura is part of a wider trend that has started in other al-Qaeda hotspots across the country and in which Sunni insurgent groups and tribal sheikhs have stood together with the coalition against the extremist movement. "They are turning. We are talking to people who we believe have worked for al-Qaeda in Iraq and want to reconcile and have peace," said Colonel Ricky Gibbs, commander of the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, which oversees the area"

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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