Re: [WDDM] Response to PVR - Regarding rule by representatives

[Antonio Rossin <rossin(at)tin.it>]

Hi,

Unfortunately, most of democracy activists neglect
facing this very subject, that is, the about 98 % of the  population
being dependent on the about 2 % of the
"politicians" opinion engineering anf PR to the only
advantage of the power-holders elite

Let me quote:

QUOTE
-----------------------
Noam Chomsky
Media Control
Noam Chomsky - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 17, 1991

(excerpted from the Alternative Press Review, Fall 1993
http://www.lbbs.org/chomsky/talks/9103-media-control.html

...Let me begin by counter-posing two different conceptions of democracy.
One conception of democracy has it that a democratic society is one in
which the public has the means to participate in some meaningful way in
the management of their own affairs and the means of information are
open and free....

An alternative conception of democracy is that the public must be barred
from managing of their own affairs and the means of information must be
kept narrowly and rigidly controlled.  That may sound like an odd
conception of democracy, but it's important to understand that it is the
prevailing conception....


Early History of Propaganda

...[The Wilson administration] established a government propaganda
commission, called the Creel Commission, which succeeded, within six
months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical,
war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear
the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world.

That was a major achievement, and it led to a further achievement. Right
at  time and after the war the same techniques were used to whip up a
hysterical Red Scare, as it was called, which succeeded pretty much in
destroying unions and eliminating such dangerous problems as freedom of
the press and freedom of political thought.  There was very strong
support from the media, from the business establishment, which in fact
organized, pushed much of this work, and it was in general a great success.

Among those who participated actively and enthusiastically were the
progressive intellectuals, people of the John Dewey circle, who took
great pride, as you can see from their own writings at the time, in
having shown that what they called the "more intelligent members of the
community," namely themselves, were able to drive a reluctant population
into a war by terrifying them and eliciting jingoist fanaticism.  The
means that were used were extensive. For example, there was a good deal
of fabrication of atrocities by the Huns, Belgian babies with their arms
torn off, all sorts of awful things that you still read in history
books. They were all invented by the British propaganda ministry, whose
own committment at the time, as they put it in their secret
deliberations, was "to control the thought of the world." But more
crucially they wanted to control the thought of the more intelligent
members of the community in the U.S., who would then disseminate the
propaganda that they were concocting and convert the pacifist country to
wartime hysteria. That worked. It worked very well. And it taught a
lesson: State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and
when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a
lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to
this day.

Spectator Democracy


...Walter Lippman, who was the dean of American journalists, a major
foreign and domestic policy critic and also a major theorist of liberal
democracy... argued that what he called a "revolution in the art of
democracy," could be used to "manufacture consent," that is, to bring
about agreement on the part of the public for things that they didn't
want by the new techniques of propaganda....

...He argued that in a properly-functioning democracy there are classes
of citizens. There is first of all the class of citizens who have to
take some active role in running general affairs. That's the specialized
class. They are the people who analyze, execute, make decisions, and run
things in the political, economic, and ideological systems. That's a
small percentage of the population... Those others, who are out of the
small group, the big majority of the population, they are what Lippman
called "the bewildered herd." We have to protect ourselves from the
trampling and rage of the bewildered herd...

...So we need something to tame the bewildered herd, and that something
is this new revolution in the art of democracy: the "manufacture of
consent." The media, the schools, and popular culture have to be
divided. For the political class and the decision makers have to give
them some tolerable sense of reality, although they also have to instill
the proper beliefs.
Just remember, there is an unstated premise here. The unstated premise
-- and even the responsible men have to disguise this from themselves --
has to do with the question of how they get into the position where they
have the authority to make decisions. The way they do that, of course,
is by serving people with real power. The people with real power are the
ones who own the society, which is a pretty narrow group. If the
specialized class can come along and say, I can serve your interests,
then they'll be part of the executive group. You've got to keep that
quiet. That means they have to have instilled in them the beliefs and
doctrines that will serve the interests of private power. Unless they
can master that skill, they're not part of the specialized class. They
have to be deeply indoctrinated in the values and interests of private
power and the state-corporate nexus that represents it.
If they can get through that, then they can be part of the specialized
class. The rest of the bewildered herd just have to be basically
distracted. Turn their attention to something else....

...In what is nowadays called a totalitarian state, then a military
state, it's easy. You just hold a bludgeon over their heads, and if they
get out of line you smash them over the head. But as society has become
more free and democratic, you lose that capacity. Therefore you have to
turn to the techniques of propaganda. The logic is clear. Propaganda is
to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state....


Public Relations

The U.S. pioneered the public relations industry. Its committment was to
"control the public mind," as its leaders put it. They learned a lot
from the successes of the Creel Commission and the success in creating
the Red Scare and its aftermath. The public relations industry underwent
a huge expansion at that time. It succeeded for some time in creating
almost total subordination of the public to business rule through the
1920s....

Public relations is a huge industry. They're spending by now something
on the order of a billion dollars a year. All along its committment was
to controlling the public mind....

 ...The corporate executive and the guy who cleans the floor all have
the same interests. We can all work together and work for Americanism in
harmony, liking each other. That was essentially the message. A huge
amount of effort was put into presenting it. This is, after all, the
business community, so they control the media and have massive resources...
Mobilizing community opinion in favor of vapid, empty concepts like
Americanism. Who can be against that? Or, to bring it up to date,
"Support our troops." Who can be against that? Or yellow ribbons. Who
can be against that?... The point of public relations slogans like
"Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything. They mean as much
as whether you support the people in Iowa. Of course, there was an
issue. The issue was, Do you support our policy? But you don't want
people to think about the issue. That's the whole point of good
propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be
against, and everybody's going to be for, because nobody knows what it
means, because it doesn't mean anything, but its crucial value is that
it diverts your attention....

That's all very effective. It runs right up to today. And of course it
is carefully thought out. The people in the public relations industry
aren't there for the fun of it. They're doing work. They're trying to
instill the right values. In fact, they have a conception of what
democracy ought to be:
It ought to be a system in which the specialized class is trained to
work in the service of the masters, the people who own the society. The
rest of the population ought to be deprived of any form of organization,
because organization just causes trouble. They ought to be sitting alone
in front of the TV and having drilled into their heads the message,
which says, the only value in life is to have more commodities or live
like that rich middle class family you're watching and to have nice
values like harmony and Americanism. That's all there is in life. You
may think in your own head that there's got to be something more in life
than this, but since you're watching the tube alone you assume, I must
be crazy, because that's all that's going on over there....
So that's the ideal. Great efforts are made in trying to achieve that ideal.
Obviously, there is a certain conception behind it. The conception of
democracy is the one that I mentioned. The bewildered herd is a
problem.    We've got to prevent their rage and trampling. We've got to
distract them. They should be watching the Superbowl or sitcoms or
violent movies. Every once in a while you call on them to chant
meaningless slogans like "Support our troops." You've got to keep them
pretty scared, because unless they're properly scared and frightened of
all kinds of devils that are going to destroy them from outside or
inside or somewhere, they may start to think, which is very dangerous,
because they're not competent to think. Therefore it's important to
distract them and marginalize them.


Engineering Opinion

It is also necessary to whip up the population in support of foreign
adventures. Usually the population is pacifist, just like they were during
the First World War. The public sees no reason to get involved in foreign
adventures, killing, and torture. So you have to whip them up. And to whip
them up you have to frighten them....

To a certain extent then, that ideal was achieved, but never completely.
There are institutions which it has as yet been impossible to destroy.
The churches, for example, still exist. A large part of the dissident
activity in the U.S. comes out of the churches, for the simple reason
that they're there. So when you go to a European country and give a
political talk, it may very likely be in the union hall. Here that won't
happen, because unions first of all barely exist, and if they do exist
they're not political organizations. But the churches do exist, and
therefore you often give a talk in a church. Central American solidarity
work mostly grew out of the churches, mainly because they exist.

The bewildered herd never gets properly tamed, so this is a constant battle.
-----------------------------------------------
ENDQUOTE


Hoping this helps,  best regards,

antonio



Annette Jackson ha scritto:
> To cover every item of Government, by having people vote on all of it
> is just not real, you would have the average citizen saying that we
> were crazy.
>
> In Australia we Government departments that handle some items, we have
> local government that handle some items, we have state government that
> handle some items, we have federal government that handle some items
> and we the Governor General that handle some items and this is their
> fulltime jobs, average person will have their own jobs and then will
> be expected to vote on all issues of government.
>
> I personally think that the selection process of our candidates is the
> most important, ask yourself who is behind the scene's ensuring that
> they get the right candidate they want, l believe it would be a good
> thing if we could move away from political parties.
>
> > From my ongoing studies, politicians a just serves to higher powers, the
> higher powers ensure they get their person, some a groomed from school
> to the office of being a politician, and the media is the weapon that
> keeps them on track.
>
> > From what l have been looking into, it is about 2% of the population,
> > that
> control the world, they believe they are something special, and the
> rest of us are nothing more then cattle, and their servants, to
> challenge them you risk your life.
>
> Personally l believe more and more if we could broke the control of
> these people, we may start getting the sort of governments we want,
> and the government processes we want.
>
> Regards
>
> Martin Jackson
>
> http://realitypoliticsgoodgovernment.blogspot.com/
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Antell, editor
> CitizenPowerMagazine.net" <citizenp(at)citizenpowermagazine.net>
> To: <wddm@world-wide-democracy.net>
> Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2007 10:56 PM
> Subject: [WDDM] Response to PVR - Regarding rule by representatives
>
>
> > Hi PVR,
> >
> > You've stated a position clearly: "We need to put our trust into
> > somebody to take care of our concerns."
> >
> > I disagree with that position.  And I think that most of us in WDDM
> > disagree with that position.
> >
> > We don't want to be governed.  We want to move from representative
> > democracy to direct democracy.
> > Mark
> >
> > PS. Yours is a legitimate, honest, and widely held position.  Though
> > I disagree with what you say, I'll defend your right to say it.
> >
> > -----------------------
> >
> > Vijayaraghavan Padmanabhan wrote:
> >
> > > Dear All,
> > > Continuing from my previous letter, an important matter to be
> > > decided before we formulate a mission statement is to decide whether
> > > by aiming at Direct Democracy, we are doing away with the concept of
> > > 'rule by representatives'. This particular view is held by some
> > > advocates of DD. While this may be the ideal theoretical goal, it
> > > may be nearly impossible in practice. We need to put our trust into
> > > somebody to take care of our concerns. This is the natural order of
> > > things in life. What we need is to have a mechanism where our
> > > representatives are directly accountable to the people and can be
> > > recalled at any time if sufficient people feel so. I request that
> > > members express their views regarding this since this is important
> > > to formulate a workable mission statement.
> > >
> > > PVR


Annette Jackson ha scritto:
> To cover every item of Government, by having people vote on all of it
> is just not real, you would have the average citizen saying that we
> were crazy.
>
> In Australia we Government departments that handle some items, we have
> local government that handle some items, we have state government that
> handle some items, we have federal government that handle some items
> and we the Governor General that handle some items and this is their
> fulltime jobs, average person will have their own jobs and then will
> be expected to vote on all issues of government.
>
> I personally think that the selection process of our candidates is the
> most important, ask yourself who is behind the scene's ensuring that
> they get the right candidate they want, l believe it would be a good
> thing if we could move away from political parties.
>
> > From my ongoing studies, politicians a just serves to higher powers, the
> higher powers ensure they get their person, some a groomed from school
> to the office of being a politician, and the media is the weapon that
> keeps them on track.
>
> > From what l have been looking into, it is about 2% of the population,
> > that
> control the world, they believe they are something special, and the
> rest of us are nothing more then cattle, and their servants, to
> challenge them you risk your life.
>
> Personally l believe more and more if we could broke the control of
> these people, we may start getting the sort of governments we want,
> and the government processes we want.
>
> Regards
>
> Martin Jackson
>
> http://realitypoliticsgoodgovernment.blogspot.com/
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Antell, editor
> CitizenPowerMagazine.net" <citizenp(at)citizenpowermagazine.net>
> To: <wddm@world-wide-democracy.net>
> Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2007 10:56 PM
> Subject: [WDDM] Response to PVR - Regarding rule by representatives
>
>
> > Hi PVR,
> >
> > You've stated a position clearly: "We need to put our trust into
> > somebody to take care of our concerns."
> >
> > I disagree with that position.  And I think that most of us in WDDM
> > disagree with that position.
> >
> > We don't want to be governed.  We want to move from representative
> > democracy to direct democracy.
> > Mark
> >
> > PS. Yours is a legitimate, honest, and widely held position.  Though
> > I disagree with what you say, I'll defend your right to say it.
> >
> > -----------------------
> >
> > Vijayaraghavan Padmanabhan wrote:
> >
> > > Dear All,
> > > Continuing from my previous letter, an important matter to be
> > > decided before we formulate a mission statement is to decide whether
> > > by aiming at Direct Democracy, we are doing away with the concept of
> > > 'rule by representatives'. This particular view is held by some
> > > advocates of DD. While this may be the ideal theoretical goal, it
> > > may be nearly impossible in practice. We need to put our trust into
> > > somebody to take care of our concerns. This is the natural order of
> > > things in life. What we need is to have a mechanism where our
> > > representatives are directly accountable to the people and can be
> > > recalled at any time if sufficient people feel so. I request that
> > > members express their views regarding this since this is important
> > > to formulate a workable mission statement.
> > >
> > > PVR



Annette Jackson ha scritto:
> To cover every item of Government, by having people vote on all of it
> is just not real, you would have the average citizen saying that we
> were crazy.
>
> In Australia we Government departments that handle some items, we have
> local government that handle some items, we have state government that
> handle some items, we have federal government that handle some items
> and we the Governor General that handle some items and this is their
> fulltime jobs, average person will have their own jobs and then will
> be expected to vote on all issues of government.
>
> I personally think that the selection process of our candidates is the
> most important, ask yourself who is behind the scene's ensuring that
> they get the right candidate they want, l believe it would be a good
> thing
> if we could move away from political parties.
>
> > From my ongoing studies, politicians a just serves to higher powers,
> > thehigher powers ensure they get their person, some a groomed from
> > school to the office of being a politician, and the media is the
> > weapon that keeps them on track.
>
> > From what l have been looking into, it is about 2% of the population,
> > that control the world, they believe they are something special, and
> > the rest of us are nothing more then cattle, and their servants, to
> > challenge them you risk your life.
>
> Personally l believe more and more if we could broke the control of
> these people, we may start getting the sort of governments we want,
> and the government processes we want.
>
> Regards
>
> Martin Jackson
>
> http://realitypoliticsgoodgovernment.blogspot.com/
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Antell, editor
> CitizenPowerMagazine.net" <citizenp(at)citizenpowermagazine.net>
> To: <wddm@world-wide-democracy.net>
> Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2007 10:56 PM
> Subject: [WDDM] Response to PVR - Regarding rule by representatives
>
>
> > Hi PVR,
> >
> > You've stated a position clearly: "We need to put our trust into
> > somebody to take care of our concerns."
> >
> > I disagree with that position.  And I think that most of us in WDDM
> > disagree with that position.
> >
> > We don't want to be governed.  We want to move from representative
> > democracy to direct democracy.
> > Mark
> >
> > PS. Yours is a legitimate, honest, and widely held position.  Though
> > I disagree with what you say, I'll defend your right to say it.
> >
> > -----------------------
> >
> > Vijayaraghavan Padmanabhan wrote:
> >
> > > Dear All,
> > > Continuing from my previous letter, an important matter to be
> > > decided before we formulate a mission statement is to decide whether
> > > by aiming at Direct Democracy, we are doing away with the concept of
> > > 'rule by representatives'. This particular view is held by some
> > > advocates of DD. While this may be the ideal theoretical goal, it
> > > may be nearly impossible in practice. We need to put our trust into
> > > somebody to take care of our concerns. This is the natural order of
> > > things in life. What we need is to have a mechanism where our
> > > representatives are directly accountable to the people and can be
> > > recalled at any time if sufficient people feel so. I request that
> > > members express their views regarding this since this is important
> > > to formulate a workable mission statement.
> > >
> > > PVR