Perhaps one of the stupidest and most hypocritical and utterly foolish things one of the most idolized of the "founders" said is also one of the most often cited with mandatory piety. It was everyone's favorite deified, slave-holding profligate Thomas Jefferson who said:
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
Yeah, really. I can imagine if the people he held in slavery ever decided to take what a later and far more admirable president* would have said was theirs by "natural right" without the leave of Master Thomas and assert their full equality and those natural rights to the fruits of their labor, which he took from them by declaration of the government he had such a hand in setting up, his recourse in stopping them would not be to wave a newspaper at them. Look at his reaction to the successful slave revolt in Haiti if you don't believe me on that point.
The entire course of Jefferson's life as a wealthy slave holder, as a politician and an office holder shows that he was blowing smoke when he said that. And it is an utterly stupid thing to say in the late 20th century when it was a slogan the media industry sold its privileges through and today when we are beginning our terrible ordeal which is the result of their having the freest reign in their history, free to degrade the public discourse and the minds of a sufficient number of Americans so they would be duped into voting for the very Donald Trump who, not a month into his regime, they are finding they were deceived, duped into and are about to be cheated, robbed by and worse.
The American media had every chance to tell the truth when they were given free reign to lie and they chose to tell lies. From the sewer pit of Breitbart, to the stink stack of FOX right up through the cabloid and broadcast crappers and even up to the Great Gray Lady of the New York Times, the free press has lied us into Donald Trump. The sales job that turned one of Jefferson's alcoholic bromides into a slogan to sell people on allowing the press to lie was, actually, an experiment in what would happen when they did that and the results are they lied us into Donald Trump.
The ACLU, the Joel Gora style media paid shills and the many scribbling class copy boys of the media who pushed allowing them to totally escape responsibility for their lies are what gave us Donald Trump.
We've seen the media lie countries into fascism before, Italy got both Mussolini and Berlusconi that way, the German and Austrian people were corrupted and sold Nazism through the media. We've seen every dictator in the modern period use the media to get and consolidate their stranglehold on countries. We've, now, seen the media creation Trump sold to the American people using the media and the very same methods of snake oil salesmanship and fascistic methods of rule through creating and channeling hate talk.
Yet we are not to learn a single thing from that because people like Thomas Jefferson said shit in the 18th century which they certainly wouldn't have lived under themselves. If the newspapers, somehow, during Jefferson's lifetime, called for the immediate abolition of slavery and his slaves to be able to sue him for the property he stole from them - declared by Lincoln to be rightfully theirs - I'm sure he would have used every organ of the government to suppress such talk, even as slaves were forbidden by law to even learn to read a newspaper.
The free-speech absolutists are in fact if not in hypocritical proclamation, the ones who gave us Trump. We need to understand that because even if we were to, somehow, manage to escape the damage that he, his fascist party and the Supreme Court with whatever fascists he and Pence put on it, it will just be a matter of time before the regime of lies that now rules our countries thinking will give us another Trump or worse. Instead of getting the puppet of someone like Putin, we could get a Putin next time. We're no smarter than they are in Russia or in any of the other countries which have been duped into voting in their own dictators.
* I am referring, of course to Abraham Lincolns utterly American refutation to Stephen Douglas's racist remark during one of their debates that Lincoln must want to marry a black woman if he claimed she was equal to a white one. Lincoln's response proves he was in every way Jefferson's moral and intellectual superior.
Now I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.
Also: It's one of the stupidest aspects of anarchism that their pipe dream is that some wonderful, decent society would result if governments were to disappear when the results of no civil government and authority is fully known and proven in the most tragic of human experience many times over the entirety of human history. When legitimate authority is absent, rule by the most violent, ruthless strong-man style thugs and their organized criminals will replace it. Anyone who advocates anarchism is rightly considered either entirely stupid or entirely in favor of such strong-man fascism. It was one of the great surprises to me, when I was able to freely access many of her full pieces online that I saw the deified Emma Goldman was a huge admirer of Nietzsche. Her anarchism wasn't interested in universal freedom, she had great disdain for the majority of people, it was with a view fo some kind of amoral superman asserting his rule, or, probably in her fantasy, hers. Goldman is another of the biggest frauds ever sold to an ignorant and gullible left.
No comments:
Post a Comment