~ Behind the propaganda engines ~
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Behind the
propaganda engines |
Version March 2001 ~ in fieri
[Need for searching the truth]
[Rare snippets of info]
[Circumventing censorship]
[Essays]
[Exegesis]
| Need for searching the truth - a rant |
Well... please excuse this rant.
See: I strongly believe that you should feel by yourself the need to reverse the distorted information
patterns, news-propaganda and advertisement - that abound so evidently around us (just have a look at my
reality cracking section). If you don't feel such a need, or if you believe you
already have your own valuable sources of real information, this part of my site
will probably not interest you much (even if I think you'r in for a surprise).
Note that it is not only a matter of pushed advertisement,
whereby we find ourselves - faces down - in the sorry situation where we
now remember better some ads we have heard (a thousand times) in our youth
than we are able to recall the names of the friends we had (don't you too
believe
that somebody should pay for this?). Shouldn't
we [retaliate] ("anti advertisement": an ongoing project)
?
The Ancient Greeks believed that you could not rely on someone else to tell you
what is right or wrong: everyone he himself must
be a
researcher in search of truth.
Today, people rely on all sort of media
to tell them "the real news".
The problem - and the ironical aspect of such an attitude at the same time - is that in the awful commercial society we live in all medias - bar
some parts of the Internet - are OWNED by someone, who will obviously pursue
his own
interests. You can bet that these media's "search for the truth"
- in the unlikely hipothesis that it
will be at all pursued - will never be allowed
to contrast the interests of their owners.
Unfortunately it is NOT ONLY a simple problem
of 'ownership' (whereby a newspaper owned by -say- a car-factory-owner will always be against
bykes and against any "pedestrian
solution" for our cities and will continuously (and viciously) push in order to compel
people to use a stinking car to fetch their
beers two-hundred meters from where they happen to vegetate).
There are MANY more cases of 'orchestrated
propaganda', as I tried to show with my old "propaganda cracking" essay
about Common
propaganda techniques in the context of the NATO / Yugoslawjan war.
Indeed it is so easy to 'orchestrate' mass media, that curious "ethically correct"
censorship phenomena now appear. It is for instance in all "mainstream" European media
nowaday practically "forbidden"
to deal with all the (huge) criminality problems due to
immigration (this is most evident for instance in France).
Alas! Since a lot of
poor and simple people, that do not happen to have a villa in a closed and well behaving
part of the town have to deal with these very problems in some
peripheries, it is no wonder at all that -as a a consequence- quite a lot of
zombies lean more and more towards little pathetical (and nazistical) "simplifiers" like
LePen in France, the Vlaamsblock in Belgium, Haider in Austria or Bossi in Italy.
The real problem is
that
reality is quite complex, not simple: therefore there are MANY "news" and MANY truths,
and of course there is
nowhere any
simple "miracle explanation" you could use to interprete the
global complexity of the world surrounding you. Lot of gains for those that profess a "simple" solution
for everything. The fact that such a solution is complete nonsense does not mean NOTHING in the real
world of politics. Big industries in Germany were in 1944 still paying the nazi,
even as russian and american bombs
were destroying them black and blue. There is an ineluttable logic in stupidity.
Moreover: profit and cynism are both very strong
forces, that you -as a reverser- should always take account of. Actually the very moment you meet somebody who
preaches to have a "solution" for all problems, you better
try to remain some steps "behind" him, so that you have the time
to sneak into a side-alley when the shooting starts and that moron gets what he jolly deserves.
This makes things quite complicated of course: "What? No compass? No weltanschauung as simple as
"I understand everything through
this gimmick philosophy"? Yep: this complicates things... on the other hand
propaganda and his ugly offspring:
advertisement are
simplifiers, and corresponds thus
better to what people await: most people want to feel that issues
are simple rather than complex, they want to have their prejudices
confirmed, they want to feel that they 'belong' somewhere (with the implications
that others do not), and need to pinpoint one or more "enemies" to blame for
their frustrations.
That is where the capability of searching can be quite helpful. But it will
not be sufficient alone. Evaluating what you find is also very important, in
a web of rumors, conspiration theories, balooney sites.
The web gives tremendous opportunities for propaganda, but it
gives also,
for the first time in the history of mankind, tremendous
opportunities to
COUNTER propaganda. Some snippets of "real" information MUST be
exchanged
behind all the "fog" by the puppet masters, the problem is to find them.
Propaganda and advertisement take many forms and affect all of us, mostly in a
negative way.
The printing press, and mass communications technology, have
facilitated greatly
the use of propaganda by governments, large corporations the
wealthy and the powerful.
They control the outlets of information sources and use it - of course - for
their own benefit.
The purpose of propaganda is to distort the truth.
Finding the truth was never easy.
It is like searching for a needle in the haystack. It takes lots
of effort.
I hope the resources I have tried to gather will help you on your own quest.
[General information]
[The Chomsky's papers]
[Satyrical information]
[All the newspapers of the world]
General information
[Le
Monde diplomatique] MONTHLY *very* good, one of the best
sources of information of this planet, a little 'pauperistic' and
'whiny', but they see through reality
better than many others. This is one of
the BEST KNOWLEDGE SITES
of the whole web, without any doubt... hope you can read some
french... anyway there is
also a on-line version [in english].
This magazine will give you every month enough
material to easily
crack most newspapers (or TV-info) around you. Best buy.
[Neue
Zürcher Zeitung] DAILY
among the best information sources in the whole world... of course
swiss need a 'unfogged' world image in order
to sell their chocolate and their
watches... and could not care less about "ready-made"
truths!
An [english
version of the NZZ] is also
available.
[The
Economist] WEEKLY for those of you who can
read only
English (Karl Marx was an avid reader of the Economist :-) there
is of course MORE disinformation than information, but the former
is -at least- VERY cleverly presented. Must read (and reverse) for all those interested in
"high level" propaganda (where some snippets of true information are
continuously presented below the dull iceberg of skilled Guinea-Pig conditioning).
Well, I have started my own [reversing The Economist] section, see if you like it!
[El
Pais] DAILY good to average
"european style" information,
especially valuable for people interested in south American
affairs
The Chomsky's papers
Keeping the
Rabble in Line by Noam Chomsky,
interviewed by David Barsamian, is for instance a
very cool and precise analyse of the world
affairs (a little too much anti-Israeli imo, for the rest quite
correct)
You'll find a small
part of Chomsky's cutting
interpretations [here].
Read
these pages as soon as you can, you'll not regret it!
I'm not Chomskian myself (far from it), but his views
and mine do actually converge on so many points that I'm glad he
exists and teaches :-)
Satyrical information
[The Onion] quite light,
but not bad at all, could be dubbed "the reversers' paper", since
it is actually
very often a good source of reversing thoughts. Sarcasm is a truly powerful weapon against
propaganda, conditioning, advertisement-induced cliches and censorship.
[McSweeney's Stories] by David Eggers (parodies Esquire)
[The Baffler], each issue seeks archly to debunk the
hip-seeking excesses of the corporate culture business
(it's not completely on-line yet, though)
All the newspapers of the world
Feel free to visit
[fu_speci.htm] and fetch whatever
newspaper you need, but don't old your breath for truths... being able to read any newspapers
of the planet does not mean much if you don't know how
to filter out the very rare snippets of information and to recognize the few valuable sources of information that
are not simple progandistic megaphones of their owners' interests. This said it is for sure quite instructive
to learn that slightly different soups of commercial advertisement,
hysterical nationalism & ridicolous propaganda are served - under all latitudes -
to the zombies...
Check the [reality
cracking] essays
| Exegesis (text reversing) |
See the [ad hoc] section
Of course there's not only propaganda, but also a lot of CENSORSHIP being enforced. Often enough
propaganda techniques are used to enforce censorship. You may wanto to check
(and fight against) the recent european laws about copyright under preparation at the Council
and the European Parliament, that the political lackeys of the commercial powers
that be are going to adopt following the recent two
frightening
Communications of the European Commission COM(2000)789 "Follow-up to the Green Paper on combating counterfeiting
and piracy in the single market" and COM(2000)890 "Creating a Safer Information Society by
Improving the Security of Information Infrastructures and
Combating Computer-related Crime" (Euphemisms are particularly abundant during
propaganda indoctrination campaigns, therefore they're of course pounding quite
heavy with 'euphemistical rhetoric' in these texts... the commercial puppetteers and
slavemasters
are for instance called "interested parties" in the Commission's Jargon... allow me to puke :-(
Yet against propaganda and against censorship we can always use
the same old weapons: transparence,
knowledge spreading and of
course the most powerful one: sarcasm.
There are many ways to ridiculize censorship attempts. Some interesting ones
have been devised and/or collected
by defenders of the
CSS Descrambler (see, for instance Dave
Touretzky gallery). Since some American clowns, under
commercial pressure, stated
that executable source code was not subject to First Amendment
protection against prior restraint of speech, and thus its publication could be prohibited, other ways to publish the code
had to be found for the United States. Some of them quite inventive. Such
approaches are interesting because
they can be applied mutatis mutandis to many other similar cases.
Just one of these examples will clarify what I mean: the complete C-source code of the CSS Descrambler (for
reading encrypted DVDs) is for instance located
INSIDE the image below :-)
To extract css-auth.tar.gz from the graphic file above, use an hexeditor,
go to byte 0x00799D and copy the
next 0x547E bytes to another file. Voila: the clownish censorship attempt brilliantly rebuked.
(Of course all this is nonsense: should you really need a Cssdescrambler you would
immediately, since you'r supposed to be a searcher, just
find one of the many copies of the complete C source code that exist all over the web :-)
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