--- Begin Message ---
-Caveat Lector-
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Kwick Pick opens locked car doors,
front doors, drawers, briefcases,
padlocks, and more. On sale now!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/ehaLqB/Fg5DAA/Ey.GAA/KlSolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->
June 7, 2002
Please Distribute Widely
Please Distribute Extra Extra Widely!
Permission is granted to post this communiqu� anywhere that there is no
advertising or exchange of "puto dinero" money...
Phase II (and Issue # 21) of Narco News Begins:
The Masses vs. The Media:
A Revolution for a Narcotized Society
http://www.narconews.com/themasses.html
Dear Colleagues,
It has been a while since we were in touch...
But we have been busy, as will now be evident...
And we're about to get a lot busier...
The events of April 2002 in Venezuela have given the world - that's you and
me, kind reader - a new way to fight against the tyranny of a commercial
media that prevents repeal of the drug war - already the stated will of the
majority of people, again and again in referenda and through any other
remaining uncensored grid of expression - and for every other necessary
change that We The People desire on earth.
Today, in a sharp break with the form of our usual alerts, we are enclosing
the entire text of our report via email... with the hope that you will
forward this message to all mailing lists of conscientious colleagues, that
you will post it, uncensored, on your website (on your local IndyMedia site
and elsewhere), and take it to heart and action.
Narco News today uncloaks the result of six weeks (really, six years) of
work. Finally, at long last, you and I and everybody else have been given a
wonderful gift: A way to collapse the mediating tyranny of the commercial
media, restore Authentic Democracy, and end this insane "war on drugs."
The gift comes from below... From the Masses... From the people of
Venezuela... who on a single day - April 13, 2002 - confronted the corrupt
commercial media - the TV and radio stations, the daily newspapers, and the
corrupt U.S. correspondents - and destroyed their power to control and limit
the discourse that in Authentic Democracy rightfully belongs to all, and not
a few.
The Masses of Venezuela did more than destroy a coup d'etat. They gave all
of us a new way to fight against the corrupt and unaccountable media.
Today, for the first time ever on the Internet, Narco News begins a
chapter-by-chapter publication of the 1997 work: "The Medium is the
Middleman: For a Revolution Against Media," with updated notes and footnotes
and links and a new Introduction, titled:
The Masses vs. The Media:
A Revolution for a Narcotized Society
http://www.narconews.com/themasses.html
Today we begin a summer-long teach-in and dialogue about the most dangerous
drug of all: The Media.
And we announce the expansion of the Narco News project... both online and
in the realm of daily life, within and away from this damn Screen.
We invite you to participate in this project - nothing more or less than an
uncooptable unstoppable revolution - to finally cut through the bullshit
caused by the commercial media and MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN.
Start here:
http://www.narconews.com/themasses.html
...and follow the links.
We're not kidding. Reports of the death of the Masses were greatly
exaggerated. The Masses never died, and neither did Revolution.
You were with us when the giant economic powers tried to shut us down, and
we won.
Together, you and me and the NOW-EXPANDED Narco News Team, we will now kick
this project to the next level, toward victory against this disastrous "war
on drugs" and the corrupt mediating power that keeps this problem, and all
problems, from being solved.
We have set up a discussion board and a new email address -- follow the
links! -- to begin this dialogue with you, the reader, with Civil Society,
the only boss we have at Narco News:
http://www.narconews.com/themasses.html
Let the games begin!
>From somewhere in a country called Am�rica,
Al Giordano
Publisher
The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com/
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Here is the text of Part I of the discussion - yours, mine and everyone's -
that can remove the illusory power of Democracy's biggest enemy: the
commercial media...
The Masses
vs. The Media
A Revolution for a
Narcotized Society
By Al Giordano
A Narco News Mission Statement
June 7, 2002
And the answer came from below�
Now, what was the question?
Pick a card, any card, kind reader� like this one:
Why are we still stuck with this disastrous policy of drug prohibition?
For the past 25 months, Narco News has reported or translated hundreds of
works of Authentic Journalism that show, individually and together, that the
"war on drugs" is a circus and a farce and the Sina Qua Non (that without
which nothing else can happen) to restore Authentic Democracy in our Am�rica
is that the drug war must be repealed.
But nothing happens. The "war on drugs" marches on.
That's because the "war on drugs" is a policy imposed on all nations by the
wealthiest one, the United States, and nothing happens anymore, nothing at
all, in the political illusion of that country.
Earnest reporting of the facts and venting of the opinions - the intent
behind that country's First Amendment - has only marginal impact, if any, on
the political decisions. Washington, the White House, Congress� they don't
move based on the facts. They only move when an issue reaches a critical
mass stage in the media. And although the edges of the media - the Internet,
the "alternative press," and occasional stories that slip through the mass
media - are, more and more, reporting the failure of this drug war, still
nothing happens, nothing at all.
The voters in 10 of the 50 United States have voted to repeal key planks of
this drug war. Every time it goes to a vote, democracy says to "stop the
war." But nothing happens on a federal level, nothing at all.
Why is that? How can that be in a place that calls itself a "democracy"?
The problem of the decomposed "democracy" of the United States has a name:
It is a problem called "the Media."
The commercial media is the tail that wags the dog. It yanks public opinion
around by the nose ring, obliterating all opinion and narcotizing the
public. Remember the anthrax scare after September 11th? It was page-one
news every day for months� until it became clear that the threat came from a
domestic source, within the United States and not from foreigners. And then
the media just shut up. Nary a word is spoken about this trauma that the
same media inflicted upon us for the entirety of last autumn.
And so it goes with every matter of importance to humans on earth: The cow
of public opinion is jerked from milking machine to milking machine, kept
disoriented, and never focused on anything real: From Chandra Levy to
September 11th to Bin Laden to Anthrax to bombs raining over Central Asia to
atomic saber rattling between India and Pakistan� and soon, on to some other
diversion. Does any of it ever get resolved?
The public is wary and bored with it all. Newspaper circulation, despite
having had the story of the century (9/11) to report, is stuck in the same
ghetto it was before the Twin Towers fell. TV news is a joke: "Hey, what
will we trivialize and turn into a 15-second distraction today?" Our remotes
click from channel to channel in a vain hope of finding something worth
watching, and we settle in like bumps on the sofa, as real life is postponed
for yet another evening. Pop music and all its market niches, Hollywood,
book publishing, and the rest of the grids of expression have sunk to new
levels of banality and irrelevance. It's all formula, meant to squeeze the
public of what little remains of our wallets and our attention spans.
This hopeless morass of mediated nonsense is what Jeff Buckley (1966 -1997)
described when he wrote, "Turn your head away from the Screen, oh people� I
see you take another drag, let's see you take another drag."
Media is a drug as damaging and addictive as any other, legal or prohibited,
and no treatment, cure, antidote or solution has appeared. For years there
has been no exit, no coherent way to fight this problem of Media that keeps
all other societal problems from being able to be solved.
And then came Venezuela�
The Wind from Below
On April 11th, 2002, the moneyed classes of Venezuela, with an assist from
the foreign governments of Washington, Madrid and Bogot�, almost set back
the cause of Authentic Democracy in our Am�rica for 30 years.
For a moment this spring, Caracas 2000 almost became the Santiago de Chile
of September 11th, 1973, with a US-sponsored coup against a democratically
elected government. The 1973 coup was a successful bloodbath. It installed
that narco-dictator, General Pinochet. And the lesson hung for 29 years like
a cloud over every Latin American nation: The message delivered on that
September 11th was that democracy is only allowed if power and money agree
with the decisions the people make. If the people stray from the will of the
tyrants, then even democracy gets overthrown and your authentic songwriters
(�Viva Victor Jara!) and leaders will be rounded up in the stadium, tortured
and shot dead.
What occurred in Venezuela last April almost reasserted that rule with a new
twist: The coups no longer come mainly from the military, but, rather, from
the real occupying force over our daily lives and our very consciousness:
the Media.
The Venezuelan commercial media and the U.S. commercial media provided the
drumbeat, for months before April 11th, to set the stage for The End Of
Democracy As We Know It. If they had succeeded in Venezuela, the ascension
to the throne by the mediating tyrants would have been complete. This is all
so very well documented and obvious to anyone who was paying attention
during the immediate history of April 2002.
We reported the facts as they were happening during those Three Days that
Shook the Media in Venezuela. The coup did not go according to plan. My
essay of April 18th focused mainly on the role of the U.S. media - exposed,
now, as enemy of the very democracy that gave it life and rights under the
First Amendment - and its attempt to simulate the coup as something other
than a coup.
And I wrote about a key difference between the events of September 1973 and
those of April 2002: Internet journalism lived its finest hour, and broke
the information blockade of the simulators like AP, Reuters, the New York
Times and CNN. The coup collapsed, and a very brief series of meas culpas
and feigned apologies occurred at the New York Times editorial page and
elsewhere. But now they're all back to their old tricks, no heads rolled,
nobody was fired, the professional simulators are still in the Latin
American bureaus, and nothing has changed in terms of how they manipulate
public opinion in favor of the advertising class, always in favor of money.
The cow is back on the milking machine, being sucked of life itself.
But the most historic aspect of those Three Days that Shook the Media did
not occur online, through this damn screen. For the first time in the
history of capitalism, the masses - Oh, the masses! Reports of our death
have been so greatly exaggerated! - surrounded the simulating TV stations
and the corrupt newspaper offices and shut down the media's power to
simulate and manipulate, instantly.
Ponder this, please, kind reader, for a moment: On April 12th and 13th 2002
in Venezuela, the cow of public opinion, its survival instinct intact, threw
off the milking machine and turned from docile domesticated slave to charge
into the china shop of the mediating tyrants. The shopkeepers of
manufactured consent in Venezuela are still whining and crying about what
happened: "We feared for our lives! We didn't report the counter-coup
because we were afraid of the mob!" The mediating police force was
neutralized for a brief shining moment, and democracy lives to fight another
day.
The issue is not, as some media critics have explored, that the commercial
media in Venezuela did not "report." It is this: That the Media was briefly
immobilized and could no longer simulate in the name of "reporting."
This was a good thing, a healthy event, a life-restoring renaissance of
Authentic Democracy when the masses of Venezuela shut down the commercial
media. (And to those spurious "press freedom" organizations and anyone else
who tries to wrap up simulation by commercial powers as a First Amendment
issue, I reply with rage and contempt for your hypocrisy, and some very
funny upcoming pranks at your expense: Ask not for whom the Masses toll� the
Masses toll for thee�)
We have met the vanguard of the next revolution and it is us: The Masses.
The Return of the Masses
During recent weeks, daily readers of Narco News have noticed (and more than
a few have yelled at me, "I WANT MY NARCO NEWS"): I have not authored an
original story or essay since April 18th.
Venezuela changed everything. And it now means big changes ahead for Narco
News and for your correspondent and, I am certain, for many of you.
This is why I went back to the drawing board during these weeks and with a
team of colleagues (you know who you are, and the rest of you will meet some
of them soon enough) now have some real news to report today. (And just to
drive all you editors crazy, we are backing into the lead of this story�
step by step building its foundation� in violation of the imposed formula of
commercial journalism� because this is not about selling newspapers or a
website� this is not about keeping the reader plugged in and reliant upon
us� No! This is about how real people truly live and think and develop a
strategy against the tyrant� and then ACT.)
The grand sweeping act of the masses on April 13, 2002 in Venezuela to take
the microphone away from the monopoly and thus collapse the absolute power
of the Media is the single most historic act so far of the 21st century.
It is more significant than whatever happened (and we still don't know, do
we?) on September 11, 2001.
The masses of Venezuela have given us a new way to fight.
The poor and working and creative majority in Venezuela revealed to the
world: The masses do not need to be educated, do not need to hear one more
fact or report or snippet of "information." The masses don't need the TV
news or the daily paper or my next article or your next documentary or even
cyberspace: they (we!) already know it is bullshit. Media is about
moneymaking and control of public opinion. Media is a power trip. And
everybody except the most deluded cyborgs and oligarchs that live off that
milking machine knows it already.
What we have lacked for too long is the way to fight, to reclaim the terrain
of daily life from this monster, to bypass its mediating control and assert
the decisions that we have, as a majority, already made. I speak not merely
about repealing the drug war or even of restoring authentic democracy� I
speak of every legitimate grievance on every "issue" of policy and daily
life. Collapse the mediating power of the tyrant, and all flowers will be
able to bloom once again.
But the work of this renaissance has only just begun. The events of April
2000 in Venezuela constitute no more or less than a lighthouse that
illuminates the place where the sea meets the shore and allows us to
navigate.
In Venezuela, in the United States, and all over our Am�rica, we still must
contend with what scholar Roldan Tomasz Suarez describes as the "avalanche
of lies, deceit and manipulation, with which the media bombards us on a
daily basis."
In his brilliant essay published this week by the Venezuelan media
vheadline.com, Five Truths About April 11, compa�ero Roldan recalls, "the
despicable performance of mainstream print & broadcast media during those
April days is irrefutable proof that media bosses were, to say the least,
biased in favor of the coupsters, if they weren't actively participating in
the coup themselves."
"There is absolutely no excuse to justify the hermetic silence which the
media imposed during April 13," he observes. "They claim that there were no
guarantees to protect their reporters' security that day. Hadn't they, a day
earlier, bragged about the courage of their reporters, who dared film the
famous Llaguno Bridge images? �Furthermore, there was no need to bring their
reporters onto the streets on April 13. It would have sufficed to
re-transmit images captured by international news agencies ... it would have
been enough NOT to lie to the country trying to convince it that absolutely
nothing was happening."
How to Beat the Media?
The lighthouse that now exists after the events of April 2000 have already
caused Suarez and so many others to ask the right question for the future of
democracy, the US-imposed drug war, and many related priorities: "How to
beat the media?"
"It would seem," writes Suarez, "that a large part of the population,
especially the part that supposedly enjoys the highest cultural and
educational levels, remains completely blind to the evidence. When we hear a
typical middle class anti-Chavist talking, we get the impression that we are
listening to a series of loose fragments, poorly repeated from radio and TV
talk shows. There are a number of empty words that are being constantly
repeated in the discourse: authoritarian, meritocracy, steamrolling,
dollar-glutton, handpicked, governance, politicization, disunited, etc. etc.
etc� a rosary of expressions that nobody knows the meaning of any more but
which silences thought very effectively� it means, in a few words, that
media is leading us Venezuelans to the abyss."
"For that reason," concludes Suarez, "there is no political action more
urgent at the moment than countering the power of dominant media discourse
over public opinion."
The Fall and Rise of
An Immedia Project
The questions being asked today by Suarez and so many others who can now see
how vital this question of Media has become to all change agents and Civil
Society everywhere are questions that some of us began asking in 1996 and
1997, and that's others, before us, began to ask long ago.
Now is the hour to use this double-edged sword of the Internet, and all
other grids of expression, to inflict a counter-discourse upon the dominant
Media monologue.
Today, for the first time online, we begin to publish the 1997 work, "The
Medium is the Middleman: For a Revolution Against Media."
This is a discourse that until now has been spoken in whispers, almost
clandestinely, and certainly has not been allowed even a soapbox on the
opinion pages of the commercial media, much less as part of the daily "news"
coverage. My publication of this 26-page document as a pamphlet five years
ago contributed to my complete ruin as a career journalist, my expatriate
status, and my 1997 voyage to Chiapas, Mexico, to learn from the Zapatista
indigenous rebellion a better way to fight. Media players who had once
welcomed me with open arms, under the illusion that I was just "another
member of the club," upon reading this document stopped any pretext of
backslapping, handshaking, false professional collegiality and no longer
returned my calls.
Oh, but what a difference five years makes! Once, in December 2001, the New
York Supreme Court ruled in my favor (and that of all Internet journalists)
and restored our rights as equal under the law as those of the New York
Times, in our court victory over Banamex-Citigroup, my mailbox abounds with
invitations to write for many of the same magazines and newspapers who
slammed doors in my face out of anger after I had called for "a revolution
against Media" in 1997. (I just politely tell them, "Thanks, I'll keep it in
mind, but I have my own newspaper to run now." Because, hey, I made some
errors, too, in that 1997 document - and in my expressions of anger and
sense of betrayal were not always said with the necessary dose of humor and
entertainment to make the medicine go down - which I have spent the past six
weeks revising, correcting and bringing up to date. As the Revolution
Against Media is today reborn, I will try to be more civil about it than
perhaps I was five years ago, but, dear colleagues, please don't take it
personally: the revolt begins nonetheless, and the slingshot army of
thousands has itchy trigger fingers under the new lighthouse of context
provided by the recent events in Venezuela.)
One of the guerrilla masks this counter-discourse has worn in battle for the
past 25 months is this little website, The Narco News Bulletin.
Narco News did not spring out of the head of Zeus, and the factors that make
Authentic Journalism so different and more credible than the discredited
form of "journalism" practiced by the commercial media can be traced
directly to the marriage of the 1997 blueprint, The Medium is the Middleman,
with the strategies and tactics developed by the Mexican and Latin American
indigenous movements and their 500 years of experience against impositions
from above.
And so, kind reader, presuming that you and I both continue to share the
priority of ending the US-imposed "war on drugs" in our Am�rica, the
renaissance of Authentic Democracy, and all the related matters that we've
reported and translated over the past two years, I invite you to
participate, dialogue, plot and scheme with us in the coming days and months
in a global teach-in which we call "Immedia Summer 2002."
Narco News has covered the wars and conflicts surrounding marijuana, coca,
poppy, alcohol, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, etc. Today we expand our mission
to include Authentic Journalism on the most dangerous drug of all: Media. We
don't want to see Media prohibited. It must be legal like all the other
drugs. But today, in 2002, it is time to develop a "harm reduction strategy"
to collapse the tyrannical power of the commercial media and make progress,
again, possible on repealing drug prohibition and all related policies.
As we will post, day after day, beginning now, the chapters of The Medium is
the Middleman: For a Revolution Against Media, with updated author's notes,
footnotes, corrections and some very important changes in the strategy, I do
assure you: Narco News will continue reporting and translating the real news
regarding the drug war in our Am�rica. Our Andean bureau continues its vital
work under the leadership of Luis G�mez in La Paz, Bolivia. We have some
additional new members of the Newsroom Team to be announced shortly, and by
autumn you will be getting more, not less, Authentic Journalism on the War
on Drugs from Latin America through this outpost in cyberspace.
But we think that you, kind reader, and we, the Narco News Team, will make
faster progress on collapsing the drug war if we simultaneously arm
ourselves to destroy the power of the commercial media to prevent the
changes that must come in drug policy and related matters of Authentic
Democracy, human rights, an end to military interventions, the environment
and all of the other related priorities.
As you know, Narco News has, since day one, reported aggressively on the
behavior of the commercial media and its correspondents in Latin America.
Corrupted journalists from Mexico to Bolivia have been exposed here and are
no longer able to simulate as they did for years before. In April, we were
sleepless throughout the attempted coup d'etat in Venezuela breaking the
information blockade and bringing you the immediate and accurate
information. In that sense, we're not really taking a new step with this
greater focus on the drug called Media: We're simply bringing the project to
the next necessary phase.
And, as you'll soon see, Phase II of Narco News is not going to occur solely
through this Internet screen. We will be inviting you to participate in a
battle that takes place on the terrain of daily life, outside of this damn
screen, too.
This screen is useful and we will continue to utilize it: Mutant Times Call
For Mutant Tools. But it also has its limits, and the Narco News project now
moves, simultaneously, both on and away from the screen.
April 2002 was truly Online Journalism's Finest Hour, but online journalism
was not what broke the back of the enemies of democracy and stopped the
coup. The Internet was merely auxiliary. The vanguard was people who mostly
do not have and cannot afford computers: The Masses have spoken. And we are
of the Masses, not apart.
"Obedience leads," wrote Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation in Mexico, without whom there would be no Narco News and
I would no longer even try to be a journalist. Narco News, we've said this
before, was an experiment in journalistic Zapatismo that, 14 million hits
and a New York Supreme Court ruling later, worked beyond our best original
dreams for it. The social and indigenous movements of our Am�rica really
have rewritten history and given all of us a new way to fight.
If we wish to be members of this human race - of Civil Society - then we
must place ourselves at the service of it, and not simply try to fight with
the tyrant over control of the milking machine. We must disconnect that
machine from the cow of public opinion, and destroy its mediating power.
The paradigm has already shifted. The defining battle of the early 21st
century has arrived: The Masses vs. the Media. Be of good cheer, kind
reader, and spread the news through all the grids of expression: The Masses
never died, and neither did Revolution.
Start here, Kind Reader:
http://www.narconews.com/themasses.html
...and we'll see you on the other side.
_________________________________________________________________
Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
--- End Message ---
