-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.mediachannel.org/views/oped/kaca.shtml OP-ED | TV Towers HOME September 21, 2000 A Tower Aflame: Media, Metaphor and Revolution By Ann-Britt Kaca When the Moscow television tower burst into flames at the end of August, the fire blacked out 10 million TV screens and made news all over the world. And so did President Vladimir Putin's sinister comment: The fire at the Ostankino tower is a metaphor for the state of the nation. Metaphors, symbols and sayings are mighty mind-setters. They captivate our minds and focus our attention to one main point, effectively excluding others. Putin used the burning of the Ostankino television tower, once hailed as a symbol of Soviet supremacy, as a metaphor for the desperate economic need of Russia. The global media played along with this tune, once again showcasing images of Russia's decay. But there is another largely untold story to be extracted from Putin's metaphor: TV towers are more than symbols � indeed they are very concrete centers of mind control, distributing the flow of information and entertainment. In Putin's Chechen war the TV tower in Grozny was recently a Russian target and so were the Baltic TV towers during the events that finally lead to the collapse of Communism. The battle over media and the role of underground and international media preceding the final breakdown of communism in Central Europe and the Baltics is a story that still needs to be told: It wasn't about the free flow of capital, it was about the free flow of information. It was one of those ironic twists of history. Putin, with the Ostankino tower threatening to collapse into a heap of glowing steel and cables and with state television mute, had to borrow air from the private broadcaster, NTV, with whom he is involved in an escalating media war over intricate business transactions, ownership and control of information. The Ostankino tower was erected in 1967 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. Higher than the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building, it was then the world's tallest structure. Watching it burn, surrounded by Russian soldiers, charged my memory, bringing back flickering images of the Baltic TV towers surrounded by Soviet Black Berets, the feared "special forces." I vividly recalled that the only armed clashes during the upheavals that finally ended communist rule were over � and at the bases of � television towers. Who still remembers that the popular movements which overthrew governments and changed the system began with a challenge against the sovereign media? Media critique was a powerful current which ran through the Eastern European and Baltic revolutions from the very beginning. Furious protests against manipulative and dishonest media, demands for fair media access for oppositional voices with different views representing other values than the ruling, red bourgeois elite embraced. Truth, Voice And Solidarity In the Polish Solidarity's vocabulary, words like "dignity" and "truth" were more than buzzwords. They referred to a corrupt totalitarian system of economical disaster and decay in which the authorities and the media were united in lies about the past (i.e. history), as well as about the present reality � a society which forced its citizens to cheat and lie to make it through the daily chase for trivial commodities like toilet paper, coffee and cheese. "The word truth appeared with the frequency of a punctuation mark in the statements, graffiti and conversation of Solidarity," writes British historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash in his excellent book "The Polish Revolution: Solidarnosc." "We need truth as much as we need coal," said Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. In the 1980s Solidarity opinion surveys in Poland, the demand for media that did not lie came second only to the demand for freedom. The complex role of media, the impact of symbols and propaganda in the broad sense of distortions, buzzwords and silence, were fully understood by generations of Poles. The communist "New Speak" was never as totally dominating in Poland as it was in other Soviet bloc countries. There were independent intellectuals who, from the 1970s on, simply started to print themselves what the censorship forbade. And the church spoke a different language, heard by the masses while in underground so-called "Flying Universities," a language scholars and professors had for decades been teaching people in private flats. Thesis 31 of the Polish Solidarity Program declared: "The very language of propaganda, which damages the way we want to express thoughts and feelings, is a dangerous tool of lies. The union will seek to give back to society the Polish language, which allows people truly to understand each other." When the communist regime decreed martial law in Poland, imposing curfews, outlawing the Solidarity movement and forbidding meetings, tanks and armed soldiers guarded the TV station. Banned, with no visibility in any media, and with its members and supporters scattered and prohibited from assembling, Solidarity as a movement had ceased to exist. Solidarity supporters responded by going back to an old tradition: symbolic public acts to fight the sense of isolation, to preserve the sense of belonging, to keep the vision of a community with shared values visible. In a symbolic act directed at the media control, citizens of Warsaw left their homes when the state TV news went on the air and went in huge crowds into the Lazienki Park for a silent mass walk under the trees, then vanished equally silently back home when the broadcast was over. Schoolchildren removed the electronic resistors from old radios and attached them as visible badges on their clothes: "opur," or resistance. It was time to go back to underground media, radio and magazines for uncensored information. Pawel Lawinsky, then a journalist on the underground paper Wola (Will), today a leading journalist for Adam Michnik's daily Gazeta Wyborcza, told me about the first simple underground magazine: Gazeta Rozmova (The Talk Magazine). As printing equipment was forbidden for private citizens, the "magazine" was read aloud in churches by well-informed journalists. The hunger for information was immense; the churches were packed. Tomasz Jastrun, beloved underground journalist and poet, told me in an interview about his greatest media experience from the first days of Martial Law: The monumental classical music on the state radio was suddenly interrupted by a crackling announcement: "Attention! Attention! This is the Underground Radio Solidarity! Ladies and Gentlemen, if you can hear us, please respond and confirm by switching your lamps on and off!" With his hand on the switch in his lonely hiding place, isolated from wife and son, Tomasz saw the lights in the house opposite start twinkling, then lights down the block and the district, and soon all of Warsaw was twinkling in the night. During the eight years that Solidarity was banned, an underground kingdom of over 1500 magazines was established. Every group in the society seemed to have its own oppositional paper dealing with their issues: the taxi drivers, those working on the railways, even the soldiers (those who opposed martial law). In an interview for a media program for the Finnish Broadcasting Company, Tomasz Jastrun told me the underground publishers translated Orwell, Milan Kundera, Solzenitzin and other voices of rebellion. They published their own literature for children and introduced the first Polish comic strips. They wrote "The History of Solidarity," and distributed professional historians' research accounts disputing the "official" history of Poland . Tomasz Jastrun was one of the founders of the first Polish underground literary magazine. He wrote poems and was � like everybody else � eager to record and collect the testimonies and evidence of the nightmare they all were living. He started to collect dreams. Wherever he went, whoever he met, he asked about their dreams. His dream-collector's work was published in the French newspaper Le Monde. During those long eight years, the communist regime chased magazine canvassers, printers and journalists with helicopters, special forces and soldiers. The Underground Radio Solidarity carried their broadcast equipment from house to house. When Solidarity was finally legalized in 1989 and free elections permitted, the media issue was one of the last and most difficult conflicts to settle. "I'd rather give you Zomo [the Riot Police], than one single TV station," groaned Czeslaw Kiszczak, the communist general and Interior Minister to the Solidarity negotiators. The Tower Battles In Lithuania crosses drawn on the TV tower still remind visitors of the lives claimed in 1991 when the citizens of Vilnius, alerted by Lithuanian radio, went out to defend their television tower against the Russian Special Forces. Already retreating from Lithuania, the Forces turned around, drove up to the TV tower and fired against the forewarned civilians who blocked the way with their bodies. The citizens prevented the Black Berets from capturing the TV tower and hence thwarted the Russian plan to regain control of TV broadcasts. In Latvia, similar scenes were played live over CNN and on Scandinavian TV stations one or two days later: The people of Riga running through their city in a desperate race to reach the TV tower and surround it before the Russian Black Berets arrived in their vehicles. The people succeeded, and in Riga, as opposed to Vilnius, no lives were claimed. Estonia, 1991: In the wake of the August drama in Moscow, when hard-core communists tried to overthrow Michail Gorbachov, the Soviet Black Berets in Estonia were ordered to take the Estonian TV tower. Tanks rolled out from the barracks and onto the streets of Tallin, but here, too, the citizens were alerted by the radio. In Tallin the armed forces stormed the TV tower and advanced slowly towards the top floor where Estonian TV personnel were barricaded with weapons and food for several days, devoted to defending their TV. Finnish TV news correspondent Ulla-Maija M��tt�nen, who reported from the scene, told me that she was in phone contact with Estonian TV leaders during the whole drama. They persuaded her not to reveal that armed TV personnel were hiding in the tower. She kept her word and didn't give them away on Finnish TV news, which could be seen in Tallin. Mysteriously, the Black Berets did retreat, on whose order nobody seemed to know. In Estonia, as elsewhere, the fall of communism started with the media. TV journalist Juhan Aarre blew the whistle on the environmental disaster caused by phosphorus mines. This single TV report sparked off an environmental movement which attacked the communist authorities for lies, neglect and ecological havoc. A frenetic public "phosphorus war" ensued, which escalated into the massive movement for social change and reform that was so poetically named "The Singing Revolution." And it was not just the story of the national media, but also of the international media's role in the breakdown of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Baltics that has gone too long untold. On my late-night TV talk show, "Caf� Kafka," I asked Hain Rebas, the first Minister of Defense in the free Estonia, about the new extended security policy after 1989 and the breakdown of communism. I asked him about how far the free Estonia had come in building up a national military defense. He grinned: "We have built up a defense that could hold for about 4 days � or as long as it will take CNN to get in place." "Yes, the CNN doctrine," smiled Bo Huldt , one of Sweden's leading experts on security politics. In the wake of the dramatic events that ended communist rule in Central Europe, the Baltics and the Soviet Union, the "CNN doctrine," or "CNN factor," became a buzzword among security and defense professionals in the fledging Baltic democracies and Scandinavia and also a popular topic of debate. It refers to the sense that once CNN arrives, the U.S. network brings along the eyes of the world as witnesses. These memories, of Polish struggles for truth and history, of radio rallying Baltic citizens to protect their national voices, of TV towers as symbols and catalysts of revolution � this is what the Ostankino TV tower burning meant to me. Not Putin's primitive metaphor for economic decay. As for the power to shape metaphor: Who chose the crumbling Berlin Wall as the icon and metaphor for the breakdown of communism and the end of the Cold War? Wouldn't a TV tower in flames be more accurate? It wasn't about the free flow of capital. It was about the free flow of information. - Annn-Britt Kaca ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is a TV journalist at the Finnish Broadcasting Company. She covered the breakdown of communism in Central Europe and the Baltics on television and radio. What's Your View? Speak Out in the MediaChannel Forum. HOME AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA. The Media Channel is a not-for-profit project of OneWorld Online and The Global Center, and is produced by Globalvision New Media. A<>E<>R Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the State among its hapless subjects. 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