On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 8:16 PM, Michael Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, 13 May 2012 16:04:26 -0700 > Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: > >> 1) the fact that the NYT published this article -- which refers to workers >> as "wealth creators" -- means *something* even if it's only UMC folks like >> me (and Carrol) who read it; it reflects popular disgust > > No NYT article reflects anything 'popular'. Every word in the > Times is the elite talking to the slightly less elite.
I wasn't saying that the NYT was suffering from "disgust." Rather, the non-elite disgust is reflected in the opinions bandied about among the elite.[*] And "slightly less elite" is what I meant by "UMC." Anyway, elite sources shouldn't be shunned as much as filtered, i.e. read critically to try to get rid of the elite bias. The late I.F. Stone was very good at this. (The same goes for reading non-elite sources, by the way. The opposition can fall for -- and believe -- its own exaggerations, just as others do.) In any event, if the power elite is worried about social disorder, that's significant. I remember that Nixon once looked out at the large mass of anti-war demonstrators in Washington D.C. (either the VVAW in late April, 1971 or the one in early May) and told one of his henchmen that it looked like a revolution. That was a significant event. >>According to one of the few historians to have studied the event, Mayday so >>unnerved the Nixon administration that it palpably speeded U.S. withdrawal >>from Vietnam. White House aide Jeb Magruder said that the protest had >>"shaken" Nixon and his staff, while CIA director Richard Helms called Mayday >>"a very damaging kind of event," noting that it was "one of the things that >>was putting increasing pressure on the administration to try and find some >>way to get out of the war."<< >>http://libcom.org/library/ending-war-inventing-movement-mayday-1971 [*] Right below the article being discussed (or being ignored because it comes from an incorrect source) in the print edition of the NYT, there's an article that (in so many elite words) makes a leftish point: the concern about "human rights" in US and "Western" foreign policy has become totally politicized, specifically to become a justification for military intervention. It's become a tool in US/"Western" foreign policy (like "war crimes," which the article doesn't mention). (To a large extent concern with "human rights" has _always_ been a US foreign policy tool; but it once involved non-elite protests against Soviet authoritarianism.) -- Jim Devine / "When truth is nothing but the truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth." -- Aldous Huxley _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
