Check out this debate and make up your own mind

AA

All I can say is this. America is run by fanatical centrists. It’s just that we have a highly sophisticated propaganda machine that effectively sustains the illusion of free choice and a free expression of ideas.

There are rigorous constraints on the range of acceptable ideas that the American public is exposed to. This is even true within academia. Controlling what people know and limiting those ideas that are deemed responsible stacks the deck in favor many policies that really do not behoove the interests of the American public.

Virtually the entire American media abides by the unspoken rules that are not legislated or formally codified anywhere but which are clearly understood and adhered to by all of our major media.

Just take the subject of the Israel Lobby or of American interventionism as examples. The subject of the Israel Lobby and whether support of Israel is beneficial to the US is a taboo. Walt and Merasheimer were two pillars of the mainstream in the political sciences and they were almost unanimously written off as wacked out nutjobs after they published their paper on the I Lobby. Why even Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein – famous political dissidents in America – wrote off Walt & Mearsheimer’s thesis as expressing either an immature or a delusional understanding of “elite policy formation” in America. Also, noninterventionists are regularly derided as “isolationists” and as having an immature, overly narrow US-centric perspective on foreign policy. Their critics regularly claim that the world demands and expects American “leadership” (code for intervention) in foreign affairs. This is patently absurd but it’s what most people believe and the media is careful to sustain this illusion.

To make matters worse, American politics is structured so that no more than two political parties can seriously vie for power, imposing – yet another major constraint that shapes policy outcomes.

So, to get back to your question of whether this seems like the work of a fanatical theocracy, my answer is that I really don’t know. On its face, the answer is clearly no. But I am still not certain. The art of propaganda has advanced and perhaps Iran has taken lessons from the US. I am not kidding either. I really can’t say. But I really think it might be more productive for Americans to look more carefully at their own media and their “marketplace of ideas”.

PS: I strongly recommend the book ‘Propaganda’ by Jacques Ellul. Ellul posits that the people who are most susceptible to propaganda tend to be the most informed and best educated in the society. Education indoctrinates individuals with the necessary pretexts to make propaganda seem reasonable and acceptable. A typical example of how education conditions people to accept propaganda can be found here:
Indoctrination in Grammar School
The steady and predictable repetition of certain messages and themes that seem plausible enough and are rarely questioned tend, in aggregate to color one’s perception of what is reasonable in ways that are hard to detect. I give credit to the blogger above for giving hell to his daughter’s elementary school for indoctrinating children in this way.

That Tehran uni professor has to be commended for putting his political differences aside in defence of the nation ;)

People using Twitter in Honduras these days (link in Spanish). But this time mainstream media seem to find more reliable Honduras’ official state media.

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