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Whitaker's Current World View
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Fun Quote:
Here is the Western answer to a three-thousand-year old riddle to which
Oriental Wise Men
devote their lives:
A single hand does not clap.
Next question.
On
Popular Opinion the Media are Clueless and the Experts are Even More
Clueless
I was in a hotel behind the Iron Curtain when I got on an
elevator with a British girlfriend.
There was only the girl, the operator and me. The elevator
operator didn’t even look at us as we got on.
When the door closed and we started to move between floors, all
that changed. He smiled and said, “English?” I replied,
“American.” He smiled broadly and said “Good, good.”
A moment later we reached our floor and the elevator operator
resumed his stuffed frog imitation.
This kind of thing happened to me a lot in totalitarian
lands. This kind of thing
happened to everybody I knew in Communist countries. But I have never seen a single reporter mention this sort
of thing happening in a Communist country. Every report I ever saw
indicated that nobody behind the Iron Curtain ever gave this sort of
indication that they were personally unhappy or felt afraid.
Today the experts and the media insist that Cuba loves Castro.
Until about 1990 they
insisted that Eastern Europe was not all that upset with Soviet
rule.
People were not allowed to leave Communist countries and they
shot people trying to escape. But if you go by what the media DID
NOT say, nobody in those countries felt particularly oppressed.
When Moscow cut back on its total suppression of dissent in the
1980s, the entire Soviet Empire collapsed completely.
The media and the Soviet experts were completely astonished. The only
people more astonished than the media were the experts on Communist
countries.
So the media and the experts are now telling us what the Iraqi
people want.
Once again the media and the experts have not the vaguest idea what the
Iraqis feel. Any logical approach to how Iraqis react is denounced
as “simplistic.”
For example, media commentators were comparing three villages.
In two of them some people who came out to see the American troops go
by smiled and waved. In one village the people who turned out to
meet the Americans were glum. Media experts are both media and
experts, which mean that they are doubly clueless.
So the media experts concluded that Americans were popular in two
villages and not popular in one. Then they proceeded to discuss why
one village liked us and the other hated us.
Newsmen report on places where people are terrorized, but they
get their reports by pleasing those in charge. Peter
Arnett could never have gotten all that access if Iraqis didn't know
he genuinely loves Saddam. Dissidents don't come up to
the media the way they did to me because they know the media could
turn them in.
You can get a lot of cooperation in a Communist country by
informing on dissidents.
Back to those three Iraqi villages.
If you have ever been in a terror environment, it would be pretty
obvious what was going on: two villages didn’t have terrorizers in town and the
other one did. There is no evidence whatsoever that two
villages were friendly. There is no evidence the other one was
hostile.
Let me explain a very simplistic fact to you. Outside of Western
countries, people do not usually turn out and yell insults at heavily armed
troops in tanks. As Al Capp pointed out about the “students” who
got shot rioting at Kent State, “It doesn’t take a college education
to know that the best way to get killed is to throw a rock at an
armed man.”
So the simple and simplistic fact is that the people who greet
the troops at first tend to be the friendly ones. When the
tanks first arrive the hostile people
stay home.
Those who show up to greet the troops tend to be friendly. If
they show up and are glum, chances are they were told to show up and
be glum.
But the media never understand how real people react when they have a
gun in their backs.
Moderates Are
HORRIBLE People
Every conservative has to tell liberals and
moderates how sweet they are. Every one of them talks
about how they disagree with liberals and moderates, but those
moderates are fine, patriotic people.
For ten years everybody has agreed to forget
how horrible it was for Iraqis when President Bush Senior told them
to rebel and then abandoned them. Can you imagine exposing yourself on the word of the American president and then
facing the horror of Saddam's vengeance?
Was this something awful that happened because
the sweet old professional moderate George Bush Senior just didn't
know what he was doing to the Iraqis?
Before becoming president, George Bush Senior
was head of the Central Intelligence Agency. He knew
exactly what happened to people when they faced the revenge of a
totalitarian regime.
As we all know now, many of our soldiers have
recently paid
with their lives for that sellout . So now many Iraqis fight because
they think Saddam will be back after all our promises to remove
him.
A moderate spends
his life selling people out, and Bush Senior sold people out throughout his career. Please see
March 15 2003
If They Turn on Me, They'll Turn on You and
What Do You
Expect of a Moderate?
Don't think that because a person is called
"moderate" he is wishy-washy or harmless. These are the
coldest, nastiest people you will ever meet.
The business of being a moderate is selling
principles out.
The business of being a moderate is selling
people out.
What no respectable conservative will ever tell
you is that when Bush Senior turned those Iraqis over to Saddam's
vicious, horrible thugs he was simply a moderate doing business as
usual.
I have spent my entire life fighting the left.
But I despise moderates even more than I do our outright enemies. Leftists hate my race and
they hate my country and they hate the South.
But leftists stab you
in the front.
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