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Title: Controlled Media Impaled on Horns of a 'Racist' Dilemma
Source:
National Vanguard
URL Source: http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=5393
Published: Jul 1, 2005
Author: Mark Neufeldt
Post Date: 2005-07-01 23:17:05 by 1776
Keywords: Controlled, Racist, Impaled
Views: 149
Comments: 1
...the poet like an acrobat with South African expatriate Deirdre Fields. Both of these programs dealt extensively with the hellish conditions in South Africa since Black rule was imposed in 1994. Poster Comment: SOUTH AFRICA---is it our future?
climbs on rime....
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits....
-- excerpt from the Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem, "Constantly Risking Absurdity"
LAWRENCE Ferlinghetti is no hero; he's not even a very remarkable poet. His associations with Jewish drug-addicts and homosexuals during the "beat" era marks him as questionable. But even scoundrels like Ferlinghetti can hit on a good idea or two. His comparison of the poet to a tight-rope-walking acrobat resonates in a sense with the way our corporate media operate.
The corporate media, like the poet, are constantly risking absurdity. Where the poet must remain a "super realist" who must "perforce perceive taut truth," the corporate media must maintain a delicate balance between the "charade reality" they have created in the minds of their viewers, listeners, and readers, and the frequent and unavoidable imposition of the actual truth upon our five senses. (ILLUSTRATION: Dauntless letter-writer April Gaede with her daughters and a friend.)
Journalists and editors employ "spin" to help manage their stories, in the way that poets employ literary devices such as metaphor and simile, but for far different purposes. The poet's goal is ultimately to awaken our senses to the world as it is, whereas the goal of our corporate media is to deaden our perceptions and to shape the way we view the world so it matches their manufactured illusions.
One National Vanguard activist and writer who has had a number of successes in penetrating the media's façade is April Gaede. She regularly gets her letters to the editor published, phones in to radio talk shows, and articulates her views on national television. Most recently, she is responsible for a letter to the editor which has generated so many written responses that her local newspaper, The Bakersfield Californian, has created a weblog for the purpose of allowing readers to debate editor Diane Hardisty's decision to publish what are called "racist letters."
Gaede's letter was penned in response to an article which appeared on February 6, 2005, titled, "Hatred," featuring the pictures of Black South African photographer Peter Magubane. The photographs appeared at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles and purported to show "the racial wars in South Africa generated by apartheid."
The Bakersfield Californian followed this story, some months later, with an article titled, "New world for teacher," on April 26, 2005, also about life in South Africa.
The second article told the story of a teacher and former resident of South Africa, Pat O'Connor, who had moved to Bakersfield to escape "the crime and violence" of her former home. O'Connor characterized the situation in her former home (since the end of White self-determination and the imposition of the ANC's version of multiracialism) as "totally getting out of hand," and stated that her "children couldn't play in the street (any longer)." Conditions had grown so bad in the city of Durban , where the O'Connors lived, that they had to retreat behind a six-foot wall patrolled by guard dogs just to escape the turmoil.
Pat O'Connor's story must sound quite familiar to American Dissident Voices listeners, as the current abysmal conditions for Whites in South Africa has been the subject matter for Kevin Strom's interviews
However, nowhere in the Bakersfield Californian article about the O'Connors is there any mention of why the crime and violence should be out of control in South Africa. This is an error of commission rather than omission. The fact is that in order to maintain the absurd fiction that a society governed by Blacks is just as likely to be as protective of its citizens and as safe as a society governed by Whites, writers and editors of the corporate media must avoid that essential question of the journalist: 'Why?' -- why has South Africa fallen so far, so fast?
Many of the Californian's readers must have been asking 'why?' After all, Americans had been told by our media that the South African problem had been a "White rule" problem, and that once the "evil White man" had been ousted, South Africa would return to the civilized "family of nations."
The enormous gulf that separates 1) the false expectation that had been established by the media regarding Black rule in South Africa and 2) the reality of that country today, presents a fantastic opportunity to expose the mendacity of the corporate media.
Enter April Gaede.
Gaede wrote a letter to the editor, May 25, 2005, reminding readers that South Africa was not always a place where residents feared for their lives. In fact, under White rule, South Africa had been a much better place to live, for both Whites and Blacks.
And these are sentiments that have been echoed by a number of Blacks, including Moeltsi Mbeki, the brother of South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, who told the BBC: "The average African is worse off now than during the colonial era." Mbeki accused African leaders of "stealing money and keeping it abroad, while colonial rulers planted crops, built roads and cities."
Gaede made essentially the same observation.
She wrote that under multiracialism, the situation in South Africa had deteriorated to a state of savagery: "Since South Africa was not originally populated by Blacks, other than a few nomadic bushmen, and since the Blacks who migrated there only did so after the Europeans had created a society in that land, it is not at all a surprise that the society that remains has 'gone native.'"
This leads to another question: Why would the media publish a letter that exposes the reality of Black rule in South Africa at all?
It may be that the editor simply hasn't always got enough material to print, and the "racist" can be used to stir up interest in the paper and increase sales.
A second possibility is that when a "racist" letter arrives on the desk of a newspaper editor, such as Dianne Hardisty, the editor may believe that others who haven't written may feel exactly the same way as the letter writer. By publishing a "racist" letter, the media reassures readers of its "objectivity."
Perhaps, the very fact of the letter's existence presents the media with the opportunity to attack "racism" -- a favorite pastime of multiracialists, and an essential aspect of their agenda. Multiracialist writers and editors -- that is to say, virtually all of those employed by the lapdog press -- can advance their agenda through an editorial denouncing "hate," or from an "outraged" citizen or two, who will passionately disagree with the "racist" letter.
Whatever the reason for publishing the letter, it isn't done out of any sense of balance or desire to learn more about what the "racist" has to say, a point that will be demonstrated a little later.
On this particular occasion, and almost as if on cue, several writers of the "outraged citizen" variety responded with letters in the following days, repudiating Gaede for holding on to such heretical views.
One reader wrote about "200 years of exploitation" (as if that explained why Black Africans were not able to stop raping infants and start governing themselves).
Another writer argued that since a few Bushmen inhabited what is now South Africa before White people arrived, that the Whites stole the country.
What none of the writers could do was refute April Gaede's logic.
Enter Diane Hardisty, editor, The Bakersfield Californian.
Hardisty has been an enthusiastic endorser of Black rule in South Africa for some time. She wrote an article on November 28, 2004, "Be thankful for a free press" about a South African trip she made -- one that no doubt bypassed Pat O'Connor's Durban neighborhood -- and celebrating that country's transition from "the world's racist pariah to a stable democratic partnership between Whites and Blacks."
Apparently, Diane Hardisty exists in some parallel universe to the one inhabited by Deirdre Fields, Pat O'Connor, and the rest of us. A "stable partnership between Whites and Blacks" is the furthest thing from the truth about life in South Africa today.
It was in defense of her rosy conceptions about Black rule and her decision to publish a letter which criticized Black rule that Hardisty wrote a recent article titled, "Expose hate; it grows in the dark," June 5, 2005. (The word "hate" is a popular euphemism employed by the corporate media to malign racially-conscious Whites).
After applying the customary smear of "White supremacist" to Gaede, Hardisty went on to explain her decision to publish letters by "evil racists" in terms of freedom of speech -- a clever move on her part, morphing the debate about the true nature of Black rule into a debate about free speech.
Hardisty contends that the "problem" of "racist opinions" is not confined to Bakersfield and its paper. Instead, she says, it is a problem for newspaper editors around the country. According to Hardisty the "problem" of racially-aware citizens reaching out to their communities by way of letters to their local papers has become so acute and widespread that "an online network of U.S. editorial page editors" was established to discuss the "crisis." (Can we join this network, I wonder...)
A discussion of this nature, with the participation of some of the nation's leading newspaper editors, would seem to imply that action is called for whenever a considerable group of citizens holds a view that is not in alignment with the view pushed by the newspaper editors and writers of the country. That's a very odd proposition when one considers the fact that the nation's editorial pages are thought to exist for the purpose of discussion and debate.
Quoting two Jewish editors (presumably authorities on the subject of squelching opposition to multiculturalism and multiracialism), Karl Seitz, of the Birmingham Post-Herald in Alabama and Paul Greenberg, of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Hardisty went on to repeat that she, like the editors of those two larger dailies, treats "these letters on a case-by-case basis; keeping the commentary as civil as possible; but allowing race to be discussed as openly as any other topic in the Opinion section."
She concluded by outlining her editorial policy, stating that: "name-calling and accusatory letters that are filled with invectives and distort facts (like one received just a couple of days ago) won't be published." However, "we will publish letters that may 'offend' some people."
But Hardisty was not completely forthcoming. Though anti-Gaded writers had free rein, we know that at least one very worthy pro-Gaede letter -- there were no doubt others -- went unpublished, in direct contradiction to Hardisty's claim that she allows "race to be discussed as freely as any other topic."
Here is the letter, by South African national and author Arthur Kemp:
29 May 2005
Letters to the Editor
The Bakersfield Californian
Bakersfield.com>http://target="_blank">Bakersfield.com
April Gaede's letter "South Africa a Mess" raises some uncomfortable truths, as can be seen by the hysterical reaction of some readers.
1. It is true that the majority of SA was unoccupied when Whites first arrived in Cape Town in 1652. The Bushman were the true indigenous people, but they migrated north and can still be found in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia.
2. The first large Black population was only encountered in the Eastern Cape (some 1000 km from Cape Town), in the late 1700s, and later in the eastern seaboard province of KwaZulu Natal.
3. The Transvaal, the largest and richest province, with a total area of 111,196 square miles (almost the size of Great Britain and Ireland combined) was virtually empty: the first-ever census in that province in 1904 revealed that there were only 802,085 native born Blacks in that region.1 Bear in mind that this was 1904, making a mockery of one your letter writer's assertion that "200 years" of oppression is the cause of SA's current predicament. When it is considered that the current SA population is 44 million, it can be seen that April Gaede is correct in her assertion that Blacks moved there in search of development opportunities offered by the White settlers.
As to the current state of South Africa? Well, the readers can consider the following crime statistics, and decide for themselves if the "New South Africa" is a success story or not:
- One woman is raped every minute in SA.2
- One third of all females in South Africa will be raped in their lifetime.3
- Since 1994, some 1,724 of SA's White farmers have been murdered.4
- In 2004 there were 19,824 murders, or 55 per day.5
- 4.2 million South Africans were victims of violent crime between June 2003 and June 2004, an increase from 3.8 million the previous year.6
Yours Sincerely
Arthur Kemp
Sources:
(1) 'Transvaal,' 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, http://61.1911encyclopedia.org/T/TR/TRANSVAAL.htm
(2, 3) SA men are wife-beaters and rapists - survey, Independent Online, November 15 2004, http://tinyurl.com/88b8h
(4) Farm Murders, Censorbugbear, Uncensored News from South Africa, http://groups.msn.com/censorbugbear
(5) Crime stats: 1m+ arrested; http://News24.com, 21/09/2004, http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_1593009,00.html
(5) SAARF Crime Monitor , SA Advertising Research Foundation: An eye on crime: SAARF "keeps 'em peeled"; http://www.saarf.co.za/pressreleases.htm
Obviously Arthur Kemp's letter was not a "name-calling and accusatory letter... filled with invectives," nor did it distort facts. If anything, Kemp's letter provided plenty of documentation to support his facts, something sorely missing from Hardisty's own column. So, why was it that Kemp's letter went unpublished?
If you read between the lines the answer is clear.
Hardisty's rationale for publishing "racially charged letters," is framed as a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland way of defending free speech. But really it's just another way of crushing dissent while not appearing to do so. She gives cursory exposure to a letter or two on the topic of race so that she can orchestrate a rather conspicuous mock trial of the "racist" idea by publishing only letters that oppose it.
It is interesting to examine Hardisty's logic in this light. Why, if in fact "hate dies in the light," would she not publish a hundreds of letters by "racists," continuously or all at once, thereby inoculating the community for good?
Having the power to choose what to publish and what not to publish is a powerful tool in shaping public perceptions, especially when you can smear anyone who opposes your view.
Earlier this year the National Vanguard editorial team produced the research report Who Rules America? in which this technique, which might be called "marginalizing the 'racist,'" is discussed in the context of entertainment programming:
"A White-racist -- that is, any racially conscious White person who looks askance on miscegenation or at the rapidly darkening racial situation in America -- is portrayed, at best, as a despicable bigot who is reviled by the other characters, or, at worst, as a dangerous psychopath who is fascinated by firearms and is a menace to all law-abiding citizens."
False characterizations of racially-conscious Whites help to ostracize them in the minds of the public -- and discourage others from asking real questions about what is happening in South Africa (or in their own communities, for that matter).
Once the corporate media have used synthetic outrage and selective publication of responses to successfully exclude the racially-conscious, thinking person from the debate, they can reestablish the parameters of "acceptable" public discussion (i.e. Hardisty's switch from a discussion of S.A. to the "free speech debate").
As Who Rules America? states: "For all too many Americans the real world has been replaced by the false reality of the TV environment, and it is to this false reality that his urge to conform responds. Thus, when a TV scriptwriter expresses approval of some ideas and actions through the TV characters for whom he is writing, and disapproval of others, he exerts a powerful pressure on millions of viewers toward conformity with his own views. And as it is with TV entertainment, so it is also with the news, whether televised or printed. The insidious thing about this form of thought control is that even when we realize that entertainment or news is biased, the media masters still are able to manipulate most of us. This is because they not only slant what they present, but also they establish tacit boundaries and ground rules for the permissible spectrum of opinion."
But in establishing a 'blog on the subject of Gaede's letter and congratulating herself for permitting it, Hardisty may have inadvertently opened up a Pandora's box out of which may spring countless positive incarnations of our ideas.
Even bloggers who disagree with us will see that we are fair-minded, rational, and articulate -- not the outcome desired by Hardisty and others who apply the "White supremacist" smear to our every appearance in their papers.
Media control is at best an imperfect weapon from the multiracialists' point of view. The vast gulf that yawns between media-generated accounts of events and the reality of those events, coupled with the arrogance of the media in dealing with intelligent opposition, creates ongoing problems for the media masters as they try to control public perceptions.
A short-term goal for every activist should be to penetrate the illusory world of the corporate media, establishing contact with those who are receptive to our ideas. Many National Vanguard activists and writers are doing this every day with outreach programs ranging from billboard campaigns to fly-overs at national sporting events, and in continuing and evolving efforts of every sort.
In the long-term, National Vanguard activists and writers should continue to pursue the goal of building our own truly free and independent media -- media that White Americans can trust, for a change, to deliver news and entertainment designed to help, not hinder, the forward progress of our families, our nation, and our race.
Every day, National Vanguard activists and writers are exploiting the openings provided for us by our enemies' own rhetoric -- and their fabrications about life in South Africa and elsewhere -- to deconstruct the illusory "reality" that they try to impose on our people's minds. More and more, we are turning the corporate media's weapon of choice -- the pages of its papers, the billboards of its advertising agencies, and the bandwidth of its Weblogs -- against them.
Momentary setbacks will not stop us. Meanwhile, Hardisty and her cronies will have to keep working on their high-wire acts -- and a fall is coming!
Articles cited:
HATRED
Author: MARK BARNA, Californian staff writer e-mail: mbarna@bakersfield.com
Date: February 6, 2005
Publication: Bakersfield Californian, The (CA)
Section: Eye Street
Words: 684
New world for teacher
Author: MISTY WILLIAMS, Californian staff writer e-mail: mwilliams@bakersfield.com
Date: April 26, 2005
Publication: Bakersfield Californian, The (CA)
Section: Local
Words: 521
Page: b1
Expose hate; it grows in the dark (printed in full) beneath the weblog, "Why publish racist letters?"
Date: June 5, 2005
Publication: Bakersfield Californian, The (CA)
Section: Editorial Page
Words: 847
Page: B8
Author: DIANNE HARDISTY, Bakersfield
Date: November 28, 2004
Publication: Bakersfield Californian, The (CA)
Section: Editorial Page
Words: 909
Page: B12
The "Why publish racist letters?" weblog address: http://bakersfield.typepad.com/fired_up/2005/06/why_publish_rac.html
"South Africa better in colonial times" BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3679706.stm
Excerpt: Hatred
Los Angeles: Though the images were taken in South Africa, they bring to mind recent Black history in America.
South Africa's apartheid and America's renewed energy toward segregation after World War II are kissing cousins in the family of racial prejudice.
Peter Magubane's photographs of the racial wars in South Africa generated by apartheid are on display through May 28 at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.
These powerful and disturbing pictures document race relations in the 1960s and '70s in South Africa, where governing Whites created a social climate that relegated Blacks, who made up 75 percent of the population, to second-class citizenship.
"Apartheid" is a Dutch word meaning "apartness." It dates to the 17th century when the Dutch arrived with the English to colonize South Africa. (During the 18th and 19th centuries, several European nations settled Africa in a land grab known as colonialism.) Apartheid segregated South African Whites, Blacks, mulattos and Asians (Indians and Pakistanis)....
Excerpt: New world for teacher:
It was a simple question. "How come you talk funny?" the 5-year-old boy blurted out.
The room erupted with giggles, as the rest of the children stared up at her.
It's not the first time teacher Pat O'Connor, who tutors students twice a week at the Bakersfield Homeless Center, has heard the query.
"Are you from Britain? Boston? Rome? South America?" the guesses poured out.
No. She's from South Africa.
O'Connor moved her family to Bakersfield three years ago after a short stint teaching at an international school in Portugal.
Now a special education teacher for the Kern County Superintendent of Schools, she spends her days at Stockdale elementary school in the southwest.
She left her homeland in 1999 with her husband and two children.
"The crime and violence was just totally getting out of hand," she said. "It just got to the point where my children couldn't play in the street."
A 6-foot wall surrounded their home in the coastal city of Durban. Guard dogs stood behind it.
Unemployment and poverty were rampant. AIDS was epidemic.
It wasn't worth the risk, she said....
Excerpt: BBC article:
Africa 'better in colonial times' The average African is worse off now than during the colonial era, the brother of South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki has said.
Moeletsi Mbeki accused African elites of stealing money and keeping it abroad, while colonial rulers planted crops and built roads and cities.
"This is one of the depressing features of Africa," he said....
He said that while China had lifted some 400,000 people out of poverty in the past 20 years, Nigeria had pushed 71 million people below the poverty line.
"The average African is poorer than during the age of colonialism. In the 1960s African elites/rulers, instead of focusing on development, took surplus for their own enormous entourages of civil servants without ploughing anything back into the country," he said.
In July, a United Nations report said that Africa was the only continent where poverty had increased in the past 20 years....
Excerpt: EXPOSE HATE; IT GROWS IN THE DARK
By Dianne Hardisty, editorial page editor
...Voicemail — May 26: "I was really disappointed to see the letter you printed on Monday — 'South Africa a mess,' by April Gaede. I know you have printed things by her before. I don't know if you are trying to create controversy so you can get lots of letters going on this. But for you to publish a letter like this that is so full of intolerance, racism, poor knowledge and ignorance really bothers me," said the woman.
"I think unless you had absolutely no other letters in your file or in your mail that day, this is absolutely incredible. I think it shows irresponsibility."
...Within two days, I had received calls from two readers protesting unpopular racial views espoused by two letter writers on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Both callers contended The Californian should not have printed the offending letters.
Coincidentally, as I dealt with the protests, an online network of U.S. editorial page editors erupted in an exchange on the very same subject: Should Opinion sections print racially charged letters?...
Editing and publishing intolerant letters — whether they are written by Fuentes or Gaede about race, or by others about gay rights, religious causes, and other issues — is tricky business. The public discourse is not always polite and "acceptable." But it should be issue-oriented.
Name-calling and accusatory letters that are filled with invectives and distort facts (like the one received just a couple of days ago) won't be published. We will publish letters that may "offend" some people....
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#1. To: wbales, christine, Jethro Tull (#0)
Rob Noel knows that is true.
But this torment is her delight, of which she can never grow weary.
Africa 'better in colonial times' The average African is worse off now than during the colonial era, the brother of South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki has said.
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