Sunday, September 24, 2006
Columbus
One of the great examples of historical propaganda is Christopher Columbus. The often-told hero-story of Columbus is one of my pet peeves. I'm always surprised at how tenaciously people cling to the Columbus myths. I've had people get downright mad at me for debunking the Columbus story.
The conventional story of Columbus portrays him as a visionary who courageously stood up to the forces of ignorance. The traditional telling of the story usually involves either the Spanish royals and/or the crew believing the world is flat and therefore scoffing at Columbus's plan to sail the opposite direction around the world to India. The whole thing is delivered as a moral tale about believing in yourself even if everyone else thinks you are wrong.
As nice as the moral lesson is, the real story of Columbus is rather different. For starters (and I can't believe how difficult it is to convince people of this), people in the 15th century did not believe the world is flat. Few people in human history have ever believed that. The medieval symbol of royal power was the globe, which explicitly symbolized the world. Seafarers in particular have never believed the world is flat, because when you see a ship come over the horizon, you see the mast first and then the rest of the ship rises into view, which is obviously due to the fact that the Earth is curved.
So why did poor old Columbus have such a hard time convincing the Spanish court of his plan to sail the other direction to India? It had nothing to do with shape and everything to do with size. The Greek mathematician Eratosthenes in the 3rd Century BC had ACCURATELY calculated the circumference of the Earth. Let me say that again: ACCURATELY. Other mathematicians after him had confirmed the ACCURACY of his calculations. In Columbus's time, the Vatican had officially endorsed these ACCURATE calculations of the Earth's size and everyone in nautical circles accepted them.
...Everyone, that is, except Christopher Columbus, who believed in a bunch of conspiracy-theory, wingnut calculations that FALSELY showed the Earth to be 40 per cent smaller than it ACTUALLY is.
So, put yourself in the headspace of the Spaniards, who knew the true size of the Earth, as they listened to Columbus's pitch. Imagine the globe if the Americas weren't there (since no one, especially Columbus, knew they were). Imagine sailing a rickety wooden boat from Spain non-stop across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans to India with nowhere inbetween to stop for supplies. Would you invest money in a scheme like that? Would you risk your life to slow starvation by signing up as a crew member on an expedition like that? Not bloody likely.
If things had gone exactly as Columbus had planned them, there is no doubt he would have died at sea. Lucky for him, he bumped into a continent he didn't know was there before he could starve to death.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the real story of Columbus. It is not a story of an enlightened visionary standing up against the ignorant masses. It is a story of an ignorant loon standing up to the well-informed masses.
The great moral lessons of the Columbus story are that sometimes sheer dumb luck will win out over the best information in the world and sometimes the greatest discoveries come to us from total lunatics.
posted by The Propagandist @ 3:26 PM,
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Saturday, September 16, 2006
Teal Conservatives
A few weeks ago, I found myself doing a strange thing: I watched Preston Manning being interviewed by David Suzuki on the CBC.
First of all, I don't like the CBC. Second of all, I really don't like David Suzuki. Finally, since I'm an old-line PC Tory, I haven't previously liked Preston Manning either, although I'm starting to warm up to the guy by small degrees.
The show was a discussion of the environmental effects of the Alberta oilsands development. Manning was preaching a new breed of politics - teal politics, he dubbed it. Blue and green, conservatives with environmental concerns.
I found the show, subtly, very funny because you can almost see Suzuki's head about to explode as he tries to compute this thoroughly unfamiliar situation. The guy is usually such an unabashed propagandist and he is used to having guests do nothing but feed his hysterical rhetoric. But here he had to deal with Manning, a conservative who was agreeing with him on environmental policy but who wasn't afraid to challenge Suzuki's political rhetoric. Suzuki clearly didn't quite know how to handle this.
Despite the noodle-twisting aspects of the show, I must admit I like this notion of teal conservatives and I think it will be a growing trend. Conservatives are, first and foremost, supposed to be about prudence and long-term thinking, but we certainly haven't acted that way with regard to the environment over the last 20 or so years.
Instead, conservatives around the world have reflexively taken the approach of hiding our heads in the sand over these issues. We are always very quick to believe the first piece of propaganda (like Michael Crichton's State of Fear) that allows us a little more time to deny reality.
I used to be in that headspace, but I write articles for an engineers' journal. Engineers are very cautious, small-c conservative types as scientists go. They are responsible for bridges staying standing and water systems staying unpolluted, so they don't jump on bandwagons or make any sort of radical change overnight.
A few years ago, I was assigned to do a story that would feature engineers on both sides of the climate change issue. Trouble was, I couldn't find engineers on either side. I found them all in the middle. Every researcher I talked to said that climate change was definitely happening, that at least part of it was due to natural causes, that human activity may or may not have contributed to it, that there was probably very little humans could do to mitigate the change and that we needed to get started right now to adapt to climate change.
Of course, then as now, both the Right and the Left were saying and doing things that were completely counterproductive. Right-wingers were burying their heads in the sand and shouting "Garbage science! Garbage science!" whenever the topic of climate change came up. The Left, on the other hand, played the heavy, pulled out every guilt tactic about humanity's polluting ways and proposed all sorts of greenhouse gas reduction strategies that were politically, economically and scientifically not feasible.
On climate change, I firmly believe, on the basis of what my engineer friends tell me, that our only realistic response is adaptation not mitigation. But that doesn't mean we should ignore greenhouse gases. They cause a range of other problems, most notably acid rain. Some may recall that Brian Mulroney went toe-to-toe with the US to get continental air quality standards to help prevent acid rain in Eastern Canada. Now the scourge has reared its head again in Western Canada, thanks to those f**king filthy, horrific, crime-against-humanity oilsands developments in Alberta.
But don't bother telling this to today's conservatives, 'cause all they will do is holler "Garbage science!" at the top of their little ostrich lungs.
In keeping with the theme of this blog, I think the main problem is propaganda. The Right is conditioned to view the environment as a soft, "pinko" topic and therefore close their minds to it. We need to change the message. Bad environmental policy is, first of all, bad long term planning. If you owned a business and decided to save money by not hiring a janitorial service, you might have higher margins for awhile, but eventually you would lose money as your customers started avoiding your filthy stinking mess. Also, it's a public health issue. If somebody pissed in the civic water supply, the proper conservative tough law-and-order response would be to throw the hoodlum in jail. Shouldn't that logic carry through on a larger scale?
OK, let the abuse begin. I bet any money both my left and right wing friends will hate this piece ;-)
posted by The Propagandist @ 8:51 AM,
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Friday, September 15, 2006
V of Vindictive
This might seem like a movie review, but it's really an opinion.
I saw some bits from V for Vendetta on TV recently. I like that movie. In fact, I like pretty much everything from Alan Moore, paranoid old lefty though he may be.
But there was one bit in the film I didn't like. When they walked through the history of how Britain came to dictatorship, the evil, shrivelled, heartless Chancellor Sutler is ominously described as having been a member of "the Conservative Party." The tone in which this was said conveyed the sense of "oh, well, yes then he would be a dictator then, wouldn't he, being a conservative and all."
OK, I admit I'm a Tory - an old-line, moderate, PC Tory, but a Tory nonetheless. But that's not why this pisses me off. What I find most aggravating is that it displays such ignorance of history.
The story depicts the British dictatorship as being of the mass-party type of regime. In other words, the dictatorship started as a popular movement and continues to depend on the support of a party organization to maintain broad-ranging control over the population.
Well, hate to break it to ya kids, but those sorts of regimes have always flown the flag of left-wing ideology (even if they didn't always live up by it).
What about the Nazis, you say? Do you mean the National Socialist German Workers Party?
What about the Italian fascists? Mussolini was originally a member of the Socialist Party and his defining slogan of fascism - "everything inside the state, nothing outside the state" - is hardly something one could imagine coming out of the mouth of George Bush, Margaret Thatcher or Stephen Harper.
Then, of course, there are all the various and sundry out-and-out Communist and Third World nationalist regimes that cut a bloody path across the 20th Century.
This isn't to say there haven't been right-wing dictatorships in modern times, but most of those (e.g. the Pinochet regime in Chile) were not the highly-oppressive mass-party type but rather tended to be military coups whose resulting regimes were relatively short-lived.
The bigger point is that the Left has no business getting an attitude about repression and dictatorship. The fact is that most of the horror and atrocity of the last century was committed by people who at least pretended to be left wing.
The Right to be sure has its own faults, but its evils by comparison are smaller. More numerous perhaps, but smaller.
The long and short is that if a dictatorship really did emerge in modern Britain, it wouldn't come from the Tory party. It would come from the Labour Party. Or maybe the Greens.
posted by The Propagandist @ 9:34 AM,
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Monday, September 11, 2006
The Wheel
It just never stops.
Sometimes I wish I could throw a giant wrench into that wheel and make it stop. The Wheel of Lies. The Wheel of Illusion.
But of course I can't do that, not only because it's impossible and but also because I probably wouldn't do it if I had the chance.
I'm a professional propaganda writer. I used to be all about political propaganda. I still do that a bit, but now I've branched off into commercial propaganda, aka magazine writing. Peppy, up-beat, feel-good pieces about the subject of your choice. A dash of wit, a little aliteration and voila! the most boring, stupid or tragic aspects of human life become suitable fodder for passing time pleasantly in the doctor's office.
It all wears me down. Not the work. The work is fun. The concept horrifies me. When I think of the generations upon generations of deceptions, heaping up like silt, I want to retreat to a Buddhist monastery and never come out.
In Buddhism, we talk about a concept called the samsara, the eternal, self-perpetuating cycle of human delusion and suffering. I know it well.
Take my political work. Political parties in western democracies would like us to believe that their ideologies are deep, thoughtful analyses of the problems of the human condition. After 20 years of cranking out their crap, I've learned otherwise. All publicly communicated political "thought" can be summed up in one word: reaction.
A party in opposition engages in basic marketing strategies. They seek to condition voters to believe that everything their opponents are doing in government is fundamentally wrong, demonically wrong and that things would be better if only we did the opposite of what the government is doing. They rationalize, to themselves above all others, that these changes are necessary, but really they are aimed solely at creating a distinction in the minds of the voters.
I remember well the words of a former colleague, a spin-doctor for an opposition party, on hearing of some tragic event the government could not handle.
"It's worse than we hoped!" he beamed.
Of course, the governing party developed their "ideas" in reaction to the policies of the previous party in government. That previous government reacted to the one before that. And so on. The snake eats its own tail.
Look at the old British party nicknames, Tories and Whigs. Mountains of political literature have been piled up to extol or condemn both parties and their successors. How did it all start? Both terms originally meant "cattle thief", which was pretty much the worst thing you could call somebody in Stuart England. Variations on the theme of "you asshole!", in other words.
Lost in time, the whole business started as an insult contest that just kinda got out of hand. What I write for my political clients is not more intelligent or mature than the ancient British name calling. It's just longer. Which is lucky for me because I mostly get paid by the word.
posted by The Propagandist @ 4:26 PM,
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