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from
thor@aol.com
reply-to all@goldgang.com
to
all@goldgang.com
date Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at
12:25 PM
subject Re: The War You Don't
See
The Bernays family had a
tradition of deceit.
Anthony
Grafton's article "In Bernays, Scaliger, and Others," which
is found in The
Jewish Past Revisted: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians,[294]
discusses the German Jewish classicist Jacob Bernays,
who was a very important 19th century scholar in the tradition of the
religious historian Joseph Justus Scaliger. Grafton includes a
significant reservation on pp. 34-35 about Bernays' work that applies
to modern Jewish ethnoreligiously and Zionistically correct
scholarship of academics like Alan Segal of Columbia, Aren Maeir of
Bar Ilan, Jacob Lassner of Northwestern University, and Alexander
Joffe formerly of Purchase College.
Most
important of all, Bernays could not deal honestly with some of
Scaliger's most radical and challenging theories about history and
exegesis. Bernays insisted that he himself had no faith in biblical
criticism. Historical readings of the Old Testament he dismissed as
pseudo-scholarly profanations of a sacred text, based only on wild
hypotheses. Scaliger had other views. He not only found but published
(and refused to abridge the Egyptian dynasty lists that plunged the
world of European historical learning into a century and more of
crisis. Worse still, he speculated in radical ways about the gaps and
defects of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible. Scaliger noted
that the Masoretic text was relatively late: he dated it to around
the time of Gamaliel, whose remark thatmasoret seyag la-torah
(tradition is a fence to the law) he took as a reference to the
Masoretic apparatus. And he insisted that even this well-preserved
official text represented only a version of a lost original. Its
language, Hebrew, was not -- = so Scaliger claimed -- a special, holy
language, with which God had created the world and in which Adam had
named the animals, but the ordinary tongue of ancient Assyria.
Neither was its script original or sacred, since the Jews originally
had used a different one, much like that of the Samaritans. Only
after their return from the Babylonian exile did they transliterate
the text into the square [Aramaic] characters used in extant
manuscripts and the printed Hebrew Bible. The Old Testament, like the
new, suggested Scaliger, incorporated many errors and showed some
worrying gaps. The Masoretes, narrowly Jewish in culture and
tradition, had known little or nothing about non-Jewish history.
Their vocalizations of non-Hebrew names, for example, were often
faulty; much less accurate, Scaliger thought, than those of the more
cosmopolitan Alexandrian Jews who had translated the Septuagint.
Finally, all texts of the Old Testament referred to stories and texts
now lost, such as the story of the young man killed by Lamech,
referred to -- but not recounted in Genesis.
The
attempt to filter certain questions out of scholarly discussion
continues even more aggressively today as indicated by the
controversy over Barnard Professor Nadia Abu el-Haj, who had the
audacity to be a scholar of Palestinian ancestry addressing topics in
Jewish and Israel studies and who had the bad manners to challenge
assumptions, e.g. on pp. 127-128 of Facts
on the Ground, Archaeological Practice and Territorial
Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society:[295]
It
is important here to consider the issue of ethnicity in (Israeli)
archaeological practice and the ways in which positivism and
nationalism met on its terrain. What is it that makes an Israelite an
Israelite?
That question was never
posed in this Israelite settlement debate. There was no need to ask
the question at all. The Israelites were a category of people known
from the Bible who entered Palestine at a particular historical
moment, (eventually) conquered the Canaanite city-states then regnant
in the land, and ultimately built a nation-state of their own –
the fore fathers of contemporary Israelis. The question is not who
they were, but how to identify and locate them.
from
Charlie Brown <badboy@gmail.com>
to
all@goldgang.com
date Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at
2:15 PM
subject Re: The War You Don't
See
my friend John Laughland has
written on
this:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/laughland8.1.1.html
There is a second body of
literature, which makes a slightly different point from the specific
technique which Münzenberg perfected. This concerns the way in
which people can be made to react in certain collective ways by
psychological stimuli. Perhaps the first major theoretician of this
was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward
Bernays, whose book Propaganda
in 1928 said that it was entirely natural and right for governments
to organise public opinion for political purposes. The opening
chapter of his book has the revealing title – "Organising
chaos" – and Bernays writes,
The
conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised opinions and
habits of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
Those who manipulate
this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government
which is the true ruling power of
our country. [my italics]
(The
text continues: "We are governed, our minds are moulded, our
tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never
heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic
society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in
this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning
society. ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the
sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical
thinking, we are
dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who
understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.
It is they who pull the wires which control the public
mind.")
Bernays says
that, very often, the
members of this invisible government do not even know who the other
members are. Propaganda,
he says, is the only way to prevent public opinion descending into
dissonant chaos. Bernays continued to work on
this theme after the war, editing "Engineering consent" in
1955, a title to which Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky alluded when
they published their seminal Manufacturing
Consent in 1988. The connection with Freud is important because,
as we shall see later, psychology is an extremely important tool in
influencing public opinion. Two of the contributors to "Engineering
consent" make the
point that every leader must play on basic human emotions in order to
manipulate public opinion. For instance,
Doris E. Fleischmann and Howard Walden Cutler
write,
Self-preservation,
ambition, pride, hunger, love of family and children, patriotism,
imitativeness, the desire to be a leader, love of play – these
and other drives are the psychological raw materials which
every leader must take into account in his endeavour to win the
public to his point of view … To maintain their
self-assurance, most
people need to feel certain that whatever they believe about anything
is true.
This was what
Willi Münzenberg understood – the
basic human urge for people to believe what they want to believe.
Thomas Mann alluded to it when he attributed the rise of Hitler to
the collective desire of the German people for "a fairy tale"
over the ugly truths of reality.
Other
books worth mentioning in this regard concern not so much modern
electronic propaganda but the more general psychology of crowds. The
classics in this regard are Gustave Le Bon’s work The
Psychology of Crowds (1895), Elias Canetti’s
Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht)
(1980); and Serge Tchakhotine’s Le viol
des foules par la propagande politique
(1939). All these books draw heavily on psychology and anthropology.
There is also the magnificent oeuvre of one of my favourite writers,
the anthropologist René Girard, whose writings on the logic of
imitation (mimesis), and on collective acts of violence, are
excellent tools for understanding
why it is that public opinion is so easily motivated to support war
and other forms of political violence.
On
Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Charlie Brown <badboy@gmail.com>
wrote:
>what an evil wanker Eddie
Bernays was--
>how many people have
ever heard of him, compared to his uncle Siggy
[Sigmund Freud]?
>
>On
Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 1:40 PM, Goose <Jolly@greylag.com>
wrote:
>>Fred,
>>
>>Try
this link:-
>>
>>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TJvPBgEok4
>>
>>
>>Goose
>>
>>
>>
>>On
17/12/2010 2:42:47 AM, Frederick Chase (fchase@gmail.com) wrote:
>>> Video 'could not be found'
in Boston.
>>> Thanks for trying
-
>>>
>>>
-Fred
>>>
>>>
On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Andy Harrington <andy_ha@uk>
wrote:
>>>
>>>
> Maybe you wont be able to watch this, might be UK only.
>>>
>
>>> > John Pilger
investigates the media's role in war. He traces the history of
>>>
> 'embedded' and independent reporting from the carnage of WWI to
the current
>>> > wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
>>> >
>>> >
http://www.itv.com/itvplayer/video/?Filter=198443
>>> >
>>>
>
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22edward+Bernays%22+%22mad+men%22