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Urban Ranger
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Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic
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The Apotheosis of Ronald Reagan
Divinity Thorugh Marketing
By NOAM CHOMSKY
There was something similar after the JFK assassination, but of course the assassination of a living president is quite different. I don't recall anything else remotely similar, perhaps since FDR, in the midst of a war, and of course he really was a significant figure, whatever one's judgment of him. Reagan is another story: mostly a PR creation in the first place, and massively so in recent years.
During his years in office, Reagan was not particularly popular. Gallup just published poll figures comparing him during office with other presidents. His average ratings during his years in office were below Kennedy, Johnson, Bush I, and Clinton; above Nixon, Ford, Carter. This is averages during their terms in office. By 1992 he was ranked just next to Nixon as the most unpopular living ex-president. Since then there has been an immense PR campaign to convert him into a revered and historic figure, if not semi-divine, and it's doubtless had an effect, radically shifting the rankings. Not on the basis of facts: rather, extremely effective marketing. The current performance is reminiscent of the death of Hirohito and Soviet leaders. One of the more depraved moments of US media. The lying is quite impressive, even by people who surely know better.
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East Street Trader
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London, United Kingdom
Jun 2000
time: 05:36
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The views being expressed about the chain of events leading up to the USSR fragmenting are all wholly new to me.
I rather think that the Cold War is something which has been seen differently by the protoganists and by those who, to a greater or lesser degree, were onlookers.
I must say the idea that something like the events in Granada still had the slightest significance by the time the USSR broke up seems odd.
The two really striking things about the break up were its speed and the fact that it began, continued and reached a conclusion feeding throughout solely on matters internal to itself. The conflict of wills was between such persons within the USSR as wished to maintain the empire - pretty much those who ran the governments of the various countries within the empire - and the ordinary people who had got fed up with the way things were. Happily by the time it happened there were few of the first kind and an overwhelming majority of the second.
If I was going to chart a path leading towards the events that took place the earlier events I would choose would be those in the two or three years (or maybe just a bit longer so as to include the particular discontent in Gdansk) before the event which demonstrated the gradual reduction in the will which existed on the part of the authorities to stamp out internal dissent. Foreign policy would just not figure.
Which is not to say that foreign influences were not the key element. But they were cultural influences. It was the contrast between all those images of busy shops full of goods and people able to gratify their materialist needs in the west and the reality of queues and limited materialist well being in the east which gradually led the people in the USSR to decide that there had to be a change. And much the same influences which sapped the will of those in power to maintain all the propoganda and the physical force needed to keep the materialist aspirations in check.
The sight of people bringing about so huge a change by spontaneously just standing up and saying, "no more. Things are now going to change" was an extraordinary one which, as far as I know, is unprecedented at any other time and in any other place.
Unsurprisingly so because it is only with the extraordinary changes which have taken place in the ways we all communicate with each other that the level of universally held dissatisfaction could develop and know itself. And the media was also a necessary ingredient in the process where the actions of the first few brave souls was taken up by others and the incredible snowball effect began and then gained pace in the spectacular way it did.
When I compare that sense of what happened with the stuff I now read about Grenada or about the cost of the arms race I find it difficult to imagine thatbthe same phenomenon is under discussion. Conceivably things like that may deserve some sort of footnote in the story. Although, for myself, I don't think so. But, whatever view you take of that, to ignore the spontaneity of what occured and its immediate cause in order to focus on the minutae of what happened in the lead up to it is to just miss the point of one of the two most extraordinary events which have happened in my time.
And to miss the chance for a really good injection of enthusiasm and optimism. Because if it were actually true that the collapse of the Russian empire was brought about by such things as armed conflicts with foreign powers over territory and influence, and by the outcome of an arms race, then there would be nothing new, or extraordinary going on. History is littered with empires the collapse of which is innitiated from outside.
And if it is to be business as usual there is no reason to think that we will not go on suffering from invasions and wars and go on wasting huge amounts of time, energy and resources on the production of ever more hideous and frightening weapons. Because that is what we have done up to now.
Whereas if you allow yourself to see what actually happened for what it was - a spontaneous and effective decision by a whole bunch of very ordinary folk to reject the things from the past which were causing them grief and to start pursuing what they wanted from their lives untrammeled by that junk - why then it becomes a lot easier to imagine the human race getting rid of a whole lot more of the daft and outmoded baggage that we are currently carrying. The idea of war and the folly of nuclear weapons not excepted.
These are not ideas, I think that Reagan would understand.
But his formative years were before the extraordinary events which took place in the former USSR.
I find it very difficult to imagine schoolboys of the future being asked to write much about what happened in Grenada. Whereas I can well imagine the events in the USSR topping by a long way any poll of the subjects which are set for study in the whole of the twentieth century.
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10-06-2004 17:53
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