[Dean's World] Dave Price: Information, Insularity, and Induced Insanity

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Price:
Information, Insularity, and Induced Insanity
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1155702427.shtml


   We are, all of us, victims of our context. That which controls our
   context controls us.
   Recently I stumbled across the amazing story of North Korean agent and
   mass murderer [1]Kim Hyon Hui, a woman now in her 40s who as a young
   girl in 1987 helped kill 115 people aboard [2]KAL Flight 858 by
   planting a bomb on the plane. I had never heard this story before,
   which surprised me, because it is one of the most shocking and
   poignant stories I have ever read, and at the same time such a
   profound insight into the nature of tyranny and totalitarianism that
   it ought to be in the mandatory history curricula of every high
   school.
   When Kim was arrested after the atrocity, her and her older male
   accomplice both tried to commit suicide via cyanide capsules hidden in
   cigarettes (as per their orders). He succeeded, she did not. Iâll
   quote [3]Tantorâs comment as to what happened next:

     She had been taken from her parents as a young teenager to be
     trained as a covert agent. She had grown up on North Korean
     propaganda, believing that South Korea was a land of starving
     paupers. Instead of the typically brutal interrogation done by the
     South Koreans when they catch a spy, they did a soft sell instead.
     They drove her around Seoul showing her how rich it was. She
     refused to accept it, so they told her to tell them where to drive.
     She directed them out into a residential section. They told her to
     pick any house. She picked one. They knocked on the door, told the
     inhabitants they were coming in, and took her in the house. When
     she saw the modern appliances and the refrigerator full of food
     (luxuries reserved for the elite in North Korea) she broke down
     sobbing, realizing everything she had been told was a lie.

   Unreal. She was convicted and sentenced to death, but later pardoned
   on the very reasonable grounds she had been brainwashed by those truly
   responsible for the horrible act she committed, and wrote a book about
   the experience called [4]The Tears of My Soul. She later converted to
   Christianity and while I know Christ forgives her, I have to wonder if
   she has ever been able to forgive herself. She now lives in seclusion.
   In a similar vein, in the wake of the recent bomb plot Michelle Malkin
   had posted [5]a survey from Britain with a result I can only describe
   as deeply disturbing: only 17% of British Muslims believe Arabs
   carried out the 9/11 attacks, and 56% believe it was not Arabs. This
   is one of the most frightening feats of social informational
   engineering since Germany 1938.
   I wondered how this poll could possibly be true, and have been told
   British subcultures can be very insular, apparently the diametric
   opposite of our American "melting pot." Growing up a Muslim in
   Britain, one might never be exposed to the wider range of Western
   influences. This example of contextual control does not strike me as
   much less contrived or ill-intended than the first, and the practical
   consequences are eerily similar. Of course, fascism wearing a
   religious face is not confined to radical Islam; many cults of various
   stripe engage in this kind of contextual control in order to gain
   power over their followers. But few are this successful.
   And [6]as Mohammed at ITM notes, the tyrants of the Mideast wield
   their own blend of totalitarian control and cynical pseudoreligious
   narratives to manipulate the people they purport to govern.

     But in fact and again taking a look at some simple statistics we
     find that the entire Arab media industry makes less than 1.5
     billion dollars/year while consumes approximately 15 billions/year
     [7]in return and this makes one think about who pays the
     difference.

   No kidding. That has to be at least ten times our Mideast budget for
   counter-brainwashing programs like Voice of America. This is why
   Palestinians have no desire for peace with Israel: tremendous efforts
   are being made and tremendous wealth being expended by those in power
   to sell an alternate version of reality in which they and the violence
   they encourage are necessary. And the insanity they deliberately
   induce is apparent in the prevalence of suicide bombings across the
   region.
   All of these things are of a piece, of course. By controlling a
   groupâs contextual data (systematically degrading the accessibility
   and perceived reliability of outside information and controlling
   information's distribution within the group), the unscrupulous are
   able to coerce great masses of people to serve their ends in acts both
   gross and subtle. Lies are the lifeblood of tyrants and fascists,
   Islamo- or otherwise. They hate and fear free democracies not because
   they are jealous of our freedom but because they realize our freedom
   is a potentially lethal threat to them, as evidenced by Kim's epiphany
   and Mohammed's arguments. Regimes and movements built in the shadows
   of deliberately fostered ignorance and aggressively marketed lies
   cannot survive the harsh sunlight of truth, logic, and empiricism.

References

   1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Hyon_Hui
   2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_858
   3. http://www.donaldsensing.com/index.php/2006/08/10/uk-bomb-plot-north-korea-connection/#comment-44606
   4. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0688128335/sr=8-1/qid=1155701560/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-2257744-2522419?ie=UTF8
   5. http://michellemalkin.com/archives/005699.htm
   6. http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/2006/08/logic-amid-sands.html
   7. http://www.asharqalawsat.com/leader.asp?section=3&article=326453&issue=9806