In every human society there are always ambitious, unscrupulous, cruel men, who, I have already endeavoured to show, are ever ready to perpetrate any kind of violence, robbery or murder for their own advantage; and that in a society without Government these men would be robbers, restrained in their actions partly by strife with those injured by them (self-instituted justice, lynching), but partly and chiefly by the most powerful weapon of influence upon men – public opinion. Whereas in a society ruled by coercive authority, these same men are those who will seize authority and will make use of it, not only without the restraint of public opinion, but, on the contrary, supported, praised and extolled by a bribed and artificially maintained public opinion.
Written in 1905, Tolstoy’s The End of the Age: An Essay on the Approaching Revolution could well have been written today, given how little has changed with the nature of State power and the governments of the world. George Bush Snr. once said to a White House correspondent, “If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.” But since the media functions to create the “artificially maintained public opinion” the people remain largely ignorant of how those in power abuse their influence in order to expand further their already excessive wealth and power.
They can be implicated in large-scale paedophile rings, as, for instance, the aforementioned George Bush was in the Franklin cover-up affair; members of the Labour cabinet were implicated during the Metropolitan Police investigation into paedophilia, Operation Ore, after which a D-Notice was promptly slapped on the media. While D-Notices (which prohibit the media from reporting on issues of “national security”) are not legally binding, the media nevertheless effectively treats them as such and any investigative journalism – however tepid it may be, given the lackadaisical attitude to dirt-digging from the press – is immediately called off.
Coercive authority has little difficulty masking its own crimes from the eyes of the public.
Whereas paedophilia is clearly too taboo for even the servile and amoral politicians and their allies in the press to endorse, when it comes to other forms of “violence, robbery or murder for their own advantage” the shapers of public opinion are all too eager to justify the most barbaric acts of naked imperialistic aggression and plunder. Witness the devastation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere, then try and find a mainstream journalist capable of expressing compassion for the countless victims rather than extolling the virtues of the aggressors.
The aphorism “might makes right” – when it is “our” might being used against others – dominates the discourse; the enemy figures are portrayed in a manner not dissimilar to Kipling’s “white man’s burden”, written just 6 years before Tolstoy’s essay. The government and media may be slicker endeavours in the modern world but little has changed in terms of its message to the rest of the world; their delusional superiority complex no different today than it was in …read more
