OUT OF CHAOS, ORDER

Out of chaos, order

April 19, 2003

During the course of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the mantra was pushed, heavily, that Americans had a front row seat to the war, minute by minute, from the comfort of their living rooms. This was a picture painted over and over again by government pundits on talk show after talk show.

While the pictures coming out of Iraq were quite real, were the words accompanying them the reality, or were they what the media wanted the public to hear?

Case in point. Repeatedly, during the course of what people were allowed to assume were "live" broadcasts coming out of Iraq, the same pictures kept showing up on the television screen while the voice feed carried different captions. This was especially true concerning the explosions to be seen and heard in the early days of the conflict in Baghdad. Another of particular note was the building blown up by American artillery and mortar rounds that appeared to be like a cat with nine lives ... that building just kept reappearing to be blown up again and again in the same manner but with a different voice feed.

Quite obviously, the film footage ran, the figures on the screen moved, but the film feed wasn't live even though the voice-over might have been.

All the while this was going on, the question was raised numerous times of whether the film footage being shown on Al-Jazeera (also spelled al-Jazeera and Al Jazeera) television of Saddam Hussein was shot that day or was old footage. Interestingly, that same question was never raised in the context of film shown "live at five" on American television. It has been raised since by individuals inured to the media spin on the war.

In the information age, where information travels at high speed world-wide, the ability of the media to maintain control of what the public sees and hears no longer exists — something the government spin doctors seem to have forgotten in their coverage of the Iraq war.

It becomes apparent, in all this, that the war shown in living rooms in America was not necessarily the war as it happened, but rather what the media and the government talking heads wanted the public to see. Just as the film of Saddam Hussein was probably not credible, neither was all of what the Americans saw.

If this is true with the "war" in Iraq, is it safe to assume the same is also true with most everything else shown on television? How many times have people seen film footage on television that was supposedly related to the voice feed but, in reality, wasn't? Which raises the question of how true, and how accurate is anything coming from any of the mainstream national "news" services? Or has mainstream media become one big propaganda machine for the government?

This raises many questions. Is the SARS epidemic for real or is it just government hype to scare people, to create one more crisis, picking up where the situation in Iraq left off in the lives of the American people? What about the weapons of mass destruction that have yet to surface in Iraq? For real or just another crisis? Was the attack on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon preventable but allowed to happen to create yet another crisis?

Saul Alinsky, in his book, Rules for Radicals, stated:

"Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future."

To rephrase this quote — people must become so tired of the chaos, the constant state of crisis creating stress and disruption in their lives, that they will do anything to attain peace and quiet. At this point they will accept tyranny to achieve order out of chaos. In this vein, the crises created must be of the magnitude to create mass chaos:

The minute by minute coverage of the planes flying into the World Trade Towers, the collapse of those towers and the human carnage that followed, repeated over and over again.
The minute by minute coverage of the DC sniper shootings, shown over and over again, emphasizing the human carnage.
The developing war in Iraq over weapons of mass destruction with the capability to invoke mass human carnage, showing footage of the gassing of the Khurds in the north of Iraq in 1988.
The SARS virus, characterized early on as an airborn virus, making it highly contagious with the capability of mass human carnage such as resulted from various plagues down through history.

What will be the next crisis? North Korea or India over nuclear weapons. Or maybe Syria who, we are now hearing, "has a lot of explaining to do." Will Syria be the next "crisis"?

When will enough be enough? When the people cry "uncle" and accept tyranny as their lot in life to avoid the chaos and disruption in their lives caused by crisis, to achieve order out of chaos.

Sources:—

Alinsky, Saul; Rules for Radicals; New York: Vintage Books; 1971.