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Last updated on June 10th, 2017 at 04:52 am
Vegan Richard Kahn explains September 11, the war, and stuff:
Following September 11, 2001, the American government and corporate media have promoted “novelty�? as a topos by which citizens should understand current events: America’s New War arises to meet the challenge of a political situation in which “things will never be the same.�? This paper examines this claim of historical discontinuity through the application of both Douglas Kellner’s critical approach of “diagnostic media critique�? and Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s “propaganda model,�? and thereby finds that the American corporate media’s representation of the war legitimates specific national interests through the lack of proper context. Drawing upon Herbert Marcuse’s notion of war as an inhuman activity that seeks to annihilate the very context that would allow for human understanding to emerge, an analysis is undertaken that reveals that the ideology behind America’s New War is itself anti-contextual, and so, inhuman. Countering this ideology, a theory of human practice, as necessarily embedded in a process of socio-political contextualization, is promoted. Further, it is noted that this quality of “embeddedness�? means that the process of contextualization is itself an “ecological�? practice. Therefore, to complete the paper’s diagnostic critique, America’s New War is contextualized by the current global ecological crisis, referred to by Richard Leakey as the “Sixth Extinction.�? The war, it is found, is typical of a capitalist ideology that not only fails to accurately report the ongoing ecological catastrophe, but is in fact its primary cause. Finally, the role of the Internet, as a globalizing-contextualizing media, is examined and promoted as a possible sphere for housing the future of progressive politics.
Suddenly everything is perfectly clear. (This piece is three years or so old, but I think you’ll agree that it’s just as relevant today as when it was written.)
