Bidding will open at one hundred. Do I hear 100?
"The primary role of journalists on the front lines is to do your best to tell a story in a situation when truth is not always readily available. It's also vital to tell what you see and question what you don't see, as well as to provide context to complicated issues... There hasn't been a single time I've ever turned down an assignment because of the dangers involved."
- Christiane Amanpour
Who needs truth?
Good, how about 200?
I guess I don't need my history and culture anymore; CNN et al. are the keepers of truth these days and according to them, we're tribes from a bygone era who simply got up one morning and decided to fight out of pure barbaric hatred. Popular wisdom now has it that our tribal leaders whipped our primitive minds up in a bloodthirsty frenzy, leading us to pick up our bone clubs to do their bidding between our savage territories. We waved our soiled banners, danced for the gods, and drank blood from the skulls of our enemies.
"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
- Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger
Excellent, do I hear 250? Yes, the Man in the Yellow Hat.
Haven't you heard that people go to war simply because? That there are no such things as aggressors and victims? That all sides are equally responsible for bloodshed? Haven't you heard that war is decided upon by consensus over raw flesh and chalices of blood? That oppression is a figment of everyone's imagination? That cultural and linguistic imperialism is impossible? That history and culture are obsolete? That some nations are so small they never existed in the first place? Haven't you heard that time began in 1945?
Independence is so passé.
Do I hear 300?
"The media often generate the very events that they describe. They add an impetus, import momenta, dictate trajectory, nudge leaders and determine consequences. They are an active partner rather than a disinterested bystander. As such, they share the matrix of responsibility with politicians and army generals. Every cozened canard, the falsely pullalating numbers of the victims, the obnubilating dehumanization of the enemy, the courage of crapulous pen pushers who risk only their laptops in bloody battle carries a price tag in human lives. The ratings climb on mountains of corpses and lives destroyed."
- Sam Vaknin, Central Europe Review
Going once...
And so the forces of Good and Civilization are yet again rewriting our history, oiling our joints and tightening our strings so that we may dance for them once more.
Please sir, may I have some more?
Going twice...
"Modern man is thus a man of the entire world, but this does not mean he has no prejudices. The global village is his village. The videosphere is his fatherland. Detached, at the outset, from his natural surroundings, he tends to naturalize the environment without borders that progress has fashioned for him. Far from opening up his mind, his wings obsess him. Hardwired today as he was rooted, he cannot conceive that one can humanly live outside the networks of communication and consumerism in which he evolves. This is why he looks at the autochthon as a peasant and at this peasant as the bizarre and disturbing reminder of a prehuman species. Since everything, in his view, exists here and now, and since all identities are, under the name of difference, exchangeable, available, and offered for consumerism, people from some other place, the wogs, the 'unhealthy,' are, for him, those who do not play the game of exchange and who claim to be attached to a history, a land, and a community."
- Alain Finkielkraut, Dispatches from the Balkan War and Other Writings
SOLD!
Revel in your modernity; we're all barbarians now.