"The
smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit
the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate
within that spectrum." – Noam Chomsky
By
Manmeet Sahni
Part
2 - Power of Suggestion
Words
are powerful: they suggest, and help shape public opinion. Used the
wrong way, they can prove extremely damaging. For instance, while
Chavez was in power, Western media frequently described him as a
'quasi-dictator' and 'strongman.'
Jonathan
Cook is a senior policy officer with the World Wildlife Fund. He
says: "Columnists like the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl and
the Miami Herald's Andres Oppenheimer have wielded the sharpest
hatchets. Diehl, for instance, labeled pro-Chavez social movements
'anti-democratic' while lauding the anti-Chavez opposition, which
used such tactics as distributing false exit poll results during the
2004 referendum.
"Washington's
hostility toward the recent changes echoes a wave of earlier
suspicion of the likes of Cuba's Castro, Nicaragua's Ortega and
Chile's Allende. It also reflects unease at declining U.S. influence
in the region.
"The
Post's Diehl gripes about Venezuela 'buying the support of' other
Latin American governments with subsidized oil, and an April 4
article in the New York Times prods Chavez for 'spending billions of
dollars of his country's oil windfall on pet projects abroad.'
Nothing is said about Uncle Sam's own long history of handing out
carrots and wielding sticks in the region."
Now,
words such as 'dictator,' 'extreme' and 'radical' are being deployed
by Western media to describe Maduro and other left-wing governments
in the region for one reason alone: to stoke fear.
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