Hello!: Popular backlash against Berkeley

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Nov 9 09:10:35 PST 2001


Hakki Alacakaptan wrote:


>As an ignorant foreigner, I am puzzled at why the above piece of news has
>been ignored by the list. Chauvinist vigilantes, singly or in groups, are
>hounding a dissident municipality and have contributed greatly all over the
>US to silencing the media. Some of it may be organized by right-wing
>organizations but it appears to be largely spontaneous (as much as anything
>can be in the media-blitzed land of the free). Doesn't this worry anyone
>over there?

It just seems so ordinary that we don't even think twice about it.

You're from Turkey, right? A few years ago, I finally met in person a Turkish woman I'd gotten to know in the virtual world. It was her first visit to the U.S. She was stunned by the amount of primitive religious programming on US TV. She said, "I come from what's supposed to be the backward country and I've never seen anything like this." We don't need censors - the private media censor themselves. We don't need religious police - the churches and TV preachers do the work instead. And since it's all private and "spontaneous," you can't blame the state.

Doug



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