Our Potemkin Press

Our Potemkin Press John L. Perry Thursday, March 16, 2006 Someone once told President John F. Kennedy a certain senator was, well, doing something into his ear – trying to convince him it was raining outside.

That's the same game the elitist leftwing news media are playing today with the American people – trying to convince them of a false, nonexistent reality.

It's also the alchemy of disinformation practiced by governments' covert entities that produce "the desert of mirrors."

And it's essentially the theme of the 1967-68 television series "The Prisoner," starring Patrick McGoohan in the role of No. 6, who maddeningly knew he was being held psychologically captive in an unreal but artfully contrived Potemkin village from which he could never manage to escape.

Little did Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin, the 18th century Russian general of considerable renown, realize that history would come to associate his name primarily with a hoax about a hoax.

Potemkin, whose authentic achievements included being one of Catherine the Great's more-durable lovers, conducted the military annexation of the Crimea as a trophy suitable for his insatiable tsarina.

Lamentably, a spurious legend arose that Potemkin had constructed a series of fake, hollow villages along the otherwise deserted banks of the Dnieper River to give Catherine an exaggerated impression of the value of that forlorn real estate during her drive-by inspection trip.

Such elaborate constructs of deception as that are at least a large step up the ethical ladder from the shameless masquerade through which the ringmasters of American masscomm are today endeavoring to hoodwink their victims.

The arrogance of this ambition of the leftist news media is bad enough. What's really sinister, though, is that they have a sublime responsibility, nay, a constitutional duty to do just the opposite with their privileged power under the Bill of Rights.

The press in this republic was given by the Founding Fathers a protection unprecedented, then and to this day, anywhere else in the world. This protection of freedom of the press was granted not to toss a bone of extra profit to owners of printing presses – and certainly never to bestow personal benefit or gratification upon narcissistic scribblers and babblers.

It was granted solely for one purpose – to provide the citizenry with an untrammeled means of learning the unvarnished facts so that they, as the only ones entitled to run this country, could make informed decisions.

No other nation has ever had such an expression of confidence vested in its people. No other people have been guaranteed that right to be informed.

It is an abomination what the elitist press, in its printed and electronic formulations, is doing today to the very people it has been commissioned in the Bill of Rights to serve.

Instead of telling the truth for the love of truth and out of respect for its own customers, it has set out to hammer and saw a devilishly cunning Potemkin-like world environment of pseudo-reality.

By falsely painting endless sets of phony scenery to make reality appear as they want it to appear, they hope to hasten the day when it will actually turn out to be their twisted, self-aggrandizing dream of a collectivist world come true.

Little wonder these haughty high priests of socialist secularism, who haven't the candor or courage to come right out and admit their Marxist underpinnings, have such zeal for denigrating, even abolishing, religion – including one that teaches ". . . you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

A concluding note about Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin: He died in 1791 of the unpleasant aftereffects of having eaten an entire goose.

Might a similar demise await the flatulent hoaxers in our latter-day Potemkin press?

John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com.

Actually, the roots of self-serving deception go back much farther and deeper into history -- into the essential problem of the human condition. Plato described it as the difference between reality and the shadow of reality. Jesus noted the complicity of the Scribes with the Pharisees to maintain their privileged positions in society -- while crucifying those who questioned that authority. Gautama's awakening, is the realization that "Shit doesn't just happen," but there is a cause and effect to it -- if one merely pays attention to the actuality rather than what the priests of wisdom say is happening. George Orwell warned of this danger of total mind control by 1984 -- but when 1984 rolled around, the information institutions (media, schools, universities) were the first to disabuse us of such notions, saying, "See, it's 1984 and there is no Minitruth -- we are in control."

And so we all went back to sleep, safely trusting that Masstruth was watching our back -- instead of slitting our own throats, selling us down the river, for a few dollars more.

Check out not just the papers and 'zines like Time, Newsweek and Rolling Stone but Esqure, GQ, even Men's Journal all have articles lampooning Bush, conservatives and filled with the gloom of war, mistreated soldiers and the evils of capitalism.

No wonder our society is so cynical. If anything, the public isn't swallowing all the Leftist tripe, it is becoming so jaded and disillusioned with its own identity as the Last Free society. Therein lies the true transgression.

My own favorite rendition on the theme is Iago in Shakespeare's Othello -- who perfectly defines and depicts the pathological liar, who "gets off" wholly in the deception of others, the exhilaration of control and manipulation.

Prisons are also loaded with guys like this. In the media business, they are highly rewarded. Especially talented demagogues are given all the free press they want -- as one of their own, the personality they aspire to be.

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