Editor,
The claim that the United States media are helplessly tilted toward a biased, critical left - blindly lashing out at the government in their fanatic wrath over self-inflicted political failures - displays utter or even deliberate ignorance of the dire straits in which this country is increasingly entangled.
Such nonsense is symptomatic of the American problem.
There are healthy degrees of ignorance all of us experience. They rekindle human virtues like humility and modesty to set us back onto the endless path of continued human formation we call education - literally a lifting-up of the human spirit toward enlightenment. Socrates is humanity's paradigmatic example of this humble drive toward self-knowledge and self-understanding.
There is, however, an unhealthy degree of ignorance fatally pointed at patriotic idolatry displayed by a dangerous number of people in this country. They are shameless enough to display their intellectual shortcomings in public through the avenue of the press, including this newspaper. This kind of ignorance is not accidental, but a deliberate moral blindness and, as such, the breeding ground of another vice we call arrogance.
When arrogant ignorance becomes the status quo - as is the case in this country, where it occupies the White House as religious and secular zealotry - any deviation from this kind of self-glorification gets denounced as wicked liberalism akin with treason itself.
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The Danish theologian and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard recognized the demoralizing effect of the press in such a demagogic climate and despised it. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche saw in it the decadence of modernity of which the United States has taken center stage.
The epitome of this American disease is impersonated by the New York Times' now disowned Judith Miller, who - in betrayal of her journalistic profession - prostituted herself to the White House and the Pentagon to disseminate falsehoods on which advocates for war could then in turn rely on in public to persuade the public of their lies. Consistent with such fabrications, the national newspaper of record referred to the hundreds of thousand protesters against the looming Iraq War gathered in New York in the fall of 2002 as a mere few thousand.
The rest of the world, where people are better informed, was outraged at the string of lies then-Secretary of State Colin Powell told before the United Nations and the whole world on Feb. 5, 2003. They responded 10 days later with a global stampede of millions protesting against United States war mongering. The atrocities that have happened since then - and the daily revelations of American war crimes - confirm their suspicion and increase their outrage. They collectively hate U.S. policies and despise those who stand behind them.
Secret detention and torture centers, ghost detainees, disappearances, torture and murder by CIA henchmen, as well as chemical warfare (white phosphorous) and nuclear warfare (depleted uranium) ought to remain atrocities of the ugly past, and not be reinvented by the so-called leaders of the free world. In the face of so much pain and blood, can there be forgiveness?
Joachim Oberst
UNM staff
