Skip to main content

Sleep Walking into a War

The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” -This quote (By Garry Kasparov, originally) from an article by Tobias Stone – in Medium. It seemed to me that it's worth highlighting because it is insightful about what is happening now on the internet particularly social media.

I think it's interesting because it parallels a tactic that governments and corporations seem to operate in relation to pushing through measures that they sense will garner much opposition: they throw loads of information out, make a song and a dance about relatively minor things so that by the time a bigger issue is brought out, opposing voices are muted and energies are sapped. And of course this can work because populations have become passive, soporific and take democracy for granted, forgetting that its price is eternal vigilance. The problem being that eternal vigilance is costly in effort and attention, especially when life is hard, as it is increasingly for our populations.

And then, the other useful thing to note about this is that this is the new war. If war is politics by other means, then disinformation and distraction is politics by other means and that too is war. Actual bombs-and-deaths war is part of the picture but a relatively small part.

So, I'm left wondering what this means for war resistance. It goes way beyond refusing to fight, it goes beyond making the case for resolving conflicts through diplomacy, pressure and legalities. It goes beyond building the capacity of communities to use tactics and discipline to overcome oppression non-violently. No, we are going to have to learn to build capacity for 'eternal vigilance' and for myth busting and understanding what the real issues are to keep an eye on without being obfuscated into obscure and ultimately irrelevant matters.

And I'm already feeling tired just thinking about it. So, how to move forward?



Sleep Walking into a War – Tobias Stone – Medium:



'via Blog this'

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Foundation, Empire -and the mission of the church

 I've been watching the TV series 'Foundation'. I read the books about 50 years ago (I know!) but scarcely now remember anything but an outline and some character names. A lot has happened in my life since I read the series and now watch it adapted to television. For one thing, I committed my ways to Christ and have a role which involves official ministry in the church's mission. In the intervening years, a constant companion for me has been concern for ecology, for creation. Latterly this has become a more urgent concern and I have realised that we have collectively run out of time. We are living on borrowed time. In fact, some of us, globally speaking, are not even living on borrowed time. All through my adult life I have unconsciously (I now realise) assumed that we would have time, that there was time to persuade and to change and to head off the worst. That assumption, that naive hope, has now been stripped from me. The situation of living on borrowed time  needs t

Pray ceaselessly, but how?

I've just had an article published on emergingchurch.info. It's an adaptation of some of my book, but I thought I'd share it and give you a taster... ... ask ourselves whether there is a way of understanding the command to pray ceaselessly in a way that doesn't conflict with loving our neighbour. Paul may have meant his readers to pray as much as they could, whenever they could. However that would be to read a meaning into the text based, perhaps on a sense of realism faced with an understanding of prayer that involves giving God full and exclusive attention. We don't have to be bound by that interpretation. I'm going to suggest a deeper fulfilment of the exhortation. One that makes contact with Paul's command to his Roman readers to offer their bodies as living sacrifices to God (Romans 12.1-2). Perhaps Paul was suggesting making life into prayer rather than making prayer into a life emergingchurch.info > reflection > andii bowsher : Filed in: prayer

The Lords Prayer in Aramaic

I came across this a year or two back and was quite concerned that it was being purveyed as a translation when it quite clearly is not. Now my Hebrew is not extensive but enough that when combined with training in linguistics and biblical interpretation I can tell when a 'midrash' is being offered. [PS inserted here. Since I wrote this originally and noting that this post gets a lot of hits, I have continued to research and would like to encourage readers to visit more recent posts here and here and I tend to add thinngs from time to time to a Squidoo Lens dedicated to the topic of Aramaic Lord's prayer] Anyway, see for yourself the discrepancy between the quantity in the original and the English (as far as I can tell, the orthography is vaguely german, so 'j' is a 'y' sound etc.) The Prayer To Our Father (in the original Aramaic) Abwun "Oh Thou, from whom the breath of life comes, d'bwaschmaja who fills all realms of sound, light and vibration.