and I will give you the man
Joyce
I remember being terrorised as a child by the priest's sermon in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It took me months if not years to get over it. It's hard to tell because that sort of thing was part of the environment in which I grew up. Guilt, fear and terror were the instruments of "development".
There is, of course, truth in the slogan above which is attributed to the Jesuits, God's Storm Troopers and Educators Extraordinary. The minds and psyches of children are malleable and none better to mould them than the Js.
Jews
I've just watched a film called Defamation in which an Israeli, Jew and film director, sets out to find out what all this "anti-semitism" is about and where it can be found. Two stark points emerge from his journey.
His film shows that much of the current reported anti-semitism appears to have been manufactured. In the USA by the Anti-Defamation League in order to keep themselves in a job and ensure that their officers are held in high social and political esteem throughout the world. The key premise on which they survive is the assertion that all those who are anti-Israel are closet anti-semites. And at home in Israel, it is manufactured by some of the media who see the need to cultivate resentment and victimhood so that the Israeli State can misbehave with impunity.
His film also shows disturbing sequences of Israeli children being brought to Auschwitz to experience the Holocaust first hand, so to speak. In itself this would be no harm, we should not forget. But it is the context that is worrying. The trip is used to reinforce the line that Jews are still being persecuted on a grand scale, and that, therefore, "proportionate" retaliation is in order. The film-maker asks one of the young Jewish girls "How do you feel?". "I want to kill them". "Kill who?" "The Nazis". "But they're all dead" "Yes, but they've got heirs".
Palestine, Iran, or whoever you are, you have been warned.
Homeland Security
We all had paintbooks, or colouring books, as they now appear to be called. They had animals and cartoon characters, baloons and buildings, all for colouring in. Guess what? They now have colouring books for children to colour in TERRORISTS. I kid you not. And, they have little cards, like the cigarette cards of my day which pictured footballers or cars or whatever. But these have pictures of TERRORISTS and right in the middle of them is Julian Assange. Nuff said.
Credits
Now, where did I get all this subversive stuff. I got Joyce from my excellent school English teacher, Michael Judge. I got "Defamation" from a comment on the blog of that sterling ex-Foreign Office employee and now human rights campaigner, Craig Murray. And I got the colouring book from a Tweet retweeted by @wayupnorth, whom I follow on Twitter.
Punchline
And what is the point of this rambling and semi-coherent post. It is that you pick your own sources over time. Follow those that you can trust, irrespective of the particular format in which they publish. And, above all, be wary of the MainStreamMedia, or the Presstitutes as they are known in some quarters. They present themselves as objective, moderated and authoritative but they all have an agenda from the ideological to the profit motive.
he can be fun.