Masters of Illusion: American Leadership in the Media Age
Steven Rosefielde
Language: English
Pages: 570
ISBN: 1107626730
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The United States will confront a series of fundamental challenges through the middle of the twenty-first century. Using a theory of economic systems to gauge present and future global conflicts, Steven Rosefielde and D. Quinn Mills see the challenges as posed sequentially by terrorism, Russia, China, and the European Union. In the cases of terrorism, Russia, and China, Western leaders appreciate aspects of these perils, but they are crafting unduly soft policies to deal with the challenges. The authors believe that 'globalists' notwithstanding, such views are myopic in an era where nuclear proliferation has invalidated the concept of mutually assured destruction. What America requires is a new security concept that the authors call 'strategic independence' to enable keeping the peace in dangerous times and foster new generations of leaders capable of acting sanely despite a current public culture addicted to wishful thinking.
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Two great illusions – harmonism and convergence. Both are potentially dangerous on a large scale to our country. We will discuss in this chapter how they come to exist, are continually reinforced, and become so rigidly a part of our thinking. But this will be a difficult discussion for many of our readers. Trying to question what we believe to be true is always very challenging and often unpleasant, and so it is when we address the strongly held convictions of our public culture In private life.
British spirit. In reality, terrorism is a less dangerous form of conflict than others – especially nuclear exchanges between nuclear powers (as almost occurred several times during Cold War) and conventional war between great powers (as in the two world wars and Korea). Terrorism is directed mainly at civilians and cannot result a military defeat for our nation – the other two forms of conflict can. The danger of nuclear and conventional conflict between great powers has not been eliminated, so.
Culture – its optimism and its illusions. HOW WE AND OTHERS SEE US A most important element of our public culture is our view of ourselves. It’s shaped by the same forces (wishful thinking, partisan politics, and media commercialism) as are other elements of our public culture, and it is reflected in misapprehensions and misinformation as well. Our politicians and our media tell us what we want to hear about ourselves. But our self-image is more complex and self-contradictory than other parts of.
Trying now in mistaken efforts?” Thus, the key question isn’t one on which the media seems to focus – how does the world regard us – but instead is how well will we play our role – how quickly will we find the right thing to do, and how effectively do it? A reason why so many people in the world view Americans as hypocrites is that we often recognize only the side of our personality that searches for the right thing to do, and we ignore the side of our personality that is selfish, grasping and.
Understanding of what Russia has become today. The USSR was the embodiment of what all democratically oriented westerners abhorred. It was a authoritarian state, committed to burying the freedom of the west, run by a self-anointed vanguard of an initially largely nonexistent proletariat. It criminalized private property, business, and entrepreneurship. It outlawed rival political parties, and used its secret police to repress dissent, terrorize and kill tens of millions, consigning similar.