Leadership And Government
Caboose
title = name(self, handle) Join Date: 2003-02-15 Member: 13597Members, Constellation
title = name(self, handle) Join Date: 2003-02-15 Member: 13597Members, Constellation
in Discussions
<div class="IPBDescription">One big confusing discussion</div> What do you think is the best type of government?
Do you think that a government that controlls everything (socialist didcatorship for example) is better? Or a government run my it's populous?
Dou you think that it is better for the leadership of a country to keep information from the people, or for them to tell the people everything?
Do you think propoganda is bad?
Do you think a good leader should be feared or be admired for kindness?
Do you think that a government that controlls everything (socialist didcatorship for example) is better? Or a government run my it's populous?
Dou you think that it is better for the leadership of a country to keep information from the people, or for them to tell the people everything?
Do you think propoganda is bad?
Do you think a good leader should be feared or be admired for kindness?
Comments
I am unsure of the question relating the truth and the population. Out and out lies must be avoided. However, telling the population the harsh, absolute truth about everything is a recipe for disaster.
Now the question of propaganda is one that interests me a lot. I believe that in this day and age of media saturation, propaganda has an extremely important place.
War is the ultimate team game. If my soccer team goes out to play with a bad attitude, focussing on nothing but personal mistakes and failures, on how much they disapprove of the coach, and all the successes of the opposition - failure is 100% certain.
There needs to be a large scale promoting of the successes of the Government so it can at least compete with the savage anti-war media bias. Hearing nothing but defeat ensures it.
For example, if I was the American President, were I to decide whether to show pictures of American prisoner abuse - I would have taken every single photo and burnt them. I would then put every single jailor involved in prison for the term of their natural lives, both as punishment and to ensure the public never found out. I would implement a ruthless overhaul of the prison system - justice would be done and heads would role, but I'd never admit it. If Iraqi's came out and claimed they had been abused, I would have encouraged the press to ridicule them and denied everything.
The stakes in Iraq are simply to high to have horrendous behaviour by select American soldiers set things back that much. When it comes to truth vs lives, unfortunately the truth is going to end up on the back foot. This is also why I'll never end up in politics - I cant reconcile my personal religious and moral beliefs and good Governing.
I remember reading somewhere that a highly ranked American military commander went to the press and requested they not publish the photographs. I feel for that man. He recognised that the photographs could only make things worse for the military and the prospects of peace and freedom for Iraqi's. The press demonstrated clearly that an awesome story took precedence over silly things like soldier's lives and Mr Berg's throat.
This fact was universally admitted by the press during the Daily Mirror debacle in the UK. Even the most hardline anti-war papers had to admit that those false pictures endangered the lives of British soldiers. Which is what I dont understand - if everyone knew the pictures where going to endanger the British soldiers lives (false or true), then why the hell publish them in the first place. The truth - good stories are vastly more important than lives.
You'll know a leader is on the right track based around those who hate and fear him. When you are universally reviled by violent Muslim fanatics who target women and children, hated with a seething passion by flagrant, consistant human rights abusers, when those who stand for oppression and mass murder wish you dead - take that as an indication you are on the right track.
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What do you think is the best type of government?
Do you think that a government that controlls everything (socialist didcatorship for example) is better? Or a government run my it's populous?
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I think it is best if a government has the ability to control everything if need be, but in times of peace and prosperity the populous should be able to control thier own affairs. Command economies work better for dragging an economy out of the mud, but free economies are friendler to the individual and more efficiant on a small scale model (because people work for thier own benifit).
In terms of democracy or dicatorship, it would depend on the situation. A dictator can govern more efficantly and effectivly then the best democracy, but a poor dictator will distroy a country. I would probably via for a dictator who is able to be expelled by public vote, and is bound tooth and nail by a code of basic human rights and freedoms that he cannot violate in any way (on threat of being abdicated or worse), including freedom of speech, and freedoms to access information.
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Dou you think that it is better for the leadership of a country to keep information from the people, or for them to tell the people everything?
Do you think propoganda is bad?
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I am strongly against withholding information from the public, but I am also against a mass media force feeding info in mud balls to people. I would want to nationalize the media in my country so a controlled basic understanding of the events around them would be easily availible, but I would support the creation of in depth public records and illegalize the withholding of all non private information for the creation of those records and the transfer of small scale news organizations. Anyone who acctually wants to work through the vastness of the truth in full, is more than welcome to know the truth in full.
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Do you think a good leader should be feared or be admired for kindness?
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Definatly admired for his kindness. I think he should probably have organizations under him that are feared and respected, but he himself should always strive toward the betterment of life for his people.
Bleh, thiers alot of holes in my thing right now, most of which I have mentally adressed, but would probably take me another 2 hours to type out. I could probably write a book on this stuff, but I won't cause no one cares anyways.
I do. I believe you refer to it as FOX news <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->
We need more right wing, pro government propaganda, the other side of the story must be told lest we lose perspective. The following article clearly outlines runaway bias in media treatment of Iraq
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Evil off the hook
By ANDREW BOLT
14may04
The horrific slaughter of Nick Berg should be compulsory viewing for those who seem to have forgotten who our real enemy is.
IT took a long, long time to saw off the head of Nick Berg, and for nearly a third of it you could hear the 26-year-old American screaming and gurgling.
I know that because I saw the video his five killers ? Islamic terrorists ? made of his murder.
It is God-awful to watch, and ends with one of these animals holding up as a trophy Berg's severed head, eyes staring in shock. The video was then rushed to an al-Qaida-linked website, which gleefully published it.
The ABC seemed annoyed to have had this interruption to its wall-to-prison-wall coverage of the "torture" of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers.
"Beheading deflects focus from Iraq prison scandal," sighed the headline of the ABC Online report.
Sorry, but shouldn't that have read: "Beheading puts Iraq prison 'scandal' in focus?" After all this hysteria over pictures of Iraqi prisoners being made to pose naked, there's nothing like a live-on-video decapitation to remind us what real evil looks like, and to make us ask if a media that forgot the difference helped to kill Nick Berg.
It was probably about the very time this video of Berg's murder was being sent to the al-Qaida site that I found myself in a heated argument on ABC TV's Insiders program.
I'd dared to say that much of the coverage of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib jail was an irresponsible attempt by anti-war commentators to use the, yes, disgusting behaviour of a few out-of-control American soldiers to vilify not just the US army, but America itself, and to discredit the liberation of Iraq.
And I asked whether it was dangerous for media outlets to so lavishly run photographs of that abuse if they honestly believed what they were saying ? that these pictures were a recruiting tool for al-Qaida.
After all, the Age's Washington correspondent co-authored a piece that approvingly quoted a critic saying: "If you want recruitment tools, these are the best anyone could imagine."
The Australian's Washington correspondent exclaimed: "What a recruitment poster for the Iraqi resistance, never mind Osama bin Laden." ("Resistance"? These throat-cutters are to be honoured as the "resistance"?)
Yet what do these and so many media outlets from London to Sydney do with their "recruitment posters" for Osama bin Laden?
Why, they run them again and again. They run them huge on their front pages, and put them on their websites. And their commentators droolingly describe them as horrific, proof of Yankee bestiality, and ample excuse for the Iraqi "resistance" to strike back.
Islamic terrorists got the hint. Berg's killers read out a long statement as he sat on the floor before them, waiting to die, saying they were about to punish the US for its sins at Abu Ghraib, as revealed by the pictures in the Western media.
"How can a free Muslim sleep as he sees Islam slaughtered and its dignity bleeding, and the pictures of shame and the news of the devilish scorn of the people of Islam ? men and women ? in the prison of Abu Ghraib," their leader shouted.
So, was it worth publishing those photographs now that Nick Berg has had his head hacked off? And remember, these photos were first published at least three days after the US army publicly revealed details of the abuse and charged ? as is necessary ? the allegedly guilty soldiers.
Of course, when I suggested on TV the media reconsider the wisdom of repeatedly publishing their "recruitment posters for al-Qaida", I was shouted down by the other panellists. That's the way a free media in a free society works, I was instructed.
Actually, it's not the way the free media works if the facts don't fit their agenda.
The media didn't endlessly show the video of the 2002 beheading of reporter Daniel Pearl by al-Qaida operatives, or scream for apologies from al-Qaida's backers in the Saudi Arabian Government.
Nor did they endlessly run the video the Iraqi "resistance" made last month of Italian hostage Fabrizio Quattrocchi being shot in the head by his captors.
Why weren't we shown it? Too shocking? Too likely to get us angry with the Iraqi "resistance"? Too likely to give us the "wrong idea"?
That last excuse, by the way, was the one SBS gave us for not screening the tape it shot of the Grand Mufti of Australia, Sheik Taj El-Din El-Hilali, praising suicide bombers in his mosque.
Nor did many Western correspondents in Saddam's Iraq bother us too much with the ugly truth.
The admired John F. Burns of The New York Times last year accused correspondents who reported alongside him from Saddam's Iraq of having "behaved as if they were in Belgium", rather than in a tyranny: "The essential truth (about Saddam's genocidal regime) was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here."
As CNN executive Eason Jordan admitted only after Saddam was toppled, his network refused to tell us of staff who were tortured, of assassinations planned by Saddam's sons, and of a woman torn apart "limb from limb" by police, and then dumped in bits on her father's doorstep. None of this CNN had reported, Jordan said, because "doing so would have jeopardised the lives of Iraqis".
But there's no such fear of telling the dirty truth ? painted in darkest black ? about the US. And there's sure no concern that "doing so would have jeopardised the lives" of not Iraqis, but Americans like Nick Berg. Or that exaggerated criticism of America would give us the "wrong idea".
But that's the Western media, too often aiding al-Qaida by exaggerating the regretted mistakes of the US while going soft on the unapologetic barbarism of its foes.
So should the media keep publishing pictures likely to incite terrorists, both overseas and here at home?
Probably not if they truly believe these are recruitment posters for terrorists who'll kill us in "revenge". Why not just describe the pictures in words? How many beheadings is a lurid photo spread really worth?
But there is one compelling excuse for running the pictures from Abu Ghraib (although without the hype and endless repeats), and it's time more journalists and commentators used it.
The fact is that such photographs in themselves do relatively little to recruit terrorists to al-Qaida, whose members want to kill us no matter what we do. Who want to kill us whether the guards at Abu Ghraib were mean or mice.
If that's the excuse, then let's not have these ludicrous claims that the terrorists kill only because we drive them to it through some wickedness of ours.
Let's not have headlines like The Sydney Morning Herald's yesterday that described Nick Berg's murder as "Chilling pay back over abuse" ? falsely implying, yet again, that we just brought this terrorism on ourselves through our sins.
Let's not have Islamic terrorism excused as the understandable acts of men driven mad by American or "Zionist" crimes. Let's not have the Bali bombing blamed on our liberation of Afghanistan.
As we've already seen from the video executions of Daniel Pearl and Fabrizio Quattrocchi, al-Qaida and its allies didn't need the excuse of Abu Ghraib to film its killing of hostages.
As we saw this week from the video of Hamas gunmen posing with the body parts of six Israeli soldiers, and offering to "trade" them, Islamic terrorist groups have invented obscenities that far surpass in evil any offence we may have caused. And we should remember, too, that al-Qaida and its friends have being blowing up people for years ? Americans, Kenyans, Tanzanians, Saudi Arabians, Turks, Moroccans, Iraqis, UN officials, Red Cross workers, Jews, Christians, Masons, Australians and so many more.
They started their terror long before the "torture" of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and long before the liberation of Iraq or Afghanistan.
The murder of Nick Berg is just the latest atrocity of an enemy of matchless savagery, and many more people will yet die in this war with a rising militant Islam.
It's time more in the media realised just who our greatest enemy really is ? and trust me, it isn't America or a handful of its prison guard bullies.
If the media must publish pictures from this war on terror, let them include plenty of our real enemy and its satanic deeds. Then the abuse at Abu Ghraib will be put in the focus that's been all too deliberately blurred.
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As for the topic, a perfect world would have a population-run government where all information is shared in it's raw form, basically a good version of communism. However this won't happen in our lifetime so I will have to go with Swithspear in all points.
As for the topic, a perfect world would have a population-run government where all information is shared in it's raw form, basically a good version of communism. However this won't happen in our lifetime so I will have to go with Swithspear in all points. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No doubt about it. Nowhere there does he attempt to justify the actions of those US jailers, and he admits that their actions smeared the entire establishment. What he was trying to counter is the silly claims that the US army is just as bad as the dictator they deposed. People were screaming that the US army was evil and this proved it.
His arguement was that the actions of these terrorists put the US travesties in perspective. What the US did was bad - what these guys did made the US look like choirboys. Lets not get carried away slamming the entire US military and forget what they are fighting against.
What US did = inexcusable. Who they are fighting = worse. Eyes on the goal ppl <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->
EDIT
Just re-read the topic - I'm kinda hijacking here, though the article I posted was a semi-relevant arguement for propaganda. Please ignore me.
Can you explain where these people got ahold of a prison uniform? Very interesting.
The time stamp in the video... notice the elapsed time while the camera "cuts" to the actual beheading? what... 2 hours? WAKE UP...
he was already dead, it was propaganda, and i guess its doing its job
Can you explain where these people got ahold of a prison uniform? Very interesting.
The time stamp in the video... notice the elapsed time while the camera "cuts" to the actual beheading? what... 2 hours? WAKE UP...
he was already dead, it was propaganda, and i guess its doing its job <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Whoa conspiracy theorist rejoice <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Can you please link me to a site backing up your claims?
I dont have room to save the countless information exposing "rich dude" methods of obtaining more money. Use google. There was a list of things to look for and it was obvious after reviewing it.
The "terrorists" were and are still trained by the best in the buisness, Americans. When the U.S. needs resources from a country, they either bargan or take it outright, but not without making it look rightous. Insert agents armed with ideas persuading conflict. Its old as dirt, taught in school.
Have fun figuring it out, but remember...
Ignorance is bliss.
As for the "truth" - that's more in the hands of media, as opposed to government. I don't believe the two are interlinked to any real degree. Although I don't agree 100% with Marine01, I do when he points out that the media's just out for a story, and not to report "truth" (like in the Daily Mirror scandal). I believe that we have a right to know what's going on. If a government is hiding something big from its own people, its generally not a good thing.