Memory Holes and the Internet (updated) 801
blamanj writes "As reporters and researchers depend more and more heavily on the Internet as a research tool, manipulation of the net becomes a serious problem. A recent Slashdot article discussed this in regard to the White House. Now, The Memory Hole has noticed that Time magazine has pulled an article by Bush, Sr. on why it was a bad idea to try and overthrow Saddam. How can we keep corporate America honest?" Update: 11/11 22:16 GMT by T : Declan McCullagh (former Time, Inc. employee, among other things) writes in with the non-conspiracy explanation for the change, below.
Declan writes "It is silly to claim that Bush Sr. and Scowcroft would strong-arm Time Inc. into removing an article from time.com -- when that article was an excerpt from their book that you can buy today from Amazon.com for $21.
Another explanation is more likely. And, yes, a quick search turns up a May 2003 article from Slate that debunks this rumor. It turns out that Time Inc. only had permission from the publisher to post the content for a limited time."
How can we keep corporate america honest? (Score:1, Insightful)
Education? (Score:4, Insightful)
Revisionism (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't omitted. It was excised. It was there, and now it isn't, but all the rest of the contents of that issue still are.
Virg
Corporations dont have an interest (Score:5, Insightful)
Its their resources they use to do so... when they are finished with the story they can dump it..
As long as what they report is the truth ( or with a disclaimer that its opinion and not fact ) then they are within their rights to do what ever they want with THEIR data...
Now when the government does this, thats a different issue...
Worried about memory holes? (Score:4, Insightful)
CommonDreams [commondreams.org]
CounterPunch [counterpunch.org]
Bad News: Noam Chomksy Archive [monkeyfist.com]
AlterNet [alternet.org]
Or read a book. [amazon.com]
Any good and honest right-wing folk (if you want to set up such a arbitrary left/right binary) should reply with their favorite truth-speaking resources.
Hey (Score:2, Insightful)
How can we keep corporate America honest? (Score:5, Insightful)
If media corporations and content-providing conglomerates have a financial or political reason to alter their records, they will, and they have no legal reason to do otherwise. We can only hope that the open-standard-based free internet can survive and let us remember electronically.
Re:Why is this any different? (Score:2, Insightful)
As the page says:
"But a funny thing happened. Fairly recently, Time pulled the essay off of their site. It used to be at this link, which now gives a 404 error. If you go to the table of contents for the issue in which the essay appeared (2 March 1998), "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam" is conspicuously absent."
That means, they are efectively rewriting things as to look like they never did publish that.
And yes, they are a private company, but I expect private publishers of NEWS MAGAZINES to keep the news accurate and not doctor their archives, in the same way I expect private providers of meat not to give me beef with poison, private providers of water not to give me dirty H20, etc, etc, etc. . The fact they are private dont mean they can do whatever they want, unless you think that is good for an automotobile company to sell you cars that explode or anything like that.
Re:Do they sell tin-foil hats at Thinkgeek? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet is not a parent (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to keep Corporate America honest? Two ways: government mandate and journalism. That's the way its always been done, always will be. By keeping the population informed (ideally) corporations and officials will have to be wellbehaved.
Libraries? (Score:4, Insightful)
Things will sort themselves out if the internet reamains a free place where anyone can get on as a peer and publish. New publications will replace the old ones that act like Time. If the internet becomes more like broadcast TV, where only $pecial people with credentials can publish, it won't be trusted and the information superhighway will be just another billboard.
Wow... another attempt to attack the president (Score:1, Insightful)
I do not no why this story was approved by slashdot admins. This is obviously another blatent attempt to attack President Bush on his decision to go into and remove Saddam from power. If this wasn't Bush-bashing... if it was, for instance, Clinton bashing, it would have been rejected in a second.
But no matter what anyone says, things have changed since September 11... and GW Bush is NOT GHW Bush. The two situations, the two men, are two different things and can not be compared. While the points made by GHW Bush in 1998 are true and accurate, they do not consider the relevance of such a move post 9/11.
The arguements will come in that 9/11 has nothing to do with Iraq.. and Al Qaeda has nothing to do with Iraq, but current news [google.com] would disagree with that assessment. Clinton's inaction in 1994 regarding N Korea has led to another rogue nation with nuclear weapons... leaving Saddam alone could have had the same effect.
Re:Wow... another attempt to attack the president (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not addressing the key point.
Whether or not the current action was a good idea is a very valid current topic.
National publications censoring their own previous publications in an apparent attempt NOT to embarrass the current president regarding this issue is definitely News, and Stuff that Matters.
It's the removal that makes it interesting - in a sense, THEY BROUGHT UP THE ISSUE FIRST
Re:Wow... another attempt to attack the president (Score:2, Insightful)
The allies pretty much admitted that Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq before the war, but they didn't make much of a noise about that because it served their purpose to have the public believe that Al Qaeda was in Iraq to bolster support for the war.
As for N Korea, Bush claiming it was part of his "Axis of Evil" didn't help. NK has now seen what has happened to one third of that (Iraq) and is now trying to make sure it isn't the next target. At this point, you can't really blame it for developing a nuclear deterrant.
Re:The Excerpt (Score:3, Insightful)
You people really need to pick one of the two:
A) bumbling, incompetent retard who can't pick his nose without someone dusting cocaine on his finger first, or
B) cunning, devious, criminal mastermind of Illuminati-like proportions and power
Those two caricatures are mutually exclusive, but a lot of you seem to see Bush as both. Perhaps the paranoia is pickling your eyeballs or something.
Re:Education? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the old system, people were taught to think and they could think for themselves. In the new system people are taught to remember what they have been told recently and to recite it.
The new system appears to get better results and colleges and universities are measured on results. The client (student) is not interested in any more than the bit of paper that will get them a better wage. So US/UK society is dumbed down.
Ironically Russia and China etc. still respect true education and the client in those countries (and most other Eastern block/Asian) still appreaciate deep learning.
Index only from 1985 !! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wishes (Score:2, Insightful)
If they were to go and try to destroy evidence it existed, and punish people who spoke of it, i think we have an issue.
Dont get me wrong i think it is awful that a news organization would fold to political pressure and it shows how we dont have unbias reporting, but they are a company, and there is nothing that states they have to release all their published work on the internet.
On a side note, if this was a subscription based service where you had to pay for the content. I would have big issues with it.
I'm sorry, I don't get this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it important for this to be posted on
There's absolutely no geek factor here anywhere!
Re:"Keep" them honest? (Score:2, Insightful)
Name ONE liberal media news source that broadcasts on a major television network.
Can't? Good, then stay quiet.
And if there WERE a major liberal media syndicate, why would they be in the pocket of the most conservative white house we've had in decades?
Re:Silent protest (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Excerpt (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Corporations dont have an interest (Score:2, Insightful)
So, here are a few alternatives:
1. There is a in the Times archive which physically deletes random static pages. This is just a chance.
2. Somebody, purely on chance, deleted the file.
3. The removal was based on a request from the author, the previous Bush president.
4. The newspaper is afraid to annoy the current government, and is in the process of removing potentially offending articles.
5. The request came from the current government.
Imho the two first alternatives are highly unlikely, alternative 3 is somewhat manageable (old man Bush looking out for his delinquent son), if alternative 4 is true you have to ask "what is the newspaper afraid of?", and if alternative 5 is true you might have the answer.
Re:Tinfoil Argument (Score:3, Insightful)
Or maybe the author asked them to pull it?
I wonder if anyone will bother to find out the truth, or if everyone will just assume Bush is guilty.
Re:The Excerpt (Score:5, Insightful)
It's b) but it looks like a).
Bush is no imbecile. He's very intelligent and he's a very effective manipulator (obviously, he's a perfect politician).
See, he puts a bumbling presence in the White House by doing things like fumbling for words and choking on pretzels. But, just because he's a somewhat inneffective orator (which is the only part of him most of us ever get to see) doesn't mean he's an idiot. By acting like the everyday Joe Blow and showing that he too has human characteristics that cause amusing, but inoccuous missteps, he endears himself to the average American citizen. He is the everyman who is no more immune to foible than the rest of us.
The problem is, a new picture is being painted of him in his dealings behind closed doors. He's bright and he's dangerous. He's capable of orchestrating huge PR moves, power grabs, and he's not afraid to "go it alone" if he has an agenda even if it's at everyone else's expense. The first and last points are critical. During the Vietnam war, Johnson stuck to his guns for what he believed in at everyone else's expense, but he couldn't get the public support behind him. He was crucified for his beliefs because he couldn't get popular support. Bush is different - he can pull public support for something that would normally be very unpopular (granted - with significant help from gentle allusions to 9/11). He's capable of manipulating Joe Blow while he pursues his own agendas.
I think Bush and his administration are perfectly capable and willing to do something like this if they feel it benefits them politically. I'll wait for evidence before I blame them, but I won't surprised if that evidence really does come.
Re:The Excerpt (Score:5, Insightful)
As opposed to now? Let's be realistic -- Britain is the only significant coalition member still around from the first coalition.
It would have been the right thing to do
No it wouldn't have. If we had deposed Saddam in the early 90s then the most likely outcome was that Iran would take over control of Iraq -- giving the highly fundamentalist Iranian government control of 2/3rds of the land and population in the Middle East, roughly 1/3 of the oil, and every Muslim holy site except Mecca. BTW, for those keeping track, this is also the reason the US supported Saddam Hussein in the early and mid 80s -- because he was the lesser of two evils in the region.
At this point Iran's government has become somewhat destabalized -- they're in no position to be extending their influence right now. So circumstances have changed in this regard at least.
Funny that those who were so loathe to take Saddam to task for anything for so many years
What an utter load of bullshit. This is the kind of no-thought crap spouted by talk show hosts. Just because it's a bad idea to take out Saddam doesn't mean you think he's a good ruler or that he's not a despicable slimebag who isn't even worth turning into mulch. Hussein was taken to task for his crimes time and time again, but if you want to start stepping into the role of global police (a role which the right wing bashed Clinton for in Somalia, Bosnia, and elsewhere -- which we actually had a UN mandate for, unlike Iraq) then you'd better be willing to step up to the plate. Why the hell aren't we stopping countless dictators in Africa (like, oh say, Mugabe in Zimbabwe)? What about South/Central America? They've done as much, if not more, as Saddam Hussein ever did. Hell, while we're at it, let's dive into the Israel-Palestine mess, where both sides are guilty of horrific crimes.
The reality is that very little has changed in a decade. The only thing that did change was the stability of Iran. The other statements made -- about an unstable populace, the fallout of allies, the alteration of world political and military climate, and the need for the US to spend a long, long time peacekeeping in Iraq -- have not changed one iota.
Oh, and I say all of this as a moderate. I'm neither rightwing nor left. I was willing to go along with the invasion of Iraq because I believed that there was no way a president could engage in such a move without massive amounts of intelligence indicating a clear and present threat. Doing anything else would be abysmally stupid because the ultimate consequences would be setting not only the Middle East further against us, but also alienating our allies elsewhere in the world.
Oops.
Re:Wow... another attempt to attack the president (Score:4, Insightful)
What could Clinton do to decisively stop North Korea's nuclear program? Nothing, since they have thousands of howitzers in caves within range of South Korea's capital which could decimate it in a couple of minutes.
What will Bush do to decisively stop North Korea's nuclear program? Nothing, since they have thousands of howitzers in caves within range of South Korea's capital which could decimate it in a couple of minutes.
Re:Why is this any different? (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't it the prerogative of the private sector to publish at will?
Absolutely.
The later retraction of an earlier published work is just the tip of the iceberg. More relevant is deciding what is news, what is not news, and how news should be reported.
Those decisions are being made by a private sector that is aligning itself closely with its business objectives (as it should) to achieve the most growth in revenue, and not necessarily some ideal of providing complete, accurate and unbiased news.
One problem is that greater growth in revenue can be gained not only by reporting sensational but inconsequential "news" (Rosie rants in court), or by culling pieces that advertisers might find offensive,but also by claiming to be an complete accurate and unbiased source of information, even if the claim is supported only by the purveyor of news. I mean, how do we expect them to portray themselves?
Read from multiple sources, including those you would normally not want to read, sources you think are off-base, weird and misguided and tell you things that you'd rather not hear.
Otherwise, we're in danger of living in a fantasy world.
Re:"Keep" them honest? (Score:5, Insightful)
In that vein, here's an interesting piece [fair.org] on the so-called liberal media.
This is a study of the bias of sources used by the major broadcast media in the run-up to the Iraq war. FAIR classified sources as pro-war or anti-war on the basis of their affiliation with the administration, publicly expressed opinions about the war, and so on.
What I found surprising was that not even PBS gave equal time to those who opposed the war.
An excerpt: "The FAIR study found just 3 percent of U.S. sources represented or expressed opposition to the war. With more than one in four U.S. citizens opposing the war and much higher rates of opposition in most countries where opinion was polled, none of the networks offered anything resembling proportionate coverage of anti-war voices. The anti-war percentages ranged from 4 percent at NBC, 3 percent at CNN, ABC, PBS and FOX, and less than 1 percent--one out of 205 U.S. sources--at CBS."
Are people allowed to change their mind? (Score:3, Insightful)
The world changes, no one expects us to follow the policies as laid out in the cold war toward the Soviet Union. With that in mind, I believe it is only the painfully naive that would suggest that we treat the world the same way we did pre 9/11.
I think the 300,000+ bodies in mass graves, and the payments to suicide bombers post Gulf War I show us that Bush Sr. was mistaken.
TROLL (Score:2, Insightful)
"How can we keep corporate America honest?"
No, you mean to say, how to we keep people honest with respect to the WWW! It seems that popular culture right now is to inject corporation-bashing even when it is misleading to do so. So this article, while pointing out an instance of bad journalism, is itself bad journalism!
I think it really sucks that this trend of corporation bashing and anti-terrorism garbage is going to lead this country into a stagnation never before seen in the USA and only historically seen in the fiercest dictatorships. Do these people really know what road they are choosing?!?
So Easy (Score:1, Insightful)
What's truly disturbing is the ease and stealth with which they can be created in digital media. In the world of paper, it would be a laborious and highly visible undertaking, almost impossible to cover up.
How many other memory holes are out there, possibly never to be discovered?
AC
Re:The Excerpt (Score:3, Insightful)
a) Blowjobs.
b) Reaganomics, Star Wars, massive deficits.
I know which I prefer.
Wrong tense, there (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's edit:
"Apparently there were people near the top who know what they were doing,"
Take a good long look at the neocon "think tanks" from which our current foreign policy took its core. They regard the position George H.W. Bush took toward Iraq as a sign of weakness; they explicitly pushed for a unilateralist, aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East so as to re-shape that part of the world, well before 9/11.
The concerns the senior Bush shows in this article simply irritate(d) the high-ups in our current administration. The multilateral model, the concern about becoming de facto rulers of Iraq -- all that just bespeaks an America too wussy to step up to the plate, in the view of people like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. They sent at least one letter to Clinton laying out this basic policy during the 90's.
Re:Archive.org (Score:5, Insightful)
They sent at least one letter to Clinton laying ou (Score:2, Insightful)
That was before US State policy turned away from the Middle East and began focusing on ballistic missile defense.
Which was before US State policy got forcibly re-focused on the Middle East
Re:The Internet is not a parent (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm...this story is about Time Magazine (Journalism) covering up an unfavorable article on behalf of Bush Jr (Government). Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
Re:"Keep" them honest? (Score:3, Insightful)
This access is in a way dangerous, because it means you can always find a source that agrees with your preconceived ideas, but it also means that those who wish to explore the diversity of opinion have the best opportunity in human history to do so.
Re:Revisionism (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Archive.org (Score:5, Insightful)
Courts and juries should be following the laws.
If the laws are written by politicians who are beholden to corporate donors, then the laws will reflect the interests and needs of those corporations.
If a law reflects the interests and needs of profits of corporations, then, indeed, a corporation can put you in jail.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/10/
When there is too close a relationship between business and government, then the political rights and freedoms of citizens will take a back seat to profit-seeking, and whatever group of powerful business men currently controls the politicians will write the laws to their whim and fancy.
It's called facism. And its back with us, even worse than before!
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
- Milan Kundera
Letters to the editor anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
Write letters to the editor. Contact a local or national news outlet. Contact a competitor to Time. Get the news out of slashdot and into the public.
Editor of Time.com - daily@timeinc.net
Editor of Time - letters@time.com
Re:Yeah, right. (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember a time when Reagan preached against the 'commies' because they spied on their neighbors and because the people had no freedoms. Now the same thing is happening in our backyard and you expect us not to say anything about it? Some cokehead who went AWOL is running our government and getting our young men and women killed so that we can have more oil to power our SUV's and you think this is a good thing?
Hell, even daddy Bush disagrees with you it seems.
Re:I'm sorry, I don't get this. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Excerpt (Score:5, Insightful)
That said anyone who's studied the Soviet Era can tell you exactly how much sense the "Regan won the Cold War" theory makes. The X Telegram (George Kennan) stated in no uncertain terms that the Soviet Union must expand or collapse from within. Based on this document, it was the official position of the United States to contain the spread of communism. This was not a four or eight year process, but a stand which took decades. If Regan won the cold war for what purpose did our servicemen give their lives in Vietnam? In Korea?
All this aside, the argument I hear most frequently is that Regan's "genius" in backing the Star Wars program forced the Soviet Union into a spending spiral that caused internal collapse of the economy and thus the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
Unfortunately, this is totally unsubstantiated. First off, the Soviet Union consistently spent huge sums of money on the military. Many will toss figures at this argument quoting between 40% to 70% of Soviet GDP in the late 1980s. Realize two things when you see this argument. First, as a (officially) communist State the USSR has no GDP. No numbers were every kept to this extent in the USSR and any numbers we have are based on the (somewhat) biased estimates of the US armed forces and defense contractors (who have a vested interest here).
Secondly, earlier estimates from the Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Johnson administrations indicate Soviet Military spending at around 40% of the countries production capacity (think Civilization shields here, since we still don't have a real GDP here). Unfortunately I've been unable to locate decent links for this data. Apparently it only exists in dead tree media.
So what did cause the collapse of the Soviet Union? The answer is pretty obvious once you think about it... The Soviet Union caused it. Khrushchev started the ball rolling when he gave The Secret Speech [mira.net] at the 20th Party Congress in 1956. When Khrushchev released political pressures in the Soviet Union the result was what you'd expect. Give them an inch they take a mile. Khrushchev tried to clamp down on this movement, but was only able to stem its tide. Hard-line elements in the Soviet Government were less than pleased with this, and this was one of the factors that pushed Khrushchev to the now infamous military aggressiveness exhibited during his tenure.
After Khrushchev hard-line elements regained power in the Soviet Union and by instituting a Geritocracy favoring those who followed in the traditions of Stalin these elements kept the dissidents in perilous check.
Gorbachev changed all that. His policies of Glasnost and Perestroika snowballed. These policies were intended to allow some of the internal pressures to abate while keeping the Soviet system in power and the country under control. However, much like punching a hole in a dam, the tiny valve soon became a rushing torrent. Civil War erupted and on December 25 1991 the Soviet Flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.
What caused it? More than anything else it was the tide of political conservatism in the Soviet Union. This tide wasn't encouraged by Star Wars or Stealth Technology. It was the result of Coca Cola and McDonalds, the product of Ford and General Motors. The Soviet people wanted what the United States had... prosperity.
And just as Kennan said, the Soviet model couldn't maintain a decent standard of living without expanding.
So my apologies to Regan and his crew. And in answer to your question "what was Regan's legacy?" The answer is as follows. Regan was in the right place at the right time and managed not to screw it up to badly. It's a foreign policy the right has been following ever sense.
Re:Archive.org (Score:3, Insightful)
If I own a website (and I do) I feel that I can publish/delete anything I want on my site. TIME.com is not part of the public domain; it is the sole property of TIME Magazine. If they want to pull something from thier website then that is for them to decide. The internet has tons of holes AND ALWAYS DID. Websites get torn down and new ones get put in thier place. Content is ever shifting and changing. Tons of data is lost every year as websites delete,change and go away but the good news is that more data is being acumulated on the internet than deleted.
It matters a lot. (Score:3, Insightful)
It shows that the situation in Iraq was understood back in 1990.
So why did Bush think that the situation would be different now?
The source of the term 'memory hole' (Score:3, Insightful)
But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, `doublethink'.
Re:"Keep" them honest? (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember that conditioning relies heavily on repetition, and conditioning is what in Orwell's 1984 allows the police state to maintain control.
I mean, if the war is presented in terms of either pepsi or coke, how many people will think root beer? The greatest conspiracy of all would be if those two were actually owned by the same people. They'd have spent so much time forcing the choice on us like it was the only one... sounds a little like our media, doesn't it?
Re:The Excerpt (Score:3, Insightful)
So, explain why Gorby did what he did. If he was like the other hard-line commies, he wouldn't have instituted policies that "broke a hole in the dam." I say that the reasoning behind his actions were that he saw a failing economy trying to compete militarily on a global scale with a burgeoning economy.
Reagan outspent the Soviets, and in so doing caused the collapse of the Union. It was Reagan who said that the cold war was like two scorpions in a bottle, only one will live. When he came into office, the Soviets were still extremely paranoid. They exerted political pressure all over the place, and pushed for increased military power.
The spending of the 80's was a good thing anyway. Not only could the USSR not keep up with the US, the US was building an economy that was a mess due to the Carter administration. Reagan levelled off inflation at the same time as putting money into the economy. He created jobs, and really did set the stage for economic growth in the 90's.
Re:Archive.org (Score:2, Insightful)
Certainly, what you write is literally true, but it doesn't remove concern.
Previously, and even currently, libraries keep hardcopies of publications like Time. But, as we become much more reliant on digital references, we will lose the permanence that is a basic assumption of all referring. This is the problem.
Once, we relied on paper references. These were difficult for people to find, but they couldn't be revoked by the author or publisher. Now, we're starting to rely more on electronic references. This simplifies the task for the reader, but relies on the good will and permanence of the publisher.
It's not a big deal in this particular case, as far as I understand. The article is part of Time's regular (real-honest-to-God-paper) issue, right? So, it's not really lost, but it's certainly less accessible than it could be and than it was just last month. This is disturbing.
It's more disturbing when one considers that most people likely receive their news from a handful of very large corporations whose activities are likely newsworthy. One shouldn't rely on big corporations to accurately report on excesses of big corporations.
But, well, there we are.
Re:Archive.org (Score:2, Insightful)
Think Elcomsoft. Think RIAA. Think Scientology.
RIAA is not a corporation. It'a a cartel/lobbying group. Scientology is not a corporation either, it's a religious cult.
All you are saying is that sufficiently powerful organizations can influence government and make your life difficult. So what else is new? Read a little history, e.g. of Christian church before there were any corporations.
Corporations can't die.
One word: bankrupcy.
You can't pick and choose news corporations to find the best news for you.
And why not? If you are lazy, Google News works quite well. If you are not lazy, building your own news feed from sites all over the web isn't hard. No, these sites need not be news-oriented, or corporations, or anything like that.
Corporations can collude in secret to remove articles that a partisan mindset shared among managers deems unsuitable. Governments cannot, at least not until this administration, hide what they do for very long.
LOL. Just about anyone can collude in secret. As to governments unable to rewrite history, well, let's just say that you must be a bit naive... (see above: read history).
People do pick and choose governments with ease, every four years. Try firing Microsoft.
Heh. Try electing a non-Demopublican president of the US. Then try making a non-Microsoft computing environment. What's easier?
Corporations, though "persons" with constitutional rights, have absolutely no personal accountability whatsoever for their actions. Want to talk to Time Warner about erasing the record? What is "Time"? Can you schedule an appointment with it? Make it do jail time?
Don't bother to read the news, right? Does the word "Enron" or, say, "Kozlowsi" ring any bells?
Corporations now are the government. What do you call that form of government, komrade? "Police state" is a question begging term.
Get your terminology in order, please. Police state has nothing to do with corporations, it has to do with personal liberties and the ability to be different than everbody else. It's perfectly possible to have a police state without any corporations (e.g. North Korea).
Jeez. This post should be a poster child for the let-me-write-some-anti-corp-bullshit-who-cares-if
Re:Archive.org (Score:3, Insightful)
Please Note: The March 02, 1998 issue of TIME Magazine is now premium paid content on TIME.com...
Yet the story is not there. This is deceptive. It is not really the March 02, 1998 issue. It is the 2003 version of the 1998 issue.
Time magazine and other printed news sources like it purport to be a "papers of record". This means what they write should be useful as historical records of what happened at that point in time, not some revisionist version of what the government thinks history should be.
Re:The Excerpt (Score:3, Insightful)
Lenin [ex.ac.uk] 1870-1924
Stalin [marxists.org] 1879-1953 (note this period)
Khrushchev 1894-1971
Brezhnev [allrefer.com] 1906-1982
Andropov [cnn.com]1914-1984
Cherenko [britannica.com]1911-1985
Gorby 1931-????
Note that everyone up to Gorby was not only alive during the Lenin years but was policialy indoctrinated in the Stalin years. Gorby came too late for that. Born in 1931, Gorby's school years got him nearly all the way through the Stalin period.
Consequently, Gorbachev was really a product of the Khrushchev years rather than Stalin. Realize that Khrushchev's break with Stalin (as mentioned in grandparent post) was not looked upon favorably by the hard line commies you refer to and their move on power following his tenure instituted a period of reactionary extremism.
Gorbachev then, represented a fundamental ideological break with the old hard line elements in the party. If Reagan (note I'm fixing my spelling. All you ACs who bitched about it clearly didn't read the sig) had really been the deciding factor in the fall of the Soviet Union one would expect to see a re-centering of the political climate under Cherenko, Brezhnev, and Andropov all of whom held power during Reagan's first term of office. Instead, what you see is the exact opposite. These three are Stalinists they don't move to the center, but rather further to the extremes.
Reagan's evil empire musings and his overtly hostile attitude towards the Soviet Union weren't terribly helpfull in the big picture. In fact Reagan's saber rattling nearly plunged us into thermonuclear war during the Able Archer [cnn.com]exercises, a little publicized intelligence/war-game debacle that got way out of hand.
As for the spending of the 1980s, the United States dug itself into a multi trillion dollar hole in the process. Most of that money went into the military industrial complex. While I've no real issue beefing up the military (as having the 2nd best isn't good for much) its a real pity that some of the social programs so badly needed in this country go un-funded so we can sink another billion into systems both unneeded and unwanted by the Pentagon.
Getting back to the point... Gorby did what he did because he saw the ruin being perpetuated on his country by the lies and secrecy of the Stalinists. He genuinely believed he could redeem the Soviet Government and put to rest some of the injustices done in the name of the Party under Stalin and his followers. He was wrong.
When the dust settled Bush and Reagan got to grin at the world and tell it what a great job they did because no one was left to disagree with them.
Re: The Excerpt (Score:4, Insightful)
> I always thought it amusing that his administration fought so hard again UoM's affirmative action policy, when he benefitted tremendously from another form of affirmative action known as "legacy." There's NO WAY that idiot would've gotten into Yale or Harvard any other way.
His actions are very consistent, once you learn to view them as "preserving the system of privilege".