Linda Mamoun, Author at Toward Freedom

Weapons of Mass Persuasion

Linda Mamoun June 28, 2005 Linda Mamoun

Anti-war TV challenges the corporate media “consensus”

By March 19, the major TV networks had done their advance work well. After months of promotion, millions of US viewers were eagerly anticipating a prime time extravaganza. Anxious for the catharsis of a neatly crushed Iraqi military, they watched with “shock and awe” as US and British forces launched their long-awaited sequel – Gulf War II.

However, there’s another US public, one not so eager or united. Due largely to advances in personal computing and electronic communications, opposition to the latest US-led war spread rapidly before it began. Although much has been written about the impact of the Internet on anti-war organizing, relatively little has been said about the advent of anti-war TV. Yet this recent development has informed, expanded, and mobilized the ranks of the movement while engaging millions who otherwise would be forced to rely on the empty, often inaccurate drivel of mainstream TV. read more

Bearing Witness in Palestine (11/02)

Linda Mamoun May 31, 2005 Linda Mamoun

In his preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre described the callous nature of the individual bred into a colonial regime. "This imperious being," he wrote, "crazed by his absolute power and by the fear of losing it, no longer remembers clearly that he was once a man; he takes himself for a horsewhip or a gun; he has come to believe that the domestication of the ‘inferior’ race will come about by the conditioning of their reflexes. But in this he leaves out of account the human memory and the ineffaceable marks left upon it; and then, above all, there is something which perhaps he has never known: we only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us." read more