The high-minded man must care more for truth...

...than for what people think. - Aristotle, Ethics

A Simple Question of Fact

By J.R. Nyquist

Taken one by one, the following statements are either true or false: (1) The Russian and Chinese governments want to bring down the United States; to this end they (2) directly support North Korea, Iran, Cuba and other rogue states; (3) in turn these states support terrorists, drug traffickers, criminals and insurgents in Iraq, Colombia and elsewhere; (4) the Russian and Chinese government's are furtively working for the creation of a new communist bloc in South America (including Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Uruguay and Brazil); (5) they continue to support the communist governments of Africa (especially Congo and Zimbabwe); (6) they encourage anti-American propaganda at home and abroad; (7) they have penetrated the United States, Canada and Mexico with aligned criminal mafias and professional spies; (8) they are learning how to coordinate their respective military staffs for a future war; (9) they are developing options for an economic attack against the U.S.; (10) they are encouraging the French and Germans to break with America; (11) they are building nuclear weapons and new types of missiles for striking the United States.

I submit that these statements are true, that the facts will bear out their truth despite a prevailing tendency to fudge the facts (as these facts are inconvenient to a society based on hedonistic precepts). To summarize the significance of the eleven listed items: Russia and China support and assist, directly or indirectly, all those regimes that hate the United States of America; and they do this only because the leaders of Russia and China feel a similar hatred. 

I assert, therefore, that the foreign policy of the Bush administration is mistaken, that its national strategy is vain from first to last, because it does not publicly identify the main enemies of the country as enemies. President Bush has not warned American businessmen with regard to China. He has not warned Europe about Russia. He has not warned of a new threat emerging in South America, where Marxists are assuming leadership in country after country. 

Someone determined to resist the facts, as set forth above, might argue that I am attempting to falsify reality for alarmist purposes. After all, it is obvious to everyone that communism collapsed in 1991 and Russia is no longer a threat to the United States. It is obvious because everyone with a television saw the Berlin Wall being torn down. Everyone with a television saw Boris Yeltsin standing on top of a tank in Moscow, proclaiming freedom. 

But are television imagines to be taken seriously? Consider Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, where he writes: “a great media metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense.” Postman argues that the “medium is the metaphor” insofar as every medium “is metaphor writ large” and therefore has its “resonance.” According to Postman, “the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression.”

How do you know what happened in Eastern Europe from 1989-1991?

In a print-based world you know because you read it in a book. In a television-based world you know because you saw it on TV. But suppose, for a moment, that television was not your metaphor. What if your metaphor was a game? What if, instead of watching 25 hours of television per week you spent 25 hours playing strategy games? 

Instead of “seeing is believing,” perhaps “playing is believing.” Every player knows that games revolve around deception, diversion and combination. War is a game, espionage is a game, politics is a game, diplomacy is a game, and so on. First, know there is a game. Second, know who the players are. Third, know what they are playing at. Understand, as well, that the game board is the world. The game pieces are people and companies and countries. Know also that every game is a battle of wits. 

Did Russia become a democracy because Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank? Did Romania, Poland or Czechoslovakia become genuine free market societies when their respective dictators visibly fell from power? Images often mask the underlying reality. Images do not tell the whole story. Images are seductive, misleading and quite often irrelevant. Yet, the Age of Television (or Show Business) would have us believe that the “play is the thing.” What we see on television, however, is not the essence of reality. Television merely presents the husk or shell of reality. 

In The World According to Television it is not only obvious that I am mistaken in asserting that Russia and China threaten the United States, it is obvious that in doing so I am mentally unbalanced. After all, how could 300 million television viewers be wrong? And why should I – alone against the crowd – be right? Admittedly, my position is not credible when weighed against the world. And yet, a thing is not true simply because everyone saw it on television. The truth is found close up, in the details, in the gritty facts that are left out of the evening news. The truth does not reside in images, but is found in hesitant witnesses and tedious documents. You do not find it by glancing at a screen. The truth is a complicated jigsaw. And because this is the Age of Television, and because “television makes stupid,” the multitude is on a downslide.

A chess game is perplexing from start to finish. What is required for playing, for understanding the game, is remembrance of past games, study of game principles, hands-on experience, and the slow development of skill through a progression from novice to expert. None of this can be communicated via television, through a medium in which “seeing is believing.”

The question of the Russian threat, of the Chinese threat, is a simple question of fact. It is not about seeing or believing. It is about moves on a chessboard. Read the moves, study the ongoing plays and forget the imagery. 

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