communication - the terror of the hyperreal - tomislav sunic

8/13/2019 Communication - The Terror of the Hyperreal - Tomislav Sunic

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Communication: The Terror of the Hyperreal

By Tomislav Sunic

One of the secret lies of liberal democracy is the dogma of free speech. The word propaganda

has obtained over the last six decades a nasty flavor; hence the need to use the wordcommunication. However, as much as everybody in modern society craves to communicate,

traditional community ties, or in-group ties, are more than ever before subject to the process ofdisintegration. It is worth recalling that etymologically the terms community and

communication are of the same origin. But how can one communicate if community no longer

exists?

To provide a make-believe image of absolute freedom of speech, the media and the modernPrinceresort to a hyperbolic language filled with hyperreal metaphors and qualifiers. This isespecially true regarding the terms democracy and human rights. These terms have assumed

the emotional role in rallying political allegiance formerly reserved for terms evoking nationhoodand patriotism. Opinion makers in Europe and America are not so much concerned with thecontent of their language, but rather with the appropriate packaging of the language and itsemotional impact on the masses.

For effective communication a modern politician (or the modern Prince?) is required to useimages with a cheerful setting and a happy ending scenario. His looks are important too. Anaspiring presidential candidate must be concerned more with his dentures than with hisdeontology.A well-fitting Armani suit and polished Gucci shoes are far more important than hisIQ. The image is essential since it does not encourage reflection, but obliterates all reflection.The hyperreal image on TV screens with all the trappings of wealth, power, and personal appeal

is ideal for propagating new political lies and, by extension, for instituting horrendous politicalcensorship.

For a European or American politician who aspires to high office, the ritual of repentance hasbecome de rigueur.

The exception, of course, is President Obama who capitalizes on his Black identity to induceguilt in his audience.

Not long ago Europeans were proud of their colonial exploits. Not long ago the exclusion of theOther (Blacks, Jews, Arabs) was perceived as a normal thingtypical of human societies fromtime immemorial. Today the exclusion of the Other is replaced by the hatred of oneself.

Ceaseless national-masochistic sermons about Euro-American real or surreal crimes bear witnessto a quasi-pathological desire to cleanse oneself of a past that evokes guilt rather than pride.

Public language must be soft and didactic conveying a self-deprecating message andrequiring the modern Prince to formulate his statements in the conditional tenseor by usingevasive sentences starting with adverbs such as admittedly, considerably, presumably, etc.No politician wishes to stick out his neck by using affirmative sentences that would clearlyenunciate his value judgments or depict his potential foe. After reading mainstream newspaper
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editorials, a student of political semiotics is struck with convoluted locutions such as one could

say, one might say, one should consider bombing Iran, orhelp democracy becometransparent in East Timor. Such vague locutions provide a safe retreat for the liberal rulingclass, as they signify nothing and everything at the same time.

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Political language must be neutral or neutered; it must reflect the desire for a world of stasisnot of global liberal metastasis. The only exceptions are modern heretics who must endure themost violent epithets. Thus the $PLC, a principal architect and enforcer of modern discourse onrace and immigration, likes to use expressions preceded by the noun hate, or followed by theadjective extremist: hate groups, hate speech, hate crimes; White extremists, political

extremism, etc. Contemporary politicians and their media watchdogs love to compare absoluteEvil to absolute Good, using words that are loaded with emotional significance, such asfascism vs. antiracism: the horrors of the Auschwitz on the one hand versus theHollywood-like fantasy of multicultural conviviality.

Nothing new under the sun, as the old Latins used to say. This idea is well captured by the lateChristopher Lasch,the best American visionary and the theorist of narcissistic democracy. Henoted a long time ago in his bookThe True and Only Heaventhat Liberals obsession withfascism leads them to see fascist tendencies or proto-fascism in all opinions unsympatheticto liberalism.

As much as Lasch was right he was also wrong. Today he would be accused of fascist,

revisionist tendencies by the masters of political discourse thus giving further credit andcredence to the paranoid liberal mind. Historically, both the fascist and communist temptationsdid not drop from the moon. They were logical responses to the failures of liberalism to thedemocratic deficit of the liberal experiment. Therefore one must not rule out the revival of the

fascist temptation, albeit in a new garb, as a third option in our late postmodenity: If a good manin a village is constantly and publicly called a crook, he will eventually embody thoseaccusations. White nationalism, which is on the rise in the US and the EU, is the logical responseto the chaotic policies of the liberal class and its promotion of all ethnic prides world-wideexcept for white Europeans.

In postmodernity, political messages are transmitted by visual images and the sound bitenotthe written word.Rgis Debray,the ex-leftist guerrilla who ascended to high office in theFrench Ministry of Foreign Affairsand probably the best observer of the perverse nature ofliberal democracy, notes that the traditional graphosphere has been completely devoured by thevideosphere. Books and prose are relics; the virtual video message has become omnipresent. It

is no accident that a dissident or a violent radical no longer dreams of storming the Princes

palace, but rather contemplates the seizure of the TV tower.

Postmodern political imagery does not reflect the lack of reality, but rather mirrors the excess ofreality. Henceforth any political debate on a TV screen is not designed to hide the truth, butironically, to hide the absence of all truth. Everywhere the media and the modern Prince simulatefictitious events such as terrorist attacks as if they wish to have them happen, while at the sametime they try to prevent them from happening. The bogeymen of the lefthate groups andextremists appear to be nowhere near the horizon. Yet, as was the case in the ex-Soviet
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Union, they must be reinvented over and over again in order to provide legitimacy and solidfunding to groups like the $PLC who love to dress up in the apparel of tolerance andhumanity. Everything is stage-managed as if everything were true.

What we are witnessing today in the West, in all spheres of official political discourse, is agigantic display of liesfar worse than in the notorious totalitarian despotisms of the 20thcentury which the postmodern liberal pretends to abhor.

Political Metastasis

In his recent editorial in the quarterlyElments(summer 2009), under the title Une poque debasses eaux literally translated as An epoch of low tide, or loosely and metaphorically asStalemate Times Alain de Benoistgives us a bleak picture of the forthcoming darkness:

In the catalogue of the ephemeral and the superficial, images and noise are following oneafter the other. Their goal is to capture attention and distract, and to make us think aboutother things, or more precisely, to make us cease to think altogether. The insignificantbecomes a general rule. What comes to mind is the world depicted by the Wachowskibrothers in the movie,Matrix(1999). In the movie everybody takes for real what isactually inauthentic; everybody is manipulated from the very moment he imagineshimself to be free. Never have people thought to be able to do what they wish, yet neverever have they been subject to so many regulations. In fact they do not really know whatthey desire because it is the system that formulates their desires.

The biggest victory of the system is to have persuaded everybody not of its qualities, butof its fatal character. The system does not claim to be perfect; it claims that there are noother alternatives. Hence, if one cannot dream of a better world, then there is nothing thatcan be done.

High politics follows the same hyperreal lead. There is no longer any need to await disasters orthe proclamation of a state of emergency, since they are constantly evoked and artificiallyprovokedcreating thereby the genuine feeling of a state of emergency and impending disastersandsetting the stage perfectly for a judicial or police clamp down. The security checks that onemust endure at all airports in the West inevitably give the feeling of a creeping state ofemergency. Depictions of catastrophic images on fictional television drama shows inevitablyinfluence peoples perceptions of real catastrophic events. The image no longer follows reality; it

precedes reality. Modern politics is the show of hyper-realityas witnessed for the first timeduring the recent ex-Yugoslav and Iraqi wars, which were getting bloodier and bloodier the morethey were shown on TV.

The Books of the Dead

The same applies to modern historiography and to the sudden surge among Third World nationsfor the resurrection and beatification of their dead. The more dead they manage to hold up asicons of Western evil the better able they are to affirm their own ethnic identity. One of the besttheoreticians of political hyper-reality, the lateJean Baudrillard,describes Auschwitz not as asite of annihilation, but the site of dissuasion (The Evi l Demons of Images,1988, p. 24). It isno longer a site of suffering; it is a site of deterrence and didactics, designed to be the ultimatesymbol of postmodern Western culture as psychotherapy for Europeans.
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The Jewish narrative regarding the singular and unique historical event of the Holocaust hasalready given birth to similar singular and unique narratives among other peoples, notably

Armenians and (ironically) the Palestinians, with dozens more nations waiting in the wings.

Diversity obliges. Soon our postmodernity will be forced to open up post-graduate studies onpolitical necrology or (more precisely) political necrophilia, as more and more groups clamor fortheir forgotten real or hyperreal dead. However, political necrophilia carries its own dangers forgroups that see themselves solely through the lens of victimhood. In attempting to avoid therepetition of disaster, the Jewish narrative of never again does exactly the opposite: Byfocusing solely on a decontextualized event of persecution, it runs the risk of failing to rationallycomprehend Jewish historywith unforeseen consequences.

Almost thirty years ago, Baudrillard wrote memorable words to illustrate the metastasis of liberaldemocracy:

The energy of the public sphere, the energy that creates social myths and dogmas isgradually disappearing. The social arena turns obese and monstrous. It grows like a

mammal and glandular corpse. Once it was illustrated by its heroes but today it refers toits handicapped, its weirdos, its degenerates, its asocial personsand all of this in agigantic effort of therapeutic maternity. (Les strategies fatales, 1983) (Fatal Strategies.)

The system puts forward the transparency of evil by parading images of evil in the form ofmaladaptive individuals. The ruling class and its mediacracy need to display the proof of theirpower by showing that those who transgress the most basic values of the multicultural zeitgeistare psychologically derangedliterally insane. Proverbial revisionists, bigoted anti-Semites,and Nazi pseudo-scholars, are cherished demon images of liberal democracy. They need to beconstantly put on exhibition in public placeslike wayward Puritans of oldin order to lendfurther credibility to the eroding system.

Americans and Europeans are constantly put on false alerts by the media about pending terroristthreats. The invocation of terrorism is often fictitious, yet it engages the media machinery in agigantic show of lies and mendacity. The purpose of the negative imagery is to scare the massesinto submission. In a world that encourages narcissism and extreme individualism, one is notonly the victim of the image. One becomes the image himself at the price of deforming his owntragic reality.
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communication - the terror of the hyperreal - tomislav sunic

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