Smearocracy
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008Volume 7, Issue 8, August 2008
Copyright © Capital City Free Press - Use of Capcityfreepress.com and its related sites signifies your agreement to the terms of service. The article “Smearocracy” is copyrighted by Bob Gebelein and is published here with permission.
Smearocracy
from http://www.capcityfreepress.com/opinion308
Bob Gebelein
Special to the Free Press
The Republicans have learned that smear tactics win elections, and they have made a policy of using smear tactics without regard to morality, ethics or legality. And the Democrats in the past didn’t seem to know what to do about it. In 2004, I stopped giving money to the Democratic Party, saying that I would not make any more contributions until the Democrats learned to deal with the Republican smear tactics. I sent letters to Howard Dean, John Kerry, and Nancy Pelosi. I received no answers.
One of the first things that impressed me about Barack Obama was that he seemed to be able to handle the smear tactics. He now has a website called Fightthesmears.com, battling the smears head-on. I have just written a book called “The Mental Environment,” which picks apart the smear tactics and offers insights on how to combat them. I offered this book to Obama with no success, so I want to express some of my ideas here.
One mistake that people have made in dealing with the smear tactics is to defend themselves, instead of pointing the finger back at the person using the smear tactics and saying: “This person is engaging in smear tactics (or character assassination, or defamation).” John Kerry made the mistake of defending his war record when called unpatriotic, instead of just saying, “That’s character assassination.”
“If the Democrats are elected, the terrorists will take over the country.”
I have been hearing that since 2004. The statement is just preemptive finger-pointing, to divert attention away from the fact that the Republicans allowed the worst attack ever on American soil, and they handled it badly with wars of retaliation, and have yet to catch Osama bin Laden. And aren’t the Republicans collaborating with the terrorists in creating an atmosphere of fear?
In the case of smear tactics, my book defines a Speaker, a Target, and an Audience. Not only does the Target always need to point the finger back at the Speaker, as somebody who is doing evil and destructive things, but also the Audience needs to help out by recognizing the smear tactics and judging the Speaker appropriately. Just for a start, if a political candidate says anything bad about his/her opponent, you can assume it is a smear, unless proven otherwise.
If there was a better book on the subject, I would not be forced to recommend my own. Every Democrat needs to read this book, to learn how to deal with the smear tactics. Every Republican needs to read this book, to see how they have been bamboozled. I mean, if one percent of the population is very wealthy, and 20 percent compose the Religious Right, then the other 30 percent needed to elect George W. Bush were bamboozled. And every high school student needs to read this book before reaching voting age. The Audience, the American public, needs to become more wise to the ways of misrepresentation, manipulation, mental warfare, and Machiavellian tactics.
We have laws against telling destructive lies about another person. This is called “defamation.” We have come to accept politics as a dirty business, where defamation is the norm. But in a system based on law, it doesn’t seem right that the people who populate the government should win their offices using methods that are outside the law. A government determined by smears is a “smearocracy.”
I think political candidates should set aside some of their money for legally prosecuting defamation. Or maybe they could get free legal representation just by answering one of those full-page ads in the Yellow Pages (”Have you been injured?”). The United States has been injured, to the amount of billions (trillions?) of dollars, by having incompetent administrations winning elections by using smear tactics.
Joe McCarthy was able to ruin people’s lives through character assassination because you can’t sue a United States Senator for defamation. That law needs to be changed. Nobody should be allowed to tell destructive lies about another person.
I learned about some of the elements of mind pollution, like “red herrings,” before I ever experienced a real red herring in the summer of 1951. Other elements, like “mental warfare” and “hypnotic implants,” I have discovered for myself. I have observed how the Hippies took mental warfare to a whole new level of subtlety, compared to the Joe McCarthy era. And the techniques of mind pollution keep advancing. For example, the title of the article in Time (June 23, 2008) about Obama fighting the smears is “Can Obama Shred the Rumors?” The word “shred” usually means to get rid of the truth, not lies.
We need to focus on mind pollution and make it into “a subject.” And we have some catching up to do.
About the author: About the author: Bob Gebelein graduated from Harvard University in 1956, with a degree in Mathematics. Gebelein has spent most of his time developing a new civilization and becoming a songwriter and a writer in order to express his ideas. In 1985, he published “Re-Educating Myself: An Introduction to a New Civilization,” describing his new civilization. After retiring in 1999, he spent eight years writing “The Mental Enviroment (Mostly about Mind Pollution)”. He currently lives in Provincetown, Mass.