spin, spotlight, & suicide | lenin’s legacy | voltaire’s rationale of reason | comparative linguistic study of john stewart & steven colbert
Spin, Spotlight, & Suicide:
How No. 10 and BBC Killed Dr. David Kelly Softly, with Words
The Iraq Dossier, steeped in controversy of virtually every kind, markedly changed the landscape of British media and politics in the first decade of the 21st century. Published in September 2002 by Tony Blair’s government, the document allegedly contained “sexed-up” language inserted by spin-doctors to make a stronger case for military intervention in response to Saddam Hussein’s menacing biological warfare programme. The main controversy of this allegation, however, focused on the infamous “45-minute” claim of the dossier, which stated that Hussein had the capability of firing biological weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) within that time frame (qtd. in Ames, WP). In an anonymous interview in with BBC reporter Andrew Gillian in May 2003, Britain’s chief weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly allegedly suggested that this claim was not supported by evidence, and that it was merely a product of government spin. Kelly, after admitting to meeting with Gilligan, became the focus of multiple inquiries and hearings by the Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC), the Ministry of Defense (MoD), and the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC). The mental distress caused by these intense cross-examinations ultimately led to Kelly’s suicide. While the Hutton Inquiry published after Kelly’s death found no legal fault…
Lenin’s Legacy:
The Fatal Conflict Between The People and The Party of The People
For centuries, the Russian Empire was ruled by an autocratic regime headed by a royal bloodline of tsars. It was no mystery that this autocracy was repressive, feudalistic, and extremely primitive compared to the developed Western European countries at the turn of the 20th century. With increasing popular unrest, Imperial Russia teetered on the brink of collapse from 1900 to 1917 (Hosking 20). It was in this economically, socially, and politically backwards society where Lenin cultivated and proposed his heterodoxy of Marxist socialism. From an ideological perspective, Lenin’s “grass roots movement” that promised to bring power to the hands of the people was very appealing to a repressed population under the ineffective tsarist government. But the first ‘realistic’ cracks of this ideology were uncovered with the failure of Russia’s October Revolution to spark international socialist revolutions as predicted by Lenin. Thus, Russia became the one “socialist fortress” that was to be preserved at all costs (60). With the bloody struggle of the civil war that followed the Revolution these cracks turned into schisms, and Lenin’s post-revolutionary doctrine became markedly contradictory to his pre-revolutionary claims. The Bolshevik Party rose to power successfully, but it now faced the challenge of turning around a failing economy while simultaneously advancing “the people’s cause” (61).
Voltaire’s Rationale of Reason
Voltaire never wrote a philosophical critique. He never theorized or presented a system to define human existence. Except for his Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire’s hidden philosophy must be deduced from his polemical novellas, letters, and essays. The greater part of Voltaire’s thought is embedded within his works of satire, known as his Contes philosophiques, or ‘Fables of Reason.’ Specifically in Zadig and Candide, Voltaire used this fictional framework to satirize and poke fun at Leibniz’s theodicy. While Voltaire derisively criticized Leibniz’s optimistic understanding of creation, God, and free will, he never proposed an alternative. Rather he leaves the reader to infer his philosophy from his satire. Because Voltaire never directly elucidated his own philosophy, O’Flaherty claims, “It is moreover full of contradictions because the philosophe often leaps from one point of view to another, perpetually governed by the impulse of the moment.”[1] But while Voltaire was quick to find the holes in Leibniz’s philosophy, he never came close…
joe marinelli 