By
Edward Curtin
Two
categories of propaganda must be
distinguished. The first strives to
create a permanent disposition in its
objects and constantly needs to be
reinforced. Its goal is to make the
masses ‘available,’ by working spells
upon them and exercising a kind of
fascination. The second category
involves the creation of a sort of
temporary impulsiveness in its objects.
It operates by simple pressure and is
often contradictory (since contradictory
mass movement are sometimes
necessary).” – Jacques Ellul,
The Technological Society
March 20, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - The French-Algerian
writer Albert Camus’
great 1947 novel, The Plague, is a warning
to us today, but a warning in disguise. When he
died sixty years ago at the young age of forty-six,
he had already written The Stranger, The Fall,
and The Plague, and had won the Nobel
Prize for Literature.
The outward story of The Plague revolves
around a malignant disease that breaks out in a town
that is quarantined when the authorities issue a
state of emergency. After first denying that they
have a problem, the people gradually panic and feel
painfully isolated. Death fear runs rampant, much
like today with the coronavirus. The authorities
declare martial law as they warn that the situation
is dire, people must be careful of associating,
especially in groups, and they better obey orders or
very many will die. So the town is cordoned off.
Before this happens and the first signs that
something is amiss emerge, the citizens of the town
of Oran, Algeria remain oblivious, for they “work
hard, but solely with the object of getting rich.”
Bored by their habits, heavily drugging themselves
with drink, and watching many movies to distract
themselves, they failed to grasp the significance of
“the squelchy roundness of a still-warm body” of the
plague-bearing rats that emerge from their
underworld to die in their streets. “It was as if
the earth on which our houses stood were being
purged of their secret humors; thrusting up to the
surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been
forming in its entrails.” To them the plague is
“unthinkable,” an abstraction, until all their
denials are swept aside as the truth emerges from
the sewers and their neighbors and families die from
the disease.
“Stupidity has a way of getting its way;” the
narrator, Dr. Rieux tells us, “as we should see
if we were not always so wrapped up in ourselves
…. plagues and wars take people equally by
surprise.”
The American people are wrapped up in
themselves. Nor do
they recognize the true rats. They are
easily surprised; fooled would be a better word.