|
charlatan: is war a product?
is a state a brand that can effectively sell war?
the ethical question is not new, really---any war requires that support be generated and maintained amongst the public--but it seems to me that there is something basically wrong with shifting from a model in which this is an explicit activity undertaken by the state to a model where the state is understood as a type of corporate body which sells its policies as product, particularly war, particularly war launched on problematic grounds--particularly by selling that war not through explicitly framed official statements, but through the use of proxies that infiltrate information streams and function to blur the line between factual reporting (whatever that really is) and official propaganda.
the line seems clearest if you adopt the approach which emphasizes the nature of the polity--in a democratic political system, information has a certain status because of the way the system is supposed to operate---so the blur of official marketing and information is not only more obviously a problem framed this way, but the consequences of it emerge with a certain polemical clarity.
if you adopt a position that assumes pr as a procedure that can be applied in principle to any relation, then the same problem looks quite different, and does come, as you say, to a matter of scale or degree.
so the meta-problem has to do with the desirability of effects of adopting one approach over another to framing this ethical and maybe legal problem. this is a political matter, really (the criteria that you would use to evaluate approaches are political, in other words, and would involve argument from outcomes).
this is why i have not been willing to concede your way of framing the question at hand here to you---even though i haven't had time to make the case until now.
this seems the place where we are, though. a step prior.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|