“You don’t hate the media enough.”
It’s a line you often hear when people are describing the media. In an attempt to encourage readers to appreciate how horrible the press is, conservatives use it again and again: “You don’t hate the media enough. You think you do, but you don’t.”
I have long advocated calling the media the American Stasi - or even just the Stasi. It’s the name of the German communist secret police that terrorized the country from 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Stasi was an evil force. It was also one that included many journalists, artists, and writers.
In theology and popular culture, there has always been an emphasis put on dealing with something evil, of gaining control over it, only by calling that thing by its right name. Horror movies from The Exorcist to The Conjuring rely upon the good guys finding out the real name of the demons they are battling. In The Pope's Exorcist, a priest played by Russell Crowe is trying to exorcise a child possessed by a demon but is failing. Why? Because he doesn't know the demon's name.
Every time we call the American Stasi “journalists,” we are losing ground, effectively playing on their turf. These are the people who implied that President Trump brought on his own assignation attempt, have tried to destroy Nick Shirley, and who accused Brett Kavanaugh of gang rape. They want to hurt you, to ruin your life, to destroy your relationships, and drive you mad. These are not “journalists.”
In her classic 1968 novel A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin creates a fantasy world that also has layers of spiritual and psychological meaning. In Earthsea, every living thing has a hidden true name that defines its essence. Knowing something’s true name provides remarkable power. You can control a person, an animal, or even minerals by knowing the proper name of these things. Wizards spend months studying the true names of every living thing.
In a climactic part of the story, the young wizard Ged sails to the island of Pendor to confront a dragon, who has been destroying local villages. The dragon, like a modern journalist, speaks in a sinister, solicitous way, offering to help Ged while simultaneously mocking him – “twisting the true words to false ends, catching the unwary in a maze of mirror words each of which reflects the truth and none of which leads anywhere.”
There’s an unexpected twist: Ged knows the dragon’s true name. Asked by the towering serpent what he could possibly have to threaten him with, Ged answers: “With your name, Yevaud.” Then it happens: “When he spoke the dragon’s name it was as if he held the huge being on a fine, thin leash, tightening it on his throat. He could feel the ancient malice and experience of men in the dragon’s gaze that rested on him; he could see the steel talons, each as long as a man’s forearm, and the stone-hard hide, and the withering fire that lurked in the dragon’s throat: and yet always the leash tightened, tightened.”
Writers and journalists working with evil is not new. In a compelling new book, A State of Secrecy: Stasi Informers and the Culture of Surveillance, University of Melbourne scholar Alison Lewis reveals that while dictators like Hitler or Stalin sought to crush writers and other artists because they feared the freedom they represented, the German Stasi saw writers, journalists, and artists as allies.
“From its inception to its dissolution,” Lewis writes, “the Ministry for State Security recruited an alarmingly high proportion of writers as informants. It recruited sources from deep inside official circles, such as the consecrated spheres of the German Writers’ Guild (Deutscher Schriftstellerverband), as well as from the fringes of society. The Stasi touched the life of virtually every writer in the country. Writers, whether of poetry, novels, drama, essays, radio, television, or film scripts, belonged to the intelligentsia.”
Lewis offers that “although writers were persecuted in the Soviet Union by Stalin in his cultural revolution of the 1930s, postwar-era Eastern European regimes desperately relied on them to shape Soviet-style revolutions.”
There are very few “journalists” in America. Instead, we have an American Stasi whose job it is to ruin your life. Call them what they are.
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