The Western Media its Tactics, Motive and Impact on People’s Minds
Paper presented by
Hameed Abdul Karim
At the Institute of Objectives Studies
At its Silver Jubilee Celebrations at Bangaluru on 14 October 2011
‘Oh you who believe, if a sinner comes to you with any news, ascertain the truth, lest you harm people unwittingly and afterwards become full of repentance for what you have done’
Qur’an 49:6
Most people associate media with TV, newspapers and radio. But when we were children we were not exposed to TV and didn’t have much to do with newspapers except the sports page. We were, however, exposed to comic books and we devoured every one of them we could lay our hands on. Our favourite ones were the Lone Ranger and Tarzan.
We did not know then that our minds were being ‘programmed’ or that we were being subjected to ‘Thought Control’ as one of the great intellectuals of our times Noam Chomsky put it in his book ‘Pirates and Emperors’.
The Lone Ranger brainwashed us to believe that the White man was superior because we found him riding a white horse and always solving the problems of the oppressed. Tonto, his side kick, was ‘red Indian’ and he rode a brown horse – no white horse for him. We started to believe the White man was superior and that a brown man was only good enough to do his bidding. It was around this time the supreme racist imperialist Rudyard Kipling wrote about the ‘White Man’s Burden’. (We were his victims)
Tarzan brainwashed us to believe that the White man was superior in every aspect of life and that if something good had to be done it had to be done by the White man. We couldn’t imagine why Tarzan had to be White man in the thick of the Black African jungles. That’s how ‘Thought Control’ operated then and continues to operate up until today in a variety of ways. High tech toys have replaced comic books, but they carry the same message.
We were so awed by the goodness that America and the rest of the West represented that we began to despise our leaders and the heroes amongst us. Our heroes were Western leaders like Churchill or John Kennedy. Jawaharlal Nehru or Mohandas Gandhi – the half naked fakir according to Churchill – or Allama Iqbal, or Rabrinath Tagore or Omar Khayyam and countless others were to us backward and regressive with the evil intent to keep us forever backward. Instead we were brought up to read William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. Here I must confess the latter two Englishmen were of high quality and their writings still echo in my mind. But I think Dickens and Shakespeare among others were too overvalued and the sole purpose in getting us to read their works in school was to keep us within the realms of ‘thinkable thoughts’ the additional motive was to keep us away from ‘our’ writers and thinkers.
