As I continue through the discovery process of Rule By Secrety, I am struck by the author’s methods of persuasion. He actually utilizes a multi-pronged approach, attempting to overwhelm the reader with citations, out-of-context, that bolster his case and lead to the appearance of support. The validity of his quotes and their intended meaning combined with the accuracy of some of his sources definitely calls in to question his methodolgies. He also relies heavily on secondary sources, including biographies and newspaper accounts, which may or may not be true, while providing little in the way of more “original” sources. He also attempts to “name-drop”, including many passages such as the following (from page 105):
These members include many past and present media corporate leaders such as Laurence A. Tisch and William Paley of CBS; Robert McNeil, Jim Lehrer, Hodding Carter III, and Daniel Schorr of Public Broadcast Service; Katherine Graham, Harold Anderson, and Stanley Swinton of Associated Press; Micahel Posner of Reuters; Joan Ganz-Cooney of Childern’s TV Workshop (Sesame Street); W. Thomas Johnson of CNN; David Gergen of U.S. News & World Report; Richard Gelb, William Scranton, Cyrus Vance, A. M. Rosenthal, and Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times; Ralph Davidson, Henry Grunwald, Sol Linowitz, and Strobe Talbott of Time; Robert Christopher and Phillip Geyelin of Newsweek; Katherine Graham, Leonard Downie Jr., and Stephen S. Rosenfeld of the Washington Post; Arnaud de Borchgrave of the Washington Times; Ricard Wood, Robert Bartley, and Karen House of the Wall Street Journal; William F. Buckley Jr. of National Review; and George V. Grune and William G. Brown of Reader’s Digest. Furthermore, sitting on the boards of directors of the corporations which own the media are secret society members.
On the whole, his attempts at “journalism” come across as nothing more than an attempt to overwhelm and infuriate, with heavily sourced accounts of questionable value, one-liners that are then unsubstantiated at all and poorly constructed arguments. In fact, the passage above is a perfect example. After simply overwhelming the reader with the top editors from the mastheads of several major publications, he drops the one liner, without substantiation, that the boards of major media corporations are “secret society members.” I assume he feels that by the time you choke down the preceding sentence, you won’t care what he has to say in the follow-up.
In fact, the one aspect that has become exceedingly clear is that at heart he appears as an isolationist, angry at the rise of globalization more than anything else. The whole subtext is most clearly (to date) displayed on page 101, where he writes the following regarding the 2000 election:
Once again, the American electorate was to choose between a globalist-supported Bush or a globalist-support Gore. Obviously, the globalists will be the winner, regardless of the election outcome.
In late 1999 globaloism suffered a slight setback when more than sixty thousand demonstrators, representing an odd mixture of unionists, enviromentalists and strict constitutionalists (what about those anarchists?), protested the loss of United States sovergeinty and jobs during a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. Predictably, the corporate-controlled news media styled the protests as unruly rioters although other accounts calimed that trouble began only after heavily armed police began clubbing and gassing participants.
Simply, the controversial General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) renamed in 1995, the WTO was widely seen as nothing more than a vehicle to further the Bilderberger goal of removing all trade barriers.
Unfortunately, there is no citation in this instance regarding where exactly these other accounts come from, which would have offered a dash of credibility to his account. After all, he can certainly read staff rosters, so I’m sure he could have found a Greenpeace newsletter somewhere to reference that would support his account of the WTO riots. Heck, I’ve even heard that that has been true in some of the anti-globalization riots over the past several years.
I did read a survey given on a semi-global-basis that essentially presents the view that the anti-globalization movement has been a failure, and that in the Third-World there is strong support for the benefits of globalization. If I can find that, or links to articles on the jobs created since the adoption of NAFTA, I’d be more than happy to post them.