10 December 2010
Assange is a James Bond villain out to conquer the world!
Well, that's the angle being forced by ... no surprises... the Murdoch-owned news.com.au and the UK's Daily Mail. A little reminder - Rupert Murdoch may be Australian by birth but he has been an American citizen since 1984. As this 'news' website, full of lightweight and puffy tat mixed with extremist and brain-dead populism - all norms when it comes to Murdoch media, claims with its pictures, WikiLeaks is using a 'cold war bunker' with interior design 'inspired by Bond sets'. Knowing very well that their readership loves Bond movies, especially as they clearly show who is the good guy and who is the bad guy (complicated twists in story lines are left for reality TV shows), this creates a simple analogy for them to join the dots - Julian Assange obviously is a villain. Why? Because he has an underground lair like a James Bond villain. And he even looks like one too! So he must be like them! Amazing propaganda! Of course, most of these people won't be able to pinpoint which one though - but the parallel here in being drawn with the villian in 1985's 'A View To A Kill', Max Zorin, played by the silver-haired Christopher Walkin. Zorin happened to be a a microchip industrialist and... computer specialist!
Now tell me, how is this different from the villification of the Jews that Nazi Germany used in their propaganda? They would make not-so-subliminal comparisons using widely-used populist imagery and stereotypes, forerunners to the pop references used in this case, to eventually make the Jews equal to all evil in the world.
In this instance, to ram down the point (as the bogan/chav/redneck readership of news.com.au also need some visual aids), clips from James Bond films off of YouTube have also been used. Check here to see the actual article and you'll see what I mean.
This is part of the slippery pole used worldwide to generate hate. Little by little, the negative connotations grow, and before you know it, the vilified person(s) have been associated with rage and fear, leading to calls for their death. This is how the people of the Balkans were sucked in blindly to carry out the genocides they did in the 1990s.
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