Saturday, September 13, 2008

Speaking Truth to Power

Interesting the article that I read for breakfast in The Economist "Speaking Truth to Power". Interesting becuase it seems, for the perusal of the magazine content, that the Economist is a right wing publication or at least one alinged to the economic powers that govern the life and politics of USA or the West for that matter. So it is highly ironic that they are critizing the silence and complacency of the russian intellectuals, in the (money) god-blessed new capitalist country. Of course they are not so naive and they put some cover-ups like this:

Who today speaks truth to power—not only in authoritarian or semi-free countries such as Russia and China but in the West as well?
(...)
The West has printed a lorryload of angst-ridden books about the demise of the intellectual. Political correctness and academic over-specialisation have indeed hurt the quality of much that is said in the media and taught in the universities. But at the root of most complaints is the supposed problem of surplus. Authoritarian places nurture a class of recognised intellectuals whose utterances are both carefully listened to and strictly controlled. Democracies produce a cacophony, in which each voice complains that its own urgent message is being drowned in a sea of pap. “Repressive tolerance”, one ungrateful 1960s radical called it. It would cause not a ripple if MIT’s famous intellectual subversive, Noam Chomsky, were invited to speak to the annual capitalist jamboree in Davos.

And in Peru who dares to speak to (economic) power?
Here the article deriding the Russian intellectuals.

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