The Linguistics of Deception
When CNN announced their documentary on the assassination of Martin Luther King, which aired here in Germany on April 6, I predicted that they would not mention the verdict of the 1999 Jowers trial. This was of course the civil suit that the King family brought against Loyd Jowers, the owner of the restaurant below the rooming house where James Earl Ray rented a room on April 4, 1968, and from which he supposedly shot King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel opposite. The King family won the suit, and though the legal consequences were trivial (Jowers was ordered to pay $100 in damages for "wrongful death"), it brought a certain amount of closure to the King family, and for them and millions of other (not only black) Americans, established the truth in the case as definitively as could be realistically expected.
Unfortunately, my prediction was correct. Read further at http://www.mdmorrissey.info/logical8 .
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William Pepper, Act of State - Media
http://www.actofstate.org
No doubt.
This trial in 1999 is important in the MLK trial that no one ever talks about. Too inconvenient I suppose???
And then you have the 1979 hearing that declared there was indeed a conspiracy in the JFK case. Largely ignored.
Great essay on some belated justice for the MLK family! Also, I
really liked this paragraph on our deplorable mainstream media that helps "them" whittle away all of our basic liberties:
"...As a linguist and a language teacher, I am probably more patient than most with this kind of thing, but how many of us would it take, working 24/7, to keep up with the "mainstream" flow of lies, omissions and distortions? "Mainstream" is a misnomer, since the corporate publishers do not represent anything like a "mainstream" of the population, much as they would like us to believe they do, so I prefer the term "media mafia"; they have the resources, the money, the manpower and the organizations to control what passes for information, news, and in the case of this "documentary," for history." ...
We must defeat the "media mafia" & restore true freedom-of-the-press if we are going to win the info war!
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Consider mass emailing truth messages. More info here: http://www.911blogger.com/node/13321
Excellent, except...
"This has become clearer than ever after 9/11, but the King case is particularly instructive because the truth about it has been established in a way, namely, in a court of law, that the truth about many other so-called "mysteries," such as the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, and most importantly 9/11, will probably never be established."
This sentence ends with a suggestion that the evidence against the 9/11 OCT will not be heard by a jury in a civil or criminal court.
I'm thinking that it will and that it when it is, the jury will be overwhelmed by it and the truth about 9/11 will be established at least to the degree of the MLK assasination.
Otherwise, I really enjoyed reading the analysis. Thanks!
Hope
I hope you're right. But how many Jowers trials do we need? My unstated point here was that the MLK case shows us that this is as much as we can expect from Big Brother, and it is not nearly enough. Hope, to be real, has to be more than this. It's hard to say this without sounding pessimistic, so I didn't. I would like to say, with people like Alex Jones, "We're gonna kick their asses!", but I'm afraid that's the other extreme. So what kind of hope can we have? I'm still working on that. How about something like "We Shall Overcome"? Sounds corny, but it was good enough for MLK, and I still believe it. After 9/11, at least we know that "we" includes all of us--although we should have known that after JFK and RFK, etc., as well.
Thanks to you and others for reading and commenting!
Direction
I guess we don't need to have any foregone conclusions about how successful our efforts will be. Instead, we can simply continue in the direction of truth in our language. Things are different these days. Internet. And we can appreciate more and more Jowers trials, if they are truthful, even if not individually effective to the degree we might want them to be.
Maybe there was some irony in your analysis, because you were talking about purposeful subtleties, meant to sway the audience, in language and then included a direct assumption of impotence of the truth movement and complete control of big brother. This might lead the reader to just give up hope.
Thanks again for writing.