Dear Editor,
Twenty-nine years ago, in August 1991, the Internet went public. Those of us who grew up on this island before there was a World Wide Web came of age in a world in which information was not easy to access and, therefore, knowledge was more difficult to acquire than it is today. Way back then, but still not that long ago, very few of us could afford to learn by traveling to Europe, to the USA or to anywhere else in the world. The schoolhouse, books and magazines, one or two local newspapers, movies, magazines, radio, and (later) television were the means from which we got our information/representations and could acquire some knowledge.
Nowadays, propaganda (information/misinformation/disinformation) is plentiful and much easier to access. Consequently, knowledge is also more readily accessible for those who are curious, and who have the time and the means to do the research required to become well informed. It is unfortunate that there are still folks on this island and elsewhere in the world who, for all sorts of reasons, do not own a computer or a smart phone that would enable them to communicate with others instantly both locally and globally, allowing them to obtain information online, on Internet sites all over the world.
Three months ago, minus a few days, in my “Payback and Projection: the Impeachment of President Trump” (letter to the editor of The Daily Herald, January 30, 2020), I argued that the US Senate impeachment trial of President Trump was an “ill-conceived exercise in progressive projection and propaganda … the staging of a narrative designed to project onto others, onto the Republicans and onto President Trump, in particular, the corruption of the Democrats.” I opined that the US Senate trial was “a kitchen fire: lots of smoke” that had to be “deprived of oxygen; snuffed out promptly lest it erupts into an inferno precisely when the nation may have to battle a real world menace: the Coronavirus.”
Today, almost three months later, the Coronavirus/COVID-19 is a pandemic, a worldwide inferno. Have the Democrats and their powerful allies in the mainstream media (mass media) learned anything from their witch trial in the US Senate, their earlier failed coup d’état and Mueller Investigation? Not one bit! On the contrary, they have grown more enraged. Now, today, they are accusing their President of having fiddled while Rome was burning: of having procrastinated while COVID-19 was contaminating the US and the world.
In reality, this virus originated in communist China. Officials of China’s repressive communist government manipulated and misled the World Health Organization (WHO) on the matter. They also refused (are still refusing) to allow the WHO and Western scientists to participate in an examination of the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan province.
Today, officials of the communist Chinese government are engaged in a cover-up of their misdeeds, but the proof of their perfidy is indisputable: shortly after the outbreak of the virus, they suspended all travel from Wuhan province to other parts of China, thereby protecting all other parts of their country while allowing travel out of Wuhan to other parts of the world (to Europe, to the US, and to everywhere else). This may account for the rapid spread of the virus in Europe, in the US (despite President Trump’s January 31, 2020, early wise restriction of travel into the US from China), to Australia and throughout the world.
In his Republic, one of the world’s most influential works of philosophy and political theory, if not the most influential, Plato reviews a number of key philosophical ideas. “Justice,” the “just person,” the “just city,” the “origin of knowledge,” the “nature of reality” and the “problem of representation” are some of the key-subjects considered. Plato advises us to beware of representations: the “shadows on the wall of the cave” in which we are imprisoned. He urges us to break loose from our confinement; to exit our cave and examine representations in bright sunlight. But he warns us that once we have probed and pierced the veil of the shadows, once we have viewed them in bright sunlight, life back among our fellow cave dwellers will become a most challenging and dangerous enterprise.
Projection is a defense mechanism in which individuals attribute to others characteristics they find unacceptable in themselves. Reader, these are trying times. If you have access to a computer, Google: “YouTube out of shadows,” the interesting and informative video that was posted on the Internet earlier this month.
Gérard M. Hunt
