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When I was a kid the news seemed to buzz with stories of political prisoners, dissidents or hostages. The media, perhaps in concert with groups like Amnesty Int
by nonrandomstring 5y ago
When I was a kid the news seemed to buzz with stories of political
prisoners, dissidents or hostages. The media, perhaps in concert with
groups like Amnesty International performed a function of keeping a
spotlight on these people, often regardless of their political
leaning. I can recall names like Nelson Madella, Steve Biko, Terry
Waite, Bobby Sands, around whose fate world history seemed to pivot.
Today there feels a cold, indifferent silence around the fate of
unlawfully and arbitrarily detained people around the world. I think
this is one of the most profound changes/failings of today's (social)
media and justice systems. And I think to some degree it's systematic
and deliberate - to disempower martyrs and figureheads. It applies at
home too, as there are many political prisoners in the USA [1] and the
UK treatment of Julian Assange is been shameful.
I think MLK nailed the climate today eben better than the 1960s; "In
the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the
silence of our friends"
[1] https://afgj.org/politicalprisonersusa https://afgj.org/politicalprisonersusa
- cottager2 5y agoI don’t think it’s deliberate. The U.S. media is much more inwardly focused now. How often have you heard the name Breonna Taylor? We no longer have global hegemony. We can’t change Russia. We can maybe change some domestic police forces.
- Barrin92 5y agoThe spotlight was always on people who had some exemplary role to play in the ideological conflict of the day. Mandela was a figurehead of the anti-apartheid movement, which drew both praise as well as condemnation. He was considered a terrorist and communist by a non-trivial amount of the US well into the 2000s after all, very exciting stuff. Navalny or flat out most dissidents today have no ideological relevance, and nobody cares about 'ordinary' dissidents, who vastly outnumber pivotal historical figures. It's not a converted effort that prevents the media from reporting about jailed journalists in Turkmenistan, it's that nobody reads it. Pussy Riot was popular for a minute because the media could put some hot naked women on the cover of their newspapers, but that's about it.
- cafard 5y agoI would remark that only two of the men you list survived their imprisonment. The world has a limited attention span, and often a short one.