@mlchild (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6645904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6645904) wrote: > The power and precision of the right word at the

@mlchild (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6645904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6645904) wrote: > The power and precision of the right word at the right moment can be intoxicating. @arethuza (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6645940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6645940) replied: > Not only intoxicating but immensely powerful - we live in an age where politics is dominated by form rather than content, "spin" and being "on message" are more important that policies. Both of them are indeed right. Except it has always been like that, and not necessarily a new phenomena as we sometimes think. Here's a quick excerpt to an interesting essay in imperial villain making.... By the end of the 90s, the hardliners calling for regime change in the east found that they had a powerful ally in government. This new president was not prepared to wait to be attacked: he was a new sort of conservative, aggressive in foreign policy, bitterly anti-French, and intent on turning his country into the unrivalled global power. It was best, he believed, simply to remove any hostile Muslim regime that presumed to resist the west. There was no doubt who would be the first to be targeted: a Muslim dictator whose family had usurped power in a military coup. According to British sources, this chief of state was an "intolerant bigot", a "furious fanatic" with a "rooted and inveterate hatred of Europeans", who had "perpetually on his tongue the projects of jihad". He was also deemed to be "oppressive and unjust ... [a] sanguinary tyrant, [and a] perfidious negotiator". It was, in short, time to take out Tipu Sultan of Mysore. The president of the board of control, Henry Dundas, the minister who oversaw the East India Company, had just the man for the job. Richard Wellesley was sent out to India in 1798 as governor general with specific instructions to effect regime change in Mysore and replace Tipu with a western-backed puppet. First, however, Wellesley and Dundas had to justify to the British public a policy whose outcome had long been decided in private. Read the rest here: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/may/24/foreignpolicy.india/print http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/may/24/foreignpolic...