Alternatives to Freedom: Arguments and Opinions by William L. Miller

Author:William L. Miller [Miller, William L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317890959
Google: 3VSPBAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28028275
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

Public hysteria

Outside the former Yugoslavia, gunfire and the rattle of tanks have not accompanied the process of transition in East Central Europe.2 Thank God. But outbursts of passions and prejudices, hatred and animosities, paranoic and hysterical reactions have indicated the underlying enormous tensions, the torturing uncertainties, the exorbitant price most of the people have had to pay, yet again, ‘for a better future’. The media war was not an exception to this rule – quite the contrary. It functioned almost as a collecting lens of emotionality and irrationality.

There was nothing surprising in this. People’s relationship with their television screen is extremely personal and emotional in normal times as well. They project their hopes and fears to the world of pictures moving on the screen. Freud might add, in a more professional style, that the struggle between our egos, ids and superegos is enacted in a symbolic way, on the screen. Or he could point out analogies between the ‘dream world’ of our subconscious and the transformation of the real world that takes place on, or behind, the screen. It could be described also as a Platonic play of shadows (in colour now in its modern version), which is the reflection of the word of ideas, of the essence of life and being, which we are unable to discover in real life. Sociologists would describe the screen as the only or most important agora of late twentieth century life, where conflicts are fought out and social consciousness is formed. The television screen is not a door but at least a window, the only window, for most of the people, opening onto public life, the only means of participation in politics, the only companion, the only real source of values, beliefs, and identities, the only arbiter elegantiarum, the highest moral authority. It is natural and inevitable that people react with extreme sensitivity to everything that happens on and around the screen.

The high stakes and tensions of the post-1989 world have, as a matter of course, worsened this condition and led to some of those episodes which seem absurd and incomprehensible to outside observers. I think for instance of the hunger strikes. In June 1992, Bishop Tokes, who had played an important role in triggering the Rumanian revolution (if it was a revolution) staged a short hunger strike to protest against the acquittal by a Rumanian court of those responsible for a bloodbath in Transylvania. He set a contagious example. A couple of weeks later a parliamentary deputy of the governing party in Hungary started a hunger strike with a much less glorious objective. He demanded the immediate resignation of Mr Gombar and myself. Following this, an editor at Hungarian Radio went on hunger strike, also demanding the immediate resignation of Mr Gombar. In response, two female pop singers announced that they would start a hunger strike in our support; they had some weight in surplus and had planned to go on a slimming cure anyway. Luckily, these various hunger strikers stopped their

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