Talk:Layalina Productions

Ten years later, as Ambassador to NATO, I saw a well-executed communications strategy change attitudes at a critical phase in history. In the early 1980s, strong popular opposition in three NATO countries threatened to derail our plans to deploy Pershing and cruise missiles in order to counter Soviet SS-20s, which were deployed as part of a Soviet strategy of nuclear blackmail designed to split the alliance. We turned the tide of public opinion with a communications strategy and vigorous diplomacy, supported by the White House and the Congress, and executed through the extraordinary machinery of the United States Information Agency. This campaign helped us turn the corner and start down the road toward the end of the Cold War. http://www.iwar.org.uk/psyops/resources/public-diplomacy-programs/David_Abshire_testimony.pdf

Billy, some queries:

'Yonder stands your orphan with his gun'

not sure what this heading referes to? If it is a relevant quote can you source it? Otherwise put in a literal heading.

I don't understand the following para: Fairbanks concerns over his business interests are shared generally by US elites according to Emmanuel Evita partnerships, such as the Transatlantic Business Dialogue, are adopting "a proactive approach to head off the impact of anti-Americanism to their bottom lines in the long term". Jeffery Werner, chairman of the TBD stated:

"The Transatlantic Business Dialogue is not looking to replace what the government does — the state does diplomacy — we are just looking to provide industry input (where damaged political relationships might affect industry)."

What concerns does Fairbanks have? Can you spell them out? Also the punctuation seems to break down between 'Evita' and 'partnerships'. should that be a new sentence? Is the Evita ref the source of the succeeding quote? If so can you make that clear?

This sentence is opaque:

Layalina are taking the 'reality TV' approach but the stentorian barking of their advisors drowns out the 'soft power' guise as material reality that fuels resistance.

Do we need to use a phrase like 'stentorian barking'? The rest of the sentence is too convoluted for me to make sense of. Can you clarify?

Again, this heading needs sourcing and shown to be relevant or replacing:

"... Crying like a fire in the sun"

The phrase on 'undercover subversion needs explaining. If you mean that 'soft power' is undercover subversion, then say so explicitly. But given that this is not at all clear to most people you will have to explain this. Surely the point of note her is the claim that the US only responds?

Fairbanks uses the old Vietnam war public diplomacy/soft power term "winning hearts and minds" to title a work on the Middle-east (to a Yale audience) that argues anachronistically that the undercover subversion is the provenance of jihadists:

"The first "soft power" hints of the war first appeared on popular Arab satellite networks and websites where jihadists vowed to destroy the American way of life, one seen to interfere with their ultimate goal: establishing an Islamic caliphate to rule over the Muslim world. Over the last decade, sedate, controlled, and state-sponsored media have been replaced by satellite TV and the world wide web. These new media, which provide a de facto means of breaching traditional government controls, provide pan-Arab vehicles that jihadists exploit to appeal to their would-be followers — millions of disenchanted, unemployed or underemployed young Arabs under thirty — which constitute 70 percent of the population of the Arab world. More than three and a half years after the September 11 attacks and the start of the War on Terror, the United States still chases after terrorists, denying them the refuge they have enjoyed in such regions as formerly Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. In the battle of ideas, the US is deploying the very same tools first used by the jihadists: soft power."

Again a little more clarity here would be useful: Do US Ambassadors read Guy Debord's ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ and dream of the ‘colonization of everyday life’? The struggle for dominance in the realm of the image is not a new shift in US power, nor was it invented by jihadists. Debord's notion of ‘spectacle’ was intended to characterise a new stage in the accumulation of capital; as the Retort Collective put it

"...the submission of more and more facets of human sociability—areas of everyday life, forms of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of local solidarity, kinds of ethical or aesthetic insubordination, the endless capacities of human beings to evade or refuse the orders brought down to them from on high—to the deadly solicitations (the lifeless bright sameness) of the market. Those who developed the analysis in the first place resisted the idea that this colonization of everyday life was dependent on any one set of technologies, but notoriously they were interested in the means modern societies have at their disposal to systematize and disseminate appearances, and to subject the texture of day-to-day living to a constant barrage of images, instructions, slogans, logos, false promises, virtual realities, miniature happiness-motifs."

Not sure of the relevance of catch 22 here? Either cut or explain?

Perhaps it is Joseph Heller's Catch-22 which is the influential reading material:

The following sdentence is again a little opaque. what does it mean? Can you explain?: The indigenous becomes exogenous, democracy is trusted to (vested) private interest.

The para below need to explain how Abshire is connected to this: Not Heller then, Jack Kerouac has been reworked with 'Bill and Ted's Big Adventure'. But the members of the Advisory Group steered by Ed Djerejian on 'Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World' (which published its report 'Changing Minds, Winning Peace' in 2003) actually notes the 'lack of a strategic focus for communicating foreign policy' and it seems they are challenging the iron rule of letting the market decide, as in this from The Honorable David M. Abshire President of the Center for the Study of the Presidency:

"Although the Discovery Channel and other quality stations have operations abroad, too many of America’s commercial media exports are low-quality products, such as reruns of Dallas and even pornography, because they are inexpensive and readily available."

The para below need to explain both what 'Dallas' is (with a ref) and obviously what 'debbie does dallas' is too! Perhaps the sarcasm of 'fine upstanding' can be reworded less sarcastically?

What is wrong with such fine upstanding programmes such as Dallas (and indeed 'Debbie Does Dallas') with its focus on a ruthless murderous lust for power based on oil — what is it about the American way that it fails to address. Shunning the products of the free market the Advisory Group report "calls for the creation of a grant-making organization that would fund the production and export of quality television and radio." They think that Layalina Productions, "illustrates the creative potential that America’s private sector can bring to bear on this challenge."

'Yonder stands your orphan with his gun' is a quote from bob Dylan's 'It's all over now Baby Blue' as with '"... Crying like a fire in the sun" which is (for those whom 20th century music has passed by) the line that follows it, used here as a metaphor for US involvement in the middle-east. Catch-22 is almost always relevant when discussing the conection between business and war and the absurdities needed to hide the relationship.

The indigenous becomes exogenous, democracy is trusted to (vested) private interest. A simple reversal of perspective: the democracy promoted denies local programmes.

http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page

quite fun i thought, but for a minute you might feel you've travelled into a parallel universe