Canadian Labour Congress Hush Order is Bush League
Can you imagine a labour organization like the Canadian Labour Congress having the audacity to issue a hush order demanding union leaders keep members' concerns top secret?
What do Saddam Hussein, George Bush and the Canadian Labour Congress have in common?
The use of deception, through secrecy and other means to retain control of their subject populations for purposes of advancing their own agendas.
Control requires loyal obedience from the subjects and that invariably requires suppression of free speech and free thought. Depending on the despot and the laws of the land that he inhabits, obedience may be coerced in unpleasant and very direct ways or it may be achieved more subtly - through manipulation of the media, vilification of critics and dissenters and - secrecy.
Under current President Ken Georgetti, the Canadian Labour Congress has evolved a cult of secrecy. Decisions that affect the lives of millions of workers are made by Georgetti and his small cadre of insiders and put to a larger circle of insiders for the rubber stamp of approval. Union leaders are encouraged to keep intra and inter-union problems (like disenchanted members, escaping members, leaders colluding with bosses, affiliated unions poaching each other's turf) "in the family". These important issues are labeled "dirty laundry" and the faithful are implored not to let it hang in public. Members who refuse to be silent and insist on speaking out on issues that are of high interest to them, are chastised for bringing embarrassment on the family... um, labour movement.
In the spirit of paternalism that is shared by oppressors - big and puny - throughout the ages, all of this supposedly is done for our own good. In the same spirit, the fact anything that curtails our most fundamental of freedoms - the right to think and communicate our thoughts - is bad for us, is not even worth mulling.
How pervasive is the cult of secrecy in the corporatist labour movement? Read on.
By AU and RV.
So why aren't the people rising up?
Could it be that they don't actually feel as oppressed as you'd like them to?
Could it be that...
quote:
Control requires loyal obedience from the subjects and that invariably requires suppression of free speech and free thought.
is not quite the full story, and that rather control does not require loyal obedience, but a distancing effect - irony for smart people, cynicism for the rest - so that people feel they are free while they continue to perform the masters' tasks?
Could it be that the fact that you can snicker about shopping at Wal Mart while you're shopping at Wal Mart be a key to Wal Mart's power?
Or grousing about you boss anonymously on some web site is the chain that keeps you in his bondage?
No, I don't think control requires obedience or loyalty or anything quite so rigid - control requires that you express yourself - not suppression of speech, but the mandatory speaking out, even contemptuous speech. It can all be absorbed.
Is that unions engage in the old-fashioned suppressive forms of control is a symptom of their *lack* of control, a symptom of decline?
Are critics who harp about the phantom walls that the lugheads are trying to prop up just wasting time because they're already down, boxing at the shadows of their own obsessions?
We've already won. Nobody knows it. And nobody's doing anything about it. In some places, I mean.
The most dangerous thing you could ever say is "I believe."
Are you suggesting we all go back underground JD, to recreate the silence which allowed the vile disease to fester?
