Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [212]
14. Catarina Kennedy-Bannier, “Berliners,” The New Republic, July 18-25, 1994, p. 11.
15. Stephen Kinzer, “Luckenwalde Journal: In East Germany, Bad Ol’ Days Now Look Good,” The New York Times, August 27, 1994, p. A 2.
16. Cited by Margaret Talbot, “Back to the Future, Pining for the Old Days in Germany,” The New Republic, July 18-25, 1994.
17. Ibid.
18. East Germans were once voracious readers, which is perhaps why the literate leaders of Neues Forum gained such an extensive following. First printings ran to a half million volumes. Poetry volumes could expect first printings of twenty thousand. Those days are over. East Germans remain one-fifth of the total German population but buy less than 2 percent of its books. While East-zone writers saw themselves as dissidents, they were also part of a reformist socialist project, working for their country as they wished it might one day be. To Stefan Heym, a Jewish writer who fled Hitler, fought in the American army, and has been a dissident under the Communists, new writers are another breed; they “see themselves less as East Germans than as writers who live in Germany.”
19. Roger Cohen, “High Hopes Fade at East European Newspapers,” The New York Times, December 28, 1993, p. A 1.
20. Ibid.
21. Statistics and quote from “The Population Plunge That’s Wracking Eastern Germany,” Business Week, August 29, 1994, p. 20. Business Week noted that “such changes are unprecedented for an industrial country at peace.”
Chapter 19. Securing Global Democracy in the World of McWorld
1. Walter B. Wriston, Twilight of Sovereignty (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), pp. 170, 176. Wriston also thinks “modern information technology is also driving nation states towards cooperation with each other so that the world’s work can get done,” p. 174.
2. A Western diplomat in China says, “the Chinese Government has decided and I think logically that it really can’t shut out satellite television entirely, whatever the threat. We’re not talking about a few dissidents here. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese have now invested their life savings in these dishes, and there would be a nasty public uproar if the Government really forced the dishes down.” And in Iran, the Teheran Times concludes that “The cultural invasion will not be resolved by the physical removal of satellite dishes.” Both quotes from Philip Shenon, “A Repressed World Says ‘Beam Me Up,’”The New York Times, September 11, 1994, Section 4, p. 4. Note that the danger is not of political propaganda but of pop cultural contamination. Murdoch willingly took the BBC World Service off of his China service and in Iran the problem is not CNN, but Dynasty, which is the most popular program in Teheran today.
3. Robert Reich, Work of Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), Chapter 23, “The New Community.”
4. See Brock, Telecommunications Policy(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).
5. Channel One currently is in about twelve thousand junior high and high schools. It offers free televisions, VCRs, and a satellite dish to schools (usually needy ones) willing to dish up two minutes of soft news, two minutes of commercials, and eight minutes of infotainment to its students during regular school hours. Channel One sells spots for up to $195,000 for thirty seconds, and has attracted many of the corporations on McWorld’s frontier, including Pepsi and Reebok. Chris Whittle has sold it to K-III, an educational publisher, for profit.
6. J. G. A. Pocock, “The Ideal of Citizenship Since Classical Times,” Queen’s Quarterly, Spring 1992, p. 55.
7. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 52.
8. Pocock, “Ideal