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El_Keh's Recommended Reading
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An absolute must read! - Page 3
If only one book existed that you absolutely had to read, then "Free to be Human" would be it!
Before leaving this site, please read the quotation at the bottom of Page 1 of El_Keh's Recommended Reading...
Available from Green Books.
Click here to order "Free to be Human: Intellectual Self-Defence in an Age of Illusions" by David Edwards!
The author builds on the premise and demonstrates that capitalism's propaganda filter system distorts our understanding of political, personal and spiritual issues ensuring that we remain passive, conformist, confused, uninformed and willing to accept the irrational values of corporate consumerism in its unrelenting quest for profit.
Since this book is difficult to find outside of the UK, order online from Green Books.
David Edwards is also one of the editors at 
Please read the following synopsis that describes the site's raison d'être.
is a response based on a conviction that mainstream newspapers and broadcasters provide a profoundly distorted picture of the world. The increasingly centralised, corporate nature of the media means that it acts as a de facto propaganda system for corporate and other establishment interests. The costs incurred as a result of this propaganda, in terms of human suffering and environmental degradation, are incalculable.
In seeking to understand the basis and operation of this systematic distortion, MediaLens flatly rejects all conspiracy theories and points instead to the inevitably corrupting effects of free market forces operating on and through media corporations seeking profit in a society dominated by corporate power. MediaLens rejects the idea that journalists are generally guilty of self-censorship and conscious lying; rather the all-too-human tendency to self-deception accounts for their conviction that they are honest purveyors of uncompromised truth.
has grown out of frustration with the unwillingness, or inability, of the mainstream media to tell the truth about the real causes and extent of many of the problems facing us, such as human rights abuses, poverty, pollution and climate change. Because much modern suffering is rooted in the unlimited greed of corporate profit-maximising - in the subordination of people and planet to profit - it seems to be a genuine tragedy that society has for so long been forced to rely on the corporate media for 'accurate' information. Quite obvious conflicts of interest mean it is all but impossible for the media to provide this information. The Soviet Communist Party's newspaper Pravda was not expected to tell the truth about the Communist Party - so why should the corporate press be expected to tell the truth about corporate power?
Media 'neutrality' is a deception that often serves to hide systematic pro-corporate bias. 'Neutrality' most often involves 'impartially' reporting dominant establishment views while ignoring all non-establishment views. In reality it is not possible for journalists to be neutral. While MediaLens seeks to correct corporate distortions as honestly as possible, its concern is not to affect some spurious 'objectivity' but to engage with the world to do whatever can be done to reduce suffering and to resist the forces that seek to subordinate human well-being to profit. Passively observing human misery without attempting to intervene does not constitute 'neutrality'. 'Neutrality' can never be deemed more important than doing all in our power to help others.
aims to increase rational awareness, critical thought and compassion, and to decrease greed, hatred and ignorance. Its goal is not at all to attack, insult or anger individual editors or journalists but to highlight significant examples of the systemic distortion that is facilitating appalling crimes against humanity: the failure to communicate the truth of exactly who is responsible for the slaughter of 500,000 Iraqi children under five; the silence surrounding the motives and devastating consequences of corporate obstruction of action on climate change; the true nature, motives and consequences of 'globalisation'; the corporate degradation and distortion of democratic society and culture.
As historian Howard Zinn has written:
"Society has varying and conflicting interests; what is called objectivity is the disguise of one of these interests - that of neutrality. But neutrality is a fiction in an unneutral world. There are victims, there are executioners, and there are bystanders... and the 'objectivity' of the bystander calls for inaction while other heads fall."
So in summary it should be noted that - MediaLens simply strives to turn the world's bystanders into compassionate actors on the world's stage.
Hopefully, you will decide to visit soon and often!
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"When modern men and women insist that they feel completely free in their work, they are in a sense telling the truth, for the triumph of conformity lies in the crushing of all resistance, all experience of conflict." - David Edwards, from his book, Free to be Human
If everyone was entitled to read only one book, then "Free to be Human" should be it! - El_Keh
A second book that should be read by everyone is James Howard Kunstler's "The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change and Other Converging Catastrophes Of the Twenty-First Century". To learn more about it, click on the book's title. - El_Keh
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newly-added books on 'El_Keh's Recommended Reading' list.