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Planning to get married in Goa? www.weddingsetcgoa.com Making your 'dream wedding' possible ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Goa net readers, I came across this article and thought of sharing this with you. BEWARE OF THE NEOCOLONIALISM ! - By Victor Ferrao and Boniface Furtado In our last article on Herald (Dated:10/09/09 ), we have already deconstructed and exposed the following erroneous assumptions of the proponents of the Church ‘Transparency –Accountability’ Discourse: 1. That the Church is a Democracy; 2. That Rebellion is a necessary tool for Change; 3. That there is a rampant lack of Transparency and Accountability in the Church; and 4. That the Church in Goa is plagued by high-caste dominance. In the present attempt, we wish to engage with their discursive strategies and bring to light their manipulative intent. This engagement into the discursive politics of the proponents of the discourse is indeed crucial because it has the power to dismantle the piercing fangs that strive to inject obnoxious venom into the minds of thousands of innocents and expose their malevolent design to frame the Church and her Leaders. We notice that the discourse under our scrutiny is constructed and maintained with a deliberate employment of a motivated semiotics and hermeneutics that aims to disturb, doctor, manipulate, colour and control the public perception of the Church and her Leadership. Such a dangerous attempt to socially engineer a public perception to manufacture support for their devious agenda is certainly an oppressive strategy of the master promoters of Neocolonialism. Hence, we attempt to critically examine the link between this Discourse and Neocolonialism. By juxtaposing ideals of Democracy, Freedom and Equality with some real or fake stories of abuse of properties in the Church, the proponents of the discourse generate a picture that all is not in the order of things in the Church. This clever semantic ‘othering’ of the Church through the introduction of a framework (doctored frame: Democracy, Freedom, Equality and stories of abuse) creates and manufactures a need for the Church to change. Such an orchestrated design is manifested by an attentive reading of the discursive choices of the proponents of this discourse. The lexical choices, the heteroglossia (double voicing) and foxy semiotics craftily employed by Dr. Teotonio de Souza prove our contention. Hence, we attempt to analyze the strategies of the proponents of the discourse and bring into the open their manipulative character. Our earlier effort has already exposed that their discursive strategies suffer from crafty insinuations, caustic sarcasms, gross overgeneralizations, and reductionist oversimplifications. Here we try to examine the texture of their text and the tonality of the speaking subjects (which, surprisingly, shows a remarkable change after our intervention) and expose how the discourse threatens to become a new incarnation of Neocolonialism. We find that the discursive politics unleashed by the proponents of the discourse employ the following corrosive discursive strategies: Cunning use of Semiotics Crafty Mix of Fiction with Truth Politics of Propaganda Fallacy Ad Hominem Cunning use of Semiotics The proponents of the discourse use combinatory and associative hermeneutics to engineer a public perception of the Church to suit their dubious agenda. As we have pointed above, they mix the ideals of Democracy, Freedom, and Equality with the real or fake stories of abuse of property in the Church and generate an explosive hermeneutical cocktail. This designer hermeneutics constructs a picture that all is not in the order of things with the Church. This picture is further reinforced by a devious use of double voicings like “praying doves and preying vultures”, “The Name of the Rose” or “the priest with konkan herbs” primarily by Dr. Souza. But the explosive hermeneutical cocktail generated to produce a malign picture of the Church and her Leadership in Goa follows tooth and nail the strategy of the master promoters of Neocolonialism. The mass-disintegrating forces of Neocolonialism manipulate the shared mental environment of the people by skillfully shaping perceptions, creating impressions, inducing beliefs and preparing their mindset to generate consensus, in order to execute their hidden agenda and promote their vested interests. At the global level, these manipulative catalyzing dynamics is obvious in the classic examples of the stage-managed invasion of Iraq by the allied forces led by the USA and “Israel’s” lament of her Nazi past while ironically caging Palestinians in Gaza’s ‘open-air concentration camps’. Crafty mix of Fiction and Reality We find that the plot of the novel of Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, which later was made into an Oscar-winning movie is craftily used with malafide intention to doctor the public perception of the Church and of a priest. This again proves to be the favourite distortive strategy of the promoters of Neocolonialism. What if we invert the plot that is proposed by Dr. Souza and suggest that the brutal killer carries poison in his pen and is out to kill, destroy and paint black anyone who is opposed to his point of view? We can already observe many victims who are painted black in the context of this debate. We also find that our ‘discourse analysis’ that deconstructed the assumptions of the proponents was misconstrued by Dr. Souza as a Scholastic discourse. It appears that he has dishonoured both, Scholasticism and his alma mater ,the great Rachol Seminary, by alleging that Scholastic philosophy as taught in Rachol in his days has trained him to paint his opponents black to win his argument, which appears that he now piously follows. At the global level, we observe how Zionist propaganda manages to deceive millions into believing that ‘Israel’ is a victim of hostile Arabs hell-bent on subjugating it for being a Jewish State, exhibiting the strategy of the unholy mixture of Fiction and Reality of Neocolonialism. Politics of Propaganda The sites of the circulation of the proponents’ ideas of the discourse raise important questions. We can notice that their discourse enjoys patronage in the media. It is glaringly visible that their views occupy the prime space and central coverage in our media, while their opponents have to project their views in the margins. This shows that they have a nexus with the corporate controlled mainstream media. This again links them with the promoters of Neocolonialism who actively use propaganda tactics and control the media to camouflage their evil designs and manufacture a public perception that will garner them support or at least prevent opposition. They believe that words can reshape reality as long as one has a media megaphone to shout out and repeat the distortions ad nauseam. At the global level, this strategy was used to perfection in the above-mentioned invasion of Iraq by Neocolonial forces to manufacture public opinion in support of their designs and blunt all brewing opposition. It was interesting to observe how those countries in the West that preach about the freedom and independence of the ‘Fourth Estate’ became slaves and propaganda spewing ‘mouthpieces’ of the Neocolonial lobbies – Oil, Arms, Zionist, etc. - that brought about the unjust Iraq War. Fallacy Argumentum Ad Hominem We have seen that issues and persons have got muddled in this discourse. The attack of persons rather than their views have become the main weapons of some of the proponents. Dr. Souza, in particular, appears to have specialized in this task of painting others black so unbecoming to a historian of his caliber. But his emotively driven manipulative adventures have boomeranged on him as almost everyone who has read his writings has taken offence to it. He has exposed himself and his ulterior motives by attacking the persons holding prominent offices in the Church, ridiculing and calling names to persons who do not agree with his perceptions and conveniently escaping the embarrassment of an apparent inability to tackle their ideas. We would not be surprised if he also chooses to attack our persons rather than our ideas. But this kind of a strategy drags the proponents of the discourse into the camp of the promoters of Neocolonialism. Again in the global context, we see that this is a favoured strategy of Neocolonialists who revel in demonizing those who are impediments to their imperialist designs be they persons - such as Saddam, Ahmadinejad, Chavez, et al - or nations, like Iraq, Iran and North Korea which were tagged as axis of evil by the famous/notorious Bush and accused of promoting ‘Terrorism’ and seeking ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ ( WMD’s ). Our discourse analysis (with no links to Scholasticism) exposes the evil strategies of the proponents of the discourse and demonstrates how they leave no stone unturned to bring about a social engineering that can affect the public perception of the Church. But, unfortunately, their manipulative tactics betray them and reveal that they are actually agents of Neocolonialism and not sincere agents of change in the Church. These are the real modern-day WMD’s – WEAPONS OF MASS-DISINTEGRATION! Coincidentally, the first wave of Colonialism in Goa came from Portugal and, as we are about to mark its 500th year, we are being threatened with a second wave…..a more destructive tsunami…not with Roses…but with the poisonous herbs of Neocolonialism…! _________________________________________________________________ Missed any of the IPL matches ? Catch a recap of all the action on MSN Videos http://msnvideos.in/iplt20/msnvideoplayer.aspx Now, send attachments up to 25MB with Yahoo! India Mail. 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