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In a society where the governments depend on popular support, the creation and manipulation of public opinion is more important and must be more sophisticated than in a crude dictatorship. It is for this reason that television news media have become a battlefield where only one side is armed. If the main weapons in this war are the radio and television channels, their munitions are the ideolexicons. For example, the ideolexicon radical, which is encountered with a negative value, must always be applied, by association and repetition, to the opponent. What is paradoxical is that radical thought is condemned—all serious thought is radical—at the same time that a radical action is promoted against that supposed radicalism. That is to say, one stigmatizes the critics that go beyond politically correct thinking when these critics point out the violence of a radical action, such as a war, a coup d’etat, the militarization of a society, etc. In the old dictatorships of our America, for example, the custom was to persecute and assassinate every journalist, priest, activist or unionist identified as radical. To protest or throw stones was the behavior of radicals; torturing and killing in a systematic manner was the main resource of the moderates. Today, throughout the world, official discourse speaks of radicals when referring to anyone who disagrees with official ideology.

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