Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06928_Field_TCUM T493.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

press image in Russia is felt as an immediate form of tribal
unity and participation. Those features of the press that we
find most discordant with austere individual standards of
literary culture are just the ones that recommend it to the
Communist Party. “A newspaper,” Lenin once declared, “is not
only a collective propagandist and collective agitator; it is also
a collective organizer.” Stalin called it “the most powerful
weapon of our Party.” Khrushchev cites it as “our chief
ideological weapon.” These men had more an eye to the
collective form of the press mosaic, with its magical power to
impose its own assumptions, than to the printed word as
expressing a private point of view. In oral Russia, fragmentation
of government powers is unknown. Not for them our function
of the press as unifier of fragmented departments. The Russian
monolith has quite different uses for the press mosaic. Russia
now needs the press (as we formerly did the book) to translate