The following comments/snippets (1924) regarding the effect of the Press have been taken from the late British author Nesta H. Webster (24 August 1876 – 16 May 1960) writer, historian and theorist.
1. "More than eighty years ago a Frenchman endowed with extraordinary prophetic instinct foretold not only the danger that one day would come from Russia, but that the press would facilitate the destruction of civilization:
'When our cosmopolitan democracy bearing its last fruits, shall have made of war a thing odious to whole populations, when the nations calling themselves the most civilized on earth shall have finished enervating themselves in their political debaucheries, .....the floodgates of the North will open on us once again, then we shall undergo a last invasion not of ignorant barbarians but of cunning and enlightened masters, more enlightened than ourselves, for they will have learnt from our own excesses how we can and must be governed. It is not for nothing that Providence piles up so many inactive forces in the East of Europe. One day the sleeping giant will arise and force will put an end to the reign of words. In vain, then, distracted equality will call the old aristocracy to the help of liberty; the weapon grasped again too late and wielded by hands too long inactive will have become powerless. Society will perish for having trusted to words void of sense or contradictory; then the deceitful echoes of public opinion, the newspapers, wishing at all costs to keep their readers, will push (the world) to ruin if only to have something to relate for a month longer. They will kill society to live upon its corpse'."
2. "To-day the newspapers, no longer the echoes of public opinion but its supreme directors, throw open their columns to every form of disintegrating doctrine and close them to arguments that could effectually arrest the forces of destruction. What is the hidden influence behind the press, behind all the subversive movements going on around us? Are there several Powers at work? Or is there one Power, one invisible group directing all the rest.....?"
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