Why communicators are the targets of authoritarianism

Authoritarianism perpetuates its hegemonic power and control through the control over the narrative.

Stories make up the bases of the regime's power.

The reproduction of the regime is legitimated through the production of specific truth claims that form the narrative bases of the regime's rule.

The regime tells stories that are central to its justifications of its repressive strategies. Stories of security threats. Stories of economic opportunity. Stories of transformation brought about through the power and control of the regime.

The continuation of the power of the regime is enabled through the manufacturing of these specific narratives that form the bases for the various forms of control enacted by the regime.The consent of the subjects of the regime to its authoritarianism is sought and accomplished through the telling of stories of positive transformations brought about by the regime. The tools of repression are necessary at a violent time of the national history, allaying the threats to the nation.

Circulating specific myths about the moral authority of the regime to rule is integral to the achievement of the regime's power and control.

These myths are manufactured, serving as communicative inversions, to transform material observations into claims of truth that serve the regime's hold over power.

Even as strategic communication works through the 24X7 cycle to manufacture the regime's legitimating story, the regime works actively to silence any other story that challenges the regime's authority.

Communicators therefore are systematically the targets of authoritarian regimes. From jailing and murdering journalists to dismissing communication professors, the regime follows a wide range of strategies to silence the telling of other stories.

Communicators are openly marked as direct threats to the national interest, labeled as anti-national. Sedition charges or charges of disrupting national harmony are written up so communicators telling other stories can be erased from the discursive space. Communication professors telling other stories are pulled up for the anti-national character of the stories told. Targeting communicators is one of the critical and essential tools of the regime.

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga

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In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit

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Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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