After WWII, due to her work as a filmmaker for the Nazi leadership, Leni Riefenstahl, a former actress, was persecuted and banned from making films. Her creativity and interest in human culture undeterred, she turned to still photography and journeyed into Africa to document the lives of such notable warrior tribes as the Masi and Duma. Her interest in how cultures invent and preserve their traditions was not permitted expression in the dominant form of expression, film. As with many of those who would seek an understanding of our human roots, rather than simply the propagation of the dominant worldview, Leni chose a lesser media than film.

Likewise, before film became the dominant media, many of the authors who wrote about primal matters, of terror and guilt, such as Howard and Lovecraft, did so in a lesser literary format, the pulps. This dynamic continues today, with fringe thinkers excluded from the main street of the market place of ideas, but not silenced, as they continue their chatter, not on the media highway, but its often perpendicular byways.

With the changing way young people access information the old broadcast-cable-print mainstream is quickly being eclipsed by the internet. In our recent riots in Baltimore, all violent crimes reported outside of the media zone [which was less than 1% of the physical community] where reported on websites and on social media. This begs the question, will there be an attempt to monopolize or silence these information strands of the collective mind, to purify it in the manner that newsprint, large book houses, and the three broadcast networks once maintained America along a binary axis of thought? With broadcast news increasingly telling a story opposite of that had over the internet and social media, and in light if the fact that this major media is telling the story the government wants told, I see an effort by the state and the media to silence webzines, blogs and vlogs, probably in an inverse order.

I hope I live to see the attempt, and also its failure.

Even if we are temporarily silenced, print media, such as Leni’s photo journals of the African tribes, and Marcus Aurelius’ mediations, may well survive us to be used and enjoyed by a future generation.

Below is a, link to Leni’s work on the Duma and Masi.