Jamming: Instrument of the weak
Jamming of radio and television signals is not a recent phenomenon in the history of the world. It has been widely practiced especially during the Second World War and the Cold War. The practice has been frequented to deter the influence and ideology from one camp reaching the other camp. The practice has been widely used by the US government.
During World War II jamming was used in different forms and for different purposes. During the war jamming was applied to mislead pilots by providing false instructions and avoid areal bombing. It was also used to disrupt the use of radars used to guide enemy missiles. More importantly jamming was practiced to prevent citizens from listening radio broadcast transmission messages from reaching the other side.
Be it for any purpose, the end result for jamming is to put ones citizens in a black out from what is happening at the other side or monopolize information so that people would not understand activities of their own governments behind the curtain.
The Cold War ear was a period during which many uprisings were happening by people from different countries against colonialism and for independence and sovereignty. The youth movements against colonialism were mainly adherents to the revolutionary ideologies. That revolutionary ideology was not welcome by the colonizers and especially the west. Hence, any media that was broadcasting to motivate the youth to rise up against colonialism and hegemony had to be blocked. However, jamming has limited effectiveness because the affected stations usually change frequencies, put additional frequencies or increase transmission power.
The practice of Jamming of media outlets is still practiced by some regimes. These regimes that practice such acts are usually regimes that want to hide the truth from their citizens or who fail to resist the messages coming from other media outlets that cause them headache. And instead for them to try to challenge the messages with facts they resort to jamming.
People in the contemporary world are becoming more aware of the socio-political maneuvers by the so-called world powers in a bid to control the resources of developing countries. People are aware of the mechanisms they apply to secure their hegemonic interests. And during the course they hate to see and hear media outlets that bring forward in the open air their aim and ill intentions. The truth, they believe and work for, must remain buried. The awareness of people must not increase and should remain low and allow them do what ever they want to do. The world should remain an open forum for them to exploit the riches of people as will. Truth for them is hard to swallow.
There are media outlets in different parts of the world that openly challenge and expose the wrong policies and motives of those that pursue the continuation of neo-colonialism, exploitation and subjugation. They are challenging them hard and exposing their day to day activities of dis-information; they are very much hated and they resort to do every thing they could to blackout them. That is conducted either by resorting to blow defamation rhetoric or stop their broadcast media from reaching the public.
The Eritrean media outlets are working with a set of mind of serving the truth. The truth of what is happening inside the country, the region and worldwide. The development efforts in the country: the introduction of modern agricultural machineries aimed at boosting agricultural products not only for local consumption but also for export; the new buses to strengthen the capacity of transportation; the mining industry; what have you, are daily broadcast on the Eritrean radio and television. There are some quarters who hate to observe this becoming reality in Eritrea. They think as if tomorrow their people would ask them “Eritrea is doing this and that, what are you doing on your part?” To avoid such timely questions and hide their weakness they resort to begging others to help them block the Eritrean media. What a shame!