Against Euphemism II

“Authority”- Power systems and those in those systems who wield power.

“Underprivileged”- The American poor. Shitty schools go with that. (That really IS a “disadvantage.” A crippling one, in fact.) Term applied to domestic “racial minorities” on the bottom rungs of the U.S. socio-economic ladder.

“Disadvantaged”- Oppressed and repressed U.S. domestic “racial minorities” on the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder.

“Free Enterprise”- Laissez-faire U.S. capitalism overlaid with a patina of sham regulation.

“Security:” Power and domination. As in “national security,” (the power of the nation-state),
“U.S. security,” “Israel's security,” etc.

“Pro-Israeli”- Pro brutal repression of the Palestinians. Anti-Palestinian.

"Reform"- Making something worse. As in “reforming Social Security,” or “reforming teachers' tenure,” or “reforming public workers' pensions.”

"Strengthening"- Making more brutally repressive. In the context of the military, wasting even more money on, increasing the militarization of U.S. society.

“Bring to justice-” Take revenge on. For example, after the “Islamic State” executed a captured American freelance journalist in retaliation for U.S. bombing attacks on them in Iraq, the U.S. Attorney General, Eric “Due Process Means We Kill You If We Feel Like It” Holder, Jr., angrily vowed that the perpetrators would be “brought to justice one way or another.” Meaning; capture and execute, or just execute. Likewise, the assassination by military commandos of Osama bin Laden was described by government officials from Obama on down as having “brought [him] to justice.”

“A challenge” or “challenges”- Problems.

“Police tactics”- police violence, brutality, and repression. Example: “On Staten Island, Thousands Protest Police Tactics,” (New York Times headline, Sunday, August 24, 2014, page 17). They were protesting the “tactic” of choking to death Eric Garner, on the street, for the “crime” of selling single cigarettes without giving the government its cut (“tax”). Basically what the poor have to do to survive in America is defined as criminal, including begging.

See also: “Against Euphemism.”

Bill Keller, Accessory to Murder

[This is an essay from June, 2011, from one of my other blogs, taboo-truths.blogspot.com]

U.S. Establishment apparatchiks will never stop lying about the 1963 coup that murdered then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Since the Warren Commission was convincingly refuted almost as soon as it came out as a pathetic pack of transparent lies, and since then voluminous evidence has dribbled out proving the CIA (with help from the FBI, U.S. military, and Dallas PD, and complicity of the corporate media) carried out the assassination, you'd think the smart thing to do would be to avoid talking about it and waiting for people to just die off. Instead they engage in a chronic campaign of disinformation and ridicule to create a false historical record, a la in George Orwell's 1984. Not only are the absurd lies of the Warren Commission treated as gospel- without examining them of course- but people who challenge it or merely repeat inconvenient facts are ridiculed as kooks, nuts, and "conspiracy theorists."

Bill Keller, a particularly loathsome example of a bourgeois propagandist, has just [2011] been replaced without explanation as chief editor of the New York Times, an organ that fancies itself as the combined Tass and Pravda of the U.S. ruling class. His new job there is akin to what the mass murderer Abraham M. Rosenthal, one of his notorious predecessors, did after he stepped down from that post, namely to act as a sort of chief ideologue at the Times.

Keller, in his first post-editor screed in the Times Sunday Magazine, (a major platform at that rag), once again repeats the tired trope that anyone who doesn't drink the Kool-Aid and dutifully repeat the Establishment line on the JFK hit is a nutty conspiracy theorist. [6/5/11] (Conspiracies apparently are in the same category as unicorns and UFOs, namely mere superstitions, purely imaginary. Apparently the only conspiracies that exist are those imputed to people persecuted by the U.S. legal system- drug sellers, political dissidents, arms dealers who fall out of favor with the U.S., ex-U.S. allies now considered "terrorists," and assorted and sundry criminals. U.S. conspiracy laws are so broad and vague that prosecutors can use them in virtually any situation- even against single defendants, as long as they assert the existence of "unindicted co-conspirators," unindicted conveniently freeing the prosecutors of having to prove anything against those individuals. But a conspiracy by the U.S. rulers? You must be insane to think any such thing is even possible!)

He starts his column- placed right in the front of the rag- with an excerpt from someone who made the mistake of trying to reason with him about the FACTS of the JFK hit. This person's reward is to be used as an example of human irrationality and borderline mental illness.

Keller, and other Times hack propagandists, lately keep linking belief in JFK "conspiracies" with 9/11 delusions and "birthers," white racists whose need to reject the legitimacy of a (half) "black" President leads them to insist that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Never bothering to refute, they throw into one category obviously false and irrational beliefs (like "birther" nonsense- but the media, including the Times, was happy to give Donald Trump obsessive and big coverage pushing that crap- and speculating that Trump might run for President, when he obviously wasn't going to- the same media that blacks out legitimate opposition candidates like Ralph Nader, who actually DO run for President and DON'T spout nonsense). So they can discredit truth by lumping it in with crackpotism, without having to engage the facts, without having to have an honest debate. Meanwhile they pose as sober and responsible arbiters of what is real and what isn't.

Nothing better proves the essentially propagandistic nature of the Times and all its ruling class media ilk, and the fanaticism that motivates them, then the treatment of the JFK assassination/coup.

One-Sided 'Rights'

We in “the West” often hear this propaganda message: “Israelis [meaning Israeli Jews] have the right to live in peace and security.” But Palestinians don't, obviously. All Hamas and similar groups are doing is saying, If we can't live in peace and security, than neither can you. But other than provoking self-induced hysteria in Israeli Jews, the Palestinians actually have virtually NO capacity to inflict more than inconvenience on their oppressors.

But then, if you regard Palestinians as subhumans, “animals,” “beasts,” as most Israelis do these days, there is no contradiction to insisting on human rights and dignity for Israeli Jews only and not for Palestinians. The circle is squared.

Dead Palestinian Human Beings Don't Count Unless They're "Important"

The western establishment media (like BBC, NPR, and all the U.S. commercial broadcast media) have been reporting Israel's "victory" (by their and Israel's lights) in killing three more Hamas leaders. Unmentioned are nine other Palestinians butchered with U.S. -supplied aerial bombs, including seven members of a single family. (Wiping out whole families has been a favorite Israeli tactic in its latest assault on the Gaza concentration camp.)

With maximum cynicism, Binyamin Netanyahu almost daily claims that Israel does all it can to avoid "civilian" casualties (yet somehow 80% of the dead, by the UN's reckoning, have been non-combatants- and the death toll is over 2,000 now including almost 500 children; another 1,000 or so kids have been maimed for life), while out of the other side of his mouth blaming Hamas for the Palestinian deaths, even saying on U.S. television (to Wolf Blitzer on CNN, who happens to be Jewish) that Hamas WANTS Israel to kill Palestinian children. No one in the U.S. establishment media takes exception to this depraved nonsense. In fact, many parrot the Israeli "talking points" (a euphemism for propaganda).

The four young boys deliberately murdered on a beach by an Israeli gunboat, in full view of international journalists in a hotel fronting the beach (the Israelis waited until the journalists who had been kicking around a football with the boys left the beach) is simply never mentioned, for obvious reasons. Instead we are daily fed a diet of Israeli propaganda.

Then there was the sinister way the Israeli drove Palestinians into UN refuges, telling them their homes and neighborhoods would be bombed. Turns out this was just a way to kill more of them, as Israel bombed at least 7 UN centers. One UN center was bombed after the UN gave the Israelis its location 17 times. Another was bombed after Israel was reminded of its location 33 times. UN personnel have also been killed in the bombardment. Meanwhile, Israel and its various media and political agents are accusing the UN of anti-Semitism. (The best defense is a good offense, see? Don't even deny anything, don't explain, don't defend, just attack the "accuser," in this case anyone who raises an objection or speaks the truth.)

From Obama on down, the U.S. political establishment predictably acted as loyal puppets to Israel and repeated the Israeli line that Israel "has the right to defend itself." "Defend itself" meaning destroying 40,000 homes, bombing hospitals, bombing homes for the disabled, bombing UN targets, etc. At first Israel kept blaring the lines that Hamas was "firing rockets" from the thousands of bombed targets. Or maybe "storing" rockets in 40,000 homes, and in the power plant, and in the water purification sites (8 water workers were killed by the Israelis trying to restore potable water to the populace), and Hamas was using all those civilians Israel was bombing as "human shields." After while, they didn't even bother saying those things. The U.S. media fell in line, repeating all those sick alibis for a murderous attack on a captive population.

Obama did find one thing "barbaric." That was the alleged capture of an Israeli soldier, a lieutenant who was part of the invasion force. Capturing an enemy invader is "barbaric," to Obama, if it's an Israeli soldier. Bizarre. Turns out the "capture" was an Israeli hoax, just as "looking for three kidnapped teenagers" for two weeks, when the Israeli knew all along they were killed on the day they were seized, was a hoax. The lieutenant had been killed in combat.

Well, I guess having the blood of thousands of Palestinians on their fingertips is small beer for the U.S. government and media. After all, they have the deaths of millions on their hands already, in places like Vietnam, and Laos, and Cambodia, and Indonesia, and Guatemala, and Argentina, and Chile, and El Salvador, and Nicaragua- the list unfortunately goes on too long to list without jading the reader.