NY Times Obsessed With Plight Of Dissidents- But Only In Certain Countries

Here's an essay I wrote for another of my blogs, taboo-truths.blogspot.com, a few years ago, before this blog existed. The theme is hypocrisy by the New York Times, regarding its selective "concern" over human rights, specifically around the case of the female art band Pussy Riot. (I'm a fan, and I think they should not have been imprisoned.) That is to say, "enemy" countries get bashed, while allies (Saudi Arabia, fascist death squad states, etc.) get the kid-glove treatment or even total blackout of information. (The Times hailed the 1973 CIA coup in Chile, for example. And it didn't report the Argentine "dirty war," that is, the kidnapping, torture, and murder of 30,000 defenseless Argentines for suspected Bad Thoughts, until decades later, and consistently low-balled the number of victims.)

Anyone looking for hypocrisy in the New York Times has an easy job finding it. There's some there every single day, probably going back to the paper's inception. 

But the essay also cites cases of U.S. repression of musicians, fact too little known, that you should familiarize yourself with if you aren't already aware of them. The NY Times' hypocrisy is part of the larger hypocrisy of the U.S. ruling class and power structure. I think the assholes actually believe their own propaganda about how they stand for freedom, democracy, and human rights! Talk about drinking one's own propaganda Kool-Aid!

So without further ado, here is the essay:

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The New York Times has run full-length articles for four days in a row now, about the prosecution of the Russian female punk rock band Pussy Riot. These articles appear in the main news section, not Arts, for example.

Pussy Riot is being prosecuted for performing an anti-Putin and "sacrilegious" song in a Moscow cathedral of the arch-reactionary Russian Orthodox Church. (That church has the same kind of relationship to the Russian State as the Roman Catholic Church has to the New York State and City governments, that is, very close and influential.) Of course I don't think they should be prosecuted. (Wonder what would happen if some punk rockers performed a raucous, anti-Catholic and anti-U.S. Government song inside St. Patricks's Cathedral, say? Think they'd be prosecuted?)

However, unmentioned in all the Times' lavish coverage of the fate of three formerly obscure punk rockers in Russia, are the U.S. antecedents and precedents. The U.S. has a long history of persecuting rock musicians and other entertainers who run afoul of the establishment. The U.S. media keeps reminding us that the Russian punk rockers face a possible maximum of 7 years in prison. (All indications are that they won't get that. Putin himself publicly signaled as much.) Under the Nixon regime, radical band MC5 frontman John Sinclair was lured into giving two joints to an undercover agent of the U.S. police state, for which he was sentenced to ten (not seven) years.* And more recently, the Los Angeles County D.A. went after the scalps of the Dead Kennedys. The charge?  "Distribution of Harmful Matter to Minors" Despite being acquitted, their albums were subsequently banned from large chain stores. The Dead Kennedys broke up under the pressure. The D.A. openly announced his political intent: to "send a message" to the underground/alternative music scene that their expression would not be tolerated. (See http://www.alternativetentacles.com/bandinfo.php?band=jello&page=3. Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Kennedys.

When "Communists" (Bolshevik hacks) still ruled Czechoslovakia, the U.S. media liked to hold up that state's persecution of the band Plastic People of the Universe as an example of how repressive and unfree their Cold War enemies were, by implication in contrast to the allegedly "free" "West." What ludicrous, bald-faced hypocrisy. But the propaganda works, because the corporate media is as disciplined and uniform as the state media of any totalitarian system, so the fate of persecuted musicians and dissidents in America is completely unknown to the vast majority of the populace, since the propaganda system never reports it. (Or rarely, and only in the way that Soviet or Chinese media reports the persecution of their dissidents, in a way that portrays the victims as guilty, weird, different, dirty, depraved, sexually libertine, on drugs...gee, sounds familiar!)

While the NY Times gives loving coverage to every time Chinese artist Ai Weiwei sneezes (and I certainly think the Chinese regime is loathsome and should be overthrown, unlike what the U.S. elites think, for all their tut-tutting about dissidents there!) you'd be hard-pressed to find anything about the persecution of peace activists and "leftist" protesters in the U.S. It has long been routine to repress demonstrations against the WTO, NATO, the two corporate stooge parties, and so on. They are targets in advance for raids, arrests, infiltration, entrapments, bugging, wiretapping, the entire panoply of state repression. Obama imprisoned environmental activist Tim deChristopher for two years for bidding at a Federal auction for oil leases. (By contrast, James, O'Keefe, the reactionary libel-artist, who was caught red-handed trying to bug the offices of U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, was let off scot-free, as I predicted, despite committing Federal felonies, including conspiracy. Because even Democrats don't prosecute reactionaries, only progressives.)

Here's another example of the NY Times obsession with harassment of dissidents in other places, from today's nytimes.com:

THE LEDE BLOG

Kremlin Critic Debugs Office. Tweets About It.

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

Aleksei Navalny, a blogger and anticorruption crusader in Russia, arrived at work on Monday to find that his office had been bugged.

Gee, we never get bugged here! You bastards never report that.

And check out the first paragraph of this article on the Times website dated today (8/8/12):

 A Russian court reduced the prison sentence for a business partner of the oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky on Wednesday, a rare show of leniency amid a spate of criminal cases against opposition leaders. ["Russian Court Lowers Jail Term for Oil Tycoon’s Associate."]

"Rare show of leniency"? Speaking of which, in the U.S., there's no Federal parole. It was abolished years ago. And their are harsh mandatory minimum sentences- like ten years for a few grams of crack cocaine. (Lately the NYT has editorialized against some mandatory minimums, out of pragmatism. The U.S.is absolutely demented in its punitive penal policies, imprisoning far more people as a percentage of population than any country on earth. And the deranged "war on drugs" is as irrational and zealous as Nazi anti-Semitism.

And U.S. Presidents and Governors have gotten more and more merciless in refusing to dole out pardons to prisoners.

As for "criminal trials against opposition leaders": well, of course the U.S. has a very long history of persecuting leaders of dissident political movements, and lately the GOP has used the legal system to persecute Democrats, with barely a whimper from that supine party. Remember how the Bush/Gonzalez gang fired 9 U.S. attorneys for refusing to bring bogus criminal charges against Democrats? Nothing ever came of that. Imagine if Democrats had done that! A Democratic President doing that would have been impeached (with the "liberal" media leading the charge). And Craig Unger, author of a new book, Boss Rove, about "Turdblossom"-that's George Bush's nickname for him- Karl Rove, says that the GOP takeover of the judiciary has led to criminal prosecutions of "hundreds" of "up and coming" Democratic politicians on questionable or spurious charges, citing specifically the persecution of ex-GA Governor Don Siegelman. [Radio interview: "The Influential Karl Rove," Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC, 8/7/12.]

        

*John Lennon, through his very public drumming up of protests against the imprisonment of Sinclair, was instrumental in getting Sinclair freed early. This was yet another black mark against Lennon in the minds of the U.S. secret police and reactionary politicians like Nixon. Ultimately the CIA arranged Lennon's assassination through its MK-Delta program of hypno-programmed assassins.

Turkey Providing Material Support to Terrorism, And Destroying UNESCO World Heritage Sites à la ISIS

Certain more-thoughtful precincts of the U.S. elites occasionally fret over how to square the circle of glaring U.S. contradictions. This phenomenon gets manifested from time to time in New York Times articles that reveal more of reality than is standard in that publication, sometimes with sympathy for some victims, but that generally end with a throwing-up-of-hands attitude, at a loss for a solution.

Such an article was published today on the Times' website. [1]

The contradiction in question this time concerns the fact that Turkey and the U.S. have been operating at cross-purposes, to say the least, in Syria. The most effective fighting force against ISIS and the other Islamofascists (the main enemy of the U.S. in Syria, as the U.S. government sees it) are the Kurds.

But Turkey is waging war on the Kurds, both in Syria and in Turkey. Even in Iraq, in fact, where it has attacked Kurds.

And Turkey is even backing some of the Islamofascists.

But Turkey is a member of the U.S.-created-and-dominated military alliance, NATO. And has key military bases that the U.S. uses, particularly air bases, from which the U.S. is now flying sorties against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. (Turkey has been a key base for U.S. espionage and military activities since World War II. Turkey was the base from which many U-2 spyplane flights were launched over the Soviet Union. The CIA ran a fake defector program against the Soviet Union from Turkey. One of those well-prepared fake defectors was U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald.)

It's as if such articles are throat-clearing exercises to get the attention of the executive managers of U.S. imperialism. Like a tap on the shoulder saying "What are you going to do about this?"

The article doesn't explicitly say what I stated in the title of this essay. That would be too disruptive. The New York Times only very rarely engages in boat-rocking. But the following excerpts show that my title is true.

All emphases that follow are mine.

"Erdogan has offered limited help in the fight against ISIS, despite years of American lobbying. That has pushed the United States to rely more and more on the P.Y.D., which it views as distinct from the P.K.K. American Special Operations troops now arm, equip and advise these Kurdish fighters, even as Turkey shells their bases farther west — and pays Islamist militias [aka 'terrorists' as designated by the U.S.] to attack them."

"Islamist militias" are what are usually called "terrorists" in the U.S. media, and by the U.S. government. The Times discreetly avoids naming the actual "militias" it is referring to.

The U.S. designates the fighting groups in Syria it thinks are okay as the "moderate" ones.The "Islamist" ones, like the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their ilk, are the "terrorists."

Of course, for the New York Times, it is literally unthinkable that Turkey is breaking U.S. law by "providing material support to terrorists," or that Turkey should be on the State Department list of "state sponsors of terrorism."

Or at least, they don't want anyone reading the New York Times to have such thoughts cross their minds.

Then there's the destruction of UNESCO world heritage sites- the same crimes the U.S. and European medias are so exercised about (rightly, if hypocritically) when ISIS does it.

The article makes plain that Kurdish towns and cities are being systematically leveled by Turkish army artillery and tank shelling.

"In Diyarbakir [Turkey], the capital of a largely Kurdish province, [Turkish] artillery and bombs have destroyed much of the historic district, which contains Unesco world heritage sites. Churches, mosques and khans that have stood for centuries lie in ruins. Tourism has collapsed. Images of shattered houses and dead children are stirring outrage in other countries where Kurds live: Iraq, Syria and Iran."
The author also describes the destruction of Cizre by Turkish shelling, and that a similar fate awaits the surrounded and besieged city of Nusaybin:

"...it has been an outpost and a battleground for a half-dozen empires over the past 3,000 years, from the Aramaeans to the Ottomans. It still contains Roman ruins and one of the Middle East’s oldest churches. It has been a Kurdish town since a century ago, when Christian residents fled southward from Turkish pogroms that started during the upheavals of World War I."

Again, the obvious similarity to ISIS crimes is overlooked.

One difference between ISIS and the Erdogan regime of Turkey is that ISIS makes a point of publicizing its crimes, as it takes a perverse pride in them. It sees its destruction and murders as making ideological points. The Turks, on the other hand, ban journalists from the cities they are laying waste to. Typical of states, they seek to hide their crimes, clumsily, from the rest of the world. (The Times reporter had to do some sneaking around to get the story. Which is fine.)

It's not just in Turkey that the U.S. has tied itself up in a ball of contradictions. The same is the case with Saudi Arabia, with Pakistan, with Afghanistan. In all these cases, its "allies" are part of the problem, indeed the root of the problem in the cases of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

On top of all its strategic incoherent, the U.S. slathers a thick layer of incredibly hypocritical, self-righteous, moralistic rhetoric about "terrorism" and "freedom," and applies draconian laws (and assassinations) in extremely selective, biased fashion. This rotten ideological crust is supposed to hide the political incoherence from public view.

Which, with the help of the loyal U.S. media, it largely does.

1] "Behind the Barricades of Turkey’s Hidden War: A simmering conflict with the Kurds threatens to consume an American ally and inflame an already-unstable region," New York Times, May 24, 2016.

Concerning a Particularly Fatuous New York Times Article About Trump

A fool wrote a rather inane article (and his editors ran it) about how the class of poohbah politicians (a crowd of venal mediocrities) and the rapacious suckerfish of "K Street," the lobbyists and fronts of corporate power that manipulate Congress to do their bidding, are supposedly totally in the dark about Donald Trump, because they haven't personally met him. (Yes, and no one knows what Adolf Hitler was all about since no one has met him.) [1]

GOP hack and political barnacle Lamar Alexander, Senator from Tennessee, an egotist who thinks he should be president, is put at the core of the article. Here's how it starts:

"WASHINGTON — Senator Lamar Alexander has run in elite national political circles for decades, sought the presidency twice and served as governor of Tennessee, cabinet secretary and university president. He does not know Donald J. Trump.

“'Never met him,' said Mr. Alexander, a Tennessee Republican now in his third term."

Well, two things are subliminally implied to us already. Lamar Alexander is a Very Important Person, and Trump is such a Nobody that Alexander has never even met him. (The subtle dis is a Times specialty.)

The thesis of the piece, if we can call it that, is that the GOP elite is having such an awkward time with Trump because they just aren't acquainted with him. (Maybe they just don't like some boorish political carpetbagger crashing their political party and taking over their power game.)

The piece is written from the viewpoint of the corrupt (in every way) DC power elite, the politicians, lobbyists, and corporate power fronts that control the country and much of the world from their seat of power. Yet the content is banal, focused on the lack of personal acquaintanceship with Trump that these arrogant world-rulers have.

Here is a gem from this example of thumb-sucking "journalism:"

"That experience and track record [of knowing "one another from years of rubbing shoulders"] provide those in the political world a working knowledge of whether candidates are true to their word, are willing to compromise, know the subject matter, can keep a confidence — all among the important things to weigh in making political judgments."

Really? These are mysteries about Trump?

There is a voluminous public record, now decades-long, that conclusively answers all these questions, as does Trump's ubiquitous public performances since last year.

True to his word? What is his word?His word is constantly changing. And he blatantly lies, denying he said things he's been recorded on video saying.

He has a history of double-crosses and broken promises. Then there was "Trump University," which defrauded thousands of people.

Willing to compromise? A little, I suppose. But he plays hardball and always tries to get the maximum advantage for himself. So the only thing that can force him to compromise is leverage and power. But there's no guarantee he'll live up to any compromises he agrees to. He rewrites history and "reinterprets" things a lot.

Know the subject matter? Please. His ignorant on all matters of substance has been obvious and transparent. He doesn't actually know anything. Anyone who does know something can see that.

Can keep a confidence?

Ask Lindsey Graham about Trump publicizing Graham's private cellphone number. Enough said. Oh, and this is a guy who likes to boast. Trust him with a confidence? Be my guest!

Finally, other "important things to weigh in making political judgments."

I guess some other "important things" might be temperament, tact, ability to satisfy competing interests, and political experience. Trump's experience in dealing with politicians and bureaucracies is bribing them.

Trump is used to being The Boss. Period. His notion of the presidency isn't as head of one of three co-equal branches of government. He thinks he'll be Boss of the USA.

That'll be fun.


P.S. If the NY Times wasn't so snobbish, they could find out a lot about Trump from the Village Voice. The Voice publishes the facts the Times won't, for its own inscrutable reasons. (You might want to peruse some of the 500 articles about Trump on the VV website.)

1] "‘Who Is This Guy?’ In Connected Political World, Few Know Donald Trump," Carl Hulse, New York Times, May 16, 2016. Hulse is "deputy bureau chief" in the Times' Washington, DC, bureau. As he works for a pillar of the establishment, the NY Times, that makes him part of the power structure of the Empire's capital. Of course he would vehemently deny that. (He'd also insist the U.S. isn't an empire. Credible guy, huh?)

U.S. Reporter Detects "Momentum" For Donald Trump

NPR "national political correspondent" Don Gonyea says Trump might have "momentum" going into the Indiana party primary, as he leads Ted Cruz by 15 percentage points.

So with Trump on the verge of either obtaining a majority of delegates to the party convention or nearly so, a U.S. reporter uses the "M" word. (NPR is the domestic radio propaganda network started by the U.S. government and funded in part by corporate advertising.)