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:
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:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
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