New York Times Confers Legitimacy On Taliban Terrorists

But first...

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Is it only terrorism when “white” people are targets?

Or, more accurately, when the people or country are white?

Either that, or the U.S. media better explain what weird hidden political agendas drive its “coverage” of violent events. Politically motivated bombings by the same Islamic jihadists that the U.S. and its lackey nations and their media call “terrorists” when they're assassinated by the U.S., or when those groups try to blow up a couple of cargo planes with explosive printer toner cartridges, or take down a passenger jet with explosive underwear, are suddenly just “militants,” and their bombings plain old bombings, not “terrorist bombings,” when the victims are Pakistanis, or Nigerians, or Indonesians, or Turks. Same political movement, same ideological motivation, same deliberate murder of civilians, yet a different and lesser crime. Specifically, a much less serious crime, since according to the indoctrinational system, “terrorism” is the WORST POSSIBLE EVIL IN THE WORLD. That's certainly the attitude that is inculcated in the populace by the hysteria and outrage fed to us by Western bloc media.

But bombs in any of those places that target U.S. embassies, as happened in Africa in 1998, or even “Western” (i.e. “white”) tourists, are emphatically and always “terrorism.”

There are examples of this glaring and obvious double standard practically daily, which demonstrates that this inexplicable and unexplained devaluing of certain victims is routine and entrenched in U.S. establishment media. Obviously it is intended that we don't even notice the double standard, and that if we do notice, we just accept it as unremarkable, merely the natural order of things requiring no explanation, much less justification. As for assuming we wouldn't- or shouldn't- even notice; thanks for the insult to our intelligence, propagandists!

[See also: “What's the Difference Between a Terrorist Bombing And a Bombing?”]

Here are some examples on Sunday May 12^th from two “prestige” media outfits, NPR, and the crème de la crème of the U.S. bourgeois propaganda system, the august New York Times.

At 5 pm EST (Eastern Standard Time, the time zone of the east coast of the U.S., including Washington, D.C., New York City, and Boston, three important hubs of power), NPR led with a story about the bombings yesterday in Turkey in a city bordering Syria (Reyhanli, Turkey) with a large population of Syrian refugees. The Turkish government was quick to blame the Assad regime. (Probably correctly. That is, it's most likely a correct assumption.) Even though much devastation was caused, at least 43 people were killed and many injured, and the attack was obviously a wanton assault on civilians, the words “terrorism,” “terror,” or “terrorist” were not uttered in the story.

The next story starts by saying “the biggest terrorist trial in Germany in a long time.” It's the trial of a surviving member of a gang of neo-Nazi killers who went around murdering Turks (and one Greek) in Germany for a decade, and planting nail bombs (the poor man's cluster bomb- actually more like the poor man's Claymore mine) in marketplaces that permanently maimed people, to the indifference and hostility of the police, who brushed off the murders as communal spats among Turks or criminal gang activity. It wasn't until the Nazis made the mistake of killing a policewoman that suddenly “the authorities” took it seriously. That's when the German secret police when on a document destruction binge (unmentioned by NPR, natch) to hide its apparent links to the Nazis. Obviously they knew about them at the very least, and perhaps much worse.

So why are some serial killings by a gang of racist neo-Nazis in Germany “terrorism,” and large bombs that devastate a town in Turkey not? You tell us, NPR.

Meanwhile the New York Times did what it always does, demoting terrorism in non-elite countries to some lesser level of evil. It did this in two different articles this time. And in a third it couldn't seem to make up its mind whether the violence was “terrorism” or mere “militancy.” So it went with both.

First, on the front page, a story by Declan Walsh about the election victory of a former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif. [A corrupt, rich bastard, by the way, which is to say a typical Pak PM, who was overthrown previously by the military. Not because he was corrupt. Because he fired a couple of generals. The nerve of the guy!] The Times sub-subhead reads “Record Turnout Despite Taliban Attacks That Killed at Least 21.” That would be 21 on election day itself, so it gives a false impression of the true toll of the Taliban's terror campaign. And 21 is only about a third of the number the European Union says died that day. 21 is seven times the number killed in the Boston Marathon bombing, which was immediately labeled terrorism. The EU's figure of 64 is 21 times the death toll in Boston, which was 3. If you like, we could do the math for the over 100 killed overall by the Taliban in its attempt to stop the election. (The terrorism continues even after the election is over.) Or the thousands they have murdered over the last several years to impose their will and express their displeasure with particular people or policies- like the schoolgirl they almost succeeded in murdering on her way to school, to make the totally reasonable point that girls should not be allowed to be educated. And what better way to impose that sensible policy on other people than by stopping a school bus at gunpoint and shooting a child in the head?

(The last six paragraphs of the story are devoted to Walsh getting expelled from Pakistan, because of his “undesirable activities,” quoting the Paki “authorities.” As of press time the NYT wasn't able to pry any further explanation from the Pakis.) [1]

The article is mostly devoted to the election itself and the background of Sharif, and how it might affect the U.S. There is some reporting on the terrorism of the Taliban, who are mentioned by name- but the word “terrorism” (or “terror” or “terrorist”) does not appear. Instead we get “militant movement” (referring specifically to the Taliban by name) and “militant violence over the years.” Gee, when does it rise to the level of terrorism?

Walsh even quotes a statement from two days earlier (Friday, April 10th) by “the Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud” (who by the way lives quite openly and moves about freely in Pakistan, unmolested by the so-called authorities, a fact unmentioned by the Times- hey don't want the Paks to feel pressure to arrest an actual terrorist) ordering his “commanders to attack the 'infidel system' of democracy, warning that teams of suicide bombers would hit targets across the country.” Said “targets” being entirely civilian in nature, indeed chosen specifically for their political significance and to terrorize people away from voting. But that's not terrorism.

Now consider what may have been Walsh's weirdest paragraph:

“But the sense of a vibrant, if flawed, democracy was tempered by Taliban attacks throughout the campaigning. [Not “terrorist” attacks, note, even though these were attacks on civilians for a stated political purpose, to stop people from voting, by terrorizing them.] The militant [sic] movement's ability to derail campaigning, particularly in the mountainous northwest, was taken as a signal that it has evolved beyond its nihilistic guerrilla roots and has become a powerful political insurgency bent on upending Western-style democracy in Pakistan.”[“Ex-Premier Is Set To Regain power In Pakistan Vote,” NYT, Sun. May 12, 2013, pgs. 1 and 8, paragraph 22.]

So the fact that its terrorism is successful means it has “evolved beyond” its “nihilistic guerrilla roots” and is now a “political insurgency”? What's the difference between a “political insurgency” and a terrorist movement? Why was the IRA “terrorist,” why was the PLO, why is Hamas? Indeed, why was the ANC “terrorist”? (Dick Cheney, for one, still insists it was.)

Does not referring to the Taliban as a “powerful political insurgency” lend it legitimacy? Sounds like a political movement. Which it is, albeit a violent one. With totalitarian aims that include the utter abnegation of women. And it uses terrorism to achieve its ends. Which is the only sensible way to judge whether a group is “terrorist,” as opposed to the U.S. method, which decides based on the ideology, goals, or economic structure of an entity, or cynically to dovetail with some U.S. political ploy of the moment. (Hence Cuba is officially “terrorist,” says the U.S. State Department, keeper of the Official List of Which Nations Are Terrorist.)

I think what the Paki Taliban does- plants bombs to stop elections, assassinates officials who call for reform in the vicious “blasphemy” law used to persecute innocent Christians and others, shoots schoolgirls in the head for going to school, and much more, constitutes terrorism. The NY Times evidently does not, for some odd reason.

Notice also the characteristic mealy-mouthed passive voice, “taken as a signal.” By whom? Declan never says. I would guess by the NYT, for whatever bizarre reason. And what is “nihilistic guerrilla roots” other than an example of contorting oneself into a verbal pretzel to avoid the word “terrorist”?

I wonder why Hezbollah isn't “a powerful political insurgency” that has “evolved beyond its nihilistic guerrilla roots” instead of being a “terrorist” organization? Why isn't Hamas, which actually governs territory, and doesn't bomb polling places to try and stop elections? And what are we to make of FARC as “terrorist.” They've never engaged in suicide bombings, or bombings of crowds of civilians simply to cause mayhem and kill random strangers. In fact, they laid down their arms and tried to participate in elections some years back, and the Colombian bourgeoisie proceeded to double-cross them and sic its fascist death squads on them, murdering their candidates. Those are the same people who systematically slaughter labor organizers and honest journalists, with U.S. support.

Nor can it be claimed that the NYT is merely slavishly hewing to the U.S. Government line and calling “terrorist” only those orgs that the State Department puts on its “terrorist list.” I'm assuming, perhaps wrongly, that the Paki Taliban is on that list. (It sure should be.) But the Iranian terrorist group MEK, which has killed Americans, most certainly was on that list. But it still wasn't “terrorist.” Rather, it was “on the State Department list of terrorist organizations” or “listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization.” Notice the difference. When it came to MEK, being on “the list” was a legal technicality. And a technicality with no import, as a slew of U.S. politicians, including Fearless Terrorism Fighter Rudolph Giuliani, who provided material support to, and received lavish speaking fees from MEK, can attest to, given the lack of prosecution for their obviously illegal activities. [2]

The point is that while affecting a tone of neutral, objective reportage, the NY Times and other outlets of corporate state propaganda are presenting an almost funhouse mirror distortion of the world, an image warped by their secret, almost inscrutable hidden political and ideological agendas. Figuring out the motives and inner workings of the U.S. media is akin to Kremlin-watching. At times keeping up with who are the demons and who are okay is like playing Simon Says, with the media telling people who to love and hate, according to today's alliances of convenience and temporary political gambits by the U.S.

None of this should be taken to mean that I defend or endorse Hamas or Hezbollah, or FARC. But nor can I say they are all good or all bad. I prefer to be objective and not be forced to boo or cheer on the command of the rulers of the U.S. to suit their own interests, which they define as the national interest. In fact, ultimately what goes under the rubric of U.S. “national interests” are the class interests of the top layer of the corporate elite and megarich individuals. The rest of us just pay the taxes and fight the wars, while they tell us we have to sacrifice more to maintain their empire for them. This is called “patriotism.” To object is disloyalty, or treason, or “supporting terrorism.” Such is life in a Free Country.

In that “vibrant, but flawed” Paki democracy, it turns out that in some districts more ballots were cast than there are registered voters. A mere “flaw,” I suppose. Hey, nobody's perfect!

A few words about the NYT equating of elections with democracy, indeed a “vibrant democracy.” Of course this is nonsense. Pakistan is no more a democracy, which would be a country where the government actually has to answer to the people and where ultimate power rests with the people, than the U.S. is. In Pakistan cliques of rich people vie with one another for state power, similar to what the GOP and Democrats [sic!] represent here. Plus, in Pakistan, the civilian government doesn't even control the military. And as Mao Zedong so depressingly observed, “political power flows out of the barrel of a gun.” Which he thought was a good thing. Of course he was a thug who lusted for power his whole life, the more power the better. [3]

The second article in the Sunday paper (p.12) was “Car Bombings Kill Dozens in Center of Turkish Town Near the Syrian Border.” “At least” 43 were killed. An accompanying photo shows blackened buildings with their facades blown off. But they weren't “terrorist bombings.” The “T” word appears nowhere in that article either. This is the same story as on NPR I mentioned near the beginning, the terrorist attack on the city of Reyhanli.

                                         

      

                    

                                         Reyhanli, Turkey, after car bombings on Saturday May 11^th. Not terrorism,

                                                                       according to the New York Times.

In the third article the Times gets sloppy and seems to use “militant” and “terrorist” synonymously, something I've never noticed in the paper before. In fact, usually the two words never so much as appear in the same article. This is also on p. 12 and concerns the arrest in Egypt of “three militants with ties to Al Qaeda [so why aren't they “terrorists”?? Obama KILLS people with such “ties”] who were planning terrorist [AH! there it is] attacks in Egyptian cities and against a foreign embassy, the interior minister said Saturday.” (My italics.) That's most of the first paragraph.

So, a “foreign embassy” was a target. Guess which country's? That might be a hint to why these “militants” were going to commit a “terrorist” attack. If it was just some Egyptians in a marketplace getting blown up- feh, that's just a bombing, not a terrorist bombing.

I think I understand. The attacks in Egyptian cities, i.e. against Egyptian civilians, would have merely been “bombings,” acts of “militancy.” Whereas attacking an (U.S., perhaps, NYT?) embassy would be terrorism. Hence some of their attacks would be acts of “militancy,” and some “terrorism,” depending on the target. Some would be tragic news from a faraway land, others would be moral outrages, occasions for high dudgeon requiring the U.S. to kill somebody, somewhere.

The next day, Monday, (May 13^th) NPR and the NY Times are still hewing to what's obviously an editorial policy on when and when not to use the T word. (A policy that per standard establishment media practice is never explained to their targets, namely us.) Bright and early on NPR's “Morning Edition,” the regular presenter Steve Inskeep has a chat with- what do you know!- Declan Walsh of the NY Times. The same Walsh who just got kicked out of Pakistan and wrote the first article I discussed. He says of the just-concluded elections there, “there was a very strenuous campaign of violence” by “militants.” That would be a reference to the bombings, shootings, kidnappings, and constant bloodcurdling threats by the Taliban terrorists that killed “over 125” in the last month of campaigning, we're told. [According to the EU, 64 people were murdered just on election day- that apparently wasn't included in Walsh's total. BBC reported this later the same morning.] So he's sticking to the script.

Walsh further explains to Inskeep (and us) that the “Taliban” “abandoned the democratic process.”

Abandoned? When did they uphold it? They do have front parties with the same demented ideology. Does he mean those parties didn't run? I've heard nothing about that. Certainly if they didn't run, it would have been because they were ordered not to, or like the Taliban, suddenly believe that “democracy” is “UnIslamic,” as the Taliban have announced in justifying their terrorism-enforced edict that there should be no elections and no one better vote- or else.

I can see why the terrorists would prefer Pakistan's traditional military dictatorships. The Pak military has been very very good for Islamic terrorists. They actually were created as a nominally covert arm of the Pak military to attack India, especially the Indian province of Kashmir, as well as do other dirty work. By the way, Kashmir was actually divided into three, with about the same land area going to India, China, and Pakistan. For some reason the U.S. media never tells you that. I guess it's to support U.S. policy of telling India- Hey, just give Pakistan your part of Kashmir. Then you guys can be friends.

As if.

But I'll bet you the Pakis never try and pull their terrorism shit on China!

These days the Paki Taliban are feeling their oats, and thinking they should be running the show, not the ISI. The terrorists' ultimate goal is to take over Pakistan themselves, and its nuclear weapons arsenal. Meanwhile their ideological soul mates are trying to take over Afghanistan again, and have only recently been beaten back from taking over Mali and Somalia, at least temporarily.

So what should the U.S. media do? It should either use the word “terrorism” and its variants in a consistent, even-handed, objective manner, like actual journalists would do, or refrain from using the word at all if it is hopelessly tainted by its use as a political and ideological bludgeon against official enemies. But since the U.S. media is the propaganda arm of the corporate oligarchy, an oligarchy which is served by the U.S. Government (and by the 50 individual state governments as well) this will not happen. So it is up to us to be constantly skeptical and critical of the propaganda system to avoid being duped and brainwashed by it. That's more work than just being able to trust. (Hello there, welcome to the adult world!)

We live in interesting times. It is morally and ethically challenging to defend human values and not just throw in with either global imperialists or fanatical primitives. This requires resisting easy thinking. I offer my analyses to you to help you in this worthwhile endeavor.

1] He and the NY Times can be thankful they get privileged treatment. They aren't murdered, the way journalists get murdered in Pakistan by the ISI, or the way the U.S. military and U.S.-backed governments of Mexico, or Colombia, or Yemen assassinate them. Nor do NY Times employees get kidnapped and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay like an Aljazeera employee was, where his captors pumped him for info on Aljazeera's inner workings and tried to force him to agree to be a spy for them in order to be let out of his cage in Gitmo and go home to his wife and children. Nor does the President of the United States call up a foreign government to demand that their reporters be locked up in prison, as Obama as done with the Yemeni journalist who revealed a civilian massacre in Yemen by a U.S. aerial attack. (Of course he was tortured also.)

2] Yet the Supreme Court recently ruled that if lawyers were to give free advice to the “terrorist” Tamil Tigers (since exterminated by the Sri Lankan rulers and army, along with a large number of Tamil civilians held hostage by the Tigers) on how to renounce terrorism and legalize themselves, that would be “material support for a terrorist organization” and subject to criminal prosecution. This is the kind of mind-twisting hyper-hypocritical double standard the U.S. legal system subjects us to. Obviously U.S. law is purely and simply an instrument of political power. Their judges are left to twist themselves into logical pretzels to give a judicial imprimatur to the cynical calculations of state power.

The MEK is A-okay, because influential politicians support them, and they help out in planting bombs in movie theaters in Tehran and other chores, such as assassinations, and spying on the regime for Israel and the U.S. (Gee, spying on one's own country for foreign powers, and hostile ones at that? Isn't that high treason? Nah, it's patriotism, because they're doing it for US.)

See, in order to wind up in prison (or dead), you have to be connected to a group the U.S. really doesn't like. Like charities that try and help the Palestinians and Lebanese subjected to Israeli bombardment and so forth. These are said to be “linked” to the “terrorist” Hamas and Hezbollah. Hey, if you get an email from someone on a U.S. shitlist, you're “linked to terrorism.” That's not an exaggeration. That's exactly the kind of “link” that is cited by the media, between Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter who killed 13 soldiers in 2009, and the now late Anwar al-Awlaki- aka Scourge of Yemen, to hear the U.S. media tell it. Why, his very genes are evil, thus they needed to bump off his 16 year old son in a restaurant two weeks after they offed al-Awlaki. [No, no, I'm not “defending” al-Awlaki. But anyone who defends government assassinations as routine policy is defending the most sinister form of oppressive state power.]

There are people rotting in U.S. prisons right now for donating to the wrong charity. Viewing the wrong website will get you on a terror suspect list too. Such unhealthy interest has been used as evidence in U.S. courts to convict people of “terrorism,” including for translating jihadist statements. (The ACLU was appalled by that last case, but they're terrorist sympathizers, of course, so who cares? Anyway, the ACLU has been a target of FBI and CIA infiltration going back decades, so they're a known “enemy” of the secret police, and thus unpatriotic.)

Cutting off any and all economic and humanitarian aid to the Palestinians- especially the ones living under Hamas- has long been U.S. policy. Palestinian political activists were persecuted by the Clinton regime for years for the crime of handing out leaflets that said the wrong things. (Namely pro-Palestinian things that of course highlighted Israeli oppression.) American Jews on the other hand are encouraged to contribute hundreds of millions of dollars annually to finance “settlement expansion,” i.e. the sacred mission by Jewish religious fundamentalists of “re”claiming the Land of Israel (as they imagine it), rightly theirs because “God” promised it to them. (So why doesn't “God” get rid of the Palestinians? Send in a flood or a hoard of locusts or a leprosy epidemic or something? Never mind, that must be an “anti-Semitic” question.) That's on top of the several billion a year in free money that all U.S. taxpayers are compelled to give to Israel to buy high tech U.S. weapons to bomb hospitals in Gaza with white phosphorous (see the Goldstone Report etc. if you think I'm making that up) shoot kids who throw rocks, (and non-violent protesters who don't) and so on. Israel, it's rarely mentioned, so therefore needs to be mentioned more often, is the top recipient of U.S. foreign aid. And those are grants, not loans.

Oh, but those horrible Hamas and Hezbollah are such religious fanatics! And they're suicide bombers! (Unlike World War II Japanese kamikaze pilots.) And they want to impose Sharia! (Whatever that is.) They cut off people's hands! (Our Saudi “allies” only cut off people's heads. What, the jihadists do that too? That's different! They're the Bad Guys. And besides, they videotape it! Anyway the Saudis only behead people who deserve it, like drug dealers and foreign maids.)

And they oppress women! (True enough, and they're loathsome for it, and for their general totalitarianism and imposing their religious CRAP.)

After all, the U.S. establishment cares so much about the oppression of Muslim women! Why wouldn't they? Hey, look at how the U.S. insists on equality for women in its own society! That's why women make just as much money as men for the same jobs. And half the members of Congress are women. And half the Fortune 500 companies are headed by women, and...

What's that? None of that is true? Far from it?

So what!

To quote the Great Man Himself, Ronald Reagan, “facts are stupid things.” They're stupid because they keep contradicting ideology, which is Truth Itself. (RR, GOP Convention speech, .)

3] Regarding the attitude of the U.S. government and corporate media towards elections. Their attitude is either to use the ritual of elections to validate as legitimate some oppressive government it supports, or slams elections as shams when they're in countries whose regimes they don't like, for economic or political reasons. For example, the NYT and the rest of the gang regularly held the “elections” that the PRI staged during its 75-year one-party dictatorship in Mexico. Only after the PRI's monopoly on power was broken did there start to creep into Timesland oblique references to past, shall we say, a taint of unfairness in Mexico's electoral process. And the elections of fascist state terror dictatorships, like “South” Vietnam under the rule of various generals, or El Salvador in the 1980s, where people were herded to the polls under a state reign of terror, are treated as if they're actual free and fair elections occurring in normal democratic lands. [See the book Demonstration Elections, by Herman and Brodhead, for example.] Japan is another example of a long-time one-party dictatorship that only recently has loosened up some, but to no avail in terms of real change in the power structure or social order.

On the other hand, perfectly legitimate elections that produce winners the U.S. doesn't like- such as in Venezuela since Hugo Chavez first won, or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (after they overthrew Somoza), or Hamas among the Palestinians, running against the corrupt and venal PLO (now inflated into the grander-sounding Palestinian Authority, to which the Israelis have subcontracted repression in the West Bank, which helps Israel assassinate “militants,” and whose “security forces” are trained by those avatars of human rights, the CIA)- those elections are dismissed with contempt as shams or as somehow unfair.(Why, U.S. elections are perfectly fair! Even when five political apparatchiks on the Supreme Court do the electing! Just ask the U.S. media!)

What's the Difference Between a Terrorist Bombing And a Bombing?

Two things. The victims, and the perpetrators.

In Pakistan, for the past few weeks, there have been constant bombings of political rallies, party headquarters, and polling stations by the Pakistani Taliban. They say that elections are "UnIslamic" and thus it is not just their right, but their duty to use violence to try and stop them. Each bombing has killed one to two dozen people, and wounded more.

But in the U.S. media- broadcast and print, including the "premier" organs of propaganda like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, these bombings are never terrorist bombings. They're just "bombings." 

The Boston Marathon bombings were "terrorist" bombings from the first day, before the perpetrators were identified, before a motive was known. It could have been an insurance fraud, or a personal grudge, or an assassination attempt.

Why are obvious terrorist bombings that kill non-"white" people "terrorist" bombings? Why are the perpetrators never terrorists, but "militants"? They're the same type of jihadists allied with the Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda, with the same ideology.

If there is some reason other than racism, let the U.S. media explain the reason.

It certainly cannot be from any rational definition. By any reasonable definition, even by the definition of the U.S. Government, these ideologically motivated bombings targeting civilians that are designed to produce a desired political result are terrorist. They are certainly intended to terrorize, to terrorize people from voting. And these are fanatics that the U.S. media and Government calls "terrorist" when they're trying to kill them, such as with drone strikes AIMED AT PAKISTAN. So they only become"terrorists" when the U.S. decides to target them?

Other terrorist bombings aren't "terrorist" because the U.S. or its allies commits them, of course. And it's false to say the U.S. (and Israel, for example) DON'T deliberately target civilians. They do. There are numerous examples, both historical (World War II, where the U.S. deliberately razed German and Japanese cities. 60 Japanese cities were reduced to ash by firebombing before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and recent. (Like the Israeli attack on Gaza,  dropping white phosphorus on hospitals, etc. Or the attack on the Qana refugee camp in Lebanon, in which 100 civilians were shredded to death by U.S.-supplied munitions.)

Oh, that's "different"? That's "war"? So what's the "war on terror"? Not a war? That means the "terrorists" are at a war too. In fact, Western polemicists constantly tell us the Islamists are at war with "us." So what they're doing is no more- or less- terrorism than the practices of the hypocrites who cynically deny doing it on purpose. And I'm NOT saying one justifies the other. Both are criminal.

When the U.S. or its allies do the bombing, that's not terror. In fact, it's Freedom Bombing.

{You know, I couldn't help noticing that you're on this webpage and you're reading this. That gives me an idea. Why don't you subscribe to email alerts for new posts? That way, you'll get notices of new commentaries and you can check them out if you're interested. There are no commercial tie-ins whatsoever. And you can always unsubscribe if you decide you hate me.

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Spinning

The same thing can be viewed positively or negatively, depending on choice of words, especially adjectives, nouns, and verbs. (Even adverbs!)

Spin is an establishment insider term for manipulation of the establishment media, or the attempt to manipulate it, by politicians' lackeys, media “consultants,” PR “experts,” corporate operatives, celebrity agents, and other such gold-plated riffraff.

Spin is flacks trying to get hacks to write positive propaganda about their clients or bosses, or to “shape the coverage” of some policy or event to make their clients or bosses look good or to deflect bad publicity or blame.

Spin has two directions, or slants: positive and negative.

Positive spin would be trying to make a candidate look good, for example. Negative spin would be trying to make the opposing candidate look bad.

Defensive spin occurs in response to negative information coming into the public domain, or in reaction to a crisis or negative event, such as the killing of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya by jihadi types.

When the media spins things at us, you can call it bias. Most “spinning” is in fact done by the corporate media, to us. Naturally the establishment's propagandists pretend spin is only something flacks do to the propagandists. They maintain this pretense because they want us to believe they are objective, and neutral, and thus trustworthy, and that the propaganda they present us with is in fact the world as it actually is.

Which it most definitely is not. But you figured that out by now, didn't you?

Spin can be as simple as basic word choice. Look at the paired words below. Notice how the same thing can be viewed either positively or negatively.

Warming-- Threat

Committed-- Stubborn

Dedicated-- Obsessive
Passionate- Emotional
Alert to danger- Paranoid

Determined to get justice-- vengeful

Childlike-- Childish

Bold-- Reckless

Brash-- Abrasive

Outspoken-- Shrill

Feisty-- Obnoxious (1)

And so on. Thus the adjective applied to someone or to their action depends on whether the media masters are for or against that person or action.

Now that you have reviewed this short list, find your own examples! Have fun doing your own propaganda analysis!

1) Bella Abzug was “shrill,” Ed Koch “feisty.” I do believe their politics had something to do with those word choices by the $ media.

The Wicked Witch Is Dead

One wicked witch, anyway. Margaret Thatcher, hailed as “The Iron Lady,” a sobriquet with a dual meaning. To admirers, it means steely determination, someone with “backbone,” an admirable quality in “traditional British values.” To her victims and those with humanist values, she was an ideological fanatic and a cruel, remorseless oppressor who waged relentless class warfare on the British working class and on the welfare of the general public. She was a staunch ally of fascists in other countries, a cheerleader for the crimes of U.S. Imperialism during the regimes of Reagan and Bush the Elder. She screeched with outraged indignation when Augusto Pinochet, poster boy of fascist admirers everywhere, was temporarily detained in the UK after he was officially out of power, pursuant to a Spanish arrest warrant for murdering eight Spanish citizens during his bloody, illegitimate reign in Chile. The UK ultimately let Pinochet go on his way, on the spurious grounds of sovereign immunity. He got a get out of jail free card pursuant to ex-ruler immunity privilege. (1)

Predictably, the BBC (and U.S. media) has strewn her path to Hades with rose petals. “She pursued her vision with vigor,” a “vision” they describe in glowing terms. Her “vision” actually consisted of the destruction of working class power by systematically dismantling unions. The bosses of course loved this, as reflected in their agit-propaganda media. Rupert Murdoch in particular took advantage of the anti-union offensive by freeing himself of pesky newspaper worker unions. Now we have to listen to days of praise for this vicious shrew so beloved by the capitalists she fought for.

Just for ersatz balance, BBC leavened its hosannas to the horrible harridan with political hack Neil Kinnock of the fake “Labor” party saying Thatcher “was not a malicious person,” just someone insensitive to the effects of her policies. Which in addition to being a milquetoast critique is a backhanded if unintentional insult to her intelligence. She knew exactly what she was doing. [David Cameron, the current Tory PM, insists Thatcher “saved” Britain. Saved from what, I have no idea. Saved from workers having some security in their lives, maybe.] So the range of acceptable opinion ranges from Thatcher was a heroine to She Meant Well and was a not a bad person.

A day later, [today], noxious NPR cobbled together a puff piece on the putrescent hussy for Morning Edition, chock full of laudatory cliches like “she changed Britain forever” (without saying in what way, or by what means). They put on some Canadian female pol to make the point that she “opened doors” for other women politicians to become country bosses.

Then the young male NPR morning dweeb who did the piece (they all sound the same to me, and they all are the same, just interchangeable cogs in a propaganda machine) asserted approvingly that Thatcher “could be tough and feminine all at once.” She asked some female UK toff to validate the statement, which this woman did by saying Thatcher was “flirtatious,” which surprised foreign country bosses. [Aka "heads of state."]

In other words, she was manipulative and tried to throw other country bosses off balance by behaving inappropriately with them in a sexual manner.

So playing the coquette the essence of feminity. I guess if you're stuck in the 19^th century it is. Is that where your head's at, NPR? The 19^th century?

Of course the mouthpieces of a system of corporate oligarchy would hail one of their class warriors. Thatcher was an aggressive political warlord for capital who went on the offensive against the working class, smashing their organizations and reducing them to isolated, powerless individuals. She emboldened the ideological system to push the parameters of acceptable discourse farther right.

By disempowering the working class, and attempting to discredit the idea that an economy should serve people and not vice versa, she set the stage for social disintegration. As more and more people are discarded by capitalist society as superfluous, they become an alienated, unorganized, inchoate mass with an ideological framework of understanding, prone to outbursts of rage that manifest in mindless crime and occasional bouts of rioting and looting. Yet the capitalists and their politicians have convinced themselves that they are heading into a brighter future. In fact, they are driving society into a black hole of social malaise and despair and an economic dead end of where capitalism grinds to a halt, as in Spain. At that point their only card left to play is overt fascism to stay in power.

Thatcher infamously said “there's no such thing as society,” an Ayn Randian vision of human existence as a dog eat dog struggle of all against all, the most selfish being the winners. In practice, it means a highly organized upper class of the rich and power crushing and exploiting a mass of disorganized individuals who are helpless to defend themselves. Destroying their organizational structures, such as unions, of course abets this condition, a throwback to earlier centuries. Thatcher's point was that there was no obligation to help others, no obligation of society- which doesn't exist, remember- to provide medical care, housing, any kind of security against the ravages of capitalism red in tooth and claw. (The BBC forgot to mention that remark of Thatcher's. Odd, that.)

The sickest part if that anti-human creatures like Thatcher and Rand insisted that this nightmare vision in fact is the most moral way to organize society, that attempts to interfere with its realization are in fact immoral. Thus they totally invert morality, and by basing their economic and political credo on a perverted morality, attempt to cement it as an irreversible and immutable condition of our species. This is pathology on a level that threatens humanity, and their ideology should be treated as an infectious mental disease.

1) On the other hand, ex-African nation-bosses (I reject the aggrandizing media term “world leaders”- they don't “lead” anything, they rule, they command, they boss. They control swaths of territory) get put on trial in Europe. They don't seem to get the ex-ruler immunity privilege.

SHHH! Quiet! Don't say it! Don't say “racism.” Europe loves human rights! How could they be racist? For example, they love human rights so much that Dutch troops handed over 8,000 or 10,000 Muslim men and boys (they care so much they don't even know how many it was) to the Serbian military for extermination, and sat on their hands while Saravejo was under murderous siege for four years, and while the Serbs set up rape camps and “ethnically cleansed” what was once Yugoslavia and generally rampaged for a decade while the governments and “leaders” of Europe occasionally cleared their throats and wrung their hands.

But yeah, they did put Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of the ruination of Yugoslavia, on trial. A trial that dragged on for so long- a year, with no end in sight- that Milosevic died before it reached a verdict. I guess they love trials so much in Europe that they don't want them to finish.

Oh, speaking of Pinochet, Chile is currently exhuming the body of Nobel Prize winning poet Pablo Neruda, to confirm that Pinochet had him murdered days after the coup. Neruda had revealed that he was going abroad to organize opposition to the fascist putsch. Subsequently Pinochet sent death squads as far away as Rome and Washington, D.C., to murder opponents of his regime. But Thatcher wasn't malicious! Why, all the UK's toffs agree on that, even the “Labor” ones! By the way, she was the nost ersatz of that fake class, aristocrats, having been born into the petit bourgeoisie and later made a “Baroness.”

One Million Turn Out For Pope Installation! -Or Is It 10,000?

Big difference. You'd think the bourgeois media could get their stories straight. Maybe they need to conspire together more.

That is literally the range of numbers announced on different radio outlets this morning.

NPR, 5:30 am (all times EST): “...thrilled, tens of thousands of people gathered for his installation Mass, taking a winding route...”

Minutes later, Aljazeera at 5:37 am- ”Now this is the scene in St. Peter's Square where world leaders and up to a million pilgrims are expected.” (Note the trapdoor qualifiers, "up to" and "are expected." Expected by whom? The guy in the Vatican press office giving the press handouts?)

But is it fair to call Aljazeera "bourgeois" media? Ok, how about "bourgeois and oil plutocrat media"?

WINS 9:30 am ; “An estimated one million people turned out” for Pope ritual. Estimated by who exactly?

Then yet another billionaire's media, this one owned by Michael Billionaire Bloomberg, WBBR, 9:39 am: “Up to 200,000” people at the Pope ritual, reports Jon Bascom. (I like that weaselly qualifier, "up to." Sounds like those promises of connection speeds from phone, cable, satellite, and ISP companies.) But he's based in D.C., so he might not have even been there.

Given the narrow streets there, I'm gonna guess tens of thousands. Low tens of thousands. It reminds me of the "Salute To Israel Day" parades in New York City. I'd go to them and observe about five to ten thousand people, and the media would claim one million, obviously fraudulent. (Lately they've stopped that game.)

So here's a Muslim-owned channel and a Jewish-owned one (WINS) both shilling for the Roman Catholic Church! Guess they're doing it out of brotherly love.

Or maybe authoritarian capitalists stick together.

Addendum: the self-appointed "newspaper of record," the NY Times, says "The Vatican estimated the number at 150,000 to 200,000."* Which no doubt is a gross exaggeration. Don't know why radio broadcasters can't mention where they get their numbers from. And notice that WINS and Aljazeera both multiplied the Vatican's high end number five times, to one million! They're outshilling the Vatican itself! And they aren't even Catholic!

*"Pope Francis Calls for Service to ‘Poorest, Weakest’" NY Times, 3/19/13. Ugh, that fucking Vatican propaganda right in the headline! No link here, it was just junk. See "Meet The New Pope, Same As The Old Pope," for analysis of how sick this Vatican propaganda offensive is.

Chavez, Cancer, and the CIA

As I've previously said, there's no way to know one way or the other yet if the CIA murdered Hugo Chavez, the late President of Venezuela.

The U.S. media and government is still stalking that country, looking for an opening now that things are somewhat more fluid with Chavez's death.

The Venezuelans just had to kick out a couple of subversive U.S. imperialist operatives thinly camouflaged by diplomatic cover. (Diplomatic status is a protective device that gives operatives immunity for criminal activities in the host country. Given that coups and subversion and manipulation of internal politics are routinely run out of U.S. embassies, and the history of the U.S. imposing and/or supporting murderous fascist regimes, especially in Latin America, the U.S.' self-declared “our hemisphere,” Latin nations would be well-advised to close all U.S. embassies and consulates until the U.S. has changed its stripes and is no longer a threat to democracy and the well being of the people of those nations. )

Nicolas Maduro, Chavez's designated successor, just gave a speech that has provided grist for the U.S. media's anti-Chavismo mill. NPR's reliably reactionary Saturday morning “news” host Scott Simon hauled on NPR's current Latin American correspondent Juan Forero to properly indoctrinate us on current events in Venezuela.[1] Forero made sure to call Maduro's speech “rambling,” an adjective bourgeois propagandists frequently use when discrediting a speech, manifesto, or any expression of ideas they need to discredit without having to engage with and refute the actual content. (And they certainly don't want you to know what was said in detail. They just cherry-pick the parts good for painting the picture they want to paint, and aren't even honest about those parts. Cf. how they keep saying Ahmadinejad “threatened to destroy Israel.” No he didn't. Even a high Israeli official admitted that was a- ahem- misquote.) Or maybe Forero just wasn't bright enough to follow Maduro's argument and see the connection between his points. Then it would seem rambling to him. Betcha plenty of Venezuelans had no trouble keeping up with him.

Forero mentioned that the U.S. sent a “low level” rep to Chavez's funeral. Which, Forero failed to note, is a deliberate insult, and a poke in the eye of the Venezuelan people, the large majority of whom admired Chavez and are grieved by his death. (Much was and still is made in the U.S. media about how “polarizing” Chavez was. Unlike their own leader, Obama, huh?)

Forero noted that it was “shocking” to hear Maduro “imply” that “the U.S. had a hand in the death” of Chavez. He skimmed lightly over that point. NPR assumes its “educated” listeners will dismiss such paranoid ravings out of hand, I suppose.

Scientific tests are planned to look for poisons. I would expect these to be futile, unless the CIA used a radioactive substance with a long enough half-life to have left some traces after several years. (Aljazeera recently discovered that it was polonium that Israel used to murder Yasir Arafat. And Putin's goons killed Alexander Litvinenko in Britain with polonium- which made have given Mossad or Shin Bet the idea.) If it wasn't a radioactive substance, all detectable traces may have been eliminated after the several years that have elapsed since the presumed introduction into Chavez's body. [2]

What are well established facts are the following:

It is precisely the main mission of the CIA to be an “action arm” of the U.S. government that conducts covert operations- especially the overthrow of unwanted governments, if necessary by murdering their heads. [3]

The CIA, almost from its formation, began researching and stockpiling numerous poisons, including carcinogens, with an emphasis on untraceability.

The CIA is a murderous organization that instigated the murder of 800,000 people in Indonesia (that number is from the internal CIA boasting about the operation); murdered 65,000 people in Vietnam by its own hand under the Phoenix program (number from a USMC major who participated in the program).

The CIA has instigated coups in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), and elsewhere that have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

The CIA sent its chief mad scientist, Sidney Gottlieb, to the Congo with a vial of pathogens with which to murder Patrice Lumumba (the plan being to somehow get it on his toothbrush, but ultimately internal enemies kidnapped and murdered Lumumba). [4]

John Stockwell, formerly the CIA field officer in charge of their Angola operation in support of Jonas Savimbi, some years ago attributed a total of 2 million deaths to the CIA.

The CIA has tried an endless number of times to murder Fidel Castro, with plots including poisons (like the infamous plan to poison him with thallium in New York by dusting the inside of his shoes with it- which the U.S. media converted into a harmless prank to make his beard fall out! In fact it would have caused an excruciating death taking months- look up the symptoms of thallium poisoning, something the U.S. media is just too busy to do, I guess.)

The CIA assassinated John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and various other American and foreign citizens over the years.

The CIA has nurtured, trained, cooperated with, and provided lists of people to torture and murder, to numerous fascist secret police and military organizations over the years. These junior CIA's include the Korean CIA (KCIA- now there's a chip off the old block!), the Shah's SAVAK, all the Latin American state murder organizations, and others in Asia and Africa.

Now, for all these decades, this ruthless, murderous organization, one of whose main missions is to overthrow governments the U.S. doesn't like, has stockpiled poisons, but it never uses them? Is that what NPR, Forero, and the entire U.S. propaganda machine wants us to believe? And we're paranoid nuts if we don't drink their Kool-Aid.

No thanks, guys, I'm not thirsty for what you're peddling.

Again, I'm not saying the CIA did murder Chavez. I'm saying it's an entirely rational, reasonable question to ask and should be investigated insofar as it is possible to do so.

But I don't think the answer will mainly lie in science. It will lie in good counterintelligence that can identify the operatives responsible for the poisoning. It could have been someone in Chavez's inner circle. Or maybe a “well-wisher” gave him poisoned food or drink. Or it could have been in a restaurant he frequents. That would be relatively easy to arrange, via a kitchen worker or possibly a waiter. Maybe someone with access to his personal living quarters, access to things he touches, or wears, or puts in his mouth. (A toothbrush, cigar, cigarette, favorite drinking glass.) As far as testing for substances, with hundreds or maybe thousands of possibilities, the lab work required could be quite extensive. (Hey, I know, let's ask the CIA what they used! File a FOIA request! They have to answer those!)

It won't be easy because it must have been done before the cancer was detected about 2 years ago. And there is the potential for a destructive, paranoiac witch hunt among the Venezuelans.

What isn't imaginary (paranoiac) is the murderous hostility of the U.S. to socialistic regimes like Chavez's and to leaders like him who inspire the poor masses and politically mobilize them. That is the most dangerous leader possible to the U.S., the defender and protector of the world's rich. (They call it “defending freedom and democracy.” It makes for a better advertising slogan for their empire.)

1] Forero cut his eyeteeth writing anti-Chavez propaganda for the New York Times. As moving to NPR is really a step down in the bourgeois media hierarchy, one wonders if he was facing demotion or worse at the NYT, although his Chavez-bashing seemed up to NYT propaganda standards to me. It surely couldn't be because NPR made him an irresistible offer. Some people simply find working for the NYT a miserable experience. As the propaganda system is at least as opaque as the Kremlin, which the U.S. media has always loved to tweak for its opacity, we almost never learn the real reasons for media personnel shufflings. I suppose there might be hints in their trade journals. I have read them on occasion, and find them thoroughly dishonest, the content mostly shilling and glorification of executives, the verbiage an impenetrable corporate-like surface that makes finding any nuggets of information hidden between the lines slim pickings, at least for an outsider. Unless someone were paying me to read them, I have better things to do with my time. And in the larger scheme of things, the motives for the career moves of a Juan Forero are insignificant, mostly a matter of idle curiosity with perhaps the potential of providing some slight insight into the internal mechanics of the U.S. propaganda system.

2] The half lives of different radioactive elements and their isotopes ranges from tiny fractions of a second to hundreds of thousands of years, depending on the specific element. A half life is the amount of time it takes for a given quantity of radioactive material to lose half its radioactivity. This is a measure of its decay. The polonium used to murder Arafat was mostly decayed by the time Aljazeera arranged to test his clothes. The corrupt Palestinian Authority, run by U.S.-Israeli stooge Mahmoud Abbas, has dragged its feet for years on investigating the Arafat murder, and even now is stalling, taking months after the Aljazeera expose to allow Arafat's corpse to be checked for polonium. But I think the case for murder by polonium has already been proven, having been found on what Arafat wore around when he died.

It may be that radioactive substances with shorter half lives may be suitable for murder, which would leave a shorter time frame in which to detect them. Different radioactive elements emit different types of damaging particles, in different intensities. These particles have different penetrative abilities, so would impact the body differently. They also lodge in different parts of the body, if they lodge in at all. Some are lethal in tiny amounts, and rapidly so. Many radioactive elements would give you cancer years or decades after you were poisoned. A millionth of a gram of plutonium, inhaled into and lodged in the lung, would reliably give you lung cancer.

You'd have to ask the Russian and Israeli assassins why they chose polonium, and a form of polonium only produced by nuclear reactors, which absolutely rules out “natural” exposure. They apparently wanted a quick and sure result, and assumed no one would think to look for polonium. (From now on, I guess people will look! Or should, anyway, depending on the symptoms.)

3] Covert of course means secret. To maintain secrecy, the cooperation of the propaganda system is essential. The propaganda system cooperates first and foremost by calling the CIA a “spy” organization (yes indeed, it spies, in order to carry out its subversive and violent activities, and to manipulate and control others) that mainly is about “gathering intelligence.” (Probably 99% of U.S. “intelligence” is “gathered” these days by technical means- by the NSA, for example, and by spy satellites, drones, and so forth.) The CIA has often liked to project this ridiculous image of itself as a bunch of scholars who just like to study things. One of their favorite images they foisted on the public- with the eager cooperation of media and book publishing accomplices- were photos of the murderous fascist Allen Dulles smoking a pipe. One of the first CIA directors and part of the cabal that murdered JFK in 1963, Dulles was a Wall Street lawyer along with his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. These two hatched the fascist coup in Guatemala, that destroy that country's future down to the present day, under Eisenhower's authority. And before that the coup that ended democracy in Iran. And after that, the Bay of Pigs invasion was arranged and handed off to JFK. JFK was lied to and told that there would be a mass uprising in Cuba once the fascist Cubans landed. None other than JFK assassin E. Howard Hunt scoffed at this idea, saying the CIA never believed any such thing. So the CIA deliberated lied to JFK to trap him into the plan, the idea being that he'd be forced to send in the U.S. military after the Cubans. That didn't work. Eventually that was a main reason the CIA, with the complicity of the military, Dallas PD, and after the fact if not before, the U.S. media, bumped him off. The U.S. media mainly because it would be ideologically intolerable and a grave threat to the legitimacy and “stability” of their system to admit that a coup had occurred in the U.S.

Oswald, a low-level CIA asset, was to be the fall guy. He was made to look like a “Castro agent,” apparently with the idea that the assassination would be blamed on Castro, and the most extreme fascists would get their wish, a U.S. invasion of Cuba. That part of the plan didn't work. Oh well. At least they got the Vietnam War they wanted as a consolation prize.

4] In Lumumba's stead the U.S. got a “friendly” (to Western “interests” i.e. Western capital and business) military dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. As usual with these types, he was a mega-thief who did nothing to develop the economy of the Congo or the lives of the people he misruled. Between him and elite Western corporations and banks, billions were drained from the Congo, with nothing to show for the people, the country, or the future. Now the Congo is a perpetual battle ground for various gangster “rebel groups,” some backed by venal neighboring governments, looking to loot the natural resources. Eventually a wasteland will be left behind, with no infrastructure or modern economy.

Megalomaniac Mobutu left behind nothing for his country but bad memories, not even the name he egotistically pasted on it, “Zaire.”

Oops! I digress! I better get back on topic! If Juan Forero ever gets hold of this, he'll tag me for “rambling” for sure!

Hugo Chavez: Champion of the Poor or Unhinged Megalomaniac?

That's the question posed by the BBC on the death of Chavez.

3/6/13 circa 8:25 am London (GMT): BBC female anchor announces the big story is the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who just died. “Was he a champion of the poor or an unhinged megalomaniac?” Those are the choices, as framed by the BBC. (Yes, that's an exact quote. Given the BBC's unrelenting anti-Chavez bias to date, his death must be a moment they were eagerly awaiting.) Then the male announcer reads a handful of very brief listener comments on Chavez, which either praise him in general terms or damn him with invective.

Following that, we get to hear him comparing Bush to the Devil in a UN speech. He also denies being a dictator because he was elected, and “the rich” tried to overthrow him in a [failed U.S.-backed] coup.

Next, to figure Chavez out, while totally ignoring any discussion of his actual policies, they bring on, of all people, Jon Lee Anderson from the New Yorker. The discussion with Anderson focuses on Chavez' alleged personality- a typical way the bourgeoisie avoid discussing actual issues and policies, in this case the reality of economics, politics, and U.S. Imperialism's role in Latin America. (Anderson does allow in passing that “the poor,” Chavez's constituency, are the majority in Venezuela.) Anderson authored the recent hatchet job titled “Slumlord” in the New Yorker, which was mainly a hatchet job on Venezuela's poor, who it presented as criminals. Facing the first page of the article was a full-page picture of a close-up of Chavez' face. He looks dour and vaguely menacing, as anyone photographed in that fashion while not smiling might look. Don't be too subtle, New Yorker! “Slumlord” indeed! Guess you decided to exchange your usual stiletto for a meat cleaver this time.

On the BBC, Anderson calls Chavez “thin-skinned.” Why? Because when Anderson repeated to Chavez's face racial epithets that his “opponents” use against him, Chavez “became visibly upset.” I guess you'd have to call all African-Americans “thin-skinned,” because if you called them “nigger” (or “asked” them to “respond to” their “opponents calling you nigger,” as Anderson must have phrased it or something like that) they'd get upset. That's the sole evidence Anderson presents for Chavez's thin-skinnedness. He may very well have been thin-skinned, but Anderson damns himself in my book with his gross racial insensitivity, at best, or racist baiting. As a Head of State, Chavez sure got no respect from bourgeois media hatchet men like Anderson!

But if you want to prove that someone was a dictator, showing that they couldn't handle their “opponents' criticism” without getting upset is a useful tactic, I suppose! What says "dictator" better than "volatile" and "quick to anger"?

The BBC also treats us to the U.S. ambassador's take on Chavez. (Guess. Let's just say he's not a fan.)

[The BBC, in all its hours of interviews and blather, didn't have time to talk to any ambassadors from countries friendly to Chavez. Unimportant countries like, oh,  Russia, whose UN Ambassador offered praise for Chavez and regrets over his passing. Not what the BBC or the rest of the Western media pack is looking for. Hey, you gotta prioritize when you're in the media biz!]

The BBC did mention at one point that Chavez provided subsidized oil to 18 countries. This was either an act of solidarity with the poor of those nations, savvy politics, or “bribes,” depending on one's attitude towards Chavez. Or a combination of some of the above. Unmentioned by BBC: Chavez provided cheap fuel oil to poor Americans. This act of generosity got short shrift in the U.$. media, predictably. The U.S. Government didn't provide the oil. (In fact heating oil subsidies are on the budget chopping block, as are all programs aimed specifically at the poor.) None of the numerous rich plutocrats in the U.S. did it. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn't (and doesn't) do it.

NPR launched “Morning Edition” with co-anchor Steve Inskeep proclaiming Chavez championed the poor “and demonized his enemies.” (Just paying them back in kind, no Steve?) An hour later (6 am Washington D.C. time) he's saying Chavez beat a coup and recall attempt, “but he couldn't beat cancer.” Which just goes to show that there's more than one way to skin a (red) cat, huh U.S.?


Later, co-anchor Renee Montagne “interviews” NPR's U.S.-imperialism-beat reporter Tom Gjelten, who speculates about harm to Cuba from the possible loss of subsidized oil. Maybe there'll be unrest! he speculates. The previous afternoon (3/5), NPR's Audie Cornish “interviewed” him on their afternoon "news" show All Things Considered. Topic: “Rivalries And Infighting Could Follow In Wake Of Chavez's Death.” That's how it's titled on NPR's website. You can read or listen to it there, but why bother? The title says all you need to know. Yes indeed, rivalries and infighting could follow after Chavez's death. How right they are. Or maybe they won't follow. NPR did say “could,” after all. Who knows? We'll just have to wait and see. (Don't worry, the U.S. will do its best to exacerbate rivalries and infighting. Look how well that worked to help destroy the Black Panther Party.)


And here's how loutish Obama is: his “statement” on Chavez's death doesn't even offer condolences to the Chavez family, instead putting in a barb about “democratic principles” and “respect for human rights.” Shut up, man. Can the bogus ideological cant for once. You got what you wanted. You could at least be gracious enough to offer a normal condolence message to the family of the dead. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, Obama is so morally cheap he won't even cough it up. (1)

It's obvious from all this, and from Obama's "statement" [see below at (1)] that the U.S. is eager to take advantage of Chavez's passing to get rid of the Chavez party and put back in power the rightful rulers of Venezuela, Venezuelan rich and their political representatives. That is who the U.S. sees as the rightful rulers of every country on earth.

An Aljazeera man made the odd comment that when Chavez took office he “intended to provoke” the U.S. He certainly did provoke the U.S. But that doesn't mean he set out to do that. I think he set out to push back against U.S. domination and indeed oppression of Latin America. The U.S. has been doing that for over a century. (Indeed, it tacitly announced its intention to do so with the Monroe “Doctrine,” which brazenly declared This is Our Hemisphere.) The U.S. has been imposing its will on Latin America by force at least since its 1898 conquests of Cuba and Puerto Rico, then Spanish colonies. That was also when it foisted the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and Prison/Torture/Show Trial Center on Cuba. Inevitably the U.S. finds resistance to its will “provocative.” That should be on the U.S.' head, not Chavez's. And in a piece by Patty Culhane on Aljazeera, we get a soundbite of Donald Rumsfeld delegitimizing Chavez by saying “Chavez was elected. Hitler was elected.” Ergo, elections don't count when you're a Bad Guy.

Culhane also includes an Obama soundbite, attacking Chavez as “authoritarian” who's “repressing dissent.” (Good one, coming from him. Obama's been no slouch in the domestic repression department.)

Only problem with Rumsfeld claim is, Hitler was never elected to anything!! He was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President (and former Field Marshal and head of the German general staff in World War I) Paul Hindenberg, in January 1933. Then the Nazis arranged the burning of the Reichstag (national legislature building), which they used as a pretext to imprison all the leftist members of the Reichstag and “vote” to give Hitler dictatorial powers. (It was an emergency, don't you know!)

This right-wing trope, that “Hitler was elected,” started some years back in the U.S. I first noticed the American Tory George Will pushing this disinformation. No one ever corrects it or demurs. Now Aljazeera is (unwittingly?) putting it out there. Thus do lies gain currency and become “truth,” through uncontradicted repetition.

And by the way, the Nazis never got more than about a third of the vote for Reichstag seats. They were never voted for by a majority of Germans. (You can look it up. Try a reputable history book. Every one I've ever read has the same facts.)

I won't waste time scraping the bottom of the propaganda barrel, except to note one bit of poison poured into my ear when I was looking for the weather and had to endure this, from WINS, a CBS property in New York City, that used to brag it was “the most listened to station in the nation.” One of their long-time hacks was saying “he's been in this country for 12 years, during which time he says Huge Chavez divided his country.” Then we get a guy with a foreign accent- evidently a Venezuelan- saying “He created a lot of hatred, a lot of resentment.” Well man, if you hate someone, whose fault is that? I guess it depends on whether they did something to deserve it.

WINS plumb “forgot” the rule from Journalism 101, about providing “balance.” But hey, Propaganda 101 says always be one-sided.

I'd love to see an objective, balanced critique of Chavez's policies and accomplishments (if any- I believe that at the very least the political mobilization of the Venezuelan majority alone is an advance in human progress) anywhere in the U.S. media. But that is like looking for a needle in a haystack. There may be one in there somewhere- good luck finding it. (Hint: don't waste your time looking for it in the self-appointed “newspaper of record,” the New York Times. They've had it in for Chavez since Day One. Others have documented this well, such as the people at fair.org. Or you could go the NYT online and read their shit. I've had the misfortune to do that for years.)

So Chavez, dead at 58 from cancer. Now, did the CIA give him that cancer? Very possibly. With the available information, it is impossible to rule that in or out, rationally. What seems obvious is that it was a form of cancer guaranteed to be lethal from the outset. Even from the beginning two years ago, when the cancer became publicly known, the prognosis appeared poor. Despite the attempts of the Chavez regime to obfuscate the details, this is how it seemed to me.

But that question will never be taken up by the capitalist propaganda system. Except if it generates a certain level of interest among “conspiracy theorists” (aka “kooks). Then the system will deign to notice the question and ridicule it, without actually engaging with it either factually or logically. This might include speculation as to the weird psychological problems of people who are attracted to such crazy ideas. (Perhaps they should do as the Soviet Union did, and lock up people with “crazy” political thoughts in mental “hospitals.” Why not? They've already called them nuts. Locking them up would be the next logical step.)

I'm not a particular fan of Chavez. I believe Venezuela's majority, who are poor, need a government that serves their interests. Chavez tried, but he wasn't very competent in the realm of policy, it seems. While his showmanship and extroversion were necessary to inspire people and get them to follow him as a leader, the downside was the creation of a personality cult and the absence of a strong movement and organizational structure that is guaranteed to survive his death. He would have needed a deeper understanding of economics and politics to be truly successful. In short, it would practically take a superman/woman, a perfect person, to overcome the obstacles to progress put in place by the existing social order there, backed by a global economic-political power system. (Now that Chavez is dead, get ready for increased attempts at subversion by the rich and the reactionaries there, in league with the U.S., the global patron of those types.) Also some of the alliances of convenience Chavez made with the likes of the Iranian regime, while perhaps necessary as a defense against the hostile U.S. and its Euro-lackeys et al, provokes moral queasiness in me.

But his ties with Cuba (and Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Nicaragua) are fine and completely justified on the other hand, and are based on genuine ideological and political affinity. Yes, Cuba is a one-party oligarchy. But Cuba is such a long-standing victim of the U.S. that it has to get a pass on its undesirable political system. And the Castros are far and away the most benign dictators in Latin America, ever. It's the only Latin America dictatorship without death squads, for example. And in all the anti-Cuban propaganda in the U.S. media over the years, I don't see descriptions of horrible torture, as is the case in every other Latin dictatorship. (Have there been stories of people dying under torture in Cuba, as they have under U.S. torture during the never-ending “war on terror”? The U.S. media would be waving such stories like bloody flags if they existed.)

Colombia, today, in which the murder of union organizers and many others (lawyers, activists, peasants, whoever) is still routine and ubiquitous, is far, far worse than Cuba in human rights terms. Yet Colombia's government is beloved by the U.S. media and BBC, among others. (Those media reflect the political and ideological alignment of their respective governments in matters of foreign policy, not 100%, but 90-95%.)

In terms of economics Cuba would function better with more small-scale entrepreneurship. More capitalism, sure.

But I'm not sure that should even be called “capitalism.” There have been merchants trading, buying, and selling goods and services for millennia. Small-scale independent farming has co-existed with various forms of serfdom for ages. Yet “capitalism” as a system is commonly dated as only a few centuries old. Perhaps the Cuban Communist Party is overly allergic to anything having to do with making a profit. I don't think there's anything wrong with people accumulating some wealth. There's something wrong with people accumulating grotesque amounts of wealth (and power), like billionaires, for example. There's something wrong when 400 people on a magazine list (Forbes) control two trillion dollars of wealth, while tens of millions of others struggle in unnecessary economic insecurity. 

But now we're wandering off the topic of BBC/New Yorker propaganda. Propaganda that is obviously ideologically motivated. The ideology in turn is designed to defend, protect,and uphold the economic interests of billionaires, multi-millionaires, and the large corporations that are the vehicles of the ruling economic class, against all challenges, actual and potential.

Yes, we wandered off the topic there, but I believe the scenic detour was edifying in heuristic terms, don't you agree?

1. One might argue that Obama is hypocritical many a time. No, he's cynical. A hypocrite cons himself. Obama is a conscious manipulator and liar. For example, when he prattles on about global warming, and then promotes more fossil fuel consumption, he's being cynical.

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

Statement of President Obama on the Death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

At this challenging time of President Hugo Chavez’s passing, the United States reaffirms its support for the Venezuelan people and its interest in developing a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government. As Venezuela begins a new chapter in its history, the United States remains committed to policies that promote democratic principles, the rule of law, and respect for human rights.

[http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/03/05/statement-president-obama-death-venezuelan-president-hugo-chavez]

Just take a look at the U.S.' murderous policies in Honduras, Colombia, Bahrain, and scores of other nations to see what unadulterated, cynical balderdash that last sentence is.

As far as U.S. “support for the Venezuelan people” goes, if the word rich were added before people, then it would be an honest assertion.

Here's a timely coincidence: Aljazeera has a program on their website dated today about Operation Condor. Kissinger gave the global terrorist murderers a green light, which led directly to the murders of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in D.C., among other victims.

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2013/03/2013367461442124.html

Media Marching Orders For The Day: All Hail The Pope!

Orders for the week, actually.

Now, is it a newsworthy event? Of course it is. What is out of whack is the amount of “coverage,” and since there are hardly any facts to report, they're stretching this story like Turkish Taffy to fill all that time with two facts: 1) the “Pope” is resigning, and 2) the “Cardinals” will pick a successor. (“Who will it be? We don't know! is the breathless trope endless repeated to stretch that tiny fact to fill loads of air and print space.)

Most shows on NPR dedicated to Pope palaver.

Bogus claim of “One Billion Catholics,” repeated uncritically. (1) (Sounds like the tally kept by a certain hamburger chain, only a lot less reliable.) Where does this number come from? No doubt the CC (Catholic Church) itself. I would bet it is highly exaggerated, and even if technically accurate- anyone who goes to “Mass” once a year being counted as a member, say- very misleading. We're told, for example, that most U.S. Catholics don't even obey the Church's “teachings” on birth control, for example. (Imagine, a gang of pedophiles and alleged male virgins “teaching” anyone else about sex. Of course, by “teach,” they mean “order.” It's a dictate, under threat of burning in eternal hellfire for disobedience. Unless you “confess” to a priest. Imagine telling a priest intimate details of your sexual relations! What kind of idiots are Catholics, anyway? Of course, forcing people to reveal intimacies is a standard control technique of cults. Then there's abortion- I'm sure that no Catholic has ever had an abortion, aren't you?)

The media has been assiduously whitewashing his role as protector of pedophiles. In fact, does just the opposite, claiming he was good on it. “Better than John Paul” in some unspecified way. Crap. He's spent years as part of the Vatican pedophile protection racket, going back to his days in Germany.

NPR put on some fool who was molested as a child by a priest and who was chumped by the Pope, to gush that the Pope “gets it.” This fool was obviously carefully selected by the CC to meet with the Pope. This idiot is still a loyal Catholic, apparently. NPR willingly made itself a tool of Church propaganda in the way it reported this insignificant meeting, at which apparently all that happened was that the Pope got to “feel the man's pain” (as we now say, thanks to a certain slippery politician who was President of the U.S. between the reigns of Bush the Elder and Bush the Younger). Totally gratuitous. NPR goes above and beyond the media's self-assigned duty to protect Roman Catholicism, bending over backwards to rehabilitate the CC- even as the Vatican still stonewalls and evades responsibility for its massive sexual crimes.

As I started writing this at a little before 4:30 in the morning last week (EST), I turn on the BBC to get some news. Instead of news, they're doing exactly what I'm writing about- vague, pointless speculation. (“Who do you think is likely” to be the next Pope? Answer: I dunno. And is the ex-Pope going to have influence? A: Dunno, but I expect so. Q: What about sexual politics under the new unknown Pope? And so on, worthless empty musings.)

Amid all the chatter about the quitting Pope's future living quarters, the media hacks omit the fact that by hiding out in the Vatican, he evades lawsuits against himself.

Of course, this news is actually unimportant, because another reactionary will be appointed (or anointed, if you want to semi-sanctify this shit) as Godfather of Catholicism. Nothing is going to change, contrary to the hopeful, idle speculation of some. On the other hand, the media is currently virtually ignoring lot of more significant news around the world. One worth mentioning: Baby Doc Duvalier is semi-embroiled in court in Haiti.

The establishment media has always done its utmost to promote and protect the Roman CC. It's easy to guess their motive. The CC is a bulwark of reaction. So that dovetails nicely with the interests of the corporate media and big business. The three have been allied throughout the world for over a century now. They're also united in hatred of their common enemies, “communism” (Bolshevik socialism) and socialism (variously understood). The two terms are also often conflated.

1) Aljazeera apparently couldn't decide if it was 1 billion or 1.2 billion, using both numbers within seconds of each other in a single broadcast.