Manufacturing consent – Page 24

“These Are Not The Terrorists You’re Looking For..”

Published on April 28, 20072 Comments

Europol, the EU’s transnational police force, has released its first report tracking terrorism incidents and arrests within the EU and it makes very interesting reading (.pdf), especially when you compare the published figures against the perception of a Europe-wide Islamist terrorist conspiracy that’s projected by governmental spin and media presentation.

For instance, did you know that of 498 terrorist incidents reported by EU states in 2006, only 3 were Islamist-terrorism related?

Along with the failed terrorist attack that took place in Germany, Denmark and the UK each reported one attempted terrorist attack in 2006

The collected Europol data for October-December 2005 and for 2006 give a total of 549 attacks, 128 terrorist activities, 810 arrested suspects and 303 trials in the EU. From the executive summary of the report:

.In 2006, separatist terrorists carried out 424 attacks in the EU.

[…]

In 2006, left-wing and anarchist terrorists carried out 55 attacks in the EU.

[…]

Along with the failed terrorist attack that took place in Germany, Denmark and the UK each reported one attempted terrorist attack in 2006

[…]

A total of 706 individuals suspected of terrorism offences were arrested in 15 Member States in 2006. Investigations into Islamist terrorism are clearly a priority for Member States’ law enforcement as demonstrated by the number of arrested suspects reported by Member States. Half of all the terrorism arrests were related to Islamist terrorism.

Is it just me or is there an assymetry between the number of arrests and the actual incidence of Islamist terrorism? I could make any number of cheap political points about these figures but why bother, when several jump out right away by themselves, with very little coaxing?

But there are problems with the figures. This report, like any consensus report produced by the EU, is a creation of political manipulation and spin by member nations, despite the best attempts of the compilers. In the end the member countries validated their own data and picked and chose what they would release, despite having signed up to an agreed monitoring protocol.

For example, while all had lots to say on Islamist terrorism and an extensive reporting and monitoring process is in place, despite such terrorism’s admittedly low occurrence, right wing and neonazi activities are barely mentioned. That’s because some member states reported neonazi activity as terrorist and some didn’t:

Right-Wing Terrorism:

right-wing violence is mainly investigated as right-wing extremism and not as right-wing terrorism. Although violent acts perpetrated by right-wing extremists and terrorists may appear sporadic and situational, right-wing extremist activities are organised and transnational. For instance, details regarding possible targets are collected and disseminated on the Internet.

Exactly. People I know have been targeted in this way so I’m much less worried about some mythical threat from Al-Qaeda as embodied by some anonymous woman in a burqa than I am of home grown rightwing nutters in Lonsdale t-shirts and docs.

But neo-nazism and Islamism are political ideologies cut from the same authoritarian, repressive and separatist cloth, so why is the one reported and investigated but not the other? Why so many more arrests on suspicion of Moslems, and so little reporting on credible neonazi terrorist plots?

Might it have something to do with the number of quiet supporters, passive collaborationists and outright denialists – who’d rather see a threat from brown-skinned ‘others’ than from their compatriots – within the institutions of the member states and in the .eu-wide media?

So many in Europe, while condemning neo-nazism out of one side of their mouths, with the other will support the soft apologists and enablers of this kind of hatred, people like Geert Wilders or the late Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands or the right-wing theocrat Kuzcinski brothers in Poland.

Here’s one example of that passive collaborationism in the media, from Dutch writer Margriet De Moor:

Neo-Nazi movements to be taken seriously, like the ones in Germany, are practically non-existent in the Netherlands.

Non existent? No supporters? Oh, really?

Police raids led to arrest of neo-Nazis and arms finds

Serving soldiers amongst suspects
Geert Cool, LSP/MAS (CWI Belgium)

Last Thursday, after a raid by the Belgian police, 17 activists from the Neo-Nazi movement, ‘Blood & Honour’, were arrested. Amongst those held were 10 Belgian army professional soldiers. The next day, two more neo-Nazis were arrested. The main suspects organised a fascist grouping inside the army, whose activities included weekend “terrorist” training camps and trading arms.

Those arrested are part of a section of Blood & Honour that go under the name, ‘Bloed Bodem Eer Trouw’ (BBET; Blood, Soil, Honour, Fidelity). There are two different groupings using the name Blood & Honour in Flanders, both linked to rival international groupings. The Blood & Honour group that was targeted by the police regularly use the name of its paper, ‘BBET’, as its public face.

Last Thursday, when police made the raids, they found over 100 high-tech weapons, including sophisticated weapons of war. On Friday, two more raids followed, in which another 100 pistols and machine guns were recovered. The police also discovered a large quantity of munitions, explosives and a sophisticated bomb. There was even a model letter claiming responsibility for terrorist attacks.

Although the Belgian police say the group did not have detailed plans to use the weaponry, one of those arrested declared publicly that the group did have the intention to strike against the state, migrants and radical left organisations. In an interview on television, this suspect said members of the security services, soldiers in the army and politicians would be involved in the planning and execution of these plans.

No right wing terrorism? Conspiracies like the above and the Lancashire right-wing bomb plot I referred to earlier are just the visble tip of potentially viciously violent and Europe-wide rightwing terrorist movement.

I’m certainly not suggesting there is no threat from Islamist terrorism in Europe; that would be patently absurd, given what happened in London and Madrid.

What I am saying is that, as so many times before, the facts are being fixed around the policy. While our leaders ramp up the paranoia and suspicion of the Moslems in our midst and present the available data to make it appear our biggest threat is from ‘outsiders’ (thus validating the ‘war on terror’ propaganda and rhetoric we’ve been subjected to since 2001) quietly the wannabe stormtroopers on the inside are regrouping.

Comment of The Day – Several Days Late and Several Dollars Short

Published on April 26, 2007

Naomi Wolf’s Guardian article “Fascist America, in 10 easy steps” has been riding high at the top of the paper’s most-read list and has been being feverishly linked to and discussed widely on US liberal blogs. Unsurprisingly so, as it ticks all the boxes and provides the perfect predigested narrative for what Bushco has been up to since ‘elected’. Simple, they’ve been putting in place planned fascism.

Wolf is not exactly what you’d call left-wing; rather she’s in the van of the soft liberal Democrat-ism that enabled Bush in the first place. So why the cries of fascism now? She took her time noticing. and is she actually sincere, or is it more Dem triangulation?

Leninology:

If you ask me, it’s part of this ‘Anyone But Bush’ politics that is destroying the American left and drawing the antiwar movement into the frigid Democratic Party graveyard. The politics of MoveOn.org, Howard Dean’s fan club, and such alignments, are to divert mass disaffection with Bush’s wars into the mainstream of the Democratic Party

Commenter Spartan Weakling takes that view further:

Playing the Fascist Card is calling for the disastrous Popular Front against it: working class organisations will HAVE TO “ally” themselves (read: support without question) with all “progressive” political forces, that is, who seek to return to the “previous” state of political status quo, being oh so much better than the current one (now christened “fascism”).

Therefore, the peace movement, the veterans, the families of the soldiers, the workers who pay for the war MUST come under the leadership of the Democrats (that progressive force in US politics), or else… FASCISM!!! And you don’t want to support FASCISM do you? Then shut up and come under the leadership of the radical (lol) bourgeoisie, because FASCISM!, and otherwise FASCISM!, and if you don’t then FASCISM! and anything else (read: the current state of affairs with no substantial change) is so much better than FASCISM! what’s the matter with you people.

So for me, it’s once again the question of the Popular Front vs the United Front, on which Trotsky had rather A LOT to say…

Now I don’t disagree with Wolf that the framework for fascism is in place and ready to roll, when it so patently is. I don’t disagree on the facts; indeed it’s us left-wing bloggers that have made sure those facts came to light. We’ve been warning of creeping US fascism on this blog since we started in 2001, and before, and there’s thousands of others just like us who’ve been doing the same.

The current US political situation didn’t just happen. Extremists need passive collaborators, or at the very least people too self-absorbed to notice anything that does not directly affect them, to do their nefarious work and Wolf was one, part of the charmed circle of the ‘feminist’ political media establishment, the one that trumpets free markets and the corporate state as empowering for all women despite the empirical evidence. She’s as much a Democratic political operative as she is a writer:

Wolf was involved in Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election bid where she brainstormed with the Clinton-Gore team about ways to reach “soccer moms” and other female voters.

During Al Gore’s unsuccessful bid for the 2000 US presidency, Wolf was hired as a consultant to target female voters, reprising her role in the Clinton campaign. Wolf’s ideas and participation in the Gore campaign generated considerable media coverage and criticism. According to a report by Michael Duffy in Time Magazine, “Wolf [was] paid a salary of $15,000 a month…in exchange for advice on everything from how to win the women’s vote to shirt-and-tie combinations.” This article was the original source of the widely reported claim that Wolf was responsible for Gore’s “three-buttoned, earth-toned look.” The Duffy article did not mention “earth tones.” The Time article and others also claimed that Wolf had developed the idea that Gore is “a beta male who needs to take on the alpha male in the Oval Office”.

In an interview with Melinda Henneberger in the New York Times, Wolf denied ever advising Gore on his wardrobe. Wolf herself claimed she mentioned the term “alpha male” only once in passing and that “[it] was just a truism, something the pundits had been saying for months, that the vice president is in a supportive role and the President is in an initiatory role…I used those terms as shorthand in talking about the difference in their job descriptions.”

It’s all very well Wolf standing up at this too-late stage in a foreign newspaper and saying this, but where was she when it really mattered, when this could have been nipped in the bud? When Alito was up for confirmation, for example? Too busy pushing her career of telling us ordinary women what failures we are compared to her and her privileged sisters, that’s where.

Did it never once occur to Wolf that the reason she made so much money and did so well pushing her personal empowerment agenda through her books is because it suits the long-term propaganda purposes of the very institutions, individuals and organisations she now accuses of enabling fascism?

Oh, how I loathe accommodationist women.

The Case For Shunning

Published on April 24, 2007

Image from Flickr

A principled disagreement has arisen at Sadly, No over the hiring of Matt Yglesias by the Atlantic magazine, a subject which, although riveting to a minority, is barely a blip on the radar in the larger scheme of things. In the course of the back and forth, though, HTML Mencken nails the much wider and more important point:

[…]

You know who doesn’t deserve being paid for their opinion? Just out of principle? Anyone anywhere who was for the Iraq War for whatever amount of time. Period. I mean, that’s a fucking minimum. And Matt Yglesias doesn’t meet it.

And why Matt Yglesias got that one wrong — again, a very very fucking hard thing to get wrong — isn’t because he’s precisely not a polymath — though real polymaths who ought to be paid for their opinion, people like John Emerson or even Brad DeLong, got Iraq right. It’s because his first instinct is accomodation with the Right; it’s because his political judgement was forged post-Clinton, thus he was completely naive to the facts of innate wingnut depravity. I suspect he thought of the Kosovo operation as the rule rather than an exception; for such bovine people, the sicky-sweet neocon catchphrase “I believe America is a force for good in the world” functioned as a cattlecall. Of course some of us could recognize imperialism’s euphemisms when we heard them; for those who couldn’t, well … it doesn’t really make any difference whether it was from ignorance or stupidity. Fuck ‘em. They need to spend a long time in the journalistic wilderness before they again deserve serious attention.

Iraq is too important to forgive and forget the stupid fucking idiots who got it wrong (and often, not only got it wrong, but concentrated on attacking those who got it right). It’s the touchstone of a pundit’s political judgement.

[…]

Abso-fucking-lutely.

I’d add a corollary to that: it’s also a touchstone of a pundit’s personal moral judgement if she or he chooses to hang out and socialise with people who enabled and supported the Iraq invasion and occupation.

At the moment in Washington there’s more social stigma attached to having a child at the wrong preschool than there is to enabling mass murder, world disaster and institutional thievery on the grandest-ever scale.

Comment of The Day: French Framing

Published on April 23, 20072 Comments

Democracy, though sickly and a bit nauseous from repeated blows to civil liberties, is not yet dead in Europe: 85% of the electorate, a tribute to banlieues activism, came out in France yesterday and made a statement – no more wishy washy middle. France seems to want a clear choice between neoliberalism or socialism; ether more of the Blair and Bush-led globalisation agenda, or a President that thinks that ‘liberte, egalite, fraternite’ applies to more than just middle-aged white men with a comfy bank balance.

No prizes for guessing which candidate I prefer; although my preference is irrelevant given that I can’t vote there, nevertheless I think it would be a triumph for all European women should the French elect a female socialist president at the heart of the ‘old’ EU.

But now the election will move into a whole new phase. The stakes get much higher. In comments to Peter Preston’s Guardian article on the election this morning, a French commenter points out the election has wider implications – that it’s not just a left-right battle, but a question of the basic legitimacy of public leftwing ideas:

Being french, I found this article quit interesting, but even more the reactions some people have posted here. Indeed, france does have some things it can be proud of (good health care, excellent rail network, free education – from primary school to university – , and state subventions to sport, art, environmental groups, …), and of course some bad things that go with it (people abusing the health system creating a great debt, a very heavy bureaucracy, many taxs that few people understand). But it is true that this “France in a state of decline” narrative is indeed the corporate media’s ploy to break what was left of, not the socialist party, but the credibility of left wing policies. We hear all the time that Mrs Royal has no program, but that is not true. She has solid a program, many ideas,not all brilliant, but dominantly a pragmatic left wing.

But medias today spend their time telling us that we can be left wing untill we are 30 year’s old, but then, “please, be serious, a globalized society doesn’t have room for such nonsense. Get back to work and stop being childish”. Because problems in our welfare system do exist, we are made to believe that any welfare system is doomed to faliure. Indeed corporations big and small, and individuals do abuse of this system, but it does not mean that this system is a bad one, that it couldn’t be repaired. When your car has a flat wheel (or even two flat wheels), do you just scrap the car ? By ridiculizing the system, corporation and media are just slowly killing the idea that people can be left wing, by promoting a new idealic society of which their corporations would be at the center making the money and dictating their policies. This election isn’t just an election between RIGHT and LEFT, it is an election where the existence and legitimacy of LEFT ideas are at stake.”

Framing affects everything we see in the media. There is little reported in any media that is not intermediated by another person in some way even if it’s only uploading a clip. Someone still chose that clip. They framed the picture you see.

You cannot ever completely exclude the editorial voice, no matter how hard you try. Because worldwide media as currently constituted is corporate and profit making in structure, its larger editorial voice is also corporatist and the information put out is framed to support the making of those profits. To do otherwise would be fiscally irresponsible and negligent towards the shareholders: sensation sells more than fluffy bunnies and hope so that’s the course the media follows.

Thus the narrative of permanent decline that suffuses everything we read and hear – we’re under attack, an amorphous ‘they’ is trying.to take our stuff, we’re being swamped, invaded… unimporant threats are hyped into planetwide scourges while imporant yet dull, worthy, complicated yet important issues are trivialised or go unreported.

The commenter has spotted the biggest frame of all in modern western democratic politics in action. It’s been the ur-narrative of all western politics since the industrial revolution and the concomitant rise of the newspaper barons, advertising and then the PR industry. The philosophy is so all pervasive that it was built in to EU institutions too.

Capitalism is not only the best way, it’s the only way. The Free Market is a pure and ineluctable product of nature, like sunlight or a mother’s love, or butterflies’ wings. Capitalism’s been ordained by God to make all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Anyone who says otherwise is a dangerous lunatic and one of the amorphous ‘they’ trying to take our stuff.

So, put very crudely, goes the story and so goes the editorial direction of the US and European corporate media-at-large.

Now, at least in France, the mainstream media will have to engage publicly with actual socialist politics again. That certainly seems to be what the public want – not just, as in the UK, a non-choice between one bunch of incompetent neoliberals and another but a proper public debate and a real choice between ideological directions for the country.

But the socialists had better be on the ball media-wise and not give their usual ‘our ideas will shine through because they’re right’, naive tv and radio performance. In Spain and the Netherlands socialist parties have shown that it’s perfectly possible to handle the media on your terms and be elected on principled positions. I hope the French socialists are ready for this coming campaign – because it’s not just Sarko v Sego now, it’s Sarkozy and the whole media and cultural establishment’s framing v Segolene.