Manufacturing consent – Page 25

I See You Baby, Kicking That Ass

Published on April 18, 20073 Comments

For a Saudi woman to expose the hollow arguments of the Saudi patriarchy head-to-head on pan-Arab television is a very brave thing to do, not just morally but physically. Saudi women have been imprisoned, tortured and executed for much less.

Braver still is to use the oppressor’s own ammunition against him – and win. Saudi newscaster Buthayner Nasser is seen here in a televised debate about women’s role in public life and on tv, very publicly demolishing a male Saudi cleric’s arguments, and doing it in such a Koranically-based, logical and respectful yet totally kickass way that he can make no coherent response.

I defy you to watch this and not feel inspired.

[H/T Tenessse Guerilla Women]

Both those who see the mass of Saudi women as mere mobile, silent draperies with no voices or opinions and those who think that any feminist Moslem woman must ipso facto be automatically pro-western and pro-secular will be much enlightened and informed. Maybe it will also enlighten those self-righteous western feminists who think that they and they alone are the holy keepers of the precious feminist flame and that Moslem women are an ignorant amorphous mass just hanging around waiting to be liberated by the eventual triumph of western cultural values. There are many more ways to freedom than through the East Coast intelligentsia.

The original clip can be found here and was translated and subtitled by the Middle East Media Research Institute, which appears so far s I can tell to be a thoroughly worthy organisation in need of support.

(MEMRI) explores the Middle East through the region’s media. MEMRI bridges the language gap which exists between the West and the Middle East, providing timely translations of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish media, as well as original analysis of political, ideological, intellectual, social, cultural, and religious trends in the Middle East.

They also have a great back catalogue of subtitled clips from Middle Eastern current affairs and news programmes here, well worth looking at.

UPDATE

Good job I qualified that last statement with a “so far as I know” wasn’t it? From comments:

steve Says:

April 18th, 2007 at 8:01 am

Um. MEMRI are the guys whose “translation” was responsible for the whole Apple/Mecca storm in a teacup last year: for a neutral organisation, it’s quite surprising how often their translations make Arabs look bad and Israelis good….
Martin Wisse Says:

April 18th, 2007 at 12:02 pm

Actually, they have long been accused off being a crypto-zionist organisation and there have been times when their translations were …less than faithful to the original, shall we say?

I stand corrected.

Making Racism Normal

Published on April 17, 2007

I missed this on Sunday so thanks to No More Mr Nice Blog for pointing to this post by Phil Nugent which neatly puts the whole Imus kerfuffle, that on the face of it seems so insular and trivial (who listened anyway?), into the necessary historical context as an integral stage of the process of the absorption of barely-disguised racist right wing rhetoric into the common daily culture, a process that’s been aided and abetted by some of the most well-known names in US politics and media.

[…]

When someone shows himself to be a “real” racist, he’s stripped of his epaulets and driven from the fort. Unfortunately, in public life, you have to practically be filmed burning a cross in front of a black church and waving to the camera to be tagged as a “real” racist. If you protested the Vietnam War, you’re going to be explaining and even apologizing for it to your dying day, but there are plenty of people who voted against civil rights legislation in the 1960s–an act that you might think would pretty clearly and unambiguously stamp you as maybe not being, as Don Imus says, “a good person”– who have been allowed to go on to long, respectable political careers. People like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were held by the Beltway not to be racists because, well, because they just couldn’t be–they were duly elected politicians, so the thought was too morbid to be seriously considered. If necessary, apologies for anything they’d done that might give one pause would be fabricated on their behalf. After Trent Lott became Minority Leader last year, returning to prominence after the fall from grace that resulted from his kissing Strom Thurmond’s warty ass on the occasion of the old shitkicker’s unearned centennial, many in the media insisted that Lott had, of course, apologized for those remarks, though as far as I can determine, all he’d done was repeatedly say that he was sorry that so many mean people had misrepresented his sweet remarks to a nice old orange-haired man on his birthday. Lott, as his recent memoir demonstrates, is typical of the kind of Southerner who doesn’t think he’s a racist and would have apoplexy if anyone suggested that he is, but who still disapproves of the government’s role in implementing desegregation; if you ask him, in the right setting in front of the right tobacco-juice-stained crowd, he’ll be happy to explain that, while he’s happy as a clam that whites and blacks can share the same drinking fountain in Mississippi now, it was a dastardly act for the gummint to force all those good Mississippians to do what they’d never done before but would have been delighted to do, of their own free will, at some point. It’s just a shame that the mean ol’ gummint made them do it, thus muddying the issue. As a child in Mississippi in the 1970s, I grew up hearing this line of manure from the local grown-ups, who would apply it to everything from the minimum wage to the Clean Water Act to the attempt to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. By forcing them to do the obvious right thing, gummint was leaning on the common people, and it wasn’t fair. Heck, the worst thing about it was the suggestion that they had to be forced, by law, to do the obvious decent thing. It was true they’d never done it before, but they had been planning to get around to it, and probably would have done it five minutes after the law had been passed, if gummint hadn’t gone and gotten its panties in a bunch. Now all they could do was bitch till the end of their days about the injustice of being forced to not lynch nigras when there was nothing good on TV and not pay their employees in shiny beads. Not that they’d have ever done those things anyway, but oh, the injustice of being told that they couldn’t do it!

It would be a very pleasant thing to be able to say that this line of self-pitying imbecility died out in the provinces and never spread to the shoe-wearing regions of the country, but Don Imus and his brothers in the talk radio stratosphere depend as much on it as the Trent Lotts of this world. The fact that he has so much in common with Trent Lott would probably sting Imus more than any realization of the no-brainer fact that he is not, in fact, “a good person,” a realization that would be quick to follow if he could ever get his rodent’s brain around the simple truth that you really have used a word even if you’ve used it in an “off-the-record conversation,” but there you are. The talk radio world, one that Imus worked hard to shape, is one where overpaid white guys who did well in the voting for the title of “Class Clown” at their respective high schools sneer at blacks, women, gays, what have you, in a dismayingly self-congratulatory tone. The self-congratulation comes not from the cleverness of their material–nobody could be that self-deluded–but from the fantasy that they’re speaking truth to power and taking on The Man by being, and here hold tight while we flash back to the thrilling days of 1993, “politically incorrect.” Their natural audience is people who hate their lives and, at least for a few minutes a day, like to imagine that they’re outlaws by listening to some peabrain on the radio make fun of, say, homeless people or the victims of the 2004 tsunami.

[…]

Like they say, read the whole thing.

Palpatine’s Progress

Published on April 15, 20074 Comments

A while back there was a lot of fuss in Australia about Dick Cheney’s entourage of imperial stormtroopers and the military clampdown that they imposed on Sydney citizen’ during his visit:

For three days and nights before Cheney arrived, army Black Hawk helicopters buzzed the Sydney CBD, ostensibly for counter-terrorism training. Several residents contacted newspapers to complain of unbearable noise. One reader told the Sydney Morning Herald: “We are … being buzzed by huge noisy helicopters flying probably only about 20 storeys up. [Five] times in an hour—we can’t hear TV, we can’t talk on the phone.”

Last night, the airspace over Sydney was closed for US Air Force Two to land, and sections of the airport were virtually “locked down”. No members of the public were permitted to enter the vicinity. Dozens of police, security officers and snipers were on the tarmac, as well as inside and outside the airport. A grey Air Force plane arrived first, carrying Cheney’s cavalcade of bulletproof black limousines and an armoured van, while at least three state police helicopters hovered above.

Cheney even pressured the .au government into changing the law so his henchmen could carry guns openly in public, which is bad enough – but a story from Sifu Tweety at The Poor Man makes it horribly clear just how obscene the VP’s arrogance is getting. Apparently Cheney is so completely paranoid that he travels in a plane inside another plane.

Airstream’s appeal seems to have few limits, and indeed a powerful world traveler recently provided proof of its persistent appeal. On a trip to Asia in February, Vice President Dick Cheney traveled in an Airstream — inside an airplane.

Mark Silva, chief of the Washington bureau of The Chicago Tribune, accompanied the vice president as the press corps’ pool print reporter. The group flew on a huge gray C-17 cargo plane that the Air Force calls the Spirit of Strom Thurmond,in honor of the late senator.

!?! Strom Thurmond?. That says so damned much…

Mr. Silva said that when he boarded he noted the familiar outline of the Airstream roof inside the vast fuselage.

What? That’s how he travels? Seriously, is Cheney trying to make himself into a cartoon supervillian? He’s like a white trash Dr. No; would it be surprising at this point if his team of doctors turned out to be sexy martial artists or dwarfs?

Pelosi gets shit for following the common sense recommendations of security professionals, and meanwhile Cheney’s rocking the turducken of air travel. When does this crappy-ass Bruckheimer movie of imperial sunset end, again? Because it’s really stupid.

By the way, I’m sure he uses the C-17 for security purposes. But seriously, the fact that he needs to travel with a small army anywhere he goes in the world doesn’t make it any easier not to see him as, well, what he is.

“The turducken of aviation”. Heh. There’s only one thing missing to make that comparison absolutely perfect.

Mr. Smith’s Not Going To Washington.

Published on April 5, 2007

“>

In comments to the Bush/Cheney shrubbery video, commenter Swan brought to my attention this article from Carpetbagger about media disinterest in the US Attorney scandal:

[…]

One should be cautious about throwing around phrases like “journalistic malpractice” casually, but for the nation’s leading news-weekly to entirely ignore the nation’s biggest political controversy, just as it’s reaching crisis mode for the White House and the Justice Department, at a minimum raises questions about the magazine’s editorial judgment.

To be fair, Time altered its publishing schedule recently, and the new issue was released today, making it practically impossible to offer any kind of meaningful coverage of yesterday’s Sampson hearings. Also, Time did report on a new poll, which at least mentions the story in passing.

But given the circumstances, it’s hard to fathom why the controversy has been given short shrift.

Indeed, there were plenty of key developments in this story earlier in the week, any and all of which would have made good copy. A senior Justice Department official has taken the 5th, Gonzales gave an unpersuasive interview on national television, Republican lawmakers are increasingly unwilling to defend the DoJ’s decision making, the White House is getting antsy, new questions have arisen every day this week about exactly what happened and why.

But Time magazine, to borrow its editor’s word, finds all of this so “uninteresting” that there’s no need to even mention it to readers.

[…]

Swan asked whether I thought it possible that there could be coercion involved.

Oh dear, you had to ask… and by the time I’d finished blathering at length about my views on US domestic spying and its purpose I realised I’d written a whole post, not a comment. So here it is, tidied up and with links added.

It’s been conclusively proven that the Bush administration has been spying internally within the US since well before 9/11. The fact that Bushco hired the former heads of the Stasi and the KGB to advise Homeland Security is also well known, and they didn’t do that out of the goodness of their hearts.

The politicisation of the organs of state control, the NSA, CIA, FBI and the Justice Department, has been going on since the beginning, as has the development of TIA, the total informational awareness programme, which was officially quashed but continues under other names and other budgets. This is no scatttergun approach, it’s being done for a purpose; it looks in certain lights like a deliberate, targeted programme of corruption and blackmail. It’s all about the practical application of power to individuals to to coerce them to circumvent pesky, inconvenient rules.

Do I think key figures in politics, the media and the civil service are being blackmailed? Duh.

Corruption and blackmail are the classic tools of non-violent repression. It’s simple – the one blackmailed is powerless and cannot report the crime for the fear of their own crime or or that of someone close to them being revealed (the latter technique, as in torture, is often the most effective) and is thus ripe for manipulation. The secret doesn’t have to be much: you just have to know which levers to pull and that’s where the spying comes in. One iill-advised phone call from a monitored phone and bingo… it doesn’t need to be blackmail either. Solve a little problem for someone and they’re beholden to you, too.

There’s also a whole swamp of corruption and favour-peddling, of which the high-profile corruption trials we’ve seen so far are just the stinking methane bubbles on top. There’s a whole lot more of the likes of Dusty Foggo’s ‘booze, broads and cigars’ parties (a classic spook honeytrap) to come out yet, for example. Such is the venality and of Republicans that most involved walked right into what was a was a classic cold war blackmail ploy – get a bunch of notables in compromising positions and record it for later use. FFS sake, they all knew Foggo was CIA… but they did it anyway. Have willy, will follow.

That happened in Washington and caught some big fish but think of all the minnows at all the other private wingnut ‘fundraising’ dinners in state capitals around the country… I expect thee’s a fair few county commissioners, state senators and school board presidents with some dirty little secrets they don’t want to come out.

Tax cheating, affairs, drug use, porn, sexual pecadillos, abortions, incest, domestic violence – just think what some of these allegedly Christian people have to hide and what they’d do to avoid being publicly denounced by their co-religionists. Cut off from wingnut welfare and the largesse of the religious right, a lot of these people would struggle to survive and they know it. That’s a massive incentive to keep in line and that’s one of the reasons why the government has been stacked with fundies, because there’s so many guilt levers you can pull and sexual buttons to press.

This sounds like a description of the US or UK media to me:

The press in **** is heavily biased in favor of the ruling party, *****. Most private newspapers also are biased in favor of the ruling party, since they in fact are not entirely “private.” Government supporters very often provide some of the financing for the “private” press, making news tipped in favor of the president and the key government positions and views. The opposition press is likewise political, in that the newspapers associated with opposition party candidates present their party perspectives and criticize the president and his party.

But no, it’s from a critical US-authored report on… Kazakhstan.

Since the days of Reagan networks and major publishers owned by right wing money have steadily promoted young conservatives through their ranks, and this cadre of journalists has always had an incestuous relationship with their counterparts in the GOP lobby firms and thinktanks, and latterly in the government itself – so much so that at times they’re hard to tell apart. They went to school together, they party and socialise together, their children go to the same schools and they belong to the same same churches. There’s a lot of leverage there.

The questions that the media, and that includes blogs, are failing to ask about US domestic spying are the simple ones – who, what, where, when and why. Yes, we know they spy, but we don’t know the specifics, other than when it’s liberals who’ve been spied on and they’ve sued.

A major figure in the mainstream media would have to be very brave to speak out and say they’ve been coerced into taking a certain line on something. To be honest don’t think there’d be any media figure who has the guts.

Oh, wouldn’t it be fantastic if it was like, all Hollywood and someone big spoke out against injustice and Bush was defeated, yay, and it all came right in the end with liberty and justice and popcorn for all?

Not gonna happen. This is a mess that can’t be tidied away, not with peak oil and a foreclosure crisis and an ecologically-driven depression looming. Even if a Democrat wins the presidency they’re going to want all the tools for repressing a rebellious populace that they can get, when faced with the aftermath of yet more Hurricane Katrinas, for example, or when the ‘lone wolves’ nurtured by the far-Right Turner Diaries and Left-Behind readers go on the rampage when they realise they have a black or a female president ..

If the Democrats win the election then a new Administration, faced with the rabid winger IEDs that the Right has placed all over local, state and national government, will want a political purge – and when they realise just what a powerful tool they’ve got on their hands in a politicised domestic spying programme they’ll be just as bad, if somewhat less incompetent, as Bushco.

This is the way it is now.