Manufacturing Consent – Page 4

Excusing dictatorships the liberal media way

Published on June 30, 2009

Sadly No is surprised and upset that the Wall Street Journal would defend the military coup in Honduras:

It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.

But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya’s abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.

A far cry from their treatment of the Iranian elections in which its editorial opinion seems firmly on the side of the protestors and their demands for free and fair elections. How come the Wall Street Journal is so concerned about Iranian democracy but so cavalier about the Hondurian coup?

Simple. Iran is an enemy of the US and is therefore safe to attack. Honduras is an ally and what happened there has not be done without at least some level of support or approval from the US government, if not necessarily any official support. It’s an old, old tradition Mary O’Grady engaged in, this whitewashing of a military coup. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Argentine; every time the US government meddled in a South American country or allowed its military to thwart a nascent democracy, the newspapers of record were there to excuse it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the “liberal” NYT or the “conservative” WSJ, every time an US supported coup happened, they helped whitewash it. Read Manufacturing Consent, read Killing Hope, dig through the newspaper archives and you’ll find the same thing over and over again.

And liberals fall for it everytime.

(Crossposted at Prog Gold.)

The Iranian elections

Published on June 14, 20092 Comments

Like Jamie I don’t share the Foreign Policy magazine’s experts certainty that the Iranian elections were rigged. Iran has a reasonable reputation for holding honest elections, even if they are, as Jamie puts it “engineered to produce the right results from the outset through candidate selection and so on”. Western experts and expat Iranians may have been convinced that Ahmadinejad was to be wiped from the pages of time and see the failure of this as evidence of voting fraud, but that doesn’t mean reality has to conform to their wishes.

The reason expert opinion has gotten it so wrong it seems to me is not fraud, but the myopia with which western news media and experts approach Iran: through the prism of US foreign policy. Iran is only in the news whenever its supposed nuclear weapons programme is brought to our attention again, or it’s accused of meddling in Iraq or Afghanistan. In the same way Ahmadinejad is only quoted when he says something stupid about the Holocaust or is supposed to threaten Israel with extinction again. We only get to see Iran as a menace and Ahmadinejad as a clown, with nobody really covering the reality of Iran’s internal politics.

So we get an incredible distorted view of Iran and Ahmadinejad and because we don’t like him we automatically assume this is the default view in Iran as well. But as Splinty points out, in the country itself he has a quite different reputation; he may not be liked by the western-orientated middle class, but he’s a friend of the poor and the peasants and they vote too.

And of course, expecting Iranians to vote according to our views of their foreign policy is as absurd as to have expected the last Dutch elections to have been decided on the withdrawal of Dutch troops from Iraq.

Congratulations North Korea

Published on May 25, 20096 Comments

mushroom cloud

…For showing your nuclear arsenal is as powerful as America’s was in 1945… That’ll show them.

But seriously, is it too much to ask that for once, the news coverage of these events does not follow the well worn, wrong paths in which everything is looked at through the point of view of “the west”, anything North Korea does is dangerous and irrational, a threat to world peace and only lip service is paid to the context in which North Korea has decided on building a nuclear arsenal, that this is in fact a rational strategy on their part? And would it kill journalists to every now and then mention the greatest “rogue” nuclear power in the world, Israel, which still does not admit to owning nuclear weapons but is thought to have an arsenal of in the hundreds? I won’t mind if nobody mentions the inconsiderate fact that the sole nuclear power to have ever used the weapon in anger is that bastion of liberty and justice, America itself and that it used the atom bomb largely as a warning against the USSR?

North Korea, even though it is an opressive dictatorship, has valid reasons to arm itself with the sole weapons to command the respect of the world’s sole superpower. It can’t really trust its supposed superiority in conventional weapons (and in any case, they still think the Mig-21 is a frontline fighter and upgunned T-55s a match for modern tanks) to deter South Korea and the US from attacking it, but the prospect of a nuclear battlefield still scares America enough to deter it from doing anything drastic. Again and again in the last two decades the US has shown North Korea it will only take it seriously if it rattles the nuclear sabre. Can we blame it then for doing so?

Chipping away at Stone

Published on May 23, 2009

It’s downright fitting that it’s Commentary Magazine (or what’s left of it), that Cold War CIA warhorse, that’s started the latest round of retroactive redbaiting, with the claim that I. F. Stone was a Soviet agent. Despite the end of the Cold War being almost twenty years behind us, redbaiting s still alive and well in America, with claims like this still having the potential to ruin reputations.

Few people my age or younger will have more than a vague idea who I. F. Stone was, but many of the people he annoyed in his lifetime are still around and more than willing to take their revenge posthumously. As you can see from the Wikipedia article linked above, already the allegations of espionage take up most of the space. Just another little rewrite of history in which an independent leftwing critic of America is turned into a two dimensional Soviet stooge. It may not look important in the great scheme of things, but its all part of the continuing marginalisation of critics of American foreign policy. Smear the man and you smear his reporting; obviously you can’t trust what a commie spy wrote about America’s motives for fighting the Korean War. Stone’s reputation needs to be defended, and I’m glad to see Brad Delong and other liberals do so, even if their defence can be as wrong as the original redbaiting, as it operates on the same flawed assumptions that anybody who was supportive of the USSR was ignorant, wrong or a traitor, but that there are special circumstances that can excuse this support.

Now I called Commentary a CIA warhorse because while it may be a liberal or even leftist magazine, many of its more influential writers and editors (e.g. Irving Kristol and Sidney Hook) have been deeply involved in the CIA’s Cold War Kulturkamp, as documented in Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper and elsewhere. As part of the socalled “anticommunist left” Commentary was as much an agent of the CIA as Stone is accused of being of the KGB.

The real crime I. F. Stone committed therefore was not that he may or may not have supported a brutal and ruthless regime that oppressed millions of its citizens and brutally subjugated its neighbours, but that he may have supported the wrong one. It doesn’t matter whether or not Stone was a supporter of the USSR, as his influence on that country was nihil: what mattered was that he was critical of his own country and its rulers.

Socalled respectable journalists meanwhile can always be found cheerleading the latest US invasion of a third world country, the latest dictator installed by the CIA to “fight communism” (or “terrorism”) or the latest interference in a supposedly sovereign country’s elections for the sake of “democracy”, happily excusing murder, rape, torture or worse, but since they’re on the right side they’re rarely held to account. A journalist like Judith Miller could lie and lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for years before she finally “retired”.

For anybody who doesn’t operate on the principle of “my country, right or wrong”, it’s obvious that the behaviour of Miller and generations of journalists like her, enabling and supporting American imperialism is much worse than what somebody like Stone could ever do. We shouldn’t excuse Stone for his allegiance as pillorate his critics for supporting a country that has been and still is a far greater menace.