I actually spent a month in Venezuela many, many years ago, during the Chavez period. I fell in love with the country.
My friends make fun of me, maintaining that Chavez bewitched me with his songs. (He was a wonderful singer.)
What is certain is that when I stayed there, I was only a tourist. I did not have the academic or technical tools to assess social progress in the country since Chavez’ election. (Yes, he was fairly and squarely elected.) So I won’t write about “my Venezuela”. Instead I recommend a 2007 documentary film by John Pilger: The War on Democracy
When Maduro followed Chavez – and I haven’t heard Maduro sing – I was in doubt. What now? The mainstream press was describing Venezuela as a grizzly dictatorship where political opponents are routinely tortured. Venezuela has defenders, but they are not given press. The horror stories about Venezuela were such that a woman who praises Netanyahu and actually begged the USA to invade her own country was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s how bad the mainstream press is!
My point is this: Thanks to the mainstream press, we know little about Venezuela. Correction: We know nothing.
Now Maduro and his wife have been kidnapped. They are being kept in a prison somewhere in NY state, under charges that are universally understood to be absurd. I heard today that they are incommunicado. Strictly speaking, we cannot even be sure they are alive. The dismal state of US justice and of US embarrassment is now such that I would not even be surprised if they get sent to Guantanamo.
Long before I started writing this piece, I knew I was so angry that I should “keep my mouth shut”.
I shall now shut it and leave the floor to somebody who is blissfully objective and sensible and wise, and who has actually spent a couple of weeks in Caracas. In fact, he is still there. Hear what he says:
We’re just human, after all, and being human tends to mean that we side with the princess rather than with the frog. So when the princess makes a false move, all the world is up in arms, but when the frog makes a false move, we hardly notice.
A certain princess in her glass cage was probably bored; indeed she explicitly said so to her “friend” Epstein, who had, after all, served his sentence and who must have been an extraordinarily interesting man, judging from the number of highly competent people who seemed to dote on him. Moreover, Norwegian royalty is merely ceremonial, so the princess is unlikely to have had access to state secrets to pass on, unlike some of her compatriots, among them a former prime minister, a former foreign minister and the famous “diplomatic couple”, fêted in the 2021 film Oslo.
The late Mr Arafat also made a false move back in 1993 and 1995. He signed the Oslo Accords, or rather he was cajoled and/or tricked into signing the Oslo Accords. Nobody wept. On the contrary, back then, most of us rejoiced. Only after many years have some of us – far from all – understood that those accords were a masterfully infernal, backhanded deception.
Arafat failed to understand that the negotiating table itself was rigged, and he was on the menu. Most significantly, Arafat misjudged America’s role. He counted on the United States as an “honest broker”.
In essence they are both blaming the frog (Arafat was not a beautiful man, let’s face it). Until recently nobody blamed Terje Rød Larsen and Mona Juuel who are credited with having engineered the trap.
Raef Zreik, still a young and powerless Lawyer back in 1993 may have seen through the sham at the time, but all the world (and when we in the West say “all the world”, we usually mean the 12.5 % of the global population that inhabits our part of it) rejoiced. Today, almost all of us know that the US is far from an “honest broker”.
Back then, we believed that when a generation of brave American kids who had been brutally beaten demonstrating for civil rights and against the Vietnam war took charge, the US would mend its ways. The US had seen the film Missing, had listened to Arloe Guthrie, Angela Davis etc. And Clinton even played the saxophone! We rhapsodised about a new era.
Later, here in Norway, we were sure that after the disastrous Iraq war the US would finally have learnt. And again, after the financial crisis in 2008, some of us still hoped… Actually, to be fair to myself I had long since lost my illusions about the USA, not to mention Israel. But back in 1993 and 1995, I was still easily duped.
You see, there was this massacre in 1982. That was the first time, from my perspective at least, that the press was able to convey some of the horror we have regrettably grown quite used to: The Sabra and Shatila massacres. Quoting Wikipedia:
The Sabra and Shatila massacre was the 16–18 September 1982 killing of between 1,300 and 3,500 civilians—mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shias.
No matter how they turn this around in the blame game, it was and is clear to me that this was an expression of Israeli racist loathing. It became clear to me, that every Palestinian anywhere near Israel risked being exterminated. So ten years later, the Oslo Accords seemed preferable to extermination. Therefore, Prof. Zreik and Mr Al-Azzawi: don’t blame the Frog!
Blame the lionised diplomatic couple Terje Rød Larsen and Mona Juuel. Blame their employer, the Norwegian Foreign Service, who must now endure the shame of having been one of Jeffrey Epstein’s gullible targets. Please note, also, that with 12 US military bases on Norwegian soil, my country is a US vassal. If Trump “takes” Greenland and/or Iceland and/or the Svalbard archipelago, there will be nothing, nothing, we can do about it.
*** Post scriptum: I suspect that Epstein’s collusion with powerful citizens in my country (and, in the event, yours) will not be properly examined by our judiciary: It is too embarrassing. I therefore urge you to search through the enormous cache of Epstein files. It is a treasure trove, consisting mostly of worthless pennies with the occasional ingot. Sifting through files under “rod larson” I found, for instance, Epstein’s will of 29 June 2017 – since revoked: Epstein designated three executors, one of whom is Terje Rød Larsen. Nowhere in the press have I seen this piece of information. This is, as I see it, an ingot which we can use to force our authorities to come clean on their collusion with the racist state of Israel.
Once upon a time, there were few vocations prouder than that of “investigative Journalist”. Now people tell me that journalists don’t do their job properly because they are ignorant and lazy.
I fear that is not the problem. The problem is that journalists, like most people I know, including myself, need to make a living to pay the rent. They need electricity, internet, insurance… They cannot – they simply cannot afford to be fired. As anybody familiar with 19th century literature knows: prostitution is an act of desperation, not of love.
Carleton Beals (1893 –1979) was a US journalist about whom I know absolutely nothing. Nothing, I repeat, except that Wikipedia maintains he wrote “more than 45 books” and that Time Magazine called him, “the best informed and the most awkward living writer on Latin America”.
Today, there are few “awkward writers” in mainstream (i.e. State or corporate) media. True investigative journalists have had to find new homes in alternative outlets, such as Consortium News, founded by Robert Parry (1949-2018).
In 1988, Robert Parry informed the US public (in issue no. 72 of the influential magazine Foreign Policy) about the Iran-Contras scandal. By doing so, I believe he contributed to the end of the decade-long war in “America’s back yard”. Reagan was dismayed: Robert Parry and his ilk had to be stopped from meddling in matters of “national interest”, i.e. the economic interests of an infinitesimal portion of the US population. How the press was progressively gagged is a long story, but it is best told by a journalist. Who better than Robert Parry himself: The victory of perception management.
When Europeans are shocked by the current US president’s recent actions against Venezuela, ongoing actions against Greenland and Gaza and future actions against Iran, they seem to have forgotten that he is not the first nor the second King Kong. They ask: “Why on earth did Americans vote for such a clown? Why do they believe all those crazy conspiracy theories?”
Well, for one thing, not all crazy conspiracy theories are false. We now know, for instance, that there is more to the Epstein story than meets the eye, though we still don’t know just what. Moreover:
The USA is a country where the authorities still refuse to admit what many historians suspect: that the murder of President JFK was an inside job related to his “Commencement Address” to the American University three months earlier. Confer the moving statement of the 79-year-old Oliver Stone to congress on 1 April 2025.
The USA is a country that still denies that the furin cleavage site of the virus that caused Covid 19 was very unlikely to have developed naturally and that the virus was most probably leaked from a lab conducting gain of function experiments partly financed by the US government (NIH).
The USA’s healthcare record is so abominable that it lead to the tragic oxycontin drama which in turn has culminated in a grim epidemic of drug overdoses.
The USA is therefore a country whose population thinks that “you really cannot trust a word they say” – “they” being the Presidents and their mouthpieces, including the once formidable NY Times and Washington Post; including also, by the way, all state and corporate media in vassal countries in Europe.
So, with respect to Latin America, the USA has had not only one but lots of fingers in the pie almost since the very beginning. The year 1812 saw the “Patriot War”, i.e. the unsuccessful attempt to steal Florida. As a result of subsequent attempts, the USA took possession of bit by bit of what was to become the state of Florida. I suspect that US schoolchildren are taught that the inhabitants of Florida had everything to gain by becoming US citizens. That is undoubtedly Marco Rubio’s point of view, but he is not – you will admit – the average US citizen, at least not as far as wealth and health is concerned.
Nor was Ronald Reagan the first president who tried to annihilate independent Nicaragua. In 1909, US warships were sent to the area. The military intervention forced a progressive president to resign. It was a story we have seen played out umpteen times since: The Yankees didn’t like his policies, quoting Wikipedia:
… improved public education, railroads, and established steam ship lines. He also enacted constitutional rights that provided for equal rights, property guarantees, habeas corpus, compulsory vote, compulsory education, the protection of arts and industry, minority representation, and the separation of state powers.
The 1909 intervention was followed by full-scale occupation in 1912. However, the occupation was not entirely successful. A man named Augusto Cesar Sandino made life difficult for the occupants. He was assassinated by General Somoza in 1934. His example was later followed by the Sandinistas who ousted the dictator Somoza in 1979. Of course the Yankees were not pleased and provided massive assistance to the Contras.
In 1990, presumably to celebrate the Sandinistas’ defeat over the Contras and to commemorate the hero who inspired them, the film El Sandino directed by the exciting Chilean director Miguel Littin, conveyed to those of us who cared, some of the spectacular difficulties facing Latin American countries trying to shake off the grubby fingers of King Kong. As far as I have been able to ascertain, Carleton Beale was the only US journalist to interview El Sandino. Was the brave fictional US Journalist in the film modelled on him? Did Beale’s work inspire the late Robert Parry?
At any rate it was Robert Parry who informed the public about a 90-page manual written in 1983 for the Contras. Quoting Wikipedia, the Contras were taught to:
[lead] demonstrators into clashes with the authorities, to provoke riots or shootings, which lead to the killing of one or more persons, who will be seen as the martyrs; this situation should be taken advantage of immediately against the Government to create even bigger conflicts.
[and to engage in] selective use of armed force for PSYOP effect. … Carefully selected, planned targets — judges, police officials, tax collectors, etc. — may be removed for PSYOP effect in a UWOA [unconventional warfare operations area]
Do these two paragraphs remind you of more recent events, by any chance?
Like Iran and Venezuela, Nicaragua has been demonised by the Western press and plagued by economic sanctions. According to the Human Development Index it nevertheless ranks above Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador (that are not subject to sanctions).
Far be it from my intention to defend our present King Kong, but I put to you that a boss who honestly states his ghastly aims is preferable to one who cloaks them in “freedom and democracy”.
As a result of the present King Kong’s frankness, what PM Carney has just referred to as “the fiction” (of the rules-based order) has hopefully lost its “free and Democratic” veneer. Likewise, our leaders, of whom PM Carney revealed that “we” have known it was fiction “for decades“, have been exposed. Is there a glimmer of hope here?
***
I add, by way of conclusion, a link to the trailer of a Netflix documentary about another great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. He most recently made a splash when he claimed that the USA, with the assistance of Norway, carried out the sabotage of the Nord-Stream Pipeline.
I had not listened to the grand old man of political science, John Mearsheimer, for a long time when, today, I heard his recent conversation with Glenn Greenwald. What he said about the currently burning matters of Greenland, Venezuela, Iran, Gaza and Ukraine did not surprise me. His position on these topics is above all reasonable and rational – as was his initial position on Ukraine in 2015. After all, he is a “realist”. He does not pretend to know what will happen in 24 hours, but he peers into the distance and assesses the long-term effects of today’s foreign policy. With regard to Ukraine, ten years after his warnings in 2015, he has been proven right.
Due to those warnings in 2015, the Western press dropped their former star political scientist as though he were a carrier of the Bubonic Plague.
Only on one point did Mearsheimer disappoint me today, not – I repeat not – because I assume he is wrong, but because I hope he is wrong. (The distance between hope and assumption is as that between myself and the moon.) Glenn Greenwald quoted President Lula of Brazil, who claims to dream every night of “de-dollarisation”. To my chagrin, Mearsheimer told Glenn Greenwald that he did not foresee “de-dollarisation” for at least five to ten years.
John Mearsheimer is the antithesis of a vulgar man. He is eminently courteous, soft-spoken, the perfect diplomat, you might say, because he makes no secret of being in every sense an “American”, although he so deeply regrets the foreign policies espoused by his country’s administrations over the past decades.
I recommend the said conversation.
For instance, on a topic about which I, who am anything but a diplomat. howl with rage, he tells us, smiling dangerously, what he thinks will happen next:
You have this so-called cease-fire. The fact is, it’s not been a cease fire from the Israeli perspective. The Israelis have basically continued to behave as if there were no cease-fire. By the way, they’ve done the same thing in Lebanon. … and what they’ll do, they’ll engineer some crisis where they blame Hamas for a gross violation of the cease-fire and say that this is reason for Israel to go in and “finish the job”. … The Israeli goal here is to either drive all the Palestinians out of Gaza into Somaliland or Egypt or whatever or if not do that, kill them. Right? Either starve them to death or bomb them to death or some combination of the two.
The Mearsheimer smile! Paraphrasing the Israelis who refer to the Palestinians as though they were cattle, he beamed his terrifyingly benign smile at us.
Alas, even Mearsheimer cannot foresee any Armageddon for that most vile of entities, Israel. Not as long as the USA, his country, still has its fangs planted in the world economy. Yes, there are many of us who dream of de-dollarisation.
Glenn Greenwald did not question him about Europe’s growing authoritarian tendencies. I wonder why. Does Glenn Greenwald not know how bad things are here now?
One morning last year, the above appeared on one of the walls of the British Royal Court of Justice.
The authorities wasted no time having the stencil removed, leaving its shadow. And this is where we are now: Liberal Democracy.
Christmas has always been a time of make-belief. Never more so than now. Here in Oslo we have tried our best to pretend that all is normal, although there is no snow on the ground, although Trump has been threatening to occupy our neighbour Greenland and Venezuela, and although the genocide of Palestinians is continuing unabated.
I spent Christmas day with adult family – no tree, no red, green or gold baubles – what a relief! There was a fire burning in the hearth, though, which is consistent with our fantasies. And we had a delicious meal of baked trout.
For psychiatrists, police officers, mental health workers and MDs on duty over the Christmas holiday, there is nothing festive about those days and never has been. For a large number of people, the discrepancy between fact and fiction is vast. Consider the classical scene: In a block of flats, somebody starts screaming on the third floor, really screaming – man or woman – enraged, delirious. The entire neighbourhood tries to overhear the violently hurled threats, turning up the volume of the TV’s rendering of “Adeste fideles“.
There is nothing new about this.
What is new is that the screaming is heard not only from the third floor but from “our friends” in the EU, Santa Ursula and her lot. Meanwhile, our most prized “ally” with its 12 military bases on our soil was engaging in piracy in the Caribbean, so there is no reason to doubt it might make good on its promise to “take” Greenland too.
Even Norwegians, whose intake of real news is blocked in all mainstream media, get the uncanny impression that there is evil in the air, lacing the scents we have treasured for centuries: cinnamon on baked apples, cardamom in raisin bread, cloves on legs of ham, sage in turkey stuffing, or maybe rosemary for those who prefer lamb, not to mention the scent of a wood fire and of spruce. Christmas has always been a glorious festival of scents.
This year, we celebrated Christmas with an orgy of desperate consumption, as though fearing it would be our very last, and who knows: maybe it will be. If Mertz, Starmer and Santa Ursula have their way – certainly if they succeed in killing Putin – we will be embroiled in all-out-war with Russia within minutes. And that is what they want, because then the US will have to defend us, or so they hope. And then, they hope, Russia will be crucified.
Of course Mertz, Santa Ursula and Kaja Kallas won’t be sent to the front to fight. They will send us – European citizens, as they have sent Ukrainian citizens – to the meat grinder. WWI all over again. Have we not learnt?
(AI generated image)
Alas, “we”, European voters, are denied information and are hence unable to make “informed decisions”.
I have not seen “proof” that Norwegian media have explicitly been subjected to press censure . However, the very fact that there has been absolutely no discussion in the press about our military and economic support to the corrupt regime in Kiev is highly suspicious, to say the very least.
Dissent in Norway is suppressed not with criminalisation, not yet – true – but by other means, which I do not have the instruments to analyse, except that I note that social media are also used to discredit dissenting views. Those who attempt to question the official narrative in the press are instantly and viciously smeared. No arguments are offered, just defamation. Weird and definitely Orwellian.
Some people say it’s all about ingrained ancient “Russophobia”. I do not entirely agree: I maintain it’s not least about money. The rich and powerful thought they could easily put Ukraine and the frozen Russian billions in their pockets by riding on the backs of the ultra-nationalist Western Ukrainians. They were mistaken and now they are desperately indebted.
The US is trying to extricate itself, while the EU leaders and Starmer are digging in, deeper and deeper. Desperate.
So desperate are they, that they are starting to clap sanctions on European journalists and writers. Without even being charged, let alone tried, even the eminent military analyst Jacques Baud has seen his bank accounts and sources of income frozen and is banned from travelling because he has dared publicly doubt the official narrative.
Russophobia is merely a tool used in the media by the powers-that-be to legitimise their awful campaigns, now as in the past.
Most wars are about money – greed, if you will – just as much so as the financial crisis in 2008. So is the Ukraine war. So is the rape of Venezuela. Greed and lust for power. Money is the conduit for power.
Moneys are running out and power is slipping, in Europe as in the USA. Basically, the US dollar is increasingly understood for what it is, a Ponzi scheme. This charming piece explains why. (If you prefer to skip the introductory charm, search in the text for the sentence: Watch how it plays out in real life.
Incidentally, the writer even explains the fallacy of “the growth mindset”. The more people understand this, the sooner the Ponzi scheme will collapse.
So the USA and the EU need new moneys. They need them bad, so bad that they are willing to break any rule and to expose themselves for what they are: unscrupulous totalitarian predators.
Today, we wake up to learn that the chief predator is on the kill in Venezuela. He wants Venezuela’s oil (money) so he can keep the Ponzi scheme going. My country’s press basically holds its breath and says nothing. The global south, however, notes once again: Yep, that’s Western “Democracy”.
Happy New Year, guys and girls. This promises to be quite a ride on a dangerous carousel.
CNN lied! Just about all the corporate press outlets lied about Iraq, about Libya, about Syria… They are still lying through their teeth about the ongoing genocide in Palestine (all of Palestine, not just Gaza!).
They are lying for dear life to defend EU financial investments (Ponzi scheme?) in Ukraine… etc.
“Lies, lies, lies is all they’ve got!” I am quoting Max Blumenthal.
In Oliver Stone’s take on Big Finance’s ugly war on countries like Venezuela, he makes it eminently clear that the “press”, the corporate media on which we all depend, has VERY MUCH to answer for.
Listening today to the mild-mannered social anthropologist Emmanuel Todd on Glenn Diesen’s substack, I was struck by the fact that he does not claim to be a political scientist. Yet he reaches conclusions similar to those posited by the political scientists I have been following, who focus on economic, diplomatic and military observations of the geopolitical chessboard.
Emmanuel Todd uses the tools of his field, the science of social anthropology. Similar conclusions are reached in an article on the role of energy over the past five centuries by means of another scientific field, that of the historian Alfred W. McCoy.
I am stressing the word “scientific”, because what we hear and see in the media regarding geopolitical issues does not even pretend to be scientific and is often divorced from reality. Is it fiction? In a sense, yes.
On the other hand, much of what I have learnt in life, I have learnt from fiction, i.e. from novels and short stories. Science is not supposed to be ideological. We can like or dislike its findings, but like it or not, science is heartless. Science will not tell you that genocide is evil. Treatises, scientific papers, statistics, etc. can support or dismiss hypotheses about human interaction, but only fiction can flesh out the real thing.
Let me spell it out: If your wife breaks your heart telling you she wants a divorce, statistics won’t heal your heart; far less give you a clue as to how you can reignite her attachment to you. Fiction will be your best bet.
So my third source for today is the 2024 novel Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. The protagonist is a British actress, whose father is a Palestinian. She feels British, but visits, almost reluctantly, her father’s family in Israel/Palestine and gets involved in a theatre production of Hamlet on the West Bank.
I chose to read the book because it seemed innocuous. There would be no explicit genocide, no horrors of Gaza. What there was, however, was in a sense worse; the day-to-day humiliation of Palestinians. This undramatic aspect of life under Israeli subjugation was actually not really known to me. I was forced to feel what Haneen, Ibrahim, Wael and the others felt, for example at IDF-controlled checkpoints. Only an accomplished writer of fiction could force me to continue reading after having cringed at the insults of a 19-year-old Israeli brat with a gun.
The worst part, for me at least, is that the Palestinians cannot, must not under any circumstances tell the brat what they think of him.
If you have been following me here, you will know that I feel very strongly about Palestine. I ask myself: Had I suffered as much compassion with the protagonists if they had been from Sudan or Yemen?
Alas, no. Why? Because I know Palestinians! I have witnessed their grief, shared a little part of their pain. For decades I have known that Israel was committing genocide! I know no Sudanese and nobody from Yemen.
One of the characters in Enter Ghost tells a disheartened compatriot: “[No] we haven’t won, but it doesn’t exactly look like they’ve won either.” That’s just it! Palestine is occupied. Yes, But the diaspora of the Palestinian people is alive and well. They have lived to tell the story. Israel tried but could not silence them. Israel will for ever be compared to Nazi Germany. That is not “victory” and it never will be.
There is no diaspora from Sudan or Yemen. Alas. I truly wish there were!
My conclusion, then, is that knowledge requires both science and fiction. However without compassion, knowledge is hollow. Compassion requires people with whom we can bond.
I am no angel, believe me. Every year I commute, as it were, across Europe, not once, but twice: Four trips in all, by plane. Moreover, I have four computers, bought within the last six years, and three mobile phones, the most recent of which I bought just last week. So my carbon footprint is no better than that of my compatriots, which is worse than that of citizens in any other European country.
Why am I confessing my sins to you? I am not a Catholic and you are probably not a priest. The answer is simple: I know that I am no better than most. We Norwegians buy too many clothes, too many new cars and we refurbish our houses too often. However we look at it, most of us Norwegians throw away too much and buy far too much. Period.
Perhaps you did not know this, but “Nordic countries have among the highest consumption-based CO2 emissions in the world, worse than the rest of Europe…. Gains in domestic renewable energy are wiped out by consumption-based emissions”.
My country is virtually self-sufficient in terms of clean electricity, yet … Well, to be brief, I suggest you listen to this zoom presentation by Jason Hickel.
In much of Europe, the indigenous population is plummeting because young people cannot afford to buy a flat where they can procreate and rear children. So the European countries need to import desperate immigrants who, incidentally, are willing to work for next to nothing. Even in Norway, that is increasingly the case. Why? Why are the prices of ordinary flats prohibitive for hard-working young couples?
Is it a coincidence that while the price of a place to live is exorbitant, outdoor temperatures are starting to kill us? “A searing heatwave that swept across parts of Europe in late June 2025 has been linked to nearly 2,300 excess deaths, …”
The heat wave referred to by the journalist lasted only “ten days”. But for much of Europe, the heat continued to kill people for four months. The murderous temperatures are no longer a “heat wave”; they are the new “normal”.
I ask again: Is it a coincidence that more and more young people have nowhere to live, that much of this continent is becoming uninhabitable from June to September, while deliberate total destruction (AKA war) is being perpetrated all over the planet. Most ongoing wars could have been avoided! I put to you that the reason they are not avoided is that for a handful of powerful people with seriously warped mindsets, war – per se – is a source of enrichment and/or power and therefore a blessing.
[r]ecent research has found that global militaries are responsible for nearly 5.5% of total global greenhouse gas emissions—a staggering figure that puts military emissions on par with the global cement industry. If it were a country, it would be the fourth biggest emitter in the world.
because a loophole the US inserted into the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 exempts all militaries from disclosing their emissions – meaning the world’s total emissions are significantly higher than officially recognized.
Now why would the US insert such a loophole, I wonder? Is it a coincidence?
I was taught in primary school – we all were – to adore my country, its flag, its king and its government, which represented us and acted on our behalf.
As we grew older, we could not fail to notice that our government often made what we considered mistakes, though we assumed it always did its best. After all, nobody’s perfect.
In high school, more and more of us started taking sides, right wing or left wing. Of course you also had the smug set, the people who maintained they followed a middle course.
We voted, defended the party we voted for, and denigrated the other parties. We read the paper we subscribed to and/or listened to our favourite news channels. Those were the days of innocence! Governments came and governments went; left side, right side (or, as they are now called, “centre left” and “centre right”). We would grumble when our side lost as though the whole business of elections was a sports event, and between elections we would discuss the performance of prominent politicians when they appeared on television.
Did we really think that the lies that led to the war on Iraq were a one off? Yes, I’m afraid we did. As for the lies that led to our war on Libya – well, they were never really exposed, were they. At least they were not loudly exposed, not in the mainstream press.
The outrageous persecution of Julian Assange was a wake-up call for quite a few of us, not least since even the Guardian joined the witch hunt.
For some time now, I have realised that we need to go back and re-assess a great deal of post-WWII history. What really happened when Yugoslavia was dismantled, for instance, and why? What they told us was definitely not true. What is? David Gibbs has spent years studying the matter.: I find his book very unsettling and interesting.: First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. I also enjoyed the documentary The Weight of Change, which challenges the official record.
Now, many of us “Westerners” – even many of Charlie Kirk’s people – have understood that we have been lied to about Gaza. Actually, we have been lied to for decades about Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian refugees after the Nakba (many of whom settled in Gaza) and about its gradual but methodical ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank.
I wonder how Trump voters of median and lower income will feel in the face of the unassailable fact that living conditions will remain as bad or worse under his rule as under Biden. Trump duped his voters.
They all do, of course. It’s a show, after all.
Someone shouted at me the other day during a discussion: “I don’t want to distrust everybody!” No, I certainly understand that.
And it’s not that everybody merits distrust. It’s not the players that need to be replaced, but the rules of the game. That’s what Zohran Mamdani seems to have understood. Who knows, maybe he will prove to be the spark that sets fire to the refuse left by years of mismanagement in Europe, as well as in the USA. If he can inspire the rest of us to demand the Democracy we were promised, that would indeed be great.
Alas, I am not optimistic. Many have tried in various parts of the world, and they have been undercut or killed. Even JFK was killed when he showed indications of leaving the track that had been laid out for him.
And if there is to be real democracy – Ben Norton maintains that Western governments are NOT democracies, they are oligarchies – we must understand that financialization of our countries’ economies is not the way to go.
Another thing we must understand is that “sustainable growth” is a contradiction in terms economically and certainly ecologically. At least in the so-called West. My country talks louder than most about “sustainable growth”, and performs worse than most, according to an assessment of the Nordic countries’ very considerable contribution to the accelerating ecological breakdown .
Finally, let it be clear: War destroys immeasurably. Yes, there are occasions when there is no alternative to armed self-defence. But it must be a last – a really LAST – resort. Imposing “democracy” is not a plausible excuse for violence.
Advertisers, news outlets and Trump all subscribe to superlatives:
The biggest, the best, the greatest, the worst, the smallest, the most …, the least…, etc. We also often hear expressions such as “never before” and “for the first time”. Grammatically speaking, these are not superlatives. Semantically, however, they are.
I would have liked to ask the linguist Noam Chomsky, whether this fascination for superlatives is universal, hard-coded into the genetic make-up of our species, or whether it is merely a cultural by-product of Western hubris.
There are some polite non-western expressions floating around to describe Western hubris (I repeat for the record that we represent only 12-14 % of humanity), among them: “US exceptionalism”, “US sense of entitlement”. Note that Europe and other US allies don’t count; we are just appendages to the US.
I am less polite. If you behave as a brigand, a brigand is what you are. The US is so riddled with debts that it has to attack countries to steal their mineral wealth!!! Having starved Venezuela with deadly sanctions for years and engaged in extra-judicial killings of its citizens in international waters, the US is now going to pilfer its riches. The US is preparing to engage in outright robbery in broad daylight. And its European minions are not going to interfere.
The dissenting media are not howling. They are merely shaking their heads. Why? Are they afraid? Or are they grieving? The corporate media are not even shaking their heads.
Maybe they are speechless for lack of superlatives. After all, this is not the first, nor the worst nor even the most…. not even since WWII. This is just business as usual.
I must admit that not until fairly recently have I realised how underhanded US and European foreign and domestic policy have been since WWII. Why did it take me so long?
After all, I read Manufacturing Consent years ago. I perused it as an intellectual, dispassionately, and with respectful interest. For me, the tide only turned when I read Nineteen Eighty-Four, shudderingas I did so: So much of the novel was terrifyingly recognizable!
Novels address your gut. They aim to immerse you into the matter, forcing you to “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” in a way that a cool analysis is unable to. The same applies to the film format.
Today, I returned to Manufacturing Consent, this time as it is spelled out in a gripping 1992 documentary by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick. The documentary explains what Chomsky refers to as “the terrifying aspect of our society and other societies, [which] is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe such events.”
Just so. As to why “such events” occur, you will need to watch another equally tide-turning documentary: The Corporation.
