Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Category: Media (Page 3 of 4)

Antagonising journalists

26.04.2023 /

By mistreating and possibly poisoning the prisoner Aleksej Navaljnyj, the Russian authorities are merely reinforcing the Western public’s perception that the concept of justice simply does not exist in Russia.

No matter what you or I think about Navaljnyj’s political views, he is not suspected of having killed anybody, or of having turned “customers” into helpless drug addicts or even of having raped a child. Such crimes, had he committed any of them, might have justified the nine-year prison sentence, with which he has been saddled. He has only been convicted of the sort of financial activities regularly committed with impunity by the filthy rich. Moreover, he is said to be kept, not in a “prison”, but in a “labour camp”, whatever that means.

Of course the Russian authorities have every reason to laugh – even guffaw – over Western sensibilities. I shall not even mention the innumerable school (and other mass ) shootings and deplorable health conditions in US America, merely limit myself to pointing out that you need not be in prison to get killed, one way or another. I do, however, want to stress that Western suppression of investigative journalists and whistle blowers is increasingly reminiscent of what has hitherto been considered more typical of Russia and China.

Suppression of fact, current or historical, is basically unsustainable. The suppressed fact will sooner or later catch up with the suppressor or his/her descendants. And there is no vouching for the good behaviour of those who have been duped.

Take military expenditure: According to Sipri, 2.2 percent of global GNP went to military expenditure in 2022. That’s quite a lot of money not being used on health services or education. 39% of that military expenditure was US American, 13% was Chinese and 3.9% Russian. A lot of people are being duped pretty seriously, wouldn’t you say? A lot of people are going to be, sooner or later, very very angry. But the Western powers have counted on the general public’s tagging along nicely, led by a nose ring.

Indeed, so far, the Western powers’ suppression of fact has duly had the effect of discombobulating and paralysing the general public.

It has also had the effect of turning Julian Assange into a martyr, a saint. Now I very much doubt that the long-suffering man ever intended or wanted to be considered a saint, but there you are. His name is emblazoned on banners and heads “Free Assange” petitions all over the world. Even The Guardian (a paper that in my opinion stabbed Assange in the back some years ago) acknowledges the importance of his case. It is, in fact, a test case. If Assange is convicted, Russia will rightly be able to say: You, the West, are no better than us.

But beware, Mr Lavrov: You are quoted as having rejected the notion that journalists do not commit crimes. While I always enjoy your elegant irony, I advise that you desist from antagonising journalists, be they Russian or Western. After all, there are journalists on this side of the ugly curtain who are doing their utmost to present an alternative to the prevailing US/NATO narrative about the Ukraine war. While they are not your allies, they are not your worst foes either. And while you may consider Navaljnyj a pain in the ass, he will not go away even if he dies. On the contrary, he will haunt the Russian authorities for years to come, if for no other reason because journalists on this side of the ugly curtain will find it less risky to revile your country than to revile their own. I am sure you can understand that.

Defence of self or of hegemony

11.04.2023 /

Have you heard of “perception management”? Simply put, it means persuasion on the basis not of facts but of lies (or suppression of facts).

During the 1980s, Reagan decided to “kick the Vietnam syndrome“, a condition from which the US public was suffering, sick to the heart of the horror and shame of the Vietnam war, so that future presidents would find it very difficult to pursue the nation’s foreign policy goal of maintaining global hegemony.

In Reagan’s case, the challenge was to convince the US public to support US martial activities in Central America. As Robert Parry subsequently wrote (in 2014):

In that sense, propaganda in pursuit of foreign policy goals would trump the democratic ideal of an informed electorate. The point would be not to honestly inform the American people about events around the world but to manage their perceptions by ramping up fear in some cases and defusing outrage in others – depending on the U.S. government’s needs.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/12/30/endless-war-and-victory-perception-management

Various tactics were used, one of them being:

to weed out American reporters who uncovered facts that undercut the desired public images. As part of that effort, the administration attacked New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner for disclosing the Salvadoran regime’s massacre of about 800 men, women and children in the village of El Mozote in northeast El Salvador in December 1981. Accuracy in Media and conservative news organizations, such as The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, joined in pummeling Bonner, who was soon ousted from his job.

Ibid

During its wars, the US Government found new ways of limiting television viewers’ insight:

One solution involved imposing strict control over the movements of journalists. The government could no longer afford to allow – as it had in Vietnam – enterprising reporters to run around the battlefield, going wherever they wanted and speaking with whomever they pleased.

https://theconversation.com/how-the-pentagon-tried-to-cure-america-of-its-vietnam-syndrome-83682

An important group targeted by perception management consisted of the many who were saddened and shocked by revelations of crimes against humanity. We have therefore been seeing, with increasing frequency, the waging of what Joseph Darda calls “humanitarian wars”. In his paper Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome Narrative: Human Rights, the Nayirah Testimony, and the Gulf War, he quotes George Bush, who in 1990 was preparing for yet another war:

With a war on the horizon, Bush took the proclamation [his own presidential proclamation designating December 10 as Human Rights Day] as an opportunity to situate the looming Gulf War in a human rights context. “In a world where human rights are routinely denied in too many lands,” he observed, “nowhere is that situation more tragic and more urgent today than in Kuwait.” Listing the atrocities reportedly committed by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait, Bush concluded, “As long as such assaults occur, as long as inhumane regimes deny basic human rights, our work is not done.” The Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait was not merely a threat to Kuwaiti sovereignty but also, Bush alleged, a threat to the sanctity of human rights everywhere. Americans could not feel secure in their own liberal rights until these rights were restored to the citizens of this small, oil-rich state in the Persian Gulf. Thus, the United States’ intervention in the Middle East was not really a war but, as Bush continually stressed that fall and winter, a unified “stand in defense of peace and freedom.”

https://josephdarda.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/darda-kicking-the-vietnam-syndrome-narrative-human-rights-the-nayirah-testimony-and-the-gulf-war.pdf

Next, I quote someone who appreciated George Bush’s appeal to humanitarianism. On the face of it, he sounds like a humane fellow. Only the name of the source, (hoover.org) gives us pause:

The Bush administration made its case for military action, and, after considerable debate, the American people, through their representatives in Congress, gave approval. The administration also made its case to the United Nations, highlighting the damage that inaction would inflict on prospects for peace in the long term.

Although the dangers of careless military activism are easy to imagine, the cost of passivity is more difficult to discern. In the 1990s, the Vietnam syndrome helped delay and limit U.S. military intervention in the Balkans. Those delays and limits extended murderous Serbian repression and actually accelerated ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Failure to intervene militarily often permits humanitarian crises to continue and leads to more dangerous conflicts.

https://www.hoover.org/research/kicking-vietnam-syndrome

I have previously written about the bombing to kingdom come of Libya, a vicious NATO operation performed allegedly to protect demonstrators. This was definitely a case of successful perception management, since the public hardly raised an eyebrow at the devastation in NATO’s wake.

Of course, one very important reason to go to war is “self defence”. For some years now, the USA has been spreading its network of military bases in the Far East – obviously for “self-defence” (in case the humanitarian plight of the Uighurs fails to capture sufficient public sympathy). I quote Glenn Greenwald, mocking the self-defence rationale:

I was looking at a video earlier today of George Bush and others saying that the reason we had to go fight in Iraq and invade Iraq is that we’d rather fight them over there than fight them over here. And I saw a video earlier today of California Democrat Adam Schiff saying exactly the same thing about the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. Namely, the reason we must fight Russia over in Ukraine is that, if we don’t, we’ll have to fight them over here. Presumably, the Russian army is on the verge of attacking the American homeland right after it gets done trying to hold a town or two for more than three months in Ukraine, confident that it can conquer the American homeland, despite spending 1/15 in its military of what the United States spends.

https://rumble.com/GGreenwald (Sorry, I failed to take a note of the post)

More recently, “freedom and democracy” has supplanted humanitarian justification of destabilisation activities – bellicose or otherwise. During the Euromaidan Protests, Senator John McCain, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Senator Chris Murphy visited Kiev to “show solidarity” to the demonstrators. McCain dined with opposition leaders, including members of the ultra right‐​wing Svoboda Party, and later appeared on stage in Maidan Square during a mass rally. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Svoboda leader Oleg Tyagnibok.

John McCain — repeat: a US Senator — enthusiastically addressed the protesters — Ukrainian protesters in Ukraine, not in the USA:

Ukraine will make Europe better and Europe will make Ukraine better.

We are here to support your just cause, the sovereign right of Ukraine to determine its own destiny freely and independently. And the destiny you seek lies in Europe,

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/john-mccain-ukraine-protests-support-just-cause (bold text is my highlighting)

He told CNN:

What we’re trying to do is try to bring about a peaceful transition here, that would stop the violence and give the Ukrainian people what they unfortunately have not had, with different revolutions that have taken place – a real society. This is a grassroots revolution here – it’s been peaceful except when the government tried to crack down on them, and the government hasn’t tried that since.

I’m praising their ability and their desire to demonstrate peacefully for change that I think they deserve.

Ibid (bold text is my highlighting)

Now, there is every reason to question how “peaceful” this so-called “peaceful transition” was. After all, quite a few protesters and some police officers were killed. We have been told that they were killed by officers defending (the Democratically elected) president Yanukovich. Apparently, the story is being compellingly disputed by Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist at the University of Ottawa, Ivan Katchanovski. Read the abstract of his paper and/or download it here.

However, his peer-reviewed paper has been ignored by mainstream media (which has proven its stalwart ignorance of late). It is truly quite fascinating. No less fascinating is the story of its suppression and the suppression of another of his papers, that of the 2014 Odessa massacre.

To conclude, for now, my exploration of applied perception management in Western foreign policy matters, I bring to your attention an investigative journalist’s address on March 24 this year, to the UN security council about the OPCW examination of the dreadful deaths by mysterious means in Douma, Syria, in April 2018.

So! The final OPCW report appears to have been a cover-up. For what? Why? What/who killed the victims in Douma?

There are still nearly 1000 US troops in Syria. What are they doing there? Who is currently controlling Syrian oil? What are the effects on the Syrian population of US sanctions?

Every day, to this day, Syrian civilians are being killed or maimed by land mines. And the nearly 20 Israeli attacks on Syria over the past year have not helped.

The regime change attempt in Syria was motivated and presented to the public as defence of human and civil rights. I put to you, though I cannot provide documentation — because investigative journalism is now becoming illegal in a growing number of “Democratic” countries — that the regime change attempt was largely orchestrated by the USA for reasons that are totally non-humanitarian. The result was death and devastation.

As usual.

Meanwhile, the arms race is on, full speed. And the engines of perception management are running at maximum capacity.

Please do not bring any more children into this world. I put to you that bringing children into the world now is turning into an act of parental egoism, the victims of which will be those same children.

On the heels of science fiction

17.08.2022 /

Do you sometimes come out of a building and feel that the world outside is somehow unreal? Maybe if you have been very immersed in your work, or if you have seen an engrossing film or even just read a thrilling saga?

Recently, I have had that feeling almost every day, but not when I relocate between physical spaces. No, I am discombobulated by a sense of unreality every time I enter the space of – the enormous space of – mass media.

During Covid, we clung to mass media, not only for entertainment. Banned from the real world, many of us had to resort to laptops, mobile phones and TVs, to see a beach, cows in a field, and the delightful hubbub of a train station. We even turned to broadcasting outlets for comfort and reassurance.

In my country, the benign, familiar face of one of our news anchors would remind us every evening to maintain a two-metre distance distance, wash our hands thoroughly, and wear the mask properly. We would anxiously wait for the daily figures (remember the Worldometer?) – active cases, critical cases, deaths…. Almost every evening, the news included a brief lesson, such as “How to put on your mask”, “How to wash your hands”, “How to sneeze”, “What to do when you feel ill”.

In Norway, there was hardly any political opposition to government imposed measures regarding Covid. In fact, there was practically no political debate at all during the Covid regime.

We hoped, month after month after month, that it would soon end, that this was only a parenthesis in our normality, but it lasted for two years. Strictly speaking, it is still not entirely over. And we all know that it will happen again. And again.

Yet, we return with a vengeance to a semblance of normality, to a pretence of normality – to the realm of make-belief. News anchors are still telling us that everything is fine, except of course in Ukraine, but we will all do our bit to help Ukraine, and everything will soon be all right there too. Of the looming energy crisis in Europe, particularly in Germany and UK and of the numerous apocalyptic fires devouring hundreds of square kilometres (yes, kilometres, not acres) of forest, not to mention homes… hardly a word. As for the tension in South-East Asia – all China’s fault, of course, just as the war in Ukraine is all Russia’s fault – we choose to hope that justice will prevail, and justice is, of course, on our side. No doubt about that, at least.

There are doubts, though, fears even. Not about justice’s being on our side. We are, after all, like all human inhabitants, inculcated with certain values. (Inculcation is just a polite word for indoctrination – which, of course, is only practised by “Commies” (i.e. the Russians and Chinese). So justice is no doubt on our side, and we believe in progress, and just look at what science has accomplished, even in our lifetime.

Yet, something feels wrong, and definitely not right. Deep down, under our apparent complacence, there is angst. Everywhere.

Overnight, in my country, the mainstream press has become monolithic. Faced with a common enemy, Covid, the competing news outlets joined forces. Now that the threat of Covid may or may not be over, there are still threats, most notably that of Russia. Russia stands accused, and no news outlet or newspaper will allow the defendant to state his case.

As for the rest of us, we all know that the government is and has always been lying about the energy situation and about the urgency of the climate situation, yet, we put up with increasing militarisation, the theft of our hydroelectic energy and the refusal to seriously cut back emissions. Every evening, the benign, familiar face of one of our news anchors still tells us that everything is fine except for the people in Ukraine, and since most of us feel, for some reason or another, more kindly towards Ukrainians than to Syrians, we hope and believe that NATO’s defence of democracy and liberty will prevail.

Narratives vs. fairytales

25.07.2022 /

If the West has presented a narrative that gives a clear, recognisable picture of reality, why should it so adamantly suppress the Russian narrative, which is that USA is waging, and has long been preparing a proxy war against Russia?

Likewise, had Zelensky’s narrative given a clear recognisable picture of reality, why should he have closed down TV channels, nationalising the remaining TV channels to create a single “united news”, and why should he have banned 11 political parties, including the largest opposition party – whose former leader has, incidentally, been arrested and is being held in custody without a trial. Why is Zelensky prosecuting hundreds of people for treason, including Bakanov, chief of the security service.

Interestingly, Bakanov was head of Kvartal 95, the company founded by Zelensky, whose partners were implicated with him – i.e. Zelensky – in the Pandora Papers. You didn’t know that Zelensky was one of the heads of state that was exposed in the Pandora Papers?

Ukraine was and is a fabulously corrupt country. One of the main fixtures of Ukrainian corruption has been the oligarch Mr Kolomoisky, accused of all sorts of financial crimes, who has been Zelensky’s main backer, so much so that the IMF refused at length to grant Ukraine a loan because of ties between the two men.

I am linking to an article in the New York Times about Mr. Kolomoisky, which you may not be able to read (unless you are a NY Times subscriber). In 2014, he financed a pro-government militia against the East Ukrainian separatists. I quote the N.Y. Times:

But Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine’s most powerful figure outside government, given his role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn back toward Russia.

“They’re stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations,” he said, comparing Russia’s power to that of Ukraine. “People want peace, a good life, they don’t want to be at war. And you” — America — “are forcing us to be at war…

… the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its geopolitical rival. “War against Russia,” he said, “to the last Ukrainian.” Rebuilding ties with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine’s economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued.

I should tress that the article is dated November 13, 2019, long before the war even started.

Speaking of fraud and Zelensky’s attitude to corruption in Ukraine, you should also take a look at a Washington Post Article dated March 17, 2020. Obviously, the article would not have been published today, nor the one I linked to in N.Y. Times. My point being: Whatever else Zelensky might be, he certainly is not the shining prince of democracy he is made out to be by the western press today.

Fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, etc – financial crimes – are all very complicated businesses, so complicated that reading the details about Zelensky’s network is terribly strenuous. We are tempted to jump to the next section, which is a pity, because financial crimes are real, they are serious and they undermine everything some of us still believe in.

They say that Russia underestimated Ukrainian nationalism and hence Ukrainian resistance. That may very well be true. I have no doubt that Ukrainians resented the political suppression of the Soviet era, and that they longed to get out of the USSR. Nevertheless, I know that a very large segment of the Ukrainian population spoke Russian, felt Russian and thought Russian until fairly recently. Hard to tell, exactly, just how large a segment, and for just how long. There has been a concerted effort on the part of the Ukrainian authorities, to “Ukrainianise” the country, i.e. to suppress all that is Russian, including the language. This process is referred to on the Russian side as “genocide” – to my mind, a ludicrous misnomer. Nevertheless, the pressure on Russian speakers will no doubt have been considered repressive.

My experience is that if you whip a recalcitrant child, it will hate you – silently, perhaps, but implacably. Suppression of an ethnic group is usually not a good idea. Military violence against a country that considers itself a country is usually not a good idea either.

On the other hand, how will a country react to being forced to sacrifice its male population in an absolutely pointless, hopeless and interminable war that could have been avoided?

Of course, every attempt is made in the West, to conceal the fact that the war could have been avoided, but in the long run, maybe Ukrainians will understand they’ve been had, not only by Russia but by USA/NATO/EU as well. We shall perhaps see a very angry army of widows.

For years, international analysts, and even advisers to the White House, not to mention historians, have warned USA/NATO: stay away from Ukraine. Anybody who knows anything about Russian history must know that Ukraine is not a coveted object of Russian imperialism, it is and has always been felt, by the Russians, to be at the very heart of Russia. I leave it there for you: Go study the history of Russia.

That USA/NATO chose to disregard those warnings must be considered a slap in the face by the Russians (and certainly not just by Putin); or should I say “another” slap in the face, because there have been many since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Have you not heard of them? I suspect you might not, because that is something the Western press chooses to not write about, just as it doesn’t write about Zelensky and the Pandora papers.

You may argue that Russia is, politically, a nasty piece of work – with too many political prisoners – and I whole-heartedly agree with you!

But in USA with its soft-talking lying, cheating, slippery, vile and cynical financial elite, there are too many too-poor people and too many people in prison. Most of the prisoners are where they are, not because of their views, but because of their colour and/or their poverty. In fact USA has the largest number of prisoners in the world, larger even than China, and not just per capita. Far larger than Russia. That is neither “narrative” nor fairytale: that is a fact.

Within the framework

30.01.2019 /

Since Trump came to power, there has been much talk about the media. Trump says the mainstream news outlets are lying, but what do we say? For my part, I can’t say I have all that much confidence in mainstream news outlets either; yet, there is no doubt that they have offered me wonderful articles and illuminating documentaries. So what will it be?

Thirty years ago, Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky had a book published called Manufacturing Consent. About the media. About how the media is not as free as we like to believe. About how the powers that be control public opinion without censorship.

Much has changed since then. When you stop to consider that personal computers hardly existed when the book was written (on a typewriter, I am told) and that email was an exotic and very technical affair, it really is quite remarkable that the mechanisms described in the book still apply today.

I would like to recommend a piece on the Internet written by a man of whom I know nothing except what he writes himself: that he is a youngish journalist, that he deeply admires the very much older Noam Chomsky and that the latter has agreed to be interviewed by him. What follows the journalist’s introduction is not so much an interview as a very agreeable and interesting conversation between the two about, yes, the media as it splashes all over the place, on the verge of spilling into the next decade.

Why, in spite of so much knowledge out there, in spite of any number of extremely talented and hard-working journalists, are we so ill-informed, so confused, so battered by the elements?

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present Matt Taibbi and Noam Chomsky.

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CAPERNAUM

05.01.2019 /

Nothing I can say or write, nothing anybody can say or write, can hold a candle to what the Lebanese film director Nadine Labaki has managed to record in Capernaum, which received a long standing ovation and the Jury Prize when it was shown at Cannes this year.

I am certain that no kid, not even a Lebanese street urchin, is as wise as the film’s tiny protagonist Zain (played by the Syrian refugee Zain Al Rafeea), who eventually, through sheer grief and with nothing whatsoever to lose, beats the system. If there were such a kid, there would also be supremely wise adults, which evidently is not the case. Nobody is beating the system. I suppose Nadine Labaki is about as close to doing so as anyone ever was, because those of us who see that film will never be the same.

As far as I can make out, Ms Labaki has two good reasons for allowing the film’s protagonist to beat the system and for suggesting from the very start of the film that he may be able to do so. One of them is that the public would never otherwise be willing to endure witnessing so much injustice and so much pain, knowing – oh yes, and without a shadow of doubt – that what the restless camera reveals to us is the Lord’s truth.

The film is spiked with humorous incidents, and we laugh, relieved at each break from the sordid documentary reality we don’t really want to know about. Laughing and pleased by our hero’s resourcefulness, we are dragged to the next scene of humiliation and hopelessness, during which we gasp and shiver until somebody’s kind smile, or a charming remark, again alleviates our discomfort.

The three heroes are fabulously alive, though only on the screen; without ID documents, they would none of them be missed if they vanished: a tiny Lebanese street urchin, an “illegal” Ethiopian immigrant, and her lovely toddler.

Thanks to Nadine Labaki, they won’t ever vanish. To really make her point, she has apparently chosen her actors for the film from among the sort of people she is portraying.

The second of the two reasons for allowing the film’s protagonist to beat the system is to try to prod us into doing likewise. “If a street urchin can do it, so can you, ” she seems to be saying.

Nadine Labaki, I take my hat off, I bow to you.

In November 2018, director Nadine Labaki reported Al Rafeea’s situation had changed:
Finally, he has a Norwegian passport. He’s resettled in Norway. He’s been there for the past three, four months. He’s going to school for the first time in his life. He’s learning how to read and write. He’s regained his childhood. He’s playing in a garden; he’s not playing anymore with knives and in garbage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zain_Al_Rafeea (as per 05.01.2019)

Semantics

19.02.2018 /

I need not remind you that what we imagine we know about the past tends to be what victors of the past wanted us to believe. Ever since barons, of one sort or another, came into existence, they made sure to hire and overpay the most talented bards to sing their praises. In our day, we have the media. Running an attractive media outlet costs far more than consumers are willing to pay, and modern barons are happy to sponsor those who tell their side of the story.

I have just been to Cordoba, Spain. There are many reasons to visit Cordoba, one of which surpasses every other. True, you may not share my tastes, but the Mesquita in Cordoba is the most sublimely beautiful building I have ever visited! To my mind, neither the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg nor the Acropolis in Athens nor any Gothic cathedral hold a candle to the Moorish Mesquita in terms of transcendental architectonic harmony.

The Moors were defeated and driven out of Spain, and most of us are unaware of the remarkable scientific and artistic supremacy and – not least – relative tolerance that had characterised Moorish culture in Spain during what is known elsewhere in Europe as the “dark ages”. “We won”, as it were, and we are telling our story now, a story that centres on Western moral superiority, on the one hand, and Islamic religious fanaticism and brutality, on the other. The story is no more true than innumerable other fanciful concoctions spun out of ignorance. The ghastly war crimes committed by US soldiers in Vietnam, for instance, do not mean that US Americans are cruel monsters.

Now, telling a fib is not as straightforward as you might think. After all, incorrect facts can be gainsaid, although the correction will often only be found on the last page, in small print and long after the entire population has taken the venomous bait. In the long run, though, a mainstream news outlet would not want its reputation to be tainted as fallible, so journalists and speech writers need a more indirect approach, which is where their semantics come into the picture, their choice of words.

If you are up against a brutal dictator, and there are many of those, you may be engaging in political activism, but as soon as your authorities get on to you, they will not convict you of political activism but of “sedition”** or “incitement” for the simple reason that no self-respecting country will admit banning “political activism”. In the news, your friends will hear about a “rioting mob”, rather than about a “crowd of demonstrators”. Nobody wants to be part of a “mob” and most people are reluctant to have anything to do with a “riot”. Serious opposition to your country’s authorities will not be labelled a “rebellion” – since anyone can easily be sympathetic of a rebellion against a tyrannical regime – but as “treason” or “terrorism”.

In fact, even in a country that does not have a tyrannical regime, you risk being indicted of treason if you are some Mr Nobody who exposed your country’s war crimes. On the other hand, presidents who harm their countries past the point of no repair are very rarely accused of anything at all.

Mind you, semantics – the words that are used to describe, in this case, your political opposition – matter not only to you as a dissident, but to all who attempt to bring down tyrannical regimes. No country is an island, not even North Korea. Your country will have financial, military, strategic and other ties to other countries. The US, for instance needs to keep its military bases in a large number of minor countries and will not risk disrupting relations with a regime that has taken draconian measures against “terrorists”.

As for the rest of us, those who believe that the occupants of the White House are – ehem – whatever-we-believe-they-are, we are all “conspiracy theorists”. Those of us in favour of some redistribution of income and wealth are “populists”, and analysts who expose the inefficiency and financial extravagance of the US health system are elitist, and their arguments are merely referred to as a “narrative”, i.e. something distinctly dubious.

Israel refers to all who have the slightest sympathy for the Palestinian cause as anti-Semite. Makes my blood curdle, in fact, because I very much resent being called a racist.

Unfortunately, those of us who are referred to as populists, conspiracy theorists, elitist or anti-Semite are often no better. Referring only to myself, I have on occasion vehemently stated that so-and-so was a racist, a fascist or for lack of anything more precise, a bastard. Only recently I referred to a very prominent person as a hooker, on these very pages. I can’t say I very much regret having done so, because letting off steam feels good. My words were less elegant, though, than those used against me, and would have no other effect than to make it clear that I loathed the object in question, and that was not really my aim, which was to make the reader share my loathing.

Any political movement that is referred to as populist, elitist, anti-Semite or based on conspiracy theory will probably never seriously get off the ground, so semantics do matter.

**A recent case from a so-called Democratic country is that of Catalonia: Although the separatist movements earned a majority in Democratic elections for the second time in a row in December 2017, the Spanish authorities have indicted the separatist movements’ leaders on charges of “sedition”.

The rat is out of the hole

28.06.2017 /

You may have heard – and then again, you may not have – that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt have issued an ultimatum against Qatar, the 13 so-called “demands” the country must meet within ten days, “or else”.

If Qatar meets the demands, it will have ceased to be a state: It will merely be a vassal of Saudi Arabia, since what is demanded is in reality that the country surrenders its sovereignty.

It all started with an economic and diplomatic blockade launched in the wake of the US emperor’s visit to Saudi Arabia, and since the Saudis evidently feel confident about US support, goodness knows where it will end. For that very same reason – i.e. US support – nobody even mentions this issue around here. In Europe you don’t talk back to the US! Not in this country, not in any European country, least of all in the UK.

Now I was brought up with the BBC. I feel warmth and gratitude to the BBC. I know the names of many of their foreign correspondents. I download BBC podcasts and listen to them. But let us not delude ourselves: BBC is a British broadcasting company, and Britain is very cosy with the USA. As for the USA, well, need I remind you …? No, I won’t remind you, because that would require not a website but many tomes of modern history. However, take a look at Reporters without borders. If you click the map you will see that the USA ranks no higher than 43 out of 180 states as far as freedom of the press is concerned.

My country is also uncomfortably cosy with the USA, if not quite as cosy as the UK, but certainly cosy enough for its national broadcasting company to refrain from ever quoting Al Jazeera. Yet, I suspect that all good foreign correspondents – be they from my country or from the BBC – consult Al Jazeera more than almost any other outlet, at least about Middle East issues. Why? Because Al Jazeera is good, very good! And they are not bound by the US Patriot Act.

One of the 13 “demands” is that Qatar close down Al Jazeera. Now I don’t know whether you watch Al Jazeera, but what I do know is that whether you do or don’t, the news outlet will have considerable impact on what is revealed to you about world affairs. If it were not for Al Jazeera, the US and the UK could tell their side of the story, and nobody would know the difference.

I wish to quote another Guardian article of today (also quoted, by the way, by Al Jazeera):  Asked whether the closure of al-Jazeera was a reasonable demand, the UAE envoy said:

We do not claim to have press freedom. We do not promote the idea of press freedom. What we talk about is responsibility in speech.

I ask you, could any quote be clearer?

Palatables and non-palatables

18.03.2017 /

Several European countries are facing national elections, these days. Lately, I have taken to watching the evening news on television, rather than just reading RSS feeds or listening to podcasts, because so many of my lunchtime companions talk about Trump’s and Gert Wilders’ hairdos that I feel a need to be visually informed.

But alas, information comes at a price. Watching the evening news means you can’t skip paragraphs or fast-forward. You have to listen to a lot of – excuse my French – crap, and crap makes me feel slightly ill. Now, I realise I seem to be echoing Mr Trump as far as distrust of the media is concerned, and for that I prostrate myself in abject apology, but there is no denying that the media has no choice but to record what dominant actors say and do, not least what Mr Trump says and twitters, which is quite a mouthful.

Tonight an opposition party in my country trumpeted: “We intend to redistribute wealth!” Why are they saying that? Because they hope to attract low-income voters. Will they succeed? I doubt it. Why? Because people know that what is meant is really “we will raise taxes”, and although they only want to raise taxes on the filthy rich, we all know that when taxes go up, the bottom two thirds of the population pay more, but when taxes go down, the top third of the population pays less. Why this is so? Beats me!

But taxes do have to be be raised. Why? Because the wealth gap between the top 10 percent and the rest of the country is growing exponentially, here as elsewhere in the western world. As you will know if you have read your Piketty, this is not only because the right-wing parties currently in power here have lowered taxes on wealth and capital, though tax reductions in recent years have been considerable and have gone almost unnoticed. (Everybody got a tiny tax reduction, whereas the top of the pyramid got an enormous tax reduction. Since we don’t want to loose our “tiny” tax reduction, we don’t talk about it.)

While making serious adjustments to cater to the companies and billionaires that regularly contribute outrageously large sums of money to its two main parties, the right-wing government has to attract low-income voters to stay in power. It therefore spends an awful lot of money on trifles that will win votes, oblivious to the unpalatable fact that what goes out has to come in.

Meanwhile, the number of poor people in this country has grown considerably in recent years – and the poor are growing poorer – and a growing number of frustrated and angry young poor are lured by whispered rumours of “great leaders” – charismatic right-wing and/or religious misfits with personality disorders.

The poor are the elephant in the room. Here, there and everywhere.

Elections should be regarded as entertainment, no more, no less, the verbal equivalent of a football match. Contenders hand out chocolates on street corners, appear on talk shows, dress to the nines and repeat their carefully chosen mantras until we all turn into sleep walkers.

If you want to win an election, you have to tell people what they want to hear. You certainly don’t tell them that we have to raise taxes. You don’t tell them that unless we do something about it, the wealth gap will continue to widen. You don’t tell them that unless we do something about it, there will be more terrorism. You don’t tell them that unless we do something about it, most of the planet will sooner or later be uninhabitable.

You don’t serve them the unpalatable truths. You serve canapés and a glass of something or other, smile your red-lipped, full-bodied smile and tell them assuaging non-truths. You tell them that we shall lower taxes, thus increasing employment and wealth for all. (Teresa May is one the real pros!) You tell them that terrorists, far from being poor are just simple killers, and will be dealt with accordingly, swiftly and effectively. You tell them that poverty, climate change and other nasty things have nothing to do with us, that the poor must look after themselves and that the climate must look after itself. In short: Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles. That is what you tell them.

Enjoy the elections!

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