“The
media rush to glorify Obama the ‘warrior president’ is symptomatic of a
Western society that has come to view war as entirely normal… It is by
now almost impossible to imagine that the West would not always be
attacking, or targeting for attack, some defenceless nation or other.” — ‘You Cannot Kill An Ideology With A Gun‘ By Media Lens
All things being equal, which undoubtedly they are not, and surely
that’s point, the long overdue arrival of a truly socialized, globalized
planet would have been able to tackle the mess capitalism has made of
things. After all, our disasters are now planetary in scale and thus can
now only be handled by the planet as a whole. That means all of us, not
just a privileged few.
And, it is surely an irony that
‘globalization’ has been heralded, nay crowed over by the Pirates as the
solution to all our problems, yet it’s the nature of capitalist
‘globalization’ that is the main source of not only our local but also
now the global crises that multiply by the day as the Empire desperately
seeks to hang on to its ill-gotten gains. Problems that now threaten
our future as a species, never mind a better future for all.
No doubt when comrade Marx first branded our socialist vision with
‘Workers of the World, Unite’, he had no idea just how badly his world
would screw up everything, for although he was the first true globalist
and experienced first-hand the awesome power of industrial capitalism to
‘tame nature’, I am sure given the lack of knowledge about the real
nature of the biosphere as well as capitalism’s astounding ability to
consume everything in its path, nothing could have prepared him for
Fukushima or Chernobyl.
Operation Odyssey Dawn however would have been ever such familiar
territory to him. Such ‘escapades’ formerly known as Gunboat Diplomacy
had helped build the world Marx inhabited. The only difference was that
back then they didn’t need a pretext, might was right, end of
story. Nowadays, with all the talk of ‘human rights’ and war crimes,
gunboat diplomacy is a tad out of sync with all the horseshit being
peddled by the Pirates.
One of the Pirates, Gen. Sir David Richards
The outrageous call by Gen. Sir Richard Davis the other day to bomb everything
in Libya illustrates what lurks beneath the veneer of civilization. And
believe me, Gen. Sir Davis comes from a long line of pirates stretching
all the way back to the 16th century and the reign of Elizabeth I when
the pirates were described as ‘privateers‘ or to call them by their contemporary name, private military contractors.[1]
Googling the man, I found plenty of refreezes of his outburst but not
a single criticism or even a question from our political masters or the
MSM about the military interfering directly in the political process.
And it is no accident that the military has moved into the political
spotlight, after all, the Empire has had no choice but resort to armed
force as its ‘solution’ to political/economic problems (caused by its
policies in the first place!).
So it’s a double-whammy once again, a feast of imperialist wars
abroad and economic/social crises at home, a re-run of the 1930s (and
all for pretty much the same the reasons), replete with elected,
alleged socialists morphing into fascists through a sophisticated
‘rebranding’ of what it is to be fascist. Now we’re fascists abroad and
humanitarian at home, well that’s how most of the world sees us and
quite rightly so. Unfortunately we don’t see that view represented in
our mass media/entertainment behemoth. What we get is the Big Lie,
repeated over and over again.
For example, the BBC’s coverage of the invasion of Libya consists
either of jingoistic displays concerning ‘our boys and girls’ doing
their thing with their things, eg:
VIDEO: Footage of air strikes on Libyan warships
BBC News 20/05/2011 at 07:49
Nato air strikes have hit eight warships belonging to Col Muammar
Gaddafi’s forces in co-ordinated raid on Tripoli, Al Khums and Sirte.
VIDEO: Cockpit video of Tripoli attacks
BBC News 17/05/2011 at 16:32
Nato says overnight air strikes in Tripoli hit important Libyan government buildings.
VIDEO: ‘Scanning thousands of miles in minutes’
BBC News 11/05/2011 at 19:05
The BBC’s Caroline Wyatt is the first broadcast journalist to be
allowed to film on board an RAF Sentinel spy-plane on a sortie over
Libya
And of course, the ‘pirate’s’ call,
‘VIDEO: Libya: Calls for Nato to ‘up the ante’
BBC News 15/05/2011 at 07:38
The head of the UK armed forces has called for Nato to intensify the military campaign in Libya.
The rest of the BBC’s coverage is without exception the Empire’s view of events, there is not a single
article on the BBC’s Website that questions Operation Odyssey Dawn and
the reasons for the invasion. Just as with Nato and its governments, it
is an a priori assumption made by the BBC that every act of the
Empire is done for humanitarian reasons or at the very least, the right
reasons. There is simply no reason to entertain any alternative to the
BBC’s reality and to question it invites disdain and dismissal with a
healthy dollop of sarcastic condescension thrown in, itself a sign of
weakness when challenged.
Andrew Marr, the then political editor of the BBC to Media Lens:
“I’m afraid I think it is just
pernicious and anti-journalistic. I note that you advertise an
organisation called Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting so I guess at
least you have a sense of humour. But I don’t think I will bother with
‘medialens’ next time, if you don’t mind.”
(Email dated October 7, 2001, after being challenged on his analysis
of the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia. For more on this, see our
Media Alert, ‘The BBC’s Political Editor Responds‘, October 13, 2001)
In a very real (and I hazard a guess, legal) sense the BBC is
complicit (as is the rest of the MSM) in the committing of war crimes
not only by accepting the idea that force is the only means of resolving
conflict, but also by actively promoting this view in its ‘news’
coverage.
Note
1. See also ‘Call for Attacks on Libyan Infrastructure Provides Glimpse of NATO’s Real Motives By Conn Hallinan‘ for more on this pirate of the Mediterranean.
