#very new york times op-ed circa 2017

[kristenswig]

#27. Holler - Nicole Riegel

2/5

#holler #2022 movies #very new york times op-ed circa 2017

[fughtopia]

October 17th, 2017  

David P. Hamilton  

Opinion — For the most part, “fake news” is a fake concept designed by the corporate news media to discredit those who challenge the official U.S. hegemonic narrative.

The typical MSM fake news accusation starts with some egregious fictionalization and then morphs over to the real targets: the subversives, those who would dispute foundational elements of the official history or its recent approved updates.

These subversive elements are likely to question important myths, such as the necessity of the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima or – before the Iraq War – Saddam Hussein possessing WMD, and hence must be silenced.

There are people in this world who write what they know to be fiction and try to pass it off as fact. Many of them work for the CIA and related institutions. Then, there are satirists like The Onion who write fictionalized truth. These professional prevaricators are not what draws the ire of the corporate “news.”

The approved rendition of U.S. history is a composite of lies, euphemisms and dubious rationales taught in schools, public and private, since the nation’s founding. It is continuously updated by the corporate news media. There is an army of PR types and psy-op warriors working constantly on this project; some private sector, some public, who often switch roles and sectors, but work hand-in-glove regardless.

    The real fake news is the fake narrative that flows perpetually forth from these functionaries of the MSM to dominate the discourse which the billionaire owners allow voiced via their facilities. In this manner, we are all being played, all the time, and have been since birth.

For the record, the official narrative follows certain principles.  Among them are:

The U.S. is never wrong in any conflict with other nations.

If the U.S. ever happens to be wrong, it was a reasonable mistake.

U.S. intentions are always benign and honorable.

U.S. judgment is always objective and fair.

The U.S. is a democracy and always supports democracy.

Americans are a peaceful people.

Americans are a superior people, so American lives matter more.

Americans are always on the high moral ground because God is on our side.

The word of our leaders is sufficient proof of any assertion.

The U.S. is the greatest nation in history.

Private is always better than public.

Individualism is always better than collectivism.

One-Sided ‘News’

In application of these principles, NPR’s “All Things Considered” never considers the Maduro government’s position in Venezuela, nor is Noam Chomsky, often voted the world’s foremost public intellectual, to be heard on this “public” radio. Nor will North Korea’s negotiating position relative to their nuclear weapons program be explained. It requires the U.S. military to refrain from conducting war games on North Korea’s border in exchange for freezing their weapons program; unmentionable because the U.S. militaristic leadership is unwilling to consider the proposal and because it sounds too rational.

You will hear from the world’s greatest exporter of terrorism, that Iran - which hasn’t invaded a neighbor since Darius I in 500 BCE - is the world’s greatest exporter of terrorism. And that apartheid Israel is a democracy. And that the Saudis are jolly guys in silk robes you want to hold hands and dance with.

Are the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, et al, lying knowingly? Not exactly. The news media doesn’t have to invent the lies, only repeat them. They are mainly the stenographers of governmental agencies that provide the raw material to be quoted, invariably substantiating the validity of the official position. The owners of those news outlets likely believe that narrative, but mainly they want you to believe it.

The pundits and talking heads of those news media, the on-camera personalities, must think within the parameters the official narrative or they wouldn’t have been hired to the position of highly paid spokesperson for it. Wolf Blitzer is a Zionist true believer who used to do P.R. for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).  Anderson Cooper is a Vanderbilt heir worth $100 million.

How objective can you be about issues of income inequality when you’ve been the top .0001% for six or seven generations? And if one dare to go off the reservation, the next thing you know you’ll be working for RT for a lot less money like Ed Schultz.

This process of narrative creation is principally a matter of focus, parameters and interpretation. On major U.S. cable news channels, the great bulk of coverage involves domestic politics, mass murders and “natural” disasters. In Europe, the focus is far more on international relationships.

The spectrum of opinion allowed in the U.S. is limited to the point that Hillary Clinton is considered “the left” and the anti-capitalist left might as well not exist. The range of permissible opinion typically stretches from pro-capitalist social liberals to pro-capitalist social conservatives. This is hardly surprising if one considers that billionaire investors own the controlling interest in all major U.S. news media. One outcome is that the U.S. is the only major industrial nation without a significant socialist political party.

The private interests that own the news media don’t have to get together and compare notes because they all have a high level of ruling-class consciousness that includes shared economic fundamentals, e.g., socialize debts and privatize profits. Their message control is described far more clearly by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman in Manufacturing Consent, chapter 1 on “the propaganda model”.

Dubious Conformity

It is generally accurate to assume that there is an entirely reasonable interpretation of news events that contradicts what you are being told to believe by the corporate news media. Cases of official duplicity are notorious and legion: the Gulf of Tonkin, WMD in Iraq, the black kid killed by the police had a gun, etc.

Furthermore, that the Soviets would do this despite having achieved their major war aims, a divided and demilitarized Germany and a “sphere of influence” between themselves and Germany, an arrangement agreed upon by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta. This Cold War creation myth of Soviet aggressive intent is essentially a U.S. cover story to mask U.S. aggression disguised as defensive.Central among the American myths is that the myth surrounding the origins of the Cold War. This myth would have you believe that the Soviet Union in 1945, despite having lost over 30 million of its citizens during two German invasions in less than 30 years and with a devastated infrastructure, would suddenly decide to invade Western Europe, into the teeth of the world’s sole nuclear-armed military power, the USA, and its various formidable allies.

Like Germans in 1939 believing the Polish horse cavalry was about to attack their tanks, Americans bought this spurious interpretation. These steady U.S. “defensive” efforts have now brought NATO, essentially an agency of U.S. foreign policy, to Russia’s very doorstep in the Baltic states, with Ukraine up next for NATO membership. Who is the aggressor?

Every other late Twentieth Century storyline of official U.S. history had to conform to the basic foundational concept of the U.S. defending freedom against an expansionist Soviet Union/Russia bent on destroying us. And so, today, we have thousands of NATO troops, innumerable missile batteries and nuclear-armed aircraft carrier-led naval battle groups patrolling Russia’s borders and shorelines, including the Black Sea, because “THEY are the aggressor.”

Try to imagine the U.S. reaction to a Russian fleet cruising the Gulf of Mexico, although that might be difficult given that 11 of the world’s 17 aircraft carriers, a uniquely aggressive weapon, belong to the U.S., all with unlimited range, and Russia’s only puny little single carrier rarely leaves Russian territorial waters and doesn’t have enough range to get to the U.S. and back.

The U.S. has an estimated 800 foreign military bases in well over 100 countries while Russia has three in two countries. U.S. military budget is at least ten times that of Russia’s and was just increased by 10 percent while the Russians just reduced theirs by 7 percent. Who is the aggressor?

Top photo | Editorial cartoon by Leon Barritt, circa 1898 shows newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst pushing against opposite sides of a pillar of wooden blocks that spells WAR. This is a satire of the Pulitzer and Hearst newspapers’ role in drumming up USA public opinion to go to war with Spain.

David P. Hamilton is a long-time Austin activist and writer. An archive of his other articles can be found at http://www.theragblog.com/tag/david-p-hamilton/.

Source: Mint News Press

#propaganda #war propaganda #endless war #amerikkka #nation of lawless nazi psychopaths #fake news

[hollywoodjuliorivas]

The Opinion Pages | CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER Latino Americans Pity You, President Trump Héctor Tobar FEB. 13, 2017 Continue reading the main storyShare This Page Share Tweet Email More Save Photo A Border Patrol agent at the fence between the United States and Mexico on the outskirts of Nogales, Ariz., last year. Credit Tomas Munita for The New York Times LOS ANGELES — My Guatemalan grandmother used to tell me: When a fly lands on your arm, it means I’m thinking of you. Now I and my fellow Latino troublemakers have become flies in the White House. No Latino was invited to join the new president’s cabinet, so it was the only way in. We lurk in the niches in the Oval Office, circle lazily in the Lincoln Bedroom, and buzz in the private residential corridors where the president sleeps. We land on the president’s arm. It’s driving him crazy. The commander in chief believes we stole true victory from him. Somehow, on Nov. 8, we convinced several million of our undocumented brothers and sisters to abandon their work in fields, factories and family residences, leaving crops untended and babies crying — just so they could cast the votes denying Donald J. Trump the glory of a popular vote plurality over Hillary Clinton. Many different people have pointed out the absurdity of the president’s latest beef with Latino immigrants and his obsession with voter fraud in general. My favorite is the study concluding that more people are hit by lightning in this country each year than are illegally impersonated in the voting booth. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Alas, no fact will persuade Mr. Trump to surrender his obsessions. He’ll give up on a lie only when he feels his enemy has been vanquished, or his goal accomplished. “Barack Obama is Kenyan” was his trial balloon; so then Mrs. Clinton deserved to be locked up — until Mr. Trump became president. The fly was swatted, so to speak, and it didn’t matter anymore. As president, Mr. Trump is still selling the undocumented menace, the border wall and the rest of his anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican fixation to the American people. And he will keep doing so until the day he leaves office. Unwilling to truly transform the economic structure of this country — the presence of so many Wall Street types in his administration hardly suggests a revolution is imminent — the president will instead bully Spanish-speaking busboys and day laborers to convince the country he’s doing something to “make America great again.” Most immigrants and residents of the American Southwest know that the Trump border wall is superfluous. A robust barrier already exists. Back in 1996, a Border Patrol agent took me on a tour of the beefed-up fences, barriers and detectors that had been recently built south of San Diego. New obstacles have been steadily added along the border in the 20 years since. These days, the flow of unauthorized migrants is down to a trickle: Border Patrol apprehensions in the Southwest are at their lowest levels since the early 1970s. But that’s just one more fact for our addled, angry president to ignore. All good hucksters know emotion and perceptions can trump facts. Americans see how immigration has transformed the look and feel of many cities and towns in the United States. Mr. Trump is only the most successful of the many entertainers, politicians and pundits who’ve built their fame, fortune and power by telling us that our foreign-born neighbors are responsible for the decline of the America we love. Their message has trickled deeper into the collective American psyche, aided by a very small minority of activists who’ve been using low-budget tools to spread lies for decades. Opinion Today Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, The Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world. Sign Up Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. SEE SAMPLE MANAGE EMAIL PREFERENCES PRIVACY POLICY Circa 2008, long before anyone imagined that “fake news” might help someone get elected president, one such activist wrote an email filled with invented “facts” about Latino immigration that had been supposedly reported in The Los Angeles Times. These so-called facts illustrated how “illegals” were transforming California into a barbarous pit, while simultaneously draining the public coffers. In 2009, I dissected the list, and found a series of distorted and inflated statistics, opinions and conjecture disguised as fact. The email quoted a purported government report circulating on the internet that was a complete fabrication. “There’s something really disturbing about a work of fakery meant to tarnish an entire class of people,” I wrote then. In the Trump era, paranoid, manipulative and patently false visions of immigrant America have become the basis of United States government policy, including the recent ban on visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries. If the wall is built, the true foundations of its construction will be in fake emails and talk radio rants. It will be a multibillion-dollar slander made of steel and cement, a taunt directed at both Mexico and the Latino residents of this country. Since the election of Mr. Trump, we’ve seen too many ordinary Americans embrace their inner bullies. Middle-school kids shouting “build a wall” at Latino students in Michigan. Anti-immigrant vigilantes harassing day laborers in Los Angeles. Like Mr. Trump, the people doing these things find a fleeting sense of power in the idea they’re superior to the darker-skinned multitudes in their orbit. Of such ugly people, my mother, a Guatemalan-born United States citizen, says, “Hay que tenerles lástima” (“We must pity them”). Their hatred is born of ignorance and an inner inferiority, whereas we are confident in our existence. Like our Muslim immigrant brothers and sisters, we are survivors with roots in distant places. We speak more than one language. We know something about the suffering of the world, and so we know how truly great this country is. We believe that humility, persistence and perspective are our greatest strengths. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Mr. President, you may not care to see or understand these things, but every time a fly lands on your arm, it means we’re thinking of you. We are wherever you are and will be everywhere you go. And we’re not going away. Héctor Tobar, the author of “Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free,” teaches writing at the University of Oregon and is a contributing opinion writer.