Columbus Freepress - November 7th 2013 Nov 7 2013 | Page 7

Ain’t no love in the heart that the US was/is the morally superior party in the wars it’s been fighting for the past ten years probably numbers in the thousands. There is no Islamist celebrated figure among the radical left a la Ho Chi Minh. The most ardent criticism still comes from a fundamentally liberal Suppose that the reported explosion was an actual standpoint, of a desire to see American force attack. Explosions and bomb attacks happen used for good. Nobody argues that American in Iraq on a regular basis, and yet now that the imperialism actually deserves to be fought, country is no longer under occupation, they don’t much less that political Islam is a valid way to constitute “news” to American media. Back in the do so. We may have avoided military aggression real world, the operative question is, why would in Syria, but Assad is a secular dictator, and the nation’s largest media outlets report on a story indeed much of the skepticism was over how using anonymous sources that wasn’t even close the plan fit in with the goals of the War on to being fully developed? Because the US foreign Terror. Currently, all signs point to Congress policy apparatus (insert-historical-imperial-power scuttling any deal President Obama might be here) gets to set the terms of the discourse for able to reach with Iran. everyone from war-machine sycophants to postBack in August, when the same embassy colonial theorists. closed in Yemen, along with other US embassies This is the dilemma that those seeking to resist hegemony or create a just world face. One of the around the Middle East, Al Jazeera had a token imperial stooge, on Inside Story, who most effective ways to make the powers that be irrelevant is to treat them as such, but in doing so said the closings were in a response to “some you allow the hegemonist propaganda to continue very specific intelligence, particularly within the region. It may not have been specific” unmolested. Applied to the non-explosion, if and of course that the intelligence came from you’re a purported anti-imperialist media outlet, do you ignore the story or do you report it with a intercepted communications. These closings healthy context critical of US drone strikes in the came at a time when hubbub around the Snowden leaks/NSA surveillance story was at area? a high point. All of which is to say that master This dilemma is more than theoretical. The propagandists these guys are not. And yet more insidious effects of the media lie not in the they’ve largely managed to succeed, not least stories people read, but the ones they skim, the because whenever they clear their throat, we all ticker feed, or the ones they don’t even click on. It is in the milieu where the US war machine has come running. achieved its most complete propaganda victory. The number of Americans who do not believe Address all hate mail to [email protected] All Quiet on the Western Front By Peter M. Gunn “NOW MORE THAN EVER” On Monday, October 28, an explosion and heavy gunfire were reported outside the US embassy in Yemen. You may have heard about it. It got a brief mention on all the cable news channels with promises of more on this story as it develops including possible casualties. It pierced my leftist information silo through a small paragraph on Gawker mentioning this fact and nothing else. It was, a sobering reminder, indeed, of the dangerous world we live in. A moment of pause, for reflection that for all the criticism we do and outrage we share about the military-industrial complex, they really are working to keep us, Americans, safe. A few hours later, there was more on this story as it developed: the explosions were fireworks from a wedding party. Now this is far from the first time that the US has “mistaken” a wedding party for socalled terrorist activity, as quite a few former citizens of Afghanistan can attest to. Nor is this far from the first time that questionable news reports have been deployed in an effort to keep the populace good and scared. I will admit that were it not for this column, I would have never bothered to follow up on the story. No news outlet. ever reports the boner-killing truth-filled updates as breathlessly as it does the the initial scandalizing lies. This is of course not a bug of the news media, but a feature, and as much as I love Chomsky, it’s not just about manufacturing consent, but about the nature of the concept of news itself. When we talk about the evils of imperialism, much is made about the damage it does militarily, economically and politically, but more than that it shapes and limits our fundamental understanding of the world itself. Regions, cultures, borders become defined solely for the purposes of imperial interests. There is no concept of “the West” without an Oriental East to colonize and conquer, and any and all discourse about the West plays off that tradition. Similarly, Afghanistan and Iraq are not in the same region, historically and environmentally. They are completely different cultures with different languages and traditions. However, in order for its War On Terror/Project for a New American Century agenda to make sense, the Bush administration started to push a new regional formulation called the “Greater Middle East.” 9 years later, and the war in Afghanistan is colloquially understood as a war in the Middle East, with all of the wonderful Clashof-Civilizations elements implied. And once those regions have been defined, our understanding of what goes on in them is also almost entirely shaped by imperial interests. 7