Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $11.50 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
November 7, 2003
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
November
8, 2003
War, Social Justice,
Media & Democracy
"Let's
Save Pessimism for Better Times"
By NORMAN SOLOMON
Prepared text of speech at the Brazilian
Social Forum November 8, 2003 Belo Horizonte, Brazil
For me and the grassroots activists who I work
with every day in the United States, many events have caused
us to feel discouraged during the last few years. But I have
often remembered words that I heard in early 2001 at the World
Social Forum in Porto Alegre. Speaking there, Eduardo Galeano
mentioned a statement that he saw written on a wall on a street
in a South American city. The statement said: "Let's save
pessimism for better times."
To people on this planet who are striving
to overcome the destructive priorities of neoliberalism, the
transition that has occurred in Brazil this year offers hope.
We see in the present day that the struggles of millions of people,
for years and decades, can bring uplifting changes that once
seemed very unlikely or even impossible.
But in the United States--and for the
people elsewhere in the world who have been in the main line
of fire of U.S. policies--the times have gotten worse in recent
years.
I live in California, a state where a
bad actor can become governor. And I live in a country where
the presidents are bad actors.
In Washington, the job description for
presidents is to act like humanitarians while functioning as
world-class exploiters and thugs.
Ten months ago, I visited Baghdad while
accompanying Denis Halliday, the former United Nations assistant
secretary general who had been director of the UN's "oil
for food" program in Iraq. I felt in January that I was
at the scene of a crime against humanity--a crime that had not
yet occurred, but that was being proudly proclaimed on the agenda
of the leaders of the U.S. and British governments.
Before the launching of cruise missiles
and two-thousand pound bombs against Baghdad and other heavily
populated urban areas, before the "cluster munitions"
that would be scattered across cities and towns in Iraq, before
the depleted uranium shells that would be fired with the subsidies
of U.S. taxpayers--before the all-out unleashing of the Pentagon's
lucrative firepower--there were the weapons of mass deception.
In the cross-hairs of these weapons of
mass deception were any people who could perhaps be persuaded
to be gullible. The propaganda armaments were endless phony claims
about seeking diplomatic solutions. The propaganda armaments
were speeches at the United Nations where President George W.
 Bush
and Secretary of State Colin Powell fervently presented false
claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to Al
Qaeda. But most of all, the arsenals of propaganda--enabling
the war on Iraq to proceed--were the news media.
And in many ways, the most powerful technique
of deception continues to be silence about truth.
In the United States, very few prominent
journalists are willing to mention that President Bush has the
blood of many Iraqi children on his hands after launching an
aggressive war in violation of the U.N. Charter and the Nuremberg
principles established more than half a century ago.
Anti-democratic news media are hostile
to history. And so, the same propaganda machinery says little
about the suffering that results from the class war constantly
waged by the wealthy--and avoids telling much about the human
consequences of militarism.
The writer Mark Twain once said that
"None but the dead are permitted to speak truth." And
often that seems literally to be the case.
In the United States, certain vital statements
by Twain--who's often considered to be the nation's greatest
writer--are excluded from corporatized media culture.
* A hundred years ago, he wrote: "Who
are the oppressors? The few: the king, the capitalist and a handful
of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed?
The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages;
the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and
idle eat."
* He wrote: "Why is it right that
there is not a fairer division of the spoil all around? Because
laws and constitutions have ordered otherwise. Then it follows
that laws and constitutions should change around and say there
shall be a more nearly equal division."
* And he wrote: "I am an anti-imperialist.
I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other
land."
In current times, for the government
that is pleased to proclaim itself "the world's only superpower,"
the media bias that prepares the path for war must avoid certain
inconvenient realities of history. One of those realities, for
the U.S. media, has been the profound verdict rendered 58 years
ago at trials in the German city of Nuremberg.
Despite such deafening media silences
this year, the fact remains that judgments at Nuremberg and precepts
of international law forbid launching an aggressive war--an apt
description of what the U.S. government inflicted on Iraqi people
in the spring of 2003.
"We must make clear to the Germans
that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is
not that they lost the war, but that they started it," said
Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, a U.S. representative
to Nuremberg at the International Conference on Military Trials
at the close of World War II. He added that "no grievances
or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly
renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."
When a country--particularly "a
democracy"--goes to war, the passive consent of the governed
lubricates the machinery of slaughter. Silence is a key form
of cooperation, but the war-making system does not insist on
quietude or agreement. Mere passivity or self-restraint will
suffice to keep the missiles flying, the bombs exploding and
the faraway people dying.
We now face an emboldened regime in Washington
which sees military actions as reliable solutions.
To devote billions more dollars to weaponry
while so many people are hungry and dying from preventable diseases
is a sin and a crime.
No part of the world is spared the impacts.
The excellent news agency Inter Press Service reported in late
September that "levels of U.S. military aid to Latin America
have more than tripled over the last five years." The news
agency added: "At a time when the region's economies are
stagnating or even shrinking, throwing millions more people into
poverty, total U.S. military aid to Latin America now almost
equals the amount of money Washington is devoting to social or
economic development there."
The backing for the U.S. war on Iraq
and the occupation of that country cannot be understood apart
from the economic imperial designs known as "neoliberalism"
and "globalization"--the eagerness to create optimum
conditions for investment and maximally profitable trade arrangements.
Today--despite all that has been revealed
and all the splits that have developed among U.S. elites about
the occupation of Iraq--the media supporters of it include the
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. We should consider
what the esteemed journalist Friedman had to say in his 1999
book titled "The Lexus and the Olive Tree." He wrote:
"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a
hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas,
the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist
that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to
flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine
Corps."
That declaration was written in a spirit
of enthusiastic approval. The visions of hegemony--with their
geopolitical, economic, cultural and media components--are driven
by the specter of a kind of "united corporate states of
the world" ... a world in which the preeminent sovereignty
belongs to the likes of American Express and Citicorp and McDonalds
and Burger King and Monsanto. And Disney and CNN.
Seriously distorted reporting tells us
that the leaders in Washington are eager to achieve peace. But
this is true only in the context of subjugation.
The U.S. government wants peace--on its
own terms.
The man with a boot on another person's
neck may speak loudly of desiring peace. So does the Israeli
government as it maintains a brutal and flagrantly illegal occupation
of Palestinian territory, now in its 37th year.
As the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz
remarked two centuries ago: "A conqueror is always a lover
of peace."
Last weekend, the shooting down of a
helicopter in Iraq resulted in the deaths of 16 members of the
U.S. armed forces.
On Monday [November 3] the organization
that I'm part of, the Institute for Public Accuracy based in
the United States, released a statement from a California resident,
Fernando Suarez del Solar, whose son Jesus Alberto Suarez del
Solar Navarro died in Iraq on March 27, a week after the start
of the war. The bereaved father said: "These attacks are
the tragic result of the illegal occupation of Iraq by the U.S.
military. Our young people are exposed to death every day. They
are wounded in faraway lands for the whims and lies of President
Bush.... The military does all kinds of things to recruit Hispanics,
African Americans and poor Anglos. How many children of congressmen
or CEOs are in Iraq?"
But the U.S. news media cannot accept
very much of such candor. The debates about policies are tactical,
not fundamental. Certain perspectives--prevalent in elite circles
and promoted by most government officials--are heard again and
again. Other outlooks, questioning not only the strategic wisdom
but also the moral basis of government policies, are heard only
once in a while.
In the mass media, the power to include
and exclude is the power to shape and manipulate public opinion.
As dominant media corporations grow larger in size and fewer
in number, the major means of mass communication are engaged
in a "corporatization of consciousness."
And in times of war, there is often a
parallel militarization of consciousness. In a country with democratic
forms of government, this is what makes possible the manipulated
consent of the governed for war based on lies.
Now, the occupation of Iraq is imposing
new economic models of privatization for the benefit of U.S.
corporate interests. This is neoliberalism at gunpoint.
Iraq has an estimated 112 billion barrels
of oil under the sand. The news media of the United States like
to pretend that the oil there has little or nothing to do with
the war and the occupation. But can anyone seriously believe
that the U.S. government would have 130,000 troops in Iraq today
if that country did not have a single drop of oil reserves?
Thirty-six years ago, the civil rights
leader Martin Luther King Jr. identified the U.S. government
as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
That statement was accurate in 1967. And it is accurate in 2003.
So, too, we are still living with the
truth that Dr. King expressed as he said: "When machines
and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered
more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism
and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered."
The struggle over media and the flow
of information--whether in the United States or Brazil or anywhere
else--is inseparable from the battle for democracy. It is impossible
for democratic participation to breathe freely while the heavy
weight of capital sits on the windpipe of open expression and
wide-ranging debate.
It is necessary but it is not enough
to ensure freedom of speech. All people must also have the freedom
to be heard. Otherwise, "free speech" can be--and often
is--the freedom to speak to the walls.
The major news outlets are like walls
with cracks. Every day the confining structures of big media
loom large.
Yet we have countless opportunities to
find, utilize and widen the cracks in the corporate media's barriers
to democratic communication. Meanwhile, we need to grow non-corporate
media institutions capable of effectively promoting social change.
Steadily worsening concentrations of
ownership and the hefty clout of advertising combine to severely
limit the range of information and debate in news media. Ongoing
pressures--economic, ideological and governmental--constrain
the work of mainline journalists, whose efforts routinely suffer
from skewed priorities and self-censorship.
Self-censorship is a huge problem in
our societies with freedom of the press. As George Orwell observed:
"Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but
the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault
when there is no whip."
The profit-driven ideology of the "free
market" is in sync with the agendas of top management and
advertisers. The tilt against truly independent media and wide-ranging
discourse is extreme when corporations are the owners who hire
the managers who hire the journalists and producers.
While no individual or single organization
can take on more than a fraction of the necessary endeavors,
the overall work to create a democratic media environment must
run a wide gamut. Popular movements now face the imperative of
struggling for democratic media.
Sustained efforts to challenge the corporate
media and support independent media outlets can reinforce each
other with continuous synergy--to establish, sustain and expand
progressive movements' media organizations; to spread deft criticism
of rancid mass media; to push for better reporting and much wider
debate in mainstream media; to fight for structural reform of
government agencies so that the airwaves can be reclaimed by
the public; to lambast, debunk and satirize the insidious junk
that so often passes for journalism and cultural uplift.
In the long run, no campaign for basic
media reform can succeed apart from broader social-justice movements--and
vice versa. The degradation of journalism and mass entertainment
is entwined with pervasive corporate power that severely damages
virtually every facet of political and social life.
Media criticism becomes profoundly useful
in combination with media activism. Too often we've held onto
theories about what is and is not possible. But analysis and
action become much more powerful when they constantly inform
each other--when assessments shift due to on-the-ground experiences
that benefit not only from the results of trial and error but
also from insightful up-to-date analysis.
We've discovered that it's not nearly
enough to put out a powerful expose or release a cogent analysis
in a few print outlets or on some web pages or on a few radio
stations--or to briefly surface in a large national media venue.
Such achievements, while important, are insufficient. They need
to draw strength from each other--while simultaneously finding
ways to reach broader audiences, including via mass media, where
there are cracks in the corporate walls.
Some journalism students are taught the
noble theory that journalists should "afflict the comfortable
and comfort the afflicted." But under corporate control,
news media outlets are routinely engaged in comforting the already
comfortable and afflicting the already afflicted.
On an ongoing basis, major news outlets
participate in class warfare, from the top down. And they often
condemn those who engage in class warfare from the bottom up.
In many countries, the routine is for
the mass media--the daily newspapers, the biggest magazines,
the radio and TV networks, the cable stations--to side with those
who "have" against those who "have not."
In the United States, every daily newspaper
has a Business section. Not one has a Labor section. Apparently
the dominant media assumption is that wealth creates all labor,
instead of the other way around.
Popular movements urgently need to boost
the resources and improve the coordination of their media work.
It should be possible to attain the creative advantages of sharp
analysis, institutional growth, coordinated planning and agile
cooperation while encouraging a decentralized, democratic, grassroots
approach to social action.
Right now the cracks in the media walls
are much too thin and much too scarce. The long haul of our struggle
involves bringing down the institutional barriers that, in effect,
"soundproof" much of the media world and suppress the
voices of those without privilege.
Any campaign for media democratization
will encounter massive opposition from those who own the big
newspapers and large magazines and the radio and television networks.
And they're determined to also dominate the Internet as much
as possible.
The corporate media are committed not
only to their exorbitant profits but also to propagandizing the
society to accept an economic order based on fundamental injustice.
We can have corporate domination of media
or we can have genuine democracy--but we cannot have both.
Under the ownership of enormous corporations,
heavily influenced by the main sources of advertising revenue,
often functioning in tandem with state power--the major media
outlets cast a massive shadow over our lives, wherever we live.
Every day, when the voices of the rich
and powerful dominate what is loudly broadcast and widely publish,
the media managers are doing what they're paid to do.
But it is possible to create democratic
media. Possible--and absolutely necessary.
Norman Solomon
is co-author of Target
Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You. For an excerpt
and other information, go to: www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce
Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler
/ Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets'
Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|