Noam Chomsky is the eighth most cited source in history behind Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Jesus, Plato and Freud and yet, despite still being alive, gets next to no mainstream media exposure.
Now, why would that be, girls and boys?
Our guess is that his being an Anarcho-Syndicalist/ Anarchist/ Libertarian Socialist (his self-description understandably varies dependent on the media outlet) is something that cannot be accommodated by the "unaccountable private tyrannies" that dominate.
And, before continuing, it is worth noting that six of the above are/were Jewish (Aristotle and Plato being the obvious exceptions).
And if anyone says Lenin wasn't Jewish, yes he was...
And if anyone says Shakespeare wasn't Jewish, yes she was - check Haaretz (the only non-terroristic mainstream Israeli media).
In 1988, Chomsky together with Edward Herman produced a Propaganda Model to explain the workings of the media in their groundbreaking work "Manufacturing Consent".
To avoid me waffling on and on, surely it is easier to reproduce the outline of this Propaganda Model in full.
We will then provide some recent examples of the suppression of Realities in support of this Model.
And then we will conclude with the usual pithy one-liners, smirking words and very short sentences.
Chomsky/Herman - The Propaganda Model
"The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.
In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behaviour and performance.
A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.
The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable. In assessing the newsworthiness of the U.S. government's urgent claims of a shipment of MIGs to Nicaragua on November 5, 1984, the media do not stop to ponder the bias that is inherent in the priority assigned to government-supplied raw material, or the possibility that the government might be manipulating the news, imposing its own agenda, and deliberately diverting attention from other material. It requires a macro, alongside a micro- (story-by-story), view of media operations, to see the pattern of manipulation and systematic bias."
So.
Let's do that thing...
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We intend to provide a brief overview of five event horizons from the perspective of this Propaganda Model.
(1) The imprisoning and release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and the hysterical reactions to the fake realities engendered.
(2) The selective coverage of the real situation regarding the Chilean miners released from Mina San José de Copiapó.
(3) The mainstream media coverage of the regressive spending cuts implemented by the Cameron/Hanging Chad government (incidentally, two more candidates for an auto da fé).
(4) The tapping of the mobile phones of the British "elite" by the Murdochracy.
(5) Football coverage in The Guardian/Observer outlets.
Whereas the media circus wish to manufacture consent, our aim, on the contrary, is to manufacture discontent and to invert the phases of the image so that illusion and fantasy are grounded somewhat nearer a Real Reality - from the neohyperreal to the nearly Real, which is as far as one may travel back in 2010.
The Lockerbie Bombing
In August 2009, we published a response to the release of Al Megrahi from a Scottish prison. Entitled "JUSTICE", this post may be accessed at http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2009/08/justice.html.
It is the responses, reactions and mainstream media stances following this justice that is of interest with respect to the Propaganda Model.
Once the initial posturing of untruth was put out there, every reactive reaction following was based on this fake foundation.
The governments of Scotland, England and the HyperImperium went for a fetishistic disavowal that was lapped up by the state controlling media of Britain and the state controlled media of the US so that, as time went by, the coverage became increasingly bizarre, indeed comical, if it were not for the deaths from Flight 103 and the human rights abuses experienced by Al Megrahi.
Individuals who understood the Reality were denied press access until the story had been relegated to the inner pages while other individuals were cowed into silence as their livelihoods and mortgages depended on supporting the phantasmatic fallacy.
One thing is certain though.
Thank goodness that none of this had anything to do with either geopolitical posturing or oil!
The Mina San José de Copiapó Miners
Oh! What a feelgood story!!
Who could fail to shed tears at the drip feed release of the thirty three miners from a fate worse than death?
But in the words of John Pilger: "However, like all great media events, it is a façade."
39 deaths occur every year in Chile's privatised mines.
Miners across the world noted that the disaster would not have occurred if there had been two egress routes but, of course, this would have eaten into private profits.
And we cannot have that.
Pilger: "On 30 July last, a labour department report warned again of "serious safety deficiencies" [at Mina San José de Copiapó], but the minister took no action. Six days later, the men were entombed.
Not only were global workers voices silenced by the mainstream media, but even the speech and the shift handover by the foreman to president Piñera following the release was edited - his comments about such a disaster "never happening again" mysteriously being replaced by numerous images of the smiling billionaire president and talking head inputs from ministers, prime ministers, psychologists, engineers, in fact any possible source other than the miners themselves.
The reinvention of the odious Piñera by the world media managed to avoid Reality, as one would expect.
Pilger: "Piñera is a billionaire who controls a slice of the mining, energy and retail industries. He made his fortune in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup and during the free-market “experiments” of the zealots from the University of Chicago, known as the Chicago Boys. His brother and former business partner, Jose Piñera, a labour minister under Pinochet, privatised mining and state pensions and all but destroyed the trade unions. This was applauded in Washington as an “economic miracle”, a model of the new cult of neo-liberalism that would sweep the continent and ensure control from the north."
A masterpiece of reason and justice!
The Wunch Of Bankers
£81 billion of public spending cuts targeting the poor, the disabled, the disenfranchised, the north, the ill without private health insurance and the public sector in general, all to grab back the loot which, after all, hasn't disappeared - the booty sits in the offshore accounts of the Wunch of Bankers and their state enforcers who created the Depression.
Which makes the heavily promoted (by the mainstream press) Banking Levy all the more sickening.
Not only will the levy only target the Wunch of Bankers for £2.5 billion. but also this levy will only be phased in from 2013.
2013?
Phased in??
The Economist: "The current government argues that the total package hits the rich more but that is largely because of a tax rise introduced by the last government. Inevitably, this will have a bigger impact on consumption since the poor have a higher marginal propensity to consume. Then there is the politicial/moral issue. The package creates the understandable impression that the poor are paying the price for the folly of the bankers."
As Economics Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz comments: "... perhaps it is better to admit failure and move on than to extract a high price in unemployment and suffering in the name of a flawed economic model."
Still, surely we may rest assured as Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs CEO has pledged "rigorous" self-examination.
I'll fucking self-examine you, you fascistic bastard...
The Murdochracy
The Andy Coulson story has been nicely sidelined just as it was looking like the mainstream media would have to face up to the fact that the Murdochracy utilises tactics more akin to gangland Glasgow than the Fourth Estate.
Simple...
Who is going to stand up to the Murdoch masonic mafiosi when fulsome details of every illicit personal penetration, corruption and criminality is to be exposed and called real news?
The fact that Coulson keeps his job as Tory Communications chief while the disabled are kicked out of their wheelchairs is indicative of the power of the Beano Men.
The Guardian
We have blogged repeatedly, some might say obsessively about the role of John Colquhoun in manufacturing football 'news' at The Guardian/Observer.
The last few months have witnessed plentiful examples of ludicrous coverage in support of the likes of David James, Steve McClaren, Theo Walcott, Scott Carson, Liverpool FC/Roy Hodgson, Chris Kirkland, usually under the pen-name Louise Taylor.
We are beginning to believe that Ms Taylor is actually Colquhoun in cross-dressing mode.
For the analytical amongst you, we suggest a little practical test.
List the articles emanating from "Taylor" and compare with the club and player contacts at the Key Sports agents.
Excellent stuff!
And meanwhile, Harry Redknapp and Mike Dean mugged Fulham last weekend, so much so that Redknapp wasn't willing to be interviewed following the game.
And why does the man bristle so much when the word "sweeteners" is mentioned?
_____________________________________________________________________________________
These macro observations could, if we could be bothered, be mimicked by the micro.
As Chomsky has pointed out, US client terror states eg Colombia, Israel, Indonesia, South Korea, Chile are gamed as "fledgling democracies" while the equivalent strata of nation state outside the US sphere of influence are always "rogue states".
Chomsky: "In sum, the mass media of the United States are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions and self-censorship, and without significant overt coercion. This propaganda system has become even more efficient in recent decades with the rise of the national television networks, greater mass-media concentration right-wing pressures on public radio and television, and the growth in scope and sophistication of public relations and news management."
Chomsky on Orwell (for a British perspective): "In free England, he writes, ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. He gives some examples, and only a few sentences of explanation, but they capture important truths. "The sinister fact about literary censorship in England," Orwell wrote, "is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for any official ban." One reason is the centralization of the press in the hands of "wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics." Another, and I think more important reason, is a good education and immersion in the dominant intellectual culture, which instills in us a "general tacit agreement that `it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact.""
_____________________________________________________________________________________
I know.
An optimistic ending is needed...
Slavoj Žižek: "... if we come to 'know too much' to pierce the true functioning of social reality, this reality would dissolve itself."
Jean Baudrillard: "Every system that approaches perfect operativity, simultaneously approaches its downfall... it approaches absolute power of total absurdity... nothing remains for us to base anything on. All that remains for us to do is theoretical violence."
Without realising it, a builder that I passed by the other week encapsulated the neohypereality very nicely...
"I don't know what's going on! I'm in the middle of Manchester and it is a strange world."
Indeed it is!
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Thursday, 21 October 2010
Friday, 20 August 2010
"Democracy Is Terror"
Robespierre: "...for, nuances of perfidy or cruelty apart, all tyrants are alike."
All psychopaths are cowards - this is our only Revolutionary Hope.
Waterstones cashing in on five illegal wars in 10 years, giving a notorious psychopathic state terrorist war mongering fascist the opportunity to assuage his recently acquired Catholic guilt complex in a marketing exercise of gross distaste.
Cut up your Waterstones card and tell them why or turn up at the store, nick a copy of the book, and spit into the bastard's face...
Or ask him how he feels about the children or Uranium-tipped weapons or even the illegal use of Uranium beyond merely being "tipped".
Peter Biskind's comment about the illegal state carnage that the Imperium dropped on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos is relevant for the War Criminal too: "The truth is that the war was a crime, not a tragedy."
But what am I saying?
We live in a democracy.
But a democracy with manufactured consent.
People marched in over 600 cities across the world in opposition to the illegalities in Iraq.
No democracy in World Government.
And at a state level, we are offered Nick Clegg, a peculiarly British version of the hanging chad, as a demonstration of our democratic rights.
Chomsky: "The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda."
I don't know about you, but I often go about winning hearts and minds by massacring innocents and using enhanced nuclear weaponry.
Just how loved do these people wish to be?
And what a Fantastic Charade the Charlatans offer the X-Factor Gens.
Jean Baudrillard: "Not a shadow of seduction can be detected in the universe of production, ruled by the transparency principle governing all forces in the order of visible and calculable phenomena: objects, machines, sexual acts, or gross national product."
State militias mutually supporting the business classes on the props of the acquiescent press and the acquiescent...
Leslie Griffith: "A modern day financial monarchy, Goldman acts with the impunity once reserved for kings. Controlling legislators. Electing the President. Filling the executive branch with well-heeled lackeys, manipulating world markets and betting against the welfare of its own clients... the American people. When the equivalent of tax-time came, they squeezed the peasants for billions of bail-out bucks."
Ah! But to be fair now, the Imperium did dispatch $10 million to 'save' the Pakistani people from the impacts of largely American-made man-made climate change.
And the most alternative television news programme in British mainstream tv (Channel 4 News) leads off on the Blair Philanthropy and the Yank Generosity...
And the most alternative mainstream newspaper (The Guardian) told their chatterers to back Clegg The Chad.
All of the mainstream supports these "unaccountable private tyrannies".
Baudrillard: "Welcome to the techno-lumino-kinetic space and total-spatio-dynamic theatre... a gentle push in the right place is enough to bring it crashing down."
Slavoj Žižek: "The King of the Universe is the supreme criminal Anarchist... Does, then, the ecological challenge not offer a unique chance to reinvent the "eternal Idea" of egalitarian terror?"
Revolutionary Communist in the short-term, Anarchist in the short, medium and long term.
Amen.
*And, if you want to plan your day out at Waterstones, you might start by reading the article by John Pilger "Tony Blair Must Be Prosecuted" at (http://www.zcommunications.org/tony-blair-must-be-prosecuted-by-john-pilger).
No more autogenocide.
© Upwards From Below/Dietrological. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from Upwards From Below and redistribute by email or post to the web.
All psychopaths are cowards - this is our only Revolutionary Hope.
Waterstones cashing in on five illegal wars in 10 years, giving a notorious psychopathic state terrorist war mongering fascist the opportunity to assuage his recently acquired Catholic guilt complex in a marketing exercise of gross distaste.
Cut up your Waterstones card and tell them why or turn up at the store, nick a copy of the book, and spit into the bastard's face...
Or ask him how he feels about the children or Uranium-tipped weapons or even the illegal use of Uranium beyond merely being "tipped".
Peter Biskind's comment about the illegal state carnage that the Imperium dropped on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos is relevant for the War Criminal too: "The truth is that the war was a crime, not a tragedy."
But what am I saying?
We live in a democracy.
But a democracy with manufactured consent.
People marched in over 600 cities across the world in opposition to the illegalities in Iraq.
No democracy in World Government.
And at a state level, we are offered Nick Clegg, a peculiarly British version of the hanging chad, as a demonstration of our democratic rights.
Chomsky: "The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda."
I don't know about you, but I often go about winning hearts and minds by massacring innocents and using enhanced nuclear weaponry.
Just how loved do these people wish to be?
And what a Fantastic Charade the Charlatans offer the X-Factor Gens.
Jean Baudrillard: "Not a shadow of seduction can be detected in the universe of production, ruled by the transparency principle governing all forces in the order of visible and calculable phenomena: objects, machines, sexual acts, or gross national product."
State militias mutually supporting the business classes on the props of the acquiescent press and the acquiescent...
Leslie Griffith: "A modern day financial monarchy, Goldman acts with the impunity once reserved for kings. Controlling legislators. Electing the President. Filling the executive branch with well-heeled lackeys, manipulating world markets and betting against the welfare of its own clients... the American people. When the equivalent of tax-time came, they squeezed the peasants for billions of bail-out bucks."
Ah! But to be fair now, the Imperium did dispatch $10 million to 'save' the Pakistani people from the impacts of largely American-made man-made climate change.
And the most alternative television news programme in British mainstream tv (Channel 4 News) leads off on the Blair Philanthropy and the Yank Generosity...
And the most alternative mainstream newspaper (The Guardian) told their chatterers to back Clegg The Chad.
All of the mainstream supports these "unaccountable private tyrannies".
Baudrillard: "Welcome to the techno-lumino-kinetic space and total-spatio-dynamic theatre... a gentle push in the right place is enough to bring it crashing down."
Slavoj Žižek: "The King of the Universe is the supreme criminal Anarchist... Does, then, the ecological challenge not offer a unique chance to reinvent the "eternal Idea" of egalitarian terror?"
Revolutionary Communist in the short-term, Anarchist in the short, medium and long term.
Amen.
*And, if you want to plan your day out at Waterstones, you might start by reading the article by John Pilger "Tony Blair Must Be Prosecuted" at (http://www.zcommunications.org/tony-blair-must-be-prosecuted-by-john-pilger).
No more autogenocide.
© Upwards From Below/Dietrological. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from Upwards From Below and redistribute by email or post to the web.
Monday, 18 January 2010
We're All Black Jacobins Now - Jeremy Bullivant
"Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu!
Canga, bafio te!
Canga, moune de le!
Canga, do ki la!
Canga, do ki la!
Canga, li!"
“We swear to destroy the whites and all they possess; let us die rather than fail to keep this vow”
C.L.R. James: "Such a mass of ignorance and falsehood has surrounded these [Caribbean] islands for so many centuries that obvious truths sound like revelations.
Daddy Comes Home In A Coffin - US Explorer's Last Journey by Mr M. Biswas (Vidia Naipaul)
On Ice by M. Biswas
"...Less than a year ago Daddy - George Elmer
Edman, the celebrated traveller and explorer -
left home to explore the Amazon.
Well, I have news for you, kiddies.
Daddy is on his way home.
Yesterday he passed through Trinidad.
In a coffin."
James: "In 1789 the French West Indian colony of San Domingo [Haiti] supplied two-thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave-trade. It was an integral part of the economic life of the age, the greatest colony in the world, the pride of France, and the envy of every other imperialist nation. The whole structure rested on the labour of half-a-million slaves."
As usual when the US takes advantage of an Act of God Terror, it turns it into an Act of Uncle Sam Terror - "Blackwater Before Drinking Water!" according to Danny Schechter. Apply geopolitical strategy, enforce security through marines and mercenaries and only then allow the aid through.
James: "Christopher Columbus landed first in the New World at the island of San Salvador, and after praising God enquired urgently for gold. The natives, Red Indians, were peacable and friendly and directed him to Haiti, a large island (nearly as large as Ireland), rich, they said, in the yellow metal. He sailed to Haiti. One of his ships being wrecked, the Haitian Indians helped him so willingly that very little was lost and of the articles which they brought on shore not one was stolen.
The Spaniards, the most advanced Europeans of their day, annexed the island, called it Hispaniola, and took the backward natives under their protection. They introduced Christianity, forced labour in mines, murder, rape, bloodhounds, strange diseases, and artificial famine (by the destruction of cultivation to starve the rebellious). These and other requirements of the higher civilisation reduced the native population from an estimated half-a-million, perhaps a million, to 60,000 in fifteen years."
As Greg Palast noted, the Chinese with their sniffer dogs arrived in Haiti within 48 hours of the disaster unfolding. China is 8,500 miles from Haiti. The US took a day longer just to reach the airport and Florida is just 700 miles away while Guantánamo Bay lies just fifty miles from Haiti. In a blaze of PR 'news', the USS Carl Vinson and the marines turned up replete with sidewinder missiles and without any emergency relief supplies.
James: "... the marines... invaded Haiti in 1915. The whole nation resisted. A General Strike was organised and led by the literary intellectuals who had discovered the Africanism of their peasants as a means of national identity."
The Americans occupied the island for two decades.
Financial Times: "Alain Joyandet, French Co-operation Minister, told reporters... he had protested to Washington via the US ambassador about the US military's management of the airport where he said a French medical aid flight had been turned away."
James Walvin: "In 1791, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, the slaves of San Domingo rose in revolt. Despite invasion by a series of British, Spanish and Napoleonic armies, their twelve-year struggle led to the creation of Haiti, the first independent Black republic outside Africa. Only three years later, the British and Americans ended the Atlantic slave trade."
US intervention opposed the Haitian revolution for independence from France - "Goodbye To The Marseillaise". The US refused to recognise Haiti in 1804 as they couldn't countenance revolution so close to the Land of the Free, while it continued to enslave millions of its own citizens and fearing that "recognising Haiti would encourage slave revolution in the US" - Bill Quigley.
Wilson Harris offers this monologue from a young Guianese, half-Chinese, half-Negro man on the run from the police at the point when he realises that all previous generations, Dutch, English, French, capitalists, slaves, freed slaves, white and Black, were expatriates.
"... All the restless wayward spirits of all the aeons (who it was thought had been embalmed for good) are returning to roost in our blood. And we have to start all over again where they began to explore. We've got to pick up the seeds again from where they left off. It's no use worshipping the rottenest tacouba and tree-trunk in the historic topsoil. There's a whole world of branches and sensations we've missed, and we've got to start again from the roots up even if they look like nothing. Blood, sap, flesh, veins, arteries, lung, heart, the heartland, Sharon. We're the first potential parents who can contain the ancestral house. Too young? I don't know. Too much responsibility? Time will tell. We've got to face it. Or else it will be too late to stop everything and everyone from running away and tumbling down. And then All the King's Horses and all the King's Men won't be able to put us together again. Like all the bananas and the plantains and the coffee trees near Charity. Not far from here, you know. A small wind comes and everything comes out of the ground. Because the soil is unstable. Just pegasse. Looks rich on top but that's about all. What do you think they say when it happens, when the crops run away? They shrug and say they're expendable crops. they can't begin to see that it's us, our blood, running away all the time, in the river and in the sea, everywhere, staining the bush. Now is the time to make a newborn stand, Sharon; you and me; it's up to us, even if we fall on our knees and creep to anchor ourselves before we get up."
James: "The distinction between a white man and a man of colour was for them [the colonists] fundamental. It was their all. In defence of it they would bring down the whole of their world... For over a century after independence the Haitians attempted to form a replica of European, ie French, civilisation in the West Indies."
With a good dose of Negritude thrown in...
Following a pseudo-recognition of Haiti, the US shifted to the dark arts in their undermining of a state of free slaves just off their coast - better Duvalier rather than another Castro at the low tide level. Papa Doc and Baby Doc were US puppets for 29 years and the US supported and energised the 1991 and 2004 coups against Aristide, placing another puppet, President Preval, in office instead. Preval is dependent on US largesse and this power shift is all too evident in the usurption of occupational control from the island to the Pentagon.
Across the region, always the same template - think Trujillo being esconced in the Dominican Republic for over a quarter of a century with the help of US marines and the friendship of Washington throughout.
Incidentally, Aristide was also banned from next month's elections which, in a further democratic roll of the dice, will, of course, now no longer take place.
Hillary Clinton tells Americans that Haiti is "our friend" and CNN has launched a "Saving Haiti" PR exercise.
Howard Zinn: "For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks, but not its record in world affairs. It had opposed the Haitian revolution for independence from France at the start of the nineteenth century. It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had 'opened' Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats. It had declared an Open Door Policy in China as a means of assuring that the United States would have opportunities equal to other imperial powers in exploiting China. It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years.
"While demanding an Open Door in China, it had insisted (with the Monroe Doctrine and many military interventions) on a Closed Door in Latin America - that is, closed to everyone but the United States. It had engineered a revolution against Colombia and created the 'independent' state of Panama in order to build and control the Canal. It sent five thousand marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a revolution, and kept a force there for seven years. It intervened in the Dominican Republic for the fourth time in 1916 and kept troops there for eight years. It intervened for the second time in Haiti in 1915... Between 1900 and 1933, the United States intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama six times, in Guatemala once, in Honduras seven times."
The linking of the social revolutions of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Boukman, Rigaud, Moise and Nazimbo to the later Marcus Garvey, Padmore, Nkrumah and the independence of Ghana and Fidel Castro is evidently far too frightening for intrinsically weak white power.
James: "They divided the offspring of white and Black and intermediate shades into 128 divisions. The true Mulatto was the child of the pure Black and the pure white. The child of the white and the Mulatto woman was a quarteron with ninety-six parts white and thirty-two parts Black. But the quarteron could be produced by the white and the Marabou in the proportion of 88 to 40, or by the white and the Sacatra, in the proportion of 72 to 56 and so on all through the 128 varieties. But the sang mêlé with 127 white parts and one Black part was still a man of colour."
James: "He himself [de Wimpffen] had sat at a table with a woman, beautiful, rich and very much admired, who had had a careless cook thrown into the oven."
Of course, we must expect US geopolitical policy to get carried away within itself when the twin goals of a neo-conservative agenda and military expansionism share strategic loci. And, what, with a chance to air the good ol' fashioned folksy racism inherent in the shareholder capitalist system too?
Far too good an opportunity to miss.
Ainsi Parla L'oncle...
Zionist Rahm Emanuel - Obama's White House Chief of Staff - and his advice to the First Man: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."
On top of the military adventurism and the seemingly ever-present economic sanctions, the impositions of the Caribbean Basin Initiative that robbed Haiti of it's rice industry so that they now have to import US rice instead, the migration from the countryside to the resultant shanty towns, the sweatshops where wage slaves earn just $2 per day, comparatively well off against the national average of just $1 per day, the abusive US sex trade tourism, the stamping on the 'Third World' in general under the (dis)guises of the Doha trade lectures and the lack of action regarding climate change, it is, apparently, VITAL to US interests to impose this neo-con agenda on a land where between one and two hundred thousand people have just died.
No different than the punishments for the Hamas 'democratic revolt'.
And what does the Mulatto-In-Chief have to say (never Black, always Mulatto in the White House)?
"But above all, we act for a very simple reason: in times of tragedy, the United States of America steps forward and helps. That is who we are. That is what we do. For decades, America’s leadership has been founded in part on the fact that we do not use our power to subjugate others, we use it to lift them up—whether it was rebuilding our former adversaries after World War II, dropping food and water to the people of Berlin, or helping the people of Bosnia and Kosovo rebuild their lives and their nations."
As James Mackintosh says in the Financial Times: "US government aid amounts to 0.19% of gross national income: the largest foreign aid in dollar terms, but one of the stingiest in proportion to the country’s wealth of all the developed countries."
Mackintosh continued: "US officials have blamed security concerns for holding up providing relief. Yet a team of Cuban doctors were seen Monday treating hundreds of patients without a gun or soldier in sight. The deputy chief of mission at the American Embassy in Haiti, David Lindwall, said the U.S. had done a lot, but that some teams and supplies “aren’t getting out as broadly as we’d like because of security” concerns."
Still after eight days, the US military finally neohyperrealised that, as they control every single action of President Preval, they might land their helicopters in the grounds of the presidential palace and distribute the aid.
State Terror At A Time Of Humanitarian Crisis.
Get the Strange Idiot Child From Texas in to help co-ordinate the relief effort following his success in New Orleans.
How Terroristic Do You Wish To Be?
And that is one of the two biggest questions of Our Time.
All aid organisations tell us that the first 48 hours are the most critical regarding the prevention of further deaths due to the earthquake and the spread of disease.
The US were in control of the airport and, therefore, distribution and failed to co-ordinate the process in any meaningful manner whatsoever.
There was no justification for the "lack of action" other than the overall strategy of inaction in itself.
This secondary genocide was State Terror.
Righteous indignation is not revolutionary enough.
It is of little use filming PR exercises dropping Caterpillars into the most damaged areas now Uncle Sam, unless the bidding for future reconstruction has already been decreed.
Week One - Genocide by Inaction.
Week Two - Enforce Mirror of Consumption Template ("We are saving you both from yourselves and from Death. Have a cupcake. Learn to consume").
Cahier D'un Retour Au Pays Natal - Aimé Césaire
"...my Negritude is not a stone, its
deafness a sounding board for
the noises of the day
my Negritude is not a mere spot of
dead water on the dead eye
of the earth
my Negritude is no tower, no cathedral
it cleaves into the red flesh of
the heavens
it penetrates the seamless bondage of my unbending patience
Hoorah for those who never invented
anything
for those who never explored anything
for those who never mastered anything
but who, possessed, give themselves up
to the essence of each thing
ignorant of the coverings but possessed
by the pulse of things
indifferent to mastering but taking the
chances of the world...
...But in doing so, my heart, preserve
me from all hate
do not turn me into a man of hate of
whom I think only with hate
for in order to protect myself into
this unique race
you know the extent of my boundless
love..."
Quigley reckons that the US owes Haiti billions of dollars: "This is not charity. This is justice. This is reparation. The current crisis is an opportunity for people in the US to own up to our country's history of dominating Haiti and to make a truly just response."
But what is Real Justice?
The Friemanist Hyperimperial State-Based Economic Juggernaut will not halt of its own accord - its air-brakes are fucked.
As the temporal narratives of climate change stare us out, is it to (eventually) be Negritude or Eh! Eh! Bomba!?
Or both...
The incremental 'justice' of Amartya Sen is merely a sign in the code - such justice doesn't function at all at extreme times and functions only partially at other times as the psychopathic system is never still.
In San Domingo, both incremental justice and social revolution succeeded in parallel in 1793, although it was only when Toussaint trained his private army of slaves that France was forced to listen.
C.L.R. James was in no doubt of the answer: "The rich are only defeated when running for their lives."
© Upwards From Below/Dietrological. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from Upwards From Below and redistribute by email or post to the web.
Canga, bafio te!
Canga, moune de le!
Canga, do ki la!
Canga, do ki la!
Canga, li!"
“We swear to destroy the whites and all they possess; let us die rather than fail to keep this vow”
C.L.R. James: "Such a mass of ignorance and falsehood has surrounded these [Caribbean] islands for so many centuries that obvious truths sound like revelations.
Daddy Comes Home In A Coffin - US Explorer's Last Journey by Mr M. Biswas (Vidia Naipaul)
On Ice by M. Biswas
"...Less than a year ago Daddy - George Elmer
Edman, the celebrated traveller and explorer -
left home to explore the Amazon.
Well, I have news for you, kiddies.
Daddy is on his way home.
Yesterday he passed through Trinidad.
In a coffin."
James: "In 1789 the French West Indian colony of San Domingo [Haiti] supplied two-thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave-trade. It was an integral part of the economic life of the age, the greatest colony in the world, the pride of France, and the envy of every other imperialist nation. The whole structure rested on the labour of half-a-million slaves."
As usual when the US takes advantage of an Act of God Terror, it turns it into an Act of Uncle Sam Terror - "Blackwater Before Drinking Water!" according to Danny Schechter. Apply geopolitical strategy, enforce security through marines and mercenaries and only then allow the aid through.
James: "Christopher Columbus landed first in the New World at the island of San Salvador, and after praising God enquired urgently for gold. The natives, Red Indians, were peacable and friendly and directed him to Haiti, a large island (nearly as large as Ireland), rich, they said, in the yellow metal. He sailed to Haiti. One of his ships being wrecked, the Haitian Indians helped him so willingly that very little was lost and of the articles which they brought on shore not one was stolen.
The Spaniards, the most advanced Europeans of their day, annexed the island, called it Hispaniola, and took the backward natives under their protection. They introduced Christianity, forced labour in mines, murder, rape, bloodhounds, strange diseases, and artificial famine (by the destruction of cultivation to starve the rebellious). These and other requirements of the higher civilisation reduced the native population from an estimated half-a-million, perhaps a million, to 60,000 in fifteen years."
As Greg Palast noted, the Chinese with their sniffer dogs arrived in Haiti within 48 hours of the disaster unfolding. China is 8,500 miles from Haiti. The US took a day longer just to reach the airport and Florida is just 700 miles away while Guantánamo Bay lies just fifty miles from Haiti. In a blaze of PR 'news', the USS Carl Vinson and the marines turned up replete with sidewinder missiles and without any emergency relief supplies.
James: "... the marines... invaded Haiti in 1915. The whole nation resisted. A General Strike was organised and led by the literary intellectuals who had discovered the Africanism of their peasants as a means of national identity."
The Americans occupied the island for two decades.
Financial Times: "Alain Joyandet, French Co-operation Minister, told reporters... he had protested to Washington via the US ambassador about the US military's management of the airport where he said a French medical aid flight had been turned away."
James Walvin: "In 1791, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, the slaves of San Domingo rose in revolt. Despite invasion by a series of British, Spanish and Napoleonic armies, their twelve-year struggle led to the creation of Haiti, the first independent Black republic outside Africa. Only three years later, the British and Americans ended the Atlantic slave trade."
US intervention opposed the Haitian revolution for independence from France - "Goodbye To The Marseillaise". The US refused to recognise Haiti in 1804 as they couldn't countenance revolution so close to the Land of the Free, while it continued to enslave millions of its own citizens and fearing that "recognising Haiti would encourage slave revolution in the US" - Bill Quigley.
Wilson Harris offers this monologue from a young Guianese, half-Chinese, half-Negro man on the run from the police at the point when he realises that all previous generations, Dutch, English, French, capitalists, slaves, freed slaves, white and Black, were expatriates.
"... All the restless wayward spirits of all the aeons (who it was thought had been embalmed for good) are returning to roost in our blood. And we have to start all over again where they began to explore. We've got to pick up the seeds again from where they left off. It's no use worshipping the rottenest tacouba and tree-trunk in the historic topsoil. There's a whole world of branches and sensations we've missed, and we've got to start again from the roots up even if they look like nothing. Blood, sap, flesh, veins, arteries, lung, heart, the heartland, Sharon. We're the first potential parents who can contain the ancestral house. Too young? I don't know. Too much responsibility? Time will tell. We've got to face it. Or else it will be too late to stop everything and everyone from running away and tumbling down. And then All the King's Horses and all the King's Men won't be able to put us together again. Like all the bananas and the plantains and the coffee trees near Charity. Not far from here, you know. A small wind comes and everything comes out of the ground. Because the soil is unstable. Just pegasse. Looks rich on top but that's about all. What do you think they say when it happens, when the crops run away? They shrug and say they're expendable crops. they can't begin to see that it's us, our blood, running away all the time, in the river and in the sea, everywhere, staining the bush. Now is the time to make a newborn stand, Sharon; you and me; it's up to us, even if we fall on our knees and creep to anchor ourselves before we get up."
James: "The distinction between a white man and a man of colour was for them [the colonists] fundamental. It was their all. In defence of it they would bring down the whole of their world... For over a century after independence the Haitians attempted to form a replica of European, ie French, civilisation in the West Indies."
With a good dose of Negritude thrown in...
Following a pseudo-recognition of Haiti, the US shifted to the dark arts in their undermining of a state of free slaves just off their coast - better Duvalier rather than another Castro at the low tide level. Papa Doc and Baby Doc were US puppets for 29 years and the US supported and energised the 1991 and 2004 coups against Aristide, placing another puppet, President Preval, in office instead. Preval is dependent on US largesse and this power shift is all too evident in the usurption of occupational control from the island to the Pentagon.
Across the region, always the same template - think Trujillo being esconced in the Dominican Republic for over a quarter of a century with the help of US marines and the friendship of Washington throughout.
Incidentally, Aristide was also banned from next month's elections which, in a further democratic roll of the dice, will, of course, now no longer take place.
Hillary Clinton tells Americans that Haiti is "our friend" and CNN has launched a "Saving Haiti" PR exercise.
Howard Zinn: "For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks, but not its record in world affairs. It had opposed the Haitian revolution for independence from France at the start of the nineteenth century. It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had 'opened' Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats. It had declared an Open Door Policy in China as a means of assuring that the United States would have opportunities equal to other imperial powers in exploiting China. It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years.
"While demanding an Open Door in China, it had insisted (with the Monroe Doctrine and many military interventions) on a Closed Door in Latin America - that is, closed to everyone but the United States. It had engineered a revolution against Colombia and created the 'independent' state of Panama in order to build and control the Canal. It sent five thousand marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a revolution, and kept a force there for seven years. It intervened in the Dominican Republic for the fourth time in 1916 and kept troops there for eight years. It intervened for the second time in Haiti in 1915... Between 1900 and 1933, the United States intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama six times, in Guatemala once, in Honduras seven times."
The linking of the social revolutions of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Boukman, Rigaud, Moise and Nazimbo to the later Marcus Garvey, Padmore, Nkrumah and the independence of Ghana and Fidel Castro is evidently far too frightening for intrinsically weak white power.
James: "They divided the offspring of white and Black and intermediate shades into 128 divisions. The true Mulatto was the child of the pure Black and the pure white. The child of the white and the Mulatto woman was a quarteron with ninety-six parts white and thirty-two parts Black. But the quarteron could be produced by the white and the Marabou in the proportion of 88 to 40, or by the white and the Sacatra, in the proportion of 72 to 56 and so on all through the 128 varieties. But the sang mêlé with 127 white parts and one Black part was still a man of colour."
James: "He himself [de Wimpffen] had sat at a table with a woman, beautiful, rich and very much admired, who had had a careless cook thrown into the oven."
Of course, we must expect US geopolitical policy to get carried away within itself when the twin goals of a neo-conservative agenda and military expansionism share strategic loci. And, what, with a chance to air the good ol' fashioned folksy racism inherent in the shareholder capitalist system too?
Far too good an opportunity to miss.
Ainsi Parla L'oncle...
Zionist Rahm Emanuel - Obama's White House Chief of Staff - and his advice to the First Man: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."
On top of the military adventurism and the seemingly ever-present economic sanctions, the impositions of the Caribbean Basin Initiative that robbed Haiti of it's rice industry so that they now have to import US rice instead, the migration from the countryside to the resultant shanty towns, the sweatshops where wage slaves earn just $2 per day, comparatively well off against the national average of just $1 per day, the abusive US sex trade tourism, the stamping on the 'Third World' in general under the (dis)guises of the Doha trade lectures and the lack of action regarding climate change, it is, apparently, VITAL to US interests to impose this neo-con agenda on a land where between one and two hundred thousand people have just died.
No different than the punishments for the Hamas 'democratic revolt'.
And what does the Mulatto-In-Chief have to say (never Black, always Mulatto in the White House)?
"But above all, we act for a very simple reason: in times of tragedy, the United States of America steps forward and helps. That is who we are. That is what we do. For decades, America’s leadership has been founded in part on the fact that we do not use our power to subjugate others, we use it to lift them up—whether it was rebuilding our former adversaries after World War II, dropping food and water to the people of Berlin, or helping the people of Bosnia and Kosovo rebuild their lives and their nations."
As James Mackintosh says in the Financial Times: "US government aid amounts to 0.19% of gross national income: the largest foreign aid in dollar terms, but one of the stingiest in proportion to the country’s wealth of all the developed countries."
Mackintosh continued: "US officials have blamed security concerns for holding up providing relief. Yet a team of Cuban doctors were seen Monday treating hundreds of patients without a gun or soldier in sight. The deputy chief of mission at the American Embassy in Haiti, David Lindwall, said the U.S. had done a lot, but that some teams and supplies “aren’t getting out as broadly as we’d like because of security” concerns."
Still after eight days, the US military finally neohyperrealised that, as they control every single action of President Preval, they might land their helicopters in the grounds of the presidential palace and distribute the aid.
State Terror At A Time Of Humanitarian Crisis.
Get the Strange Idiot Child From Texas in to help co-ordinate the relief effort following his success in New Orleans.
How Terroristic Do You Wish To Be?
And that is one of the two biggest questions of Our Time.
All aid organisations tell us that the first 48 hours are the most critical regarding the prevention of further deaths due to the earthquake and the spread of disease.
The US were in control of the airport and, therefore, distribution and failed to co-ordinate the process in any meaningful manner whatsoever.
There was no justification for the "lack of action" other than the overall strategy of inaction in itself.
This secondary genocide was State Terror.
Righteous indignation is not revolutionary enough.
It is of little use filming PR exercises dropping Caterpillars into the most damaged areas now Uncle Sam, unless the bidding for future reconstruction has already been decreed.
Week One - Genocide by Inaction.
Week Two - Enforce Mirror of Consumption Template ("We are saving you both from yourselves and from Death. Have a cupcake. Learn to consume").
Cahier D'un Retour Au Pays Natal - Aimé Césaire
"...my Negritude is not a stone, its
deafness a sounding board for
the noises of the day
my Negritude is not a mere spot of
dead water on the dead eye
of the earth
my Negritude is no tower, no cathedral
it cleaves into the red flesh of
the heavens
it penetrates the seamless bondage of my unbending patience
Hoorah for those who never invented
anything
for those who never explored anything
for those who never mastered anything
but who, possessed, give themselves up
to the essence of each thing
ignorant of the coverings but possessed
by the pulse of things
indifferent to mastering but taking the
chances of the world...
...But in doing so, my heart, preserve
me from all hate
do not turn me into a man of hate of
whom I think only with hate
for in order to protect myself into
this unique race
you know the extent of my boundless
love..."
Quigley reckons that the US owes Haiti billions of dollars: "This is not charity. This is justice. This is reparation. The current crisis is an opportunity for people in the US to own up to our country's history of dominating Haiti and to make a truly just response."
But what is Real Justice?
The Friemanist Hyperimperial State-Based Economic Juggernaut will not halt of its own accord - its air-brakes are fucked.
As the temporal narratives of climate change stare us out, is it to (eventually) be Negritude or Eh! Eh! Bomba!?
Or both...
The incremental 'justice' of Amartya Sen is merely a sign in the code - such justice doesn't function at all at extreme times and functions only partially at other times as the psychopathic system is never still.
In San Domingo, both incremental justice and social revolution succeeded in parallel in 1793, although it was only when Toussaint trained his private army of slaves that France was forced to listen.
C.L.R. James was in no doubt of the answer: "The rich are only defeated when running for their lives."
© Upwards From Below/Dietrological. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from Upwards From Below and redistribute by email or post to the web.
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