“The media rush to glorify Obama the ‘warrior president’ is symptomatic of a Western society that has come to view war as entirely normal� It is by now almost impossible to imagine that the West would not always be attacking, or targeting for attack, some defenceless nation or other.” — ‘You Cannot Kill An Ideology With A Gun‘ By Media Lens
All things being equal, which undoubtedly they are not, and surely that’s point, the long overdue arrival of a truly socialized, globalized planet would have been able to tackle the mess capitalism has made of things. After all, our disasters are now planetary in scale and thus can now only be handled by the planet as a whole. That means all of us, not just a privileged few.
And, it is surely an irony that ‘globalization’ has been heralded, nay crowed over by the Pirates as the solution to all our problems, yet it’s the nature of capitalist ‘globalization’ that is the main source of not only our local but also now the global crises that multiply by the day as the Empire desperately seeks to hang on to its ill-gotten gains. Problems that now threaten our future as a species, never mind a better future for all.
No doubt when comrade Marx first branded our socialist vision with ‘Workers of the World, Unite’, he had no idea just how badly his world would screw up everything, for although he was the first true globalist and experienced first-hand the awesome power of industrial capitalism to ‘tame nature’, I am sure given the lack of knowledge about the real nature of the biosphere as well as capitalism’s astounding ability to consume everything in its path, nothing could have prepared him for Fukushima or Chernobyl.
Operation Odyssey Dawn however would have been ever such familiar territory to him. Such ‘escapades’ formerly known as Gunboat Diplomacy had helped build the world Marx inhabited. The only difference was that back then they didn’t need a pretext, might was right, end of story. Nowadays, with all the talk of ‘human rights’ and war crimes, gunboat diplomacy is a tad out of sync with all the absuriities peddled by the Pirates.
The outrageous call by Gen. Sir Richard Davis the other day to bomb everything in Libya illustrates what lurks beneath the veneer of civilization. And believe me, Gen. Sir Davis comes from a long line of pirates stretching all the way back to the 16th century and the reign of Elizabeth I when the pirates were described as ‘privateers‘ or to call them by their contemporary name, private military contractors.[1]
Googling the man, I found plenty of refreezes of his outburst but not a single criticism or even a question from our political masters or the MSM about the military interfering directly in the political process. And it is no accident that the military has moved into the political spotlight, after all, the Empire has had no choice but resort to armed force as its ‘solution’ to political/economic problems (caused by its policies in the first place!).
So it’s a double-whammy once again, a feast of imperialist wars abroad and economic/social crises at home, a re-run of the 1930s (and all for pretty much the same the reasons), replete with elected, alleged socialists morphing into fascists through a sophisticated ‘rebranding’ of what it is to be fascist. Now we’re fascists abroad and humanitarian at home, well that’s how most of the world sees us and quite rightly so. Unfortunately we don’t see that view represented in our mass media/entertainment behemoth. What we get is the Big Lie, repeated over and over again.
For example, the BBC’s coverage of the invasion of Libya consists either of jingoistic displays concerning ‘our boys and girls’ doing their thing with their things, eg:
VIDEO: Footage of air strikes on Libyan warships
BBC News 20/05/2011 at 07:49
Nato air strikes have hit eight warships belonging to Col Muammar Gaddafi’s forces in co-ordinated raid on Tripoli, Al Khums and Sirte.VIDEO: Cockpit video of Tripoli attacks
BBC News 17/05/2011 at 16:32
Nato says overnight air strikes in Tripoli hit important Libyan government buildings.VIDEO: ‘Scanning thousands of miles in minutes’
BBC News 11/05/2011 at 19:05
The BBC’s Caroline Wyatt is the first broadcast journalist to be allowed to film on board an RAF Sentinel spy-plane on a sortie over Libya
And of course, the ‘pirate’s’ call,
‘VIDEO: Libya: Calls for Nato to ‘up the ante’
BBC News15/05/2011 at 07:38
The head of the UK armed forces has called for Nato to intensify the military campaign in Libya.
The rest of the BBC’s coverage is without exception the Empire’s view of events, there is not a single article on the BBC’s Website that questions Operation Odyssey Dawn and the reasons for the invasion. Just as with Nato and its governments, it is an a priori assumption made by the BBC that every act of the Empire is done for humanitarian reasons or at the very least, the right reasons. There is simply no reason to entertain any alternative to the BBC’s reality and to question it invites disdain and dismissal with a healthy dollop of sarcastic condescension thrown in, itself a sign of weakness:
Andrew Marr, the then political editor of the BBC to Media Lens:
I’m afraid I think it is just pernicious and anti-journalistic. I note that you advertise an organisation called Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting so I guess at least you have a sense of humour. But I don’t think I will bother with ‘medialens’ next time, if you don’t mind.�
(Email dated October 7, 2001, after being challenged on his analysis of the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia. For more on this, see our Media Alert, �The BBC�s Political Editor Responds�, October 13, 2001)
In a very real (and I hazard a guess, legal) sense the BBC is complicit (as is the rest of the MSM) in the committing of war crimes not only by accepting the idea that force is the only means of resolving conflict, but also by actively promoting this view in its ‘news’ coverage.
Note
1. See also ‘Call for Attacks on Libyan Infrastructure Provides Glimpse of NATO’s Real Motives By Conn Hallinan‘ for more on this pirate of the Mediterranean.
