Bill Anderson and Justin Raimondo have pointed out that in American media, nearly every major talking head was a person who had once worked for the government at a high level, with almost no exception. The same does not seem to apply as much to any other country in the world, and dictatorships prefer to terrorize journalists than make them friends (while many countries will have poor quality media anyway). So on one hand, you still have French/German/British/et cetera media to clear up details on Iraq War,.etc, but for the really essential details, the American media is too friendly to give them out. Like the fact that the “toppling” of Saddam’s statue was done with not many people present or caring about it.
But anyway, that’s just merely being complicit in nontruth. Could they be active agents for American government interests? http://www.northjersey.com/news/Records_show_feds_used_ultra-right_radio_host_for_years.html Possibly. It turns out that a racist white supremacist radio show host was actually an FBI agent being used to lure out genuinely racist white supremacists for being tracked by the government.
Hey, I am all for bad embarassing things happening to racists, but DAMN. I imagine the FBI presumed that white supremacists may ally with terrorist Muslims out of a common hatred for Israel and presumed that crowd would not mind “Caucasians” like Arabs, Persians,.etc. And this was a way of getting to them. Hal Turner could be the tip of the iceberg.
Some have pointed out now that even foreign journalists in Egypt and Saudi Arabia have been on American payroll. All that must now be pointed out is that every “fringe” journalist - including outrageous conspiracist Alex Jones, including the very trustworthy Glenn Greenwald - everybody should be skeptically suspected a shill until proven otherwise. That’s not to say they all are, but one or two of them still may be. Thoughts?
I will never cease wondering why racists are referred to as right-wing. You can barely get more collectivist than racism.
No way, really? I’ve always thought that the incident was a huge deal to the Iraqi people when it happened. This isn’t supposed to sound sarcastic, by the way. Reading it over, it does sound that way, haha. But I really didn’t know that few people cared about it.
I like fringe sites. They tend to fight harder (even when it’s untruthful at times) against the other side, so more information is drawn out. When I listen to Glenn Beck (I do like him, though) or Alex Jones, I tend to jot down mental notes of people, places, and events he mentions. I take them with a grain of salt, and then research the things on my own. Even when fringe sites overly exaggerate details, there’s always some truth behind it.
You just made the danger of assuming that the word right wing has any meaning. It does not, since there was only ever the word left wing, and it was used to refer to Jacobins only, based on their seating position in the French National Assembly. The word right wing was probably just coined in relatively contemporary times as a counter-insult after people got tired of being compared to the Jacobins. French National Assembly talk belongs in the past; we are here to discuss the present and the future.
It’s a funny little word, because too many liberals have believed that they belong to the “right wing” of politics, and thus liberals must be associated with everybody else who is arbitrarily deemed “right wing”. (Also, it made Epicurus ibn Kalhoun quite annoying with his frequent usage of those two dirty words.)
Even so, if we assumed in the American context that “left wing” meant Democrat and “right wing” meant Republican, how do we explain the fact that segregationists Al Gore Sr. and Robert Byrd were Democrats, and that eugenicist Woodrow Wilson was a Democrat, all of them blatantly racist? How do we explain that the Swedish Social Democratic Party had “racial hygiene” policies where tens of thousands of Swedes were sterilized? The two words tell us nothing about people’s positions. Racism and racialism have been present among people of a wide range of views.
There is only one true dichotomy - the Devil and those who unsuccessfully at least try to resist his temptations. The Devil may be the official who kills people under orders of the Politburo, the SS trooper who kicks around a Jewish baby like a football (true story), the American politician who supported segregation in the past and then supports forced integrationism when it is politically beneficial to turn races against each other, the corporate lobbyist who fights for reduced liability for food poisoning, the British politician who orders a German city firebombed, and so on.
Yeah, it baffles me too. That’s what I meant by saying that, though. I don’t know why people (here in the United States) equate ‘right wing’ with evil people and then blame it on the Republican Party. Who knows. I just read up about what you said regarding eugenics, and I never knew Keynes was a major proponent of it. That’s really interesting.
I’m rarely the one who brings up the left/right dichotomy, tyvm. I just comment on it when people do. Like when they make the mistake of thinking (as you said) that left/right are clear, definable positions. Or that, were there a clear divide, it would be collectivist/individualist, rather than plutocracy v democracy.
… see, you made me do it again
As far as the topic goes, I think some research on Operation Mockingbird would help. Information is power. And elite’s will always seek control over it… isn’t that why the church didn’t allow the Bible to be printed in anything but Latin?
Not at all. Elites create and control the state… and always will.
They did it to maintain hegemony over it. If everyone is ignorant of “god’s word” than who will challenge your claim that the status quo is “God’s will?”
Well, that’s my point. They’re not the elite. That’s why the elite’s (the actual Church and the Nobility) wanted to restrict access to the Bible to them. If the people want to be religous (and they do) then not letting anyone else read it except you is your best bet at hegemonizing your interpretation of it.
(But, on another note; the religous/churchgoers are not the elite. But many elite’s are religious/churchgoers)
Not just that there weren’t that many people surrounding the statue (so the cameras kept zooming in), but they were quisling Chalabi’s expats flown in for the ocassion. Also the statue was just one of series of regime monuments in Baghdad, it held no special meaning to the Iraqis (above the other statues), however it stood right in front of the Palestine Hotel which hosted foreign journalists and was important to the Americans for that reason. The media did not just misrepresent some details, it forgot to mention it was a staged event.