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The Counter Apologist takes on just one small part of questions that the religious often use when debating atheists.
In the crazy fun house world of imperial politics nationalist regimes are less preferable than radical religious ones. Noam Chomsky and Andre Vltchek discuss the motivations of empire in the Middle East in this selection from the book: On Western Terrorism – From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare.
“Noam Chomsky:
“Anyhow, going back to the Middle East after World War II. The British role in Iran was reduced and the US began to take over. IN Iraq in 1958, there was a so-called independent government, but it was basically British-run, and it was overthrown in a military coup. A couple of years later the US was able to engineer a coup that overthrew the Nasser-type nationalist government, and that’s where Saddam Hussein comes in. The CIA handed the new Ba’athist government a long list of Communists, radicals, and teachers, and then they all got assassinated. Then you come to the present; the US expects to run Iraq. In Saudi Arabia, the British were the junior partner, Finally the British pulled out, and left it to the United States.”
Andre Vltchek:
Of course Saudi Arabia is a tremendously destabilizing force in the world and its influence spreads from Bahrain to Indonesia. In Bahrain there is the fear that the country may be annexed by Saudi Arabia, The Saudi Army is and out of Bahrain.
Noam Chomsky:
The Saudis are pouring money all over the place to sponsor the most extreme forms of radical Islam – Wahabbism – in Madrasas, in Pakistan, pouring money into Egypt to support the Salafis, all extreme Islamic elements. The United States is happy with that; it doesn’t try to prevent them.
The idea that the US is opposed to radical Islam is ludicrous. The most extreme fundamentalist Islamic state in the world is Saudi Arabia, which is the US’s favourite. Britain also has consistently supported radical Islam. The reason was to oppose secular nationalism. US relations with Israel reached their current close state in 1967 because Israel performed the huge service of smashing secular nationalism and defending radical Islam.
A British diplomatic historian, Mark Curtis, wrote a very good book a few years ago called Secret Affairs: British Collusion with Radical Islam (review here). Curtis went through the British records on Islam. It turns out the British had consistently supported radical Islamist elements, pretty much was the US has been doing. They may not have liked it, but they prefer them to the secular nationalists.
Secular nationalists threatened them – they threatened to take over the resources and use them for domestic development and that’s the worst sin; so we support radical Islamists.”
-Excerpt from “On Western Terrorism from Hiroshima to Drone Warfare p.115 – 116
It would seem that Geo-political decisions are quietly being adjudicated by the imperial powers of the world. It would also seem that they are quite separate from the political fodder being offered to their respective populations.
One of our authors in residence just happens to by a huge bat-fan. So, a big hat tip to the Piano Guys for making Mystro’s day. :)
Fascinating reading about some of the circular nature of events that are playing out in the Middle East as of late. This excerpt from the Counterpunch article titled Once More, Into the Quagmire.
The Middle East Needs Our Military Might
One can hear, in the reverberating noise of mainstream justifications, a series of claims. Among them is the idea that the Middle East is united in opposition to ISIS. Indeed it is, if you confine your poll to the rotten monarchies of the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. Adding Jordan to the mix, this fulsome collection of anti-democratic and largely puritanical theocrats is by some stretch of the imagination supposed to provide Arab and Muslim legitimacy to America’s war.
Fancy that, legitimacy conferred by five of the most authoritarian governments in the Middle East. Thus we are ostensibly defending the cause of freedom by assembling a coalition of five treacherous freedom deniers. One human rights violator is leading a coalition of human rights violators against a new human rights violator whose actions deeply offend it. We are appalled at the sight of beheadings and intend to destroy those who practice it, supported by the leading beheader on the Arabian Peninsula. We bomb ISIS oil depots, claiming they have been criminally seized. This barely a decade after we criminally seized major Iraqi oil contracts, while our troops “guarded” the oil ministry (from ‘insurgents’).
Then there’s the dutifully ignored footnote, a poll conducted by the Arab America Institute, which found that:
“Strong majorities in every country favor U.S. policies that support a negotiated solution to the conflict, coupled with more support for Syrian refugees. Majorities in all countries oppose any form of U.S. military engagement (i.e., “no-fly zone,” air strikes, or supplying advanced weapons to the opposition).”
And most Arabs found President Obama most effective in ending the U.S. presence in Iraq. Perhaps the true patriot could efface all of this were it not for the additional fact that our partners in extermination are the leading financial backers of extremists across the Arab world. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are nothing if not open-air markets for arms merchants, money launderers, and angry mullah mosque builders. You could be forgiven for wondering if half our coalition is helping attack ISIS and then immediately re-arming it when it emerges from the rubble, as it invariably will. This is what’s known in arch capitalist circles as “creative destruction.”
People are so terribly ignorant when it comes to climate change, in the face of this seemingly unconquerable monolith of stupidity Jon Stewart finds a way to get his point across.
We’re in trouble if the people in charge of Science and Technology are this ignorant. (wilfully or otherwise)
I’m always amused when I see people commentating on the “liberal bias” in the media. It is usually followed by a trenchant analysis of at least one instance of how news corporation X has finally gone off the rails and has lost all of its journalistic integrity blah blah blah.
Sitting where I am, in political and social Outlier-ville, I have to smile to myself. This might be a case of “liberal bias” but when you take a step back and look at what the media does, it is fairly easy to discern that mouldering just under the surface of “a vibrant free-press’ is a well tuned, self-selecting propaganda apparatus that exists only to serve the agenda of the state.
Oh sure we like to make fun of Pravada and point to those poor brain-washed induhviduals. Ironically we here in the west have even a better system in place, that masquerades as independent and unbiased, yet in the final analysis, is just as credible as the Pravda we like to point at and say “boo”.
Of course, using different sources, as I like to do, such as Counterpoint, Alter.net, Al-Jazeera, Tom’s Dispatch, et cetera often gets me into trouble as people who are firmly ensconced in the propaganda model get bent out shape fairly quickly when exposed to a non-official point of view.
Explaining the western version of the Propaganda model is what Media Lens does best:
The essential feature of corporate media performance is that elite interests are routinely favoured and protected, while serious public dissent is minimised and marginalised. The BBC, the biggest and arguably the most globally respected news organisation, is far from being an exception. Indeed, on any issue that matters, its consistently biased news coverage – propped up, by a horrible irony, with the financial support of the public whose interests it so often crushes – means that BBC News is surely the most insidious propaganda outlet today.
Consider, for example, the way BBC editors and journalists constantly portray Nato as an organisation that maintains peace and security. During the recent Nato summit in Wales, newsreader Sophie Raworth dutifully told viewers of BBC News at Ten:
‘Nato leaders will have to try to tackle the growing threat of the Islamist extremists in Iraq and Syria, and decide what steps to take next. (September 4, 2014)
As we have since seen, the ‘steps’ that were taken ‘next’ meant a third war waged by the West in Iraq in just 24 years.
The same edition of BBC News at Ten relayed, uncontested, this ideological assertion from Nato Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen:
‘Surrounded by an arc of crisis, our alliance, our transatlantic community, represents an island of security, stability and prosperity.’
In fact, the truth is almost precisely the reverse of Rasmussen’s assertion. Nato is a source of insecurity, instability, war and violence afflicting much of the world. True to form, BBC News kept well clear of that documented truth. Nor did it even remind its audience of the awkward fact that Rasmussen, when he was Danish prime minister, had once said:
‘Iraq has WMDs. It is not something we think, it is something we know.’
That was embarrassing enough. But also off the agenda was any critical awareness that the Nato summit’s opening ceremony was replete with military grandeur and pomposity of the sort that would have elicited ridicule from journalists if it had taken place in North Korea, Iran or some other state-designated ‘enemy’. Media Lens challenges you to watch this charade without dissolving into laughter or switching it off before reaching the end.
Oh Aunte-Beebs, say it ain’t so. Of course, it gets worse –
“Of course, it is ironic that leading politicians constantly strive to foster a media image of themselves as caring, truthful and fearless. In reality, they are all beholden to powerful business and financial interests, and even afraid to step out of line; notably so when it comes to criticism of Israel. Political ‘leaders’ are virtual puppets with little, if any, autonomy; condemned to perform an elite-friendly role that keeps the general population as passive and powerless as possible. The corporate media plays an essential role here, as the British historian and foreign policy analyst Mark Curtis observes:
‘The evidence is overwhelming that BBC and commercial television news report on Britain’s foreign policy in ways that resemble straightforward state propaganda organs. Although by no means directed by the state, their output might as well be; it is not even subtle. BBC, ITV and Channel 5 news simply report nothing seriously critical on British foreign policy; the exception is the odd report on Channel 4 news. Television news – the source of most people’s information – provides the most extreme media distortion of [foreign policy news coverage], playing an even greater ideological function than the press.’ (Mark Curtis, ‘Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World’, Vintage, London, 2003, page 379).
Andrew MacGregor Marshall, the former Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad, recently related that:
‘there is tendency for the Western media to claim that it is neutral and unbiased, when in fact it’s clearly propagating a one-sided, quite nationalistic and selfish view of its own interventions in these countries.’
He continued:
‘If you want to accuse the US military of an atrocity, you have to make sure that every last element of your story is absolutely accurate, because if you make one mistake, you will be vilified and your career will be over. And we have seen that happen to some people in recent years. But if you want to say that some group of militants in Yemen or Afghanistan or Iraq have committed an atrocity, your story might be completely wrong, but nobody will vilify you and nobody will ever really check it out.’
The Dutch journalist Karel Van Wolferen recently wrote an insightful piece exposing the state-corporate propaganda that is so crucial to keeping the public in a state of general ignorance and passivity. There ‘could hardly be a better time than now’, he said, to study the effects of this ‘insidious propaganda’ in the so-called ‘free world’. He continued:
‘What makes propaganda effective is the manner in which, through its between-the-lines existence, it inserts itself into the brain as tacit knowledge. Our tacit understanding of things is by definition not focused, it helps us understand other things. The assumptions it entails are settled, no longer subject to discussion.’
Much of this propaganda originates in centres of power, notably Washington and London, and ‘continues to be faithfully followed by institutions like the BBC and the vast majority of the European mainstream media’. Thus, BBC News endlessly trumpets Western ‘values’ and takes as assumed that parliamentary ‘democracy’ represents the range of acceptable public opinion and sensible discourse. Underpinning this elite-supporting news framework is a faith-based ideology which Van Wolferen calls ‘Atlanticism’. This doctrine holds that:
‘the world will not run properly if the United States is not accepted as its primary political conductor, and Europe should not get in America’s way.’
The result?
‘Propaganda reduces everything to comic book simplicity’ of ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’.
So, really – tell me more about how about how damn liberally-biased our media is despite the fact that in the bigger picture, the majority of it (news media) is serving the propagandist needs of the state.
Harper wants Canada to go on airstrikes on Iraq. That’s right. Canada. The nice ones, the peace keepers, the polite people, the bastion of warm-gooey-joy-joy feelings, the “we’re awesome because we can solve problems without bombing people” great white north. He wants us conducting air strikes. We have to tell him ‘No.’
Elizabeth May of the Green Party spoke against the airstrikes (video below) and I think she did a good job. There’s a big part of me that wishes she didn’t tread so softly, that she went for the jugular and tore them a new one. That said, I recognize that her overly tactful and diplomatic manor probably has a much better chance of being considered than the enraged reaming I figure Harper needs. In any event, May has one seat while Harper has a majority government. We citizens need to help out on this one.
I have drafted a template letter anyone is free to copy, paste, edit, amend, and send to their MP. Please share it, send it in, or even write your own. Spread the word. Say ‘No’ to airstrikes.
Dear [your MP’s name] ,
My name is [your name] and I am a resident of [your riding], a voice you are supposed to represent. I cannot express strongly enough how much I am against Mr. Harper’s proposal to join in the airstrikes in Iraq against ISIS. My opposition to the airstrikes can be summarized in three points:
1) It’s un-Canadian. We are, first and foremost, peace keepers and have a history of peace keeping and are supposed to be the good, nice country. Nice people don’t go on airstrikes.
2) It’s ineffective. The U.S has been running airstrikes against the region for who knows how long and terrorism persists. It doesn’t work.
3) However much we might hurt terrorist organizations with airstrikes (again, history shows it won’t be much) we will hurt innocent civilians much more.
For the good of the people of the world and for the integrity of our nation I ask you to do all you can to convince Mr. Harper that this is the wrong course of action and, at the very least, vote against joining in the airstrikes.
Sincerely,
[your name]
[your address]
[your phone number]
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…