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Syria: A Turn In Western Media Coverage?
There seems to be slight turn in the western media coverage of Syria. Here in Germany the press has now more reports showing the "rebels" as what they really are: traveling jihadists and foreign paid rabble. Commentators on the news websites are now mostly highly critical about the usual propaganda pieces and the German government policy of supporting the SNC. There also seems to be a slight shift in international media.
Alex Thomson is in Syria for the British Channel 4. He put up a Q&A at his blog. Some excerpts:
What will happen in Aleppo?
Probably what happened in Damascus – the rebels will lose.
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But the rebels look to be doing well on TV?
That’s because they are winning the propaganda war better than the real war.
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But why is the Syrian army shelling its own people?
You could just as easily ask why are the rebels using the Syrian people as human shields? It’s a dirty civil war and the rebels sometimes choose to fight in residential areas.
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So what do Syrians want?
Hard to tell. But for sure this is not Egypt – there are no Tahrir Squares or vast protests against the regime.
There is no discernible sign in any of the big cities – Homs, Aleppo and Damascus for example,that the people even wish to rise up against the regime.
On Twitter Thomson also said that there he observed no food shortage and that last weeks queues in front of gasoline stations in Damascus are now gone. For now the center certainly holds.
The Irish Times finds two Libyan born naturalized Irish guys fighting in Syria. There aim is an Islamic state:
According to Harati, who first came to Syria some 10 months ago for what he says was initially humanitarian work, the brigade emerged after Syrians approached him due to his experience as commander of the Tripoli Brigade in Libya last year. The Tripoli Brigade was one of the first rebel units into the Libyan capital last August.
Liwa al-Umma is made up of more than 6,000 men, 90 per cent of whom are Syrian. The rest are mostly Libyans and other Arabs, including several who live in Ireland.
What will those "several who live in Ireland" and are now fighting Syria do once they come back home to Ireland?
The Guardian, which has since the very beginning been one of the worst propaganda outlets on Syria, is having second thoughts. Today's editorial is calling not for more war but for negotiations:
But what if Assad continues to hold on? For weeks, for months, even longer? That is why the second option, a return to diplomacy and, in particular, a new start by America and Russia in dealing with this terrible problem, cries out for consideration.
This may be a sign for a turning point in western coverage and media attitude towards the situation in Syria.
Some of the simpleminded literalists who have taken to spamming this joint should consider putting their brains into gear and actually thinking.
No one is suggesting that the pricks who run the joint delineate on any basis other than wealth and/or power. What we are saying is that the simpleminded dingbats who have been indoctrinated to get their hackles up at any mention of white disadvantage are easy to manipulate because of it.
Time for a close to home example:
The neo-liberal assholes who currently ‘control’ parliament here in Aotearoa have decided to sell off our nationally owned power generation and distribution system. It goes out to their mates who all stick their hands in the bowl to get their earner before it is passed on to some mate of the prime ministers from back in the day when he was a morgan stanley exec in the north. Most kiwis remain vigorously opposed to asset sales. OK that part simple enough for the simple-minded?
The system being sold is great since it is based around hydroelectric and geo-thermal generation. That is it doesn’t cost fuck all to make the electricity (not that you could know that here where the govt has ramped up charges in the last two years preceding the sale so as to save embarrassment when the new owners gouge us).
These state owned corporations return big bucks to the people which are used to offset taxes and have been generally successful as an efficient energy producer.
There is one problem with their plan, the same problem that stymied their attempt to privatise the nation’s forestry industry last time they were in power.
That is aotearoa’s founding document is a treaty between queen victoria as englander head of state and the iwi chiefs of about 70% of the Maori who were living here when the englanders turned up.
It was written in maori and signed after the Tangata Whenua (‘our people’) had fought the englanders to a standstill. Tough blokes who resisted and resisted to the point where colonial occupation stopped being economically viable, so the englanders decided to do a deal.
One of the aspects of the treaty is that it recognises prior occupation and ownership of everything (altho that is hotly debated) by Maori until the Crown (englanders) buy it with the agreement of the Maori chiefs.
Everything went swimmingly when aotearoa was a socialist state. Maori didn’t do very well even in an egalitarian state, but the trade-off whereby water, land, and forests were used by all people for all people was largely accepted unless theft was blatant or culture shat upon.
When that arrangement ended so everything got privatised, tangata whenua decided it was time to dust off the treaty.
The resulting cost of that to the state has been high because 150 years of indifference had resulted in some really egregious acts theft by all sorts of government quangos, local bodies, and private corporations.
The government immediately legislated to prevent anything being taken back that was in private ownership, but that left a heck of a lot which maori have been demanding be returned.
The water thing remained in abeyance past many other taonga, for as long as water was being used by all for all.
There were some ructions in the 90’s when local bodies privatised reticulated water supply but that was termed as privatising the supply network, not the substance itself so Maori who were in the process of negotiating the return of stolen land largely left the water thing alone until the current mob of greedheads and asslicks won power n began to sell off the few assets that still remained in kiwi’s hands.
The current mob in power are a coalition of tory greed head crooks, a couple of main-chancer pakeha populists, and a political party called “the Maori Party” which formed out of tangata whenua dissatisfaction with the previous centre left govt.
aotearoa has managed to resist complete hegemony by the neo-liberal two party duopoly because it was used as a laboratory back in the 1980’s by the 1%ers interested in spreading their poison past latin american states into so-called “western democracies”. The duopoly got going here when the 1980’s so-called left wing political party successfully introduced the same ‘reforms’ as reagan and thatcher were trying to get up in the north. The level of political manipulation thru media monopoly that is possible nowadays just wasn’t there so the people rose up and demanded the first past the post system of election used in amerika england and many other whitefella dominated ‘democracies’ be tossed out and replaced with proportional representation. It was a big defeat for corporate power grabbing that is unlikely to be repeated elsewhere which is why this joint was used as a trial space – to identify pitfalls and inoculate against em before the scam was rolled out everywhere.
Anyway back to now – the maori party has been sliding in the polls ever since they sided with the tories. Tangata whenua aren’t big on having their whanau thrown in jail for fuck all n seeing all aotearoa wealth moved into the hands of a few, even if a very few of those are Maori. But the most the Maori Party did to stop the sales was to abstain from voting for them.
By this time maori were as angry as everyone else so a group of traditional leaders operating outside the tory created and dominated iwi leaders group lodged a claim for ownership of aotearoa’s fresh water.
Right from the start they have made it plain that they don’t want to own water, they want to stop aotearoa’s power generation from being owned by some foreign corporation that will gouge kiwi’s cash and run it badly (many previous privatisations here show this is the inevitable course these things follow).
That didn’t stop the local 100% foreign corporation owned media from helping the tory govt to play the old “maori are greedy pricks trying to steal your wealth” beat up.
The govt is in the process of trying to turn the argument away from asset sales into race baiting.
Maori are currently about 12% of the population with another 6% of kiwis Pacific Islanders many of whom understand exactly where the tangata whenua are coming from.
There are some racists and plenty of tossers like hu bris who fall for the dog whistle every time. This article by a maori academic attempts to explain the legal standing of the claim & is accompanied by posts from lots of terrified whiteys just like hubris who have been sucked into the tory scam by dog whistle, instead of objectively considering the facts of the issue.
If the referendum gets up which it will, there is no doubt the neo-libs will respond by trying to make the argument all about race when it simply isn’t.
But fools are in abundance throughout the world so they may succeed.
Sorry to any readers who caught it first time round esp. Claudio who was put in the untenable position of trying to explain my rather obtuse scrawls but I but I have an ego too so I will get as stinky and personal as I feel when dealing with dingbats who skim posts looking for shit to attack others on pnstead of allowing different points of view consideration.
When I was talking about attitudes towards Libya, I deliberately emphasised the underlying imagery the media use to create false perceptions.
Hubris may not think that fox tv has done a good job of promoting the doubts about Libya that are expressed in the media every day. That is coz amerika doesn’t have much of a role in the post Gadhafi Libyan scam.
This is mainly a england euro thing – it is the greedies in those societies that are going to profit from the theft of Libya’s resources. Theft made more difficult if the media those societies are question the morality of doing bizness with Libya. Which is happening now.
The Syria destruction requires engagement by all of fukusi at one level or another and it is important to the planners that the politician puppets do not get implicated in some disaster before their political usefulness has worn out. They still have other scams to pull. S1mpl enuff 4 u?
My position on Syria has always been the same. I don’t like the current mob much – they didn’t do a tenth of the good works that ghaddaffi did to offset his later years, but as much as I dislike the ba’athists I dislike the puppet masters of the ‘rebels’ much more, and I like the syrian rebels a lot less than the ba’athists.
The ba’athists got corrupted by power – it happens everywhere to every political movement, however the leadership of the syrian “murderers in the name of allah” have been corrupted long before they got near power which tells me that they are true sociopaths.
It is interesting to hear some mixed up contrarian wannabe libertarian say that he/she believes the biggest problem today is the elite’s determination to deny the existence of societies. I think I posted on that a couple of months back, how thatcher had always maintained that the family was the only genuine human entity and how that meme has now been spread throughout the neo-liberal dominated cultures.
The trouble with mouthing such a statement is that everything about the way she/he operates is in accordance with neolibs planning to destroy the foundations of social thinking.
E.G. The emphasis on attacking others who don’t share his/her exact point of view, rather than going after the pricks stealing everything is classic neo-liberal acquiescence.
Every conflict from the 1938 to 45 european war onwards has used the white/unwhite subtext to motivate european people into killing.
If hubris had been paying attention during the beginning of the post tito balkan break-up he would have seen western media defining the people of the balkans as token unwhites. The most famous and oft repeated example being PJ OReilly in Rolling Stone when he termed the conflict as “the unspellables Vs the unpronounceables”.
Come to think of it WW1 was the same, my cousin is married to the son of a Dalmatian immigrant to NZ. I can remember the old man telling me he first heard about aotearoa/new zealand when he was in the Austro Hungarian army fighting in the trenches, they were told to be very careful of kiwi troops since the ‘maoris’ would eat them if they beat them.
My mother’s oldest brothers died fighting on the other side first of all at Gallipoli where the poor bloody Turkish draftees were butchered more easily because they weren’t “white like us”. both sides fed the same bullshit
By making former yugoslavs token unwhite, the unwhites could then be graded using a form of what is best described as anthropomorphism since only white people are humans if yer a white supremacist, some unwhites are more tameable and therefore lovable than others and some are just plain ‘cute n cuddly’ cause they are “so primitive”.
The serbians became the untameable stubborn unwhites and the albanians the cite n cuddly primitives. Meanwhile the Croats & Slovenes whose butt fucking by austria and germany dates back many centuries, became the wanna-be whites why cause they were catholic not orthodox some of this stuff goes back millennia to the break-up of the holy roman empire and the assholes who play on people’s fears as though they are instruments in a billion piece orchestra, know every note that is available. It was less than 50 years before that Kurt Waldheim & Co declared Serbians unter-mensch. It worked in 1943 why wouldn’t it work in 1993?
alla this silly sniping works well to distract everyone from the job. alla this silly sniping works well to distract everyone from the job. Division is an essential tool in the elite’s armoury. The big one is ensuring anti-boomer hysteria gets to the top of every young dissident’s list of concerns.
I have stopped my counterpunch fix since a.c. karked it but some days I can’t help but drop by in the hope his death was all a lie.
That is how I picked up on this”>http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/27/what-is-to-be-done-now/”>this self-serving trash.
It is an attempt by some old school Marxist Leninist to blame the failure of Occupy on its lack of leaders. V.I. Lenin is heavily quoted but much as I respect Lenin’s work in changing Russia we need to remember that he was at heart just another politician. The principle attributed to Lenin in that article should be scrutinised and imo, rejected:
The most basic of those principles is that, for fundamental political change, leadership and direction is indispensable. To put the point in a way that sounds hopelessly anachronistic: insurgent masses need a revolutionary vanguard.
A modern society inhabited by an informed populace doesn’t need leaders much less the politicians who inevitably get the leader’s gig, because as above, power corrupts.
Instead of re-inventing the wheel, or failing to understand that the last parts of the planet whose resources are as yet unexploited by greedheads are owned by the indigenous occupants – none of whom are white, or expending energy needed for the fight against greed on pointless intergenerational conflict; peeps who want to effect real change could put their minds to devising a structure for change which wasn’t personality or leadership driven.
This is the task that a few of us have set ourselves down here. It is achievable as long as activists are at pains to both maintain anonymity and credibly assert that they have no desire to attain political control.
It is certainly needed here because once the ‘occupy’ movement established itself here the dearth of leaders was exploited by media vandals and idjit aged wanna-be revolutionaries who were inevitably considered by the media to be a renta-mob and by young people as just another boomer burn.
Still as eager as some younger activists are to sledge ‘the boomers’ for selfishness and lack of engagement, their lack of trust in any political movement prevents the development of an effective strategy for change.
If the perversion of young Arabs best efforts to obtain change offends you and you live in the west, perhaps you should ask yourself whether young Arabs would prefer a microscopic examination of every detail of the destruction or a concerted effort by peeps in the west to stop their society from interfering in Arab societies.
Anonymity can be an effective means for disseminating knowledge, but on its own unsupported by ID and therefore recognition, it is just too easy for the greedies to subvert reform by employing sockpuppets that divide and misinform.
That doesn’t mean Lenin was right that change requires a commenter, but it does mean there is a lot of work to be done by those who seek change to design effective decentralised replacements for those tasks which up until now have been undertaken by ‘the leadership’.
So instead of trainspotting every last detail of the Syrian horror or attempting to assuage the pain of a fucked up childhood authority figure by attacking anyone over a certain age for merely being , why not grab hold of some peers n devote some energy into designing and building a viable leaderless (and therefore politics reduced) machine for change?
Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 31 2012 5:35 utc | 99
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