November
6, 2023
Have
you ever seen a one-sided coin? No? That’s because there isn’t one. And there
is no world in a straw either.
The mainstream media lie
to us every day. This is especially pernicious in the present case of Gaza. And
the lying is not accidental or incidental. It is intentional, pervasive,
relentless, and reckless. It’s one of the reasons U.S. foreign policy so often
results in failure: it is so often premised on lies. I call this phenomenon
“Looking at the World Through a Straw.” Here’s how it works.
Imagine you’re looking at
a photo of a man being measured for height. There he is in his undershirt, back
against the wall, the ruler painted on the wall next to him. The nurse is
dutifully taking notes on a clipboard. He’s 5’10” tall. Photos don’t lie, right?
But what you didn’t see in
the photo was that the man was standing on a small stool. The stool is 6” tall.
The man is really 5’4”. The photographer intentionally kept the stool outside
of the frame of the photo to make the man look taller than he actually was. You
were Looking at the World Through a Straw.
Until the media begin
telling the true context in which the Gaza conflict occurs, and the true,
horrifying facts of its occurrence, they are perpetrating a mass deceit on the
world.
The media do this all the
time. They decide the narrative they want to convey and anything that doesn’t
fit that narrative gets left out of the frame. Reality is reduced to the view
through a straw. This is profoundly deceitful but often, hard to detect.
Some immediate and
enormously important examples of this…
We were always told that
Vietnam was about fighting communism. The reality is that communism was a far
secondary motive. The real motive of the Vietnamese was nationalism. They
wanted their country back from the white Western invaders who had captured and
occupied it since the 1860s.
At the end of World War
II, Ho Chi Mihn, the leader of Vietnam, asked U.S. President Harry Truman for
help in evicting the French colonialists. He had great admiration for the U.S.
and how it had broken free of British colonial domination in its Revolutionary
War in the 1700s. He wanted to do the same for his country.
But Truman needed the
French to help fight communism in Europe so he told Ho to take a hike. It was
the original sin—betrayal—in the U.S.’ involvement in Vietnam. It assured that
the U.S. would never “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people and
would, therefore, never be able to win the War.
With nowhere else to go,
Ho turned to the Soviet Union which had just defeated Hitler in Europe. The
U.S. went on to kill four million Vietnamese in its failed effort to deny them
the right to choose their own government, the very Democracy it so hypocritically,
sanctimoniously trumpeted (and still does) as its international agenda.
These facts are still all
but unknown in the U.S. They were, and still are, left out of the frame the
media maintains to manage their preferred narrative about the War. We’re left
looking at the War through a straw, a narrowing so severe it is impossible to
form a coherent understanding of what it was all about and why it was The First
War America Ever Lost.
Consider a second example
of the media lying to us by forcing us to Look at the World Through a Straw:
Ukraine.
The conventional narrative
is that the Russian invasion was “unprovoked.” That adjective has been
unceasingly applied to mainstream coverage of the War. And not without reason.
It was Adolph Hitler, in Mein Kampf, who wrote regarding how to succeed with propaganda,
“Make the lie big. Make it simple. Repeat it often. People will come to believe
it.”
If you look at Ukraine
through a straw, as if history began on February 23, 2022, it does, indeed,
look like the invasion was “unprovoked.” Nothing big happened on February 23,
2022, the day before the Russian invasion. But if you scope out even a little,
you see that the provocations were many, diverse, severe, and going back
decades.
When George H.W. Bush
wanted Mikhail Gorbachev’s help unifying East and West Germany, he promised
Gorbachev that the U.S. would not move NATO eastward, toward Russia, “not one
inch.” But the moving east began under Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton. In 1999,
he admitted Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO. George W. Bush
admitted seven more countries. Obama, two more, and Trump, two more, still.
There was furious
resistance to this eastward march by leading U.S. foreign policy intellectuals.
They were adamant that the move would be provocative, that is to say,
provoking. This cadre of luminaries included George Kennan, the architect of
the Cold War policy of Containment, William Perry, former Secretary of Defense,
Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, former
Ambassador to Russia, Robert Gates, former head of the CIA and future Secretary
of Defense, and many, many others.
More than 50 former
Senators, Cabinet Secretaries, diplomats and arms control experts wrote a
letter to Clinton stating that moving NATO east would be “a policy error of
historic importance.” They knew it would elicit the same defensive response—and
for the exact same reason—that the U.S. had mustered when the Soviet Union
moved missiles into Cuba, in 1962.
But this enormous
intellectual edifice, drawn from the top echelons of U.S. foreign policy
expertise, didn’t fit the narrative the media wanted to peddle about the War.
So, it was left out of the straw. All we heard was the nauseatingly repeated
refrain that the War was “unprovoked.” The truth is that Ukraine was one of the
most nakedly provoked wars in history and the media lied profusely in claiming
the opposite.
Gaza presents a final and
even more egregious example of media lying by Looking at the World Through a
Straw.
A cursory look at
mainstream coverage has us hearing, by and large, about Palestinian savagery
and Israeli victimhood, a sneak attack and existential dread. Let’s state for
the record, unambiguously, that Jews have the right to live safely, securely,
with full human and political rights, in the country of their choosing, and
without fear of attack by anybody.
But there is never a
media-given acknowledgement that Palestinians have exactly the same rights. And
there is certainly no acknowledgement from Israeli officials that they do. And
therein lies the problem.
There’s no coverage of why
a caged mass of 2.2 million people, humiliated and denied political and human
rights for decades, might strike back at their oppressors. Those discussions
are outside of the straw of permissible discourse on the War, so never occur.
But they are the overwhelming reason why Gaza—and the West Bank—are
tinderboxes.
The first central fact of
the situation in Gaza is this: Israel was founded in 1948 by the ethnic
cleansing of 750,000 Palestinian natives. The Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe,
who John Pilger called “Israel’s bravest historian,” wrote a book about it titled,
“The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.” But it is not just history. Ethnic
cleansing has continued uninterrupted ever since.
This past summer, Israel’s
Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, showed a map of the “New Middle East” to
the United Nations General Assembly. It showed Israel but no Palestinian
territories. No Gaza, West Bank, Golan Heights, East Jerusalem. They had been
ethnically cleansed from the land Netanyahu said that Jews will dominate “from
the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea.”
Now we learn that an
Israeli government-connected think tank has written a report explaining how the
government can finish the ethnic cleansing: simply herd the 2.2 million
residents of Gaza to the south and force Egypt to admit them to avoid a
“humanitarian catastrophe.” Presto! No more Palestinians in Gaza. Which is
exactly what the government is doing.
But, again, the historic
and on-going facts of ethnic cleansing don’t fit the preferred Western
narrative about the conflict so are left out of the straw. As with Vietnam and
Ukraine, we are left without the ability to form a coherent, which is to say contextually
valid, understanding of what is going on. Which is exactly the intent.
The second central fact of
the situation which is never mentioned in the mainstream media accounts of the
conflict, i.e., left out of the straw, is apartheid.
Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli human rights organization B’TSelem, all
charge that the Israeli state operates an apartheid regime to deprive
Palestinians of basic human and political rights. It is not sporadic, benign,
isolated, or incidental. It is systematic, savage, institutional, and
intentional. It is one of the most revolting forms of state actions in all of
history, which is why it is so universally reviled.
The result of decades of
ethnic cleansing and apartheid are genocide: the destruction of a specific
group of people based on ethnic, racial, religious, or other common traits. Raz
Segal, an Israeli historian writing in Jewish Currents magazine, wrote recently
that Gaza is “a textbook case of genocide.” He wondered how the West’s media
could not be talking about it as the central focus of what is happening in
Gaza.
Similarly, 800 legal
scholars recently issued a public statement declaring that Israeli actions in
Gaza likely amount to genocide. That is a hugely momentous charge, one that
those 800 scholars would not make lightly. Surely it is weighty enough to be reported
on by the mainstream media, right? Wrong.
The very word “genocide”
is freighted with the horrors of the Holocaust in which millions of Jews were
murdered. You would think that even the slightest chance it was happening here,
now, with Jews as the perpetrators and not victims, would be newsworthy. Wrong,
again. Left out of the straw.
What else is left out?
The Israelis are
murdering—not killing, but murdering—130+ innocent, defenseless Palestinian
children every day. A week ago we had an enormous, masturbatory,
around-the-clock national fetish festival about how one lone psycho in Maine
killed 18 people.
Here we have Israel, a
state actor with complete U.S. support, murdering more than 130 innocent,
defenseless children every day, and seeming to be planning to keep it up for an
unknown duration, and it never makes the nightly news. Shouldn’t that be the headline
of every news story about the conflict, in every medium, every day, every hour,
until this stops? Yet, it doesn’t register with the mainstream media. It
doesn’t get included in the straw.
We could go on.
Killing thousands—soon to
be tens of thousands—of civilians in collective punishment for the acts of a
few fanatics. Killing civilians in collective punishment is a war crime
according to the Fourth Geneva Convention. It’s not being reported as such, is it.
Nor are the crimes against
humanity reported as crimes against humanity. That’s what cutting off the
water, food, electricity, and food to 2.2 million people amount to. So are the
intentional bombings of hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, escape convoys,
relief agencies, refugee camps, and other places where people under attack
shelter in hope of escaping the torrential death being rained down on them.
They are crimes against humanity.
These are the essential
facts of the background and the conduct of the conflict: ethnic cleansing;
apartheid; genocide; war crimes; crimes against humanity; mass murder. The most
heinous actions of a state actor that we know of. All are left out of the straw
in favor of endless tear-jerking stories of Israeli suffering, Israeli angst,
Israeli trauma, Israeli fear. Not that those aren’t real, but they don’t begin
to explain what is going on.
By never covering these
things, ever, the Western mass media are complicit in creating the environment
where such atrocities have come to fruition, and where the potential for
escalation into World War III is getting more real by the day.
Have you ever seen a
one-sided coin? No? That’s because there isn’t one. There is no world in a
straw, except the fantasy one fed to us by the media to keep us confused,
passive, and impotent. Until the media begin telling the true context in which
the Gaza conflict occurs, and the true, horrifying facts of its occurrence,
they are perpetrating a mass deceit on the world, certainly on the people of
the U.S. At the very least they deserve our contempt and revulsion, and
profound suspicion of their agenda and motives. They are not stupid. They are
not neutral. Nor should we be.
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