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[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n March 4th, the Turkish government by Tayyip Erddogan shut down the nation’s leading opposition news-medium and largest-read newspapers, Zaman and Today’s Zaman, and leading news-distribution service (equivalent to America’s AP), and imprisoned their top executives as traitors, and a few days later replaced them and re-opened these operations under new management. Prior to that, the two top people at Turkey’s other independent newspaper, Cumhuriet, were arrested and now face charges of treason for having reported that the Turkish government was shipping weapons to jihadists in Syria.
The conflict within Israel’s aristocracy is between the majority-non-religious English and German aristocratic faction that founded the Israeli state in the 1940s and ’50s, versus today’s majority-fundamentalist-Jewish aristocratic faction (dominated by American aristocrats and rabidly anti-Russian East-European émigré Israeli aristocrats), such as Sheldon and Miriam Adelson (owners of several major Israeli news-media that solidly back the theocratic Israeli politician, Benjamin Netanyahu).
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Erdogan’s demolition of any vestiges of democracy receives little criticism in Washington, for obvious reasons. “He is our S.O.B.” [‘C BY-NC-ND by caschie]
On March 11th, Israel shut down and arrested the top people at Palestine Today TV, but, because that station has offices not only in Ramallah in the West Bank but in Lebanon, it continues broadcasting despite the Israeli regime’s efforts.
Journalists are hired by aristocrats (actually by the news-executives who in turn hire the reporters), and so these types of clamp-downs occur when a minority faction within the aristocracy challenges the majority-faction for control of the public. The news-media are the eyes and ears of the public, and so anytime that the regime acts to suppress dissident journalistic organizations (such as Zaman or Palestine Today), reflects a civil war within the aristocracy.
By contrast, during periods when the aristocracy are united — such, for example, as they were in U.S. the wake of the 9/11 attacks — there’s virtually no dissenting news-media, and the regime faces no effective domestic opposition: when the aristocracy are united, the country can function as a dictatorship and the press will go along with it as being ‘its patriotic duty,’ which it never actually is; it’s actually traitorous against the public; but, when the aristocracy are united, the government itself is traitorous — that’s a dictatorship, sometimes called “perpetual war for perpetual peace” or especially America’s continuation of the Cold War even after the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact ended in 1991.
Throughout history, contending aristocracies have craved for war to determine their respective dominance-submission relationships; it has always been what aristocracies do; it’s “in the DNA” of any nation’s aristocracy. If one nation’s aristocracy insists upon being independent of other nations’, then the dominant aristocracy will ceaselessly try to conquer it, no matter what. Because today’s dominant aristocracy is America’s: America invades, overthrows and perpetrates coups in more countries than any other. That’s nothing unique about America; it’s unique about the dominant aristocracy in every era: the dominant aristocracy in any time-period claims to be ‘the one indispensable nation’ — all other nations are ‘dispensable’ to it. The message to all other aristocracies is always: submit, or else be conquered. America’s ‘exceptionalism’ used to be Britain’s ‘exceptionalism,’ and Rome’s ‘exceptionalism’ before that. All that it really ever has been is the dominant aristocracy’s DNA, always. The dominant aristocracy is always the most-evil one of them all, which perpetrates the most bloodshed and misery, of all aristocracies. And always with hypocritical claims of:
We are the hub of alliances unrivaled in the history of nations. America continues to attract striving immigrants. The values of our founding inspire leaders in parliaments and new movements in public squares around the globe. And when a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine [the Obama regime actually hired them; those masked men were agents hired by the U.S., and the EU diplomats were shocked to discover this, but the coup had been planned a year in advance], it is America that the world looks to for help. (Applause.) So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.
Turkey, like Israel, is part of that alliance. So is Saudi Arabia. So is Qatar. So is UAE. So is Kuwait. So too is the EU.
The conflict within Turkey’s aristocracy is between the Tayyip Erdogan faction versus the Fethullah Gulen faction; and the latter favors separation of church-and-state, whereas the former favors control of the state by Turkey’s fundamentalist-Sunni Islamic (majority) clergy who are allied with the fundamentalist-Sunni Saud family that own Saudi Arabia, and the fundamentalist-Sunni Thani family that own Qatar — those nations being respectively the world’s top sellers of oil and gas. Zaman is owned by Gulen, but the (CIA-edited) wikipedia article about Zaman excludes even mentioning the newspaper’s owner. (Wikipedia’s article on Gulen, however, buries its mention of his Zaman under the “Influence” section where it says, “his movement controls the widely-read Islamic conservative Zaman newspaper, the private Bank Asya bank, the Samanyolu TV television station, and many other media and business organizations, including the Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists.” That’s false; Zaman is actually Islamic liberal, not ‘Islamic conservative’: Gulen represents the clerical faction that favors restoration of the Kemal Ataturk separation of church and state — the former Turkey, Ataturk’s, was the one on the basis of which Turkey had been admitted into NATO in 1952 and subsequently became considered for membership in the EU. Erdogan favors restoration of the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire, which, prior to Ataturk, had unified church with state.
The notorious blowhard, Bibi Netanyahu, an embarrassment to decent Jews. [CC BY-ND by seatonsnet]
The CBS This Morning trio—starring disinformers Charlie Rose, Nora O’Donnell and Gayle King —typify the bankruptcy of the US media: behind the seductive glam and congenial fluff there’s an enormous degree of ignorance and malicious propaganda.
Today’s United States (ever since U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush double-crossed Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990) has a unified aristocracy and therefore has no need to shut down or replace top management at its news-media; they represent different factions of the aristocracy but all of America’s aristocratic factions support the agenda that GHW Bush put into place when the Soviet Union ended in 1990-91.
So: whereas in Turkey and Israel, the sham of ‘democracy’ now requires the government to control the ‘news’ media (to report on the ‘democracy’); in America, the ‘news’ media don’t even need to be controlled by the government, because those media are instead controlled by a unified aristocracy, which also controls the government. While there are Republican aristocrats and Democratic aristocrats, both of the political parties share a common core agenda, which transcends such lesser disagreements and dissensions. In such an environment, “bipartisanship” means government in which all factions of the aristocracy are being served to their satisfaction. It’s government by compromise, though not government by the people, and for the people. Instead, it’s simply government of the people, by the aristocracy, and for the aristocracy. Even when a dictatorship contains vigorously competing internal factions, it’s no democracy. And — at least since 1980 — America’s certainly isn’t. No imperial regime ever is, nor can be. It can be hypocritical — that’s normal. But it can’t be democratic. An imperial regime is necessarily dictatorial: that’s in its very “DNA.”
ABOUT ERIC ZUESSE
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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