Patrice Greanville
The above clip was captured from an ABC World News report, (Dec 1, 2023).
The barbaric Israeli bombardment of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, with US and EU backing, has finally proved too much for hundreds of millions of people across the world, including people in the benighted West, who are seeing, for the first time, what is usually hidden or distorted about the true workings of the US empire and its complicit client states, such as Israel.
This clip by a US TV network (ABC News), normally a stalwart propaganda asset for the status quo, like the rest of its ilk, shows a civilian population under attack by the cowardly Israeli Air Force, with the consequent indiscriminate death and suffering of untold victims—women, children, animals, and the horrid chaos that such attacks always create. This clip (similar reporting is appearing on other mainstream media) is by no means unbiased, nor is it even good (it still fails to provide the vital historical context), but it is a damn sight better than what these entities have been serving the Western public literally for generations, making the current tragedy inevitable. Maybe the Palestinian genocide, paid with the blood of countless innocents, has finally punctured the West's disinformation bubble. If so, it may have opened the road to real liberation for this extremely heroic people, and much of the rest of humanity.
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What prompted this departure from the cynical censorship approach we still see applied to Ukraine?
Probably a combination of things, powerful enough to even break ranks—to some extent— with Israel's elaborate and ubiquitous lying machine. Basically, the crimes are so huge and depraved that the Western media could not simply ignore them or put them through the usual disinformation massage. They would have lost the last shred of credibility they retain after practically a century of "reporting" on the world through the lens of the oligarchs. Furthermore, the internet (which could not be shut down entirely at this point) and other social media technologies, including the ubiquitous smart phones, were supplying rivers of images and text to platforms outside the US/EU/NATO's power to suppress. For another, the Arab/Islamic world itself now has its own information platforms (Qatar's Al-Jazeera, Iran's PressTV, Hezbollah's Al-Manar, etc.) all of which are beginning to reach significant audiences, while often collaborating with growing media in Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba and other sovereign nations, in addition to seeing their materials reproduced in thousands of non-commercial anti-imperialist websites around the world.
The preceding to simply remind our audience that humanity is engaged in an epochal battle of communications that the rising multipolar, sovereigntist anti-imperialist side cannot afford to lose. Let humanity NEVER forget that it was the corporate media, the corrupt mass communications system owned by criminals, billionaires and oligarchs (I'm repeating myself!), that helped lay the groundwork for Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, as well as the massive human tragedy we witness in Ukraine.
The "Western press"—primarily US media—is so appallingly bad that even journalistic teams inside Israel itself, a half-demented, corrupt state, are able to come up with better examples of vital information, even in the midst of a fascist fanatical war, than the bought mediocrities "bringing the news" to American homes every day. Do you doubt it? Just think of this. In this very segment, clipped by TGP from a longer (but still pitifully inadequate) segment on the Israel aggression on Gaza, there is passing mention of the immensely important fact that Israel's leaders were informed way in advance that Hamas was indeed planning an assault in the near future. I'm almost certain this datum flew over the heads of about 99% of the US public. Nor was there much interest at ABC in the fact that the Israeli leadership had planned an air campaign on Gaza with all the deliberate precision of a certifiable psychopath on an exterminating mission. Read it all here, with stunning images, thanks to the folks at +972 Magazine, journalists who define themselves as fighting apartheid :
‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza
Permissive airstrikes on non-military targets and the use of an artificial intelligence system have enabled the Israeli army to carry out its deadliest war on Gaza, a +972 and Local Call investigation reveals.
So yea, the pathetic Western TV networks and other legacy media, social media, etc, have a long way to go to qualify as moderately useful, let alone honorable. Their complete control by plutocratic cliques and intel assets beholden to the capitalist/imperialist system makes their conversion to supporting genuine democracy and service to the people a virtual chimera. This means that the US population—along with other publics throughout the West—will have to regain and defend their information space, their mental sovereignty, from those who deviously captured it: the international 0.01% and their flunkies in all spheres of pseudo-democratic power.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Patrice Greanville is a media critic and founding editor of The Greanville Post.