PAUL STREET—The U.S. corporate media is hardly a “natural” outcome of a “free market.” It’s the result of government protections and subsidies that grant enormous “competitive” advantages to the biggest and most politically/plutocratically influential media firms.
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RAMIN MAZAHERI—There is also plenty of humor: “No one has ever disobeyed the King of Kings,” shouts the CEO, excuse me, the aristocratic knight. “Oh really?” questions the Miller’s wife, “Then order the Arab army to retreat!” The lampooning also gets serious and sharper: “Do you put kings at the same level as bandits?” The laugh-to-keep-from-crying response: “Unlike kings, bandits show mercy to the poor.”
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THE SAKER—In the West, the main goal of any procurement of any weapons system is the transfer of as much money as possible from the government to the pockets of the private individuals controlling the Military-Industrial Complex. Put differently, Western force planning (especially in the US) is not threat or mission-driven, but profit driven. And while some outrageously expensive weapons systems do get canceled (like the Boeing–Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche attack helicopter), other even more expensive and poorly designed ones remain funded (such as the F-35).
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DANIELLE RYAN—Because remember, in good, free, open Democratic societies, questioning established narratives is unacceptable and grounds for public shaming and having your name immediately placed on some kind of Twitter blacklist. You might also be as surprised as I was to hear there is apparently an overarching “Russian narrative” for every world event, regardless of whether or not it relates to Moscow in any way.
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The SGP has for years been the subject of media denunciations for opposing the revision of German history and rehabilitation of the Nazis. When the SGP and the IYSSE criticized right-wing extremist historian Jörg Baberowski, the media unleashed a storm of indignation. Baberowski defended the Nazi apologist Ernst Nolte and publicly declared that Hitler was “not vicious.” The IYSSE linked this directly to the return of German militarism. Germany could not return to a policy of militarism, it explained, without developing “a new narrative of the twentieth century,” “a falsification of history that diminishes and justifies the crimes of German imperialism.”
