America’s Greatest Affliction: The Presstitute Media

By Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts

When Gerald Celente branded the American media “presstitutes,” he got it right. The US print and TV media (and NPR) whore for Washington and the corporations. Reporting the real news is their last concern. The presstitutes are a Ministry of Propaganda and Coverup. This is true of the entire Western media, a collection of bought-and-paid-for whores.

It seems that every day I witness a dozen or more examples. Take May 31 for example.

The presstitutes report that US Secretary of State John Kerry and his German counterpart are working on Russia to convince that country to be a “party to peace” in Syria by not supplying the Syrian government, whose country has been invaded, with arms. Kerry and the Israelis especially do not want Russia to deliver the S-300 anti-aircraft missile system to Syria.

[pullquote] It’s bittersweet for us to see that, at last, almost five decades after we started fingering the corporate media as the greatest obstacle to human progress, some heavyweights like Dr Roberts are zeroing in on the same issue. Except for the late Alex Cockburn, the great Michael Parenti, Chomsky and Herman, Alex Carey, and our own editor, Patrice Greanville, who founded Cyrano’s Journal in 1982, the problem of building a left-controlled machinery of mass communications was an orphan issue for most of the American left. The dreadful consequences of this strategic myopia are everywhere to be seen. [/pullquote]

This was the extent of the presstitutes’ report. The presstitutes made no mention of the fact that the invasion of Syria by al-Qaeda affiliated radical Muslims was organized and equipped by Washington via its proxies in the region, such as Saudia Arabia and the oil emirates. Americans sufficiently stupid to rely on the presstitute media do not know that it is not Syrians who want to overthrow their government, but Washington, Israel, and radical Islamists who object to Syria’s secular non-confrontational government.

One might think that the US media would wonder why Washington prefers to have al-Qaeda governing Syria than a non-confrontational secular government. But such a question is off-limits for the US media.

Israel, unlike Washington which so far hides behind proxies, has actually openly committed war crimes as defined by the Nuremberg trials of Nazis by initiating unprovoked aggression against Syria by militarily attacking the country.

In reporting Kerry’s pressure on Putin, presstitutes made no mention that the Washington-backed attempted overthrow of the Syrian government has run into difficulty, causing president Obama to ask the Pentagon to come up with a no-fly plan, which means according to the Libya precedent NATO or US air attacks on Syrian government forces. As the S-300 missiles are a defensive weapon, Obama’s plan to send in Western or Israeli air forces to attack the Syrian army is why Kerry is pressuring Russia not to honor its contract to deliver to Syria the S-300 missiles, which can knock US, NATO, and Israeli aircraft out of the sky.

Those who believed that Kerry could have made a difference as president must be disillusioned to see what a warmongering whore he is. In america marketing is everything; truth is nothing.

The real news story is that Washington is trying to convince Putin to acquiesce to Washington’s overthrow of the Syrian government so that Russia can be evicted from its only naval base in the Mediterranean Sea, thus making it Washington’s sea, Washington’s Mare Nostrum. The american pressitutes put all the onus on the Russian government for not helping Washington to overthrow the Syrian government in order that Washington has another victory over Russia and can start next on Iran.

William Hague, who serves, with Washington’s approval, as British foreign secretary to the shame of a once proud nation, made this clear when he declared: “We want a solution without Assad. We do not accept the stay of Assad.” This is amazing hypocrisy, because the Syrian government is more respectful of human rights than Washington and London.

While Kerry was trying to con Putin, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that the Obama administration’s immediate priority was removing Assad from power.http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/middle-east-north-africa/302773-white-house-no-role-for-assad-in-transitional-government So for the US and UK, “peace” means the overthrow of the Syrian government by force.

Why isn’t the United Nations protesting? The answer is that the countries and their UN representatives have been purchased by Washington. Money talks. Integrity and justice don’t. Integrity and justice are poverty-inflicted. The UN belongs to the evil empire. Washington owns it. The american Empire has the money. It pays for the headlines and for the budget that lets the UN delegates enjoy New York City,

In the world today, integrity is worthless, but money is valuable, and Washington has the money because, as the dollar is the world reserve currency, it can be printed in sufficient quantities to purchase every country’s government, including our own. One year out of office and Tony Blair was worth $35 million. Look at the amazing Clinton riches. According to news report, $3.2 million was spent on Chelsea’s wedding. http://www.goingwedding.com/news_detail.asp?newsid=67

Hague said that the UK and France “seek to end the ban on arming Syrian rebels.” Hague did not explain how the invasion force was armed if there is a ban against arming it. But Hague did tell us who the invading force is: “the Syrian National Coalition,” which consists of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt (still the American puppet), the United States, Britain, France, Turkey, Germany and Italy. Obviously, the talk about a “Syrian rebellion” is pure BS. Syria is confronted with an attempted overthrow of its government by the US and its puppet states. Kerry is trying to convince Putin to let Washington overthrow Syria.

As if this wasn’t enough, also on May 31, I listened to e.j. dionne and david brooks on National Public Radio discuss the state of the Obama presidency. Both were protective of “our president.” Neither would dare say: “the military-security complex’s president,” “Wall Street’s president,” “the Israel Lobby’s president,” “Monsanto’s president,” “the mining and fracking president.” Obama is “our president.”

Both brooks and dionne agreed that the media had got rid of the Benghazi issue and that the IRS persecution of Tea Party members was under the media’s control and was not a threat to Obama. david brooks did acknowledge that there were economic problems ignored and no new ideas. However, the blatant fact that under Obama the US is in a constitutional crisis, well described by Dr. Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois,http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35134.htm was not mentioned by NPR’s pundits, who define correct thoughts for the NPR audience, people too busy to pay attention.

In america today, the executive branch in explicit violation of the US Constitution detains indefinitely or murders any US citizen alleged without proof by an unaccountable member of the executive branch to be in any way associated with the broad but undefined term, “terrorism,” even innocently as a donor to hungry or ill Palestinian children. The executive branch clearly violates the US Constitution and US statutory laws against torture and spying on citizens without warrants. Congress does not impeach the president for his obvious crimes, and the Federal Judiciary enables them.

President Nixon was driven from office because he lied about when he learned of a burglary for which he was not responsible. President Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives for lying about a sexual affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.

President George w. Bush took america to wars based on obvious lies, and so did president Obama. Both administrations are guilty of war crimes and almost every possible infraction of constitutional and international law. Yet, no presstitute member of the media would dare mention impeachment, and the House would never bring the charge.

There is no doubt whatsoever that in the 21st century presidents, their lawyers, Justice (sic) Department officials, and CIA and black-op operatives have broken law after law, and there is no accountability. For the presstitutes, this is a non-issue. “Rule of law, Constitution? We don’t need no stinking rule of law or Constitution.”

For the presstitutes, the bought-and-paid for-whores for evil, the issues are Obama’s stable poll numbers; teenage girls arrested for fighting at a kindergarten graduation ceremony; ”Microsoft’s Bill Gates extended his lead over Mexico’s Carlos Slim as the world’s richest person,” “the $14 million-dollar girl: Beyonce rakes it in.”

Constitutional crisis? What is that? I mean, really, look at Beyonce’s legs. Didn’t you hear, the dollar rose today?

The presstitutes have not investigated any important issue. Not 9/11. Not the accumulation of unaccountable power in the executive branch. Not the demise of the Bill of Rights. Not the Boston Marathon bombing. Not the endless and unexplained wars against Muslims who have not attacked the US.

The Boston Marathon saga reached new levels of absurdity with the FBI’s murder of Ibragim Todashev, who was being pressured to admit to various associated crimes. The presstitutes first reported that Todashev was armed. It was a gun, then a knife, then after the presstitutes duly reported the false information planted on them, which for the insouciant american public was sufficient to explain Toashev’s murder, the FBI admitted that the victim was unarmed.

Nevertheless, he was shot seven times, one to the back of the head. His father wants to know why the FBI assassinated his son, but the presstitutes could not care less. Don’t expect any answer from the american press and TV media or from NPR, an organization that pretends to be a “listener station” but is financed by corporate contributions.

How’s Todashev’s murder for Gestapo justice? Where is the difference? A bullet in the back of the head. And America is the shining light on the hill, the font of freedom and democracy brought to the world courtesy of the military/security complex out of the barrel of guns and hellfire missiles from drones. And relentless propaganda in the schools, universities, and media.

Washington certainly learned [well] from [bloodthirsty tyrants]. You kill them into submission.

But you will never hear about it from the presstitutes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A protean intellect, Dr Roberts has served in many capacities from academia to presidential cabinets. A onetime full-fledged member of the privileged inner circles, he is today one of the most outspoken and eloquent critics of the American plutocracy and its shills.

Free Market Medicine: A Personal Account

by Michael Parenti
(posted in 2011)

When I recently went to Alta Bates hospital for surgery, I discovered that legal procedures take precedence over medical ones. I had to sign intimidating statements about financial counseling, indemnity, patient responsibilities, consent to treatment, use of electronic technologies, and the like.One of these documents committed me to the following: “The hospital pathologist is hereby authorized to use his/her discretion in disposing of any member, organ, or other tissue removed from my person during the procedure.” Any member? Any organ?The next day I returned for the actual operation. While playing Frank Sinatra recordings, the surgeon went to work cutting open several layers of my abdomen in order to secure my intestines with a permanent mesh implant. Afterward I spent two hours in the recovery room. “I feel like I’ve been in a knife fight,” I told one nurse. “It’s called surgery,” she explained.Then, while still pumped up with anesthetics and medications, I was rolled out into the street. The street? Yes, some few hours after surgery they send you home. In countries that havesocialized medicine (there I said it), a van might be waiting with trained personnel to help you to your abode.Not so in free-market America. Your presurgery agreement specifies in boldface that you must have “a responsible adult acquaintance” (as opposed to an irresponsible teenage stranger) take you home in a private vehicle. I kept thinking, what happens to those unfortunates who have no one to bundle them away? Do they languish endlessly in the hospital driveway until the nasty weather finishes them off?You are not allowed to call a taxi. Were a taxi driver to cause you any harm, you could hold the hospital legally responsible. Again it’s a matter of liability and lawyers, not health and doctors.One of the two friends who helped me up the steps to my house then went off to Walgreen’s to buy the powerful antibiotics I had to take every four hours for two days. I dislike how antibiotics destroy the “good bacteria” that our bodies produce, and how they help create dangerous strains of super-resistant bacteria. I kept thinking of a recent finding: excessive reliance on medical drugs kills more Americans than all illegal narcotics combined.

So why did I have to take antibiotics? Because, as everyone kept telling me, hospitals are seriously unsafe places overrun with Staph infections and other super bugs. It’s a matter of self-protection.

Two days after surgery I noticed a dark red discoloration on my lower abdomen indicating internal bleeding. I was supposed to get a follow-up call from a nurse who would check on how I was doing. But the call might never come because the staff was planning a walkout. “We have no contract,” one of them had told me when I was in the recovery room. So now the nurses are on strike—and I’m left on my own to divine what my internal bleeding is all about. What fun.

Fortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. A nurse did call me despite the walkout. Yes, she said, it was internal bleeding, but it was to be expected. My surgeon called later in the day to confirm this opinion. Death was not yet knocking.

A few days later, there were massive nurses strikes on both coasts. Among other things, the nurses were complaining about “being disrespected by a corporate hospital culture that demands sacrifices from patients and those who provide their care, but pays executives millions of dollars.” (New York Times, 16 December 2011). One cold-blooded management negotiator was quoted as saying, “We have the money. We just don’t have the will to give it to you” (ibid.).

As for the doctors, both my surgeon and my general practitioner (GP) are among the victims, not the perpetrators, of today’s corporate medical system. My GP explained that it is an endless fight to get insurance companies to pay for services they supposedly cover. Feeling less like a doctor and more like a bill collector, my GP found he could no longer engage in endless telephone struggles with insurance companies.

There are 1,500 medical insurance companies in America, all madly dedicated to maximizing profits by increasing premiums and withholding payments. The medical industry in toto is the nation’s largest and most profitable business, with an annual health bill of about $1 trillion.

Along with the giant insurance and giant pharmaceutical companies, the greatest profiteers are the Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), notorious for charging steep monthly payments while underpaying their staffs and requiring their doctors to spend less time with each patient, sometimes even withholding necessary treatment.

I am without private insurance. And my Medicare goes just so far. Like many other doctors, my GP no longer accepts Medicare. For a number of years now, Medicare payments to physicians have remained relatively unchanged while costs of running a practice (staff, office space, insurance) have steadily increased. So now my GP’s patients have to pay in full upon every visitówhich is not always easy to do.

Our health system mirrors our class system. At the base of the pyramid are the very poor. Many of them suffer through long hours in emergency rooms only to be turned away with a useless or harmful prescription. No wonder “the United States has the worst record among industrialized nations in treating preventable deaths” (Healthcare-NOW! 1 December 2011).

Too often the very poor get no care at all. They simply die of whatever illness assails them because they cannot afford treatment. An acquaintance of mine told me how her mother died of AIDS because she could not afford the medications that might have kept her alive.

In Houston I once got talking with a limousine driver, a young African-American man, who remarked that both his parents had died of cancer without ever receiving any treatment. “They just died,” he said with a pain in his voice that I can still hear.

Living just above the poor in the class pyramid are the embattled middle class. They watch medical coverage disappear while paying out costly amounts to the profit-driven insurance companies. I was able to get surgery at Alta Bates only because I am old enough to have Medicare and have enough disposable income to meet the co-payment.

For my out-patient operation, the hospital charged Medicare $19,466. Of this, Medicare paid $2,527. And I was billed $644. The hospital then writes off the unpaid balance thus saving considerable sums in taxes (amounting to an indirect subsidy from the rest of us taxpayers). Had I no Medicare coverage, I would have had to pay the entire $19,466.

I was informed by the hospital that the $19,466 charge covers only hospital costs for equipment, technicians, supplies, and room. So besides the $644, I will have to pay for any pathologists, surgical assistants, and anesthesiologists who performed additional services. I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.

How much does my surgeon earn? Not much at all. He gets about $400 to $500 for everything, including my pre-op and post-op visits and the surgery itself, an exacting undertaking that requires skills of the highest sort. He also has to maintain insurance, an office, an assistant, and an increasing load of paperwork.

My surgeon pointed out to me, “If you ask people how much I make on an operation like yours, they will say $4000 to $5000, and be wrong by a factor of ten.” He noted that in a recent speech President Obama criticized a surgeon for charging $30,000 to replace a knee cap. “The surgeon gets a minute fraction of that amount,” my doctor pointed out.

To make matters worse, there is talk about cutting Medicare payments to physicians by 27 percent. If this happens, it is going to be increasingly difficult to find a surgeon who will take Medicare. Still worse, the private insurance companies will join in squeezing the physicians for still more profits.

I was able to meet my payment ($644) not only because my operation was heavily subsidized by Medicare but because it was a one-day “ambulatory surgery.” I don’t know how I would fare if I had to undergo prolonged and extremely costly treatment.

So much for life in the middle class. At the very top of the class pyramid are the 1%, those who don’t have to worry about any of this, the superrich who have money enough for all kinds of state-of-the-art treatments at the very finest therapeutic centers around the world, complete with luxury suites with gourmet menus.

Among the medically privileged are members of Congress and the U.S. president. They pay nothing. They are treated at top-grade facilities. They enjoy, how shall we put it, socialized medicine. No conservative lawmakers have held fast to their free-market principles by refusing to accept this publicly funded, medical treatment.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, cheerfully announced that medical care is not a human right; it should be “market determined just like food and shelter.” Nobody has a higher opinion of John Mackey than I, and I think he is a greed-driven, union-busting bloodsucker. Nevertheless I will give him credit for candidly admitting his dedication to a dehumanized profit pathology.

The U.S. medical system costs many times more than what is spent in socialized systems, but it delivers much less in the way of quality care and cure. That’s the way it is intended to be. The goal of any free-market service—be it utilities, housing, transportation, education, or health care—is not to maximize performance but to maximize profits often at the expense of performance.

If profits are high, then the system is working just fine—for the 1%. But for us 99%, the profit lust is itself the heart of the problem.

Michael Parenti’s recent books include: The Face of Imperialism (2011); God and His Demons ( 2010); Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007); The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2004).

Argentinean Nightmare

Patricio Pron’s “My Father’s Ghost is Climbing in the Rain”

by CHARLES R. LARSON, Counterpunch

Patricio Pron’s publishers refer to My Father’s Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain as an autobiographical novel. More likely, the book is an autobiography with a few details altered to protect the innocent, although the innocent became victims long ago. The book is about Argentina’s Dirty War, during the 1970s, when so many people (especially the young) disappeared.

Pron wasn’t born until 1975, but he grew up in the era of state terror, and he remembers being told as a child that on the streets he should always walk against traffic. His father (who was a journalist) presumably went outside to the automobile to start it and warm it up before he drove his children to school. The real reason, however, was to protect his children in case the automobile had been loaded with a car bomb. These and other heightened conditions resulted in Pron’s fear, as a young man, about remaining in Argentina. As soon as he could, he fled the country, for studies overseas.

In 2008, after Pron had been living in Germany for eight years—ostensibly studying but drifting and heavily into drugs—he learned that his father was ill and possibly dying. He was ambivalent about flying to Argentina to see his father. He had never felt any closeness to his family, clearly because of the tense political atmosphere. As he notes, “Something had happened to my parents and me and to my siblings that prevented me from ever knowing what a home was or what a family was, though everything seemed to indicate I had both.” His father, he’d been told, had memory problems but so did the young man himself. These memory gaps are illustrated in the narration by missing numbers for chapters. Hence, in the first part of the novel, concluding with 52, the following numbers/chapters are missing: 3, 28, 31, 33, 34, 37, 40, 41, 43, 44, 48, 50 and 51—a rather ingenious way of demonstrating lapses in memory—for both father and son.

The young man wonders if his lack of feeling for his father is the result of the medication he’s been taking, which has left him blotto. “Perhaps the only real effect of the pills is that they hinder complete happiness or complete sadness; it’s like floating in a pool without ever seeing its bottom but not being able to reach the surface.” He says he doesn’t fear his own death, yet fears “the deaths of those [he cares] about, and especially the deaths of his parents.”

While his father is still in the hospital, Pron snoops around his father’s study, uncertain of what he is looking for. And there he discovers a thick folder that initially throws him off-guard. Inside, there are numerous clippings about someone named Alberto José Burdisso, a fairly innocuous maintenance man at a sports club, 60 years old, who disappeared in the town where they both lived. Pron wonders whatever could have been his father’s interest inBurdisso, besides that of a journalist’s interest in following intriguing stories. As the young man reads through the file, what is eventually revealed is a homicide by three fairly shady characters (a woman and two men) who where attempting to fleece Burdisso out of his house. But why did the elder Pron care about this man and accumulate a folder with a couple of inches of clippings?

What is so startlingly revealed in the thick folder is a revelation of Pron’s father’s own past. In the 1970s, Burdisso’s younger sister, Alicia, also disappeared—one of the thousands of disappeared radical students identifying with the Peronists and fighting the generals. It was not until 2005 that Burdisso received reparations for her death. Moreover, it was Pron’s father who got Alicia involved in politics all those years ago. “The fact was: my father had gotten Alicia involved in politics without knowing that what he was doing would cost that young girl her life, would cost him decades of fear and regret and would have its effects on me, many years later.” Both assumed they would be picked up for their activities and be killed, but it was Alicia who vanished. Pron’s father suffered from survivor’s guilt—not so far removed from the guilt the younger Pron feels having abandoned his family and fled to Germany. Thus, there are two parallel stories of guilt in this narrative and, by extension, a generational question about the young people of Argentina, today, needing to probe their parents’ pasts and understand what happened to them during the Dirty War.

Fear, guilt, and survival—these are the themes of Patricio Pron’s probings into his father’s career as a journalist during Argentina’s terribly dark days. How ironic that the son also became a journalist (like his father) and his father wanted to write a novel (as his son did several times). But that’s a story best left to Pron’s own words:

“I also knew this story had to be told in a different way, in fragments, in whispers, and with laughter and with tears and I knew I would be able to write it only once it became part of the memories I’d decided to recover, for me and for them and for those who would follow…. Standing beside the telephone, I noticed it had started to rain again, and I told myself I would write that story because what my parents and their comrades had done didn’t deserve to be forgotten, and because I was the product of what they had done, and because what they’d done was worthy of being told because their ghost—not the right or wrong decisions my parents and their comrades had made but their spirit itself—was going to keep climbing in the rain until it took the heavens by storm.”

This is a riveting story, elegantly translated by Mara Faye Lethem.

Patricio Pron: My Father’s Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain
Trans. by Mara Faye Lethem
Knopf, 224 pp., $24

Charles R. Larson is Emeritus Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C. Email: clarson@american.edu.

Classical Essays: The rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte – Part One

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PART ONE OF FOUR

Editor's Note: The core truth about Napoleon is still a matter of debate. Napoleon, opportunist or usurping though he may appear to a modern Marxian obswerver, not to mention Anglo-American mainstream historians tainted with Francophobic hatred and contempt for the French and their revolution, was also seen as a threat by the much more reactionary feudalist regimes still ruling much of Europe in his time. While Woods sees Napoleon as an upstart opportunist who betrayed the (radical) promise of the French revolution, to the crowned heads of Europe he represented something akin to a Lenin or a Mao, a charismatic leader at the helm of a powerful nation infected with subversive political notions whose spread had to be contained at any cost. Hence the ushering of a period characterized as the "Napoleonic Wars", the very label an intentional effort to smear Napoleon as a simple warmongering monster. But the fact is that, in large measure, the wars were not so much reckless wars of conquest by Napoleon as wars of necessity to beat back or pre-empt the invasion of France and the destruction of her remaining revolutionary virus by successive coalitions organized by a reactionary England, the great defender of the global status quo in the 18th and 19th centuries. One of the important questions, therefore, is: who was really responsible for these wars?—P. Greanville

•••

The rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte - Part One
Written by Alan Woods
[Originally posted: Thursday, 12 June 2003]

In a new series Alan Woods looks at the specific historical role of Napoleon Bonaparte. He looks into the characteristics of this man that fitted the needs of the reactionary bourgeoisie as it attempted to consolidate its grip on French society and sweep to one side the most revolutionary elements who had played a key role in guaranteeing the victory of the revolution.

Marxism has never denied the role of the individual in history but has demonstrated how specific personal traits reflect a given historical and social context. The personality of those who did make history - for good or ill - certainly has a bearing on their actions. But to attribute a decisive quality to this would be to fall into gross subjectivism. What is necessary is to show the dialectical relationship between the subjective and objective factors. In this equation, the objective factor is the most fundamental.

Psychological studies of "great men and women" frequently serve as a fig leaf to disguise the absence of an understanding of broad socio-historical processes. The study of history is replaced by trivial personal observations. Instead of science we have gossip. The negative traits and peculiarities of a great person are related in detail, as in the memoirs of a valet. But as Hegel remarked, the valet who recalls this trivia never made history.

A careful study of the character and background of Napoleon Bonaparte can furnish us with many useful insights into his behaviour, just as similar information concerning Hitler and Stalin can cast some light upon theirs. In his biography of Stalin - a wonderfully profound work of historical materialism, Trotsky dedicates the first chapter to Stalin's childhood and upbringing - a necessary component of any biography. He carefully excludes the kind of sensational exaggerations and the conclusions that are read into a man's past on the basis of what he later became. But having sifted the source material carefully, we are left with a small amount of useful information that can help us to attain a deeper understanding of Stalin's subsequent evolution.

Men and women make their own history, but they do not make it freely, in the sense that the scope and results of their actions are strictly limited by the given socio-economic context that is prepared independently of their will. Different personalities are required by different historical periods. There are times when history demands a Lenin or a Trotsky, and others when a Stalin can come to the fore. It is the historical context that provides the individual with the necessary field of action. But there are certain circumstances when the actions of an individual, or group of individuals, can exercise a decisive influence, inclining the balance in one sense or another.

Of course, personal characteristics cannot determine the course of great historical events. But they can and do influence the specific forms taken by events. They do not create the ebb and flow of broad historical processes, but they can create the very complicated patterns, cross-currents and eddies that affect the short and medium term. Thus, Stalin's personality was not the cause of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolution. That was the result of the isolation of the first workers' state in the world in conditions of terrible backwardness. But Stalin's character certainly gave the bureaucratic reaction against October its particularly ferocious and "Asiatic" colouring.

Every analogy has its limitations and is only useful within the boundaries of these limitations. However, it is striking to anyone who takes history seriously that certain personal characteristics constantly reappear in a given historical context, just as certain animal morphologies reappear at different stages of evolution. The similarities between, for example, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin have been commented upon many times. In the same way, there are close similarities between the character of Tsar Nicholas and his German wife and that of Louis XVI and the "Austrian woman" Marie Antoinette and even Charles I of England and his French wife. These are usually regarded as historical accidents, to be placed under the category of extraordinary coincidences.

The French Revolution offers very rich material for a study of how different individuals relate to the historical process. The characteristics of Danton and Robespierre enabled them to flourish and find an echo in the period of revolutionary ascent. These were men of vision, heroes who believed passionately in principles and ideals. In the period of descent, when the Revolution had exhausted its potential and entered into a downward spiral, everything seems to go into reverse. The type of individuals who succeeded in this period have nothing in common with those who rose with the revolutionary high tide.

Here we find men and women of a very different type. These people had a definite character and personality that was well adapted to the changing fortunes of the Revolution- the unprincipled opportunist, the conformist toady and the self-seeking bureaucrat, the male and female money-grubbing fortune hunters. The name of Joseph Fouché adequately sums up the character of the creatures that passed with consummate ease from one camp to the other, jettisoning principles and ideology like so much useless ballast.

Napoleon's formative years

The name of Napoleon is surrounded by such a vast amount of legends that it is quite difficult to separate fact from fiction. It is said that he displayed outstanding leadership qualities while still at school, even leading the charge in a snowball fight. This is undoubtedly the product of the school of Napoleonic mythology that was systematically promoted for political reasons in 19th century France. It hardly squares with the general picture of the reserved and taciturn child that has come down to us.

Napoleon was the son of a middle class Corsican family, at a time when Corsica had not even been French for long. Being formerly subject to Genoa, the Corsican people did not speak French but a dialect of Italian. They were, and are, a fiercely independent Mediterranean people, with a Mediterranean temperament. Napoleon was always self-conscious about his humble origins and provincial background. He came from a mediocre family and went to a mediocre military academy, where his schoolmates made fun of his thick Corsican accent.

By all accounts his schooldays were not the happiest period of his life. The result was not difficult to predict. He was a difficult and reserved child, resentful of his peers. He sank himself in his studies. He was considered by his teachers to be "very regular in his conduct" but "poor at dancing and drawing". The reason why Napoleon lacked what are called the social graces (which was the case all his life) was that he felt his social inferiority, an inferiority that was constantly emphasised by his wealthier French schoolmates. A very clear picture emerges of this child - and leading his schoolmates in a snowball battle is definitely not part of it. He was, in a few words, an introverted misfit. On the other hand he excelled at maths - a qualification that determined his specialisation as an artillery officer.

This was a stroke of luck - one of many that he benefited from - inasmuch as the artillery was the most prestigious branch of the army under the old regime. But the biggest stroke of luck Napoleon had was to be born when he was - in the age of the French Revolution. Napoleon, like many others, was made by the Revolution. The Revolution turned the whole world upside down and presented an ambitious young man (he was always ambitious - a consequence of his resentment at his inferior status) with new and vast opportunities

Things were no better for him in the school of artillery, which, as the most prestigious part of the army, was full of the sons of noble families, placed there by influence irrespective of their ability or lack of it. The taciturn and moody lieutenant from a middle class family in Corsica continued to feel inferior and resentful at the superior airs and graces of the snobbish young aristocrats who were his fellow officers. The antiquated world of hierarchy and rank repelled and disgusted him. Therefore the Revolution came as a godsend, and he welcomed it with open arms. There is no need to doubt the sincerity of his revolutionary feelings at this time. He was merely settling accounts with those who had refused to recognise him and held him back.

At this stage Napoleon still saw himself very much as a Corsican. In fact, the racial discrimination suffered at school would have exacerbated his national sentiment and caused a deep feeling of resentment against all things French. But life can play some strange tricks. And it is well known that love that is spurned can turn into hate. He dreamed about putting himself at the head of the Corsican nationalist movement. At this stage his horizon was no larger than the desire to make a name for himself on the island of Corsica. But he miscalculated. They say a prophet has no honour in his native land, and that was very true in his case. The Corsican nationalists were inclined to reactionary and monarchist ideas and distrustful of the ideals of the Revolution. They were also distrustful of Napoleon, who had the misfortune of being seen as a Corsican provincial to the French and a French interloper to the Corsicans.

Rejected by his compatriots, Napoleon abandoned all his nationalist ideals. He later became transformed from an ardent Corsican patriot to a fervent advocate of French centralism. The Corsican nationalist leader Pascal Paoli supported the royalist cause and organised an insurrection that was put down by Bonaparte. Such things are not forgotten or forgiven in a small island where the blood feud was an accepted part of life. Napoleon Bonaparte was forced to flee Corsica with his family and from then on became an implacable French nationalist. There are quite remarkable parallels here with Hitler, who was Austrian, but turned into a fanatical advocate of German racial superiority and Stalin, the Georgian, who spoke Russian with a thick accent all his life, but became an equally fanatical supporter of Great Russian centralism.

There is nothing surprising about this sudden turnabout. Napoleon never had any fixed principles about anything, except his own advancement. His early Republican sympathies may have been genuine but they were certainly tempered with a heavy dose of opportunism. He specialised in currying favour with his superiors in order to climb the ladder of careerist advancement. When it was advantageous to appear as a Jacobin, he donned the tricolour, but later he swung against the Jacobins with equal alacrity when their star waned.

The flood tide of the Revolution

For a number of years the pendulum of the Revolution swung sharply to the Left. The more revolutionary tendency constantly replaced the more moderate wing. And at every stage the driving force of the Revolution was the masses. In August 1792, in the middle of the war with Austria, there was a ferment in the working class quarters of Paris. The masses rose up against the Assembly and stormed the Tuileries palace. They established a revolutionary municipal council or Commune and demanded the election, with universal male suffrage, of a new National Assembly. This movement of the masses impelled the Revolution further to the Left, and created a situation of dual power. The Jacobins, the most radical wing of the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie, grew rapidly at the expense of the moderate wing, the Girondins. In response to the demands of the Commune, a new Assembly was elected in the autumn of 1792, on the basis of universal male suffrage. Naturally, power in the Assembly passed into the hands of the Left Wing.

From 1792 the destinies of the Revolution were inseparably linked to war. As early as 1791 a counterrevolutionary émigré army was formed in the Rhineland. The Compte d'Artois set up headquarters at Coblenz and his agents roamed France seeking recruits for the "liberation" of France. It was this threat that caused the Revolution to launch the Terror. King Louis and Marie Antoinette were constantly engaged in plots and conspiracies and were in correspondence with Coblenz. Many royalist officers deserted to join the counterrevolutionaries. The Revolution was in danger.

The monarchies of Europe could never tolerate the French Revolution and combined to crush it. The First Coalition of Austria, Prussia, Britain, the Netherlands and Spain, was formed in 1793. As David Thomson remarks: "The immediate causes of war included the intrigues of the court and the émigrés, the war clamour of the Girondins in the Assembly, the aggressive self-confidence of the revolutionaries, the discredit of the King, and the diplomacy of Prussia. But its basic cause lay deeper. It was, in more modern terms, the issue of whether two forms of society based on totally different principles could peacefully coexist. France within her own territories had ended feudalism, destroyed the pretensions of royal absolutism, and founded new institutions on the principles of sovereignty of the people and personal liberty and equality. The old institutions, which had been overthrown in France, remained established in her continental neighbours. The influence of the Revolution was spreading, undermining the position of other rulers and implicitly challenging the survivals of serfdom, feudalism and absolutism everywhere. The revolutionary ideals were too dynamic to be ignored by the established order." (David Thomson, Europe Since Napoleon, p. 35.)

The Duke of Brunswick issued his famous manifesto declaring that his armies were intervening in France to suppress anarchy and to restore the king's lawful authority, threatening the lives of the revolutionary leaders. The reply of the Revolution was the manifesto of 27 July 1792. After the first victories of the revolutionary armies, France offered "fraternity and assistance" to all peoples who wished to follow the example of the French and assert their freedom against the old order. This was followed in December by a new declaration of the Assembly that France would enforce revolutionary social principles everywhere the French armies were present. The revolutionary armies would abolish feudal obligations and confiscate the property of the clergy and the aristocracy. France answered the threat of counterrevolution with a revolutionary war against monarchist Europe.

The war had the effect of accelerating the revolutionary process. The recently elected Assembly met on 21 September 1792 - one day after the Prussian army had been routed by the revolutionary forces - and announced the abolition of the monarchy. After the victory at Jenappes, when the French occupied Brussels, the Republic put Louis on trial. On 21 January 1793, it threw the king's head at a horrified Europe. By executing the king, the Republic had burnt its bridges. No turning back was now possible.

Under conditions of war and foreign invasion, the Revolution was obliged to resort to drastic measures in order to defend itself. The establishment of the Committee of Public Safety and the Jacobin Terror were intended to strike blows against the counterrevolution. This was the high tide of the Revolution, but also the point when the mass movement had reached its limits, and even gone beyond them. It was impossible to go further without breaking through the bounds of a bourgeois revolution, something that was objectively ruled out. The masses in Paris had swept all before them and even began to take measures against private property. At this point, the bourgeois and its middle class allies recoiled from the Revolution and the pendulum began to swing in the opposite direction.

Despite his apparent Jacobinism, Napoleon always looked at the masses with distrust. He hated the Paris "mob". When they forced the king to wear the red bonnet in the summer of 1792, Bonaparte did not join in the celebrations. His outlook was typical of the petit bourgeois of all epochs - hatred of the upper classes, fear of the masses. His real inclination was always towards "Order" and discipline - and opposition to "factionalism". But in 1793, when the Revolution was still in full flood, the 23 year-old Bonaparte was still swimming with the tide. Without the Revolution, Napoleon would never have risen as he did. The Revolution rewarded talent, and he was undoubtedly talented.

Napoleon's big opportunity came in 1794 at the siege of Toulon. This key Mediterranean port had declared for the English and allowed British forces to occupy it. England was the real bulwark of reaction and bankrolled the wars against revolutionary France that others fought. Napoleon saw his chance to make a mark and did so by conspicuous bravery and a high degree of skill in the use of artillery, which decided the battle in France's favour. His rapid rise to fame and success had begun.

Napoleon and Thermidor

Napoleon's advance was helped by his connections with the main Jacobin leaders. He was on excellent terms with Robespierre, who used his influence to get him promoted to the rank of Brigadier-general. His star was on the rise. But then everything seemed to unravel. In the summer of 1794 Robespierre was overthrown and executed by the Thermidorean reaction. The forces that were determined to halt the Revolution united in their condemnation of the "extremists" and "terrorists", although many who shouted loudest were themselves former extremists and terrorists.

As a matter of fact, the extent of the Terror has been greatly exaggerated. By modern standards it was a relatively mild affair. The Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris condemned 2,639 people to death, and revolutionary courts condemned in all about 17,000. The great majority who fell victim to the Terror were killed by summary executions in the violent civil war that raged in places like the Vendée and Lyon. The explanation for this violence was that the Revolution felt threatened by internal and above all external enemies. But Terror proved to be a blunt instrument and when it began to be turned against revolutionaries and working people it completely alienated the masses who were the base of the revolution and this eventually caused the downfall of the Jacobin regime.

The truth is that the Revolution had reached its zenith and exhausted itself. The middle class Jacobins could not satisfy the demands of the masses, who were pushing against the boundaries of bourgeois private property. Once the masses began to succumb to disillusionment and tiredness, Robespierre was lost. When he turned the instrument of Terror against the Left, he effectively destroyed his own base and handed the initiative over to the Right wing.

The long and painful decline had commenced. The Jacobin revolutionary Terror was replaced with the Thermidorean counterrevolutionary Terror. Thermidor led directly to reaction, but this drama did not take place in one act. This was initially not a swing back to monarchism but towards the moderate wing of Jacobinism that thought the Revolution had gone too far and wished to call a halt. The party strife in turn reflected a shift in the relation between different classes. The mass of urban poor, proletarians and semi-proletarians, were downcast and apathetic. Their voice was drowned out by a chorus of the well-to-do classes that were demanding Order.

The most general characteristic of the Thermidoreans was their extreme mediocrity. With the exception of Carnot, the military genius and great organizer, the rest were a bunch of self-serving and disreputable opportunists, men of limited intellect and no vision. The class basis of the new Convention consisted of businessmen, financial speculators, people who had grown rich out of swindling the army, and above all, the landowning peasantry that was now the biggest class in France and that later provided a solid base of support for Napoleon. These elements supported the Convention and sustained it.

It was the changed correlation of class forces that predetermined the victory of the Thermidoreans, despite their mediocrity. Though their Jacobin opponents were generally far more able, their ability availed them nothing in the changed circumstances. The masses, who had been the mainspring of the Revolution, the source of all its strength, were exhausted, hungry and disillusioned. On the contrary, the forces of reaction were increasingly confident. Disguised royalists crawled out of the woodwork and began to plot and intrigue. In place of Jacobin austerity, luxury, good taste and high society were back in fashion. The old revolutionary virtues of equality and fraternity were openly mocked, while freedom was only for the nouveaux riches who had made their fortunes out of the Revolution and now wished to enjoy life in peace and quiet.

The changes ushered in by Thermidor were many and largely unforeseen by the leadership. The Convention gave up all attempts to enforce the Maximum, the law that attempted to limit price increases. This was a measure that hit the masses and further increased their alienation from the Revolution. Demoralisation and apathy grew, together with an indifference towards politics in general. The masses were exhausted by years of storm and stress. Their rebellions now had a desperate character, with no real perspective.

In the spring of 1795, the dislocation of trade and the high price of bread led to acute social distress. There were riots in Paris, where the people demanded "bread and the Constitution of 1793." But they were swiftly crushed by the troops of general Pichegru. In May a group of insurgents led by Jacobin rebels seized the hall of the Convention until they were driven out by regular troops under Murat and Menou. The barricades erected in working class districts were easily demolished. The National Guard, the traditional ally of the revolutionaries, was reorganised into a purely middle class institution.

The great historical drama affected the lives of many individuals. Like many others, Napoleon now found himself in a delicate and dangerous position. His connections with Robespierre compromised him in the eyes of the reactionaries. He was investigated on charges of terrorism. Such charges often led to a close shave with the "national razor", as the guillotine was popularly known. But like many other careerists, he changed his shirt and adapted himself to the new regime. Once more, events acted in his favour.

The pendulum was now swinging sharply to the Right. But this alarmed the authorities, who wished to put an end to the Jacobin rule but by no means to return to the monarchy. The royalists imagined that the hour had come to settle accounts with the Revolution. They were mistaken. They were put down by force. In October the masses of Paris summoned up their remaining reserves of energy to make one last attempt to halt the slide to counterrevolution and set their stamp on events. The Convention was again besieged, and called upon general Barras for protection. His young subordinate was Napoleon Bonaparte. Barras used the services of Napoleon for help in putting down the uprising in Paris. This required the shooting down of French civilians. Many would have been reluctant to perform such a duty, but not Napoleon. He later made the famous remark that he had dispersed the mob with a "whiff of grapeshot." As a matter of fact, the crowd got rather more than a "whiff", since at least 200 people were killed.

This incident was significant because here for the first time the army intervened in internal French politics as the decisive force. Lenin explained that the state is, in the last analysis, armed bodies of men. Normally the state is a weapon in the hands of the ruling class, to be used to keep the masses down. However, there are certain periods when the class struggle reaches a deadlock in which the opposing forces balance each other out. In such circumstances, the state can raise itself above society and acquire a considerable degree of independence. This is the phenomenon that Marxists call Bonapartism. In different guises it has recurred throughout the history of class society. In the ancient world it existed as Caesarism, and Napoleon took Caesar as his historical role model. In 1809 in a conversation with Canova he remarked: "What a great people were these Romans, especially down to the Second Punic War. But Caesar! Ah Caesar! That was the great man!"

With every step back taken by the masses, the confidence and insolence of the reactionaries grew. Some of the exiled royalists began to return and raised their heads. Giving a legal form to the counterrevolution, the Convention abandoned the draft constitutions of both the Jacobins and Girondins and drew up a new constitution that stressed duties more than rights. This constitution came into force in October 1795 and remained in force until December 1799, when it was replaced by a Bonapartist one.

Even at the eleventh hour there were people prepared to fight against the counterrevolution. In October 1795 the Society of the Pantheon was formed to fight against the new Constitution of the Directorate. It published a newspaper called the Tribune, and the editor's name was François-Noël Babeuf, better known as Gracchus Babeuf. When the Directory decided to close the society it chose Napoleon to do the dirty work. Babeuf and Sylvain Maréchal replied by setting up an insurrectionary committee or "Secret Directory" of six to prepare a revolt.

The significance of Babeuf's conspiracy was that it revived the idea of equality under the banner of Communism. On the one hand they demanded the implementation of the Constitution of 1793, which had been approved but never implemented. On the other hand, they proclaimed a "Republic of Equals", based on the abolition of private property and the suppression of the difference between rich and poor. Very thorough preparations were made for the insurrection: arms and ammunitions were stockpiled. Revolutionary agents were to penetrate units of the army, police and administration. At a given signal, citizens from every district of Paris were to march behind banners to support the mutineers in the army. Public buildings and bakeries were to be seized.

The weakness of the whole thing was its conspiratorial nature. This itself was a reflection of the decline of the mass movement. A few years earlier it would not have been necessary to organise a conspiracy to get the people of Paris onto the streets. It had all the weaknesses of a conspiracy. The police infiltrated it from the start. On the eve of the uprising all the conspirators were arrested. The Directory turned the trial of Babeuf and the others into a show trial to intimidate the opposition. It lasted for three months, during which Babeuf, showing admirable courage, used it as a platform from which to propound his ideas and denounce the existing social order. He was executed - a victim of the White Terror. But his ideas survived long after his death, thanks to the work of his comrade Phillippe Buonarroti.

The Babeuf conspiracy was really the last gasp of the French Revolution, and at the same time pointed the way forward. His example served as an inspiration to the workers of France in the 19th century and his ideas had an influence over the young Marx and Engels.

About the author
Alan Woods is a senior editor and leading activist intellectual with In Defence of Marxism.

The major sea change in media discussions of Obama and civil liberties

The controversies over the IRS and especially the AP phone records appear to have long-lasting effects

By Glenn Greenwald, guardian.co.uk

Barack Obama Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Due to the controversies over the IRS and (especially) the DOJ’s attack on AP’s news gathering process, media outlets have suddenly decided that President Obama has a very poor record on civil liberties, transparency, press freedoms, and a whole variety of other issues on which he based his first campaign. The first two paragraphs of this Washington Post article from yesterday, expressed in tones of recent epiphany, made me laugh audibly:

You don’t say! The Washington Post’s breaking news here is only about four years late. Back in mid-2010, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, speaking about Obama’s civil liberties record at a progressive conference, put it this way: “I’m disgusted with this president.” In the spirit of optimism, one can adopt a “better-late-than-never” outlook regarding this newfound media awakening.

As a result of the last week, there is an undeniable and quite substantial sea change in how the establishment media is thinking and speaking about Obama. The ultimate purveyors of Beltway media conventional wisdom (CW), Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei, published an article yesterday headlined “DC turns on Obama”, writing that “the town is turning on President Obama – and this is very bad news for this White House” and “reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration.” The Washington Post’s political reporter, Dan Balz, another CW bellwether, wrote that these controversies “reflect questions about the administration that predate the revelations of the past few days”. About the AP story, Balz wrote that “no one can recall anything as far-reaching as what the Justice Department apparently did in secretly gathering information about the work of AP journalists.”

This morning, the New York Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote about the AP story and the broader War on Whistleblowers, and said that Obama’s presidency is “turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and of unprecedented attacks on a free press.” She added:

editorialized today that “the Obama administration, which has a chilling zeal for investigating leaks and prosecuting leakers, has failed to offer a credible justification” for its “spying on the AP”; the NYT editors also quoted a letter from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to Attorney General Holder stating that the AP spying “calls into question the very integrity” of the administration’s policy toward the press. The New Yorker this morning published an article by its general counsel, Lynn Oberlander, denouncing the DOJ’s conduct as “cowardly”; she wrote: “Even beyond the outrageous and overreaching action against the journalists, this is a blatant attempt to avoid the oversight function of the courts.” Former New York Times general counsel James Goodale, who represented the paper during its Pentagon Papers fight with the Nixon administration, said in an interview yesterday that Obama is worse than Nixon when it comes to press freedoms.

Those are all media venues generally sympathetic to and supportive of Obama. But this anger has infected even the most Obama-loyal circles. Journalist Jonathan Alter, who has literally written books using what he touts as his “unmatched access” that are paens to Obama’s greatness and Goodness, yesterday demanded: “Obama should simply apologize to the AP and its reporters. It’s the least he can do to show he still believes in the First Amendment.” Even at MSNBC, its most influential host, Rachel Maddow, broadcast a 20-minute segment vehemently condemning the Obama DOJ on the AP matter that featured an interview with an AP lawyer and used Nixon’s attacks on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg as the historical context. Maddow then broadcast another segment on the IRS’ targeting of right-wing groups in which she correctly pointed out that there is no evidence of Obama’s personal role in that targeting but that it will create serious problems for his administration. Even Harry Reid – the Senate’s top Democrat –denounced the DOJ’s actions as “inexcusable”, saying “there is no way to justify this.”

[pullquote]

Leave to the side how morally grotesque it is to oppose rights assaults only when they affect you. The pragmatic point is that it is vital to oppose such assaults in the first instance no matter who is targeted because such assaults, when unopposed, become institutionalized. Once that happens, they are impossible to stop when – as inevitably occurs – they expand beyond the group originally targeted. We should have been seeing this type of media outrage over the last four years as the Obama administration targeted non-media groups with these kinds of abuses (to say nothing of the conduct of the Bush administration before that). It shouldn’t take an attack on media outlets for them to start caring this much. [/pullquote]

There are two significant points to make from these events. First, it is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are. For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his treatment as “cruel and inhuman”. (Italics ours.)

But, with a few noble exceptions, most major media outlets said little about any of this, except in those cases when they supported it. It took a direct and blatant attack on them for them to really get worked up, denounce these assaults, and acknowledge this administration’s true character. That is redolent of how the general public reacted with rage over privacy invasions only when new TSA airport searches targeted not just Muslims but themselves: what they perceive as “regular Americans”. Or how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman – once the most vocal defender of Bush’s vast warrantless eavesdropping programs – suddenly began sounding like a shrill and outraged privacy advocate once it was revealed that her own conversations with Aipac representatives were recorded by the government.

Leave to the side how morally grotesque it is to oppose rights assaults only when they affect you. The pragmatic point is that it is vital to oppose such assaults in the first instance no matter who is targeted because such assaults, when unopposed, become institutionalized. Once that happens, they are impossible to stop when – as inevitably occurs – they expand beyond the group originally targeted. We should have been seeing this type of media outrage over the last four years as the Obama administration targeted non-media groups with these kinds of abuses (to say nothing of the conduct of the Bush administration before that). It shouldn’t take an attack on media outlets for them to start caring this much.

Second, we yet again see one of the most significant aspects of the Obama legacy: the way in which it has transformed and degraded so many progressive precincts. Almost nobody is defending the DOJ’s breathtaking targeting of AP, and with good reason: as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press made clear yesterday, it’s unprecedented:

printed an anonymous email accusing AP of engineering a “smear of Justice”. Worse, Media Matters this morning posted “talking points” designed to defend the DOJ in the AP matter that easily could have come directly from the White House and which sounded like Alberto Gonzales, arguing that “if the press compromised active counter-terror operations for a story that only tipped off the terrorists, that sounds like it should be investigated” and that “it was not acceptable when the Bush Administration exposed Valerie Plame working undercover to stop terrorists from attacking us. It is not acceptable when anonymous sources do it either.” It also sought to blame Republicans for defeating a bill to protect journalists without mentioning that Obama, once he became president, reversed his position on such bills and helped to defeat it. Meanwhile, the only outright, spirited, unqualified defense of the DOJ’s conduct toward AP that I’ve seen comes from a Media Matters employee and “liberal” blogger.

During the Bush years, it was conservatives who supported the Bush DOJ and Alberto Gonzales’ threats against the press on national security grounds; now, defenders of such threats to press freedoms are found almost exclusively from progressive [read: mainstream liberals] circles (similarly, many of the most vicious and vocal attacks on WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning have come from progressives [mainstream liberals, again, principally Obamabots]).

This is such an under-appreciated but crucial aspect of the Obama legacy. Recall back in 2008 that the CIA prepared a secret report (subsequently leaked to WikiLeaks) that presciently noted that the election of Barack Obama would be the most effective way to stem the tide of antiwar sentiment in western Europe, because it would put a pleasant, happy, progressive face on those wars and thus convert large numbers of Obama supporters from war opponents into war supporters. That, of course, is exactly what happened: not just in the realm of militarism but civil liberties and a whole variety of other issues. That has had the effect of transforming what were, just a few years ago, symbols of highly contentious right-wing radicalism into harmonious bipartisan consensus. That the most vocal defenders of this unprecedented government acquisition of journalists’ phone records comes from government-loyal progressives – reciting the standard slogans of National Security and Keeping Us Safe and The Terrorists – is a potent symbol indeed of this transformation.

Glenn Greenwald, an attorney and political blogger, writes for the Guardian (UK). His essays are published by many leading venues. He’s certainly no mainstream liberal.