BREAKING THROUGH THE CORPORATE MEDIA BLOCKADE
TACTICS & STRATEGIES | RICK STAGGENBORG, M.D. SOLDIERS FOR PEACE INTERNATIONAL
![Obama has been and remains one of the most loyal and efficient salesmen of the imperial project. He has clearly exceeded the expectations of the plutocrats that chose him as a front. (Image by DonkeyHotey, via flickr)](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/obama-Elephant.MichaelHogue-535x400.jpg)
Obama has been and remains one of the most loyal and efficient salesmen of the imperial project. He has clearly met and probably exceeded the expectations of the plutocrats that chose him as a front. (Image by DonkeyHotey, via flickr)
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I wrote this article as an example of how to break through the corporate media with editorials explaining important facts that syndicated columnists and mainstream media reporters are clueless about. While this type of article is unlikely to ever make the New York Times, there are many newspapers that will publish well-supported guest editorials.
I hope it will be read with an eye to understanding how to communicate with the general public on the US Deep State as much as for what it has to say about that topic itself.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]ruth is the first casualty of war. Engaged in an unprecedented state of endless war to fight the phantom enemy of “terrorism,” it has never been so important that Americans understand this. They must recognize that like throwing gasoline on a fire, fighting terrorism with military means only makes it worse. ISIS did not arise spontaneously. It is the result of the US government manipulating public opinion to support policies unthinkable before 9/11 and that have remained unquestioned. Americans have been duped into accepting the use of terrorists for proxy wars in Libya and Syria. The US is ultimately responsible for the atrocities being committed by ISIS and will bear the brunt of the blame for making the problem worse if it supports further violence in the region.
Mark Twain observed: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Self-governing nations have the moral responsibility to understand why they are at war. That means seeking answers to questions beyond the superficial ones posed by the mainstream media. Despite the widespread distrust of most US news sources by both those who consider themselves liberal and those who consider themselves conservative, we continue to get most of our information from these corporate-funded sources whose main goal is profit, not enlightenment. News is therefore framed to reinforce self-serving myths that increase profit industries connected to war and the police state apparatus that supports it.
There are many reasons why the news industry has become stenographers for politicians and the economic elite most of them represent. Concealing the abuses of corporate power maintains advertising revenue and profits in the six megacorporations that own most of the media and have interests in many other industries.
Failing to cover the real issues during political campaigns leaves a void they can fill with enormously profitable campaign ads. Omitting important information about world events and providing superficial analysis of what is covered keeps us ignorant of the real goals of US foreign policy, which can only be understood by studying the underlying power structure of the US and the world. That information is not taught in school and is not talked about in the corporate media but must be sought after. In sum, we can say it’s a class question: The US government is a tool of corporate power at home and abroad, that is, it is an instrument to design and carry out policies of chief benefit to the 0.0002% of the human race at the expense of everyone else, plus nature itself. This requires a permanent apparatus of massive disinformation, which the US media, and their associates around the world well represent.
[dropcap]C[/dropcap]omprehending how we are being lied into supporting chaotic global violence requires understanding how certain powerful interests control information. Few people realize that one of the CIA’s most critical duties is influencing media for propaganda purposes. Various sources have documented a network of media corporations that are CIA fronts, both in the US and overseas. A prominent German media figure admitted to being a CIA employee for years, stating that this was common practice in both Europe and the US. While its authorization to propagandize is legally restricted to foreign media, the CIA has exercised extensive influence over US media since its creation shortly after WWII, when America’s empire building experiment began in earnest. Those who doubt this should read about the LATimes reporter who last year admitted letting the CIA edit his work. There is also the story of how investigative reporter Gary Webb, whose work revealing how CIA drug trafficking in Iran-Contra led to a drug epidemic in LA, was persecuted in a CIA-led disinformation campaign in the press that cost him his career, his marriage and his life, in a reported suicide.
We now know that claims of WMDs in Iraq were false, as were similar claims in Syria. Seymour Hersh, who uncovered much of the hidden truth of the Vietnam War, revealed the lies about Syrian chemical weapons. Robert Parry, who gave us the facts about Iran-Contra, is now trying to wake us up to the fact that the US is supporting a fascist government in Ukraine. It is not a coincidence that both are no longer New York Times reporters. The Times has set the standard for a media that parrots government lies without question. The hope for democracy in America lies in getting the truth out. That will on happen when more of us open our eyes to how we are systematically being deceived by a global economic elite who regard the world as their chessboard, and people as their pawns.
[box] Rick Staggeborg, MD is a social and political activist based in Eugene, Oregon. Rick founded and heads the antiwar organization Soldiers for Peace International (SFPI). [/box]
Contact Rick: staggenborg4senate@hotmail.com
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Select Responses (from original threads) to Did Reagan Know about Baby Thefts?
You nailed it, Bob. Small wonder such a concerted effort was made in those days to “controversialize” you. Intrepid is the word for you. Thanks. ray
For those of you who doubt the veracity of the Neo-Nazi aspect of this story, may I suggest an enlightening read: “The Nazi Legacy, Klaus Barbie and the International Fascist Connection” by Magnus Linkletter, Isabel Hilton and Neal Ascherson, Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1984. The shocker is that we weren’t just ignoring “Neo” Nazis, many of these South American dictators had REAL EX NAZIs on their payrolls and our government could not possibly have been ignorant of that fact. Just so I make my point clear: we’re talking about people that had actually worked for Himmler, Heydrich, Muller, and Goering that got jobs working for these “associates” in South America. Still think Reagan was a good guy?
Klaus Barbie, himself, was working for the U.S. State Department (or the Secret Service, I can’t remember which) as an intelligence asset in the years immediately following WWII until they relocated him to Bolivia in the early 1950′s. Of course, while in Bolivia, Barbie worked with narco-trafficers, and trained right-wing paramilitary groups in the art of interrogation, torture, and murder. Heck of a guy.
An excellent article on this unbelievably dark episode in recent history. The Reagan “Revolution” and all the talk of Reagan’s illustrious legacy is quite an achievement of propaganda and some of his own special brand of “perception management”.
Thank you, Mr. Parry. This is a much needed journalistic window into the nasty history of, and U.S. complicity in, the brutal human rights abuses of Argentina and the other dictatorships that were our allies in Latin America in the 1980s.
It would be ironic if the contents of this one memo were somehow spun to burnish the human rights image of Eliot Abrams who, as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs (an oxymoron if there ever was one). I believe Abrams was confirmed in 1983, after Argentina had been defeated in the Falklands by our primary ally, Britain, and Videla and Bignone had fallen out of favor with the U.S. and had been overthrown by the Argentine people. So, one wonders if, by that time, the Reagan Administration could have ever continued to cover for Videla, or remain quiet about the human rights abuses it had been so complicit in, once information about the mass child kidnappings had become so public. So, one could as well interpret Abrams use of the word “humanitarian” in this secret memo, with reference to its political as opposed to underlying “human rights” implications for Argentina- i.e., vis a vis obtaining a waiver or reclassification to remove Argentina from the State Department’s list of human rights violators. The declassified State Department memo can be accessed at:https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/394541-19821203-abrams-doc-full.html
Still, Abrams was a public apologist for the many other Latin American dictatorships, such as El Salvador, Guatamala, Honduras, who were slaughtering suspected “leftists”, and for the Contras who were spreading terror in Nicaragua, as well as for the Israelis during their invasion of Lebanon when they stood by as the Phalangists massacred the Palestinian refugees in Sabra-Shatilla. Throughout, Abrams clashed frequently with human rights NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International at a time when they were still free of government influence. Later, he became a key player in the Plan for the New American Century that resulted in 10 years of devastation in the MIddle East. So while his testimony may be helpful for the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo who seeking justice against Videla, Abrams himself has been guilty of more than a war crimes and should be in the dock of the next War Crimes tribunal.
We seem to be gravitating back to the same with our involvement in the overthrow of the Honduran and Paraguayan
governments, an ever increasing military base presence in Columbia, and behind the scenes influence in Chile, and Peru.
The label ‘NeoNazi’ like the myth of ‘anti-Semitism’ was coined by former supporters of the Nazi Party, the Zionist Jews. They have used it for the last six decades to shut the criticism of Israel. Many of Nazi Jews settled in Argentina. One of them was Hitler’s SS officer Adolph Eichmann. He was kidnapped by Israelis from Argentina and executed in Israel in 1961 for ‘war crimes’.
Zionist historian, Lenni Brenner, in his book 51 Documents: Zionists Collaboration With the Nazis has reported that Adolf Eichmann was himself a Zionist and supported the creation of a ‘Jewish Homeland’ in Palestine. Hennecke Kardel in his book Adolf Hitler: Begruender Israels, says that Eichmann was a full-blooded Jew. According to Eichmann himself, he was a radical Zionist.
http://rehmat1.com/2011/03/16/hannah-arendt-and-eichmanns-show-trail/
This makes ever more sense as a persistent strain of human depravity called “eugenics” and justified by the right-wing Germans in their propagandist phrase describing their victims as “life undeserving of life”. Though right-wing propaganda purposes to make us believe that only the Nazi’s held such murderous convictions and utterly lacked sympathy or compassion, as one lives and learns, the ideology thrives all over the world. It just keeps coming back, like a comet, visiting calamity upon the innocent. Only by concentration and persistent revelation can we hope to survive the next visit.
The Argentine Junta had the ‘baby trade’ as part of an effort to obliterate the ‘leftist family’ – subversion has been considered ‘genetic’ and environmental. After all – the Catholic Church and the Franco Fascists distributed tens of thousands of Spanish children to Church orphanages and to become servants to the wealthy – while hiding the fact that their leftist parents had ended up in unmarked mass graves. In their minds, these kids were ‘saved’. At least they survived.
On the other hand, the US government (and especially with the likes of Elliott Abrams) would have considered the Argentine passion for ‘handing out’ the children of murdered leftists to be pointless, wasteful and ‘sentimental’. After all, the existence of these kids have come back to bite their adopted parents and agencies and land some former leaders in prison for crimes against humanity.
US Imperialism has never viewed children with quite the ‘romance’ of the Clerico-facists and Generals. That’s why children were never spared in US- led wars – they had no intrinsic value until now.
Now these children (and their parents) may enter a more practical form of commerce: The organ trade. The wealthy and powerful of the world have only to ‘shop’ for the needed organs and … so what if the donors disappear. Elliott Abrams would have condemned the death flights out to sea of healthy leftists (so many kidneys, hearts and livers – such a waste) as well as the ‘farming out’ of their children.
Put in this context, the Argentine clerico-fascist desire to ‘save’ the children of leftists is really more civilized than the US Administrations attitude toward the kids of its ‘enemies’.