Stephen Sefton *, May 11th 2014
The massacre in Odessa by neonazi protegés of the US government and its EU allies has been systematically minimized by the Western corporate media and much of the West's alternative media too. The same happens in any conflict where Western interests are at stake. What may be unique about the massacre in Odessa is that it was comprehensively recorded on videos demonstrating the incontrovertible guilt of the Western-backed fascist-dominated Ukraine coup regime and its supporters.
Previous US and allied massacres and atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan were heavily under-reported. The prosecution of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning made sure things will stay that way. The series of massacres by NATO controlled forces in Libya is another example. Under-reporting of massacres by UN allies in Ivory Coast is another. Even worse has been the omission of genocidal massacres by extremist muslim terrorists funded, supplied and trained by the US government and its European and regional allies in Syria.
The continuity of these crimes with Western colonial atrocities and imperialist war crimes of the last couple of centuries is seamless and unbroken. Even so, people in the West continue to sell themselves the absurd idea of their moral superiority. One way they do so is by constantly repeating keywords that effectively amount to shibboleths defining their narcissistic humbug identity. Outsiders unable to deploy those keywords fluently are regarded as eccentric, at the very least, and their views excluded from serious consideration. Outright rejection of the keywords in their standard Western use is regarded as alien and hostile. This is true across almost the entire Western political spectrum.
"Democracy" is the most obvious of these shibboleths. People in the West tend to talk mindlessly about their democracies, even though all the available evidence demonstrates conclusively their societies' legislative procedures are dominated by ruthless oligarchic elites. That was never clearer than in 2008 when the populations of the United States and Europe suffered the transfer of unprecedented amounts of public wealth to a relatively tiny corporate elite.
Electoral processes in North America and Europe are determined not by popular will but by the financial and media power and patronage that defines the choices for which people can vote. Corporate and most alternative media follow very clear ideological lines also dependent on and overwhelmingly determined by their funding. These fundamental realities generate class interests that identify themselves by their use of keyword shibboleths. "Western democracy" spoken positively by anyone in the West signals their denial of the self-evident blatantly contradictory reality.
Likewise "human rights" as generally used by people in the West invariably signals their acceptance of the deprecation of social and economic rights in favour a few civil and political rights, especially the rights to vote, to due legal process, not to be abused and tortured, not to be discriminated against, to free speech, to privacy and so on. In practice, abuse of many of these exalted rights is widespread in the West, against ethnic minorities and political dissidents and especially people accused of terrorism. Denial of fundamental social and economic rights is systematic, something very clear from the Western countries' record on inequality.
The keyword deployed as the main pretext for that systematic denial of social and economic rights and the corresponding perpetuation of gross inequality within the Western countries has been "the market" as used in "market economics" or the "free market". Economists in the West serve as high priests protecting this shibboleth with different rituals depending on which prayerbook they read from. Some sects worship a market as free as possible of government intervention and free of labour unions.
Other sects praise free markets while simultaneously condemning sinful behaviour like the "undervalued yuan" or the "overvalued dollar" as if markets are not structured by the relative power, corrupt or otherwise, of the people, classes and entities that compose them. In any case, injustice and inequality in the West depend on ensuring the widespread acceptance of markets described as free largely in the sense that the information on which the markets operate is true and fair. But it is clear more than ever before that international financial currency and commodity markets are cynically managed by Western Central Banks and corrupt North American, European and Japanese global financial corporations.
Events in Ukraine, and specifically the horrific events in Odessa are yet another alert to people in the West of how far their governments and media have hollowed out the meaning of words. Just as heavily manipulated Western currencies no longer correspond to a realistic value of corrupt Western economies so Western language itself long ago stopped meaning what it says. Both the West's corrupt financial institutions and its corrupt media have categorically abandoned giving a true and fair account of things, Only the burnt-out shibboleths remain.
* This article was originally published with a byline using my former pseudonym Toni Solo