Tortilla con Sal, March 30th 2018
John Heartfield’s powerful photomontage portrait of social democrat media as a newspaper-cabbage head fascist thug in Nazi Germany remains as cogent and relevant now as it was then. He entitled it “Whoever reads bourgeois newspapers becomes blind and deaf.” Nothing could be more true today. The communications news and entertainment media of member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization overwhelmingly serve as their governments’ propaganda arm. They have always worked to construct false beliefs so as to justify Western aggression against the majority world. In that role, they have become increasingly desperate since the economic crisis of 2008.
The fundamental Western disinformation media deception is to portray themselves as fearless defenders of civil rights in their own countries, while supporting and covering up Western supported genocide and mass terrorism around the world. For example, they have facilitated and covered up decades of Israeli ethnic cleansing in Palestine, continuing mass murder by nazi militias in Ukraine, mass terror by pseudo-Islamist NATO proxies in Libya and Syria, decades old corporate driven genocide in the Congo, and, in Latin America, dysfunctional regimes murdering their own people wholesale in Colombia and Mexico. All those deceptions are imposed as received wisdom, digitally reproduced and reinforced by permanent relentless suggestion, fake corroboration, and systematic omission across every possible media.
This process is applied not only to the facts of any given event or case, but also to virtually automatic cultural and ideological infinite feedback loops involving people’s identity and values. Domestically, the very liberal and social democrat Western media protesting most loudly about civil rights freedoms are the self-same apologists of the security state regimes and systems currently being imposed in North America and Europe more intensely than ever. A few years ago, the case of Wikileaks gave an outstanding example of this reality. Leading liberal and social democrat media from the New York Times to the UK Guardian used Julian Assange and when they felt they had achieved sufficient damage control of the Wikileaks revelations, they trashed him, facilitating by their coverage bogus allegations of rape and gross procedural abuse by the Swedish prosecutor concerned.
Similarly, the Edward Snowden affair had practically no effect on the abuse and institutionalization of government surveillance. Far from being curtailed, US and allied governments have systematically incorporated into their security policy strategies global-scale industrial data production by corporate surveillance giants like Facebook and Google and their subsidiaries, like Whatsapp. Now, NATO country media are working to promote shocked surprise that a predatory commercial monster like Facebook marketed users’ private information to third parties. But that was their business plan from the start, just like Google’s. For years, Western liberal media puffed these corporate parasite behemoths as great innovators. But banal mass surveillance and control are the essence of those businesses, as is the inextricable relationship between these corporate giants and the security apparatus of their countries’ governments.
Thus, Western corporate media, in particular liberal and social democrat corporate media, have practically zero legitimacy as defenders of human rights either in terms of their foreign affairs coverage or their coverage of domestic freedoms. In North America and Europe, they have been able to project themselves as defenders of human rights because Western corporate capitalism has forced a radical uncoupling of personal identity, especially gender and ethnic identity, along with broader cultural and ideological formation, from economic and political reality. For example, most people in the West still regard their societies as democracies despite the greatest ever looting of public sector wealth by Western corporate oligarchies following the 2008 crisis so as to preserve their corrupt, predatory financial system.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the region’s elites have aped their North American and European elite patrons while also facing the exigencies of China’s growing global economic domination. To this new multipolar world order they are trying to accommodate, first, their own odious greed and, as a poor second, their countries’ national interests perceived through a neoliberal lens. However, their neocolonial subjugation to US security state-corporate fascism endures. A perfect example of this has been the withholding of crucial evidence gathered by the FBI in relation to the death, almost certainly by suicide, of special prosecutor Alberto Nisman in Argentina in January 2015. Research by the authoritative investigative journalist Raúl Kollmann has found that the FBI secured Nisman’s Yahoo e-mails and Whatsapp records, refusing to make them available to the Argentinian authorities except selectively. That enabled Argentina’s legal authorities serving President Macri’s right wing government to manipulate and abuse judical process in order to attack former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
Western corporate media cover up such details just as they deliberately omit that, while over 80% of Cubans voted in Cuba’s recent legislative elections, fewer than 50% of voters did so in Colombia’s legislative elections. Western corporate media promote the propaganda falsehood that a majority of people in Latin America now support right wing political movements and governments, the falsely misnamed "conservative restoration". In fact, corruption, violence and illegitimacy have overtaken Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. Likewise, Ecuador, Perú and Chile are in deep crisis with governments promoting policies undermining or outright attacking the economic well-being of the majority. But practically none of this continental reality receives porportionate coverage in Western media reporting on Latin America and the Caribbean.
North American and European media and Western human rights NGOs tend to focus their reporting on Latin America so as to exaggerate and misrepresent the crisis in Venezuela, highlight and legitimize judicial attacks against former presidents Lula da Silva and Cristina Fernandez and demonize the indisputably popular and successful governments of Evo Morales and Daniel Ortega. 2018 is already shaping up to be even more conflictive for Latin America than the previous year 2017, which was traumatic enough. Immediately, the key regional event will be the presidential and legislative elections in Venezuela. Western corporate media and human rights NGOs will be doing all they can to promote the neocolonial interventionist agenda of the US government and its equally corrupt regional allies. For them, serving and covering up for imperialist, corporate State fascism comes naturally.