PREACHING BEYOND THE CHOIR ABOUT THE GENOCIDE

                                          
                                            

                                                                                



As I have often written, one of the most effective ways to break through the corporate media blockade of information that would allow Americans to understand the depravity of the empire of which they are a part is to share what you know in letters and opinion columns in newspapers that still allow them.

I am privileged to live in a community with a newspaper that serves as a community forum. Here's my most recent guest column.

 

As I See It: U.S. has legal, moral responsibility to stop a genocide in process

A small item in a recent edition of this paper ("Israeli troops storm and burn hospital in Gaza," Dec. 18) was remarkable. While the incident might appear to be just another Israeli war crime, the piece was notable because it broke the near-total silence of the media regarding the program of extermination going on in northern Gaza.

The full story of Kamal Adwan Hospital provides a lens on the horror of a genocide largely concealed from those who only know what they see in mainstream media.

In October, Israel declared that any Palestinian unwilling or unable to leave northern Gaza immediately would be treated as a terrorist. According to whistleblowers interviewed by Israel’s Haaretz, the military zone that has sealed the north from southern Gaza since then has been treated as a free-fire zone. No one can leave even if they want.

All food, water, medicine and other essentials of life have been blocked from entering, in defiance of repeated orders from the International Court of Justice. The population has been under continuous bombardment. Nearly all are starving.

With the onset of winter, babies living without decent shelter are freezing to death.

Kamal Adwan was one of the last semi-functioning hospitals left in north Gaza. It had been rocked repeatedly by explosions for more than two months before being stormed.

Just days before the raid, an American-made bomb killed 50 people in an adjacent building used by staff. Hospital Director Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya bravely stated, “We will leave when the last Palestinian leaves.”

Israel “justified” its violent assault on patients and staff with allegations, presented without evidence, that Hamas fighters were based there. Abu Safiya was among those forced to strip in the freezing cold, then was kidnapped and taken to the infamous Israeli torture site at Sde Teiman.

The raid was nothing new for the occupation forces, but in view of conditions in the north it is even more inhuman. It is part of a process of ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, as former defense minister and Israel Defense Forces Chief Moshe Ya’alon concluded.

The campaign of extermination in the north is an intensification of Israel’s genocidal policies throughout this war. This ethnic cleansing appears intended to clear the way for reestablishing settlements in the Strip, as called for by leaders of all three parties in Israel’s governing coalition.

 

It is a harbinger of what is intended for the rest of Gaza. Left unchallenged by the U.S. government, this is likely to be the fate of the West Bank, where a killing spree by settlers and the occupying forces continues largely unreported in the U.S.

The International Court of Justice declared a year ago there was a plausible case for genocide. More recently, detailed investigations by the two most respected human rights organizations in the world, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have concluded that genocide is occurring.

Anyone who still refuses to accept that, at a minimum, genocide may be occurring in Gaza, is akin to a Holocaust denier.

|The U.S. has a legal and moral responsibility to do everything it can to stop a genocide in process. Instead, it is abetting one by continuing to send offensive weapons to Israel, ignoring the will of most Americans. Those who believe in "government by the people" have a duty to protest.

A recent study found that in Gaza as a whole, 96% of children expect to die at any time. Half hope for it. If that does not stir the heart of anyone still clinging to the fiction that Israel is only “defending” itself, they have no heart to begin with.

Rick Staggenborg, MD, of Albany is president of the Linus Pauling Chapter of Veterans for Peace, founder of Soldiers For Peace International and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace.

MEDIA LITERACY AND RESISTANCE

                         

This is the second in a series of articles meant to help anyone struggling to understand the underlying logic behind global crises that seem chaotic and disconnected. 

Starting with the fall of the Syrian government, these essays will explain the basics of US foreign policy since the turn of this century. They will explore how events are related to stated and unstated goals of those who determine what is euphemistically referred to as U.S. "national security" policy. 
 
Here is the link to the first article. 
 
 
Before diving too deeply into things that most Americans have been taught to regard as "propaganda," it is helpful to understand how the media works to manufacture consent for endless war. This is a topic that could fill many books, so I'll only skim the surface here. 
 
In Soviet Russia, there were two state newspapers, Pravda (Truth) and Izvestiya (News). everyone knew the phrase, "There is no pravda in Izvestiya, and no izvestiya in Pravda." Not laboring under the delusion that they lived in a democracy, Russians knew that they were being lied to by a ruling class that controlled the media. Not so in the Western world. 
 
To understand how world events result from 21st century U.S. foreign policy, we need to recognize that we cannot find the necessary information from corporate-owned media sources. Americans must learn that they cannot trust anything they are told by the Western media regarding foreign affairs. You will have a far more accurate picture of events if you start by assuming that the opposite of what you are told is true and sort out the facts from there. As Mark Twain said, "Those who don't read the newspapers are uninformed. Those who do are misinformed." 
 
   Western reporting on world events is always slanted toward what war  
        profiteers who determine U.S. foreign policy want us to believe.  
 
Mainstream media manipulates public opinion by leaving out facts and context that would enable informed opinion on foreign events and reveal the real reasons for US interventions. This is in large part due to media reliance on official statements and information from unnamed government sources that are ultimately the products of a network of CIA media handlers. If you find that hard to believe, read my short introduction to how was developed and how it works.  

Note that a lot of this information came out in the late 70s when the Church Commission investigated the CIAs activities within the U.S. during the 60s and early 70s. Some of this (and more) can be found even in Wikipedia. Despite the best efforts of the CIA and FBI to control the narrative at that site, they have so much to cover up that they must focus on contemporary events, trusting Americans to forget their history. I can't present an exhaustive review of how media propaganda works in this short space.  
 
Americans are brought up to believe that they live in a democracy and that the U.S. only goes to war for noble reasons. This is the Big Lie that makes all the others easy to swallow. Recognizing that the US is an empire is the key to deciphering U.S. foreign policy since WWII. As Madison pointed out, empires are inherently undemocratic.  Only when Americans recognize that citizens of an empire are also its victims, and that their true interest is standing with the rest of world citizenry, can they truly be free. 

 

               American exceptionalism is deeply ingrained. 
 
Even after learning that the Vietnam and Iraq wars were based on lies, most Americans implicitly accept both as exceptions to the rule that America strives to make the world safe for democracy. If it were understood that the U.S. is an empire, such nonsense would never be taken seriously. 
 
If Americans were taught real history in school, they would know that that "making the world safe for democracy" was the slogan used to market WWI, billed as the "war to end all wars." If they were also taught to think, this would raise some questions about why we are now in a period of endless war. Because they are not taught to think for themselves, far too many Americans are too incurious to consider anything they don't see on the evening news. 
 
Even many people who think of themselves as peace activists initially believed that sending weapons to Ukraine was a good idea. People who understood history and military logic knew better and tried to tell them, but it was a struggle to get them to understand. It was not just that the U.S. had provoked the war, as many thought. More importantly, Ukraine never had a chance to win it, and saner voices in the U.S. military said so. 
 
What many don't realize is that the war could have been prevented, if Biden had been interested in peace. In addition, an agreement to withdraw was essentially finalized in March of 2022, only to be nixed by the U.S. in the form of an edict delivered by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Zelensky, having been publicly threatened by the U.S.-backed neo-Nazis in his government not to negotiate, took the hint. He never seriously considered negotiations based on realistic conditions again. 
 
Since then, Biden has crossed so many of his own red lines in the obsessive quest to kill more Russians at the risk of nuclear war that it should be obvious weakening Russia was always the real U.S. objective. Although that goal is now discussed openly, most Americans do not suspect they have been had once again. 
 
Moreover, most still feel arming Ukrainians to fight and die for is increasingly recognizable as an unwinnable cause was right. They remain oblivious to the fact that in doing so, the U.S. is risking nuclear Armageddon. Only the egotism that comes from deeply ingrained American exceptionalism can explain this failure to recognize the limits of U.S. power. 
 
                                 Syria in a wider context 
 
If you're asking yourself why you are reading about the Ukraine and Russia when this series began with understanding how Syria fits into US plans for global dominance, you are paying attention.  I could, after all, have just as easily explored media manipulation by focusing on how Americans have been kept from understanding U.S. involvement in Syria. It is not just about stealing their oil. 
 
I could cite numerous examples of the use of propaganda in manufacturing consent for the US proxy war on Syria. Here are just a couple: 
- Despite long ago revealing that al Qaeda is an ally in the fight, the U.S. continues to misrepresent its continuing role and the nature of its ISIS-affiliated leader. 
- Russia's intervention in 2015 resulted in a rapid rout of the terrorist caravan of tankers carrying stolen oil to Turkey. This had been going on since 2013. No one in the media asked why the U.S. had failed to cut off this source of terrorist revenue despite allegedly being there to fight ISIS. Unknown to most Americans, it had exempted them from the embargo on selling Syrian oil. 
 
Countless other blatant lies and omissions went unchallenged by the stenographers of the corporate-owned media. If you want to get the bigger picture of the groundbreaking propaganda front of the war on Syria, I suggest Tim Anderson's The Dirty War on Syria. 
 
In terms of geopolitics, the dirty war on Syria is closely connected to the US-provoked war between Russia and Ukraine. Syria was targeted because it was the strategic bridge between Iran and Hezbollah, who are resisting Israeli hegemony in West Asia. They have been holding the line for decades against what can fairly be termed an Anglo-American-Israeli Empire. Russia, for its part, has been a target of Western imperialists for centuries because of its strategic position on the globe, connecting Eurasia east to west from the North Sea to the Pacific. 
 
Both these regional wars are being fought according to principles most famously outlined in former Carter Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard. The difference with today's inept imperial strategists is that Brzezinski based his strategies on the principle of realism. Foreign policy realists consider the fact that Russia's nuclear strength must be respected. He warned that attempting to turn Ukraine into a NATO vassal would be supremely reckless, and the neocons have ignored that warning at humanity's peril. 
 
The neocon strategy has backfired. America's blatant attempt to achieve world domination in one generation has awakened unaligned nations to the need to work together to stop the advance of the Empire. Russia is now closely aligned with Iran and much closer to China than it has been for over 60 years. Their cooperation and that of other BRICS nations, along with nations of the Global South, threatens the plans of U.S. imperialists to protect the primacy of the dollar (and thus the U.S.) in the world economy. 
 
Now that we know the outlines of the global struggle taking place before our eyes, we are ready to discuss how the U.S. developed its game plan, and how that explains nearly all that has gone wrong since the turn of the century. 
 
 
NEXT: The fundamentals of 21st century U.S. foreign policy 
 
 
                    How to do your own research  

If you consider media spin, you can get some basic facts from corporate media outlets. Just look out for unattributed or untrustworthy sources of information and outright lies. CIA-sourced information often contains misinformation and disinformation inserted into official statements. These are often taken as facts by the many reporters who don't seem to realize that professionals are supposed to question what they are told. 

 

There are a great many excellent independent sources of information online to study all this further on your own. You can't go wrong by starting with The Electronic Intifada to understand events in West Asia, but other important sites include The Cradle, The Grayzone, Consortium News and any YouTube channel with the guests Scott Ritter, Colonel Douglas MacGregor, Max Blumenthal, and Aaron Mate’ The more sources you consult, the better picture you will have. 

 

An instructive way to find alternative sources of news and analysis on foreign affairs is to check out the websites listed by the shadowy group calling itself Prop or Not as being propaganda sources aimed at spreading Russian disinformation. Almost all of them are highly respected among those who know the difference.  

 

Tellingly, the Washington Post published a featured article on this unvetted group, lending a veneer of legitimacy to this obvious disinformation, Shortly thereafter, it was forced to print a disclaimer (on a back page). That didn't persuade many people to question the debunked claims made during the Russiagate hysteria, but it was very amusing to those of us who knew the truth. 
 
Not coincidentally, many of the sources designated propaganda by Prop or Not were later targeted by the government for publishing the truth about what was going on in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. With the help of collaborators Meta (YouTube and Facebook), Google, PayPal, Twitter and other giant corporations that determine what content Americans have access to, it began to censor, deplatform, demonetize and even arrest journalists for publicizing verifiable facts that ran counter to the pro-war narrative.