“All States are governed by a ruling
class that is a minority of the population, and which subsists as a
parasitic and exploitative burden upon the rest of society. Since its
rule is exploitative and parasitic, the State must purchase the alliance
of a group of “Court Intellectuals,” whose task is to bamboozle the
public into accepting and celebrating the rule of its particular State.
The Court Intellectuals have their work cut out for them. In exchange for
their continuing work of apologetics and bamboozlement, the Court
Intellectuals win their place as junior partners in the power, prestige,
and loot extracted by the State apparatus from the deluded
public.”
Media as a Branch of Government
The toppling of Saddam's statue as
metaphor
by
Justin Raimondo,
January 05, 2011
The complete phoniness of the toppling of Saddam’s statue was exposed by
this
web
site
and
others when it
occurred, but now Peter Maass,
writing in the New Yorker, is calling the stage-managed nature
of that operation into question. While not contesting that the narrative
symbolized by the imagery was misleading, Maass avers it wasn’t the US
government, but the Western media that – without much prompting –
obligingly created and broadcast a carefully-cropped image of a nearly
empty square to give the impression that US soldiers were being greeted
by the Iraqis as “liberators.” As Maass puts it, the real significance of
the statue toppling was that the Americans had taken central Baghdad, and
yet:
“Everything else the toppling was said to represent during repeated
replays on televisionvictory for America, the end of the war, joy
throughout Iraqwas a disservice to the truth. Yet the skeptics were
wrong in some ways, too, because the event was not planned in advance by
the military.”
As for whose idea it was to bring down the statue, Maass traces it to a
lowly sergeant who, out of the blue, came up with the bright idea all by
his lonesome, but there are several holes in Maass’s story.
To begin with, long shots of the square show the area around the statue
completely
blocked off by US tanks, and yet, according to Maass’s own account,
“a handful of Iraqis had slipped into the square” – at precisely the
moment the sergeant asked permission to take the statue down.
Who were these Iraqis? Reading Maass, one would simply assume they were
random residents of Baghdad, curiosity seekers out on a lark, but a look
at
these
photos disabuses us of this notion. They were members of the
Iraqi
National Congress – those
now-infamous
“
heroes in error” – who had played a
key role in the “weapons of mass destruction”
deception and were being
groomed by the neocons to take power in post-Saddam Iraq. Along with
their leader, the
wanted
embezzler and
suspected Iranian agent
Ahmed Chalabi, 700 INC “fighters” were
flown into Nasiriyah by the Pentagon a few days before, and were
whisked to Baghdad, where they arrived just in time for their Big Media
Moment.
In short, these Iraqis were on the American
payroll –
and simply doing their job.
That the English-speaking media were also doing their job – which
is, as we all know, to parrot the line their governments were putting out
– comes as no surprise. As Glenn Greenwald has
noted, the links between our government and the “mainstream” media
have become so intimate that one can can fairly speak of an informal
“merger.” Yet we ought not to disappear the governmental aspect of this
untoward symbiosis. We need to ask: how is it that practically the entire
membership of the Iraqi National Congress wound up in that square, on
that day, while ordinary Iraqis were being blocked by US tanks?
I have no doubt that both aspects of the Government-Media Complex were
acting in perfect tandem on that occasion, and certainly Maass emphasizes
this in his piece. That some journalists on the scene who saw what was
happening, and protested to their editors that the statue-toppling
imagery projected the wrong story, were told to shut up and fix their
cameras on the fallen idol will shock the naïve, and amuse the realists
among us. Mainstream media organizations didn’t need to wait for orders
from Washington: they did it all on their own. Yet we don’t need to read
a WikiLeaked cable detailing the mechanics of the deception to understand
how the occupiers set the stage for a successful bit of performance
art.
This merger of Big Media and Big Government is not anything new, at least
to libertarians. As Murray Rothbard, the
founder of
the modern libertarian movement,
put
it:
“All States are governed by a ruling class that is a minority of the
population, and which subsists as a parasitic and exploitative burden
upon the rest of society. Since its rule is exploitative and parasitic,
the State must purchase the alliance of a group of “Court Intellectuals,”
whose task is to bamboozle the public into accepting and celebrating the
rule of its particular State. The Court Intellectuals have their work cut
out for them. In exchange for their continuing work of apologetics and
bamboozlement, the Court Intellectuals win their place as junior partners
in the power, prestige, and loot extracted by the State apparatus from
the deluded public.”
Even a dictatorship requires the implicit consent of the majority,
which puts up with its depredations until the weight of tyranny presses
down so hard that the impetus to rebel is inevitably provoked. What keeps
the spirit of rebellion in check are the blandishments of the Court
Intellectuals, among whom the mandarins of the “mainstream” media figure
prominently.
Rothbard, in the essay cited above, was discussing
historical
revisionism – the practice of revising the accepted or “official”
(i.e. government-generated) history of an event, such as a war, in light
of new and often deliberately overlooked or suppressed data. The term
entered common usage in the period following World War I, when it was
revealed that, far from being a glorious and heroic crusade to
“make the world safe for
democracy,” the conflict was all about making the world safe for
European
imperialism, for
the arms
trade, and for
American banking interests whose loans to the Allies were guaranteed
by US entry into the war. As Rothbard notes:
“The noble task of Revisionism is to de-bamboozle: to penetrate the
fog of lies and deception of the State and its Court Intellectuals, and
to present to the public the true history of the motivation, the nature,
and the consequences of State activity. By working past the fog of State
deception to penetrate to the truth, to the reality behind the false
appearances, the Revisionist works to delegitimize, to desanctify, the
State in the eyes of the previously deceived public. By doing so, the
Revisionist, even if he is not a libertarian personally, performs a
vitally important libertarian service.”
The task of Revisionism looks very much like the alleged role of
Journalism in a free society, and so it is. Yet as we’ve
lost our freedoms, down through the years, ceding them to government
at every critical turn, our “free” media, instead of “working past the
fog of State deception to penetrate to the truth,” has acted like a fog
machine,
generating and legitimizing deception rather than exposing it.
This is why WikiLeaks was inevitable:
the death of investigative journalism has created a void, which Julian
Assange and
his collaborators have filled – much to the chagrin and outrage of
our alleged “journalists,” who, as semi-official Court Intellectuals, are
concerned not with exposing but with protecting the regime. This is why
the journalistic profession has not risen as one in defense of WikiLeaks:
indeed, far from it, they’ve been in the vanguard of the anti-WikiLeaks
lynch mob.
In what Greenwald
calls an “unintentionally hilarious” piece in Newsweek, we are
told the answer to the question “why haven’t journalists been defending
WikiLeaks?” is because they are fearful of “advocacy.” Gee, is
that what all those post-9/11 flag lapel pins were about? The idea
that the media is averse to advocacy is a half-truth: certain kinds of
advocacy are verboten, while others are assumed. When it comes to
cheerleading the national security state, the US media has historically
been ahead of the general populace in ginning up wars and inciting war
hysteria.
When William Randolph Hearst sent his “journalists” to Cuba, just before
the outbreak of the Spanish-American war, he
instructed them: “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.”
Nothing has changed in the interim, except that the government-media
partnership has gotten
tighter. This marriage was going along swimmingly, until
that harlot known
as the worldwide web threatened to come between the happy
couple.
The Internet blew apart the media monopoly, and destroyed the role of the
journalist as semi-official gatekeeper. That’s why our rulers have been
so eager to regulate it, tax it, and rein it in – and if they succeed in
the case of WikiLeaks, they will have won a decisive victory. In doing
all in their power to obstruct and destroy WikiLeaks, and imprison Julian
Assange, Washington and its journalistic Praetorian Guard have a much
broader goal in mind: neutralize the internet.
Already, legal scholars – some of whom lamely protest that they’re
only trying to preserve the First Amendment – are busily constructing
arguments to accomplish this task, by coming up with novel arguments,
e.g. the concept of “low value” speech, and such statements as “society
needs not an absence of ‘chill,’ but an optimal level.” And, yes, our old
“
friend” Cass Sunstein is in on this one.
Liberals, conservatives, Democrats, and Republicans – all are united on
the alleged necessity of reining in the internet. Their motivations may
vary, but their goals converge – and freedom’s only defenders are those
liberals who remember what true liberalism means, those (few)
conservatives who value individual liberty over and above the State, and,
of course, all libertarians (with the exception of
Michael Moynihan and the editors of Reason magazine).
Liberty, besieged, is hanging by a thread – a very narrow and swiftly
unraveling thread that looks just about to give way. The only hope is a
grassroots rebellion as the Powers That Be get ready to throw the
“
kill switch” – or are the American people so domesticated that they
have lost the power to resist, or even care? I don’t believe it, I
can’t believe it, and surely don’t want to believe it – but time
will tell.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/01/04/media-as-a-branch-of-government/
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