It is not easy to gauge the political temperature in my country these days. Not easy at all. Corporate news outlets persist in doing what they are paid to do, which is to keep us in the dark.
We were told, yes, that Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan had been sentenced to a good many years’ imprisonment, but we were not told that this was a US-orchestrated regime change operation. We were told that the PM Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh was forced to resign due to violent demonstrations. We were not told that this was another US-orchestrated regime change operation and that India is now squeezed between two US puppet states. The USA is protecting us, defending Democracy.
Democracy? Well yes, if you consider votes cast by a blindfolded electorate watertight evidence.
While Harris et al. are gushing all over our screens and newspapers – opening a paper is akin to eating a pound of cotton candy – some of us ask ourselves whether WWIII will start in the Middle East or in Europe. Harris is “tough”, though, and will make no concessions. Bring ’em on, she seems to say. The bipartisan magazine Responsible Statecraft is not impressed. Harris appears to share the Neocon view, writes Jack Hunter, that
diplomacy could prevent war, their primary goal, so better to avoid it. A tried and true method in preventing diplomacy is to accuse anyone who wants it of siding with America’s enemies.
In contrast, the magazine Foreign Affairs reassures its readers with the article “What Was the Biden Doctrine?”:
… it is clear that the past four years have witnessed remarkable achievements in foreign policy…the active pursuit of diplomacy… demonstrating a grasp of the traditional elements of statecraft…
How many Europeans read Foreign Affairs? How many Europeans read Responsible Statecraft? I have absolutely no idea. One thing is pretty sure though: Our own mainstream media is likely to parrot the former rather than the latter.
Last night I joined a few old friends for a drink down town. I know they still follow the mainstream news outlets, the news outlets they have been taught to trust as “objective”. For some mysterious reason, “objective” is seen to be synonymous with “neutral”, at least in this country. If the reporter claims to be – and convinces the reader that he or she is – “neutral”, i.e. neither left-wing nor right-wing, most Norwegians believe she will be more likely to “objectively” discern what is good (or correct) from what is bad (or disinformation), than if she is strongly opposed to mainstream policies.
You will have noticed that I did not provide any link to Foreign Affairs. I believe that the agenda of most Foreign Affairs contributors is continued US global supremacy at all costs, an agenda I strongly object to. So you are right to assume I am anything but “neutral”.
My friends knew that I have not been neutered (pun intended). They know I am angry. But I love my friends, so I have learnt to shut up, and since they love me, they allow me to keep my peace. We do not discuss foreign affairs. Period. As for domestic affairs, the so-called “objective” and “neutral” press is mostly interested in the Norwegian Royals’ domestic problems and my friends are as indifferent to the Royals as I am. So I wonder: What do my friends really make of the “news”, all told?
Last night, I informed them that Associated Press had reassured me that the cat Sam had been reunited with his mistress (name not given by AP) after 11 years’ painful separation. My friends raised ironical eyebrows and retorted that the Norwegian press, on the other hand, was currently devoting most of its attention to the circus of the upcoming US elections. I interpreted this as an expression of dissatisfaction with the Norwegian press.
And since most of us in this country are very distressed about the vicious extermination of all fellow human beings from Gaza, I thought it might be safe to comment that from the few surviving Palestinians’ perspective, at least, it did not matter who became president, since AIPAC gives generous “donations” to both candidates and will make sure that Netanyahu gets what he wants regardless. “No US president can ever refuse whatever the Israeli government asks for,” I declared and received blank stares in return.
What did those blank stares express? I don’t know, because I did not press the point.
I assume my interlocutors still firmly believe that Putin is a new “Hitler”. After all, that is what they’ve been told day after day, just as they’ve not been told about AIPAC and FARA.
On the other hand, many people have learnt to appreciate Aljazeera over the years as an addition to N.Y. Times. Many also know Palestinian refugees living here. Finally, a growing number believe that what has been going on in Gaza has surpassed, in sadism if not in scale, Holocaust itself. Finally, the USA has made no attempt to conceal that they have sent billions and billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and other military aid to Israel over the past year. Yes, team Biden says they want Israel to stop the mass killing of defenceless human beings, but words have decisively been contradicted by facts. And weapons and military support are definitive facts.
So do my friends believe that the USA is not complicit in the ongoing genocide? And if we insist on using the Hitler-analogy, who is then the modern-day Hitler?
We are being kept in the dark. Yet even in the dark, a person might see the red-hot metal of distant burning tanks and smell the distant human flesh. Even in the dark, we can hear sirens.