But in 2010, as the German Chancellor Angela Merkel sat on the dais next to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, representing the opposing powers of the conflict that had more in common than differences, where are we?  What has happened to the dream, that moment of pure joy and hope?

As its predecessor, World War Two was not the war to end all wars.  Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the list is long and bloody.  Our ability to kill has improved with each new conflict.  Diplomacy is ridiculed as the the fires of nationalism brightly light the banners of the legions.  The eagle of Rome and Germany now demands the people of the world bow down to the eagle of  America.  That the symbol of power since early history has been a scavenger should speak to us.  But somehow it doesn’t.  Fear, distrust and ignorance drive us into our imagined communities, not seeing the realities that connect us behind the myths that divide.  And so the story continues written in the blood of millions.

Political lies continued to swim in human blood.  In Hungary and Iraq honest people were encouraged to rise up against tyranny only to be abandoned when they did so in good faith believing that they would be supported.  The Hungarians listened to Radio Free Europe spew its propaganda East.  Not realizing that this was only a tactic to undermine Soviet stability they rose up and awaited the aid implicitly promised.  They stood firm as the Soviet tanks rolled over the Hungarian frontier and into the streets of Budapest.  Still gazing West in desperation as they were slaughtered, the survivors later lost in the void of the Gulag.  The Shi’as of southern Iraq encouraged by Bush senior to rebel were again abandoned as were the Kurds of northern Iraq.  How much different is this to the guarantees given to the Czechs and others prior to the war.  Horribly the Tutsi and Hutu at different times learned that ‘Never Again!’ was hollow rhetoric as did the people of Srebrenica in their turn.

Domestic persecution so abhorred in the Third Reich still visits us as well.  From the Cold War where America and the Soviet Union tried to outdo each other with show trials and mock patriotism to the Patriot Act and Canada’s anti-terrorism laws and Arizona’s yellow sombrero law (see previous post The Yellow Sombrero) we have repeated the ideas and concepts of Hitler and Himmler.  People persecuted, hounded for what they believed or what they were not what they had done.  Over one million Canadians were blacklisted as communists/socialists.  Rarely were any Soviet spies.  That was not the point.  It was the idea that was feared, not the people.  The idea needed to be destroyed lest it upset life of the power elite.  Today it is Muslims.  The ‘experts’ talk about Islamic culture and say it is violent, that it praises terror, that it is regressive.  What they don’t say is, like Nazi depictions of Jewish culture, it doesn’t exist.  It is a fabrication.  There is no ‘Islamic Culture.’  There are several Arab, Persian, Turkic and Malay cultures.  Most North Americans see ‘Islamic Culture’ and think Arab Culture but it in itself is not a monolith and Malay is the largest Muslim ethnic group.  If the threat is real why would it be represented by a mythical creation?  It seems only that some threat must exist.  But why?  What is it that the powers that be don’t want us to see.  Today we can look back at the Third Reich and see what Hitler and Goebbels didn’t want the world to know.  Will historians 65 years from now be revealing abominable secrets buried behind American imperialism?  Research the provisions and justifications of the Enabling Laws introduced by German Chancellor Hitler in 1934 to see a reflection of the Patriot Act and its ilk.  Racial profiling of Mexicans and Muslims is no different than that used by Nazi administrations.  Look at the propaganda below showing the same basic caricature used in two contexts but really about the same people, Semites.

Mussolini said that fascism could more accurately be called corporatism.  Is that not the culture we have today in Canada and the United States?  Is not the corporation and the financial sector the new Rome?   Is it not the sum total of existence, that which gives meaning to our lives?  We are told constantly that there is not enough money, enough wealth to maintain the welfare state that was to raise all boats; to create a floor not a ceiling to use William Beveridge’s phrase.  Apparently the neo-conservative Right has taken him at his word and want to cut the floor out from under the powerless in order to extend their ceiling to the heavens.  Corporations steal our money to fund their failures.  And still George Will this morning on This Week (ABC) claims that the crisis in Greece is the masses thinking they are entitled when their is no money left to fund such entitlements.  What better example of self-entitlement than the bail out of General Motors or Lehman Sachs and the rest.  They told us they were too big to fail.  They told us we needed to give them more of our money for our own sakes.  Those who would now eject us from our own homes, destroy our retirements and deny our children of the same education and career opportunities as their children feel so entitled as to believe that such behaviour is an act of gratitude.  Don’t tell me there is not money to fund entitlements.  You mean there is no money to fund those who don’t belong to your class Mr. Will.

But corporations have always held the people in disdain.  They always believed in a natural leader class.  That is why so many of them supported Hitler and nazi ideology, before and during the war.  Ford enriched itself on slave labour in Nazi occupied Europe.  IBM vaulted to the lead in tabulation later computation by designing the system that sent six million Jews to the gas chamber.  President Roosevelt had to relieve Joseph Kennedy, father of the future president, from his post as ambassador to the Great Britain because of his praise of Hitler and Nazism and his repeated effort to undermine British resolve in the face of what he considered a superior German system. Do we believe that suddenly they changed their philosophy when the war was over?  Are we that naive?  Or just so afraid that if we say such things somehow we will be next on the train to the camps.

German education under the Nazis convinced young Germans that they were superior by blood to the other races of the world.  They twisted ancient northern European myths to create an image of the Teutonic race as the defenders of civilization against the barbarian hordes.  Anything that might bring that image into question was dropped from the curriculum.  Self appointed ‘experts’ shored up the image with quasi-science and bad academics.  Education seen as the conduit to maintain the social order whether or not that order is right.  Sound familiar?  Does to me.  I see it every day in the classroom and I am both sad and afraid.  I know where it will lead, not might lead.  Young Americans today are brainwashed into believing that the American way is not jut the best way but the only legitimate way.  Other cultures, other peoples, other values are ridiculed or vilified.  The lie of democracy used to shade the evil intent:  Power.

So what have we learned in sixty-five years?  What has happened to the possibilities of 1945?  Today they are just the puppets of power.  Power corrupts.  But mostly it perpetuates.  Those who have it seek to keep it.  Those who don’t lament their suffering as the Athenian generals counseled the Melians in Thucydides account of the Peloponnesian War,“for you know as well as we do that right … is in question only between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” or they live Zapata’s words:  “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

Today I mourn not because nazism and fascism were destroyed but because they survived.  I mourn because the ideals of Adolph Hitler are the ideals of the Obama administration and American Imperialism.  They are cloaked in the facade of democracy and humanist rhetoric but they are the same.  I mourn because my country, like so many others, complacently accepts this outrage lacking the courage to die on our feet if needs must.  We play the Jester to America’s Lear.  Around the world today the celebrations are not of the end of something but of its perpetuation in secrecy.  Hitler’s mistake was to open a window and let the world see.  That could not be countenanced if the power elites elsewhere were to continue without public outrage.  Secrecy reigns once more and all is well in Washington as on Wall Street.  So celebrate, but excuse me if I weep.

This particular IED image carries a 2 fold message in the reality wars.

Take for instance the glitzy NewSpeak for a bomb.  That little word does not convey the correct message.  Every word, every reference must expose a stark difference between us and our foes in a time of war.  We use bombs and we are the good guys so the public must have a different term for a bomb when it is used by the bad guys, i. e. the enemy.  Solution:  Improvised Explosive Device or IED.  Just rolls off the tongue doesn’t it.  Now you know that anything improvised is not official and is just not the tool to use.  The word improvise carries a subliminal message of inferiority.  A legitimate military organization doesn’t improvise materials.  Only some slipshod mom and pop terrorist cell would do that.  I guess if these people want to be taken seriously they need to raise some money and go out and buy an SBED (Store Bought Explosive Device).  That’s what we use and that’s the ticket to legitimacy.

If these criminals and scumbags, to use the military vernacular, would use legitimate weapons manufactured to precise specification to blow up our troops then we would be able to respect them.  They too would become soldiers and cease being criminals and scumbags.  Maybe we would then celebrate their deaths less and gain a perspective on our own casualties.  As it stands now the subhuman Taliban is gleefully dispatched to Allah and each of our casualties is a fallen hero.

Language is used to persuade, to guide the listener subtly or sometimes not so subtly to the speakers position.  It is the pigment on the canvas of understanding, the colour of reality.  If anything should be painted in the words of reality it is war.  How else will we ever break this sad cycle of carnage.  Even bomb is too kind a word.  And Improvised Explosive Device is so sanitized as to be laughable.  How about we call it what it is, a life and limb shredding horror, whether we buy it from a manufacturer listed on the NYSE or cook it up in the basement.

But only the Canadian army could screw up public relations to this level.  First there is the waste of taxpayer dollars to convince us that Afghanistan is a great and noble cause.  I guess this incident means that plan is history.   It gets worse.  This was a female soldier which adds to the public relations fiasco.   But wait there is more, she was French serving with the Royal 22nd (Van Doos).    I can’t wait to see reaction in the French sovereigntist press.  Who is in charge of propaganda at National Defence Headquarters, Gilligan?  In its imperious ineptitude, they have managed to offend just about every group one can think of.  I am surprised they didn’t wait until it was a Black French woman with autism to pull this boner.  I mean let’s piss everyone off at once and get it over with. 

Don’t forget taxpayers.  The part of this story that has raised no comment as yet that I can find is that the governor-general and minister of defense met the coffin at CFB Trenton.  Hold on.  Think about this.  The coffin was on the ground for three hours in Ottawa.  Ottawa is where the governor-general lives and the minister of defense works (and lives while he is working, if he works, I don’t know).  So, let me get this straight.  The minister and governor-general and the coffin all travelled at taxpayers expense to Trenton for what exactly, a photo-op?  Did they all travel together?  You can drive from Ottawa to Trenton in less than 3 hours maybe one of them could have made room in the back seat.  Why do they even have to be there?  Maybe the prime minister should be there too.  Hell bring the whole freaking parliament.  They love nothing better than a free trip.  Here’s a thought.  Take the coffin home, to the family.  Shouldn’t they be the priority not protocol?  Do we need an official “Death Camp”?

Military observers (cheerleaders) commented to news outlets that it was a minor controversy being blown out of proportion.  I tend to agree.  It was an insensitive decision but in overall terms the coverage in the mainstream press is probably causing more grief to the family than the incident itself.  Military observers are worried though about their little traditions and customs being broken such as failure to lower the flags while the plane was on the ground in Ottawa.  If it was me in the coffin they could shove the flag where the sun don’t shine for all I would care.  Actually when I die the flags over municipal buildings in my town will be lowered to half mast because I once served on city council.   Honestly, if they forget I couldn’t care less.  I would imagine the whole dead thing will be bothering me more at that moment. 

Where I differ from the hotties with the olive drab pompoms is, if you make out that she was a hero, you can’t say this is a minor controversy.  Heroes are a special category of people or sandwiches if you come from New York.  Therefore this would be by definition a serious controversy.  But she wasn’t a hero.  She was a young woman with her whole life before her who died under a foreign sky for geopolitical reasons she never fully understood.  This is a tragedy; not the fall of Agamemnon.  Calling her a hero implies her death was necessary; it served a greater good.  That may assuage the consciences of the political masters who threw her life on the dust heap of history.  But it will never fill the empty chair at family gatherings or give her parents grandchildren.  Maybe if Canadians would come to grips with that we might have fewer tragedies and the Canadian military would have fewer opportunities to trip over its own braid.

I am glad if one day or one hour goes by without someone dying.  However I understand Hamas’ reluctance to accept the ceasefire.  Israel has seized large portions of Gaza territory.  Its troops remain entrenched and ready to resume the attack at any moment.  No plan of withdrawal or normalization accompanies this move by the Israeli government.  Nor has Israel announced any process to address these issues.  So what we have here is a territory that has been invaded and occupied being told to stop resisting the occupation in exchange for their lives.  Israel says “We will stop illegally murdering more of your citizens, if you allow us to retain the benefit we received from the ones we have already murdered.”   What is the difference between this situation and the fall of France in 1940 when the puppet government of Vichy was allowed to survive temporarily?  Frenchmen did not lay down their arms then and Palestinians have no incentive to lay down their arms now.

This is not peace.  It is not a real ceasefire.  It is just a lull in the killing.  Whether Hamas capitulates or not, the destruction of the Palestinian nation will continue until not one Palestinian is left.  That is the goal.  It has been for the past 60 years and it will continue.

One begins to see the problem here not as Israel but as the United States.  And what do we do about the most powerful military power on the planet with the number one economy.  The conventional wisdom seems to be nothing.  But how much longer can we allow America to undermine the health and civility of this planet?  How much longer can we sit back and not scream out enough?  America has led the campaign to deny the effects of global warming and undermine attempts at dealing with it.  America has invaded a sovereign state without the sanction of the international community and in a second case used its influence to trick and cajole that community into sanctioning another invasion on false premises.  America has overthrown dozens of legitimate governments, many of them democracies, and replaced them with dictatorships or sham democracies committed to carrying out American interests.  America is funding and supplying the holocaust in Gaza.  It is time to stand up and say ‘the Emperor has no clothes.’  The myth of America in no way resembles the reality of America. 

The rest of the world needs to stand up and be counted once and for all.  The United States is not a global hegemon.  While it would take a concerted effort by other powers to face down America in a diplomatic showdown, it is not impossible.  It needs only the political will to do so. 

The U.N. Security Council should mean something.  The very existence of the veto vote should be re-examined.  There needs to be automatic sanctions attached to any Security Council resolution.  Now is the time to replace the roar of cannon with the reasoned voice of debate. 

The longer Gaza is under siege and more Palestinians, particularly civilians, die, the broader the effects will be felt.  George Bush asked ‘why do they hate us?’  Are we really that simple?  The entire ‘War on Terror’ has been a recruiting tool for militants and has undermined any hope of a peaceful or successful resolution of the problems.  The West, twiddling its thumbs and launching platitudes in the media about the sanctity of human life, has sent a clear message to the Muslim world and to Palestinians in particular:  ‘You are on your own.’  The United States has firmly stated in act and word that Israeli deaths matter; Palestinian deaths do not.  Well if they didn’t hate us before they damn well should now. 

What should be of great concern to us is that the support of the murders in Gaza are being done in our name.  I am murdering Palestinians through my government’s support of Israel and I don’t want to.  Like me most of you who read this know that we do not really govern ourselves.   We need to admit to ourselves that our democracy is a sham and admit to the world that what the United States and its allies, including Canada, are exporting to the developing world is not democracy but capitalist exploitation.  It is the new colonialism.  If any of you are in doubt on this you need only look to Hamas.  When elections were held in the Palestinian territories Hamas won a clear victory in a clean and fair election according to international observers.  But Hamas was not the government that the United States and Israel had chosen for the Palestinians to elect and so Hamas was immediately denounced, vilified and through the collaboration of Mahmoud Abbas prevented from governing.  Israel and the United States then created an internal Palestinian civil war backing Abbas to try to eliminate Hamas.  While the attempt did not fully succeed, it has created even greater suffering for the Palestinian people. 

 As long as peoples around the world believe the myth that we govern ourselves, they will hate us because of what they perceive as our callous brutality toward them.  Our governments by their actions and their lies about democracy are endangering each and every one of us.  Most of us who followed international affairs knew that September 11 was coming.  We didn’t know exactly when or where or how.  But we knew that a major terrorist attack on the continental United States was inevitable.  Many of us, myself included, were surprised that the kill count was not higher for we had expected a biological or chemical attack.  By our failure to understand the problems and deal with them in an effective way we are guaranteeing that it will happen again and this time perhaps it will be worse.  If we are going to murder innocent people and deny the right to exist to whole populations; if we are going to condone mass murder or even genocide by our failure to effectively confront it; if we are going to say that this person because of this identifier is more important than that person because of that identifier; then we sew the seeds of sorrow and grief for all humankind.

You may have noticed that I have added some links on my sidebar under the Palestine category and also under News recently pertaining to the Middle East.  I hope you will check out some of these.  Stay informed.  Do what you can do to help.  Counterbalancing the weight of disinformation coming out of the mainstream media is more important that donating but give if you can to those links that ask.  Make sure your friends, family and political leaders know where you stand.  Make ‘Never again!’  a real commitment.

Five girls from one family were killed over the weekend when a mosque near their home was targeted.  They were sleeping together in one room.  How many Canadian families do you know that talk about five children sleeping in one room as normal?  There were actually seven but two survived, but for how long with an acute shortage of medical supplies.  The other aspect of the story that seems to be taken for granted is the fact that a mosque was a target of an Israeli air strike.  Now I know the rational Israel is using here.  They will argue that radical Imams are calling upon their followers to rise up in Jihad.  Mosques are not just religious centers but centers of resistance and terrorism.  Interesting enough the Germans used similar rationalizations for their destruction of synagogues.  The Israeli government learned a lot of lessons from the Nazis.  There I have done it.  I have stepped over the line.  Now comes the onslaught.  I am an anti-Semite.  I hate Jews.  But is that what I said just now?  No.  I said the Israeli government, not Jews, had learned lessons in repression, not only of Palestinian Arabs but of any Israeli Jew that disagrees with them.  Ask activists with B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group about the harassment they experience because they protest the human rights violations of their government.  They are attacked by official sources as self-hating Jews. 

Israel is not Judaism and Judaism is not Israel.  Judaism is a religion, Israel is a state.  Until that concept is clearly rooted in the international psyche nothing will be done to end the bloodshed until Israel has succeeded in wiping every Palestinian from the face of the earth.  Actually you might say they already have.  One argument advanced by the Israeli government is that there is no such thing as a Palestinian.  Palestine is not a nation.  Arabs in the West Bank are Jordanians.  The Nazis used this tack with certain Slavic groups to justify their murder.  Better yet the late Golda Meir, former prime minister of Israel claimed that when the Jews arrived in Palestine there were not people on the land at all.  It was unoccupied.  So if these non-existent people were to disappear no one would notice.  The path to genocide begins first with an attack on identity. 

The international community sits back and refuses to act perhaps out of some misplaced sense of collective guilt, perhaps from self-interested agendas and perhaps partly out of fear.  Remember that Israel is the sixth largest nuclear power.   Israel continues to officially deny possessing nuclear weapons but their existence is the worst kept secret in the world.  Regardless of the reason, how long can we sit back and allow this atrocity to continue before our eyes.  The mainstream news media is never more biased than with reporting on middle eastern issues.  If one relies on the major American networks or the BBC for information it would be understandable to see Israel as the victim in this.  Again a tactic used by the Nazis against Jews.  Nazi propogandists repeatedly drummed the mantra into the German people that the Jews were controlling the economy and conspiring with foreign powers to destroy Germany.  The justification for Kristallnacht was the assassination of the German ambassador in Paris by a Jew.  Goebbels disseminated the idea that this was part of a greater conspiracy to bring down the German government and cause a war rather than the act of a frustrated individual.  Anyone who blindly believes the press is courting disaster.  Media is ALWAYS controlled by the politically powerful in a society and serves whatever agenda they pursue. 

The facts:

1. In the last seven years only 17 Israelis have been killed by rocket fire.  In the first day of this new pogrom in Gaza approximately 200 Palestinians died.  The number is now around 375 mostly civilians contrary to the CNN report I watched tonight which claims that most of the dead are Hamas fighters.  So five little girls sleeping in their own home are a threat to Israel, I guess. 
2. The initial attacks on Saturday, December 27th were timed to coincidence with schools letting out.  The streets were full of children and the police stations and training facilities that were prime targets were close to schools.  This can only be interpreted as an attempt to kill children.  Again this is reminiscent of the Nazi behaviour.  The Nazis paid special attention to Jewish children in the Holocaust.  The best method to annihilate an entire race or class of people is to destroy their future. 
3. Israel was first to break the ceasefire.  Ehud Barack stating publicly that Israel is no longer interested in a ceasefire leaves me incredulous as the evidence shows they never have been interested in one.  Wanton, unjustified intrusions into Gaza occurred repeatedly without Hamas responding in defense until the murder of six Hamas leaders and the attack on a tunnel complex supplying Gaza.  Israel wanted Hamas to respond for fear if they continued to unilaterally hold to the ceasefire they would achieve a moral victory.  This would further undermine the position of Israel’s puppet, Mahmoud Abbas.  Abbas and his government are equivalent to the Jewish Councils in the Ghettos. 
4. Police stations and training facilities, water wells, mosques and public officials were the prime targets of the Israeli invasion.  Interestingly the Israelis do not seem interested in rocket sites.  But this invasion was never about rockets attacking Israel.  There are many possible reasons for the attack at this time.  One that came immediately to my mind was the Israeli elections.  Kadima, lagging in the polls behind Benyamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, hopes to undermine Likud’s chief criticism that Kadima is soft on the Palestinian issue. 
5. Gaza has been subjected to an inhuman siege which have reduced it to the world’s largest concentration camp.  Everything is in short supply; food, fuel, water, medical supplies.  Those shortages now contribute to the suffering caused by this latest attack.  How many of the wounded will be able to survive is questionable and the death toll will only rise. 

Candidate Obama, now President-Elect Obama, said in his visit to Israel earlier this year:

“If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing,” 

Well what would he do if his daughters were lying in the morgue instead of those five Palestinian girls?  Would he be so quick to condemn Hamas and blame them for the problem?  Hamas acted lawfully in defending the people of Gaza against an aggressor.  The international condemnation of Israel is muted by American support.  But the international community is a paper tiger.  It does not want to confront Israel.  If the United Nations stood for something the following should happen:

1. Israel’s membership in the UN should be immediately suspended as they have flagrantly violated the UN Charter, are currently in violation of some 80 odd Security Council resolutions (for perspective Saddam Hussein was maybe in violation of six or seven before his country was invaded and he was hanged for crimes against humanity), and also in violation of their commitments under the Geneva Conventions.
2. All trade and foreign aid coming into Israel should be immediately halted.  Israel’s assets abroad should be seized and frozen.  Israeli government officials found outside of Israel should be arrested and held for investigation by the International Criminal Court. 
3. Humanitarian aid should be injected into Gaza as quickly as possible, even if this means a military confrontation with Israel.  Along with this an international force should enter Gaza to protect civilians from genocide.
4. All of this will require the courage of the other powers of the world to stand up to the United States. 

 If this all sounds extreme it is.  But we are facing a moral choice.  If we do not act, as we did not in Germany, as we did not in Rwanda, and as we are not in Congo currently, then the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is meaningless.  The Nuremburg and Tokyo trials were a waste of time.  The tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda should be stopped.  The choice is to do something or to do nothing.  So whether I have accomplished anything in my life or not, I will probably never know but since I continue, I must continue to try.

I often remind my students of the ancient curse, may you be born in interesting times.  Well if any times can be considered interesting these can.  We, the great unwashed (mental note need a shower today), in each historic epoch look to the heralds, the troubadours,  the minstrels, of the time, the fourth estate, in short the media to guide and inform us.  Legends in my lifetime like Neil Sheehan, Tom Wolfe, Seymour Hirsch, Woodward and Bernstein, Edward R. Murrow and more too numerous to mention have illuminated the dark underbelly of our society in an effort to help us understand ourselves and our world.  Understanding precedes correcting.  We rely on these heralds to tell us what is happening.  If they are silent then we are ignorant.  If they are biased we are misinformed.  If they are stupid we are in deep do-do.  These three are not mutually exclusive.  The greatest crisis facing our society and our planet today is that most ‘journalists’ are all three.  They are often silent because to report would challenge the underlying  ’truths’ of the ideology they are sworn to uphold.  And they are often too stupid to see their own bias.  To see it they would have to examine themselves and ask some very difficult questions and we live in a world that discourages analysis and critical thinking as dangerous. 

Bias in the media is not necessarily, although it can be in a small number of individual cases, a conscious behaviour.  Most journalists believe they report in an objective and unbiased manner, always sure to verify their information with ‘official sources’ and ‘recognized experts’.  What they don’t see is that these ‘official’ and ‘recognized’ people are just that, official and recognized, but by whom.  The ideology of liberalism has been accepted in our society today as natural.  It is the ideology that is not ideological.  In some ways this is true of every society in every epoch.  We believe that the way we live is the correct, most natural, most rational form of living.  Our thoughts and understanding become the hard truths by which everything is measured.  But how is this conditioned reached?  In other words, who made up these norms and enforces them, to different degrees punishing any who might think or act a little differently.  In Western society in the early 21st century the truth is a liberal truth, having firmly grasped European and most particularly American society in the 17th and 18th centuries, rising though the 19th to cult status and vanquishing its greatest challenger in the industrialized world with the fall of communism and the discrediting of socialism in general.  What is has displaced, vanquished and rejected is not necessarily wrong because it has lost a battle.  If losing a battle were all that were necessary to discredit an adversary then we should reinstitute trial by combat for all disputes for clearly might makes right.  I wish that those who so fondly recall John Kennedy’s remarks in his inaugural speech, Ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country,would actually read the rest of the speech and see the suffering and pain Kennedy expected the American people to endure just to defeat, not the Soviet Union, but just the idea of communism/socialism.  This is the objectivity that journalists are trained to see.  Liberal perspective becomes truth.  Official sources are trusted and left unchallenged.  As John Pilger remarked, speaking at a conference about his new book, ‘Freedom Next Time’,  the bits of true investagative and reflective journalism that find their way into the pages of major papers or onto mainstream networks both radio and television, are honourable exceptions rather than the rule of modern journalism.  Can we blame the journalist for seeing the world as those around them see it?  Can we blame the journalism program at university and college for putting out people that will blindly follow those who preceded them in the industry?  The question is a little unfair, I admit.  What I am really asking is can ordinary people be blamed for being ordinary?  How can we expect journalists to all be great people?  People of high conscience, principle, and great courage.  For it takes great courage to go through life uncertain of every thought you hold.  For the great person knows she/he  may be proven wrong at any moment.  Even when forcefully and vigorously asserting a position or argument, a little voice, like the slave in the chariot during a Roman triumph, constantly whispers ‘remember, you are only human’.  That is a lot to ask of anyone, to go through life in uncertainty.  But that is the human condition.  It doesn’t mean that you must always relinquish the field to your opponent or preface every remark with ‘I could be wrong but’.  You still forcefully assert your arguments because you believe them to be provably correct.  And you believe this because you have questioned them in the first place.  Accepting that we all have an inculcated perspective based on our lifetime experience means digging deeper and challenging that perspective constantly so that when we opine we do so with the confidence that that opinion will stand up to scrutiny.   That is the mark of great character and that is what I demand of journalists.  To do otherwise would be to condemn myself and you to purgatory of totalitarianism.  Such character is not encouraged by our education system or our social institutions as a whole.  The password for smoothly sailing through life is acceptance.  Accept the world as presented.  Don’t rock the boat.  But while courage won’t make you popular, it will make you honourable.   The choice is always up to the individual  So I implore those who proceed into journalism, if you don’t have the intestinal fortitude to ask the hard questions and examine your own failing then at least become a sports reporter where even basic intelligence is optional. 

In politics the first question that should always be asked is ‘In whose benefit?’   Who benefits from seeing things this way rather than that?  Who benefits when ideas are defined this way rather than that.  If the same people who are defining the events and ideas are the same people who benefit from those particular definitions, we need to be skeptical.  Maybe they are being honest and it is just coincidence that they also benefit but to accept that as the usual is to be stupid.  And that is the situation with the media today and for most of the past 100 years.  Accepting the views or their ‘official’ and ‘recognized’ sources is doing just that.  These sources benefit by the way they define the world and these are the only sources journalists must use. 

And how do journalists deal with their inability to really question the power brokers in our society?  Look at the questions they are asking.  Recently I was reminded of a question asked right after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.  I remember it being asked and at the time just shook my head in disbelief.  It has become part of the conspiracy theory industry that has grown up around that tragic day.  (The attacks have spawned several industries actually.  Only America could market tragedy like soap suds.)  The question was “Mr. President.  Where were you when you first saw pictures of the first plane hitting the towers?”  I have paraphrased as it was asked more than once directly to the president and to his media representatives.  The initial answer that he was at the school when he saw a picture of the first plane hitting which is incorrect as images of that plane hitting had not been uncovered at that point is why the conspiracy theorists are all over it.  Most likely it was the second plane hitting that he saw and the answer a result of miscommunication.  But for all the attention that the question has received because of its answer, no one has questioned the question itself.  Why would anyone, let alone someone who must by virtue of covering the White House be at an upper level of his/her profession, ask such a stupid question ?  Who the hell cares where he was when someone first showed him a picture.  What critical information is uncovered by this?  The question of when was also asked several times.  When did you know this?  When did you hear that?  When did that zit on your nose pop?  Maybe George was having a dump when his aids first showed him the pictures or told him about the collapse.  Maybe Laura wheeled a TV over to the hall and he kept the door open to watch the coverage.  If he is like me he probably got her to bring him a cup of coffee as well.  How much of this crap (pardon the pun) do we need or want to know.  Personally I have no interest in any of this.  I don’t care who told him what, when.  I would be interested in deeper questioning of his plans for dealing with the situation.  That is news! 

But news is what the heralds of these interesting times are trained to ignore.  We hear the lies repeated.  The auto industry is in trouble because it pays its workers too much.  Truth the average pay at assembly plants in the U.S. is $30 an hour.  Given the price of housing and feeding a family in America today that is not exorbitant.  But according to the heralds unless the workers stop being so greedy the Detroit 3 will collapse.  In whose interest?  The self proclaimed best political team on television asks whether President-elect Obama can move forward on health care reform in the midst of this financial crisis.  Read General Motors financial report.  You will discover that health care costs are hurting their competitiveness.  But no mention of this on CNN.  Oh! no! Wolf wouldn’t want to mention that.  In whose interest?  Victory in Iraq and in Afghanistan is necessary to secure the world (read the United States) from further terrorist attacks.  Most Americans still believe that Iraq was involved in the attacks and that the elimination of the Taliban will produce a free and democratic Afghanistan (read my earlier post Team Afghanistan for some insight into the reality).  Bringing death and destruction to those half way around the world will make them love us.  Instead every objective measure shows a more dangerous world today than before the War on Terror.  Even that phrase, war on terror is never questioned but it may tell us more than we want to know.  How can you have a war on an idea, a concept?  What would that look like?  You can’t kill an idea only the holder of the idea.  Then look at how we are proceeding in this so-called war.  In whose interest? 

In whose interest?  Over and over I ask myself that question as I watch events unfold before me.  If only journalists could find the courage to start asking those questions.  Not just of the powers that be but of themselves.  In whose interest is it that they reject information from every alternative source in favour of the ‘official’ and the ‘recognized’?  It is certainly not in mine or in the interest of society as a whole.  But it does seem to be in the interest of those who make the decision of what information the public receives.  The heralds of interesting times have much to answer for.