Category Archives: Propaganda

UPDATED: The Media-Military-Industrial-Complex & The Afghan Massacre

Media, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, War

The military is a “menacing and hyper-masculine,” “feral fighting force,” and so it should remain. “Mold the military into a friendly purveyor of soft power that fits with a political, social-engineering agenda—nation building—and you are guaranteed that cynical, unethical master manipulators will continue to use and abuse it” (“Grunts, Get In Touch With Your Inner-Muslim”). Those power-hungry members of the media-military-industrial-complex were out in full force today justifying the continued deployment of American men in Afghanistan, even though these men are losing their minds.

Ryan Crocker, America’s ambassador to Afghanistan, appeared on the Voice of the Empire (FoxNews) to make the rickety case—you’ve heard these simplistic, deeply stupid arguments many times before—that the intentional, methodical massacre of at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, by a United States Army sergeant, should in no way alter the magic mission underway in that region.

Residents of three villages in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province described a terrifying string of attacks in which the soldier, who had walked more than a mile from his base, tried door after door, eventually breaking in to kill within three separate houses. The man gathered 11 bodies, including those of 4 girls younger than 6, and set fire to them, villagers said. [New York Times]

Yes, this solider is individually responsible for his horrific acts. Above all, however, blame lies with the people who keep him and his fellow combatants locked in that country—these poor sods cannot desert this immoral occupation (or refuse to carry out nightly raids on private homes) for fear of being court-martialed, now can they?

Blame the King’s comitatus as well for penning these men like animals in that blighted and benighted country—blame “the sprawling apparatus … that encompasses not only the emperor’s household and its personnel … but also the ministries of government, the lawyers, the diplomats, the adjutants, the messengers, the interpreters, the intellectuals” (“Our Overlords Who Art in D.C.”).

And don’t forget “America’s neoconservative pundettes. Never underestimate the contribution neoconservative women in the scribbling and broadcasting professions have made to sexing up war. When babes with bursting décolletages quake and quiver for action, their fans do more than just look, they listen” (“To Pee Or Not To Pee is Not the Question”).

UPDATE: An RT commentator (who else?) pointed out that a war such as the one waged in Afghanistan gives rise to atrocities. This is because soldiers have no clear enemy or mission. The enemy is everywhere. The enemy is the Afghan people who’ve fought against invaders forever; who are waging a war of resistance against an occupier. This enemy strikes at our men and melts back into the landscape. Men lose their brothers, and they lose it. Since the enemy is ephemeral, soldiers, some of whom are on their fourth or fifth tour, lash out indiscriminately.

An impressive man, U.S. Marine Corps Gen. John R. Allen—he commands Western troops in Afghanistan—took the liberty of speaking on behalf of the Afghan people today, on Wolf Blitzer’s The Situation Room. The mission is not in peril, promised a resolute Allen. The 90,000 or so US troops currently in Afghanistan are going nowhere (I’m sure they’ll be overjoyed to hear this).

Allen also assured his listeners that the massacre over the week-end was the act of a lone wolf. I’m sure that the scores of victims and their families are comforted by such statistical assurances.

This is the second time I’ve heard Allen refer to the Afghans as “The noble Afghan people.” What’s up with that? Is he trying to sound like “Lawrence of Arabia”?

UPDATED: Talking Truth Until You’re Blue In the Face

Debt, Economy, Education, Political Economy, Propaganda, War

Freedom’s real warriors labor with little support (and by “true” warriors I do not mean the Republican TV circus animals and tele-tarts who get face time and popular love in excess of their worth). Economist Robert Higgs laments “the bitter disappointment of seeing the [invaluable] research and writing [he has] carried out over more than forty years prove to have been completely in vain.” He wonders whether perhaps his mother ought to have strangled him in the crib, to spare him the bitter disappointment:

For all of the good I’ve done in correcting people’s understanding of what happened to the U.S. economy during World War and what lessons one might justifiably draw from that experience about, say, the scientific validity of the Keynesian model or its related fiscal-policy implications, I might just as well have held my breath and turned blue. Here we are in June 2011, and millions of Americans are being presented with the purest potion of economic misinformation one can imagine, an account in no way superior to those the young Keynesians were peddling so confidently in 1944, when I was born. …
When I began to teach U.S. economic history at the University of Washington in the late 1960s, I quickly realized that this tale of the wartime “Keynesian miracle” could not withstand critical scrutiny once one went beyond the barest account of it in terms of the elementary Keynesian model and the standard government macro measures, such as GDP, the consumer price index, and the rate of civilian unemployment. Almost immediately I saw that unemployment had disappeared during the war not because of the beautiful workings of a Keynesian multiplier, but entirely because about 20 percent of the labor force was forced, directly or indirectly, into the armed forces and a comparable number of employees set to work in factories, shipyards, and other facilities turning out war-related “goods” the government purchased only after forcing the public to pay for them sooner (via wartime taxes and inflation) or later (via repayment of wartime borrowing). Thus, the great wartime “boom” consisted entirely of (1) some people’s mass engagement in wreaking death and destruction and (2) other people’s employment in producing supplies for these warriors after the government’s military labor drain, turning out ”goods” never valued by consumers or private producers in voluntary transactions, but rather ordered by government functionaries and priced completely arbitrarily in a command-and-control economy. In no sense was the alleged ”wartime prosperity” comparable to real, normal prosperity. The pervasive regimentation, rationing, price controls, direct government resource allocations, and forbidden forms of production (e.g., civilian automobiles) should have served as a tip-off.

READ “World War II: Still Being Touted as the Quintessential Keynesian Miracle.”

UPDATE (March 5): “WARTIME SOCIALISM”: “… what politician would not warmly welcome an economist who, with the aid of indecipherable econometrics, legitimizes immoral power and property grabs? This is why the anti-free market central planning advocated by the late John Maynard Keynes has been embraced with renewed verve…”

Update III: Remember Andrew Breitbart; Forget Honky Hater Shirley Sherrod (Tease Journalism?)

Conservatism, Human Accomplishment, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Race, Racism, Republicans

It is all about the legacy of Shirley Sherrod; didn’t you know it? In the universe of a dim bulb like CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux—who together with hormonally charged sisters such as Jessica Yellin just about climax on air when their president performs—the untimely passing of Andrew Breitbart, of the BigGovernment.com enterprise, is about Shirley Sherrod, the black woman Breitbart is alleged to have wronged racially.

Lies.

Sherrod, as this analysis revealed, “was fired by an administration that mistook her for a worse racist than she actually was. The Obama posse had overestimated the extent of Sherrod’s animus for whites. She turned out to be merely a mezzanine-level racist, rather than a hardcore honky hater.

One day, as she told the NAACP gathering, God put things in her path that made her realize she was there for poor people. A white farmer appealed for her assistance. Had the white farmer been a brother forced to beg before a sister in a position of power, Sherrod might have characterized him as a proud man in humiliating circumstances. Given the desperate farmer’s hue, Sherrod alleged he had a superior attitude, before going on to describe her dilemma: having to help a white man save his property, when so many black people had lost theirs.”
So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do,” Sherrod smirked. “I did enough. I took him to a white lawyer; one of them; to his own kind.”Drum roll for Ms. Sherrod

As I wrote at the time, “The acme of ethics in American is a black woman who has graduated from hard-core to soft bigotry. … if an African-American rejects her birthright, and demonstrates less prejudice toward whites than is her right—she is up for beatification.”

Do read the moron MALVEAUX’s reverential love-in with Sherrod (well-annotated with my comments).

RIP Mr. Breitbart.

UPDATE I: Myron, you make the perennial libertarian mistake of reducing all argument to the state dimension. We’ve been over this error on BAB, many times, last in “Liberty’s Civilizational Dimension.” Breitbart is not to be compared to Sherrod. Not ever.

UPDATE II: Andrew Breitbart being something of a neocon garnered plenty criticism from me. Here is one of quite a few critical posts from the past about “big this, big that” “Conservative Cretinism.”

There’s a reservoirs of piss-poor conservative commentary on the Internet. (People lap it up.) Trust Lawrence Auster to point out what few others do: “So much of the conservative part of the Web is unintelligent, incoherent partisan trash. Mondo Frazier’s article at Big Journalism about the Gore sex assault charge is an example. I saw it because it is listed in the ‘must-reads’ at Lucianne.com.”
Andrew Breitbart’s “Big this; big that,” ever-mutating websites exemplify what Auster terms “low-grade conservative media.”

But then, you had to concede that Andrew Breitbart was splendid when he told the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), “Go to hell.” He just wasn’t your typical crunchy conservative, forever cowering for fear of being called a racist.

UPDATE III: “O’Keefe Antics, Again.” And I have not been very flattering about a brand of tease journalism Breitbart sponsored, I believe.

Among the many dumb things Republicans have given us (read “GOP and Man at Yale”) is a brand of tease “journalism” headed by Hannah Giles, a well-connected, monosyllabic, Town-Hall tartlet, who partook in an ACORN-exposing (tush-wagging) operation. Her partner (he played the pimp) was James O’Keefe, who, it transpires, is even dumber than Hannah.

UPDATE II: ‘Absolute Invulnerability for America Means Absolute Vulnerability For Others’

Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Middle East, Propaganda, Republicans, Russia, Terrorism

Truth is truth no matter who propounds it (and why, pray tell, am I forced to repeat this no-brainer year-in and year-out?). The next statement is immutably true—even profound—although Americans will first look at the man who uttered it, and will denounce his wise words, given that he is not a member of the DC duopoly and the comitatus that props these Demopublicans up (i.e., the “the sprawling apparatus … that encompasses not only the emperor’s household and its personnel … but also the ministries of government, the lawyers, the diplomats, the adjutants, the messengers, the interpreters, the intellectuals”).

Via Eurasia Review:

“’The Americans are obsessed with the idea of ensuring their absolute invulnerability – a thing, I would point out, that is utopian and achievable neither from a technological nor a geopolitical standpoint.
And herein lies the problem. Absolute invulnerability for one means absolute vulnerability for all the others. It is impossible to agree with this perspective.’
Addressing the unrest in the Arab world, Putin said Russia would not permit a ‘Libyan scenario’ to take place in Syria, where he said Moscow wanted to see an immediate halt in violence and a national dialogue to resolve the crisis.
He defended the decision by Russia and China to veto a resolution earlier this month pushed by Washington and its European and Arab allies that Moscow said would have opened the door to foreign military intervention in Syria.
Russia in particular faced blistering criticism that ‘bordered on hysterical’ from Western countries for its decision, Putin said, adding that Moscow strongly hoped the United States and others would not resort to force in Syria without UN approval.
Referring more widely to the Arab Spring, Putin said that efforts backed by the United States and the West to bring about ‘democracy with the help of violent methods’ were unpredictable and often led to precisely the opposite result.

UPDATE I (Feb. 28): Finally, China stands up to the ludicrous Hildebeest:

“The United States’ motive in parading as a ‘protector’ of the Arab peoples is not difficult to imagine,” it said in a commentary. “The problem is, what moral basis does it have for this patronising and egotistical super-arrogance and self-confidence?”
“Even now, violence continues unabated in Iraq and ordinary people enjoy no security. This alone is enough for us to draw a huge question mark over the sincerity and efficacy of US policy,” it added.

UPDATE II (March 4): “Putin [has] said the main problem is that the United States wants ‘to acquire complete invulnerability’ through missile defense. He also mentioned Washington’s refusal to provide written guarantees that the system will never be aimed at Russian territory.” [RT]