http://www.revleft.com/vb/ Forum Led by: To be announced en Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:02:03 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/misc/rss.jpg http://www.revleft.com/vb/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Che-lives/~3/peVvq3DibGU/showthread.php Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:44:25 GMT 'Truth' is only true from a certain perspective



As I turned on the television this morning (April 5th, 2004), I was just in time for a ‘Live News Event’ on CNN, with President George W. Bush speaking in North Carolina. His speech was supposed to be about job creation or jobs in general but I only caught the part where he was talking about 9/11 and ‘the terrorists’.

“These killers don’t have any values,” the President was explaining. “They hate free societies … They hate freedom and the things we love.” And in the end he assured us that “we will do what is right”. I was stunned. How can I keep seeing these lame explanations day after day, and even worse, how can some people believe it?
First of all, the fact that these terrorists killed themselves for a ‘cause’ shows that they have quite strong values (I am not implying that their values are “good”). Second of all, the Palestinians (terrorists) in the ‘occupied’ territories’ and the ones living in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria want exactly what Mr. Bush said they did not want: freedom. The fact that nobody at CNN questioned those erroneous comments of the President, such as Al-Queda “no longer has safe-haven in Afghanistan” (although they do indeed have support in terms of followers and fighters), shows how the media is there to “serve the interests of the state” (Chomski, 1989) and not to give plain and unbiased facts to the general public.
Thus this paper will look at how media distorts the truth. The focus will mainly be on American media outlets (newspapers, television and radio) but not entirely. The distortion or partial portrayal of the truth is not only a characteristic of the media in the United States and by no means do I want to suggest that. Due to slogans such as “CNN: The most trusted name in news” I came to question what ‘truth’ is, in news. Once we see what ‘truth’ constitutes I will dare to show that ‘truth’ to be false or partial.
To try to see the ‘truth’ as presented by the media in news I decided to examine the portrayal of three controversial news issues: the Vietnam War, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and 9/11. I picked these three news items because they received a considerable amount of coverage and since they are in different time frames they will help prove the point that news have always been portrayed in a biased manner and that ‘partial-truth-telling’ is not something new.
The Vietnam War was the first war to be televised; the first time when soldiers were accompanied by reporters and the first time people could really believe that what the television set was telling them was true. In 1967 in a survey in America “64 percent of the nation wide sample said that television’s coverage made them more supportive of the American effort” (Herman, 199) in Vietnam. So the media was trusted to be telling the truth and as a result of that the general public at that time was in favor of the war. Let us examine then, what media was telling people about the war in Vietnam.
To begin with, the media generally presented the conflict in ideological terms. Therefore, in the press or on television the U.S. “was leading the ‘free world’s fight to contain aggressive Communism”’ (Herman, 191). It was easier to vilify people in this way, by categorizing them as a ‘tentacle’ of international Communism. It is interesting to observe that this only happened when America became involved in Vietnam. Prior to that, when the french were fighting the Ho Chi Minh, the latter were defined by the media as ‘rebels’, ‘nationalists’ and ‘the Vietnamese resistance’. Yet, as soon as the Americans arrived in Vietnam, the Ho Chi Minh were referred to as the ‘communists’ or simply ‘the enemy’.
The media never saw the paradox in the fact that they reported that the Vietcong were the ones ‘infiltrating’ (their own country) and the U.S. was the one ‘resisting’ the aggression (Herman, 191). How the Americans were ‘victims’ of the North Vietnamese in Vietnam was also never asked.
As became the norm for American media, the American soldiers were always the ‘good guys’, the ‘heroes’, ‘the brave men’ who were engaged in the ‘battle of democracy’ and ‘in the struggle to defend democracy against aggression’ (Herman, 205). In other words, they were the righteous doing the good – sort of like what President Bush was talking about today. In contrast to this the North Vietnamese were shown as ‘the forces of anarchy’; the ‘savage’ ‘terrorists’, ‘brutal’, ‘fanatical’, ‘murderous’, ‘suicidal’, and ‘half-crazed’ (Herman, 205). A clear example of this was in October 1970 when a North Vietnamese artillery shell hit an orphanage in A Hoa. ABC’s George Watson was clear in stating that: “No one was prepared for the massacre, the irrational murder that the North Vietnamese inflicted on A Hoa” (Herman, 205).
The same cannot be said when on August 5th, 1965 Marley Safer reported on CBS that U.S. troops were “burning huts in the village of Cam Ne with cigarette lighters” (Herman, 201). The story received little publicity and the Pentagon quickly dismissed it claiming that the reporter was ‘unpatriotic’.
In general the public was shown through the media a clean and successful war (at least until the Tet Offensive). Whenever there was talk of civilian casualties those were regarded either as ‘collateral damage’ (which I believe is the title of a book) or simply as the ‘price’ for freedom. Sidney Hook explained in his article in the New Leader, on October 24th, 1966 that civilian casualties were: “the unfortunate accidental loss of life incurred by the efforts of American military forces to help the South Vietnamese repel the incursion of North Vietnamese civilians.
The anti-war movement also received little coverage except a few images of hippies with flower power signs. Looking back it is true indeed that protests against the war were not taken seriously by the media. “Demonstrators were often lumped together as lazy, pot-smoking, self-centered, coodled brats who knew nothing of the real world” (Liebovich, 60).
The justifications and conclusions portrayed through the media at the end of the war are just as partial as the coverage of the entire war when the views of the Vietcong were hardly ever made public. Homer Bigart concluded in an article in January, 1977 that “the war was less a moral crime that the thunderously stupid military blunder of throwing half a million troops into an unwinnable war” (Herman, 238). And the conscience of the general public was wiped clean when President Carter announced that America owes no debt to Vietnam because ‘the destruction was mutual” (Chomski, 1989). I was encouraged to find that the Wall Street Journal mentioned something about “$180 million in chemical companies” compensation to Agent Orange victims” (Herman, 242) but the truth was again only partial. The compensation applied only to American veterans and not to Vietnamese casualties.
What was believed to be the truth within the general public’s opinion as to whom the Americans were really fighting in Vietnam can be seen from a poll in the United States which asked “Who do you think is behind the attacks by the Vietcong?” The majority, “53% blamed the Chinese Communists” (Herman, 193). It did not even occur to people in America that the majority of the Vietnamese people welcomed a communist regime, or that they supported the Ho Chi Minh.
Yet, the American public cannot be directly blamed to be ignorant because there are many facts and issues which the media did not cover. As Noam Chomski wrote, “very rarely did the U.S. reporters make any effort to see the war from the point of view of the ‘enemy’” (Herman, 177). The idea that the United States ‘defended’ South Vietnam as the U.S.S.R. ‘defended’ Afghanistan, was never raised.
Supporter and adviser of the Diem government, Joseph Buttinger stated that “’massive expeditions’ in 1956 that destroyed villages … ‘were kept secret from the American people’” (Manufacturing, 188). And British photo-journalist Philip J. Griffiths wrote in ‘Le Monde’ that in the process of retaking the city of Hue, civilians “were killed by the most hysterical use of American firepower ever seen” (Herman, 225). In the Japanese press, Katsuichi Honda wrote that gunboats and helicopters were “firing away at random at farmhouses,” “using the farmers for targets as if in a hunting mood” (Herman, 195). But such ‘unpatriotic’ reporting was never present in the American media and the CBS would have never acknowledged at the time that it “helped shield the audiences from the true horror of war” (Herman, 200).
In order to keep-up the myth of the ‘righteous American soldier’ and the ‘righteousness of the war’ such details could not be presented by the media. The fact that India tried to send one hundred buffalo to Vietnam but the U.S. “threatened to cut the ‘food-for-peace’ aid (Herman, 247) also never made the news. Neither did the fact that the Carter administration denied rice to Laos or that Oxfam was prohibited in sending one hundred solar pumps for irrigation to Cambodia in 1983 (Herman, 247). The media in the United States did not comment about the twenty-five million acres of farmland or the twelve million acres of forest destroyed. It also did not mention that all six major industrial cities in North Vietnam were heavily damaged. To mention such things would seriously underscore the ‘truth’ that America fights ‘good wars good’ and so the media presented if not untruths about the Vietnam war, then partial-truths.
The second controversial news topic to be discussed is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which dates back to the end of WWII. In this sense, it would be impossible in this paper to give a full account of what was told from the beginning until now. Thus, I will go through the coverage by the media of a couple of particular incidents. In what follows I would like to show how Palestinians are portrayed and what becomes evident of Israel through the media.
At the beginning of the latest intifada, in early December, 2000 Times magazine stated that:



“Eight weeks ago, the Palestinian began the latest protests with
old-style demonstrations. Then, they started shooting at Israeli
towns. Now they are attacking the settlements. It’s not at all clear
what the next step will be, but every step seems to get bloodier.”
- The Bias Implicit, 13



So just like the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, the Palestinians were also shown to be irrational, violent and murderous. This reminds me of protests in Romania when I used to wear shirts which read “Hooligan” because that was how the media described us as protesters. All Palestinians in this case should wear shirts which can read “Valueless Terrorists” since that is how the media and President Bush view them at this time.
To return to the coverage of news stories of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I would like to focus on two news stories: the ‘Muhammad al Durra’ controversy and the news coverage of the Israeli soldier being thrown out of a window of a Ramallah police station. Both these stories had wide coverage world-wide through the media, and took place not too long from each other at the beginning of the ongoing intifada.
The case of Muhammad al Durra, the twelve year old boy who was shot in the Gaza Strip, “ ‘caught in the cross-fire’ between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen” (Salt, 1) quickly got the attention of the media. The pictures filmed by Talal Abu Tahma of the boy killed in his father’s arms were indeed shocking. The camera man himself said that: “The bullets could not have been fired by Palestinians. I clearly saw it with my own eyes that the bullets were coming from the side where the Israelis were standing. I saw it and so did my sound man and a number of citizens” (Salt,1).
With this in mind I would like to quote from the Sydney Morning Herald on this news story (7th October, 2000) because not only is this newspaper the oldest in Sydney but also because it is regarded as one of the most trustworthy. The explanation to the ‘Muhhamad al Durra’ controversy was that it was:



“all too typical of Palestinian provocations and of the so-called
Intifada in which crazy mobs of indoctrinated refugee camp dwellers kept in the camps deliberately not by Israelis but by
Other Arabs, were thrown up against the Israeli army for the
Sake of evoking world hostility to Israel” (Caught in, 2).



Again the Palestinians were portrayed as irrational, fanatical and crazy. The news story presented the young Palestinian boy as used as a ‘human shield’ and the general question was why this boy was at that Netzarim intersection in the Gaza Strip to begin with.
The second news story, of the two Israeli soldiers detained by the Palestinian police in Ramallah, was handled differently. The news images of an Israeli soldier tossed through the second-story window of a Ramallah police station were played over and over on all news channels just as much as those of the twelve year old Palestinian boy shot to death in the Gaza Strip. Yet, the question of what the two Israeli soldiers were doing in Ramallah is more peculiar. The Palestinian boy was not ‘caught in the cross-fire’ in Israel, but the Israeli soldiers were caught in what is considered Palestinian land.
The explanations to what the two Israeli soldiers were doing in Ramallah, differed. Some rumors claimed that they were “Jewish settlers kidnapped from the nearby settlement of Pisgot” and others said that they were “Israeli reservists who had lost their way’” (Salt, 2). In the Time magazine, on the 23rd of October, Lisa Beyer went along with the second explanation claiming that indeed the two Israeli reservists took a ‘wrong turn’. In this story the victims are by no means irrational, they simply made a mistake which cost them their lives, of course once again at the hands of ‘half-crazed’ Palestinians. The media forgot to ask what happened to all the check-points entering Ramallah, or how the soldiers were able to go ahead through their own check points into Palestinian land, getting lost.
Since it is somewhat clear now that Palestinians are generally ‘brain-washed’ and crazy, as shown in the previous cases, let us look at how the image of Israel is reflected in the media. In New York Times in 2000, Michael Gordon wrote an article titled: “Greater Threats from Lesser Powers: the Middle East’s Awful Arms Race.” His first sentence stated that: “With the Soviet military threat receding, the spread of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons to the third world is fast emerging as the greatest danger to the stability of the world” (Chomski, 1993). His focus was on the Middle East, so his examples are mostly from that region but their number is substantial. Some of the dangers mentioned in the article were “missile launchers in Iraq that place Israel under threat”; the “Libyan capacity to refuel its bombers in flight” and the fact that “Saudi Arabian medium range missiles” (Chomski, 1993) were being developed. Only in the 17th paragraph it is mentioned that “Israel is believed to have a small but potent arsenal of nuclear weapons” (Chomski, 1993). Therefore, we as news recipients are to believe that Libya’s capability of refueling its bombers in flight or Saddam Hussein’s missile launchers are in general more dangerous to the security of the Middle East than Israel’s nuclear capacity. That is how ‘the truth’ is presented in one of America’s most prominent newspapers.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is perhaps the most controversial of the three issues discussed; the coverage of it in the news is thus, also the most biased. The National Public Radio was examined by FAIR in its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for six months during 2001. The results speak volumes: 62 out of 77 Israeli deaths were reported, while 51 out of 148 Palestinian deaths were reported. From this, the study concluded that there was a 81% chance that Israeli deaths would be reported in comparison to 34% of Palestinian deaths to be reported (Aamidor, 3).
The words are also carefully arranged by the media in this case. ‘Occupied territory’ is mentioned as ‘disputed territory’ or ‘administered territory’ (Aamidor, 3). This is necessary because in an ‘administered territory’, Israelis can respond to violence through ‘retaliation’ but if they were portrayed as an ‘occupying’ force than ‘retaliation’ does not hold its grounds (one is no longer on the defensive). It all has to tie in with the general portrayal of what the ‘truth’ is. If newscasts kept mentioning the conflict as a thirty-five year old occupation and a war of liberation, then the “rock-throwing” (Aamidor, 4) by Palestinians can be viewed as more than just fanatical violence.
To see how ‘truth’ is distorted and told partially, one has to look at what the mass-media outlets fail to say. On the question of settlements, they are indeed illegal “under the Fourth Geneva Convention” (Dunsky, 11) and they are in conflict with U.N. resolution 242 and 338 which call for Israel’s “withdrawal from occupied territories” (Prestowitz, 198). But again such disturbing news hardly ever reach popular news outlets in the United States. The fact that Peace Now reported how “Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak had earmarked $300 million for settlements in 2001” but this never created any questions for the media is something to think about. The growing number of settlers from 1993 to 2001 by around 60,000 (Dunsky, 14) also was of no importance. It is actually amazing how the media in the United States never made the link between the fact that the U.S. has given an estimated $85 billion in aid to Israel since 1967 and the fact that Israel is able to expand their settlements, which are “basically colonies on Arab land” (Dunsky, 8). There is also no connection in the media between U.S. financed and produced weapons and the ‘state assassinations’ by Israel of Palestinians (the latest was that of Sheik Ahmed Yassin). “The times regularly refused to report Arafat’s offers” for peace and “even letters referring to them were banned” (Chomski, 1993). In this way what we seem to perceive as truth is obviously partial. At the same time Areil Sharon (Israel’s Prime Minister) responsibility for “the vicious massacre at Qibja in 1953” or ‘his regime of indiscriminate terror’ in Gaza in 1971” (Chomski, 1993) are also disregarded and kept out of the public’s view. On August 22nd, 1988 a father of a Palestinian kid, who was suspected of throwing rocks, was beaten to death by Israeli soldiers “of an elite unit of the Givanti Brigade. This case was first reported in Ha’aretz a month later” (Chomski, 1998). But Such incidents though are insignificant for any of the major media outlets in the United States and was thus kept away form the public.
The most intriguing facts are those resolutions from the United nations which America vetoed in Israel’s favor. In early 1988 resolutions condemning Israel’s attack on Lebanon were vetoed by the U.S. (Chomski, 1993). IN 1989 a resolution against Israel’s violation of Palestinian human rights was again vetoed by the United States (Chomski, 1993). In June 1990, the “U.S. vetoed a resolution (voted 14-1) calling for a fact finding mission to investigate abuses against the Palestinians in the occupied territories” (Chomski, 1993). And prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, “the U.S. vetoed another resolution which condemned Israel’s practices” (Chomski, 1993). None of these vetoes made ‘the news’ in the United States and so one may only stop to think of the words of the director of U.N. Human Rights Commission, David Zonsheine who stated that: “You stand at a checkpoint, and you know that Israeli settlers go right through and Arabs don’t, and you remember South Africa” (Prestowitz, 206).
The last incident and also the most vivid in everyone’s minds is the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001. “Freedom has been attacked by a faceless coward. Freedom will be defended” (Eisman, 57), quoted NBC’s Tom Brokaw from an earlier speech of George W. Bush. Why do so many people in Arab countries hate America, asked Larry King on his show on October 18th. Don Rather from CBS, answered that: “They hate us because they’re losers. They see us as winners.” So it is simple: America is the winner (the winner of what we are not told) and everyone else hates that.
With such explanations and banners running on most U.S. channels such as ‘Attack on America’, ‘America under Attack’ or ‘America’s New War’, the country was ready to invade even their fifty-third state (or Canuckistan as some Americans called Canada when it refused to join the war in Iraq). It was never questioned by the media how George W. Bush declared war on terrorists. To be at war means usually that there is a conflict between states or nations and that there is a sense of ‘competition’ between the opposing forces. Thus, since terrorists do not represent a state and can not be seen as ‘competitors’ to the United States, going to war with them was not discussed.

Two polls taken in 2003 show what the public in the United States knows in regard to 9/11. First in January, 2003, in a Knight Ridder poll, fifty percent of those whom answered claimed that one or more of the 9/11 hijackers was of Iraqi origin. The second poll I would like to look at is a poll in the same year done by CBS and the New York Times. The result of this poll claimed that 53% of those whom answered believed that Saddam Hussein was ‘personally involved’ in what happened on September 11th (Robertson, 1). Kathleen H. Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania explained this situation best when she stated that:



“The Bush rhetoric and the rhetoric of the administration strongly
implied that there was an association between Iraq and 9/11 , so that
the public thinks there is, when it’s been told there is, isn’t surprising”
(Robertson, 5).



The media does indeed influence how the truth of news is presented, or how much of it is presented to the public. To show how in general an event such as 9/11 can be differently portrayed through the media, I will like to shortly compare the coverage of this event in the American Time magazine with that in the German magazine Der Spiegel. The comparison is made on the basis of these two magazines' equal popularity and readership in their own countries.
Time magazine’s special coverage of 9/11 from September 14th, 2001 incorporated many pictures, opinions of the public, stories about fire-fighters and survivors. The tone of the magazine suddenly changed on the last page when a strong bias is presented by Lance Morrow in his article “The Case for Rage and Retribution”.
Morrow is a regular contributor to Time magazine for over thirty years therefore, it can be presumed that readers take him quite seriously. That is precisely why his comments are disturbing. Morrow began by claiming that:



“For once, let’s not have ‘grief counselors’ … to make everyone
feel better as quickly as possible … Healing is inappropriate now,
and dangerous … A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment
of rage. Let’s have rage” (Time Magazine, 14th September, 2001)



And if the fact that Norrow has been writing for the Time Magazine for so long does not clearly show the magazine’s biased view, then looking at September 24th issue, of the same year, can underline that bias. The overall content suggested that the reasons why Bin Laden and his followers ‘hate America’ are because America’s support for freedom and democracy world-wide. Such a plain answer and one lacking of evidence would be unbearable for one who does not realize that the public is used to such statements and ‘half-crazed’ explanation. It has been fed such ‘pills’ since the Vietnam war constantly.
For the European audience, which is much more involved in international affairs Der Spiegel could not produce the same content as the Time Magazine did. The truth could not be shown as plain as it was shown for the American audience. In its September 15th issue, Der Spiegel included a range of perspectives, from sympathy for the victims, to first hand accounts of what happened by Germans living in the United States, to criticism of the /Bush administration. There were also in-depth articles about Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization (Eisman, 59).
Der Spiegel was not so quick to claim that ‘terrorism’ is aimed at America’s freedom or democratic views. The comments and articles in this magazine argued that:






“Terrorism is the weapon of the weak, and that a lot of
people hate America … with motive as the U.S. extends
its power to all corners of the earth and forces the U.S.
economy on all people without concern for the damage
it does” (Eisman, 63).






Also the same article mentioned the fact that the United States has “troops in sixty five other lands” (Eisman, 63), a reason why some might regard the U.S. as an imperial power.
Such issues can not be raised in any American media outlet. That is clear. A prime example why Der Spiegel would not last two issues in the U.S. is Bill Maher and his ‘Politically Incorrect” TV show. On September, 17th, 2001 Bill Maher made a comment which cost him his air-time. He criticized George W. Bush’s comments about the terrorists being cowards by saying: “We have been the … [ones] lobbying cruise missiles from 2000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly” (Eisman, 65). Almost instantaneously FedEx and Sears canceled their advertisement during the show and about ten or so television channels canceled the airing of his show.
Considering such consequences it is easier to understand why the ‘truth’ is never questioned by the media in the United States and why it always agrees with the ‘truth’ that it is told to portray. One could never write in such circumstances that Argentinian students walked out of class when a teacher criticized Osama bin Laden (Tariq, 329), or that “Greek crowds at football matches who refused to mourn for the two minutes the government had imposed … broke the silence with anti-American chants” (Tariq, 329). Americans can not even begin to comprehend why “Beijing students interviewed by the New Yorker spoke openly of their delight” (Tariq, 337) because they were never told the truth. They are never presented the entire truth about international affairs or even the affairs of their own government.
It is interesting and at the same time sad to see what Senator William Fulbright said at the Senate hearings on government and the media in 1966. He observed that “… many of our prominent newspapers have become the agents or adjuncts of the government policy” (Chomski, 1989). And this can be said about most media outlets not only in the United States but in other countries also. The point though, is that since America claims to fight for democracy and freedom, it should allow its reporters and newscasts to reveal the truth about news in general, to keep the public aware and involved instead of engulfing it in ‘half-crazed’ truths.









BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Aamidor, Abe. A Story of Conflict: coverage of fighting in the Middle East has brought war to many newsrooms. The Quill, Feb. 2003, v91, il, p12(4)
2. Chomski, Noam. Necessary Illusions: thought control in democratic societies. Publishers Group Canada: Toronto, 1989.
3. Chomski, Noam. Letters from Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda. Between the Lines: Toronto, 1993
4. Dunski, Marda. Missing: The Bias implicit in the absent. Arab Studies Quorterly. Summer 2001, v23, i3, pl.
5. Eisman, April. The Media of inamputation: patriotism and propaganda – mainstream news in the United States in the recent weeks following September 11. Critical Quorterly, vol. 45, nos. 1-2.
6. Herman S. Edward, Chomski, Noam. Manufacturing Consent. Pantheon Books: New York, 1988.
7. Kopkind, Andrew. The Thirty Years Wars. Verso, London:2002
8. Liebovich, W. Louis. The press and the Modern Presidency. Praeger Publishers, Westpart: 1998/
9. Robertson, Lori. Baghdad urban legends: how come so many people think weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, or that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11 attacks? Are the news media to blame? American Journalism Review. Oct-Nov, 2003, v25, i7, p26(6).
10. Salt, Jeremy. Caught in the cross-fire? Arena Magazine, Dec. 2000, p5.
11. Tariq, Ali. The Clash of Fundamentalism, Verso. London: 2002

]]> RevLeft Articles Mr. Happy http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=129531 http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=129531 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Che-lives/~3/FeviSPtKGvI/showthread.php Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:59:02 GMT I seem to be part of the “lost generation”; the generation of too much knowledge and of a lost cause. I say we blame our parents and grandparents for... I seem to be part of the “lost generation”; the generation of too much knowledge and of a lost cause. I say we blame our parents and grandparents for the environmental decay of our planet, for the decay in our morality and/or our addiction to consumerism. Blame them for all this shit: the famine in the world, the wars, our addiction to drugs and “the good life”, it’s all their fault. Why not?
I’m angry, helpless and hopeless. What the fuck!? Why am I here? And what the fuck am I suppose to do?
That was easy … now I am free of guilt and ready to go bannanas! “In support of Mummia Jammal, run up on you fucking pigs with the heaters and all” (I like that line from Jedi Mind Tricks). Most people can’t connect the dots. Why can't everyone see the lies that the main stream media is throwing out?
I watch the news: people blowing up in Afghanistan, kids mutilated by bombs in Iraq, more kids starving all over Africa, Native Indians without potable water in Canada and yet even more kids sleeping underneath the Gardiner Expressway here in Toronto. I wipe the tears of my face, clench my teeth and swear to do something about it then, I roll a “post” and try to drown my thoughts with it.
You see … our parents knew everything. They knew what do to. Their life was easy: they knew they had to get an education, a job then, a family and with that life was complete (so they thought); or they knew they had done their ‘duty’. With my generation it’s all different. We don’t know anything anymore because we know too much. We don’t have the sense of stability our parents had … we’re losing species of animals, we’re losing our air, our forests and with all that we’re losing our sense of purpose, our morallity, our beliefs ... our mind too.
With the break-up of the a priori belief system comes the break-up of society as we know it. A Palestinian living in a camp in Syria, without a proper home and living for decades in deplorable conditions one day gets up, straps himself and blows up in an Israeli market. Is it so hard to understand why? We’re losing all remaining belief that a decent and honorable life is possible. The Somali pirates don’t hijack ships for the fun of it, they’re starving and without a government in that country for over ten years! It’s all chaos. I see all these people going and shopping at Wallmart and really what they are doing is enforcing child labour all over South-Asia the bloody imbecils. I hope they all choke on their food tonight. How can people buy things made by little children working sixteen hour days, seven days a week for twenty cents a fucking day. Why don’t all kids around the world have the same rights? Why the fuck would you support a system like that? In my opinion if you do … you’re not worth living because indirectly you are ruining the lives of others. It's all garbage and it's making me depressed and ugly. ]]> RevLeft Articles Mr. Happy http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=129476 http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=129476 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Che-lives/~3/BsDjQ18y6cs/showthread.php Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:26:50 GMT Schooling: A Capitalist Indoctrination

The specialization of ones own diverse abilities has become, at least from what I've seen here in America, a way of life now as the school system increases based on capital, but decreases based on intellectual, intelligent learning towards those going to school, in what used to be, for the path of higher learning. Why is it that one chooses to only specialize towards one goal, despite the vast possibilities of learning much more? Is there not a sense of merely educating your mind towards all, rather than towards a simple goal of an entirety of life? What we face today are universities pumping out workers for self-beneficial reasons in the name of capital.

I cannot help but wonder where exactly this nation is heading when I see hardworking students entering college to learn, but then come out as debt-riddled workers leaving without a true goal in mind, due to the goal being achieved already & now just ready to be partaken upon. Whether the student is paying to go to college, or has already paid to go, & is merely working already to pay the state back after getting a nifty loan for a possible 4 year degree, the problem is dead center of it all, the students are paying to learn or for what they learned. Is there not a better way of handling this? I never seemed to understand the concept of paying to make a better of yourself, when the payments brought forth is used as the limitation of how much you better yourself.

Three things are created through capitalized schooling: the rich, the workers, & the poor. All of which is achieved by how much money one can cough up, rather than the willingness to learn all that can be learned. We hear the reasons for going to college from kindergarten to senior year of high school - to find out who you are & what you want to do. But how can one find out who s/he truly is & what s/he's capable of when one is limited to how much s/he can learn? This is where I find that the educational system has turned into a workers factory for the consumers of specialized learning to be consumed, themselves, later down the road.

Venezuela has recently started a revolutionary new approach to schooling. What this plan contains, which was created by his brother Adan Chavez, is the beginning of nationalizing the school systems. What this allows is free education to all that wants to participate. Now, he made it fair to where he allowed private schools to continue, but they had to follow by rules, for private schools shouldn't indoctrinate whatever lessons are felt to be presented. This is all being paid for through State income, for Venezuela has dedicated itself towards a new way of educating their people. France has been using this type of schooling as well, where all students are allowed to go to college for free. The rules are that each student that participates will do the same thing, but will be granted all learning capabilities, allowing the student to work towards a higher way of bettering themselves. This is one of the main reasons why France statistics show that students there get much higher math scores, rather than the U.S. which ranks 24th of 38 in mathematics, 19th of 38 in science, 12th of 38 in reading, & 26th of 38 in problem solving.

Though, as I am a supporter in this type of learning system, I feel that this is merely the beginning of a transitional stage towards a much more higher way of learning than we are beginning to see now. We are now realizing that making a better of our people & teaching them as much as possible, while giving them equal opportunities through education, is a far more effective approach than the dying out method of putting a price to people's education. Though, there is still money being used, which is through the use of taxes. Even though I am for this method far more than how America runs it's school systems, I feel that, until money is completely taken out of the picture of educational reform, we will never truly give students the type of education that they deserve, better yet, is a necessary possibility.

Where does money play into the educational system? To pay for books & materials? No, since these are all manufactured by the use of resources & can be provided without the use of money. Man doesn't even manufacture these books any longer, & most importantly, we don't even need books anymore due to computer-based alternatives. So that just leaves us with the materials for teachers, which plays into the same effect as books do. These are not manufactured because of money. Money only plays as the conditioning of making man do unnecessary labor. And, like the books, are now manufactured by machines, not man. Man makes the machines, but this could be done without money, for people that create these machines do it for the love of doing so, not the money. Money was there to allow these workers to live in a capitalized society. Though, if there's no monetary system, there's no need.

So, now that books & materials are now knocked out of the category, what else does money play into? That's right, the teachers. Again, plays the same as I was saying about boring labor to humans which could be replaced by machines. Though, machines wouldn't do that good in teaching, not human-based in my opinion. Which is where my other point comes into effect. People do what they love, because they love doing it, not because money might be involved. I've written & published 3 books so far & I receive no profit from it, except for maybe $1 or 2. I love writing books, so I'll do it for free. So, let me ask you this - would you rather be taught by a teacher who loves teaching, or be taught by someone who's just doing it for the money? See my point?

One thing that I've noticed when I was in high school was that school started to become a military recruiting area. Our scores began being evaluated & observed to try & find potential for what the military are looking for. I remember taking the ASVAB test, where I was told I could find out what all I'm good at & what I could be looking for when I go to college - notice how they push you into only specializing into one subject. I took the test, & a month later I was told that I did excellent in all categories, & practically that I could do whatever I wanted in life. This brought a good thing to my life, pretty much lifting my hopes up for a better future. But then a few weeks before school was to end I get a knock at my door from home. I open it up & there an army recruiter was standing by my door. I wasn't sure why, since I never signed up for anything, due to my opposition against the wars that are being waged. I allowed him to come in & talk to me. The first thing he brought up was the reason why he was at my house, which really made me start wondering what the school systems are really trying to pull off from all this. He said that he reviewed my ASVAB test & was impressed at my scores. I was then informed that the tests were being evaluated by the military to try & find people with the best scores to try & pull to their training. After letting him have his say, I politely told him that I wasn't interested & showed him the door. That was the end of it, but the realization of what the HIGH SCHOOL is doing to help the military really puts a new perspective on me on where the educational system is going.

The point I'm trying to get out of this is that we are being taught within our educational systems, not to make a better of ourselves, but to find a job & do that job until we retire. This all happens while the "educational" system profits off of you & your activities. The system that controls this nation profits off of the workforce, so why should we fuel the state that controls us? Education is what creates who we are in the future. So it's not surprising on what our school's have become after taking a look on how the workforce operates these days. I know what you must be thinking - if one doesn't specialize on a certain subject how can we get someone like doctors? The problem I have about this idea is that we are conditioned to believe that one must partake in such niche roles in society, which is only used to help profit the system. Questions were brought forth by someone that I know on a forum which directly related to the points being made here:

Should the guy building bridges be forced to build bridges his entire life? Should he be allowed to do something else when he no longer enjoys building bridges?

These are great points that need to be brought into attention. Should a person be forced to remain in such a job that he no longer loves doing? Sure, we're not exactly forced to stay in a job, but when you quit you have to mention that in your next job application. If you're fired then that goes into a record for your next employment to look over & is used to decide on whether you should be hired or not, & let's not forget the difficulties & stress brought forth when wanting to start on a new degree pathway through our capitalized educational system. This is merely used as an illusion of choice on what we want to do. Another point that needs to be realized on why it's hard to just quit your job & try searching for a new one is that, in a monetary system, bills need to be paid, & stopping the flow of income in the search of your newly desired job costs a lot of money - the military then comes in around this time of pressure & desperation within one's life.

Another question that might be asked would be, "how will things get done?". The answer to this is simple - in similar ways on how things get done now. The only difference would be that people will not be forced to do the same work their entire lives, unless they want to that is. Let's not forget that a lot of the roles which are being performed today within society will no longer be around any longer in the next coming decades. Man (mankind) should be freely allowed to do what they want to do within society, yet the profitable specialization idea seems to have become the alternative to 'freedom to work'. For what I feel to be a capitalist indoctrination within our educational systems, this needs to end now.

The main point out of all this is that it all starts through education. This is the very source of why things are what they are in life, especially within the workforce. If we are to start such a new revolutionary way of thinking, it must begin with education. Until we begin to realize this, I fear of what is to come to this nation's future.

“In a communist society there are no painters, but at most people who engage in painting among other activities.” ~Karl Marx

Question Everything...Deny Nothing ]]> RevLeft Articles The Vegan Marxist http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=129466 http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=129466 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Che-lives/~3/I9V9XCA3Ue8/showthread.php Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:36:27 GMT This is not intended to be an article. This is a request for help. Between June 25th and June 27th Toronto will be the host of the G8 meeting. Our... This is not intended to be an article. This is a request for help. Between June 25th and June 27th Toronto will be the host of the G8 meeting. Our so-called leaders will be meeting to further debate and work towards their failed plan for the New World Order. As usual our money (taxpayers) will be spent on their luxurious accomodations, their bullet-proof limos and thousands of riot police. Basically our money will be used to subdue us.
We can no longer tolarate the status-quo. We must act and act accordingly. The main goal is to take back our streets and not allow the meeting to take place. Due to the fact that what I say here may reach the hands of some who would like to stop us from succeeding, I cannot give too many details here. If anyone is interested please contact me and more details are available.
We need to unite and we need to work together. Anyone who is willing to dedicate their time and put their well-being on the line is encouraged to come to Toronto and participate in stoping this upcoming event. I am looking for people who are not into destroying private property but who want to stop this meeting from happening. I am not interested in anarchists; there should be as little violence as possible, although if the riot police want to engage in nasty confrontations we shall be ready.
"The people united will never be defeated!"

Mr. Happy (dope_31@hotmail.com) ]]> RevLeft Articles Mr. Happy http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=129428 http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=129428 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Che-lives/~3/VQqk0KgyPrI/showthread.php Thu, 11 Feb 2010 03:16:00 GMT *Transformative Critique: Directional Measures and Laws on Property Rights* Like what the typical Trotskyist “transitional” critic would say, the... Transformative Critique: Directional Measures and Laws on Property Rights

Like what the typical Trotskyist “transitional” critic would say, the list of directional measures preceding the Basic Principles is not as exhaustive as it should be from a social-abolitionist perspective, and may not be as exhaustive as it could be from even a proletocratic perspective. Some of the measures look like they could easily fit into the principles.

Consider one particular measure raised by Mike Macnair in his book on revolutionary strategy – for some reason as an “immediate” measure but tied to his background as a legal academic:

Abolition of constitutional guarantees of the rights of private property and freedom of trade.

While this looks like it could easily fit into the maximalist program of social labour, there is an element of subtlety that makes it only directional but nevertheless nothing less than directional: constitutional guarantees. For example, Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone of the magazine Dollars and Sense: Real World Economics noted in 2006 that the Venezuelan government engaged in similar measures to the one enacted by the Paris Commune on cooperatives:

In a more typically confrontational example, displaced workers first occupied a sugar refinery in Cumanacoa and restarted it on their own. The federal government then expropriated the property and turned it over to cooperatives of the plant's workers. The owners' property rights were respected inasmuch as the government loaned the workers the money for the purchase, though the price was well below what the owners had claimed. Such expropriated factories are then often run by elected representatives of workers alongside of government appointees.

There are strings attached. "We haven't expropriated Cumanacoa and Sideroca for the workers just to help them become rich people the day after tomorrow," said Chávez. "This has not been done just for them—it is to help make everyone wealthy." Take the case of Cacao Sucre, another sugar mill closed for eight years by its private owners, leaving 120 workers unemployed in a neighborhood of grinding poverty. The state's governor put out a call for the workers to form a co-op. After receiving training in self-management, the mill co-op integrated with the 3,665-strong cane growers' co-op. In July 2005, this large cooperative became the first "Social Production Enterprise." The new designation means that the co-op is required to set aside a portion of its profits to fund health, education, and housing for the local population, and to open its food hall to the community as well.

While the technical assistance was certainly not unconditional on the part of the Venezuelan government’s usage of eminent domain or compulsory purchase (a widespread power among even developed bourgeois-capitalist states that ironically violates the more propertarian Article 17 of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”), the previous owners did not enjoy property rights akin to those secured by the US constitution’s Fifth Amendment on “just compensation.”

Another application of this directional measure can be applied to interest (usury). Before extending litigation rights to include class-action lawsuits and speedy judgements against all non-workers who appropriate surplus value atop any economic rent applied towards exclusively public purposes, a society seriously intent upon the maximalist program of social labour would have to enact more stringent measures against interest beyond “equity not usury” – if not ban it altogether – like prohibiting civil courts from enforcing the collection of the interest portion of debt payments, or imposing severe criminal penalties on those who use threats of harm to extort interest. Otherwise, it would be more profitable to earn large amounts of interest in bank accounts than to use the money to employ workers.

As a legal academic, Macnair asserted that the very notion of law, from the very dawn of class society, is intrinsically tied to property rights:

Lawyers are notoriously expensive, obscure and troublesome: this has been a common theme of satire since Roman times. Moreover, not all historical societies do use law and few – most notably the later Roman empire – have been as ‘law-saturated’ and obsessed with law as the late 20th and early 21st century world.

To start with adjudication: it seems that adjudication as a mode of decision-making presupposes and is adapted to disputes about private property. The ‘justice’ which a judge or arbitrator is to deliver is at its core the restoration of prior ownership, or compensation for the loss of ownership. From this core, which appears at the heart of early legal systems, law is extended by analogy: a crime is a ‘taking from the state’ or a ‘taking from the society’; jurisdiction, or decision-making power, is treated as a kind of property right. But the sanctity of property remains the core basis of legal reasoning.

[...]

The sanctity of private property is embedded in every ‘human rights’ document, from the English Petition of Right (1627) through to the Charter of rights in the draft constitution of the European Union. It is reflected in constitutional prohibitions on expropriation and in ‘restrictive construction’ in favour of the property owner of tax laws, laws controlling property use, and so on. The role of lawyers in the construction of certainty inexorably carries with both ‘tax avoidance’ and ‘regulatory failure’: ie, the use of the requirement of predictability to undermine for the benefit of the rich the effect of rules made by parliaments. It carries with it ‘inequality of arms’: ie, that the rich can afford more and better legal services than the poor. These phenomena are commonly attributed to judicial bias: the truth is that the biases are inherent in the idea and practice of law itself.

It should be apparent on the basis of this analysis that ‘the rule of law’ is under present conditions a euphemism for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

For some reason, the abolition of all constitutional guarantees of the rights of private ownership of productive and other non-possessive property is missing from the list of directional measures. It is obvious that neither the most social-democratic form of bourgeois capitalism (that is, on the threshold) nor mere petty-capitalist social relations can or will accomplish this, but why are certain directional measures that are incompatible with present and past class societies listed (against information asymmetry, socialization of all economic rent up to and including surplus value, and full extension of labour litigation rights in accordance with the Socially Necessary Labour Theory of Value) and this one omitted? Is the “bridge” between an analysis of capitalism and its development on the one hand, and on the other the basic principles meant to be so indirect about the question of property rights?



REFERENCES



The minimum platform and extreme democracy by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/625/macnair.htm]

Venezuela's Cooperative Revolution by Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone [http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archi...wmanstone.html]

The war and the law by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker2/index...cle_id=1001970] ]]> RevLeft Articles Jacob Richter http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=129073 http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?t=129073