Bend a Knee and Live

"Since 1950 the USA has attacked more than 50 countries. It has bombed 30. It has made more than 50 assassination attempts and succeeded in more than 20 regime changes. The behavioral metaprogram: Be afraid. Be very afraid. Be grateful we have brave men and women in uniform to protect us."

The glare of broadcast lights were exactly what Chairman Foghorn Leghorn, R-CA, had most wanted.  With the solemnity of a hanging judge, he leaned forward and read his prepared remarks.

"Boy, I say, boy, you know Russia has deployed an information army inside television. I say an information army. Some doing the Kremlin’s bidding are given explicit guidelines to obscure the truth by spreading conspiracies that Dick Cheney or the CIA is responsible for everything from 9/11 and anthrax to the downing of Malaysia flight MH17 over Ukraine. Others, like that Larry King fella, are simply paid more than we can pay them, for demonizing the West."

He handed the ball off to to his counterpart in the minority party, Tweety J. Bird, D-OA, who stuffed the ball into his mouth and echoed the words of the distinguished Chairman.

Then the first show trial witness, a "Russian Expert" from a right wing think tank, leaned in and set the context:

"This is not merely an ‘information war’, in other words, but a ‘war on information.' If the very possibility of rational argument is submerged in a fog of uncertainty, there are no grounds for debate."

The Chairman opined, "Boy, I say, Boy, you are about to exceed the limit of my medications. But you are right. Their rational arguments are about as sharp as a bowling ball. About as sharp as a bag of wet mice, I'd say."

The second witness, from the Heritage Foundation, told the committee:

"Russian propaganda is corrosive to the image of the United States and to our values. Or as Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Victoria Nuland described it before this committee on March 4th, “the Kremlin's pervasive propaganda campaign, where is [sic] truth is no obstacle.”

"And Russian propaganda is being spread aggressively around the world as we have not seen it since Soviet days. This is not just in Central Asia, and Eastern and Central Europe, but even here in the West. The daily content and commentary from RT and others is often polished and slickly-produced. And it's not like old-fashioned propaganda, aimed solely at making Putin and Russia look good. It's a new kind of propaganda, aimed at sowing doubt about anything having to do with the U.S. and the West, and in a number of countries, unsophisticated audiences are eating it up.

"The unfortunate fact is that the United States government became complacent in the battle for “hearts and minds” in Russia and its neighboring countries after the end of the Cold War. For Instance, the administration’s budget request for 2016 is $751,436 million [$751 billion] for U.S. International Broadcasting. Reportedly, RT has a budget alone of $400 million for its Washington bureau."

The statements lambasting RT [a rebranding of "Russia Today"] from Hillary Clinton and John Kerry are a matter of public record. There were no witnesses called from RT or its viewers and admirers.

We admit to being among those admirers. In that vast desert of content that is television medium, RT offers a fresh perspective. Last week, we loved seeing Richard Heinberg on BoomBust and Steve Keen on the Keiser Report.

For comparison's sake we watched the Friday morning news line up for all the official US propaganda channels, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, and ABC. They all seemed to be saying the same thing, using the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the conviction of the Boston Marathon bomber, the death of a Saddam Hussein confidant, or some other pretext to paint a gloomy picture of Orwellian internal and external threats. The behavioral metaprogram: "Be afraid. Be very afraid. Be grateful we have brave men and women in uniform to protect us. Just do what the authorities tell you and all will be well. Move along, nothing to see here."

No mention is made that one of our glorious, laureled veterans kills him or herself every 22 minutes.

Former reporter Liz Wahl, who resigned RT on camera with a newsy flair, told Congress that she quit because the network was spinning the news to match their political viewpoint.

How odd that is for journalism. See this 748th edition of the Keiser Report for a discussion of Wikileaks revelations of "State sponsorship" of the news from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and other US television consortia.

"In the ensuing media blitz, Wahl gave interviews to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, and ABC’s Barbara Walters, among others. Stories about her resignation appeared in news outlets around the world. The New York Daily News credited her with breaking through “the Iron Curtain.” She wrote a feature for Politico entitled “I Was Putin’s Pawn.”

- Bloomberg 

At that same moment, across the continent former RT reporter Abby Martin was sitting in a radio studio telling podcaster Joe Rogan that she had not been controlled or manipulated and that what had attracted her to work at RT was that they were the only ones sending crews to cover Occupy.

Today they are among the very few US news organizations with camera crews on the ground in Doniesk and Gaza, interviewing protestors last week in front of WalMarts, speaking with homeless people in Jeb Bush's Florida, and decoding the financial meltdown in Greece and what it means for the euro.

RT's Lee Camp, a stand-up Bay Area comedian Abby Martin recruited to replace her (she did not like living in Washington), takes no prisoners when criticizing the US government and its media culture. Like Martin, Camp brings in rising comics and artists to underscore RT's theme ‑ we are nobody's patsy. Friday's show linked the familiar face on the twenty dollar bill to the Trail of Tears.

Another point raised in that RT show, which we watched to help us prepare this essay, was that the reason the United States left the World Court in 1986 was because the Court ruled it to be a state sponsor of terrorism. It is why the US refuses to join the World Criminal Court that prosecutes war crimes.

This is not disinformation. Just in the past few years the US backed the "popular" uprising in Egypt and Ukraine and attempted unpopular coups in Venezuela and Ecuador. It destroyed the governments of Iraq, Syria and Libya and has overwhelmed Jordan with refugees. Its surrogate Saudi Arabia is, as you read this, bombing refugee camps and residential districts in Yemen with US-supplied war planes and AWACs, precipitating a human rights disaster.

Since 1950 the USA has attacked more than 50 countries. It has bombed 30. It has made more than 50 assassination attempts and succeeded in more than 20 regime changes.

The US ranks 46th in freedom of the press, just below Romania ‑ one notch above Haiti and 2 notches above Niger.

That, we suppose, is what makes the USA special. If you agree, bend a knee. Putin is wrong. This country is exceptional.

On April 7^th we lost one of the great iconoclastic voices of our time, Stan Freberg. Here, in a short tribute, is a radio clip of Freberg, as Ben Franklin, reluctant to sign Thomas Jefferson's petition to the King: FranklinFreberg.mp3