I
worked in the business of discovering, writing up, and so distributing news to
the population for the 27 years from 1945 to 1971, working for eight different
newspapers or periodicals in five different countries, and I never once heard
the expression “fake news” until it was used by Donald Trump.
In fact, I have never taken it
seriously until recently, when I have begun to realize that “fake news” is an
entity that has taken on meaning even for people who should know better than to
accept his language, for whom his repetition of it endlessly has begun to have
its effect, making it the sort of thing on which he is building a really
poisonous run for re-election.
Along with things like his hatred of
the idea of “invading” Moslems; his disgust at the “hordes” arriving from
Central America; his embrace of the worst instincts in human feeling and
thought --- his xenophobia, his narcissism, his recklessness with the truth. All
of these are being skilfully woven into a package designed to appeal to the
many electors who feel they have been left behind, and for whom the American
dream has become a nightmare, but who, yet, seem to be so easily persuaded to
believe in American exceptionalism, which was an idea so warmly embraced by
Barack Obama, that in the hands of Trump has been developed into a naked belief
that America can do anything it wants to do, anywhere in the world.
It isn’t that I have an excessive
regard for news as it is presented by the mainstream media in which I spent so
many years. In fact I often thought the version of events we were pushing out
each day had little to do with what was actually happening in society. The
reason for that was that newspapers were always owned by people who were among
the wealthiest in whatever country I
worked in, and whether these proprietors
originated among the working class or not, they pretty quickly, as soon
as they became wealthy, adopted the outlook of the well-to-do. Perhaps my experience was unusual, but it was
borne in on me when I was in my mid-teens and still going to high school that
in the whole country of two million people, in which every small town had
either one or often two daily newspapers that I used to read in the local
library reading room, I had never read a single word of praise for the Labour
government under which I grew up. Of course, that government was a
rough-as-a-diamond outfit: many, I would almost say most, of its ministers were
working class guys with fairly minimal educations. Neither of the first two
Labour Prime Ministers went to high school, and
their finance minister had had to forego a scholarship to grammar school
in England because of poverty, and the minister of public works actually began
work at the age of nine in an Australian mine. Yet they ran a government that
introduced the first universal health scheme in the English-speaking world, and
they retained power as a popular government from 1935 to 1949, a good long run.
I guess it was at this time that I
developed a liking for hands-on working men in government, something that has
ever since tended me towards denigrating the university-educated socialists who
nowadays make up the roll call in any “socialist”
government you like to name.
But back to “fake news.” In my humble
opinion, it has become difficult in
these days to know what to believe about many major issues. The situation in
Venezuela is a classic example. For some reason, the mainstream media of the
western world has adopted a posture based on support for the the naked
opportunism of the United States in its attempt to overthrow the elected
government, for only one reason, because that government is socialist. But any
careful reading of opinion on both sides of this issue --- and there is quite a
lot of stuff favourable to the Maduro government published in left-wing online
sites --- leaves one wondering what actually is going on. My inclination is to
dismiss the prevailing accepted Establishment story, for the very good reason
that so far Maduro’s defiance of the American demarche has been unshakeable:
one left-wing report I ran across the other day outlined how Hugo Chavez, the
so-called dictator who was repeatedly re-elected until he died, had created
among the hitherto neglected and in fact grievously repressed and exploited
workers, farm labourers and so on, a system of communes which continues, and, in
the opinion of this writer, will continue whatever the fate of the Maduro
government. Not only is Maduro still in power, but there have been at least as
many people demonstrating on behalf of the government as for the opposition
with its phony-seeming leader Juan Guaido, chosen by the United States to be
the next president, never mind an election.
I read the
following tweet by a researcher called Ben Norton, who is familiar with the
situation in Venezuela: “Isn't it interesting how the US and European corporate
media keep conveniently forgetting to show these absolutely GIGANTIC
pro-government Chavista marches in Venezuela? I'm sure it's only a coincidence.
Just ignore the long, long pattern of dishonesty.”
Similarly with Syria: this is one of
the most puzzling disputes going on at the moment. The customary story is that
when in 2011 the populace, tired of the repression by the Assad government,
demonstrated and demanded changes, the government immediately responded with a
brutal crackdown, which brought on the armed rebellion that later developed
into this civil war, slowly modulating into as proxy war involving almost every
country in the Middle East with its brutal results. But I read the other
day a piece which said that before this happened, the government actually
responded with a broad series of suggested changes, which the protesters rejected immediately and instead
took to arms.
When I was looking for a copy of that
piece I came across a long, long account, published by Truthout, from the
revelations made in one of the Wikileaks posts in which they were able to
develop a coherent account of the extraordinary machinations of the U.S.
government as it plotted for years to undertake regime change in Syria.
I never did find the exact
information I was hoping to find, namely the list of changes proposed by the
government in 2011, but the many hitherto secret US cables the piece was able
to quote directly, certainly gave the game away:
A December 13, 2006 cable: “Influencing the SARG
[Syrian government] in the End of 2006 indicates that, as far back as 2006
– five years before “Arab Spring” protests in Syria – destabilizing the Syrian
government was a central motivation of US policy. The author of the cable was
William Roebuck, at the time chargé d’affaires at the US embassy in Damascus.
The cable outlines strategies for destabilizing the Syrian government. In his
summary of the cable, Roebuck wrote: “We believe
Bashar’s weaknesses are in how he chooses to react to looming issues, both
perceived and real, such as the conflict between economic reform steps (however
limited) and entrenched, corrupt forces, the Kurdish question, and the
potential threat to the regime from the increasing presence of transiting
Islamist extremists. This cable summarizes our assessment of these
vulnerabilities and suggests that there may be actions, statements, and signals
that the USG can send that will improve the likelihood of such opportunities
arising of what had been going on in
the years leading up to that moment.
Dozens more cables, are quoted, with authoritative commentary
arising from them, apparently written by Robert Reuel Naiman, of Verso Books, which calls itself the
largest publisher of radical books in the English-speaking world, with offices
in London and New York, under the heading “WikiLeaks Reveals How the US Aggressively
Pursued Regime Change in Syria, Igniting a Bloodbath.”
And then this conclusion:
And then this conclusion:
“What emerges from these
cables is that, while there was undoubtedly a shift between the policy of the
Bush administration after 2005 and the policy of the Obama administration in
2009–10 with respect to the question of regime change versus engagement, the
shift was substantially less than publicly advertised. The US continued to fund
opposition activities that it believed would, if known to the Syrian
government, cause it to believe that the US was not serious about shifting to
an engagement policy; the US continued to fund these activities as it came
increasingly to believe that the Syrian government was becoming more aware of
them. When they became public, the US denied that they amounted to a
regime-change policy, but we now know from
the US government’s internal communication that the US did not think that the
Syrian government would give credence to such a denial.”
Verily,
there is a huge amount of information available that challenges the establishment
version of events taking place around the world. There can be no doubt that
part of the United States soft power lies in its control over establishment
media and the agencies from which they buy their news and features.
But there also certainly is enough
information available offering an alternative view of events, that one feels
almost obliged to keep plugging away in an effort to find an alternate view, in
pursuit of the sacred objective of knowing all sides of an argument.
In the introduction to my book Memoirs of a Media Maverick, published
in 2003, I quoted the following comment on facts and news, by the late great Irish
wit, former Communist, and persistent shit-disturber, Claud Cockburn (who,
incidentally, gave birth to three leading journalists of our time, the late,
great Alexander, Patrick and Andrew):
“To hear people talking about the
facts you would think that they lay about like pieces of gold ore in the Yukon
days, waiting to be picked up by strenuous prospectors whose subsequent problem
was only to get them to market.
“Such a view is evidently and
dangerously naïve. There are no such facts. Or if there are, they are
meaningless and entirely ineffective; they might, in fact, just as well not be
lying about at all, until the prospector ---the journalist --- puts them into
relation with other facts: presents them, in other words. Then they become as
much a part of a pattern created by him as if he were writing a novel.”
I think that is excellent advice that
everyone should bear in mind before slavishly accepting what someone has
written about almost anything, but especially an event, like those in Venezuela
or Syria, on which the basic facts are
scarce, in dispute, or relatively unknown.
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