Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Hegemony or survival 2

The bombing of Libya on prime-time TV, circa 1986. The USA uses Aticle 51 of the UN Charter as justification - it apparently gives the right to "self-defense against future attack". Chomsky cites this as "perhaps the first explicit formulation of the doctrine of 'preventive war'".

In a section on the domestic agenda, one of the most telling insights is how the age-old method of inspiring fear in the public has been used (for instance in the Reagan era) to maintain political power. It is telling because reading how the media becomes the ally of the state to pound people with the language and images of fear, I realise again how much of what I have in my head was put there on purpose. But not my own purpose, most of the time ... Thus the leader must become the hero and saviour of a self-created crisis. That's one way to write history.

I see that as pretty much what happened when Iraq, a conveniently defenseless country whose destructive threat to the world remains to be proven to this very day, was pumped up as this terrible monster with the face of Senor Saddam. Both the American people and the Iraqi people needed a saviour, apparently. And who would he be? Is it a bird, is it a plane ...? Well, yes and no. They call him: The Cowboy!

Stories of drug trafficking and the imminent terrors associated with drugs in order to invade a country and depose its dictator - and to make the country "democratic" - Panama and one Manuel Noriega is a case in point. The real story appears to have had more to do with instating a USA-friendly business elite who were as corrupt. I guess this is in part what's meant by that famous phrase: "lies and propaganda".

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