Rob's notebook

If you’re looking for the chief kingpin in the Afghanistan heroin trade, it’s the United States. The American mission has devolved to a Mafiosi-style arrangement that poisons every military and political alliance entered into by the U.S. and its puppet government in Kabul. It is a gangster occupation, in which U.S.-allied drug dealers are put in charge of the police and border patrol, while their rivals are placed on American hit lists, marked for death or capture. As a result, Afghanistan has been transformed into an opium plantation that supplies 90 percent of the world’s heroin.

(via Instapaper)

Chris Hedges reviews Bob McChesney and John Nichols’s new book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism”.

Certainly, as the authors point out, the faux objectivity and neutrality of the traditional news industry hastened the cultural irrelevance of traditional news gathering. The narrowing of debates within the press to the minor differences among the power elite had a debilitating effect on news. The structure of “objectivity” works far better when there are powerful social movements, such as the civil rights movement, that provide an actual alternative and demand a voice. But without these movements the press functions as courtiers in the corridors of power. It dutifully reports the Democratic and Republic positions, a condition that imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. The two parties are in fundamental agreement about the underlying economic, political and military structures which are largely responsible for our decline.

I’m not sure that I agree with Hedges’s overall analysis (“America’s profound cultural shift into collective self-delusion”), but this is still worth reading.

My particular concern with schemes like those proposed by McChesney and Nichols is that perhaps the state-corporate system has a vested interest in the death of good journalism, which Hedges mentions:

The plan proposed by the authors would work only if the public, and our corporate state, recognized and cared about journalism as a vital public good.

And, more directly:

Corporations, which have hijacked the state, are delighted with the demise of journalism.

Democracy, a system ideally designed to challenge the status quo, has been corrupted and tamed to slavishly serve the status quo. We have undergone, as John Ralston Saul writes, a coup d’état in slow motion. And the coup is over. They won. We lost. The abject failure of activists to push corporate, industrialized states toward serious environmental reform, to thwart imperial adventurism or to build a humane policy toward the masses of the world’s poor stems from an inability to recognize the new realities of power. The paradigm of power has irrevocably altered and so must the paradigm of resistance alter.

As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of Chris Hedges. But this article is really, incredibly, smashingly amazing. At 4,000-odd words, it’s quite long, but boy is it worth reading.

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said that “the world” supported the invasion in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks. In truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama Bin Laden”. In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over Bin Laden for trial, Pakistan’s military regime reported, and they were ignored.

(via Instapaper)

The British understood that they were to be lieutenants. Foreign Office officials ruefully observed that guided by “the economic imperialism of American business interests, [Washington is] attempting to elbow us out, under the cloak of a benevolent and avuncular internationalism.” The Minister of State at the Foreign Office commented to his cabinet colleagues that Americans believe “that the United States stands for something in the world — something of which the world has need, something which the world is going to like, something, in the final analysis, which the world is going to take, whether it likes it or not.” He was articulating the real-world version of what is called “Wilsonian idealism” in the international affairs literature, the version that conforms to the historical and internal record.

The text of Noam Chomsky’s 2009 Amnesty International lecture.

(via Instapaper)

Whenever there was a struggle for peace and justice, Howard was there, on the front lines, unflagging in his enthusiasm, and inspiring in his integrity, engagement, eloquence and insight, light touch of humor in the face of adversity, dedication to non-violence, and sheer decency. It is hard even to imagine how many young people’s lives were touched, and how deeply, by his achievements, both in his work and his life.

(via Instapaper)

The central issue at stake in Honduras today – and the spark for the oligarchy’s risky decision to carry out the coup in June – is the increasingly adamant insistence on the part of Honduran social movements for a constituyente, the striking of an assembly to re-write the constitution. It was, indeed, this very question that was to be put to a non-binding referendum on the morning of the coup and it was expected that the people would support the idea overwhelmingly. Like many of its Central and South American neighbours, Honduras’ principle legal code was written during a period dominated by U.S. Cold War imperialism and local comprador quasi-fascists. The legacy of the Operation Condor/School of the Americas era was, among so many other tragedies, legal and political structures that ensured the continued dominance of the elite few and Honduras was a perfect case study.

In fact, the current constitution of Honduras was ratified in 1982, during the period in which it earned the nickname ‘U.S.S. Honduras.’ The most successful resistance group in Honduras in the 1970s was called the National Federation of Honduras Peasants (FENACH) and wasn’t able to muster the kind of strength that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua built, nor even to achieve the limited level of challenge of the guerillas in Guatemala or El Salvador. As a result, Honduras became the perfect base for U.S. operations in Central America, and indeed the Contra Wars against Nicaragua were waged from the U.S. military base at Palmerola, just outside of Tegucigalpa, among countless other interventions and terror campaigns in the region.

A really great article about the coup in Honduras by Tyler Shipley.

(via Instapaper)