The only thing surprising in the major, 11-page piece which appeared in the New York times yesterday debunking the credibility of the so-called "military analysts" who daily appear on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and elsewhere, was the brazenness of the administration's disinformation campaign.
The generals named and pictured in the article were assigned "to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance," the article says. They were motivated in this assignment by their financial ties to military contractors, who reap profit from the very war these same "analysts" are cheerleading on via the national airwaves every day.
Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, (the generals) and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror.
The Times drew no theoretical conclusions from the set of facts they reported. That's not their job ("Just the facts, Ma'am."), and they're not in the business of political theory. However, I could not help noticing that what this story describes is fascism in its purest form.
A government, in conjunction with a corporate hierarchy (Mussolini's "corporatism") which is connected intimately to the government's own military appropriates a society's formerly-independent mass media for the purpose of supplanting independently-gathered and -reported information with official propaganda. The huge mouth, lips, and teeth of the military dicatorship crowd out all other conversation, debate, or noise.
These people have stolen our country. But as Judy Canova might say, it was our own fault. We shouldn't have left our country lying out in the open.
1 comment:
The war economy was supposed keep our economy from tanking. But that works only when a country supplies weapons to other countries that are fighting. The key is not to be fighting.
But never mind all that. War is evil. It takes food from the tables of the world as well as the children who sit at them.
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