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Mourning in America
By Norman Solomon
June 11— If journalism is history’s first draft, the
death of Ronald Reagan has caused a step-up in the mass production of
falsified history.
It’s mourning in America.
The main technique is omission. People who suffered from the Reagan
presidency have no media standing today. It’s not cool to mention
victims of his policies in, for example, Central America.
President Reagan lauded and subsidized the Contra guerrillas —
extolling them as “freedom fighters” while they terrorized
the population in Nicaragua, killing thousands of civilians. And he
proudly funneled large-scale support to governments aligned with death
squads murdering thousands more in Guatemala and El Salvador.
With all the media-fueled mourning in America, there’s been none
left for the victims of Reaganite policies in Angola, either. His tireless
support for the guerrilla forces of Unita “freedom fighter”
Jonas Savimbi deserves much of the credit for making Angola the artificial
limb capital of the world. Reagan saw to it that Uncle Sam walked in
the bloody footsteps of colonial Portugal and Apartheid South Africa
to sustain Savimbi’s monstrous warfare.
“Every year since the mid-1980s, I have interviewed dozens of displaced
peasants who described attacks on their villages by Unita, kidnapping
of young men and boys, looting, beatings, and killings, while in hospital
beds the rows of mutilated women bore witness to the mining of their
fields,” journalist Victoria Brittain wrote in the New Statesman
magazine a decade ago. “Defectors from Unita told more chilling
stories of mass rallies at the headquarters in Jamba where women were
burned alive as witches. These were not stories the outside world wanted
to hear about Unita, whose leader was regularly received at the White
House.” Very warmly. By Ronald Reagan.
Mainstream news outlets encourage us to mourn his passing but not to
grieve a whit for his victims.
Reagan lavished big money from the US Treasury on anti-Soviet mujahadeen
— “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan who evolved into
groupings like “al Qaida” and the Taliban. Yet his supposed
idealism rarely gets a critical look through the obit-omit media lens.
Since he passed away, American media outlets have drowned the country
in nonstop veneration for Reagan as a symbol of devotion to principle.
There’s precious little US media space for the kind of reporting
that Agence France Presse provided a few days after he died: “Reagan,
determined to check arch-foe Iran, opened a back door to Iraq through
which flowed US intelligence and hundreds of millions of dollars in
loan guarantees even as Washington professed neutrality in Baghdad’s
war with Tehran... Sales of UH-1H helicopters and Hughes MD-500 Defender
helicopters were approved by Washington. Though sold as civilian aircraft,
nobody objected when they were quickly converted for military use.”
President Reagan was in the habit of telling whoppers. His tales ranged
far and wide: to deny environmental degradation, or blithely pretend
that widespread human rights violations by US-backed regimes didn’t
exist, or denigrate low-income people in the United States. Yet now,
more than ever, he’s being hailed as the Great Communicator.
Promoting huge tax breaks for multimillionaires and large corporations,
he presided over an unprecedented transfer of wealth to the already
rich at the expense of everyone else. But today’s dominant media
images present him as a beloved populist hero.
That’s media mourning in America.
He’s being hailed as a champion of “small government”
— yet he vastly increased the size of Defense Department budgets
and methodically appointed federal judges who enlarged the intrusive
powers of government.
President Reagan spoke out for labor rights in Poland while spearheading
anti-union measures in the United States and avidly supporting regimes
on several continents that repressed workers and oversaw systematic
murders of labor activists. Now, rewritten media history is touting
him as a friend to working people.
It’s media mourning in America.
He was a president so immersed in anti-gay bigotry and so bereft of
non-Hallmark-style compassion that from the time the Centers for Disease
Control announced the discovery of AIDS in mid-1981, until 1987, he
couldn’t bring himself to publicly utter the name of the deadly
disease — part of a policy approach that surely cost many thousands
of lives. Yet he is being lauded by countless pundits for his sunny
disposition.
Reagan thumbed his nose at basic civil rights legislation, including
efforts to protect voting rights. In words and deeds, he conveyed disinterest
in helping to move the country beyond the curse of racism.
But his media persona endures as a man with a big smile and an even
bigger heart.
The mourning in America is overwhelming. But the country is starved
for honesty.
Source: Common Dreams
The terror hour
Paramilitaries openly discuss planned attacks
on Cuba and Venezuela on Miami TV
June 11— Cuban television June 11 broadcast
remarkable segments of a one hour program on Miami TV Channel 41, in
which known paramilitaries from the Florida based Comandos F4 organization
openly spoke of their preparation for an armed attack against Cuba.
In moments of near-hysteria, the leader of Comandos F4, Rodolfo Frometa,
said that his organization has people inside and outside Cuba ready
to carry out armed acts against the Cuban government. Dressed in fatigues,
as were the others of his organization present in the studio, Frometa
said that his group trained with AK47 semi-automatic weapons—arms,
he said, that were legally obtained in the United States although he
admitted he had no paperwork to prove it.
The program was hosted by Oscar Asa, the nephew of former Cuban dictator
Fulgencio Batista. Batista was responsible for the murder of thousands
of Cubans until he was forced out by revolutionary forces in 1959. Asa
seemed to enjoy posing provocative questions relating to assassination
in what critics on Cuba’s nightly televised Round Table classed
as openly violating US federal law.
It is illegal in the US to defend terrorist actions on TV. The promotion
of the assassination of another nation’s leader is also illegal
under the US Neutrality Act. Nonetheless, commented round table participants,
these men were able to openly sit in a studio dressed for war and happily
discuss the different armaments they were using to train paramilitaries
to attack Cuba, and get away with it. There couldn’t be better
proof of the US government’s complicity with such would-be terrorists.
Adding weight to recent accusations of Venezuela’s President Hugo
Chavez, former Venezuelan army captain Eduardo Garcia was also present
in full uniform to discuss the help Comandos F4 were giving in his efforts
to bring down Chavez by force. Chavez has frequently charged that Miami
Cuban-American terrorist organizations are involved with Venezuelans
seeking to assassinate him.
The host of the Round Table program, Randy Alonso, simply asked viewers
to form their own conclusions after seeing such an astonishing program,
commenting that the message that Frometa gave was clear: his paramilitary
organization was ready and trained — it just needed the money.
And, said Alonso, the money is there — $36 million recently earmarked
by the US government to support such groups.
Source: CounterPunch
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