April 24, 2007

The Guardian on "Fascist America"

Stupidity on parade. An excerpt (edited for truthiniess):

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, Stalin's Soviet Union, Cuba under Castro, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s from Chairman Mao forward, North Korea under the Kims, Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, Saddam's Iraq, the Khmer Rouge, the Taliban, Venezuela under Chavez - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already. . . .

Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. After making his accusations, Wilson was found dead in his home became a huge celebrity. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed identified as a well-known CIA spy analyst - a form of retaliation that ended her career caused her to leave her CIA desk job behind for an empty life of fame and wealth. . .

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out illustrated, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House mainstream media directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

By Ragnar Danneskjold, Typical Bitter Gun-Clinger at 01:54 PM | |