History,
truth and humility
Tortilla Con Sal
Enviado
por tortilla en Vie, 22/11/2013 - 10:34
tortilla
con sal, 20 de noviembre 2013
The 2011 NATO onslaught
against the Libyan Jamahiriya confirmed the redundancy of fundamental
conventions of evidence and proof for Western media, corporate and alternative
alike. 2011 was a vintage year for the varieties of moral and intellectual
atrophy that characterize Western public policy discussions. From Libya to
Venezuela, Syria to Zimbabwe or Ivory Coast to Nicaragua, Western intellectual
production confirmed its categorical shift into demented psychological warfare.
It is worth remembering
that events and the evidence for them are determinate, even if our knowledge of
them may be incomplete. Beyond that truism, a true and fair view of given
events depends on our ability to put relevant, appropriate questions enabling an
understanding of the processes of which those events may be a part. That
understanding generates arguments that can be disproved if they are wrong.
In the Western Bloc of
NATO countries and their Pacific allies,
those kinds of questions and arguments faded into the realm of nostalgia during the
brutal, mindless capitalist euphoria of the 1990s. Driven by elite corporate
mendacity on both domestic affairs and on foreign policy, that process
accelerated after 2001. Western populations colluded in their governments'
overseas crimes of aggression while at the same time surrendering historically
hard-won social and economic rights to multinational financial corporations.
Outside the West, people
see its deepening moral and intellectual debacle as inextricable from its
relative economic and military decline. There is a sense in which the endless
falsehoods retailed in Western corporate and alternative media are becoming
progressively more irrelevant. But always there remains the continuing risk of
yet one more vicious military campaign by the sick, old, psychotic West along
with ever more desperate allies like, say, Israel or Saudi Arabia. Equally
desperate, in Latin America, are the West's allies among the region's latent
fascist oligarchies.
The main countries of
the Bolivarian Alliance of the America - Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and
Venezuela – are constant targets of Western governments aided by their
corporate and alternative media. Those media endlessly recycle long disproved
falsehoods and purposefully omit contrary evidence. In Nicaragua's case,
Western media across the political spectrum have been made to look completely
ridiculous by the indisputable success of Sandinista government policies,
despite a hostile international economic and political framework built to serve
multinational corporate power.
Apart from the long
discredited right wing varieties, among the pseudo-leftist falsehoods used to
smear both President Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista government, is the lie
that the FSLN supported the legislation on the Central American Free Trade
Agreement (CAFTA) at the end of 2005. In fact the FSLN deputies voted
unanimously as a united bloc against that treaty. Another example is the lie
that President Ortega's government stripped the social democrat Movimiento
Renovador Sandinista (MRS) of its legal personality prior to the 2008 municipal
elections.
In fact, it was the
fellow opposition Constitutional Liberal Party (PLC) that sought a review of
the MRS party by the independent electoral authority. The MRS failed to meet
the relevant criteria to satisfy that review. They did so clearly on purpose,
ensuring a united opposition vote in Managua's municipal election. In that
electoral campaign, MRS leaders canvassed openly for extreme right wing candidate
Eduardo Montealegre in a cynical alliance with the same PLC that initiated the
review to strip the MRS party of its legality.
Constant repetition of
obsolete false shibboleths works in all the ALBA countries as a kind of
background propaganda chirruping by frantic opposition cicadas awaiting their
next electoral demise. In Nicaragua, the combined right wing opposition parties
command less than 10% electoral loyalty. The social democrat MRS enjoys less
than 1%. Microscopic, anti-democratic pseudo-left groupings have even less
support. One would never realize these facts from international news coverage
in the Western corporate and alternative media whose neocolonial mindset
renders them unable to face facts.
That is equally true of
supposedly prestigious right-wing media outlets like the Economist or allegedly
influential left-wing media outlets like Rebelión. Neither are capable of the
basic humility necessary to acknowledge mistakes clearly evident from even a
cursory review of available sources. That is why people in North America and
Europe interested in Latin America and the Caribbean find themselves
consistently bewildered by events in Nicaragua. The Frente Sandinista de
Liberación Nacional and the Nicaraguan people have left behind the failed
political and economic models currently rotting away in the West and no one
here is looking back.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario