The West a long day's journey into night

The West a long day's journey into night

Tortilla con Sal

Enviado por tortilla en Mar, 08/19/2014 - 11:50

tortilla con sal, 19 de agosto 2014

The Alcoholics Anonymous group in Managua recently celebrated their 50th anniversary during a mass public event attended by President Daniel Ortega. The fundamental message President Ortega drew from the meeting was that moral and spiritual processes are the indispensable means to overcome addiction. Of the famous twelve steps promoted by Alcoholics Anonymous, the most important is the first initial acknowledgment that the person concerned recognize they are suffering from a serious illness over which they have lost control.

No message could be more appropriate for people in North America and Europe, where intellectual life is addicted to the insidious demented fiction of Western superiority. Most people in the West really believe the relative prosperity and apparent freedoms they enjoy derive from some inherent moral righteousness. In fact, the rest of the world is well aware that the West built its suave barbarian system of consumer capitalist oligarchy on genocidal conquest, slavery and rapacious imperialist expropriation.

This insidious Western dementia affects all reporting of foreign affairs both in the mainstream corporate propaganda media and most of the Western alternative media. On Latin America, the most egregious examples of this phenomenon recently have been the misrepresentation of US destabilization in Venezuela, of the US judicial assault on Argentina's sovereignty and the hopelessly inaccurate coverage of Nicaragua's interoceanic canal. In the background, ever present, is the sinister precedent of consistently dishonest Western coverage of Cuba.

On Venezuela, the Western media consistently portray President Maduro's government as incompetent and repressive. In fact, the Venezuelan opposition have failed to win power through democratic elections and are now deploying US government designed and funded subversion to destabilize their own country. The Western media misrepresentation of that reality is increasingly exposed as President Maduro and his government successfully implement counter measures to defend Venezuela's democracy.

In Argentina's case, Western media report that the country has defaulted on its debt when what they mean is that one of the hopelessly discredited Western ratings agencies has declared Argentina in default - something very different. Argentina is not in default because it made the relevant payment to the corresponding intermediary bank in the US jurisdiction. In fact, it is a US court working on behalf of elite Wall Street speculators that has prevented the intermediary bank from paying out the relevant instalments on Argentina's debt.

Among the sequels to that judicial intervention on behalf of elite US speculators, Wall Street's International Swaps and Derivatives Association took advantage of the judicial ruling to activate insurance bets against Argentina. In response to this judicial and financial assault, Argentina has sought a remedy in the International Court of Justice against the US government. Argentina argues, rightly, that the US government has allowed a low-level judicial authority in a case affecting a very small minority of US investors to impinge on Argentina's sovereign relations with its international creditors.

In the case of Nicaragua's interoceanic canal, Western media across the board have deliberately misrepresented the facts. Reports have slighted the project's coordinator, Hong Kong entrepreneur Wang Jing, in terms bordering on outright racism. Coverage of the project's environmental aspects have promoted tendentious hypothetical concerns while deliberately ignoring the overriding environmental arguments in favour of the canal. Likewise, Western media have misreported and falsified the canal's unanswerable economic and commercial rationale.

More recently, as the project gets closer to its scheduled start date, Western media reports have become more realistic. For example, supposedly prestigious magazines like Forbes and the Economist have finally woken up to the fact that the canal is a vital infrastructure development for world trade and will probably start on schedule later this year. Even so Forbes published comments from discredited Nicaraguan opposition figure Monica Baltodano questioning the project's legality. Typically, Forbes omitted to mention that all legal challenges to the canal were dismissed by Nicaragua's Supreme Court in 2013.

Even these egregious examples of Western media dishonesty, laziness and stupidity over Latin America are insignificant in comparison with the evil propaganda misrepresentation currently deployed against Russia. Western coverage of the fascist Ukraine regime's genocidal war against the civilian population of Novorossiya copies faithfully the lies used against the governments of Ivory Coast, Libya and Syria from 2011 onwards. The West is addicted to its lies, because admitting to them would involve acknowledging how sick their governments and societies have been for so very long.

Until the West via its governments and media take that first step, the world will continue to be plagued by Western injustice and warmongering. US and European expansionism now directly affects Russia and, in the South China Sea, China. In Africa, France, Britain and the US compensate with military power for the terrorist sequel to their destruction of Libya and their inability to compete with China's growing influence. For Latin America, attacks and mendacious coverage in the Western media prove how close the region has now come to emancipation from the long day's journey into night of North America and Europe.

http://www.tortillaconsal.com/albared/node/4404