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[RE THE ISRAELI GENOCIDE]
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.
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Wartime Cafe
FREE PALESTINE TV
Laith Marouf sits down with Prof M. Marandi
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“Wartime Cafe” EP11: Dr Marandi “Nasrallah assassination: beauty of resistance is what motivates us.”
Free Palestine TVSep 29, 2024 BEIRUT
Dr Mohammad Marandi sits down with Laith Marouf under the buzzing sounds of Zionist drones hovering over Beirut, Lebanon, and they have a heart-to-heart about the loss of Sayyed Nasrallah, and the sacrifices expected on the path to the assured liberation from Zionism and Imperialism.
Laith & Dr Marandi’s memorable passages:
Despite the hard price…there’s beauty in this resistance…
[RE THE ISRAELI GENOCIDE]
The West…they’re partners in these crimes. They want to justify the crimes. The legacy media are completely implicated in these crimes. [They allow] the Empire of Lies to exist…the most hypocritical [empire] in history. Some day, when we attain liberation…these media accomplices, these “journalists”, will be brought to trial, for enabling these [horrific] crimes. [Truth is] for journalists in the West…if you don’t toe the line, you’re out.
Now that the Empire is getting weaker, they’re shutting down free speech…[and worse measures are likely to come…] When the Empire was stronger, this “liberal capitalist Empire”…they allowed some freedom of expression. This also [had an advantage for them]…it “proved” [to ignorant and superficial thinkers] that the West was really a democracy, a land of freedom. But, [the reality] is that the liberal capitalist establishment has created this misery.
The genocide has changed the world.
We may or may not survive these wars…but if we don’t, we know there will be others to take our place.
Camera/editing: Hadi Hotait Donate/Watch/Share elsewhere https://FreePalestine.Video
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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.
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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
12 comments
A correction on what Dr. Marandi said, namely that the US and Israel would be partners. That is not true because in fact all that is happening in Near Asia is the will of the US government and executing its foreign policies, which are based on proxy wars. Israel
is executing US foreign policy in its regional wars as much as is the war in Ukraine fighting Russia (helped by European vassals like the UK and France). All that is happening on the Western globe is subject to US demands, supported by its financial dominance. What distinguishes Ukraine from Israel are the factional interests that control the US government. If these would be eliminated in a democratic manner, only then aggressive US foreign policies could be curtailed. The nexus of the problem lies within the US.
The strategy for Near Asia is clear. Like with Ukraine where the US forced Russia to respond, so it is trying to provoke Iran. By allowing Israel to attack Gaza, thereby provoking Hezbollah, which forced Iran to respond (who wisely keeps that at minimal level), Washington hopes to create a proxy war between Israel and Iran. And like with Ukraine making Israel the dupe.
The Biden-cabal wants to have their Israel proxy war with Iran speeded up before the election or at least soon after, with minimal resistance from the other party. Iran as crafty as China in diplomacy and equally planning ahead is trying to slow the hotheads in Washington and Israel down, where every action is made ad hoc and who cannot conceive of another culture being more advanced than their own. It is the crux of the differences between the East and the West of this globe (depending from which direction you judge), so maybe that old colonialist Kipling was right after all” East is East and West is West, etc.”
The Near Asia resistance knows that the US uses proxy methods for all its foreign policies. From Boris Johnson who is responsible for the continuation of the Russia/Ukraine war in 2021 when both were ready for a ceasefire, to the present Israel/Hezbollah/Iran war. It is presented as a caution by Biden not to attack Iran’s nuclear centers, which in a proxy strategy absolves the US from any responsibility. But it shows the Janus-mask tactic when at the same time the US stacks Israel with money and weaponry. No more masses of fallen Vietnam heroes arriving in the US. Deferred in such planning is the possibility that these proxy executors could turn onto the US when the money flow falters.
You’ll see that the utterly Machiavellian strategy you outline is real when the whore media begins to feature more stories about Israel’s criminality. Blackening its character (which will only require telling the truth about it) will be the first step toward its betrayal by Washington. The media posture is your bellwether. The whores in the political class will follow.
An interesting comment, because it reveals that the US media make policies.
This is not always true of course but they seem to have a preponderance in power, where it concerns war (vide the Hearst story about Cuba which caused the Spanish war) and the struggle within the US two-party system: a candidate for the presidency without merit versus a New York real-estate man who “will sell the US to Russia”. Telling the truth hardly enters in. What one hears and sees on television or reads in the several daily papers reflects the opinion of its elite owners (not like Pravda, the government publication, meaning ‘Truth’). What keeps the American mind in bondage are its media, a novel situation, but what prevents any renewal of the republic.
But the mass media are not self-directing in their lies and outrageous biases. Like any puppet, they lack agency, although they do a good job of seeming autonomous. The media simply represent the viewpoints and policies favored by the ruling corporate elites, operating in any advanced capitalist society, in almost seamless integration with the political class. The top tiers of the working media discharge their functions according to their own self-interest (careerism), class congruencies with the ruling order, and professional acculturation. In general no one is needed to tell them how to handle “the news”. Their talent to read the wishes of their masters is sorted out and verified at the moment of hiring.
This is especially true when that nation is also an empire. The whole global capitalist world is an elaborate power pyramid in which every member occupies its assigned place in the hierarchy under the dominant hegemon (these days, although in decline, still the US). In a way it resembles a neofeudal order. That’s why to hear capitalist globalists elites and mouthpieces talk incessantly about democracy is the height of hypocrisy.
INDEED
What I wanted to express is that the elite, surrounded and protected by like-minded personnel are unassailable, while their main media are fragile. The elite does not have to give orders for a direction that the news must take, it is automatically slanted to protect the status quo. And in this capitalist society there is no room for thought alternatives, because they are automatically ruled out as crazy phantasies. And all those who think that Trump with his crude, but honest outbursts might be a choice from the grimacing posterchild Kamala, better keep their mouth shut, which reflects the totalitarian and closed thought pattern of this society, where any alternative to conventionalism is suspect and often even persecuted.
The bourgeois structure of US society is all-encompassing and penetrates all inter-personal relations. The fragility of the propaganda machine, however, rests exactly on its utter unreasonableness and obvious untruths. Every untutored listener, reader or viewer intuitively knows that she/he is being manipulated. That is why Trump is popular with the hoi polloi, exactly because he has no polish. Only the masses of obfuscated elite-hungry bourgeois on both ocean coasts will gladly humiliate themselves to swallow the glossy nonsense that is being fed to them. That is where the main media is near danger, as is shown by the protesting students. More young people are waking up to the real threat of media propaganda, because what they are being fed does not align at all with the reality they encounter via the Internet.
That large segments of the population accept the wailing over the horrid October 7, 2023 events while keeping their eyes and ears shut over the consequences of the subsequent war against women and children, is an anomaly, but an aspect of official propaganda. That the protestors are being libeled as being antisemitic is proof of the pseudo-fascist basis of bourgeois society. Even the images of destroyed Gaza in the main media have no influence, which is typical of the mind-blowing limited thought horizon of technically educated and mechanized humankind. The US which directs wellnigh everything that happens in the Western hemisphere is a major success in its mechanical consumerism, which is the envy of the world, but morally and ethically it is itself a victim of the automatized mind. It accepts every illogical but morally impoverished input from the main media, from the carefully airbrushed ‘news hostesses’, who are as victimized as the viewers. The student protests are a wake-up call for the young to deconstruct these fairy tales.
Brilliant comment, Gui. With one small quibble. You state: “from the carefully airbrushed ‘news hostesses’, who are as victimized as the viewers.” They are certainly, in most cases, “victims” of the universal brainwash that also afflicts some run-of-the-mill ruling-class types, the “follow-our-music” nonthinking legion. But the results of swallowing this mind poison are different, qualitatively enormously different. Such people enjoy the benefits of living in the privileged tiers of society, albeit members of a criminal and utterly depraved social order. Their everyday lives are not affected in the least by such an agreement with the official narrative. For the masses, however, (a category that comprises the unwitting executors of ruling-class crimes, such as the imperial military and police), the situation fractures into various subcategories. Let’s call these tiers the “milder victims” and the “acute victims”.
The “milder victims” comprise those who live “lives of quiet desperation”—so to speak—imprisoned by their working class status here and throughout the West, utterly powerless to choose their destiny, and subject to perennial economic distress, political and judicial persecutions, and other afflictions inherent in living under a vicious class-divided system such as capitalism. For the “acute victims”—themselves a sub-category of the “milder victims”— you have all those who suffer the injuries of imperialism literally in the flesh, through various forms of assault, exploitation and subjugation, and even arbitrary death, of which Gaza and similar zones is today’s most eloquent example. That’s why you cannot compare the existential pain of a media whore like Nora O’Donnell (CBS), Dana Bash (CNN), or the petulant Margaret Brennan (CBS/Face the Nation), all millionaires, by the way, with the pain of any mother or regular woman in Gaza.
Of course, digressing a bit, the entire top tier of the Western media class —along with the political and academic whores and billionaires directly involved in the filthy business of managing the Empire—should some day stand before a new Nuremberg tribunal, as befits major agents and accomplices in horrendous crimes against humanity.
I accept your correction though frankly often mental and emotional pain is far worse than physical pain. The deprivations presently encountered in the West are simply colonialism brought home and what the masses (milder or more acutely) feel and endure is what was for eons imposed on colonies far and wide. Everyone suffers under capitalism and though one may envy the media monsters, the emptiness and unbearable desperation after a life full of lies is hard to endure. I do not feel sorry for oppressors but I do not envy them either, they are indeed the executioners for a very bad system.
Sorry, Gui. Still don’t buy it. The idea that “psychological pain”, “mental pain” is significant in the PMC class, the new Mandarin class in the corporate world, is a projection of bourgie sensitivity. The media and political whores, for the most part, like countless other vermin who profit in the decomposing imperialist order, are not—by and large—distinguished by their robust sense of moral conscience. People like Gazans, being bombed to smithereens ALSO have enormous mental pain to deal with, like the pain of oppression, the pain of ubiquitous torture and danger, of seeing their loved ones blown to bits with complete impunity, and so forth.