Jimmy and Ben Norton (The Grayzone) compare coverage in US papers and tv of events in Cuba and narcostate Colombia, which, no matter how many citizens it represses and murders, cannot ever get to be called “authoritarian,” “regime”, “dictatorship”, “murderous”, or the other tendentious epithets used against nations that struggle to free themselves from the oligarchs’ noose.
THIERRY MEYSSAN—While still in Caracas, I was invited to a dinner together with my companion. When our plates arrived, my friend didn’t feel very hungry, so we switched them discreetly since, for some obscure reason, I had received a conspicuously smaller helping than most people. Back in our hotel, he was suddenly overcome by trembling, loss of consciousness and was rolling on the floor while foaming at the mouth. When the doctors arrived, they immediately exclaimed: this man has been poisoned. They saved him in the nick of time. Two days later, a dozen uniformed officers of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service came to apologize and to let us know they had identified the foreign agent behind the operation. Now in a wheelchair, it took my friend six months to recover.
ERIC ZUESSE—So, during the first three years, she had said no to sex with him, but then he got promoted to the Politburo and ceased pursuing her; but he retired seven years later, and “Taking into consideration the affection I had for you seven years ago, I agreed… yes, we had sex.”
How, then, do the Western ’news’-media represent this as having been a case of “sexual assault”?
After leaving The Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship of the CIA and the press during the Cold War years. His 25,000-word cover story, published in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977, is reprinted here.
LEE CAMP—The government can’t truly represent the people unless the people know what the government is up to. But we’re not told most of what the government does. And when a whistleblower reveals what our government is up to — or a journalist like Julian Assange — they’re horribly persecuted and imprisoned. Furthermore, even if you wanted to claim we have a free democracy in the US, the two corporate parties agree on 90% of the core issues of our country. They agree on capitalism, on militarism, on Wall Street, on environmental destruction, on unlimited surveillance, on a massive prison state, on dystopian policing — they agree on just about everything. So if our choice is between those two parties, then it’s no choice at all. None of our elections are legit in this regard.