Category Archives: imperialism

To Liberate Cambodia

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By Robert J. Burrowes

A long-standing French protectorate briefly occupied by Japan during World War II, Cambodia became independent in 1953 as the French finally withdrew from Indochina. Under the leadership of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia remained officially neutral, including during the subsequent US war on Indochina. However, by the mid-1960s, parts of the eastern provinces of Cambodia were bases for North Vietnamese Army and National Liberation Front (NVA/NLF) forces operating against South Vietnam and this resulted in nearly a decade of bombing by the United States from 4 October 1965. See ‘Bombs Over Cambodia: New Light on US Air War’.

In 1970 Sihanouk was ousted in a US-supported coup led by General Lon Nol. See ‘A Special Supplement: Cambodia’. The following few years were characterized by an internal power struggle between Cambodian elites and war involving several foreign countries, but particularly including continuation of the recently commenced ‘carpet bombing’ of Cambodia by the US Air Force.

On 17 April 1975 the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), otherwise known as the Khmer Rouge, took control of Cambodia. Following four years of ruthless rule by the Chinese-supported Khmer Rouge, initially under Pol Pot, they were defeated by the Vietnamese army in 1979 and the Vietnamese occupation authorities established the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), installing Heng Samrin and other pro-Vietnamese Communist politicians as leaders of the new government. Heng was succeeded by Chan Sy as Prime Minister in 1981.

Following the death of Chan Sy, Hun Sen became Prime Minister of Cambodia in 1985 and, despite a facade of democracy, he and the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) have been in power ever since. This period has notably included using the army to purge a feared rival in a bloody coup conducted in 1997. Hun Sen’s co-Prime Minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was ousted and fled to Paris while his supporters were arrested, tortured and some were summarily executed.

The current main opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) was founded in 2012 by merging the Sam Rainsy Party and the Human Rights Party. Emblematic of Cambodia’s ‘democratic’ status, more than two dozen opposition members and critics have been locked up in the past year alone and the CNRP leader, Kem Sokha, known for his nonviolent, politically tolerant views, is currently imprisoned at a detention centre in Tboung Khmum Province following his arrest on 3 September 2017 under allegations of treason, espionage and for orchestrating anti-government demonstrations in 2013-2014. These demonstrations were triggered by widespread allegations of electoral fraud during the Cambodian general election of 2013. See ‘Sokha arrested for “treason”, is accused of colluding with US to topple the government’.

On 16 November 2017 the CNRP was dissolved by Cambodia’s highest court and 118 of its members, including Sokha and exiled former leader Sam Rainsy, were banned from politics for five years.

 

Cambodian Society

Socially, Cambodia is primarily Khmer with ethnic populations of Chinese, Vietnamese, Cham, Thai and Lao. It has a population of 16 million people. The pre-eminent religion is Buddhism. The adult literacy rate is 75%; few Cambodians speak a European language limiting access to western literature. Most students complete 12 years of (low quality public) school but tertiary enrollment is limited. As in all countries, education (reinforced by state propaganda through the media) serves to intimidate and indoctrinate students into obedience of elites. Discussion of national politics in a school class is taboo and such discussions are rare at tertiary level. This manifests in the narrow range of concerns that mobilize student action: personal outcomes such as employment opportunities. Issues such as those in relation to peace, the environment and refugees do not have a significant profile. In short, the student population generally is neither well informed nor politically engaged.

However, many other issues engage at least some Cambodians, with demonstrations, strikes and street blockades being popular tactics, although the lack of strategy means that outcomes are usually limited and, despite commendable nonviolent discipline in many cases, violent repression is not effectively resisted. Issues of concern to workers, particularly low wages in a country with no minimum wage law, galvanize some response. See, for example, ‘Protests, Strikes Continue in Cambodia: Though their occupations differ, Cambodian workers are united in their push for a living wage’. Garment workers are a significant force because their sector is important to the national economy. Land grabbing and lack of housing mobilize many people but usually fail to attract support beyond those effected. See, for example, ‘Housing Activists Clash With Police in Street Protest’. Environmental issues, such as deforestation and natural resource depletion, fail to mobilize the support they need to be effective.

Having noted that, however, Cambodian activists require enormous courage to take nonviolent action as the possibility of violent state repression in response to popular mobilization is a real one, as illustrated above and documented in the Amnesty International report ‘Taking to the streets: Freedom of peaceful assembly in Cambodia’ from 2015.

Perhaps understandably, given their circumstances, international issues, such as events in the Middle East, North Korea and the plight of the Rohingya in neighbouring Myanmar are beyond the concern of most Cambodians.

Economically, Cambodians produce traditional goods for small local households with industrial production remaining low in a country that is still industrializing. Building on agriculture (especially rice), tourism and particularly the garment industry, which provided the basis for the Cambodian export sector in recent decades, the dictatorship has been encouraging light manufacturing, such as of electronics and auto-parts, by establishing ‘special economic zones’ that allow cheap Cambodian labour to be exploited. Most of the manufacturers are Japanese and despite poor infrastructure (such as lack of roads and port facilities), poor production management, poor literacy and numeracy among the workers, corruption and unreliable energy supplies, Cambodian factory production is slowly rising to play a part in Japan’s regional supply chain. In addition, Chinese investment in the construction sector has grown enormously in recent years and Cambodia is experiencing the common problem of development being geared to serve elite commercial interests and tourists rather than the needs (such as affordable housing) of ordinary people or the environment. See ‘China’s construction bubble may leave Cambodia’s next generation without a home’.

Environmentally, Cambodia does little to conserve its natural resources. For example, between 1990 and 2010, Cambodia lost 22% of its forest cover, or nearly 3,000,000 hectares, largely to logging. There is no commitment to gauging environmental impact before construction projects begin and the $US800m Lower Sesan 2 Dam, in the northeast of the country, has been widely accused of being constructed with little thought given to local residents (who will be evicted or lose their livelihood when the dam reservoir fills) or the project’s environmental impact.

Beyond deforestation (through both legal and illegal logging) then, environmental destruction in Cambodia occurs as a result of large scale construction and agricultural projects which destroy important wildlife habitats, but also through massive (legal and illegal) sand mining – see ‘Shifting Sand: How Singapore’s demand for Cambodian sand threatens ecosystems and undermines good governance’ – poaching of endangered and endemic species, with Cambodian businesses and political authorities, as well as foreign criminal syndicates and many transnational corporations from all over the world implicated in the various aspects of this corruptly-approved and executed destruction.

In the words of Cambodian researcher Tay Sovannarun: ‘The government just keeps doing business as usual while the rich cliques keep extracting natural resources and externalizing the cost to the rest of society.’ Moreover, three members of the NGO Mother Nature – Sun Mala, Try Sovikea and Sim Somnang – recently served nearly a year in prison for their efforts to defend the environment and the group was dissolved by the government in September 2017. See ‘Environmental NGO Mother Nature dissolved’.

 

Cambodian Politics

Politically, Cambodians are largely naïve with most believing that they live in a ‘democracy’ despite the absence of its most obvious hallmarks such as civil and political rights, the separation of powers including an independent judiciary, free and fair elections, the right of assembly and freedom of the press (with the English-language newspaper The Cambodia Daily recently closed down along with some radio stations). And this is an accurate assessment of most members of the political leadership of the CNRP as well.

Despite a 30-year record of political manipulation by Hun Sen and the CPP – during which ‘Hun Sen has made it clear that he does not respect the concept of free and fair elections’: see ‘30 Years of Hun Sen: Violence, Repression, and Corruption in Cambodia’ – which has included obvious corruption of elections through vote-rigging but also an outright coup in 1997 and the imprisonment or exile of opposition leaders since then, most Cambodians and their opposition leaders still participate in the charade that they live in a ‘democracy’ which could result in the defeat of Hun Sen and the CPP at a ‘free and fair’ election. Of course, there are exceptions to this naïveté, as a 2014 article written by Mu Sochua, veteran Cambodian politician and former minister of women’s affairs in a Hun Sen government, demonstrates. See ‘Crackdown in Cambodia’.

Moreover, as Sovannarun has noted: most Cambodians ‘still think international pressure is effective in keeping the CPP from disrespecting democratic principles which they have violated up until this day. Right now they wait for US and EU sanctions in the hope that the CPP will step back.’ See, for example, ‘The Birth of a Dictator’. He asks: ‘Even assuming it works, when will Cambodians learn to rely on themselves when the ruling party causes the same troubles again? Are they going to ask for external help like this every time and expect their country to be successfully democratized?’

The problem, Sovannarun argues, is that ‘Cambodians in general do not really understand what democracy is. Their views are very narrow. For them, democracy is just an election. Many news reports refer to people as “voters” but in Khmer, this literally translates as “vote owners” as if people cannot express their rights or power beside voting.’

Fortunately, recent actions by the CPP have led to opposition leaders and some NGOs finally declaring the Hun Sen dictatorship for what it is. See, for example, ‘The Birth of a Dictator’. But for Sovannarun, ‘democratization ended in 1997. The country should be regarded as a dictatorship since then. The party that lost the election in 1993 still controlled the national military, the police and security force, and the public administration, eventually using military force to establish absolute control in 1997. How is Cambodia still a democracy?’

However, recent comprehensive research undertaken by Global Witness goes even further. Their report Hostile Takeover ‘sheds light on a huge network of secret deal-making and corruption that has underpinned Hun Sen’s 30-year dictatorial reign of murder, torture and the imprisonment of his political opponents’. See ‘Hostile Takeover: The corporate empire of Cambodia’s ruling family’ and ‘Probe: Companies Worth $200M Linked to Cambodian PM’s Family’.

So what are the prospects of liberating Cambodia from its dictatorship?

To begin, there is little evidence to suggest that leadership for any movement to do so will come from within formal political ranks. Following the court-ordered dissolution of the CNRP on 16 November 2017 – see ‘Cambodia top court dissolves main opposition CNRP party’ – at the behest of Hun Sen, ‘half of their 55 members of parliament fled the country’. And this dissolution was preceded by actions that had effectively neutralized the opposition, with two dozen opposition members (including CNRP leader Kem Sokha) and critics imprisoned in the past year alone, as reported above, and the rapid flight of Opposition Deputy President Mu Sochua on 3 October after allegedly being notified by a senior official that her arrest was imminent. See ‘Breaking: CNRP’s Mu Sochua flees country following “warning” of arrest’. But while Mu Sochua called for a protest gathering after she had fled, understandably, nobody dared to protest: ‘Who dares to protest if their leader runs for their life?’ Sovannarun asks.

Of course, civil society leadership is fraught with danger too. Prominent political commentator and activist Kem Ley, known for his trenchant criticism of the Hun Sen dictatorship, was assassinated on 10 July 2016 in Phnom Penh. See ‘Shooting Death of Popular Activist Roils Cambodia’ and ‘Q&A With Kem Ley: Transparency on Hun Sen Family’s Business Interests is Vital’. Ley was the third notable activist to be killed following the union leader Chea Vichea in 2004 – see ‘Who Killed Chea Vichea?’ – and environmental activist Wutty Chut in 2012. See ‘Cambodian Environmental Activist Is Slain’. But they are not the only activists to suffer this fate.

In addition, plenty of politicians, journalists and activists have been viciously assaulted by the security forces and members of Hun Sen’s bodyguard unit – see, for example, ‘Dragged and Beaten: The Cambodian Government’s Role in the October 2015 Attack on Opposition Politicians’ – and/or imprisoned by the dictatorship. See ‘Cambodia: Quash Case Against 11 Opposition Activists: No Legal Basis for Trumped-Up Charges, Convictions, and Long Sentences’. In fact, Radio Free Asia keeps a record of ‘Cambodian Opposition Politicians and Activists Behind Bars’ for activities that the dictatorship does not like, including defending human rights, land rights and the natural environment.

Moreover, in another recent measure of the blatant brutality of the dictatorship, Hun Sen publicly suggested that opposition politicians Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha ‘would already be dead’ had he known they were promising to ‘organise a new government’ in the aftermath of the highly disputed 2013 national election result. See ‘Rainsy and Sokha “would already be dead”: PM’. He also used a government-produced video to link the CNRP with US groups in fomenting a ‘colour revolution’ in Cambodia. See ‘Government ups plot accusations with new video linking CNRP and US groups to “colour revolutions”’.

In one response to Hun Sen’s ‘would already be dead’ statement, British human rights lawyer Richard Rogers, who had filed a complaint asking the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate the Cambodian ruling elite for widespread human rights violations in 2014, commented that it was simply more evidence of the government’s willingness to persecute political dissidents. ‘It shows that he is willing to order the murder of his own people if they challenge his rule’. Moreover: ‘These are not the words of a modern leader who claims to lead a democracy.’ See ‘Rainsy and Sokha “would already be dead”: PM’. Whether Hun Sen is even sane is a question that no-one asks.

So what can Cambodians do? Fortunately, there is a long history of repressive regimes being overthrown by nonviolent grassroots movements. And nonviolent action has proven powerfully effective in Cambodia as the Buddhist monk Maha Gosananda, and his supporters demonstrated on their 19-day peace walk from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh through war ravaged Khmer Rouge territory in Cambodia in May 1993, defying the expectations of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) coordinators at the time that they would be killed by the Khmer Rouge. See ‘Maha Gosananda, a true peace maker’. However, for the Hun Sen dictatorship to be removed, Cambodians will be well served by a thoughtful and comprehensive strategy that takes particular account of their unique circumstances.

A framework to plan and implement a strategy to remove the dictatorship is explained in Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy with Sovannarun’s Khmer translation of this strategy here.

This strategic framework explains what is necessary to remove the dictatorship and, among consideration of many vital issues, elaborates what is necessary to maintain strategic coordination when leaders are at high risk of assassination, minimize the risk of violent repression while also ensuring that the movement is not hijacked by government or foreign provocateurs whose purpose is to subvert the movement by destroying its nonviolent character – see, for example, ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’ – as well as deal with foreign governments (such as those of China, the European Union, Japan and the USA) who (categorically or by inaction) support the dictatorship, sometimes by supplying military weapons suitable for use against the domestic population.

Sovannarun is not optimistic about the short-term prospects for his country: Too many mistakes have been repeated too often. But he is committed to the nonviolent struggle to liberate Cambodia from its dictatorship and recognizes that the corrupt electoral process cannot restore democracy or enable Cambodians to meaningfully address the vast range of social, political, economic and environmental challenges they face.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Feelings First
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

How To Create NPR’s Propaganda – As Seen In a Hit Piece Against Me

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By Lee Camp

Source: Naked Capitalism

I never thought I’d be the target of an NPR attack piece. Through my twenties I even looked to NPR as an outlet full of good, progressive, thoughtful reporting – You know, the soothing voices occasionally interrupted by music no one really listens to but that sounds good between soft-spoken ivy league journalists over the age of 50.  Everything about NPR subtly reinforced the idea, “Everything is fine. You’re probably a middle to upper class white person or you hope to be one day, and that’s just great. Everything is fine.” They might not SAY that, but they say that. And for a long time, I was cool with that message.

Then I woke up. About the time NPR was avoiding Occupy Wall Street – or when they did cover it, acting like those of us who supported it were brainless hippies without a point or at least none that would fit easily into the lives of suburbanites with two kids, one cat, and a robust retirement account. In hindsight I should’ve woken up sooner. I should’ve seen the truth about the time most NPR shows were pushing for war in Iraq, buying into the WMD lie. Or maybe I should’ve realized the truth when Kevin Klose took over as President of NPR in 1998. Klose came straight from a nice seat as director of the US Information Agency, described as “a United States agency devoted to ‘public diplomacy’ (AKA propaganda).” So when you have one of the top government propagandists as your president, one can assume your reporting is slightly biased.

Anyway, that leads me to today. A couple days after NPR’s Weekend Edition hosted by Scott Simon did a rather awesome attack piece on me and my TV show Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp which airs on RT America. I’d like to walk you through how to write such beautiful propaganda, as I did following the NY Times smear job against me, which sounded shockingly similar (more on that later).

STEP ONE: Create a subconscious association to old Cold War Russian propaganda

Scott Simon opens his show with “Russian programming is no longer breathless proclamations about tractor production or accolades to the Kremlin. Look at a show like Redacted Tonight.” This opening sentence essentially tells the listener that everything they’re about to hear is modern Russian propaganda. Sure, he doesn’t use the word “propaganda” yet, but when you say something was ONCE accolades to the Kremlin and is now Redacted Tonight, you are priming your audience, giving them a subconscious opinion of the target before they even know what it is. This would be like saying “American programming is no longer ads where a little girl with a daisy is killed by a nuclear blast. Now it’s the Daily Show.” If you had never heard of the Daily Show, you would assume it must be a modern version of a girl obliterated by a nuclear bomb.

STEP TWO: Lie by omission

Scott Simon knows the truth, but he’s keeping it from his audience. My show is not Russian propaganda. Simon knows I’m an American in America covering American news for Americans. He does slip in that I’m American in the opening sentences, but not until the end does he reveal to his audience that I have never been told to say anything or not to say anything on RT America. And after he says that, he immediately plays a clip of me joking that my show is written by heavily bearded Russian trolls. He seems to play it as if it reveals the truth, rather than being a joke. Furthermore, assuming Simon did even an ounce of research, he knows that I’ve been doing the same type of material in my stand-up comedy act for decades – long before I was every on RT. Saying my show is Russian propaganda would be to say that all the shows on RT America are Russian propaganda including ones hosted by Larry King, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges, Governor Jesse Ventura, Mike Papantonio, and former hosts Thom Hartmann and Abby Martin.

I’ve addressed why I do this show on RT America, and you can watch that here. But for NPR’s listeners who have never heard of me, Simon wants to essentially warn them that they are about to hear nefarious neo-propaganda put forward by dastardly Russians.

STEP THREE: Subtly let your listeners know the target is not one of us

In his second sentence Simon says, “The show is hosted and written by an American comic in black jeans with a hipster beard and long, bobbed hair, Lee Camp.” To begin with, I don’t know what a hipster beard is, but I doubt I have one. I guess Scott Simon thinks any beard is a “hipster beard.” I suppose this means Wolf Blitzer has a hipster beard too. I also don’t know what “long bobbed hair” is other than a way of saying, “He’s a fuckin’ long hair!” This description is all basically Simon’s way of letting his elitist older core audience know, “This guy is NOT one of us. He probably doesn’t even OWN a salmon-colored button-down shirt.”

STEP FOUR: Imply that curse words = enemy of the state

Simon next plays a few sentences from my show, bleeping out the word “fuck.” Then he interrupts and says, “A lot of profanity. In fact ONE profanity over and over…” So Simon’s first sentence about me was to insult my clothing and look. His first sentence about my show was to express near horror at the fact I use the word “fuck”. First of all, I take great exception to the idea I only use ONE profanity. My profanity is varied AND prolific. Name another show where you’ve recently heard Congress described as a “Steaming bucket of mangy dicks.” But again this is designed so Simon can let the nice NPR listeners know, “He’s not one of us. He uses dirty language.” Isn’t it amazing that it’s been a half century since the 1960’s and yet the insults against the “counter culture” are all the same – “He’s a long-hair hipster with a dirty mouth!” As George Carlin said, dirty words can “impact your mind, curve your spine and lose the war for the Allies!” Clearly Scott Simon didn’t get the memo that fearing dirty words is not something most of America is doing anymore. Americans are far more worried about where their next paycheck will come from or how to get healthcare for their sick child. If you look at the situation our country is in and don’t say “FUCK” to yourself, then you aren’t paying attention.

STEP FIVE: Bring in an “Expert” who clarifies how awful the target is

Next, Julia Ioffe is brought on to explain how horrible Redacted Tonight truly is and why your children should be asked to leave the room and cover their ears until the terrifying thought bombs are extinguished. NPR identifies Ioffe as simply someone who writes critically about Russia for the Atlantic and other platforms. What Simon doesn’t want his listeners to know is that Ioffe is a hardcore neocon neo-McCarthyist who spends her days spouting fake news about Russia, such as this lovely piece of fact-free reporting entitled “How Russia Hacked America.” In the credits of that piece she thanks two private intelligence firms for helping her out – Fidelis Cybersecurity and Farsight Security. Fidelis used to be owned by General Dynamics, one of the biggest weapons contractors riding the Russia hysteria to billions of dollars in profits. Julia Ioffe is not even close to an unbiased critic of my show. She’s quite the opposite – a useful idiot for the weapons industry which collects bundles of cash from the deaths of millions.

And those Russian hacking claims? I covered the reality of those claims on my show with former 27-year veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

It’s very telling that while Ioffe and Scott Simon breathlessly attack dissenting voices, they choose NOT to cover how our 2016 election was ACTUALLY rigged as reported on by the nonpartisan Project Censored here, here, and here. I have also covered all of these stories extensively on my show.

Ioffe is not only a pure xenophobe, seemingly trying to angle our country towards nuclear war, but she also is – apparently – an expert on comedy! Her opening lines – “[Redacted Tonight] is very shrill. Lee Camp is very shrill. It looks like the kind of rantings I would engage in when I was an angry 15 year-old.” Apparently when Julia Ioffe was a mere teen, she was angrily spouting about how unfettered vulture capitalism destroyed Puerto Rico even before the hurricane did, or the unlimited war powers that both Democrats and Republicans voted to give Donald Trump, or perhaps the secret family making billions from our opioid crisis. I guess little Julia was once very well informed. But now, as an adult, she has changed her ways – becoming a good shill for the corporate state, toeing the pro-war propaganda line without a second thought.

STEP SIX: Shrug off or ignore any positive attributes

At one point Scott Simon talks about attending a taping of the show where the audience “laughed and cheered when prompted – but sincerely.” In the audio version the words “but sincerely” drip with disgust. This is about as close as Simon can come to admitting Redacted Tonight has very large, active, and excited fanbase of people who see through the ridiculous mainstream media and want something more, something deeper.

Another positive attribute of my show, in my opinion, is the fact that we’re left of the corporate-owned Democrats. Simon mentions that I mock both Republicans and Democrats but that’s where he leaves it. If he watched more than ten minutes, he knows that I don’t simply attack everything for the sake of mockery. I go after our ruling elite who are bought and sold by massive corporations, soulless people who seem fine with a level of inequality that surpasses even ancient Rome just before its collapse. This is the most important thing any viewer should know about my show, but NPR intentionally leaves it out. The reasoning is obvious – because it would attract a lot of viewers. And when you’re busy making new Cold War propaganda, you don’t want such stumbling blocks in your path.

STEP SEVEN: Bring in another “expert” to simply lie

Scott Simon next asks executive producer of Second City, Kelly Leonard, if Redacted Tonight is funny. Leonard response: “It is funny, but there’s a problem. ” Leonard says the real trouble is that I avoid certain subjects – such as hacking of the election. But in fact, I HAVE talked about hacking the election here, here, here, here, here, here – You get the point. I’ve talked about it FAR more than any other comedy news show Leonard can list. The problem is I don’t talk about it from the false narrative Leonard and Simon WANT me to – the narrative that calls it “hacking the election” even though no one is even accusing Russia of actually hacking voting machines, which is essentially impossible from a foreign country. (Instead voting machine rigging happens right here at home.) The accusations only have to do with hacking emails at the DNC (that showed *REAL* corruption) – and even those accusations have been debunked by experts.

So even if Leonard disagrees with my more truth-based views on the hacking, he still provably lied when he said I don’t talk about election hacking. Either he lied or he’s so woefully unfamiliar with my show that he’s hardly seen any of it. Which is worse? Scott Simon then lets this grand lie go unchecked, or Simon doesn’t know that I’ve covered the hacking extensively. Again, which is worse?

STEP EIGHT: Simply call your target evil

Leonard next says, “I think comedy is a superpower. And a very smart person once said, if it can’t be used for evil, it’s not a superpower. And in this case, that’s kind of what I feel is going on.” Yep, my show is clearly being used for evil. A show which tirelessly fights for a more egalitarian and just society – You could hardly find an episode where I’m not covering those issues and giving solutions for how to get there – Such a TV show is using comedy for evil. …Hence the sinister beard and long hair.

STEP NINE: Refuse to have the target on for a live interview

The number one question I’ve gotten about NPR’s attack piece was about this sentence by Simon, “We asked Lee Camp for an interview but couldn’t agree to his ground rules.” Simon is being intentionally vague here. Saying that we couldn’t agree to ground rules makes the listener think I said, “I’ll do an interview but no questions about Russia, and you have to be dressed as a chicken during the entirety of it!” In fact, what Simon doesn’t reveal to his listeners is that I simply said, “I would love to do a live on-air interview.” That is all I said, and I said it repeatedly over email. NPR cannot have me on for a live on-air interview because that would not allow them to cut out all the things they don’t want viewers to know. It would not allow them to redact certain parts and take things out of context. I was told by the producer of Weekend Edition that they rarely do live interviews – which means they do indeed have the capability. I, myself, have an interview show that is never filmed live because it simply doesn’t air live. So I am not opposed to pre-taped interviews played in their entirety, but NPR is not looking for that. If Simon valued honesty, he should’ve stated, “Lee Camp agreed to a live interview, but we were not willing to do that.”

STEP TEN: Bring back the New Cold Warrior faux expert

Julia Ioffe comes back to call me and my team  “co-conspirators” and “useful idiots.” (Which is it? Are we conspiring or are we idiots??) She says we are not creating the show “…for the rights and the lives of the little man or the little person. It’s for Putin’s power.” And although I find it hilarious to respond to a moral attack coming from someone spouting talking points on behalf of weapons contractors, I’ll do it anyway. Ioffe is perfectly wrong in her assertion. I’ve been doing politically minded stand-up comedy for nearly 20 years. Long before I ever created Redacted Tonight, I was speaking about the same issues – endless war, gut-wrenching inequality, environmental destruction – all the topics I continue to cover on my show. When I decided to work with RT America, it came down to one simple thought – I don’t believe we have a lot of time to waste. Our world is collapsing around us – for example the earth has lost half its wildlife in the past 40 years. We have to talk about all these issues, which are redacted from our corporate media. We have to provide information to people in new and interesting ways, and I’ve been trying to do that for two decades. Julia Ioffe on the other hand wants to create war, death, and continued destruction while tearing down anyone who dissents.

STEP ELEVEN: One last parting lie – “No one’s watching anyway.”

Scott Simon closes by saying fewer than 30,000 people are likely watching RT America. He says, “That’s not far from the average attendance at a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game.” But one can assume Simon knows he’s lying. Even without factoring in television views, the average episode of Redacted Tonight gets over 30,000 views on YouTube alone, which does not count Facebook and other platforms. Clips from each episode add hundreds of thousands of more views on YouTube. I have recent web exclusive videos that have over 150,000 views each on YouTube. Assuming Simon can do a simple search, he knows he’s misleading his listeners as to how many people watch my show. If he can’t do a YouTube search, it might be time for him to throw in the ol’ crusty  “journalism” towel.

If I really wanted to get down in the mud with Simon, I might mention that he has nearly 1.25 Million Twitter followers and yet his tweets – almost without exception – receive between zero and ten retweets. This either means Simon isn’t saying much of value or his 1.25 million followers aren’t listening to him to begin with.

It’s also a bit comical Simon picks Milwaukee as the city to use in his parting jab. Milwaukee also happens to be the home of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, which helps fund NPR and therefore receives glowing segments like this in what seems to be a pay-to-play scenario. Even when corporations are not influencing NPR’s coverage, they are still benefiting from what NPR proudly calls “the halo effect” simply by being an underwriter. Basically NPR brags that they scrub clean the image some of the worst corporations in the world, making them angelic – corporations like ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo.

Furthermore Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting did a study (“Some Things Considered Mostly By White Men”) that included Weekend Edition and other NPR shows and found that most of the commentary is by white men and in recent years there is less and less political coverage. The lack of political coverage is actually by design. NPR’s job is to cast reality in a pro-corporate pro-war light via two avenues, one is by straight up propaganda, such as hit pieces against dissenting voices – anything outside the corporate unfettered-capitalist paradigm. (I covered this in a recent web exclusive video.)  Another avenue is to simply fill the airwaves with useless information that makes us feel smart and comfortable but contributes nothing to informing the population about what is REALLY happening. This is why Scott Simon produces pieces like this one about waiting in line. (It has 9 retweets as of this writing.) If you listen to the piece, he actually could have gone deeper and made the segment meaningful. He could have talked about how our system seeks profit over all else, even over the innately fair process of waiting in line. He could’ve discussed how those ideals then become codified in our cultural mindset, creating an immense level of misery and inequality. …But instead he left it as a weak version of Andy Rooney (which is impressive because I thought Andy Rooney was a weak version of Andy Rooney).

When he does cover politics, Simon has proven to be war hungry. Right now he seems to be Cold War hungry – which could lead to nuclear war. In the past he supported the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In case it was never mentioned on NPR, the Iraq War killed over one million people according to Reuters. Even in 2003 he reassured his listeners that not finding weapons of mass destruction (the entire premise for the war) didn’t really matter that much anyway because the greatest threat to Iraqis was the regime that the U.S. had taken down. (One assumes he doesn’t mean the greatest threat to the million who were killed during our obliteration of their country.) Simon helped manufacture the consent for such a horrific bloodbath, and I wonder whether that sits with him at all.

Since Weekend Edition did a poor job of finding guests who could speak intelligibly on the issues at hand, I did it for them. Author Max Blumenthal said of this segment, “NPR only interviewed neo-Cold Warriors, giving figures with no expertise on Russia a platform to hold forth on Russian meddling, and offering figures with no experience in comedy a platform to criticize Redacted Tonight‘s comedic value. NPR interviewed Lee Camp’s fans but no media professionals from the left who could have offered a nuanced perspective on RT. And they deliberately obscured Camp’s principled left-wing positions by claiming that he bashes the GOP and Democrats equally, with the Dems as a stand in for the living, breathing left social movement that Camp is part of. If anyone is looking for slanted propaganda under the guise of news, look no further than this piece by the semi-official radio outlet of the US government.”

And Scott Dikkers, co-founder and longtime head of The Onion publicly stated to Scott Simon, “I was disappointed you thought it necessary to tar [Lee Camp] as little more than a Putin Stooge. He happens to be a talented and hard-working comedian on the populist/left end of the spectrum.”

This is the second major attack piece on me and my comedy show in recent months, one on NPR and one on the cover of the NY Times Arts section. These smear jobs are similar in nature, and I’m far from the only one experiencing such attacks. Many dissenting voices have been attacked, suppressed, and maligned, and it’s up to those of us who value truth and open debate to stand up and demand better. The good news is that corporate media [which does include NPR] and the profit-over-people they uphold are right now fighting for their lives, and the only way of maintaining their power is by drumming out those of us calling attention to the reality.

The Other Side of the Post’s Katharine Graham

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By Norman Solomon

Source: Consortium News

Movie critics are already hailing “The Post,” directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Millions of people will see the film in early winter. But the real-life political story of Graham and her newspaper is not a narrative that’s headed to the multiplexes.

“The Post” comes 20 years after Graham’s autobiography Personal History appeared and won enormous praise. Read as a memoir, the book is a poignant account of Graham’s long quest to overcome sexism, learn the newspaper business and gain self-esteem. Read as media history, however, it is deceptive.

“I don’t believe that whom I was or wasn’t friends with interfered with our reporting at any of our publications,” Graham wrote. However, Robert Parry — who was a Washington correspondent for Newsweek during the last three years of the 1980s — has shed some light on the shadows of Graham’s reassuring prose. Contrary to the claims in her book, Parry said he witnessed “self-censorship because of the coziness between Post-Newsweek executives and senior national security figures.”

Among Parry’s examples: “On one occasion in 1987, I was told that my story about the CIA funneling anti-Sandinista money through Nicaragua’s Catholic Church had been watered down because the story needed to be run past Mrs. Graham, and Henry Kissinger was her house guest that weekend. Apparently, there was fear among the top editors that the story as written might cause some consternation.” (The 1996 memoir of former CIA Director Robert Gates confirmed that Parry had the story right all along.)

Graham’s book exudes affection for Kissinger as well as Robert McNamara and other luminaries of various administrations who remained her close friends until she died in 2001. To Graham, men like McNamara and Kissinger — the main war architects for Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon — were wonderful human beings.

In sharp contrast, Graham devoted dozens of righteous pages to vilifying Post press operators who went on strike in 1975. She stressed the damage done to printing equipment as the walkout began and “the unforgivable acts of violence throughout the strike.” It is a profound commentary on her outlook that thuggish deeds by a few of the strikers were “unforgivable” — but men like McNamara and Kissinger were lovable after they oversaw horrendous slaughter in Southeast Asia.

Graham’s autobiography portrays union stalwarts as mostly ruffians or dupes. “Only a handful of [Newspaper Guild] members had gone out for reasons I respected,” she told readers. “One was John Hanrahan, a good reporter and a nice man who came from a longtime labor family and simply couldn’t cross a picket line. He never did come back. Living your beliefs is a rare virtue and greatly to be admired.”

But for Hanrahan (whose Republican parents actually never belonged to a union) the admiration was far from mutual. As he put it, “The Washington Post under Katharine Graham pioneered the union-busting ‘replacement worker’ strategy that Ronald Reagan subsequently used against the air-traffic controllers and that corporate America — in the Caterpillar, Bridgestone/Firestone and other strikes — used to throw thousands of workers out of their jobs in the 1980s and the ’90s.”

The Washington Post deserves credit for publishing sections of the Pentagon Papers immediately after a federal court injunction in mid-June 1971 stopped the New York Times from continuing to print excerpts from the secret document. That’s the high point of the Washington Post’s record in relation to the Vietnam War. The newspaper strongly supported the war for many years.

Yet Graham’s book avoids any semblance of introspection about the Vietnam War and the human costs of the Post’s support for it. Her book recounts that she huddled with a writer in line to take charge of the editorial page in August 1966: “We agreed that the Post ought to work its way out of the very supportive editorial position it had taken, but we couldn’t be precipitous; we had to move away gradually from where we had been.” Vast carnage resulted from such unwillingness to be “precipitous.”

Although widely touted as a feminist parable, Graham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography is notably bereft of solidarity for women without affluence or white skin. They barely seemed to exist in her range of vision; painful realities of class and racial biases were dim, faraway specks. Overall the 625-page book gives short shrift to the unrich and unfamous, whose lives are peripheral to the drama played out by the wealthy publisher’s dazzling peers. The name of Martin Luther King Jr. does not appear in her star-studded, history-drenched book.

Katharine Graham’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers was indeed laudable, helping to expose lies that had greased the wheels of the war machinery with such horrific consequences in Vietnam. But the Washington Post was instrumental in avidly promoting the lies that made the Vietnam War possible in the first place. No amount of rave reviews or Oscar nominations for “The Post” will change that awful truth.

 

Norman Solomon is the coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”