Author: Ian Welsh Page 96 of 437

This is hard to talk about, because we live in a debased period.

Government’s job, in a democracy, should be to increase the welfare of the people and represent their will.

Because people elect the government, they need to know what the government is doing and has done in order to choose who to elect.

This is fundamental.

When people do not know what the government is doing, they cannot make good decisions.

Further, elected representatives (in principle, not in current practice) are the employees of the population. As employers, the population has a right to know what the representatives are doing. (Or if you prefer another metaphor, perhaps better, they are trustees.) They don’t have the right to know everything, but anything related to the job, including corruption and double dealing, they do.

The only possible exceptions are certain military related issues which would be very useful to enemies, but even there, the span is limited.

The reason for this, because apparently it’s not obvious, is that if electors don’t know what the people they elected and the government those people run are doing, they can’t make good decisions, like choosing to, oh, fire them.

As an aside, this is also why we have a right to know what our government is doing and why they don’t have a right to spy on us: they work for us, we do not work for them. Even so, their personal lives, other than graft and blatant hypocrisy should be off the line. But what they do officially we need to know.

If government doesn’t serve the people, it becomes tyranny.

The current system of classifying virtually everything and then lying and lying and lying is clearly anti-democratic and tyrannical.

What we have right now in most countries (see France, Pensions for a non-American example) is not democracy. It is oligarchical tyranny: the rule of the few over the many.

Nor is this just about “ought”, the problem with endless propaganda is that our elites have been running our countries terribly. They have mishandled the economy repeatedly since 1968 or so, have completely bungled climate change and ecological collapse, have made the middle and working classes poor and the rich richer. They have been running government for the benefit of the few, not the many. The only major notable exception is China, and from what I hear from those on the ground, that’s changing for the worse and has been since after the 2008 financial crisis.

Governments which impoverish the many to benefit the few are tyrannies and need to be overthrown. But one of the ways they get there is by constant lying and saying “we’re lying and concealing for your own good. You’re children, it isn’t safe for you to know.”

Anyone who thinks you don’t deserve or need to know what they claim to be doing on your behalf isn’t your friend or your employee, they are your master and they see you as their slave.

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So, back when the DNC was hacked and documents were leaked showing that the DNC had been helping Clinton and kneecapping Sanders, I found it interesting that most of the media focused on “the Russians did it!” rather than on the content of the leak, which was, after all, in the public interest to know.

The same thing is going on with the Texeira documents. WSWS has a particularly good article on this:

While about 60 or so documents have been made public so far, US media outlets indicate they have access to far more.  The Washington Post reported Thursday, “The Post also reviewed approximately 300 photos of classified documents, most of which have not been made public.”

And the Post and the other media outlets are responsible for maintaining this secrecy. They are not reporting information that undermines and contradicts the official line from the Pentagon, State Department and White House.

Rather, the Post is selectively releasing sections of the documents with an aim to facilitate US war propaganda. An article published Thursday by anti-China war propagandist Josh Rogin declared, “The most shocking intel leak reveals new Chinese military advances.”

None of this is particularly surprising if you were an adult who was paying attention during the Iraq War and especially the run-up to it. The media actively colluded with the state to promote the war and actively got rid of prominent journalists who had the gall to oppose it and call out the lies.

We already know that the documents reveal that US and NATO special forces are on the ground. People paying attention have been sure this was the case, but most people aren’t paying that close an attention, and the US government has never admitted it.

Information like this is the real story: NATO governments are taking actions which could be considered an act of war against a nation which, despite rhetoric, we are not at war with. No NATO country is at war with Russia and we want to keep it that way. Well, “we” do if we’re sane and don’t want to increase the odds of, y’know, an apocalypse.

Western media is mostly propaganda. When well done it’s not blatant. Some of the best is just the refusal to publish. The New York Times, during the 2004 election, knew that Bush had been spying on Americans in dragnet fashion: both illegal and likely to be unpopular. It held publication until after the election and explicitly said that it did so because it didn’t want to influence the election.

But, if the goal of the institution was to make sure that citizens know what they need to to make informed decisions, then that story should have been published during the election. “Bush has been mass-spying on Americans” is exactly what people need to know to decide if they want to vote for him.

The NY Times, of course, knew publishing the story w9uld have helped Kerry, so it wasn’t a neutral decision. It was a choice to (not) do something in order to help Bush win, even though journalism is supposed to be about revealing the truth because the public has a right to know.

In the same way, the Texeira documents being withheld almost certainly contain revelations that would hurt the current government support for continued help to Ukraine to fight Russia.

But that shouldn’t be, if the media actually believed its own propaganda about its purpose, the concern of the media. If the government is doing things it says it isn’t then the public should know, so the public can decide if it supports what the government is doing.

This isn’t complicated. Journalists have simply decided that they agree with the government about Ukraine vs. Russia and thus are almost certainly concealing information which would damage the government’s position.

That ain’t journalism. Orwell once wrote:

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want published; everything else is public relations.

We don’t have reporters. We have PR people pretending to be journalists. They might as well call themselves stenographers.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.