Day: October 15, 2009

D’Escoto on the US in the age of Obama Part 3

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15 October, 2009

d’Escoto: From Iraq war to imprisoned Cuban 5, Americans need the courage to form a “new mindset”

“The inability of the United Nations to unequivocally reject the Iraq war has been a major factor in its demise”, says outgoing president of the UN General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto. In the third and final segment of his talk with Real News Senior Editor Paul Jay, d’Escoto digs into what he believes is at the root of the US image problem around the world, its actions. He identifies the continued incarceration of the Cuban 5 in US prison as an example of the hypocrisy of the “global war on terror”. But while d’Escoto points out President Obama’s unwillingness to use his authority to single-handedly pardon the five Cuban intelligence agents, he expresses a great deal of support for Obama. “I really trust President Obama,” d’Escoto says, “but he is going up against the same reactionary forces that we faced in the third world when we tried to change things.”

Bio
Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann recently finished his term as president of the United Nations General Assembly. His term was notable for numerous attempts to assert the authority of the General Assembly and numerous pronouncements on current events, such as the financial crisis and the Israeli siege and war on Gaza. This was a considerable departure from the highly conservative role that the General Assembly, and in particular the president, had played over recent years.

D’Escoto is an ordained Roman Catholic priest for the Maryknoll congregation, serving in 1970 as an official with the World Council of Churches. As an adherent of liberation theology, he secretly joined Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista independence movement. In 1979, he was appointed foreign minister of the new revolutionary government following the Sandinistas’ overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. He served as foreign minister under President Daniel Ortega from 1979 until their electoral defeat in 1990. He was one of a group of Latin American priests who were denounced and eventually suspended during the 1980s by the Vatican of Pope John Paul II, after their dedication to liberation theology compelled them to become involved in revolutionary politics.

In 2008, he was selected by the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean to as their choice to fill the presidency of the General Assembly.

Part 2 | Part 1

MEDIA LENS ALERT: THE BALANCE OF POWER – EXCHANGES WITH BBC JOURNALISTS – PART 1

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15 October, 2009 — MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

In our previous alert (‘The Westminster Conspiracy,’ October 8; www.medialens.org/alerts/archive.php) we described how the media’s insistence that journalists be ’balanced’, that they keep their personal opinions to themselves, is used as a tool of thought control.

Journalists who criticise powerful interests can be attacked for their ‘bias’, for revealing their prejudices. On the other hand, as we will see in the examples below, almost no-one protests, or even notices, the lack of balance in patriotic articles reporting on the experience of British troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the credibility of British and American elections, or on claims that the West is spreading democracy across the Third World. Then, notions of patriotism, loyalty, the need to support ‘our boys’, make ‘balance’ seem disloyal, disrespectful; an indication, in fact, that a journalist is ‘biased.’

The media provide copious coverage of state-sponsored memorials commemorating the 50th, 60th, 65th anniversaries of D-Day, the Battle of Britain, the Battle of Arnhem, the retreat from Dunkirk, the Battle of the Atlantic, the 25th anniversary of the Falklands War, and so on. Even the 200th anniversary of The Battle of Trafalgar was a major news item. Remembrance Sunday, Trooping The Colour, Beating The Retreat, the Fleet Review are all media fixtures. The military is of course happy to supply large numbers of troops and machines for these dramatic flypasts, parades and reviews.

On June 11, 2005, senior BBC news presenter, Huw Edwards, provided the commentary for Britain’s Trooping The Colour military parade, describing it as “a great credit to the Irish Guards”. Imagine if Edwards had added:

“While one can only be impressed by the discipline and skill on show in these parades, critics have of course warned against the promotion of patriotic militarism. The Russian novelist Tolstoy, for one, observed:

“’The ruling classes have in their hands the army, money, the schools, the churches and the press. In the schools they kindle patriotism in the children by means of histories describing their own people as the best of all peoples and always in the right. Among adults they kindle it by spectacles, jubilees, monuments, and by a lying patriotic press.’” (Tolstoy, Government is Violence – Essays on Anarchism and Pacifism, Phoenix Press, 1990, p.82)

Edwards would not have been applauded for providing this ‘balance’. He would have been condemned far and wide as a crusading crackpot, and hauled before senior BBC management.

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