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Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"" |
| Date: |
04 Sep 2006 08:58:24 PM |
| Object: |
'Fascism' Frame Set Up By Neocon Press |
'Fascism' Frame Set Up By Neocon Press
By Jim Lobe
9-2-6
The aggressive new campaign by the administration of President George
W. Bush to depict U.S. foes in the Middle East as "fascists" and its
domestic critics as "appeasers" owes a great deal to steadily
intensifying efforts by the right-wing press over the past several
months to draw the same comparison.
The Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News Network and The Weekly Standard, as
well as the Washington Times, which is controlled by the Rev. Sun Myung
Moon's Unification Church, and the neoconservative New York Sun, have
consistently and with increasing frequency framed the challenges faced
by Washington in the region in the context of the rise of fascism and
Nazism in the 1930s, according to a search of the Nexis database by
IPS.
All of those outlets, as well as two other right-wing U.S. magazines -
The National Review and The American Spectator - far outpaced their
commercial rivals in the frequency of their use of key words and names,
such as "appeasement," "fascism," and "Hitler," particularly with
respect to Iran and its controversial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Nexis, for example, cited 56 uses of "Islamofascist" or "Islamofascism"
in separate programs or segments aired by Fox News compared with 24 by
CNN over the past year. Even more striking, the same terms were used in
115 different articles or columns in the Washington Times, compared
with only eight in the Washington Post over the same period, according
to a breakdown by Nexis.
Similarly, the Washington Times used the words "appease" or
"appeasement" - a derogatory reference to efforts by British Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain to avoid war with Nazi Germany before the
latter's invasion of Poland - in 25 different articles or columns that
dealt with alleged threats posed by Ahmadinejad, compared to six in the
Post and only three in the New York Times.
Israel-centered neoconservatives and other hawks have long tried to
depict foreign challenges to U.S. power as replays of the 1930s in
order to rally public opinion behind foreign interventions and high
defense budgets and against domestic critics.
During the Cold War, they attacked domestic critics of the Vietnam War
and later the Ronald Reagan administration's "contra war" against
Nicaragua - and even Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon - as
"isolationists" and "appeasers" who failed to understand that their
opposition effectively served the interests of an "evil" Soviet Union
whose ambitions for world conquest were every bit as threatening and
real as that of the Axis powers in World War II.
Known as "the Good War," that conflict remains irresistible as a point
of comparison for hawks caught up in more recent conflicts - from the
first Gulf War when former President H.W. Bush compared Iraq's Saddam
Hussein to Hitler; to the Balkan wars when neoconservatives and liberal
interventionists alike described Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in
similar terms; to the younger Bush's "global war on terrorism" (GWOT),
which he and his supporters have repeatedly tried to depict as the
latest in a series of existential struggles against "evil" and
"totalitarians" that began with World War II.
Given the growing public disillusionment not only with the Iraq war,
but with Bush's handling of the larger GWOT as well - not to mention
the imminence of the mid-term Congressional elections in November and
the growing tensions with Ahmadinejad's Iran over its nuclear program -
it is hardly surprising that both the administration and its hawkish
supporters are trying harder than ever to identify their current
struggles, including last month's conflict between Israel and
Iran-backed Hezbollah, specifically with the war against "fascism" more
than 60 years ago.
As noted by Associated Press (AP) this week, "fascism" or "Islamic
fascism," a phrase used by Bush himself two weeks ago and used to
encompass everything from Sunni insurgents, al-Qaeda and Hamas to
Shi'ite Hezbollah and Iran to secular Syria, has become the "new
buzzword" for Republicans.
In a controversial speech Tuesday, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld was
even more direct, declaring that Washington faced a "new type of
fascism" and, in an explicit reference to the failure of western
countries to confront Hitler in the 1930s, assailing critics for
neglecting "history's lessons" by "believ(ing) that somehow vicious
extremists can be appeased."
But Rumsfeld's remarks, which drew bitter retorts from leading
Democrats, followed a well-worn path trod with increasing intensity by
the neoconservative and right-wing media over the last year, according
to the Nexis survey. Significantly, it did not include the Wall Street
Journal whose editorial pages have been dominated by neoconservative
opinion, particularly analogies between the rise of fascism and the
challenges faced by the U.S. in the Middle East, since 9/11.
Thus, the Washington Times published 95 articles and columns that
featured the words "fascism" or "fascist" and "Iraq" over the past
year, twice as many as appeared in the New York Times during the same
period. More than half of the Washington Times' articles were published
in just the past three months - three times as many as appeared in the
New York Times.
Similarly, the National Review led all magazines and journals with 66
such references over the past year, followed by 48 in The American
Spectator, and 14 by The Weekly Standard. Together, those three
publications accounted for more than half of all articles with those
words published by the more than three dozen U.S. periodicals
catalogued by Nexis since last September.
The results were similar for "appease" or "appeasement" and "Iraq." Led
by the Review, the same three journals accounted for more than half the
articles (175) that included those words in some three dozen U.S.
Magazines over the past year. As for newspapers, the Washington Times
led the list with 46 articles, 50 percent more than the New York Times
which also had fewer articles than its crosstown neoconservative rival,
the much-smaller New York Sun.
Searching on Nexis for articles and columns that included "Iran" and
"fascist" or "fascism," IPS found that the Sun and the Times topped the
newspaper list by a substantial margin, as did the Review, the
Spectator, and the Standard among the magazines and journals. Nearly
one-third of all such references over the past year were published in
August, according to the survey.
Nexis, which also surveys the Canadian press, found that newspapers
owned by CanWest Global Communications, a group that owns the country's
Global Television Network, as well as the National Post, the Ottawa
Citizen, and the Montreal Gazette and several other regional
newspapers, were also among the most consistent propagators of the
"fascism" paradigm and ranked far ahead of other Canadian outlets in
the frequency with which they used key words, such as "appeasement" and
"fascist" in connection with Iraq and Iran.
The group is run by members of the Asper family whose foreign policy
views have been linked to prominent hardline neoconservatives here and
the right-wing Likud Party in Israel.
(Inter Press Service)
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| User: "Cameron L. Spitzer" |
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| Title: Re: 'Fascism' Frame Set Up By Neocon Press |
05 Sep 2006 02:39:25 PM |
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In article <1157421503.945827.32810@e3g2000cwe.googlegroups.com>, wrote:
'Fascism' Frame Set Up By Neocon Press
By Jim Lobe
9-2-6
The aggressive new campaign by the administration of President George
W. Bush to depict U.S. foes in the Middle East as "fascists" and its
domestic critics as "appeasers" owes a great deal to steadily
intensifying efforts by the right-wing press over the past several
months to draw the same comparison.
It's simpler than that. Re-read George Orwell's _1984_.
One of the things a propaganda state does to stifle dissent
is to destroy the language dissenters might use to discuss
its activities. That's done one word at a time.
When it became widely understood that there was a real
problem with single use of reusable resources, and it would
take government policy to encourage conservation,
the corporations started misusing the word "recycle."
Now it's much more difficult to talk about the problem.
You can buy "100% recycled" paper towels at the supermarket
that contain hardly any fiber from used paper. If you
want what we used to be able to ask for as "recycled paper"
you have to demand "100% postconsumer reclaimed fiber,"
and you won't find it because it's so hard to ask for that
the demand has dried up. They did it to "feminism."
They're going after "organic" now for the same reason.
The bad guys take words away.
It's one of their most effective tactics.
Any student of history can immediately recognize that today's
US "neocons" are doing exactly what the Nazis did in 1930s
Germany. They had their Reischtag Fire in Sept 2001.
They created a Department of Homeland Security and passed
an Emergency Law. They've begun demonizing and persecuting
dissenters and ethnic minorities (scientists, civil rights
advocates, immigrant workers, muslims...) in a way we haven't
seen since the Red Menace and Reefer Madness.
They're merging "the private sector" with the state exactly
as Mussolini and Hitler did. Mussolini coined the word
"Fascism" to describe their movement, and explained that it
was essentially a synonym for "corporatism." Concentrated
private capital in control of the apparatus of government.
The neocons aren't stupid. They know that the word Fascism
is exactly the term for what they are doing, and people who
talk about what they are doing are going to need that word.
So they are misusing "fascism" all over the place to deprive
the dissenters of the term. Double plus ungood.
Cameron
.
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| User: "Defendario" |
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| Title: Re: 'Fascism' Frame Set Up By Neocon Press |
05 Sep 2006 03:51:17 PM |
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Cameron L. Spitzer wrote:
Great Analysis. A keeper!
:-)
In article <1157421503.945827.32810@e3g2000cwe.googlegroups.com>, wrote:
'Fascism' Frame Set Up By Neocon Press
By Jim Lobe
9-2-6
The aggressive new campaign by the administration of President George
W. Bush to depict U.S. foes in the Middle East as "fascists" and its
domestic critics as "appeasers" owes a great deal to steadily
intensifying efforts by the right-wing press over the past several
months to draw the same comparison.
It's simpler than that. Re-read George Orwell's _1984_.
One of the things a propaganda state does to stifle dissent
is to destroy the language dissenters might use to discuss
its activities. That's done one word at a time.
When it became widely understood that there was a real
problem with single use of reusable resources, and it would
take government policy to encourage conservation,
the corporations started misusing the word "recycle."
Now it's much more difficult to talk about the problem.
You can buy "100% recycled" paper towels at the supermarket
that contain hardly any fiber from used paper. If you
want what we used to be able to ask for as "recycled paper"
you have to demand "100% postconsumer reclaimed fiber,"
and you won't find it because it's so hard to ask for that
the demand has dried up. They did it to "feminism."
They're going after "organic" now for the same reason.
The bad guys take words away.
It's one of their most effective tactics.
Any student of history can immediately recognize that today's
US "neocons" are doing exactly what the Nazis did in 1930s
Germany. They had their Reischtag Fire in Sept 2001.
They created a Department of Homeland Security and passed
an Emergency Law. They've begun demonizing and persecuting
dissenters and ethnic minorities (scientists, civil rights
advocates, immigrant workers, muslims...) in a way we haven't
seen since the Red Menace and Reefer Madness.
They're merging "the private sector" with the state exactly
as Mussolini and Hitler did. Mussolini coined the word
"Fascism" to describe their movement, and explained that it
was essentially a synonym for "corporatism." Concentrated
private capital in control of the apparatus of government.
The neocons aren't stupid. They know that the word Fascism
is exactly the term for what they are doing, and people who
talk about what they are doing are going to need that word.
So they are misusing "fascism" all over the place to deprive
the dissenters of the term. Double plus ungood.
Cameron
.
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