Western Media is a Propaganda Arm of the State
by Finian Cunningham – Veterans News Now
Western news media have long functioned as a propaganda arm of the state, concealing elite corruption at the heart of government: the collusion between corporate, financial and ruling power and the deeply anti-democratic nature of that power. Despite the formality of recurring elections and parliamentary style appearance, Western states are in the nuts-and-bolts of working power more accurately described as fascist corporate entities with a patina of popular democracy for window-dressing.
Wall Street BailoutLook at the global financial collapse that was triggered in 2008. From the US to Europe, the crisis can be attributed to the criminal practices of major banks and other financial institutions operating casino capitalism – the last refuge of bankrupt capitalism as an organizing social system. Yet far from being pursued with prosecutions, the financial oligarchy has been bailed out time and again by their bought-and-paid political rulers to the tune of trillions of dollars with public money, while the public is clobbered with swingeing austerity and poverty. How can we describe this arrangement as anything but fascism – the inexorable endpoint of capitalism?
In this audacious, gargantuan expropriation of wealth by the financial oligarchy in cahoots with the political class – all across the Western world – where is the critical, campaigning, investigative functions of the supposed «free press» – the much-vaunted «fourth estate» which conceitedly refers to the media acting as a guardian of public interest and democratic rights? It does not exist. The Western media are an integral part of the fascist plutocracy.
The established media have thus acted as a vital propaganda arm of the fascist state by concealing or diverting from what is a huge systematic crime of corporate theft and public immiseration.
Of much more damning importance is the question of war. The wholesale mass murder of people and destruction of countries – without even a modicum of justification on the principle of self-defense – is the supreme crime. This crime of war of aggression was established at the post-1945 Nuremberg Trials of Nazi German leaders.
The American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, beginning in 2001 and 2003, which together have resulted in more than one million dead and millions more wounded, their livelihoods destroyed, are episodes that clearly conform to the category of «wars of aggression». The official justifications used by American and British leaders to instigate these wars – eradicating global terrorism and weapons of mass destruction – have transpired to be baseless, or at the very least cry out for proper investigation. More than this, there are serious grounds to support a prosecution case that these wars were based on deliberate fabrication and lies. …more
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